Ranking the Plaques in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park - Part I
Recently, Joe Posnanski - the greatest baseball writer of our generation - undertook the task of ranking all of the plaques currently captured in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It's an interesting project, and certainly a unique way to dig through baseball history. Naturally, those rankings got me thinking about the Yankees and how we could do a similar exercise with the plaques housed in Monument Park. At the very least, it would be a good way to distract myself from the beatings they took recently from the Red Sox, Orioles, Braves, and Mets.
In these rankings I focused only on plaques that cover what I'll call "uniformed" Yankees. That is, players and managers only. The handful of other plaques in Monument Park tend to be quite different in nature. I'm also ignoring the blue plaques beneath the retired numbers in Monument Park. There's a subset of players and managers who have been honored with a bronze plaque that have also had their uniform number retired by the Yankees. The number gets its own separate and distinct plaque with different words about the player. Why do the Yankees do this? That's an excellent question that I'm sure Hal Steinbrenner could answer with classic, nonsensical double-talk. But here, they don't matter. It's bronze or bust for these rankings.
On a final note, I won't share a picture of every plaque because they tend to run together and get redundant as you scan through them. For any that I don't have a picture of below, it's relatively easy to find via google. Without further ado, here's the first of a four part series digging into the most famed plaques in Yankee history.
32. Yogi Berra - dedicated on August 21, 1988
You'd be hard pressed to find a more charismatic and colorful character in baseball history than Yogi Berra. But if you look at his plaque in Monument Park you'd never know it. You would just understand that he was a good hitter for a catcher that had a clutch reputation. Even the quote they included - "It ain't over 'til it's over" - is probably not in the top 20 of great Yogi quotes. This plaque should have been a layup for the Yankees, instead it's a giant swing and miss.
31. Jorge Posada - dedicated on August 22, 2015
This one accomplishes the impressive feat of being both unnecessarily long and lacking any substance whatsoever. Instead of describing the fiery leader that Posada was on multiple championship teams, we get a few run-on sentences that rattle off stats and accomplishments that could be looked up on Baseball Reference. As we'll see, this is a common problem with Monument Park plaques.
30. Casey Stengel - dedicated on July 30, 1976
The first thing you notice with Casey's plaque is the strange gap that cuts the first sentence in half. After that eyesore, you'll notice a cryptic reference to his "spirit of eternal youth" and then a few accomplishments. As a manager, Stengel was a master innovator, and as a character he was eminently quotable. Like Yogi's plaque, you'd never know it by reading this one.
29. Mickey Mantle - dedicated on August 25, 1996
One of the rare plaques mounted to a monument in the namesake park. Unfortunately, it's a dud. "A Great Teammate" is a nice sentiment, but not really a nickname of his. There's literally a list of stats and accomplishments with a very generic sounding wrap-up sentence. The Mick was a mythical figure, but that doesn't come across at all here.
28. Babe Ruth - dedicated on April 19, 1949
This is the only one in Monument Park that simply doesn't have enough words. There's no mention of how The Babe revolutionized baseball, popularized the home run, or started the Yankees' tradition of winning. Even just listing a few of his dozen or so nicknames would have signicantly improved this one. Instead, we're left to wonder what made him so great.
27. Whitey Ford - dedicated on August 2, 1987
Another case of a bunch of accomplishments and precious little else. At least they had the decency to include his "Chairman of the Board" nickname, which hints at how respected he was. However, there's nothing here to clue us into what made Whitey Ford a smooth criminal as a Yankee.
26. Bill Dickey - dedicated on August 21, 1988
Yet another collection of factoids that can be looked up. They almost get to something interesting when it says "First in the line of great Yankee catchers". However, they fall short of describing his direct influence on Yogi Berra becoming a great catcher. This is especially odd when considering that Dickey's and Berra's plaques were dedicated on the same day.
25. Derek Jeter - dedicated on May 14, 2017
Such a promising start for Mr. Jeter's plaque. Not one, but two nicknames included. The first sentence does a good job of describing his leadership and winning spirit and then the plaque falls on its face. Three paragraphs of stats and awards and none of them manage to give us any indication as to why Jeter is an inner-circle Yankee legend.
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