Just before 3 p.m. on Sunday, Mike Carroll emerged from the D train at 161st Street and embarked on a footpath to Yankee Stadium that he has practiced and perfected over countless baseball seasons.

“I like riding this car because it opens right at the stairs,” Carroll said as he zipped across the platform.

Carroll, 33, who attends more than 40 Yankee games a season and has a tattoo of the team’s logo on his back, was making his first trip to the stadium this year. The Yankees, however, will not play their first home game until April 6 — a fact Carroll laughed about as he made his trip from his home on the Upper West Side. Instead, he joined an announced crowd of 43,507 at Yankee Stadium to see the first home game of New York City F.C., an expansion club in Major League Soccer.

The Yankees are part owners of N.Y.C.F.C., which will play its home games at Yankee Stadium until it can build its own stadium somewhere in or around the city. And so on Sunday the team and its fans, temporary guests in the ballpark, began the process of trying to make themselves at home.