9) Yankee Stadium (1923-2008)
Bronx, NY
Home to: Yankees

A: Never has a stadium been so inextricably linked with a single player, and vice versa, as Yankee Stadium with Babe Ruth. The park was largely funded on the success brought by the game’s most iconic player, and was subsequently tailored specifically to harness his strengths, with its massive left field counterbalanced by an abnormally short right field porch. (As owner of the A’s, Charles Finley once tried to move the right field fence in Kansas City in to match the dimensions of Yankee Stadium, and, after being told by the league that this violated MLB’s minimum distance standards for new construction, instead painted an outline where the wall would have been and instructed his team’s broadcasters to announce on fly balls that carried past the line “That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium!”).

The Yankees have remained MLB’s flagship franchise ever since, and the white decorative frieze atop the stadium has become ingrained in Americana as a symbol of baseball. With each new legend to don the pinstripes and gain enshrinement in the stadium’s famed Monument Park, the park’s mystique continued to grow, but none of these legends could ever change the fact that Yankee Stadium would always be remembered as The House that Ruth Built.

J: This final movement is built around a vamp used in the opening movement, and increasingly dense figures are layered above it as the movement builds towards its climax and contemplative coda. The escalating busyness is meant to illicit the frantic nature of New York, both in a general sense as well as the specific memories I have with getting to Yankee Stadium, seeing a game there, and attempting to get back to where my family was staying as part of our baseball road trip.