Grandpa used to be at Yankee Stadium

NEW YORK -- When they move across the street to their new stadium next year, the Yankees will leave behind the ghosts of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. And also Ned Marvin.

Marvin was a lifelong Yankees fan who could remember the starting lineups from when, as a boy, his house was a short walk from the House That Ruth Built in the Bronx. The Yankees were such a cornerstone of his life that after he died in 1999 at age 86, his grandson Jeff scattered his ashes in Monument Park.

He was not the only grieving relative to leave a family member's ashes in a New York major league baseball stadium -- usually in Monument Park or behind home plate in Yankee Stadium, or on the mound, the warning track or left field at Shea Stadium in Queens. Doing so was a very private act carried out on the sly, because officially, the teams have never permitted ashes to be scattered in their stadiums.

When the two stadiums are being razed in the coming months, demolition crews will be working where Reggie and Mookie once played.

But the ashes, apparently, will stay where they were scattered. And that means that relatives who believed they were giving their loved ones a resting place have had to accept that in New York, the quintessential tear-down-and-build-again city, nothing is forever.

"It's sad," said Jeff Marvin, who works in film distribution in Manhattan. "I've been thinking they'll be tearing up where he is. The question is, can I convince myself they're taking the ground to the new stadium, so that's Grandpa?"

(The Yankees say they have not decided whether to move dirt from Monument Park.)

Perhaps it is a measure of sports fans' attachment to the places where their teams fight it out, season after season over a lifetime, that they think about scattering ashes in stadiums -- Lincoln Center, for example, says that no music lovers have asked to have their relatives' remains left there.

Some relatives even thought of getting dirt from the stadiums before they are torn down.

Tom Bartolini of Avon, N.Y., who scattered his wife's ashes behind home plate and along the third-base line at Yankee Stadium in 2000, said two who attended the last game played there last month grabbed some dirt for him.

Lisa Hasson did not rely on friends. She had put her father's ashes on the pitcher's mound at Shea 12 years ago and went to the stadium last week in search of a keepsake. Security guards turned her away, and a team spokesman said she could not be allowed on the field. But a carpenter hired for work at Shea heard about her wish, pocketed some dirt from the field and later gave it to her.

She said she had decided that she had to have that kind of a souvenir after watching the last Mets game of the season on television. That game, on Sept. 28, was a loss to the Florida Marlins that eliminated the Mets from postseason play and cemented the date as the final contest played at Shea.

"It was emotional for anybody who was there," she said, "but for me, it was a connection with my dad. Then I realized, Shea's going to be gone -- I'm not going to be able to get in there."

No one can say how many people's ashes were sneaked in, often in film canisters or plastic baggies, and scattered at the two ballparks. Some relatives had access the teams say they do not allow.

Hasson said her father had known someone on the grounds crew who let her in before a game, let her husband run the bases and let two of her father's friends sit in the Mets' dugout.

"When we were finished, the guys who worked on the grounds crew raked the ashes into the mound so it wasn't obvious," said Hasson, whose stadium tale was first reported last weekend in New York's Daily News.

Others did not need a favor from the grounds crew. In 2002, Tony Tarasco, then in his final season as a Mets outfielder, spread some of his father's ashes in the outfield.

Robin Brass, who scattered her sister's ashes at Shea in August 2004, attended the last game at the stadium. She and her sister, Marilyn, were devoted fans, but Brass did not feel the need to take home a clump of dirt.

"Where I put the ashes is in that little triangle in foul territory where they put those recliners where people sat," said Brass, an administrative assistant at a Long Island company that maintains medical equipment. "They put recliners on top of my sister. I was annoyed about that. Those people were sitting on my sister. Now she's going to be in the parking lot. Don't laugh. I'm going to figure out where she is in that new parking lot, and park on top of her."