The great man stepped onto the field for the first time around 2 o’clock on the afternoon of April 17, 1923. It was a clear and cool day in New York City, and normally the baseball season already would have been underway for a week. The grounds on which Ruth stood was the reason for the delay.

Somehow, this enormous building had risen from the dust in only 284 days. Five hundred workers had put in double shifts every day across a relatively mild winter, but they still were going to need an extra week to get the thing done.

When they realized this, the men who owned the New York Yankees — Col. Jacob Ruppert and Col. Tillinghas L’Hommedieu Huston — petitioned Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the all-powerful commissioner of baseball, to delay the whole season a week.

Landis normally wasn’t one to agree to favoring any one player or team over another. But this was different. This was baseball shedding its simple, rustic roots and reaching for the sky, on a scale  it had never before known, or even pondered.

In its infancy, the new baseball park was referred to as “Yankee Field,” mostly because that’s what baseball venues always were: parks or fields or grounds.

But this was a whole different realm.

And thus was “Yankee Stadium” born.

The Red Sox had taken the field for a workout at noon that Tuesday afternoon, the day before the grand opening, and to a man they marveled at the vast stretches of open field; center field was nearly 500 feet away from home plate. That’s all anyone could talk about. And as Ruth took the field, he was also impressed by the distance between home plate and deep center.

“Looks pretty far out to that fence,” he said.

But he also saw something else. He saw that the right field dimensions were similar to the ones he had enjoyed the previous two seasons at the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees had been the Giants’ tenants for 10 years. He made a mental note of that: the foul pole only 257 feet away, a gently deepening power alley in right far more agreeable than the steep angle in left.

He stepped in and poked four balls over the wall. He declared himself ready for the season. And it was an important one for Ruth: After hitting 54 and then 59 home runs his first two years as a Yankee, he had missed 40 games because of three different suspensions in ’22, the most egregious a six-week ban after he and teammate Bob Meusel went on a postseason barnstorming tour in defiance of Landis’ command that such money-making practices were outside baseball’s rule of law.

Then, he had compounded his problems by hitting a feeble .118 in the Yankees’ 4-1 World Series loss to the crosstown Giants. Ruth was still only 28 years old, still the most popular player in baseball by several hundred lengths, and the newspapers still coined more nicknames for him than any other athlete before him: The Sultan of Swat. The King of Crash. The Bambino. The Behemoth of Bust. The Caliph of Clout.

And yet some wondered: Was he starting to fade? Had pitchers finally figured him out? Was his famous unwillingness to take care of himself finally catching up with him? He had a terrible spring, scuffling all across Florida. Had the world already seen the best of The Big Bam?

Ruth knew all of this, which is why he grinned when he stared at right field one last time before leaving the box. Later, back in the Yankees clubhouse behind the third-base dugout, he confided something to his closest friend on the team, Jumpin’ Joe Dugan, a line he would repeat to a few trusted newspapermen the next day, when Yankee Stadium was set to open its doors for real.

“I’d give a year of my life,” he said, “if I could hit a home run on Opening Day of this great new park.”

Baseball’s demise was at hand. That was clear.

The awful gambling scandal that sabotaged the 1919 World Series had seen to that. Even by then, many thought baseball’s popularity had peaked. The largest crowd in baseball history had been the 42,620 people who jammed Boston’s Braves Field on Oct. 12, 1916, to watch the Red Sox — who had chosen to move their home games from cozy Fenway Park to accommodate ticket demand — close out the Brooklyn Dodgers, 4-1, to win the 13th “World’s Series” in five games.

The fall had been precipitous. The cloud of war shadowed the 1918 season, which ultimately was shortened due to President Woodrow Wilson’s “Work or Fight” decree. In ’19 came the Black Sox scandal. Confidence in the game was at an all-time low.

Then Harry Frazee, owner of the Red Sox, sold Ruth to the Yankees.

The Yankees, in those years, were a sickly cousin in their own city to the proud Giants, who ruled the town from their palatial palace on Coogan’s Bluff in Harlem, the famed Polo Grounds.

