Yankee Stadium on Film

Some landmarks are so burned into our collective mind’s eye that their image tells the story of their city, the people who live in it, and the joy shared by everyone who’s experienced it. When actress and filmmaker Penny Marshall – an avid sports fan who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium and made one of the great baseball movies, A League of Their Own – spoke of her youth, she said, “Yankee Stadium was the only thing we had in the Bronx. It was an institution.”2

Marshall directed Big (1988), about a prepubescent kid who gets his wish to grow up and experience the excitement of New York City. To fully experience the city, she knew she needed to get her main character to Yankee Stadium. Big’s main character, Josh Baskin, played by Tom Hanks, enters the grandstand through an underexposed concrete tunnel. Marshall’s camera inches toward the field to reveal what awaits them on the other side: the shimmering white façade and the glowing dot-matrix scoreboard. We don’t see any more of what the characters see, but for anyone who’s ever emerged from one of those tunnels, you don’t need to see it to feel it: the expanse of green outfield grass, the crack of batting-practice line drives, and the golden, manicured infield dirt.

In an era of open concepts, those tunnels guiding our eyes to the grace of a field that always seems three times larger than our imagination are the pinnacle of baseball nostalgia. A moment shared by anybody who’s ever entered a baseball stadium. Hanks’ character in Big is an adult and a little boy at once. Through him, we can feel the awe of a child seeing Yankee Stadium’s sprawling open space for the first time.

From almost the moment the original Yankee Stadium opened to the public in 1923, it appeared in motion pictures, both in baseball stories and not. In 1928, while the stadium was amid renovations, two of cinema’s great comedy icons, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, turned it into their muse.

When Keaton came upon an empty Yankee Stadium, he endeavored to improvise a scene for his film, The Cameraman. Keaton’s character sneaks into the stadium and mimes a baseball game alone without bats, balls, or gloves. Using an empty stadium makes the impact of its presence even more powerful as it looms like the watchful Monument Valley landscapes of John Ford’s westerns in the backdrop, painting a portrait of the intricacies that made the ballpark iconic in the ensuing decades.

The barren slope of outfield seats gives way to a diagonal wall, beyond which there are only a handful of buildings and the stadium’s ongoing construction. The Cameraman was made before New York City development cascaded with housing projects and commercial real estate. Missing in the background is the well-known Gem Razor advertisement, which we can instead see as a more modest text along the outfield fence. Of course, there is also the famed frieze, which appears only fleetingly within the scene. In the few shots it does show, the lack of fans and the old, grainy film stock make the feat of architecture overwhelming and hint at why this bit of design became the most familiar part of the stadium’s iconography.

The stadium plays an even more central role in Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (directed by Ted Wilde). Early in the film, we learn that Lloyd’s character, Harold ‘Speedy’ Swift, loses jobs as quickly as he gets them, partly because he insists on being near his beloved Yankee Stadium (referred to in the film’s title cards as the Yankee Stadium). We get some brief gameplay shots from obscured angles within the stands, as if playing from a projector through Harold’s mind. Later, Harold, now a cab driver one ticket away from going to jail, has a chance meeting with Babe Ruth, who needs a lift to get to the game as quickly as possible.

In a visually dazzling sequence, Harold narrowly evades other vehicles and pedestrians before pulling up to the stadium’s front gate. Though Ruth comments, “If I ever want to commit suicide, I know who to call,” he still invites his driver to watch the ballgame. In the stadium, we glimpse the box seats and some gameplay (taken from newsreel footage of Ruth smacking a home run). Speedy is Lloyd’s love letter to the bustle of New York City and its burgeoning entertaining hotspots, such as Coney Island. Yankee Stadium’s appearance as a vital part of the film speaks to its stature as essential to the city’s rapid early-twentieth-century growth.

In 1942 two major Hollywood productions depicted Yankee Stadium, now 15 years older and more renowned thanks to its occupant’s stature as the winningest ballclub of the 1920s and 1930s. They help paint the stadium’s evolution and advancements in Hollywood technology. Most obviously, the two earlier pictures were without sync sound (filmed at the tail end of the silent era), while these newer films use dialogue as their primary mode of storytelling.

