With the help of the various scorecards and ticket stubs I’ve saved over the years, I’ve been able to list roughly 127 games that I’ve attended at Yankee Stadium over the last 20 years. From among all those games, no single memory stands out any more than any single memory stands out from the house I grew up in, or the schools I’ve attended. Yankee Stadium was not so much a landmark that I visited, but a setting for a part of my life. It’s where I grew up as a baseball fan. It’s where I learned to keep score. Where my fandom was forged, challenged, and rewarded. My memory of the Stadium is thus assembled from a large collection of moments. Moments which made up my life as a baseball fan over the last 20 years. What follows is an associative trip through those moments.

The first baseball game I ever went to wasn’t at Yankee Stadium, but at Philadelphia’s old multi-purpose concrete donut, Veteran’s Stadium. Though I knew the Yankees were my team, one I inherited from my grandfathers on both sides of my family, men who remembered Babe Ruth and everything since, I was only getting my feet wet as a baseball fan in the summer of 1986 in the wake of my parents’ separation. Prior to that, my fandom was devoted primarily to music and countless hours of MTV. The Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” became something of a gateway drug to professional sports for me in late 1985, and Super Bowl XX was the first sporting event I watched from start to finish. That summer, the Mets were the hip young team that captured the attention of the tri-state area, and my dad took me on a bus trip organized by his office to see the Mets play the Phillies at the Vet. Despite the artificial turf and the fact that the Mets, who could have clinched the NL East that night, lost, I was hooked. Dad took me on another work trip to see the Mets at the Vet the following summer. By then I had sunk my teeth into the sport, collecting baseball cards, pouring over the statistics, and redirecting my attention to the team I had rightly inherited, the Yankees.

Sometime after that second game, I told my dad that, while seeing the Mets at the Vet was cool and all, what I really wanted was to go to Yankee Stadium. After all, the Yankees were my favorite team and Yankee Stadium was Yankee Stadium. At the time it seemed such a wild and exciting concept to actually get to go there. Somewhere in the middle of trying to explain to me that his work trips only went where they went, Dad realized what he had to do was get us some tickets on his own.

My first trip to Yankee Stadium came on September 9, 1988. It was a night game, a 7:30 start, against the Tigers. Rich Dotson started for the Yankees against Walt Terrell, and my dad, his girlfriend (who three years later would become my stepmother), and I sat in the front row of the upper deck in shallow right field. Having made nearly 130 subsequent trips, I’m unable to distinguish much about my journey to the Stadium that night. We likely walked over the pedestrian bridge to get the park. I was likely entertained by the man playing the white recorder at ear-splitting levels in the tunnel. The trip up either the ramps or the escalators to the upper deck likely felt like we were climbing a mountain, and I’m sure that first glimpse of the green grass and reddish dirt through the entrance to the stands looked as much like heaven to me as to everyone else who’s experience it, but I don’t really remember. I do remember our seats, though. Those front-row upper deck seats (Section 639, Row A) felt like a red-velvet opera box to me, and always would. Those seats rank high on the list of things I’ll miss most about the old ballpark, in large part because of the experience of seeing my first game from that location.

I was a huge Dave Winfield fan at the time, and being perched directly over my hero made the experience all the more special. I remember looking at the way the grass was worn by his positioning in right field (at Shea they called that the Strawberry patch). Winfield didn’t get a hit in the game, but he walked and came around to score in the fifth to cut the Tigers’ 2-0 lead in half (though I wouldn’t have remembered that without my rudimentary scorecard, my first attempt at scoring a game).

I do remember that it was a beautiful night (77 degrees, clear, and dry according to the box score). The phenomenon of sitting outdoors in a brightly lit stadium with a pitch black sky above was still very novel to me at the time. I could have stayed there all night, and when the Yankees tied the score in the sixth on a Rickey Henderson triple and an error on Claudell Washington’s subsequent groundball to shortstop, I thought I just might get to.

As we got closer to the ninth inning with the game tied, my dad informed me that we wouldn’t be staying for extra innings. In disbelief, but not wanting to sour the evening with an argument, I believe my response was little more than, “we’ll see.”

The Tigers loaded the bases with one out in the seventh, but Dale Mohorcic got Ray Knight to fly out to shallow left and Alan Trammel to ground out to strand all three runners. Mahorcic also stranded a one-out Matt Nokes double in the eighth and Ray Knight, whom he hit with a pitch, with two outs in the top of the ninth.

