For my brother and I, Yankee Stadium is basically our third home. First is, of course, our actual home, the place where we grew up. In second comes Villanova, where we both went to school and watched Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, and Donte DiVincenzo bring home a pair of championships.
But after that, well, that’s where Yankee Stadium fits in, both this one and the last. At this point, I don’t even try to keep track of how many total games we’ve attended since our first visit on July 7, 2002. Nonetheless, it’s enough that, when half the stadium jumps up to celebrate a potential home run, we stay seated, knowing from the sound of the bat, the arc of the ball’s flight, and the part of the ballpark it’s headed to, that it’s dying on the warning track two feet in front of the wall — and we’re very rarely wrong.
But this past Wednesday, we experienced something we had never seen before.
Let me set the scene. We’re sitting in the upper deck, in the 300s in left field. The inning prior, Cody Bellinger had answered all of our prayers and recorded a hit, breaking both Dylan Cease’s no-hitter and shutout with a soaring solo shot to right field. Ian Hamilton came on to relieve the brilliant Max Fried in the eighth, and after getting Luis Arraez to ground out to start the frame, he fell apart, forcing the Yankees to go to Luke Weaver. A single and a sac fly later, and the San Diego Padres found themselves leading 3-1.
And yet, nobody in Yankee Stadium seemed to care at all.
In fact, despite being at the game, I had to double-check the exact sequence of events (thanks, Jeremy!) to make sure my reconstruction — not memory, reconstruction — was accurate. You see, near the start of the inning, we heard a commotion from the left-field bleachers, a celebratory cheer that made absolutely no sense. As people realized that the fans below us were not looking at the field, but up at the televisions in the pavilion in center field, everyone began to check their phones and realized that the road warrior New York Knicks had just taken a late lead from the Boston Celtics in their NBA Playoffs showdown.
As the Yankees bullpen — first Hamilton, then Weaver — melted down and handed the Padres back their lead, everyone in the Stadium had their phones in their hands, frantically trying to refresh whatever app they were using to get the score of the game (and, because so many people in such a small area were on their phones at the exact same time, cell phone service was absolutely awful). A pair of women in the seats near me watched the bottom third of one of the pavilion televisions, trying to fill in the gaps where our phones had failed. Everyone took their emotional cues from those below us, who actually could see the televisions in their seats; we had become, in essence, watchers of the watchers, eagerly awaiting news of glorious victory or bitter defeat.
Most days, when the opposing team scores a run, boos and groans are the response; when that run is the go-ahead run in the eighth inning, that response is even more intense. But just this once, the Padres did not hear boos as they snatched the lead from the Yankees.
In fact, the Stadium erupted in jubilation, because Mikal Bridges had just pickpocketed Jayson Tatum as time expired. The Knicks had just stunned the Celtics for the second straight game at TD Garden, and seized a 2-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.
While Weaver escaped the inning without further damage, the Stadium continued to hum with excitement.
Even as “Jessie’s Girl” played for ’80s in the 8th, the Knicks remained on everyone’s lips, and it was not until, “Now-pinch hitting for the New York Yankees, Trent Grisham” reverberated over the PA system did our minds truly return to the baseball game in front of us …
… and when Grisham’s home run landed in the right-field seats, the game we had tickets for had our full attention once more.
But for those several minutes, Yankees baseball sat in second place to Knicks playoff basketball even at Yankee Stadium. What a night for New York sports.