Woman of the Year, directed by George Cukor, is about two newspaper reporters who fall in love; one – played by Spencer Tracy – is a sportswriter, and the other – Katharine Hepburn – writes about culture and turns up her nose at low-hanging fruit like baseball. Tracy takes Hepburn to a Yankees game at the old stadium to show her the value of sports. It’s the film’s best scene. The press box is pretty clearly on a stage, while the angle on the field remains primarily from the third-base line behind home plate looking out at right field.

On the infield, the grass in front of second base takes on different shapes, occasionally well-manicured and in other instances displaying large chunks of browning grass or encroaching dirt patches. This makes it obvious that the actual stadium shots happened over multiple games. In the background, we get a distant glimpse of two monuments (Miller Huggins and Lou Gehrig), Jacob Ruppert’s plaque on the center-field wall, and the flagpole in the field of play, behind which a sign warns that “persons throwing bottles or other missiles will be arrested and prosecuted.” Outside the stadium, a water tower rests beyond left-center. Buildings have sprouted in the Bronx, including the one with a Marlin Blades advertisement that remained affixed across the top floor for the next decade.

The Pride of the Yankees, directed by Sam Wood, tells a very different kind of story, one that makes the stadium into the place where its hero, Lou Gehrig, becomes an icon. In actuality, Yankee Stadium rarely appears in the film.3 Most scenes were staged 10 miles southwest of Hollywood, at Wrigley Field (home to the Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League). Smartly, many games portray the Yankees on the road, as made clear by the away “New York” lettering across their jerseys. A few shots, however, were done at Yankee Stadium, including a shot of the exterior and another with in-game action in the outfield. Footage shot by a second unit at the real Yankee Stadium during the 1941 World Series is sporadically intercut with shots at Wrigley. During Gehrig’s attempt to hit two home runs for Bill, the small boy who’s sick with cancer, Gehrig’s monument is vaguely visible in center field, despite being unveiled roughly a month after his death.4

In the film’s most famous scene, Gary Cooper as Gehrig gives his “Luckiest Man” speech. As Richard Sandomir describes in his book on the making of the film, “The absence of a complete text, film, or audio copy means that it might have faded without the existence of Pride.”5 Although Sam Wood wanted the speech to look as though it was done inside of a real stadium, the primary shot, a low-angle to make Cooper look heroic with his teammates and throngs of fans hanging on his every word, was done on Samuel Goldwyn’s sound stage. In post-production, the filmmakers superimposed this shot over the footage taken at Yankee Stadium during the World Series.6

A decade later, television was a ubiquitous form of entertainment in America. Yankee Stadium found itself as the backdrop for various shows such as The Phil Silvers Show (1955-1959) and Naked City (1958-1963). In a 1961 episode of the latter entitled “A Hole in the City,” we catch a sight of the Bronx neighborhood surrounding Yankee Stadium. Cops set up in front of Gate Six, preparing to apprehend a young criminal (played by Robert Duvall in an early guest role) who desperately hides away in his aunt’s apartment, which directly overlooks the outfield. The stadium can be seen from unique vantage points throughout the episode, including when the climactic chase leads to the rooftop and provides a look at the frieze from the perspective of neighboring buildings.

At the movies, Yankee Stadium remained a fixture, making appearances in baseball stories such as The Babe Ruth Story (1948),7 It Happens Every Spring (1949), and the critically maligned Doris Day and Ronald Reagan vehicle, The Winning Team (1952)8 about Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. Clarence Brown’s 1951 version of Angels in the Outfield takes place primarily in Pittsburgh, prominently featuring Forbes Field, but a short moment at Yankee Stadium is notable for capturing Joe DiMaggio breaking his pregame warmup to directly address the camera. We get a view of the left-field bleachers in the background, with ads for Con Edison, Tydol, Philip Morris, and, most prominent of all, Manhattan Shirts.

The Stadium also showed up in two more comedies in the 1950s, Trouble Along the Way (1953) and the Martin & Lewis comedy/musical Living it Up (1954). In Living It Up, the stadium is grouped with iconic New York City landmarks when Jerry Lewis jumps onto a freight train in hopes of getting to New York for sites like “Broadway, Radio City, and the Yankee Stadium!” Living It Up was the first Hollywood film to shoot the stadium in color, revealing in just two angles the vibrant blue of each deck, the muted green of the seats, and the red, white, and blue bunting. Living It Up was also the first of several musicals and concerts to cement Yankee Stadium’s status as an alluring place in which to perform.

