Ballpark's opening bittersweet for one
PHILADELPHIA - He was staring out into the splendor of Citizens Bank Park, watching the Phillies take batting practice yesterday morning, standing on the new grass he is charged with caring for, and still Mark Carfagno couldn't help but let out a sad little sigh.
"I'm going to miss that other place," he said. "I was there for a long time."
For 32 years, Carfagno tended to the hard green carpet at Veterans Stadium, just an 18-year-old kid from Most Blessed Sacrament parish in southwest Philadelphia when the Phillies hired him in 1971 as a groundskeeper for what was then their new stadium. He was perhaps the only person here yesterday who saw Citizens Bank Park's opening as bittersweet - as a tough transition from the place that was so much a part of his past.
All around Carfagno, the scene was strange and sweet, the 41,889 fans rarely staying in their seats long enough to see the Phillies lose to the Cleveland Indians, 6-5, or to catch the spectacular view of the city skyline over center field.
Instead, they walked from section to section to take everything in - to sit underneath the giant scoreboard and lights standard in left center. To wander around the concourse to the open-air level in center field, leaning against a railing and seeming so close to the action on the field. To position themselves in the short porches in left and right in the hope that Jim Thome or Pat Burrell would crack a fastball into the bleachers, which each slugger did.
Really, there's no comparison between the Phillies' old stadium and their new one. There's no comparison at all. The Bank is a baseball stadium, fit for that sport alone, with enough character and comfort already to rank among the majors' best venues. The sightlines; the restaurants, Harry the K's and McFadden's; the natural grass field - the Bank combines the old and the new of baseball in a way the cold, dingy, football-first Vet never did or could.
But it's always so hard to let go when you've practically lived somewhere so long, when you turn your head on your way into work and see several heaping mounds of gray dirt where the place of your past once rose above you. As a boy, Carfagno had hocked copies of the Evening Bulletin outside Connie Mack Stadium, a prelude to his grounds crew duties at the Vet, which was the only full-time job he had ever known until yesterday.
He kept calling it "the other place," as if he couldn't bring himself say those two simple words, The Vet, as if they would hurt too much to hear. It was almost home to him, after all, and the players he met and admired were almost family.

They all knew him by his nickname, "Frog" - Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose and Richie Allen and Tony Taylor, each one gladly stopping in the Vet's tunnels to shake hands and offer gifts of autographed baseballs and bats to the short, slight man with the Roman nose and the eyeglasses and the deeply set cheeks.
"I should have had a lot more [memorabilia]," he said, "but those were the only people that meant anything to me."
On March 21, he stood near Broad and Pattison and watched the Vet crumble, a pair of photographs in his back pocket. One was of Pete Cera, the longtime equipment manager at the Vet, the man who became Carfagno's surrogate father after his parents' deaths. The other was of Gary Tinneny, another groundskeeper, who started the tradition of having ballplayers sign the wall in the grounds crew's office when they hung out there after games. Willie Stargell, Steve Carlton, Lou Brock - they and so many others had scribbled their names there.
The wall was removed before the Vet's demolition. It survives as a pile of stone blocks, each 16 square feet, stored at a warehouse at 20th and Oregon.
Pete and Gary died several years ago.
"I really miss them," Frog said.
He arrived at 8 in the morning yesterday, to join his coworkers in rolling the tarpaulin off the moist grass and making sure the field was ready for play. Come 5:30 p.m., more than an hour after the game had ended, he was still working, smoothing the rich brown dirt along the right-field line with a rake.
He stared at the field, and as pretty and cozy and clean as Citizens Bank Park is, Frog was still thinking of the other place, the one that was like his home.
"I spent a long time there," he said. "Thirty-two years is a long time. ...
"But this is nice."
It is. It is a beautiful park, a new beginning for the Phillies and their fans, a stadium that will surely be a special spot on a summer night. Mark Carfagno is 50 now, and he grew up with the Vet like so many around here did, grew up inside it like no else did, and maybe someday soon he'll bring himself to say what he couldn't yesterday:
This is his place now, too.
This is home.