The Yankees, meanwhile, hadn’t had a baserunner since Washington reached on that error in the sixth and was stranded by a Don Mattingly pop out and a Winfield groundout. In fact, Henderson’s triple was their only hit of the game (Winfield’s fifth inning walk had been plated by a walk to Ken Phelps and productive groundouts by Mike Pagliarulo and Willie Randolph). Terrell was still in the game in the bottom of the ninth when Washington came to the plate to lead off the inning with my dad’s deadline looming. Moments later, Washington launched a ball over the fence in deep right center field to give the Yankees a 3-2 lead and send both me and my dad and his future-wife home happy.

The Yankees actually won the first four games I saw at Yankee Stadium which stretched out over three years, a lifetime for an adolescent boy. My second game at the Stadium came on April 1, 1989. It was an afternoon preseason game between the Yankees and the Mets, which was the greatest of novelties in those days before Interleague Play. This time my dad and I went with his father and sat in the very last row of the upper deck up behind first base (Section 17, Row X). I remember looking out the grated slit window in the concrete wall behind us and being shocked to see the Empire State Building standing tall in the distance. What I remember most from the game is Daryl Strawberry hitting a mammoth home run that arched into the front corner of the upper deck in left field, which seemed an inhuman feat to me at the time.

The next year I saw the Red Sox at the Stadium for the first time on June 14. I attended that game with my mom’s boyfriend and his large assemblage of Italian brothers and brothers-in-law. We sat up high in the main reserves under the net behind home plate. The Yankees won a pitchers duel between Chuck Cary and Dana Kiecker, 3-1, and it drizzled throughout the game. In the late innings, Bob Sheppard announced that, as a token of appreciation from George Steinbrenner, those Yankee fans (from the announced crowd of 27,073) who sat out all nine innings could use their ticket stubs as rain checks for one of several designated games later in the season. I was in charge of redeeming the tickets and got us all seats out in the lower deck in left field in fair territory (Section 344, Row F) for a July 16 tilt against the Royals.

That complimentary game, to which I was able to bring my best friend at the time, Ben Weinman (who would go on to found the Dillinger Escape Plan), would prove to be far more interesting because of a controversial play that unfolded in front of us. At some point during the game (the play-by-play data is unclear and I didn’t keep score that night) a Yankee that I remember being Jesse Barfield hit a deep fly to the wall in left field several rows in front of us. In a precursor to the famous Jeffrey Maier play, Royals left fielder Jim Eisenreich retreated to the wall and lept to make the catch just as a fan in the front row swiped at the ball and knocked it into the stands. Eisenreich reacted just as Tony Tarasco would six years later, but this time the umpire (most likely third base ump Tim McClelland or second base ump Don Denkinger) sided with the outfielder and called Barfield out.

The fans in our section went nuts, of course. I didn’t see the play that clearly because Ben and I, not having had enough ballpark experience to really judge a major league fly at that point, ducked, while the rest of our group jumped to their feet. In contrast to the Stadium’s current policy not to replay any play that’s either close or in favor of the opposing team, the play was shown several times on the DiamondVision screen in right center. Beyond getting a better look at the play, I was struck by the fact that, had I stood up, I would have been on the screen. One of the guys in our group, Vinnie, who had worn a white wife-beater and hot pink shorts, stood out like a sore thumb on each replay (Vinnie also had the presence of mind to mug for the camera rather than follow the play, an instinct which befuddles me as much now as it did then). In between innings, the MSG Network’s Al Trautwig came down to ask the fans whether they though it was a home run or an out. They, of course, said it was a home run, but before he could ask a follow-up, Trautwig was escorted out of our section by Stadium security.

The first time I ever saw the Yankees lose in person was the first time my mom took me to a game. A professor at the local community college, my mom took me to see the Yankees play the Angels with a school group on July 26, 1991. I was especially excited about this game for two reasons: 1) we had front row seats in the upper deck, this time right over third base (Section 630, Row A), and 2) Dave Winfield would be returning to the Stadium with the visiting Angels. Winfield singled and walked in four trips while Mark Langston limited the Yankees to a Hensley Meulens home run (of which I have no memory) and the Angels won 5-1. The key moment in the game for me, however, came in the top of the eighth inning with big lefty Dave Parker leading off for the Halos.

