Opening Day at the House That Ruth Built
On April 18, 1923, Yankee Stadium opened with a 4–1 win over the Red Sox — and Babe Ruth christened it with a three-run homer into the right-field seats.
Everything smelled of fresh paint.
That's what the New York Evening Telegram reported on Wednesday, April 18, 1923, when the gates of Yankee Stadium swung open for the first time: "fresh paint, fresh plaster and fresh grass." At 3 p.m., John Philip Sousa led the Seventh Regiment Band through "The Star-Spangled Banner," Governor Al Smith tossed the ceremonial first pitch, and the greatest cathedral baseball had ever seen was officially in business.
The Yankees had built it because they had outgrown the Polo Grounds — and because they had Babe Ruth. The Babe had turned baseball into a national obsession, and the new park in the Bronx was designed to hold the crowds he drew: more than 70,000 people squeezed in that afternoon, the largest crowd ever to watch a baseball game to that point. The roads around the stadium weren't even paved yet, and dust from the arriving cars choked the crowds massed at the turnstiles; it took a cordon of 200 police to hold them back. Even baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, arriving by subway, got caught in the crush outside the gates and had to be rescued by the cops. Inside, the two rival managers — Miller Huggins of the Yankees and Frank Chance of the Red Sox — pulled the rope that raised the flag just inside the center-field wall.
The game itself was a pitchers' duel until the third inning. Then Ruth stepped in against Boston's Howard Ehmke — his old team, the Red Sox, the visitors for the occasion — and, as the sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote the next day, "a white streak left Babe Ruth's 52-ounce bludgeon... and into the right field bleachers." A three-run homer, the first ever hit in the new stadium. The Yankees won 4–1, with Bob Shawkey — who also scored the game's first run — earning the victory.
Ruth had reportedly told writers beforehand that he'd "give a year of my life" to homer on opening day. Asked afterward what he thought of the new park, he grinned: "Some ball yard." The Telegram's Fred Lieb gave it the name that stuck: "The House That Ruth Built."
It was only the beginning. That October, the Yankees won the first World Series in franchise history — in their new home's very first season. Ruth batted .393 with 41 home runs and was named league MVP. And the Stadium went on to host 26 Yankees championships, Lou Gehrig's farewell, Don Larsen's perfect game, and three papal visits before closing its doors in 2008.
But it all started on a gray April afternoon in the Bronx, with the smell of fresh paint and a white streak into the right-field bleachers.
Photo: Bain News Service, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
