It's a goddam good game," says Yankee President Gabe Paul, "to survive what's been done to it."
What is being done to baseball and by whom is a matter of substantial contention, but the first half of Gabe Paul's statement has been resoundingly endorsed in the past few days.
> In New York, hallowed old Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built, reopened in plushly refurbished form, its dedication presided over by Mayor Abraham Beame. It was 53 years from Babe to Abe, but the difference in what a community will lavish on its sports team could be measured in lightyears. Trembling at the thought that its Yankees might leave town forever, the stone-broke metropolis ponied up an estimated $100 million to provide the likes of 6,900 parking spaces and an electronic Scoreboard for the fans, expansive lavender-carpeted dressing rooms for the players and a plush lounge, featuring overstuffed chairs in the shape of fielders' gloves, for the owner's guests.
> In Chicago, Peg-Legged Bill Veeck (see box page 76), dressed as a Revolutionary soldier and playing a fife, stumped triumphantly across the 100% natural turf he has restored to Comiskey Park. Marching to Veeck's tune were White Sox fans in unheard-of numbers. There were 40,318 in the flesh at opening day (compared with 20,202 last year), season-ticket sales were up more than 40%, and a franchise that had been ready as late as December 1975 to blow the Windy City looked solid as a line-drive double—all because the greatest promoter baseball has ever known was back in action.
> In Atlanta, the Braves' new owner, a tough-minded, salty-tongued communications czar and yachtsman named Ted Turner, signed up the game's most sought-after right arm in a reported $1 million deal engineered by—of all people—a fan who took the negotiating authority upon himself. With one stroke of the pen, the moribund Braves had a bright new look. The signee was a handsome, 30-year-old, bubble-gum-chewing pitcher named Andy Messersmith, a free spirit and free agent whose victorious legal battle against baseball's "reserve clause" was reshaping the entire sport.
Little wonder then that turnstiles clicked like Castanets as combined major league opening-day attendance figures hit an alltime high. Baseball '76, which for weeks had seemed unlikely to get launched at all, was off to a rocketing start. The long legal arguments over the rights of spring, at least for the moment, proved no contest for the game's own rites of spring.
The grandest new blossom of baseball's most stimulating April ever was Yankee Stadium, a glowing renovation of the most famous, nostalgia-imbued house of sweat in America. Only New Orleans' Superdome, completed last year, cost more ($173 million); Seattle's "Kingdome," which opened this month, was a mere $60 million. Of course, teams domiciled in these weatherproof bubbles never have to worry about slipping in the rain, losing fly balls in the smog, getting grass stains on their pants or suffering other terrestrial indignities.