[For many Americans, Opening Day was, and remains, the true marker of each year's beginning. Here we relive the Opening Days of baseball's most storied and glamorous team, the New York American League club that began as the Highlanders and achieved glory as the Yankees. As we watch the Yankees year by year, we watch them, as well as baseball and the social fabric of America, change gradually, and at times radically. We begin early in the century, when the team played at Hilltop Park and follow them as their opening day venue shifted to the Polo Grounds, the gigantic new Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, back to the renovated Yankee Stadium, and finally in the new Yankee Stadium. We also see them open in historic Fenway Park, fondly remembered Shibe Park and Griffith Stadium, and all around the expanded leagues after 1961. We see the first game in which Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio played against each other, the only game in which Williams shared the diamond with Lou Gehrig. We ponder the fact that, with that Opening Day of 1939, the Yankees entered the era of broadcast baseball with no expectation that the tail would eventually be wagging the dog. We see the teams of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Derek Jeter gradually give way, each to the next.

We watch the annual opening-day celebration modified and affected by wars, by economic depression and expansion, by the shift of populations West and to the suburbs, and by political protest. We see presidents and mayors, actors and singers, and of course, managers and owners and players. We see protesters at Opening Day, 1945, demanding that black men, so vital to the war effort in Europe and the Pacific, be allowed to play in the major leagues. Eleven years later, we see President Eisenhower, eating peanuts and staying for the whole game as he watched the integrated New York and Washington teams open the 1956 season.].