The House Built for Ruth Is Not a Home for Winfield

Yankee Stadium is the Vatican of baseball. This is where the game went big time. This is where it all began, really.

This is where Babe Ruth took the game away from the gamblers and the small-time hustlers and the corner saloon, and put it on Broadway.

New York without Yankee Stadium is as unthinkable as New York without the Great White Way, the Statue of Liberty, the skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Broadway stage. This is the town that gave the nation its music, its humor, its drive. But it needs Yankee Stadium the way Vienna needs its waltz, or Paris its spring.

Baseball needs Yankee Stadium. Also, its Yankees.

Once, the Yankees were baseball. It wasn’t a game, it was a parade. The Yankees had the calliope; everyone else had the nose that lights up. If the Yankees weren’t in a World Series, it wasn’t a World Series. If you didn’t do it in New York, you might as well not do it.

The liveliest writers, the brightest spielers congregated in New York. The Yankees sold papers, shaving cream, automobiles and candy bars as well as baseball. The tabloids made a pennant run seem like Armageddon.

The Yankees became the Bronx Bombers, the dreadnoughts of the grand old game. They were haughty, proud, clannish. To be a Yankee meant to wear a tie in a public place, to keep your dignity at all times--and to trounce the league with the kind of nonchalant perfection of members of the aristocracy putting footmen in their place.

Other teams hustled, scrambled, worked to put together teams that could compete. The Yankees sat back and took the position that God will provide.

And so He did. The Ruth era passed and the Gehrig era took over. Lou went and Joe DiMaggio came along. As Joe was hanging them up, Mickey Mantle arrived. The Yankees had a supply line. God was a Yankee.

A canny old German named Jacob Ruppert once ran this institution with an iron hand. To be a Yankee wasn’t a sport, it was a religion.

CBS got hold of this theological conglomerate and completely misunderstood the whole thing. They turned the Yankees into just another sit-com in very few years and were glad to cancel the show after a few rough seasons.

When George Steinbrenner bought into this royal family, it seemed at first as if the gamekeeper had taken over the manor. George was a brawler. George was no Ruppert. No organ music and incense for George. George liked noise, combat, controversy. George wanted to have fun.

He also wanted to have winners. He correctly perceived that what the modern Yankees lacked was “the big guy.” The Yankees needed a Moses.

George came up with a beauty. David Mark Winfield is one of the most imposing hunks you will ever see in a baseball uniform--or out of it. Six-six, 220, not an ounce of fat on him, he looked in the batter’s box like a thunderstorm on the horizon. Pitchers got rattled, outfielders moved back and infielders prayed he didn’t get a fastball to pull.

He didn’t come cheap. Twenty-three million for 10 years shocked the baseball Establishment of its time. Outraged historians pointed out that Babe Ruth never made more than $80,000 a year. Cynics wondered why George hadn’t bought Rhode Island instead.

Winfield never had a chance. The cards weren’t stacked against him but Yankee Stadium was. Yankee Stadium is “The House That Ruth Built” in popular lore. The house built for Ruth is more like it. You have to be careful not to bump into right field rounding first. Left field is just a rumor. You have to change planes to get there, so to speak.

It’s no accident that almost every Yankee they write songs about was left-handed. Only Joe DiMaggio was not and it is no secret that Joe’s home runs would have been in the 500 range, instead of 361, if he’d had the dimensions Ruth, Gehrig, Maris, Berra and Mantle had to shoot at.

Winfield didn’t have a career, he had a sentence. He left the airport confines of San Diego’s stadium for the great outdoors of Death Valley in Yankee Stadium, where fly balls go to die.

The numbers he put up were heroic--37 home runs one year in that cavern, a .340 average another. But the Yankees made it to only one World Series in his tenure.

The man who was not Babe Ruth sat in a corner of the Yankee dugout the other night. Even sitting down, Winfield looks like 50 homers looking for a fence to fly over. They make statues out of bodies like these.

But the tabloids were full of stories laying to rest the myth of the next great Yankee superstar. George Steinbrenner was issuing statements containing words like mistake to describe his signing of Winfield all those years ago and letting Reggie Jackson go.

Winfield is quietly bitter. “My performance has been super consistent, occasionally stellar,” he points out. “It’s the Yankee team that’s different, not Dave Winfield.

“You add all the dimensions I bring to the team--defense as well as hitting--and I’m a positive addition to the Yankee tradition and I’ve always been.

“Look at what this team has done for me. I got my 2,000th hit this year. You think they stopped the game and bronzed the ball? I got my 300th home run. Pretty important milestones, eh? Not to the Yankees.

“I got honored by the city today. The mayor gave me a certificate of appreciation for my work with children. You think one guy from the Yankee office was there? Guess again.” Mayor Koch called Winfield “one of the finest athletes in the history of New York sports.”

Adds Winfield: “You look at those numbers I put up here: 37, 32, 26 home runs, 19 this year. And 106, 116, 100, 114 runs batted in. What’s that, chopped liver? You can add 8 to 10 home runs a year to my totals if I’m playing anywhere but San Diego and Yankee Stadium.

“I’ve stood the heat here very well. I stayed in the kitchen. The writers here-- some writers--are like agents provocateurs. They work both sides of the street to bring out headlines. I produced. You think any pitcher in this league is happy to see Dave Winfield come up?”

So, Dave Winfield was--is--the last great Yankee? They should keep a pedestal warm for him next to the statues of Babe and Lou in center field?

Very likely, thinks the last great Yankee himself. “When I’m gone, they’ll get someone and they’ll say, ‘Well, he’s no Dave Winfield. He can’t go get ‘em like ol’ Dave.’ ” he predicts.

So, he didn’t make a mistake becoming a Yankee all those years ago when he had a choice of becoming a superstar or the guy who wasn’t Babe Ruth?

“I didn’t make any mistake,” said Dave Winfield quietly. “But they may be getting ready to make one, letting me go.”