BRONX, N.Y. — Standing beyond the centerfield wall at Yankee Stadium could cause chills to radiate through the body of any baseball fan.
There rests monuments honoring some of the most legendary players in baseball history: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.
It’s a step back in time into the heyday of these players’ careers. A time when Ruth was bigger than the Pope, Gehrig’s farewell speech was lauded by fans, DiMaggio’s hitting streak captivated Major League Baseball, and Mantle’s sweet home run swing was idolized by kids from coast to coast.
Monument Park at Yankee Stadium is a place where legends are immortalized for eternity with arguably the most revered franchise in not only baseball but all of sports.
Greg Bates and Jeff Owens of Sports Collectors Digest took an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour of the hallowed grounds — including Monument Park and the team museum — prior to a Yankees game during the 2022 season.
Yankees curator Brian Richards led an insightful, magnificent tour.
“I call this ‘baseball’s most exclusive fraternity,’” Richards said about Monument Park. “This is really secular, sacred ground. If you go to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, I think now 340 inductees are there, and that’s a hallowed place, truly. I think the world of the Hall of Fame. When you come here, what you see is far more exclusive company. These are the greatest of the great who have been with the Yankees — players, managers, executives, broadcasters — and it’s a much smaller pinstriped fraternity, if you will.”
New Yankee Stadium opened in 2009. All of the monuments, plaques and retired numbers moved across 161st Street in late 2008-early 2009 and were reinstalled in their new home.
“In the original stadium, Monument Park evolved,” Richards said. “Out of what used to be fair territory, of course, the Ruth, the Gehrig, the Huggins monuments used to be on the field of play in deep centerfield out in front of that flag pole. When Yankee Stadium was renovated in 1974 and ’75, the fences were brought in. So, in that kind of new no-man’s land of sorts in between the wall and the new fence, a garden was planted, the monuments and plaques
