October 2- 8, 2003

pretzel logic

Dust to Dust

by Howard Altman

In the end, at the doomed stadium slated to be turned into dust, it is all about dirt.

Men in tuxes digging up chunks of the mound and placing them in paper cups used by the Phillies. Uniformed police digging up chunks of the dirt where home plate was and putting them in blue rubber gloves. Women in dresses scooping up loose dirt and placing it in whatever is handy.

The players are long gone. The legends, or most of them, have taken their caravan of memories elsewhere, though Lefty is still wandering around with a troupe of devotees, looking for some lost object in the visitor's dugout.

Me, I am wandering around the Vet with a 10-pound mound of mound that I picked up earlier, a trophy to 33 years of baseball. Forget that the mound was only a year old -- the league's highest hill was routinely jackhammered away for Iggles' games -- this pile of dirt witnessed a no-no. And this was the spot where Frank Edwin McGraw jumped for joy.

And now the building is nearly empty, save for the crazies like me. There are some Aramark folks, stadium workers, the beat writers scribbling their last stories from this place and TV crews, some flirting with the cleanup crew, setting up for one final shot.

One giddy woman zooms around in a golf cart festooned with dozens of red and white balloons. A man in his 20s slides headfirst over the pit where home plate was.

It is festive and warm, nothing like the end time of Vet football, which was frigid and moody like a harsh Russian winter.

It is a happy, sappy goodbye to a place that was never more loved than on the night of its death.

As the pre-game festivities build to a climax with Sen. Jim Bunning tossing the ceremonial first pitch, Phillies' PR man Larry Shenk sidles up to me to offer some sage and, as it turns out, very prescient words.

"In the movie A League of Their Own, they said there was åno crying in baseball,'" says Shenk, one of the classiest men in the business. "Well, that's not true today. There will be a lot of crying."

For good reason.

The Phillies may have posted a losing record here and it may have been out of date even before it opened, but for a little more than three decades, be it ever so crumbling, there was no place like home.

Ralph Frangipani, a groundskeeper for 18 years including a stint as the head man, blames the media for trashing the Vet and questions the need for a new park.

"Let me ask you this," says the irascible, Macanudo-chomping Frangipani, no relation to the columnist with two Ns. "A lot of the houses around here were built 75 to 100 years ago. Would you tear down your house after just 33 years?"

John Marzano, a catcher for 10 years with Boston, Seattle and Texas, also has fond memories of the Vet.

"I grew up not too far from here," says Marzano, now an analyst with the Phillies post-game show.

"We started coming here as soon as we could cross the street, at about 10 or 11," says Marzano, who also runs the Marzano Baseball Academy at Eighth and Montrose. "I remember coming here with six or seven of my friends back when if you were with a family, you could get in for 50 cents. We would run around looking for couples without children, and ask them if we could pretend we were their kids."

It only got better for Marzano at the Vet.

"I used to take the train with my wife back before we were dating," says Marzano, a proud Temple grad. "When I finally asked her out, our first date was the 1983 World Series."

As the game progresses, another lackluster affair in which the Phillies exhibit the lack of urgency that marked their nosedive out of playoff contention, I walk the stadium, up to the 700 level, down to the field boxes. Everyone talks memories. It is a sold-out wake, a standing-room shiva.

Out of those tens of thousands, I bump into an old friend, Mark Casasanto, who, like Marzano, grew up not too far from here.

I used to coach baseball, football and soccer with him at Seventh and Bigler.

Casasanto, the Phillies' front-office concierge, offers a perspective about the Vet as icon.

"From the time I was first aware of my surroundings, the Vet was part of the neighborhood," he says. "It will be very strange to not see it there anymore."

Larry Shenk's crying time, for me, comes as the Tugger emerges from a black Lincoln -- the last of the legends introduced to help bring down the curtain.

My eyes well up. When I was a 13-year-old Mets fan, he convinced me that you gotta believe, a personal credo ever since. Later, in the locker room, I listen as he talks about his emotions and how he's still fighting the fight against cancer. I want to tell him how much he's inspired me, but I don't. I go down looking.

A few hours later, standing on the spot where he threw one past Willie Wilson to win the Phillies their only World Series ever, I don't want to leave.

Because the next time I come here, it will be dust.