I had just bought a pretzel and a souvenir-sized Coke and had situated myself in my seat with my scorecard on my right knee, pencil in my right hand, my pretzel on my left knee, and the Coke in my left hand. Just then, Parker fouled off a pitch that seemed to just hang in the air without moving. Over the course of what felt like several seconds, the ball did little other than get larger in diameter when I suddenly realized it was headed right for me. Pinned to my seat by my food, my scorecard, and my soda, which was filled to the brim, all I could think of to do was to hold out my right hand, pencil still woven through my fingers, and hope to deflect the ball. I missed the ball, but it didn’t miss me, hitting me right in the soft spot below my right knee cap and shooting under the seats to my left. In the stunned realization that I had just blown what could have been the only opportunity to catch a foul ball I’d ever have (still true), all I could do was slump in my seat, hope the cameras hadn’t caught my pathetic display (I couldn’t bear the thought of Phil Rizzuto thinking I had poor fundamentals), and try not to pitch a fit when another member of our group sitting to my left jumped up proudly brandishing the ball.

Though I’ve never caught a game ball, I do have a couple of practice balls from Yankee Stadium. In 2000 I had nosebleed upper deck seats (Section 16, Row U) to see the Yankees play the Mets in Interleague play. I got to the game early and went down along the left field line where then first-base coach Lee Mazzilli was hitting fungoes into the corner for aspiring left fielders Shane Spencer and Rickey Ledee to practice the carom. I was standing with my hips against the retaining wall as it rose toward the foul pole when suddenly one of Mazzilli’s fungoes came right at me. Unencumbered this time, I casually caught the ball with two hands in front of my stomach and politely held it aloft and shouted “thank you” to Mazzilli, who shot me a dirty look and proceeded with his work. That night, Mike Piazza hit a grand slam off Roger Clemens as the Mets cruised to a 12-2 victory. In their next meeting, Clemens would hit Piazza in the forehead with a fastball as retribution, igniting the feud that climaxed with the bat-throwing incident in that year’s World Series.

More recently, I was seated in my regular bleacher seats in Section 37 out in right field during White Sox batting practice on July 16, 2006 when an unidentified White Sock hit a home run that bounced around under the largely empty bleachers in front of me. Without leaving my seat, I bent over and picked it up. Later during batting practice, Jim Thome would hit the advertisement on the face of the upper deck closest to my section, knocking the bottom border of the sign loose. It would hang there throughout the game, which the Yankees won 6-4 thanks in part to first-inning home runs to left field by Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez.

Surprisingly few home runs seemed to land in Section 37 during my six years as a Sunday season ticket holder there (Row JJ, Seats 5 and 6). Hideki Matsui seemed to be the player most likely to reach our section. He once hit a ball clean over my head toward the back of the section, but the Matsui home run that I came closest to and that I remember best was his Opening Day grand slam in 2003. That April 8 game against the Twins was my first game as a season ticket holder, my first Opening Day, and Matsui’s first game in Yankee pinstripes. It was about 32 degrees that day and me and my buddy and bandmate Chris Murphy were bundled up like we were going on a ski trip, me in a big black puffy coat, hat, and gloves, Chris in red versions of the same. I would wear my winter coat to other games, but this may have been the coldest game I ever attended. Matsui’s grand slam off Joe Mays came in the fifth inning and sailed into the tunnel between Sections 37 and 39. Had I been an outfielder in an open field, I would only have needed to take a few strides to make the catch. Looking back, I wonder what it’s like to be underneath the stands and hear the crowd erupt then see a baseball rocket into passage way.

Later that year, in an August 10 game against Seattle, David Dellucci, who had just come over in the trade that rid Joe Torre of Raul Mondesi, hit his first Yankee home run into the old bullpen to my left. The ball bounced into the seats a few rows behind me and security immediately came to gather the ball and the man who caught it, prompting me to fantasize about what I’d ask for from Dellucci in return for the ball. I figured maybe a bat, a team-signed ball, and one of his jerseys. When Dellucci’s number 11 landed on Gary Sheffield’s back the following year, it only made me wish I had caught that ball more.