In 1962 Doris Day starred in That Touch of Mink, which took her back to Yankee Stadium, this time arguing balls and strikes from inside the dugout with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra (each appearing as himself).9 A year earlier, a bird’s-eye shot of the stadium in the opening montage of West Side Story (1961) helped draw viewers into the geography and atmosphere of New York City (just as it did years later at the beginning of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)). West Side Story’s choreographer, Bob Fosse – a Chicago native who made his breakthrough in 1955 by choreographing the baseball-themed Broadway hit Damn Yankees for the stage – must have found Yankee Stadium a compelling representation of New York because he set a pivotal scene in his directorial debut, Sweet Charity (1969), on the outfield grass.

In Sweet Charity, Shirley MacLaine plays a down-on-her-luck taxi dancer, beaten by false loves and an unforgiving city that she yearns to make her “personal property.” When she meets the man who she believes will finally turn her luck, a sequence of shots begins tight on MacLaine’s face then – as she declares, “Someone loves me!” – zooms out wide to reveal famous New York landmarks such as Times Square, the Plaza Hotel, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Yankee Stadium. Fosse films MacLaine from behind, the camera and actress gazing up at the grandiosity of the decks leading up to the frieze. Just like in Keaton’s The Cameraman, the stadium is empty, only this time it’s filmed in widescreen with vibrant color. Fans cheer over the soundtrack as if playing from the character’s mind. The shot foreshadows more recent images of Mariano Rivera trotting in from the bullpen. The effect Fosse is aiming for, a woman finally confident enough to take this city by storm, is reminiscent of that of a famed closer about to take the mound and give his team the win.

Released a year before Sweet Charity, Gordon Douglas’s subversive police procedural The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra, contains a brief scene with Yankee Stadium that’s notable for the game on the field being football rather than baseball. Set up for the New York Giants (who shared the stadium from 1956 to 1973), the end zones, adorned with “NY,” stretch from the first-base dugout to the left-field wall, above which Sinatra and his girlfriend, Karen (played by Lee Remick), agree to marry. Nine years earlier, FBI Story (1959), starring Jimmy Stewart, also took place during a Giants game. Director Mervyn LeRoy staged an elaborate surveillance scene that moved from outside the stadium to the interior corridors and into the stands as fans watched football on the field.

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)10 mixed Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium as the home for the fictional New York Mammoths. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) filmed a key scene in a South Bronx park with the pre-renovation stadium lurking like an Old Hollywood matte painting in the background. The late ’70s saw a dearth in films shot at Yankee Stadium, partly due to renovations keeping the stadium under construction from September 1973 through April 1976. The renovation turned the distinctive frieze into a façade behind the bleachers and removed the 119 classic columns within the stands.

The era is well-represented by ESPN’s miniseries The Bronx is Burning (2007) which, as the title suggests, is as much a sociological study of a place and time as a baseball film. The stadium appears intercut with documentary-style stock footage of actual games and the uncanny lookalike cast acting in between. The effect is the feeling that we are watching nonfiction, centering Yankee Stadium as the heart in turmoil, reflecting the instability of late-70s New York as well as the Yankees. When the Yankees won the World Series in 1977, Yankee Stadium became a communal space injecting a town that endured financial crisis and the Son of Sam murders with hope in a time of lost optimism.

It’s My Turn (1980) inserts Michael Douglas into an actual Old Timers Game that features Yankees legends Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford and non-Yankees such as Bob Feller and Monte Irvin. At one point, Douglas appears to rob a nearly 50-year-old Mantle of an extra-base hit. In Bette Gordon’s low-budget drama Variety (1983), an enigmatic man takes the main character on a date to his executive suite at Yankee Stadium. The filmmakers shot the scene off-the-cuff during the October 1, 1982, game between the Yankees and Red Sox. “We’d gotten permission to shoot in a private booth, claiming we were making a film about life in New York,” Gordon said. “The game was in full swing, and all of a sudden, a manager burst in, screaming, ‘Your lights are in the player’s eyes.’ He explained that unless we could film without the lights, we’d have to stop shooting.”11 Perhaps owing to the difficult conditions, in the finished film, shots of Ron Guidry pitching are edited against images of Steve Balboni batting as if they are facing each other. However, they were both Yankees.

