The Stars Take the Stage

The Game's Grand Cathedral Is the All-Star Centerpiece

NEW YORK, July 14 -- Even all gussied up in red-white-and-blue bunting, the way we have come to know her on special occasions such as Opening Days and World Series games, Yankee Stadium is still not the prettiest thing you've ever seen. But she's the most interesting. Fenway Park, just by batting those lovely green eyes, can outcharm her any day. Wrigley Field is more alluring on a physical level. Without the fancy adornments, Yankee Stadium, at least if you knew nothing about baseball, could be described, somewhat accurately, as a dump.

But since you know something about baseball, you would never say such a thing about Yankee Stadium, especially on an occasion such as Tuesday night's All-Star Game, when she has gotten all dressed up one last time to say a presumptive goodbye as baseball's quintessential national stage.

Slated to be demolished to make way for parking lots when the in-progress, $1.3 billion edifice across 161st Street opens next season -- the name will be the same, even if the aura will not -- Yankee Stadium is in its final days.

With little evidence and no assurances that the third-place Yankees have it in them to rally in the season's second half -- thus bringing the postseason back to this 85-year-old cathedral in the Bronx -- the All-Star Game, the fourth to be held here, will be like a public memorial. A smaller private ceremony, for family and friends, will be Sept. 21, the Yankees' final home game of the regular season.

And while this All-Star Game has the requisite amount of luminosity and its usual subplots -- perhaps most strikingly the invasion of seven members of the hated Boston Red Sox set to overtake the home clubhouse and fight side-by-side with three Yankees in hopes of extending the American League's winning streak to 11 -- it is clear to everyone that the star of this show is the venue itself.

"This is the one stage where, if you can conquer this stage, if you can be successful on this stage, you're respected throughout the game of baseball [and] you're respected in New York," said Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones, who has played in two World Series here. "With all those World Series banners, you pretty much know the road to the World Series is going to have to come through this place eventually. And if you can stand toe to toe with the best and conquer this stage, you've reached the apex."

"It's a museum, a baseball museum," said National League Manager Clint Hurdle of the Colorado Rockies. "It's a venue that holds its own against all venues."

At Monday's batting-practice session and Home Run Derby -- a made-for-television appetizer for which tickets nonetheless were selling online for as much as $650 -- a steady trickle of players, along with their families and assorted entourages, made their way to the collection of plaques beyond the left-center field wall. Known as Monument Park, the area was once fair territory before a mid-1970s renovation, and now is where the Yankees have immortalized their greatest legends: Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, DiMaggio and others.

"Mickey," said Jones, when asked which player's memorial he was looking forward to visiting. "He was my dad's [hero]. When I invited my dad up here, he said he only wanted one thing and that was to get his picture taken next to Mantle's bust out there."

It is a longstanding tradition for ballplayers, upon their first visit to Yankee Stadium, to make a pre-game pilgrimage to Monument Park, typically alongside a handful of fellow rookies, the goosebumps lasting well into the game itself when it dawns on you: You're standing where Babe Ruth once stood. Right there is where Gehrig gave his luckiest-man-on-the-face-of-the-Earth speech.

If you have been here only once, you remember it forever. If you have been here a thousand times, you still remember the first.

"I don't remember [which teammates] I was with," Oakland Athletics pitcher Justin Duchscherer said. "I just remember we all went and checked out the monuments. It's almost surreal. And then I remember the first time I was warming up on the mound and thinking about all the people who had stood there. It's definitely a special place."

Among the all-stars who had never been to Yankee Stadium before this week was Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets, who will start for the National League. During Monday morning's news conference with the managers and starting pitchers, Sheets mentioned looking forward to visiting the "statues."

"Statues, monuments -- I didn't know what they were called," he said later. "Whatever they are, I'm going out there. Whatever's out there has got to be important and I'm going to go out there and take a picture with it."

Yankee Stadium, where Ruth and Gehrig played -- and where Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling, and Knute Rockne gave his "win one for the Gipper" speech, and the 1958 Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in the "Greatest Game Ever Played," and three Popes have delivered Mass -- will be no more in a few more months.

They will transport the 26 championship banners, and the iconic white-frieze façade of the outer shell, and monuments from Monument Park to the new stadium. "It's, what, 100 yards away?" Derek Jeter, the Yankees' all-star shortstop, said on Opening Day. "It's not too far for the ghosts to go."

The new place will have a price tag roughly 500 times that of the original, and it will have luxury boxes decked out like fancy steakhouses and $750 seats behind home plate. Eventually, it will host an All-Star Game, and the red-white-and-blue bunting will be hung from the upper decks for her debutant ball.

But she will never be as cool as her older sister, the one that launched a million memories, the one that still commands attention all these years later.