THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED

By Steve Wulf

Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds are now housing projects. The Deliverance Evangelistic Church sits on the site of what was once Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium. The Herbert Hoover Boys Club is where Sportsman's Park used to be in St. Louis, Missouri. Crosley Field was swallowed up by I-75 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The spot on which Bill Mazeroski stood in 1960 when he hit his dramatic World Series home run in Forbes Field is actually in a ladies' room on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. They paved paradise, the old Comiskey Park in Chicago, to put up a parking lot for the new, vastly inferior Comiskey Park.

All those ball parks have been leveled since the '60s, all in the name of progress, prosperity and Manifest Destiny. Now only four remain to connect fans to the past, to link Lou Gehrig to Cal Ripken. Of those, three have recently been given the kiss of death: Tiger Stadium, Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. Going, going, gone.

Their obsolescence is being planned not just because they are old, but also because their builders didn't have the foresight to provide them with club seating, luxury boxes and Hard Rock Cafes. It would be easy to blame the baseball owners for being greedy, and make no mistake, they are. But their co-conspirators and enablers are legion: politicians, corporations, economists, fans, journalists. Sportswriters who once thought the designated hitter was the end of civilization now dismiss the old ball parks as inconvenient anachronisms. Tiger Stadium? "Bad neighborhood," say my brethren. Fenway Park? "Hey, it's a sardine can." Yankee Stadium? "Bad neighborhood and no parking."

Damn Camden Yards, the gleaming, charming, "old-fashioned" Baltimore ball park that has turned so many cities green with envy. Damn the Jumbotrons and the food courts and the infuriatingly courteous ushers and the souvenir superstores with the Cooperstown Collection jackets. And damn us for letting ourselves be played for suckers by people who see us not as fans but as a "revenue stream."

Granted, some ball parks probably aren't worth saving. Not many folks in Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, preferred spider-infested Municipal Stadium to Jacobs Field, the brand-new Camden Yards knockoff that puffed up civic pride even while the school system was going down the tubes. Not many tears will be shed for Candlestick Park in San Francisco and County Stadium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Kingdome in Seattle if and when those yards bite the dust.

But the ancestral homes of the Tigers, Red Sox and Yankees tell much different stories, of Ty Cobb and Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. These parks, and safe-for-now Wrigley Field, are baseball's Libraries of Alexandria, the repositories for its greatest treasures. The memories, which distinguish baseball from every other American sport, are the reasons we can't give up the game even after it abandons us.

Traditionally, cultures become more fascinated with the past as a millennium approaches, so this rush to scrap baseball history in favor of creature comforts is all the more disturbing. We can't get enough news about tombs discovered in Egypt and terra-cotta warriors unearthed in China, yet the good people of Boston now see the Green Monster in Fenway not as the Great Wall it is, but as some big slab of Sheetrock that can be transferred to a new site with better access, easier parking, more seats, and, oh yes, more corporate suites.

Tiger Stadium, which began life as Bennett Park in 1896, will be the first of the three to go. Twice in the past few years loyalists have surrounded the ball park and given it a hug to demonstrate their affection, but they are down to their last, futile lawsuit, and ground will soon be broken for a Camden Yards knockoff in a better neighborhood.

Fenway, which dates back to 1912, will be the next to fall, if only because Boston sees another Camden Yards knockoff as a fait accompli. There are a few holdouts, most notably Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, but he's up against no less a personage than Ted Williams, who says, "I would not be sentimental about moving into a new ball park." And you won't find any Fenway supporters on the current Red Sox, either. "Blow it up," slugger Mo Vaughn said one day last year. "Blow the damned place up." The Red Sox may as well put a THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED sign on the Green Monster.

Last but not least will be Yankee Stadium. The House That Ruth Built could very well become The House That Ruthless Had Built for Him. Owner George Steinbrenner, who for years has been trashing the stadium's Bronx neighborhood while making eyes at New Jersey, is being massaged by New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is backing a proposal for a billion-dollar SkyDome knockoff on Manhattan's West Side.

Never mind that Yankee Stadium is far more accessible by both car and subway than the new stadium would be, never mind that the neighborhood is actually quite safe on game days, never mind that 2 million fans a year can still imagine Mickey Mantle gliding across the outfield. The wish list of one megalomaniac seems to take precedence over the welfare of millions. Instead of giving the billion to George, why not sprinkle some of it over the school system and some of it over the Bronx, and renew New York City? As it is, Yankee Stadium is one of the few places in the city where cultures and ages and incomes still mix. People who watched the Yankees' home opener on television three weeks ago marveled at the snow; people who were there marveled at the warmth.

Baseball historians have noted that the very same wrecking ball leveled both Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. In a figurative sense, that same destructive weight is swinging anew. How do you stop it? How do you tell people they won't know what they've got till it's gone?