The first game I ever saw with the girl who would become my wife came on August 13, 1993. My dad and by-then stepmother took us. We sat in the lower deck in shallow left field (Section 304). Becky and I had been dating for about four months at that point. Jim Abbott pitched a complete game to beat Jamie Moyer and the Orioles 4-1. Abbott, as easy a ballplayer to root for as there ever was, Don Mattingly, who Becky informed me and I later confirmed bore a striking resemblance to her father when her dad was in the Vietnam War and had a mustache, and Bernie Williams, who quickly became her favorite player, helped hook Becky on the Yankees, for which I owe them all a great debt.

Meatloaf, then staging a comeback with his first Bat Out Of Hell sequel, sang the national anthem at that game. Three years later, Beck and I and a group of friends would attend a Wednesday night game against the White Sox in an attempt to capitalize on discount ticket offer. We sat in Section 16, Row D for $11.95 a piece, but getting the tickets at the ticket booth as well as herding our friends caused me to miss the first pitch of the game for the first time, an act nearly as inexcusable in my book as leaving before the last out. Or so I remember. In an odd trick of the memory, I recall my foul mood be exacerbated by the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish singing the national anthem (though my spirits were buoyed when he was roundly booed for no reason other than for being “Hootie”), but we wouldn’t have seen that if we arrived late. Nonetheless, Frank Thomas was ejected for arguing a called strike three from Mariano Rivera in the eighth, and the Yankees would go on to lose 8-3 in ten innings, with Jeff Nelson, Dale Polley, and Bob Wickman combining to put the capper on a crappy day at the ballpark.

In the game I attended immediately before that one, Rafael Palmeiro homered off Mariano Rivera to cap a ninth-inning Orioles rally as Rivera took the loss in his third inning of work after entering the game with the score tied 4-4 in the seventh. As was my luck at the time, that was the only home run Rivera gave up in the entire 1996 season.

Of course, I got to see things go the other way as well. In addition to Washington’s walk-off homer in my very first game at the Stadium, I saw Scott Brosius hit a three-run walk-off homer off Arthur Rhodes (of course) with the Yankees trailing the Orioles 5-3 in the bottom of the ninth on July 3, 1999. Less than a year later, I saw Jorge Posada hit a three-run walk-off homer off B.J. Ryan with the Yankees trailing the O’s 10-9 in the ninth inning. In that game, the Yankees entered the ninth trailing 10-8. Paul O’Neill led off with a home run off Mike Timlin. Bernie Williams singled to put the tying run on base. Mike Hargrove called on B.J. Ryan to face the left-handed Tino Martinez, who represented the winning run. Ryan walked Martinez, pushing Williams to second. With the tying and winning runs on base and none out, Cal Ripken was charging from third base anticipating the bunt when Posada laced a line-drive home run right over Ripken’s head. It would have parted his hair had he had any. The Iron Man said after the game that he saw his life flash before his eyes when Posada connected with the pitch.

That fall I got my first taste of live postseason baseball, when my buddy Jamie had an extra ticket to Game 6 of the ALCS. That was the game in which David Justice homered off Arthur Rhodes (him again) to give the Yankees the lead that would send them to the World Series for the third straight year, that time to face the Mets in the first subway series since 1956. The following year, the Yankees would fall behind the A’s 0-2 in the ALDS only to stave off elimination in the Derek Jeter flip game. When they forced a Game 5, I got myself a single seat in the middle of the upper deck over shallow right field. Jeter made another great play in that game, flipping backwards into the camera pit to catch a fly ball, and the Yankees again clinched the series in my presence.

My subsequent postseason experiences didn’t go as well. With access to a pre-on-sale via my ticket package, I got tickets in the upper deck behind home for Game 1 of the ALDS and bleacher seats for Game 6 of the ALCS in both 2003 and 2004. Both times the opponents were the Twins and the Red Sox. Both times the Yankees lost a close game behind Mike Mussina in Game 1 of the ALDS and lost an ugly game to the Sox in the ALCS. Those two ALCS Games 6, the latter of which was Curt Schilling’s bloody sock game, rank as two of my least favorite memories of Yankee Stadium. I’m sure the game results helped shape my opinion, but as much as I loved sitting in the bleachers during the regular season, I found them hellish in the postseason when they were overcrowded with people who didn’t typically sit there and didn’t know how to share the limited space. In 2003 I felt like I was afloat high up in Section 39. The following year, I was back in Section 37, but no more comfortable.