The Yankees played their games when they first hit town at a rickety wooden ballpark in Washington Heights, Hilltop Park, on the site of what is now Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. Seating capacity was 16,000. They were born as the Highlanders, and they rarely came close to filling every seat.

In 1912, the Yankees were 50-102-1, dead last in the American League. They drew 242,194 fans, and their lease was expiring. There was brief talk of possibly finding a new city, but instead they were offered a new home: the Polo Grounds. The Giants would be their landlords, returning a favor the Highlanders had provided a few years earlier, when the Giants played at Hilltop following a fire that destroyed the Polo Grounds.

The National League Giants were willing landlords: They hadn’t an ounce of concern the American League team — rebranded the Yankees — would ever pose a serious threat to them. And for seven years, they were compliant tenants, never finishing higher than third.

Then they acquired Ruth.

In 1920, they won 95 times, falling three games shy of Cleveland in the AL. Ruth hit 54 home runs and immediately became a folk hero. In 1921, the Yankees won their first pennant, winning 98, and Ruth swatted 59 more.

More to the point, in ’20, the Yankees outdrew the Giants in their own building by more than 350,000 fans, 1,289,422 to 929,609. The Giants closed the gap slightly in ’21, but still were swamped, 1,230,686 to 973,477.

It didn’t matter that the Giants actually won where it mattered most, on the field, capturing the 1921 World Series in six games, all played at the Polo Grounds. As early as May 1920, both Giants owner Charles Stoneham and his fiery manager, John McGraw, had sensed what was happening in their own backyard and tried to muscle the Yankees out after the end of the season. They were talked out of that by American League president Ban Johnson.

Still, Stoneham wasn’t the only owner in town who knew he had to protect his market share. Ruppert, the beer baron, had taken notice when, in 1917, an elevated subway station was constructed in The Bronx, at 161st Street and River Avenue.

To Stoneham and McGraw, The Bronx might as well have been Wyoming. They owned Manhattan. And didn’t want to share. An uneasy truce commenced, the Yankees extending their lease at the Polo Grounds through 1922.

Then, early in 1921, Ruppert and Huston contracted with Osborn Engineering, a Cleveland company that had built Braves Field in Boston, Tiger Stadium in Detroit and the latest version of the Polo Grounds, which had opened in 1911 on the same plot of land where the earlier one had burned. Osborn Engineering said it planned to build the biggest baseball field in the world — it was here when the word “stadium” was first used — that would almost double the capacity of Braves Field.

It was assumed the Yankees would find a home elsewhere in Manhattan. There was some talk of building over the train platforms on the island’s west side. There was some talk of Midtown, somewhere in the 50s. At one point, it was reported that the Yankees had settled on buying land owned by the Hebrew Orphan Asylum on 136th and Broadway, but both sides quickly denied that.

At last, in February, the Yankees announced they had paid the estate of the Astor family $650,000 for a 10-acre plot of land that was being used as a lumberyard. It previously had been a farm granted by the British before the Revolution to a man named John Lion Gardner.

All of that — the idea of their bitter rivals playing in a pasture in the middle of nowhere — was almost too much for McGraw to believe. He was overjoyed.

“The Yankees,” he declared, “will never be heard from again,”

The Yankees felt otherwise. On April 18, 1922, it was announced that White Construction Company would become the contractor on the project. At a news conference, an Osborn engineer named Bernard Green made the stunning prediction that if all went well, they actually could have the stadium ready in case the Yankees made the World Series — less than six months later.

“A little teamwork will be necessary to accomplish this happy result,” he said. “If the Yankee colonels will only make sure that their team wins the American League pennant, the contractors will do their best to see that the park is ready for the big series. That’s a fair enough proposition.”

And Ruppert, never lacking self-confidence, immediately waved his arm and said: “Already done!” His team was 3-1 on the young season.

The Yankees did make the World Series, overcoming Ruth’s “sluggish” 1922 of .315/35 homers/96 RBIs in just 406 at-bats. But the stadium wouldn’t be available to them.

