I felt myself tear up only once this past Sunday, I swear. In fact, I’m not even sure if they were tears: I may have just gotten some dust in my eye during that smarmy ESPN commercial, when James Earl Jones did his best “Field of Dreams” voiceover and sepia-toned images of an empty Yankee Stadium flashed across the screen. Either way, I was affected by the pictures of an architecturally bland ballpark in the Bronx with overpriced food and perpetually dirty causeways.

Yankee Stadium was a place of firsts for me. Its pinstriped pennants were my first sports love, and I attended my first baseball game there. I was on television for the first (and to my knowledge, only) time at the stadium, caught on camera sitting next to my father when I was four years old. It was the first sports venue where, knowing full well the pedigree of the players and fans that had taken in the same scene, I was in complete awe every time I laid eyes on the expanse of grass and dirt.

My experiences at the stadium mirrored my maturation as a person. It was buying a hotdog alone for the first time, not my bar mitzvah, that made me feel most like a Jewish kid from New York who was on his way to manhood. Most recently, I drove down to the Bronx by myself to catch the train to the stadium and sat with the rabid fans known as the “bleacher creatures” in right field. Both actions were accomplishments in that they made me feel like a full-grown adult, as well as an urban-savvy city kid (both of which I am definitely not).

I feel genuinely sorry for the people who never got a chance to step out from a tunnel on the upper deck and look out on a field that has seen more historic players and games than anywhere else in baseball. The field where Joe McCarthy and Casey Stengel managed Joltin’ Joe and the Mick; where the only perfect game in World Series history was thrown; where the legends of Ruth and Gehrig and, more recently, Jeter and Mo were created. They will not be able to settle into their seats on a muggy New York summer evening and look at the Bronx County courthouse glistening in the setting sun and think, “This is why I come to baseball games.”

Some of the traditions that make going to a Yankee game great will still be there, in that brand new ballpark across 161st Street. The bleacher creatures in right field will still do the roll call and chant “Box seats suck,” and River Avenue will still be flooded with people two hours before and after game time. But the creatures will have to contend with the 60 box seats that will lend an elitist and unenthusiastic atmosphere to the venue, and the fans in the street will have to look at an empty lot where once stood a stadium that meant so much to me and baseball fans everywhere.