Entering the 2003 game, which pit Andy Pettitte against John Burkett, I was convinced that the Yankees were going to clinch again. Indeed, they took a 6-4 lead into the top of the seventh, but Jose Contreras had a meltdown in that inning, followed by more of the same by Felix Heredia, and the Red Sox took the lead. All along an annoying kid of about ten, who seemed to be at the game independent of any parental escort, kept telling me how he was convinced the Yankees were going to blow it. It was all I could do not to slug him. In the ninth, Trot Nixon hit a rocket upper-deck home run off supposed LOOGY Gabe White to twist the knife.

In Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS, the Yankees failed to even take a lead. In the eighth inning, Alex Rodriguez ground back to Bronson Arroyo and then slapped the ball out of the pitcher’s glove when he attempted to come over and make the tag. Rodriguez was initially called safe with Derek Jeter scoring from first on the play, but the umpires, who had correctly changed a call on a Mark Bellhorn hit from a ground rule double to a home run earlier in the game, again reversed their call, and things at the Stadium got plain ugly. Fans started throwing things on the field and police in riot gear came out to ring the field. Meanwhile, up in row J of Section 37, the very large and very irate woman who had been pushing Jay Jaffe and myself off the edge of our bleacher bench all game nearly got into a fight with her husband over her conviction that the game had been fixed.

I had already dodged one fight in the bleachers earlier that night, but the worst fight I ever saw at the Stadium came on the day Joe DiMaggio’s monument was dedicated, April 25, 1999. Paul Simon sang “Mrs. Robinson” in center field that day, which seemed oddly inappropriate, but still pretty cool, but my memories of that beautiful afternoon have been overshadowed by a skirmish between a muscle-bound doofus and a crew of Latino teenagers up in Section 652 in deep foul territory in left field. The doofus, a white guy no older than his early 20s seated in the section to our right, had plenty of beer in his system and had spotted an attractive girl in a tight white t-shirt in the section to our left. He spent a large portion of the game leering and flexing in her direction in the direct line of site of the group of Latino teenagers who were seated in the last row of our section. They got on his case about his behavior, but the doofus didn’t fight back so much as keep up his antics directed at the girl in the shirt. Later in the game, the doofus got up and headed toward the concession stands or the bathroom, but he had a half a cup of beer in his hand and, as he turned to head into the tunnel, he passed behind the teenagers and casually dumped the beer on them. In a flash, they jumped over the railing, knocked him to the ground, and started wailing on him. I remember seeing elbows jabbing the air as they brought back their fists and their Timerlands coming up before dropping on his face. Security broke things up after a minute or two, and when the doofus stood up, he had bruises all over his face and a huge gash under one eye. I’d never seen anyone beaten like that in person before.

If those were some of my worst Yankee Stadium memories, some of my best include the May 27, 2003 game against the Red Sox that I got to see from seats directly behind the camera pit at the end of the visitors dugout. That day was just another Tuesday until I got a call at work from Jamie who said he had an extra ticket to the game. His mother’s boyfriend was a fairly important attorney (and, coincidentally, a former NBA player) and would come into such tickets on occasion. This time they had an extra and, though I had left my glasses at home (I’m mildly nearsighted), I lept at the chance to see a game from that perspective. Andy Pettitte pitched a gem. Manny Ramirez misplayed a ball in left, giving Jamie, his brother, and me ample opportunity to mock him on his way back to the dugout, and the Yankees cruised to a 11-3 win. I also remember that game because Boston reliever Matt White couldn’t hit the catcher during his warmup pitches prior to the bottom of the eighth, then gave up three doubles a single and a walk across seven batters after the inning began.

Another great memory came prior to Game 4 of the 2005 ALDS. That game had been delayed a day by rain from Saturday to Sunday. With nothing else to do that Sunday, Becky and I got to the ballpark extra early and headed to Monument Park. Though it was a playoff game, there was barely anybody there that early, so we got to just hang out in Monument Park for a while. We watched batting practice through the Plexiglas in the left field wall, standing on an even plane with the players shagging flies. We wandered over to the edge of the Yankee bullpen and leaned on the wall as Jaret Wright went through a throwing session under the watchful eye of Mel Stottlemyre, his fastball popping the catcher’s mitt like a mini sonic boom. Later, Tom Gordon walked by and signed autographs for the few others present on his way out to the outfield. After soaking in the rhythms of the ballpark and the players’ various warm-ups, we headed up to our seats in the upper deck in left field and watched the Yankees pull out a crisp 3-2 win, thanks in large part to a fine start by Shawn Chacon and a key pinch-hit by Ruben Sierra, to send the series back to Anaheim.

