Of Monuments And Men: The Story of Monument Park at Yankee Stadium
This article was written by Daniel R. Epstein
This article was published in Yankee Stadium 1923-2008: America’s First Modern Ballpark
The renovation of Yankee Stadium created Monument Park as a permanent home to monuments to Lou Gehrig, Miller Huggins, and Babe Ruth, as well as plaques to general manager Ed Barrow and others that previously sat in fair territory. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Here’s a thought exercise: Get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Write down the names of as many of the most important individuals in Yankees history as you can think of in two minutes. They can be players, managers, owners, team employees, broadcasters, or anyone else you feel plays a significant role in Yankee lore. No cheating, though! You have to think of the names off the top of your head.
Ready? Begin!
…
Almost done?
…
Okay, pencils down!
Look over your list. Undoubtedly, it includes the names Ruth, DiMaggio, and Jeter. You probably wrote down Steinbrenner and Stengel as well, but how far down is Miller Huggins’ name? Is he below Bernie Williams or John Sterling? Did you neglect to mention him at all? You’re forgiven if you succumbed to recency bias, but Huggins’ Yankee legacy is more than simply being the guy who substituted Lou Gehrig for Wally Pipp.
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Miller Huggins was listed at 5-feet-6, 140 pounds, but both of those figures were likely inflated. Some sources believe he was closer to 5-1, 125 pounds. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati and playing three years for the minor-league St. Paul Saints, he joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1904 as a 26-year-old rookie second baseman. Being smaller and less athletically gifted than most other players, he strived to eke out every possible advantage he could – learning to switch-hit and taking as many free passes as possible. Over a 13-year playing career for the Reds and Cardinals, Huggins led the National League in walks four times and on-base percentage once. He was unafraid to push against the rules of baseball – written or unwritten – to get an edge, mastering the hidden-ball trick and (illegally) storing baseballs in a freezer to deaden them.
His scrappy cunning, relentless desire to win, and unwillingness to take flak from players much larger than himself made Huggins an ideal managerial candidate. He took the helm of the Cardinals as their player-manager in 1913 and remained their skipper for five up-and-down seasons. After a difference of opinion with ownership, he allowed his contract to expire and signed on as the Yankees manager in 1918.
Since their inception 15 years earlier, the Highlanders/Yankees franchise had experienced hardly any success and never reached the World Series. From 1912 to 1917, they went 397-519. It would be easy to portray Huggins’ arrival two years before Babe Ruth’s as fortuitous timing, but after a respectable 60-63 finish in his first season, he led the club to an 80-59 record in 1919, finishing a close third place in the American League and 13 games better than Ruth’s Red Sox.
As much as Ruth revolutionized the game, much of the Yankees’ incomparable success in the 1920s was attributed to Huggins. Those were the days when the manager was the judge and jury of his players, ruling as an unassailable monarch in the clubhouse. He was as respected, beloved, and feared as his legendary players and viewed as just as responsible for the team’s accomplishments. Those included six pennants and three championships from 1921 through 1928.
During the 1929 season, a red blemish appeared under his left eye. He steadfastly refused to see a doctor – after all, the club was in a pennant race – until mid-September, when the bacterial skin infection had spread throughout his body, sapping his strength completely. By the time he checked into a hospital, it was too late, and he died a few days later, on September 25 at age 51.
It is impossible to overstate the emotional devastation caused by Huggins’ death. All major-league games were canceled on September 27 for his funeral. The 1929 Yankees roster featured seven future Hall of Famers (nine if you include Huggins himself and his managerial protégé Leo Durocher), yet they limped to a distant second-place finish 18 games behind the Athletics.
The respect, love, and admiration for Huggins mixed with the shock and anguish of his untimely passing did not abate over the following years, even as Ruth continued to clobber the American League and Gehrig established his legacy of everyday excellence. On May 30, 1932, the Yankees held a ceremony at Yankee Stadium to honor their beloved deceased manager. In front of 42,990 witnesses, the monument was unveiled in the deepest part of left-center field, roughly 460 feet from home plate.
It was the first in what has become known as Monument Park.
