Up there with the steam from the sidewalk and a fist fight between a cab driver and a cycle courier, Yankee Stadium is just something you have to see at least once when you’re in New York.

The New York Yankees’ stadium is where baseball came of age. It’s where Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle went to work, and where sport’s most famous logo – the interlinked N and Y – feels at home.

The stadium opened on April 18, 1923, and at the end of this season, 85 years and 26 World Series later, one of the city’s best-loved landmarks will close.

In September, at the end of this season, the Yankees move across the street in the South Bronx to a new state-of-the-art home, costing £660m, and the old stadium will be demolished and turned into recreation parks.

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Which means you’ve now got less than six months to see a game at The House that Ruth Built, in an atmosphere that is increasingly resembling an end-of-term party.

For those who are not au fait with the rules of America’s national sport, a quick summary: it’s like rounders.

Good, now we’re all on the same page, we can settle down and enjoy the fun. But where to sit? If you’ve got the money, by all means fork out £200 for championship seating behind home plate, which will give you a great view. But let’s be honest: you’re not here for anything as trite as a game. You’re here to be part of history. So, for my money – which tends to be limited – by far the most atmospheric option is in the bleachers.

For the price of a salt-beef sandwich in a downtown deli, you get to sit with the real fans. The bleachers are baseball’s equivalent of football’s terraces – home of the brave and the die-hard; as far, both literally and philosophically, as you can be from the corporate boxes housing the corpulently buttocked.

The bleachers run in odd numbers from blocks 37 to 59 (missing out 45 and 47, which are blacked out to provide sightlines for the batsman to follow the ball). The most vociferous fans, the Bleacher Creatures, take up residence in sections 37 and 39, and act as conductors and cheerleaders for the rest of the stadium.

You can endear yourself to them by shouting “Boston sucks” whenever you fancy – such is the rivalry between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, there is never a bad time to air such opinions.

If you’ve ever been to a football match in the UK, you’ll be amazed at the language inside the stadium. It’s so polite. For all their reputation, these guys would get laughed out of their seats in the Premier League, where even wrinkled veterans and their seven-year-old granddaughters loudly question the parentage and mating habits of the opposition.

A nine-inning game lasts about three hours, but you’ll barely notice. In the bleachers in a New York summer, with the grass about 70% greener than Wimbledon’s Centre Court and the sun roaring down on your head (making you wish you’d bought a Yankees cap like everyone else), there’s no better place to be. The crowd claps along as Zorba the Greek booms over the Tannoy, someone shouts “Boston sucks” and all is well with the world.

Hungry? Buckets of Coke or nuts (£2.50), trees of candyfloss (£2.50), binlids of nachos (£3), whole roast bison stuffed with doughnuts... They’re all within inhaling distance. So scoop your neighbour out of your chair and settle in – the most peculiar sight in sport is on its way.

The seventh inning is significant in baseball, traditionally for the “seventh-inning stretch”, when the stadium rises as one, performs a few perfunctory trunk twists, nips to the lavatory and comes back with a hot dog. But it’s at the end of the seventh that things get weird.

The ground staff come out again, dragging rakes to comb the sand in the infield, but this time the Tannoy accompanies them with YMCA by the Village People. So these poor men in Yankees jackets do a jaunty little synchronised tip-tap dance, and as the campest song ever written reaches its nadir/chorus, they lead the crowd in the full-blown YMCA dance. And then the players, serious athletes to a man, in their skin-tight jump suits, hard hats and great big gloves, on salaries of as much as £10m a year, just carry on with the game as if it had never happened.

If ever there were a moment that encapsulates the passion and the perversity of the American sporting dream, this is it. In fact, I think it could well be my favourite sporting moment, ever. I just can’t believe it took me this long and this many wasted years watching Spurs to find it.

— Paul Croughton travelled as a guest of Virgin Atlantic and W Hotels

Getting there: Virgin Atlantic (0870 574 7747, www.virginatlantic.com) has returns to New York from £334. Other airlines flying to New York include British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com) and Continental (0845 607 6760, www.continental.com). W Union Square (00 800 325 25252, www.starwoodhotels.com) is buzzy and friendly, and has decent-sized doubles from £170. Or try Hotel Thirty Thirty (www.thirtythirty-nyc.com), from £125. Yankees tickets (from £7) can be booked through Ticketmaster (00 1 212 307 7171). By far the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to get to the stadium is by subway. Take the 4 train (which goes from Brooklyn, through Manhattan and into the Bronx), or the B or D trains, to 161st and River Avenue (Yankee Stadium), for £2 return.

Yankees get shirty

A plot to curse the new Yankee Stadium nearly a year before it was due to open has been foiled. Acting on a tip-off, construction workers spent five hours on the stadium site with a jackhammer this week, unearthing a replica shirt of the Boston Red Sox – the Yankees’ fiercest rivals – which had been buried under two feet of concrete in what will be the basement of the new, £660m stadium.

It had been planted by Red Sox-supporting workman Gino Castignoli, who nearly turned down the opportunity to work at the ground, but changed his mind having hatched his devious plan.

The shirt has now been sent to the Red Sox and will be auctioned off for charity.