The previous September, I saw both ends of a single-admission double-header at the Stadium for the only time. Jay Jaffe had an extra ticket, but was only able to attend the night-cap as the games were on a Wednesday. My bosses, in their infinite kindness, let me leave work early to catch the early game. As was expected, given that the double-header was single admission, the early game was sparsely attended (the box score on Baseball-Reference has no official attendance), so I settled into a comfortable seat in the main boxes close to the first-base side of home plate and watched Johan Santana carve up the Yankees for five innings up close. After five frames, Santana was removed so as not to be overextended before the upcoming ALDS, and the Yankees rallied to win the game 5-3. I then headed upstairs to meet Jay at our designated seats in the tier boxes behind home plate and watched Jon Lieber beat Kyle Lohse 5-4.

You may have sensed by now that I could go on like this forever and still only touch on a sample of the 127 games I was privileged to see at Yankee Stadium. There was the double-comeback against the Padres on June 13, 2004. The legendary game against the Red Sox on July 1, 2004 in which Jeter dove face-first into the stands. The time I took one of my benevolent bosses to his first ever baseball game, five Opening Days, a few Old-Timers Days, seeing Albert Pujols homer as Tino Martinez and Joe Girardi returned to the Stadium as St. Louis Cardinals, Phil Hughes’ major league debut, watching with my wife as Mike Mussina won his 250th game with Joba Chamberlain earning the save on our first wedding anniversary, walkoff hits by Jason Giambi, and Brett Gardner. And there were still other disappointments, such as sitting in the stands as the final Opening Day was rained out, being sent home after an official 5 1/2 inning loss to the Indians was shortened by rain, and Christian Parker’s only major league game. More recently, there was Giambi’s walk off hit in the final game against the Red Sox and the long farewell of the Stadium’s final game.

The last memory I want to leave you with, though, was a random game against the Kansas City Royals in the summer of 2002. As I said somewhere above, my Yankee fandom is inherited. You’ll find Yankee fans up and down my family tree, from my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1907 and lived through the late-90s dynasty, down to myself and my cousins and the younger generation that’s starting to spring up behind us. Out of all of those Yankee fans, one of the most devoted was my mother’s aunt Dorothy. When I was younger, she would boast proudly that Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, and other Yankees lived near her house in Englewood, New Jersey. The Yankees were such a part of her life and her passion that, when she passed away in her early 90s in the summer of 2002, her daughter, in her eulogy, described the way her mother would make lists of the young players that struck her as future stars and would implore the hitters, through the TV, to straighten out their long foul balls. One of the players she had made note of a couple of years earlier, her daughter noted, was Alfonso Soriano, who was, as she spoke, in the midst of his breakout season.

After the funeral and the reception, Becky, my mother and I, her three cousins, the son, daughter, and son-in-law of one, and the husband of another all gathered back at my great aunt’s house, which had been the family gathering place since they had all been kids. Sitting in that house, the family house, which, with my great aunt having been predeceased by her husband, would now have to be sold, the various heirlooms divided up among the surviving family members, and the lifetime of memories created there resigned to memory alone, sitting in the TV room where my great aunt Dorothy would watch the Yankees play, we hatched a plan to go to Yankee Stadium. What better way to honor her memory, we thought, than to go to the Stadium together, as a family. Amazingly, the ten of us were able to get seats in the upper deck above left field for that night’s game against the Royals. After those of us who had come in only our suits and formal dresses borrowed some clothes from the relatives visiting from out of town, we headed off to the ballpark. Andy Pettitte, my great aunt’s daughter’s favorite pitcher, started that night against Paul Byrd. Heading into the bottom of the fifth, the Yankees held a 3-1 lead. Raul Mondesi led off the inning with a single, stole second, and moved to third on a groundout. Ron Coomer followed by reaching on an error by Royals third baseman Luis Alicea. That brought the Yankee lineup back around to the top and Alfonso Soriano. Soriano hit a long drive to left field and kept it straight. The Yankees held on to win 6-3.

It felt like home.

Cliff Corcoran blogs about the Yankees here and is an analyst for SI.com.