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It was somewhat common at the time for statues or objects to be erected in the field of play. The New York Giants built a monument to infielder Eddie Grant in center field at the Polo Grounds after he died in World War I. Fenway Park’s center-field flagpole stood on the field until 1970 and Tiger Stadium’s flagpole remained in center field until the ballpark was replaced after the 1999 season. Yankee Stadium’s own flagpole was in play, too, just behind Huggins’ monument.
The modern practice of retiring numbers was impossible, because players didn’t begin wearing uniform numbers until 1929. Originally, they noted where a player usually batted in the lineup, and they weren’t always stable. For example, Tony Lazzeri started with number 6, then switched to 5, then 23, then 7, and finally back to number 6 over the course of his Yankee career. Due to their impermanence, early jersey numbers usually didn’t carry the weight of a player’s legacy as they would later on.
Of course, there are exceptions for exceptional players. Lou Gehrig wore only number 4 until ALS forced him to retire during the 1939 season. The club held Lou Gehrig Day on July 4 of that year, during which he delivered his famous “Luckiest Man” speech at the Stadium. A less memorable speaker at the ceremony was general manager Ed Barrow, who made history with an innovation of his own. He announced that Gehrig’s number 4 would never be worn again by another Yankee, thereby making it the first retired number in baseball history. (To be fair, it’s an idea that Barrow borrowed from hockey, where the Toronto Maple Leafs had retired number 6 for Ace Bailey in 1934.)
Gehrig’s ceremonial uniform number originally was not publicly displayed. The team framed a cloth swatch of his jersey with the inscription “Lou Gehrig Number Retired July 4, 1939” embroidered in cursive under the familiar number 4. This hung in the Yankees clubhouse, where it would be joined later by numbers 3, 5, 7, and others until the 1970s Yankee Stadium renovations. On July 6, 1941, just over two years after his historic number retirement and 34 days after his tragic death, the Yankees dedicated a second monument directly to the left of Huggins’.
Just as Ruth, Gehrig, and Huggins were responsible for the ascendance of the first Yankee dynasty, the three legends shared a fate of untimely demise due to illness. Ruth was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1946 and his health declined rapidly over the next two years. He made his final appearance at Yankee Stadium on July 13, 1948, keeping himself upright by leaning on a baseball bat so that the team could retire his number 3. He died two months later at age 53. On Opening Day the following season, the team dedicated the ballpark’s third monument, just to the right of Ruth’s former manager.
To say the three grave-like markers remain untouched until the early 1970s wouldn’t be entirely accurate. After all, they were in the field of play. There’s a famous video highlight of young Bobby Murcer jumping between Huggins’ and Ruth’s monuments to chase down a ball in the gap on June 24, 1970. Red Sox outfielder Dom DiMaggio (Joe’s brother) maintained a healthy fear of them when he patrolled center field. “It was scary. Very scary. Oh yeah. It was a good way to eliminate yourself,” he recounted in 2008.
Comically and somewhat irreverently, former Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall once engaged Ruth in a conversation during a pitching change. “(The Yankees) were pounding us. We used a lot of relief pitchers, so I sat up on the monuments. I sat on Babe and I said to Babe, ‘You wouldn’t play in these games, Babe. These are terrible games.’”
By the time Yankee Stadium approached its 50th birthday, the ballpark was no longer in great condition. Rice University had owned the stadium since 1962 and failed to adequately maintain it. In 1972 New York City used eminent domain to buy the park just a few months before George Steinbrenner and a group of partners purchased the franchise itself in January 1973. Not long thereafter, the city approved a $24 million stadium renovation that forced the Yankees to play in Shea Stadium for the 1974 and 1975 seasons.
It’s an understatement to say that Steinbrenner had a flair for dramatizing – and monetizing – Yankee legacy. Rather than leaving the three monuments as a curiosity in the field of play and the retired numbers hanging inaccessibly in the clubhouse, he pushed the fences in to make room for a memorial area beyond the outfield wall and between the bullpens. Even though this outdoor museum would not become accessible to fans until 1985, it was named Monument Park.
