The New Yorker Books:

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting once produced a pastime that bound a city together.

By Adam Gopnik

Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit’s deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White. The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural placement within Coogan’s Bluff, and a dramatic death of its own, when, fourteen years after the White murder, Carl Mays struck and killed Ray Chapman with an inside pitch, still the only on-field death of a player in the history of major-league baseball. There are other places it would have been nice to see: notably, Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, the home of the Dodgers until they were snatched by Los Angeles. But Ebbets at least has had its façade and some of its dimensions replicated in today’s CitiField, which Fred Wilpon built, the way moguls can, as a monument to his Brooklyn-baseball boyhood.

But the Polo Grounds uptown still touches hearts while having truly disappeared. Jimmy Breslin, in a fine new collection just published by Library of America, conjures the childhood memory of seeing the green park in the gray city: “I start squeezing and pushing through these men because the moment I get near the top of the subway stairs I can look around and see the ballpark, the Polo Grounds . . . and for me that was the best part of the whole day at a baseball game, coming up the subway stairs and seeing the park for the first time.” The Polo Grounds holds our hearts in part because in photographs it still looks so weird. Staring at an antique panoramic picture of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson on the mound in 1913, one can hardly believe how bathtub-shaped the stadium is, how close the right-field bleachers, how wildly distant deep center, how high the overhanging porch. 

Go to link