Memories of Yankee Stadium

On the occasion of my last game at Yankee Stadium..without looking anything up:

* The 1996 divisional series. Still the four best baseball games I have ever seen, including the first two at Yankee Stadium.

* Watching Yankees hitters whine after every called strike. No team was better at it. The Big Three: 1. Paul O'Neill (class all by himself); 2. Bernie Williams; 3. Derek Jeter.

* The Atlantic Flyway. A huge loss. Very upsetting. Right across the street from Yankee Stadium was Macombs Dam Park with a brick courtyard and massive trees. It was a major stop for birds flying from Canada to Florida along what is known as the Atlantic Flyway. Now it has been leveled. Where are all those environmentalists when you need them?

* Stadium security making Michael Young show his player I.D. card to get into the stadium.

* Challenger, the Bald Eagle, making a great entrance from his perch deep in the center field bleachers to the pitching mound before playoff games.

* Meeting Jose Canseco at Kennedy Airport on a Thursday night when the Rangers were off after he had been acquired in that big 1992 trade with the Athletics. Asking him maybe three questions before the Rangers shoved him in a van and whisked him away. Then the big press conference the next day at Yankee Stadium.

* Juan Gonzalez hitting a home run into the third deck in left field or Alex Rodriguez hitting one over Monument Park.

* Easter at Yankee Stadium after Mass at St. Patrick's.

* October post-season baseball in the Bronx. An electric atmosphere. Nothing like it. Feeling the Stadium literally shaking when something big happens like Scott Brosius' game-tying two-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 5 of the 2001 World Series.

* One part of the press box for the playoff games is right next to the VIP suite. Only a glass window separates ink-stained wretches from the Big Apple elite. Among those who have sat there over the years include Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Henry Kissinger, Billy Crystal, Tom Cruise and of course Donald Trump and his latest squeeze. One year he kept standing up and blocking my view. Well, his hair did.

* Interviewing the two San Diego couples who flew all the way from the West Coast for the first two games of the 1998 World Series. They had seats in the bleachers and were heckled so unmercifully in the first game they left after three innings and didn't come back for Game 2.

* That same Series, listening to one prominent New York sports writer mutter: "I can find better places to eat (in the South Bronx) than I can in all of San Diego."

* Watching Rangers manager Kevin Kennedy go nuts when the team bus missed the turn back to their Manhattan hotel because he thought he was supposed to go to LaGuardia. As the bus tried to navigate through the streets of Queens back to Manhattan, Kennedy barked, "We are not the Washington Senators anymore!"