On top of that, the Stadium had amassed an assortment of commemorative plaques over the years which were mounted on the center-field wall for players including Yogi Berra, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle as well as managers Joe McCarthy and Casey Stengel, owner Jacob Ruppert, GM Ed Barrow, and Pope Paul VI. All of these were displayed in Monument Park as well.
No organization celebrates its heroes quite like the Yankees, who have now (through the 2022 season) retired 24 numbers for 26 players and managers. Joe DiMaggio’s number 5 joined numbers 3 and 4 in 1952 as the only three numbers removed from circulation for the next 17 years. A retired-number boom kicked off a few years before the 1970s renovations with Mickey Mantle’s number 7 in 1969. This was followed by four more in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, three in the 1990s (including Jackie Robinson’s number 42, which was retired by all 30 major-league teams), and eight since 2000. Each retired number was displayed on the back wall of Monument Park with a plaque commemorating the individual’s accomplishments. Additional plaques have joined the collection for a handful of players whose uniform numbers aren’t retired as well as ones honoring visitors to Yankee Stadium like Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and Nelson Mandela, and to commemorate the Stonewall Inn Uprising.
As Monument Park swelled with retired numbers and plaques, the honor of a monument was reserved just for the greatest of Yankee legends, and only after their passing. In 1995 Mickey Mantle’s plaque was moved from the wall to its own red granite monument to match those of Huggins, Gehrig, and Ruth. In 1999 Joe DiMaggio’s followed suit. On September 11, 2002, a special monument was dedicated to the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks the year before, situated off to the side of Monument Park away from the player monuments.
Throughout the 1970s renovations and subsequent changes to the ballpark, the monuments themselves never moved, but when the Yankees relocated to a new ballpark across the street in 2009, Monument Park came with them. Instead of being located beyond the deep left-center field fence, it now resides in straightaway center beneath the batter’s eye. In September 2010, two months after Steinbrenner’s death, his family dedicated a seventh monument. The enormous monument to The Boss is 35 square feet – nearly triple the size of the others.
Yankee Stadium opens to ticket-holders 90 minutes before the scheduled first pitch on every game day. Monument Park opens at the same time and closes 45 minutes before the game begins. Even as nearly everything else at Yankee Stadium has a sponsorship or requires a separate expenditure, Monument Park remains free to enter with the purchase of a ticket to the ballgame.
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Among the most universal human experiences is loss. When someone dies unexpectedly, they never truly leave us. We carry them and feel the weight of their absence for the rest of our lives – but only for the rest of our lives. When we pass on, our memories of loved ones go with us. The next generation is left with the stories we tell them.
When the Yankees built an everlasting monument to Miller Huggins in 1932, it was a comforting tribute for the bereaved – even three years after losing someone we remain bereaved – but in equal measure, it was built for our own generations 90 years later. It’s a testament to the enormous legacy of a man so admired and missed that our fore parents could not allow him to become merely a historical footnote. His monument and each monument and plaque that followed is a lesson, a story, and a demand that we remember. A person is more than a won-lost record; we are each the amalgamation of our experiences and the emotions and actions we inspire in others.
A 56-game hitting streak matters not just because of statistical record-keeping. It’s about the stories it collects along the way. The legacy of playing 2,130 consecutive games isn’t tarnished whatsoever just because it’s no longer the major-league record. The inspiration and reverence, the close calls and famous quotes, the glory and anguish – all of these are what our elders passed on to us. They’re right there beyond the center-field fence waiting for us to discover and remember. They’re a command from our parents and grandparents to say to our children, “Do you see the one over there that says ‘Derek Sanderson Jeter?’ Let me tell you a story …”
DANIEL R. EPSTEIN is a teacher, writer, musician, and union leader in Central New Jersey. He writes for Baseball Prospectus, Off the Bench Baseball, and Bronx Pinstripes. He also serves as co-director of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America. By day, he is an elementary-school special-education teacher and president of the Somerset County Education Association.
SOURCES
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/miller-huggins/
https://www.mlb.com/news/history-of-monument-park-c263612104
https://goldinauctions.com/Lou_Gehrig_s_Retired__Number_4___That_Hung_in_Yank-LOT41271.aspx
http://bronxpinstripes.com/yankees-history/yankees-retired-numbers-uniforms/