For: New Yankee Stadium

The original Yankee Stadium was a stadium located in The Bronx in New York City. It served as the home baseball park of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees from 1923 through 2008. Located at East 161st Street and River Avenue in The Bronx, the stadium has a capacity of 57,545 and hosted 6,581 Yankees regular season home games during its 85-year history. It was also the former home of the New York Giants football team, as well as the host of twenty of boxing's most famous fights and three Papal masses. The stadium's nickname, "The House That Ruth Built" comes from the iconic Babe Ruth, the baseball superstar whose prime years coincided with the beginning of the Yankees' winning history.

Yankee Stadium is one of the most famous sports venues in United States, having hosted a variety of events and many historic moments during its existence. Its primary occupants, the Yankees, have won far more World Series championships (26) than any other major league club and Yankee Stadium has hosted 37 World Series, far more than any other baseball stadium. The Stadium also hosted the major-league All-Star Game four times: 1939, 1960, 1977, and, as part of its curtain call, 2008.

In 2006, the Yankees began construction on a new $1.8 billion stadium in public parkland adjacent to the original Yankee Stadium. The Yankees are expecting to open their new home in 2009. Once the new stadium opens, most of the old stadium, including the above-ground structure, is to be demolished to become parkland.

The first game at the stadium was held on April 18, 1923, with the Yankees beating the Boston Red Sox 4-1. The final game at the stadium was held on September 21, 2008, with the Yankees beating the Baltimore Orioles 7-3.

History and design

Soon after its opening, Yankee Stadium came to be known as "The House that Ruth Built", in reference to the Yankees' star player, Babe Ruth. Ruth's power as a drawing card had enabled the Yankees to build their own stadium in the Bronx after their rivals across the Harlem River in Manhattan, the New York Giants, were threatening to evict them from the Polo Grounds. In the first game at Yankee Stadium, April 18, 1923, Ruth hit the first home run at the Stadium, a three-run shot to help defeat his former team, the Boston Red Sox, 4-1. Boston Red Sox first baseman George Burns got the first hit ever in Yankee Stadium. The Yankees also won their first World Series during the Stadium's inaugural season, a rare coincidence that would not occur again until the St. Louis Cardinals did it in 2006.

When Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston and Jacob Ruppert, the team's owners since January 1915, footed the bill for construction of a $2.5 million stadium, they did so at considerable financial risk and speculation. Baseball teams typically played in 30,000-seat facilities. Huston and Ruppert invoked Ruth's name when asked how the Yankees could justify a ballpark with 60,000 seats. Many people felt three baseball teams could not prosper in New York City, but Huston and Ruppert were confident the Yankees could outlast the more established Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants of the National League (which proved true, as both would eventually relocate to California in the 1950s). The doubt over the Yankees' lasting power was amplified by baseball's sagging popularity after the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were expelled for conspiring with gamblers to fix that year's World Series.