From the start, it was plagued by various issues: some design changes ordered by the owners; a national railroad strike delaying steel shipments; a city labor walk-out; permit issues; cash-flow problems for both the ballclub and White Construction.

Still, when April 18 dawned mostly cloudy and with temperatures in the 40s, Yankee Stadium was ready for a delayed Opening Day, an astonishing 284 days after breaking ground. In that time, 45,000 cubic yards of earth had been removed and 116,000 square feet of sod had been laid. Workers employed 800 tons of rebar, 2,300 tons of steel, 950,000 square feet of lumber for the bleachers and 600,000 feet for the grandstand. Twenty thousand cubic yards of concrete were poured.

They used a million brass screws. The most iconic element of the park — the copper frieze that ringed the grandstand — was manufactured at the construction site and painted white to protect it from the elements that otherwise would have turned it a sickly shade of green.

It all had cost a tidy $2.5 million. Factoring inflation, that’s $44,128,070 in 2023 dollars — or 5 percent of what the building that replaced it would cost 86 years later.

This was what greeted Ruth and his teammates as they stepped on the field for the first official time early in the afternoon of Wednesday, April 18, 1923.

They all knew what everyone in New York knew: None of this would have been possible if George Herman Ruth — “Jidge” to his friends, The Babe to the world — hadn’t found his way to New York. Before the game, he was presented with a case carrying an oversized bat as a gift.

The symbolism was not lost on him. And when he was told the Yankees were hoping to break the attendance record his Red Sox had set seven years earlier, he smiled.

“You know,” he said, “I was at that game, too.”

The Yankees knew how popular Opening Day was going to be. The day before, hundreds had stood in line at the Yankees’ Manhattan offices on West 42nd Street to buy advance tickets. But only 20,000 or so were available.

“Thirty thousand unreserved box seats and 20,000 bleacher seats will not be placed on sale until the day of the game,” Yankees general manager Ed Barrow said. “There will be plenty of room for all and plenty of chance for the fans to buy their seats at the park on Wednesday. The Yankees fans can now go to the games on big days with the assurance that they will not only be able to get in the ballpark, but will also be able to get a good seat.”

It seemed laughably laced with hubris, a walk-up of 50,000. But the Yankees already viewed themselves as the baseball princes of New York, even if they had yet to prove it on the same field as the Giants. Barrow announced there would be 36 ticket booths and 40 turnstiles to accommodate the masses. 

Fans were urged to take mass transit. Special express trains on the Sixth and Ninth Avenue elevated lines would drop fans off at the Jerome Avenue station beginning at 12:30, three hours before first pitch. The Lexington Avenue subway made it even more convenient, taking people right to the 161st Street station that had captured Ruppert’s imagination six years earlier.

Those with cars were told to cross the river at 138th, 145th or 155th, utilizing what are now the Madison, Willis and Macombs Dam bridges.

At first, Barrow and his bosses were worried. Peering out of their offices high above the stadium, they saw a modest crowd of 500 people milling around the front when the doors opened at noon. But their fears were soon allayed. By 1:00, each of the three dozen ticket booths were swarmed with fans eager to plunk down $1.10 for grandstand seats and 50 cents for bleachers. By 2:00, even the third deck was packed. And by 2:10, Inspector Thomas Riley ordered the main gates closed and padlocked.

“Standing room only, folks,” he said, redirecting them to that entrance. Many just went there. By 3:00, the SRO section was packed five deep.

Judge Landis tried to show himself a man of the people, and took the subway to the Stadium from his Manhattan hotel. He made the mistake of arriving around 2, and was nearly crushed in the throng before being rescued by police and hustled to his seat alongside the third-base line, where he would sit next to New York Governor Al Smith.

The Yankees would announce an official crowd of 74,200. The club and the police estimated some 25,000 more were turned away and told to go home.

The NYPD made two arrests for ticket speculation: Detective Andrew M. O’Connor of the Fifth Inspection Division caught Abraham Cohen, 28, of Brooklyn trying to scalp a $1.10 seat for $1.25 and 35-year-old Sebastian Calabrese asking for $1.50. Both men were arrested and held overnight in lieu of $500 bail.

