As the United States marks 250 years, few American institutions have kept their name and their hold on the public imagination as stubbornly as the New York Yankees. The franchise arrived from Baltimore in 1903 as the Highlanders and became the Yankees in 1913. It has won 27 World Series since. For more than a century, the Bronx has been where the old guard hands the game to the next generation.
The House That Ruth Built
The original Yankee Stadium opened on April 18, 1923, on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Joe DiMaggio took center field there in the late 1930s and made the job look effortless. On his day in October 1949, worn down by illness, he told a packed stadium, “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee.” When he left after the 1951 season, a young switch-hitter from Commerce, Oklahoma, named Mickey Mantle took over his position and carried the franchise through the 1950s and early 1960s.
Mickey Mantle Day
By September 1965, Mantle was having the worst season of his career, and his injuries were mounting. On Saturday, September 18, before his 2,000th game as a Yankee, the club gave him a day of his own. Mayor Robert Wagner proclaimed it Mickey Mantle Day, and 51,664 came out for the afternoon game against Detroit. Red Barber, the old broadcaster, ran the ceremony. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was on the field. So was the restaurateur Toots Shor, and so were Mantle’s wife, Merlyn, and their eldest son, Mickey Jr.
Then Joe DiMaggio stepped to the microphone to introduce the man who had followed him in center field. Mantle admitted he had never been more nervous in that ballpark. “Thank you very much, Joe,” he began. “I think just to have the greatest baseball player I ever saw introduce me is tribute enough for me in one day.” At his request, the proceeds went to research on Hodgkin’s disease.
Batter up, 1967
LIKE® has been covering New York sports since the sixties, and the proof is in our archive. The April 1967 Election Issue, priced at 40 cents, put the two men on the cover together, DiMaggio in a dark suit and dotted tie, Mantle in pinstripes. “BATTER UP!” reads the cover line, as DiMaggio welcomes Mantle to the new season. It invites readers to visit the “New” Yankee Stadium, and then sends them out into the night: after the game, Toots Shor’s, the Barberry Room, El Morocco.
The “New” was earned. Over the winter of 1966–67, the CBS-owned club spent $1.35 million refurbishing the old park, with 90 tons of paint, a white facade, royal-blue seats and new sound and lighting. It reopened for the home opener on April 14, 1967.
That year the club adopted a new anthem, “Here Come the Yankees,” written by Lou Stallman and Bob Bundin. A year later Simon & Garfunkel would ask, in “Mrs. Robinson,” where Joe DiMaggio had gone. The cover already had an answer: he was at the ballpark, welcoming the next man. Mantle retired in 1969. In 1978 he told a UPI reporter, borrowing an old quip, “If I knew I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
Across the Harlem River
Washington Heights, at the top of Manhattan, looks across the Harlem River toward the Bronx, and generations of its families have made the short trip to the ballpark.
One of them was a teenage refugee named Henry Kissinger. Born in Fürth, Germany, in 1923, he arrived in New York with his family in 1938, at 15, and settled in Washington Heights among other German Jewish refugees. He attended George Washington High School while working in a shaving-brush factory. He also found the Yankees. “At that time, I could only afford bleacher seats,” he later told Yankees Magazine. “From the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, I had a great view of Joe DiMaggio playing centerfield.”
The boy in the bleachers became secretary of state, and in later years he was a frequent guest of the Steinbrenner family at the stadium. When he died on November 29, 2023, at 100, the Yankees called him “a lifelong friend of the Yankees organization.” LIKE photographed him in New York in a Yankees satin jacket, pen in hand.
George Washington High has a baseball line of its own. Rod Carew came to Washington Heights from Panama in 1962, enrolled at the school, and worked as a grocery clerk while he learned English. He never played high school ball; he played sandlot ball with the Cavaliers on the fields of Macombs Dam Park, in the shadow of the old Yankee Stadium. Minnesota scouts noticed him there, the Twins gave him a tryout at the stadium, and he signed in 1964. He reached the Hall of Fame with 3,053 hits and seven batting titles.
Over the 1970s and 1980s, Washington Heights became the heart of Dominican New York, and baseball came with it. In 1991 every player on the George Washington varsity was Dominican, and the team’s best hitter was Manny Ramírez, whose family had moved to the neighborhood from Santo Domingo in 1985. That June, Cleveland took him with the 13th pick of the draft, and he went on to hit 555 home runs. Alex Rodriguez was born in New York in 1975 to Dominican parents who ran a shoe store in Washington Heights.
The house across 161st Street
The present Yankee Stadium played its first regular-season game on April 16, 2009, across 161st Street from the original park, on part of Macombs Dam Park, where Carew’s sandlot team once played. The Associated Press put its price at $1.5 billion, and its architects brought the old park’s white frieze back to crown the upper deck. Monument Park and the New York Yankees Museum carry the old park’s memory inside the new one. That October, with Rodriguez at third base, the Yankees won the World Series there. On September 25, 2014, Derek Jeter played his last game in the Bronx and won it with a walk-off single, 6–5 over Baltimore.
The present chapter
Eleven summers later another 6–5 night joined the story. On Thursday, July 10, 2025, Seattle’s Bryan Woo, an All-Star that summer, held the Yankees without a hit for seven innings, and the Mariners led 5–0 in front of 41,241.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. opened the eighth with a single to right, the first Yankees hit of the night. Ben Rice singled, and Austin Wells’ sacrifice fly ended Woo’s night after a career-high 103 pitches. With two out, Giancarlo Stanton pinch-hit against Matt Brash. Stanton had been 5-for-48 as a pinch-hitter, with no home runs. He hit a two-run homer to make it 5–3. “No lead is safe,” he said afterward.
In the ninth, against All-Star closer Andrés Muñoz, Trent Grisham and Cody Bellinger singled and Rice walked to load the bases with two out. Wells worked the count full, one strike from the end, and lined a two-run single to right to tie it. In the 10th, Anthony Volpe began at second base as the automatic runner and reached third on a walk. Aaron Judge lifted a fly to center off Gabe Speier, and Volpe slid around catcher Cal Raleigh’s tag to beat Julio Rodríguez’s throw. The call survived a challenge. “I’m glad Volpe’s fast,” Judge said.
ESPN Research found that no team had come back to win after being held hitless through seven innings and trailing by five or more since 1977, a span of 236 such games. It was the Yankees’ first win when trailing by at least five runs in the eighth inning or later since June 29, 2016. It also finished a three-game sweep of Seattle.
Visiting the Stadium
Yankee Stadium stands at One East 161st Street in the Bronx, where the 4, B and D trains stop at 161st Street–Yankee Stadium. The club sells tickets on its official site, mlb.com/yankees/tickets, and on game days the box office opens two hours before first pitch if seats remain. For resale, the club points fans to SeatGeek, MLB’s official ticket marketplace. Stadium tours visit Monument Park and the museum.
The Hard Rock Cafe Yankee Stadium, at Gate 6 on the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue, has been open since 2009 and serves guests year-round, with or without a ticket. On game days its hours vary, and a game ticket is required to enter. Official gear is sold at the Yankees Team Store locations inside the park, including the Great Hall Store at Gate 6, which is open year-round. Online, the club’s official shop is MLB Shop.
It ain’t over
Yogi Berra, who caught for the Yankees across the street, liked to say it ain’t over till it’s over. Two hundred and fifty years into the American story, and more than a century into this one, his old ballclub is still proving it.