Yankee Stadium vaccine effort in extra innings

NEW YORK — It was opening night at Yankee Stadium, and outside Gate 4, a young woman was making a maze of metal stanchions her stage.

“Yeah! We’re getting vac-cin-ated!” she sang, as “Thriller” blasted from her phone.

The ballpark has been a coronavirus vaccination clinic since February, but Thursday it became just one of two mass-vaccination sites in New York City to stay open 24 hours a day, distributing the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot through the wee hours.

With the Yankees far away, at spring training in sunny Florida, residents of the Bronx — the city’s poorest borough, which has the highest coronavirus infection rate — queued up well past midnight in hope of inoculation.

Some of them were dancing, if only to stay warm. At around 10 p.m., the temperature was below freezing, and dropping, with the wind shaving off another 20 degrees. Still, there was an air of nervous elation rippling through the crowd, which was small but steady with about 20 people hovering around Gate 4. They seemed thrilled to be here, at an odd hour, in the shadow of a stadium that hadn’t been full for more than a year.

The delighted-to-be-vaccinated energy was contagious. “People were laughing and singing on the line together, pure New Yorker style,” said Bianca Rodriguez, 30, who’s eligible for the vaccine as a city employee who works with Section 8 housing. “It’s a happy time.”

It’s rare to meet someone from the Bronx who’s not a Yankees fan, and a trip to the stadium typically marks the arrival of spring, a time of hope and possibility. Baseball season hasn’t arrived here yet, but with the vaccine comes the dream of some of American life returning to what it was, complete with the rush of cheering in the stands at ballgames.

“It feels like it’s opening night of the country hopefully getting back on track. At least we have some grown ups doing something reasonable,” said Landon Dais, a lawyer, 39, who wore a jacket embossed with the Yankee logo.

The construction firm he worked for built this new stadium — which replaced the iconic House That Ruth Built — in 2009. A “die-hard Yankee fan,” Dais lives a couple of blocks away from home plate. He was here for Game 6 of the 2009 World Series, when they won it all. He and his dad have been going to Opening Day every year since 1991, but last year the pandemic made that impossible. He misses it.