Those who did get in saw an afternoon filled with ceremony. There was Smith. There was Landis. There was the Seventh Regiment Band, which began to play at 1 o’clock sharp, under the baton of John Philip Sousa. Mayor John F. Hylan and Johnson, the AL president, couldn’t attend because both were stricken with influenza (and in those years right after the great plague, that was no easy diagnosis).

Two of the most interesting figures on hand took part in the parade beginning at 3 p.m. in which Sousa and his players led both teams and a host of VIPs to center field, where they would hoist the American flag, then the Yankees’ 1922 AL Championship banner, and then play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

One was Stoneham, the Giants’ owner, who essentially had set all of this in motion and had seen every second of the building’s construction from his office at the Polo Grounds, walking distance across the Harlem River. It is fascinating to imagine what he was thinking, seeing close to 75,000 people gathered in a baseball building seven-tenths of a mile away from his own.

The other was Frazee, the man who sold Ruth to the Red Sox.

Just before 3:30, the Yankees took the field, and though the loudest cheer accompanied Ruth on his way to right field, there also was a sizable hand offered to shortstop Everett Scott, whose appearance meant he would be extending his own record by playing in a 987th consecutive game. That streak would reach 1,307 by May 5, 1925; 26 days later, on June 1 — two days before the Yankees waived Scott — Lou Gehrig would play a game for the Yankees and not come out of the lineup until 1939.

There had been a long tradition that anyone asked to throw out a celebratory first pitch before a big baseball game purposely would throw it high, wide, or low. But Al Smith had played some ball growing up on the streets of the Lower East Side, and didn’t like to fail. He had been spotted warming up before the ceremonies. And he delivered a strike right to the glove of Yankees catcher Wally Schang, who was delighted by The Happy Warrior’s accuracy.

The crowd roared. And did so again at 3:31 when Yankees pitcher Bob Shawkey threw ball one to Red Sox leadoff hitter Chick Fewster before retiring the Sox 1-2-3. Sox pitcher Howard Ehmke returned the favor in the bottom of the first, including inducing Ruth — already identifying his preferred Stadium target — to fly out to right.

It was in the third when the Yankees finally broke the ice. With two outs, Dugan drove in the Stadium’s first run with a bloop to left-center, scoring Shawkey.

Up stepped Ruth.

The crowd was in an uncontrollable frenzy by now, and Ehmke tried to bear down and minimize the damage. Ruth worked the count to 2-2. Dugan took his lead off first. Whitey Witt did the same at third. Ehmke pondered what to do.

Later he would say: “Everyone knew that in the Series the year before, the Giants had gotten Ruth out constantly with big, slow curveballs. That seemed like the right choice.”

In came a 12-to-6 beauty.

Ruth swung. He connected.

Red Smith once described witnessing a Babe Ruth home run thusly: “You felt the contact with your very heart.”

In the moment, 74,200 people felt that contact in their hearts. And then set free a wave of thunder that only increased when the ball curved inside the right-field pole and landed 10 rows deep, and only multiplied as Ruth rounded the bases, touched home plate, shook Wally Pipp’s hand and doffed his cap with a dramatic flourish.

It was pure bliss, and it was not helped along by artificial means; though vendors reported a brisk sale of beer, in those days of Prohibition, that meant a brew with only 0.5 percent alcohol. You’d have a better chance catching a buzz drinking water from the Bronx River.

And they didn’t stop. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. In those days, it never occurred to players to emerge from the dugout for a curtain call because the next pitch thrown would hit a teammate in the ear. So Ruth took a seat in the dugout.

If this would, indeed, cost him a year at the back end, he seemed perfectly willing to pay up the debt.

Upstairs, on the stadium’s second level, a columnist for the New York Evening Telegram named Fred Lieb smiled in his press box seat and marveled at what he was watching. Soon enough, he would roll a leaf of paper into his typewriter and he would clack away.

“Welcome,” Lieb wrote, “to the House that Ruth Built.”