"The home office of baseball!" blurted out the toll collector on the Tappan Zee Bridge, after he spied the driver's Detroit Tigers shirt and figured correctly that we were on our way to Yankee Stadium for the All-Star game. When we got down to the Bronx, at the intersection of River Avenue and East 161st Street, it seemed that we had arrived not at the home office but at the teeming locus of baseball, what with the crush of cars, buses, and people around the stadium. Noel hopped out to assist while his dad squeezed off a few photos. We drove under the elevated train tracks, and the younger boys looked up through the multiple glass moonroofs every time a subway train rattled by overhead.
The game itself opened with Hall of Fame players standing at their positions alongside today's All-Stars. Seeing greats like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays added a special thrill and further cemented our two destinations. Of course, it was also exciting to see today's stars from so many teams all together on one field, among them Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, and Manny Ramirez. Some Yankee fans, though, couldn't put aside their Boston Red Sox hatred, even for one night. "GO BACK TO BOSTON, YOU TRAITOR TO NEW YORK!" screamed one woman behind us, who had been conversing pleasantly only seconds before Ramirez stepped up to the plate.
Still, the All-Star game was a fitting last-season hurrah for Yankee Stadium, and I wish I could say that we stayed until the bitter end: the fifteenth inning, at 1:37 a.m. But when you go with your kid, it can be just as rewarding to head out to the car with your tired little guy's head on your shoulder as it is to see the Minnesota Twins' Justin Morneau slide across home plate to clinch another win for the American League. By the time we finally were able to slip free of the city, carried north along the weaving parkways, our boys of summer had become boys of slumber. It being The Man Trip, no one said how good it felt to road trip with our kids, experiencing a sport that deftly blends the modern and the timeless, undertaken in a car that does the same. For a few days, at least, it was as if we'd hit time's pause button. But time does not stand still, of course; not for baseball, not for carmakers, and especially not for dads, who see their two-year-olds become eight-year-olds and then thirteen-year-olds in what feels like no time at all. ...next page >>