Yankee Stadium returned to the movies in force in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It showed up briefly in baseball films like Major League (1989), Mr. Baseball (1992), The Babe (1992), Little Big League (1994), and The Scout (1994)12 as well as the aforementioned Big and the action blockbuster, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995).13 The Scout turned the bright lights of Yankee Stadium into a performance anxiety trigger for two highly-touted pitching prospects, culminating in the titular scout talking “the best baseball player that ever lived” down from the stadium roof. Like Buster Keaton’s film nearly 70 years earlier, Die Hard with a Vengeance depicted the stadium in its empty state. Zeus Carver (played by Samuel L. Jackson) arrives to solve a riddle by the criminals leading him around the city looking for bombs. Unbeknownst to Carver, a sniper trains his crosshairs from beyond the drapes of the stadium executive suites. Groundskeepers work on the field in the background as an elevated train rushes past the slot behind the right-field bleachers, and we see the mid-’90s addition of “Welcome to Yankee Stadium” stenciled along the top of the visiting team dugout.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary appearance by the stadium came in Seinfeld (1989-1998). Beginning at the end of Season Five, George Costanza, the neurotic and perpetually unemployed friend of Jerry Seinfeld, lucks into a tumultuous job working for George Steinbrenner as the assistant traveling secretary of the Yankees. The Yankee Stadium shown in the series is covered in drab blues and concrete grays without any signage or unique iconography. The show’s creators, Seinfeld and Larry David, turn Yankee Stadium into a reflection of the show’s theme of being about nothing. Devoid of the mythical aura surrounding the stadium, it becomes a place where George comes to loathe working for the owner, which, in tandem with the drab depiction of the stadium, might presage criticisms leveled at the new Yankee Stadium for being a “soulless, corporate replica”14 out of step with modern ballparks.

Billy Crystal’s 61* (2001) did a fine job re-creating the old stadium by way of set dressing Tiger Stadium. A TV movie with a limited budget, 61* had the luxury of using an abandoned old ballpark since the Detroit Tigers had moved to Comerica Park in 2000 (the year the picture went into production). The film’s production designer, Rusty Smith, went to painstaking lengths to dress Tiger Stadium’s identifiable features with ones that matched Yankee Stadium in 1961. One such detail was painting all of the blue seats a color of green that matched Yankee Stadium exactly. Smith found the color match on an old stadium seat owned by Crystal.

Computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy in the early 2000s, but 61* used its limited budget to digitally enhance the location with an additional deck (Tiger Stadium had two tiers to Yankee Stadium’s three) as well as the classic frieze. The overall effect is one of the truest representations of Yankee Stadium from the 1960s despite the filmmakers not recording even one frame in the actual space.

The film that most literally weaves the stadium throughout is For Love of the Game (1999). This baseball romance makes New York a critical part of its characters’ psychology and, as such, centers Yankee Stadium as the pivot point for an aging Tigers pitcher trying to defy the odds one last time. New York is the place where he met the love of his life. The film contains late-’90s details, such as the sparse ads for brands like Kodak and The Wiz on the outfield fence along with the interlocking “NY” painted behind home plate. For Love of the Game understands that to tell a story about New York City within Yankee Stadium, the crowd must be a character, too. We get a view of stereotypical Yankees fans, passionate about the game and more than a little bit aggressive. Hecklers hiss and swear at the pitcher, who comments, “I always know when I’m in New York,” and the announcer says, “Yankee Stadium is like a schoolyard, and [the umpire] is like a teacher who sees trouble.” By the end of the film, the crowd, respecting the game, has come around to the opposing pitcher’s achievement, giving him a round of applause. Nothing is more Yankee Stadium than that.

For the final feature shot at Yankee Stadium, filmmakers took us back to where we began: a comedy. In the Adam Sandler starrer, Anger Management (2003), the stadium stands as the location for the climactic scene where Sandler’s character, believing his anger-management counselor intends to steal his girlfriend and propose to her on the stadium video screen, races onto the field and grabs the mic from Robert Merrill before the national anthem. Far from the high art of Keaton and Lloyd, the sentimental scene possesses madcap energy reminiscent of those earlier comedians. Granted free rein of Yankee Stadium over four nights, the filmmakers and hundreds of professional extras don’t linger long on the stadium’s architecture. However, the film secured the participation of people who were mainstays of the ballpark in Merrill (who began singing the national anthem for major events in 1969), Bob Sheppard (public-address announcer from 1951 to 2007), and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Over its 85 years, Yankee Stadium appeared in film and television dozens of times, sometimes as itself and sometimes with other stadiums standing in, dressed up with its iconic features. Sometimes the stadium was empty and sometimes it was filled with screaming fans. Sometimes the images were in black and white and sometimes in vibrant color. Each appearance tracks the evolution of not only the ballpark but time itself.

