It's Gone! Goodbye!

You know what happened next. Engineers gave me a full workup and concluded that I was falling apart. Steinbrenner wanted a new ballpark anyway, so this gave him more leverage. I guess they could have fixed me up again as they did in 1974 and '75, but baseball had grown into such a huge business that it would have been an even bigger undertaking to meet today's unofficial standards: more luxury boxes; concourses that are not walled off, allowing you see to see the game while walking about; restaurants and shops that provide additional revenue streams; team meeting rooms and indoor training areas, etc. The Yankees are routinely drawing four million fans each year, and I've got to admit, it's wearing me out.

"In 1976 nobody anticipated Yankee Stadium accommodating four million fans a year," Appel says. "No one thought that someday it would be inadequate. When we drew two million fans in 1976, it caught us by surprise."

So that's why I am, at 85, as you people like to put it, a dead man walking. The Yankees have spent a year combing every narrow hallway and dark storage closet to assemble an inventory of every item within me. They opened up one storage room, for instance, and discovered more than 1,000 cracked bats, game-used jerseys (mostly from the 1980s and '90s) and steamer-type trunks used to haul Yankees equipment. In the carpenters' shop there is a blue leather sofa that used to be in the Yankees' clubhouse during their Bronx Zoo days of the '70s.

Get ready for the world's biggest garage sale. "This is about more than collecting," says Brandon Steiner, whose collectibles and marketing company, Steiner Sports, will assist the Yankees in selling items, much of them by auction. "Unlike anything we've ever dealt with, there are so many people, even around the world, who have a personal, emotional attachment to the Stadium. What can I create to get so many people a little bit of something?"

In the meantime, Morante has led nonstop lines of tourists through me this year, and it feels like that day in 1948 when 200,000 people filed through me to view the open casket of the Babe. These people are mourners. Some of them actually cry when they get to Monument Park, which only became accessible in the mid-'80s after Steinbrenner tired of watching the frustration build in his righthanded sluggers like Dave Winfield and Don Baylor. "People want to see home runs," said Steinbrenner, who ordered the fence moved in, which coincidentally created public access to the monuments now standing behind it.

Next year the six monuments and 24 plaques will be relocated behind the centerfield wall and under the overhang of the monstrous glass-walled restaurant, where you can still drop this trivia question on someone the way a friend did to Edward Cardinal Egan: What three former Cardinals have plaques in Monument Park? The answer: Roger Maris, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II.

THE DAY I was born, April 18, 1923, Sousa led the Seventh Regiment Band before the biggest baseball crowd ever (74,217), and the Babe declared, "I'd give a year of my life if I can hit a home run in this first game in this new park." Of course, he did hit a home run, my first, and the next day Fred Lieb of the New York Evening Telegram referred to me in his account as "The House that Ruth Built." Since then, you could write a pretty good history of baseball just on the events I saw, events so familiar they exist comfortably in shorthand: Pipp's headache, Babe's 60th, Lou's "luckiest man" speech, Babe's "camel-hair coat" goodbye, Larsen's perfecto, Roger's 61st, Koufax's 15 K's in the '63 Series, Reggie's three home runs in Game 6 of the '77 Series, the Pine Tar Game, the Aaron Boone Game, the Bloody Sock and the Frank Howard Game.

(I owe you an explanation of that last shorthand. I used that game as a proxy for all the otherwise routine occasions on which somebody saw their first major league game. I picked that one, from Sept. 3, 1967, with the Senators in town, because I knew it was the first game for a six-year-old kid from New Jersey who would become a baseball writer. The kid saw Howard and the Mick each blast home runs in the game, then was awestruck after the game to see the 6'7" Hondo walk to the team bus.)

There is one night, however, in all these 85 years that stands out the most. I am going to ask you a favor now. See, I am worried that when I am gone—as with Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds, or as my good friend Tiger Stadium is finding out—the lack of a physical structure dims the power and emotions of memory. You can stand at the Alamo and practically still hear the gunfire, but what might your grandkids feel about me if all that is left is a park? To help them truly understand me and my place in American history without tangible, visual clues, I want you to tell them about the night of Oct. 30, 2001.

On that night, the wreckage and rubble of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were still smoldering at Ground Zero. People were afraid to fly. The comfort of routine was lost to the anxiety that another attack could come at any moment. People came to Game 3 of the World Series that night with great apprehension. President Bush was scheduled to throw the ceremonial first pitch. What unnerved the fans was that they knew they were either in the safest place in the world at that moment or the absolutely most dangerous place in the world, but they had no way of ruling out either choice with any certainty.