If you didn’t wake up at 5:00 EST this morning and turn on ESPN2, you may not be aware that baseball season has begun. (The Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox played their season opener in Japan’s Tokyo Dome, which accounts for the rather unorthodox start time.) This will be the final season for Yankee Stadium (a new version of same is scheduled to open across the street in 2009), so it only seems appropriate to commemorate Opening Day with a look at the cinematic history of the House That Ruth Built.
According to our crack research staff, Yankee Stadium’s earliest screen appearance came in Harold Lloyd’s 1928 feature Speedy. In his final silent film, Lloyd plays a cabbie who races Babe Ruth to the Stadium and stays to watch in the game, in which Ruth swats one of his then-record 60 home runs for the season. Not to be outdone, Buster Keaton appeared that same year in The Cameraman, in which he played a one-man game at the otherwise deserted stadium:
Fourteen years later, another sort of one-man show became the most famous scene to be shot at Yankee Stadium, as Gary Cooper re-enacted Lou Gehrig’s famous farewell address in Pride of the Yankees:
It’s hard to top that one as far as baseball monologues go, but Kevin Costner gave it a shot in 1999's For the Love of the Game, in which he played an aging pitcher attempting to complete a perfect game from the Yankee Stadium mound. With John C. Reilly as his catcher, how can he lose?
And finally we have this romantic moment from Anger Management, featuring the incomparable emoting of Rudy Giuliani. If only every American voter had seen this clip, his presidential campaign might still be alive today.