On this day in New York · April 18, 1923
The House That Ruth Built Opens
The Yankees had never had a stadium of their own, so they built the biggest one in baseball and Babe Ruth broke it in with a home run on the first pitch he saw.
The facts
- Date
- April 18, 1923
- Final score
- Yankees 4, Red Sox 1
- Attendance
- Announced at 74,217, with about 25,000 more turned away at the gates; the Yankees' own business manager later put the real number closer to 60,000
- Build
- Built in under a year, from May 5, 1922 to April 18, 1923, for about $2.4 million, with an opening capacity of roughly 58,000 seats
On April 18, 1923, the Yankees opened their brand-new stadium in the Bronx, a three-tiered concrete colossus the team had built after years of playing as tenants in the Giants' Polo Grounds across the river. Governor Al Smith threw out the first pitch, John Philip Sousa led the Seventh Regiment Band through the national anthem, and the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. Babe Ruth supplied the moment everyone came for, a three-run home run into the right-field stands, and the sportswriter Fred Lieb went home and gave the ballpark a nickname that stuck for the rest of the century.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The House That Ruth Built
Fred Lieb of the New York Evening Telegram, describing the new stadium on opening day
Source: Wikipedia -
Some ball yard.
Babe Ruth, asked for his opinion of the new stadium
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Yankees had spent two decades as guests in someone else's ballpark, and the stadium they built for themselves turned out big enough to need its own name and its own myth on day one. It set the template every city has chased since: build the team a house, and let a legend christen it.
Sources
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