Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer details it with such unbridled passion and vivid nostalgia that it is considered among the best sports books of all-time.

Roger Angell sneaks it into every one of his articles, especially his piece Early Innings, and it is a part of every visitor—whether announced or unannounced by the voice crackling through the PA—who has gone to a baseball game in the last two centuries.

It is a staple of every baseball writer’s portfolio, from George Plimpton to David Halberstam, from Frank DeFord to Rick Reilly.

And it is a piece that I will never be able to write. 

I will not be able to rave about the glory days of my youth, hitching humble trams on my way to endearing Ebbets Field. I will not be given the opportunity to ramble retrospectively of Yankee Stadium, its nooks and nuances as familiar as the Mick’s home run numbers and the Splendid Splinter’s batting average. I will not have the chance to pine for the muffled warbling of a Red Barber or a Mel Allen or a Bob Casey, their timeless voices acting as the PA systems of my childhood.

And it’s all because I live in the Dead Stadium Era. 

These are not the crisply cut fields nor the stadiums rife with history of your time, no sir. No longer can you find stadiums of distinctive shapes and sizes or with lovable idiosyncrasies like the Green Monster in Fenway Park. No longer are these the grounds upon which legends were made, where stars rose and fell, where records were accumulated, stood, and inevitably toppled. 

These are unfeeling hunks of concrete and mortar, replete with every possible amenity one could want—save a soul. Certainly, you can find glowing behemoths listing out-of-town scores, plush seats, cup-holders, and a liberal sprinkling of internet cafes, but I have yet to find any famed journalist who extols portable internet access as the origin of his affection for the sport.

Gone are the days of Ebbets Field (and the Brooklyn Dodgers that were once housed there); gone too is Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, the ballpark whose 88 years of major-league service began in the same tragic week that the Titanic famously sank. 

My desperate hunt for nostalgia even finds me longing for that much-maligned cookie-cutter era of baseball stadiums, that period of ballparks that prided itself on versatile function rather than form. But even those have upped and left: Veterans Stadium, Philly’s lovable old eyesore, has since been replaced; Candlestick Park, where the hometown Giants’ Willie Mays once roamed and where 62,000 baseball fans huddled as an earthquake rocked San Francisco in the 1989 World Series, is now exclusively a football field; and more recently, the original Busch Stadium, where Redbird fans were privy to a steady stream of stars from Stan Musial to Ozzie Smith to Albert Pujols, was detonated in June 2006.

Those that remain have been poisoned by the growing sense in the sport that fans need more than the game itself to keep them coming out. 

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