Farewell to a baseball shrine

They are baseball's cathedrals. Wrigley Field in Chicago, Fenway Park in Boston and Yankee Stadium in New York.

But the last of these disappears at the end of this season, only to be reincarnated next spring as more of a palace than a cathedral. It will still be Yankee Stadium, but it won't be The Yankee Stadium.

The Yankee Stadium. That's what the old-timers used to call it, and it fit. You'd never say, for instance, the Fenway Park or the Turner Field, but for Yankee Stadium, it fit. For there was only one, and love it or hate it, it was the heart of baseball.

The Yankee Stadium.

The original will be no more after this season, when the new and even larger edifice replaces it right next door. That one, at a cost of $1.6 billion, will be more like a mall than a stadium, and will include a Hard Rock Cafe, a steakhouse and at least 14 other culinary options.

Now, as we push into September, only one homestand -- 10 games -- remains on the Yankee Stadium schedule.

Admittedly, the current venue is no longer exactly the House That Ruth Built. It opened in 1923 and the Babe hit its first home run, but Yankees owner George Steinbrenner got the city to totally refurbish it in the mid-1970s.

When it was done, the most spacious playing field in the game was reduced to more human size. The power alley in left field shrunk from 457 feet to 399; center was shortened from 463 to 408.

Still big, of course, but not the dimensions familiar to Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle. The fences came in, and the monuments that had once stood in that deep outfield were moved into the now-familiar Monument Park behind that shortened left field wall.

There is irony here; for years Steinbrenner threatened to move his team somewhere else (New Jersey, anyone?) because the old stadium was located in the blighted Bronx, and fans were supposedly afraid to attend games there.

The only thing wrong with that theory was that once the Yanks became winners again, the stadium began regularly selling out, featuring crowds of around 55,000 virtually every night.

I was occasionally among them, and never lost the enjoyment of climbing off the subway and into the looming shadow of the huge building. It seemed substantial and powerful and permanent; something that would simply always be.

When the safety issue deserted George, replacing the stadium became a financial issue. It's about generating more revenue, with more amenities, club seats and skyboxes churning out vats of money.

I almost took one last trip to the cathedral this summer, but time got away from me and ticket prices spiraled and other things took precedence. The memories of other trips and other summers, though, remain.

The new version will be gorgeous, and a cash machine, and the franchise and the Steinbrenners will grow considerably more wealthy. And it will still be called Yankee Stadium, or at least New Yankee Stadium.

But it won't be The Yankee Stadium.