Last rites for the Cathedral (cont.)

In what may have been the most memorable image in Yankee Stadium history, a dying Babe Ruth bid farewell to the ballpark, the fans and the game in 1948. AP

The renovated Yankee Stadium has its own, if less powerful, history and sense of place. The Black, for instance, the centerfield bleacher section painted black to serve as the batter's eye, is unique to this version. In the old stadium, sometimes a makeshift black curtain would be hoisted in centerfield, but sometimes, such as when the seats needed to be sold for World Series games, it was not. Imagine facing Koufax or Ford in late afternoon in October, with home plate darkened by shadows and sun-splashed fans sitting in centerfield behind the ace lefthanders. The Yankees thought they could occasionally still sell tickets there in the renovated version, too, but the story goes that Graig Nettles convinced GM Gabe Paul that the hitters needed a black background. Yankee Stadium, in fact, came to be known as having one of the best hitting backgrounds of any ballpark.

Reggie Jackson, of course, became synonymous with The Black with his third home run in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series. His legacy will be unmatched. The new Yankee Stadium will have glass-walled restaurant in centerfield.

One day recently, while the Yankees were playing on the road, I stood in The Black in the approximate place where Jackson's home run had landed. Standing there, literally looking back on history, it is amazing to think a ball could be struck that far, especially seeing the height off the ground of The Black at that point.

One last time I walked the Stadium, the guts of it, right down to the rat traps the size of small condominiums in its bowels. Here was a creepy basement storage room where I picked up my luggage from clubhouse men Pete Sheehy and Nick Priore after spring training in 1985. (In those days the Yankees transported the beat writers' luggage, hanging a bag tag with the Yankee logo and writer's name.) The place was down a dark narrow hallway.

Here was the press room, where working the many postseason games was like serving time on a U-boat: no fresh air and no personal space to speak of. Here was the home clubhouse, where you could sit on a couch in the office of Billy Martin or Lou Piniella, complete with a red phone on the desk on which George Streinbrenner would call, and listen to the manager tell stories for an hour or more before a game (no one sits in the manager's office any more), or pull up a chair or sit at a picnic table in the middle of the room to talk with players about restaurants, current events, movies and maybe even some baseball (writers are no longer allowed to sit at all in the clubhouse, even to conduct interviews with a seated Yankees player, even if the player invites you to take a seat, and so the disconnect between player and writer, and by proxy, to you, widens.)

Here was the visiting clubhouse, where the ceiling was so low that Randy Johnson would have to navigate around the sprinkler heads, lest his head smash one. Watching him walk from one end of the room to the other was like watching a marble working its way through one of those wooden mazes with the holes. It's the same place where in 2004 I understood what it meant for Boston to beat New York when it counted. Theo Epstein, who had never known such a thing in his young lifetime, was practically in tears.

It will all be gone soon. The Yankees made sure it would go quietly, without the postseason sendoff it deserved, with a plan for 2008 that could not have turned out much worse. They banked on young pitching and a 900-run offense. But the young pitchers were dreadful, hurt or both. The Yankees got 68 starts from pitchers in their 20s, and the combined record of those pitchers in those games was 17-23.

The offense sputtered because 1) Jorge Posada was hurt, 2) Alex Rodriguez was at his worst in big spots (he has driven in seven runs all year in late-and-close situations, less than half of what Robinson Cano had in a bad year), possibly because he stopped using the whole field (his opposite field hits by year since joining the Yankees: 23, 25, 28, 15, 9) and 3) the Yankees had neither the homegrown talent or the front office smarts to find good complementary players to withstand injuries the way Boston and Tampa Bay did. Xavier Nady was a good addition, but otherwise the Yankees' support players were dreadful. They gave 18 percent of their total at-bats to non-players Jose Molina, Wilson Betemit, Ivan Rodriguez, Brett Gardner, Chad Moeller, Morgan Ensberg, Shelly Duncan, Alberto Gonzalez, Justin Christian, Richie Sexson, Cody Ransom and Chris Stewart. Those players hit .221. The Yankees had a National League offense, if that. The 7-8-9 spots in the Yankee lineup, excluding pitchers, posted a .295 OBP. The Cubs, with pitchers taking most of the plate appearances, had better production from the nine hole (10 homers, 60 RBI) than did the Yankees (8, 38).

These Yankees didn't give their grand old ballpark a proper sendoff. It's been five years since the Yankees played a World Series game there, five years since they celebrated any kind of postseason series win there (going back to the Aaron Boone game), eight years since they fielded a world championship team. It has been a long and quiet goodbye.