The common thread among each is that Yankee Stadium is a vital part of the fabric of New York City. Each time the stadium showed up, the filmmakers, in their own way, tried to bottle that feeling that Penny Marshall portrayed in Big when her character moves into that magical space, with its looming façade and ghosts of memories past, beyond the tunnel.

ZAC PETRILLO has a BA from Hunter College and an MFA from Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. He has directed multiple short films and produced shows for Comedy Central and TruTV. In 2016 he launched Vice Media’s 24/7 cable network, Vice TV. As a Society for American Baseball Research member, he focuses his work on post-1980s baseball and the intersection between the game and the media industry. He is currently the director of post production at A+E Networks and teaches television studies at Marymount Manhattan College.

 

NOTES

1 Dan Moore, The Baseball Stadium That ‘Forever Changed’ Professional Sports,” The Ringer, August 4, 2022, h​ttps:​//www​.ther​inger​.com/​mlb/2​022/8​/4/23​28854​6/cam​den-y​ards-​30th-​anniv​ersar​y-bal​timor​e-inf​lue​nce (last accessed August 8, 2022).

2 Penny Marshall, “The Tie That Binds a Girl to Her Borough,” New York Times, September 20, 2008.

3 Two TV movies about Lou Gehrig – an episode of CBS’s Climax! called “The Lou Gehrig Story” (1956) and NBC’s “A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story” (1978) – also featured Yankee Stadium.

4 Richard Sandomir, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic (e-book edition), (New York: Hachette Books, 2017), 131.

5 Sandomir, 210.

6 Sandomir, 218.

7 The Babe Ruth Story contains some wonderful shots in and around Yankee Stadium, including a shot from beyond the elevated train looking in at the stadium, a shot inside the press box with Mel Allen, and one featuring William Bendix as Babe Ruth rounding first base with a Ballantine Beer ad in the background, despite the Yankees’ partnership with the beer brand beginning after Ruth’s career ended.

8 See, e.g., Bosley Crowther, “‘The Winning Team,’ Story About Grover Cleveland Alexander, Arrives at the Mayfair,” New York Times, June 21, 1952: 15. In Crowther’s review, he sarcastically mocks the film’s blatant inaccuracies: “But this only goes to show you how misleading the records can be, since this picture version is presented by the Warners (who are honorable men) as ‘true.’ Certainly Ted Sherdeman, Seeleg Lester and Merwin Gerard wouldn’t have written the script this way if there were even the slightest question of the facts as presented on the screen.” Not mentioned, and perhaps most egregious, is the final out of the 1926 World Series. Famously, Babe Ruth was caught stealing to end the Series. In the film, Alexander records a strikeout to end the game.

9 American League umpire Art Passarella also makes a cameo as the person on other end of Day’s complaints.

10 The opening scene where the main characters jog around the edge of the field (from which the film’s famous poster art is taken) was shot at Yankee Stadium. In the background, there are minor details from just before the stadium’s renovation, such as the dark blue padding at the base of the perimeter, the blue seats, and the tunnels that lead into the stands.

11 Bette Gordon, “Voyeurism and Half-Lit Streets: Bette Gordon on Variety,” Talkhouse, https:/​/www.​talkh​ouse.​com/v​oyeur​ism-a​nd-ha​lf-li​t-str​eets-​bette​-gord​on-on​-vari​ety/ (last accessed August 13, 2022)

12 The Scout contains notable cameos, including George Steinbrenner, John Sterling, Bobby Murcer, Keith Hernandez, and Bret Saberhagen.

13 In a bit of trivia with a Yankee Stadium link, 1968’s The Detective was adapted from the book of the same name by Roderick Thorp. Thorp’s sequel, Nothing Lasts Forever, was adapted into Die Hard. Making The Detective something of a prequel to the much later action hit.

14 Andrew Joseph, “All 30 MLB stadiums, ranked: 2022 edition,” USA Today, https://ftw.usat​oday.​com/l​ists/​best-​mlb-s​tadiu​ms-ra​nked-​2022-​editi​on-ba​sebal​l-bal​lpa​rks (last accessed August 8, 2022).