Game's greatest reminisce about Yankee Stadium

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) - From a bunt base hit to World Series championships, from an All-Star Game homer to the roar of the crowd, memories of Yankee Stadium great and small flooded over baseball's greatest all-time players Tuesday.

An array of Hall of Fame players gathered in New York as part of the festivities ahead of the 2008 All-Star Game to be played at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night in its final year before facing the wrecking ball.

The "house that Ruth built," which went up in 1923 to accommodate the growing fan base around Yankee great Babe Ruth, will give way to a new ballpark across the street in 2009.

Though reconstructed in 1974 and 1975, the existing stadium was built on the same spot where Ruth and greats such as Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played.

Goose Gossage, the former Yankee reliever who will be inaugurated into the Hall of Fame later this month, recalls the first game there after the Yankees' catcher and team captain, Thurman Munson, died in a plane crash in August 1979.

"I had never been in a stadium where there were 55,000 people crying. It was very strange that first game back after Thurman's death and funeral," Gossage said. He then ticked off a list of other memorable games there, including his first while still with the Chicago White Sox in the early 1970s.

"It was an out-of-body experience," Gossage said of his first game at Yankee Stadium. "I couldn't walk. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. There's probably five or six times in my career when I've been that nervous."

The venue has hosted three Popes, big American football games, and championship boxing matches including Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling in 1938. Pele played there for the New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League.

The stadium may be dank and crowded compared to modern ballparks, but players revere it as a cathedral of baseball.

MEMORABLE DAY

Former Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, 89, recalled a no-hitter he threw there in 1946, but also the day the Yankees said farewell to Ruth in 1948, when the retired and dying slugger was invited back to wear the Yankee pinstripes.

"I remember the Babe Ruth day on June 13 when he leaned on that bat, used it as a cane. That was the last time he ever showed up in Yankee Stadium in a uniform. He died two months and three days later on Aug 16. That was a very memorable day. I pitched that ballgame and lost," Feller said.

Others have painful memories, including former Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda. Though his 1981 team won the World Series in Yankee Stadium, he cannot forget losing the Series there in 1977, when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs to clinch the victory in Game 6.

A year later Jackson helped his team to a victory in Game 3 when, as a baserunner caught between first and second, he leaned his hip into a thrown ball, extending a Yankee rally when he could have been called out for interference.

"He should have got hit in the head," Lasorda said."