All-Star Game

Barton Silverman/The New York Times
Chipper Jones and Derek Jeter at venerable Yankee Stadium.
NYTimes:

Across the last 85 years at the Stadium, there has been endless baseball history and, simply, history itself. There have been masses celebrated by Popes, boxing matches featuring the likes of Joe Louis, concerts fronted by Bono and a day for Nelson Mandela. And there have been, of course, those 26 world championships accumulated by the Yankees. Now there is a fourth and final All-Star Game at the Stadium, a signature moment in a final season that will be filled with them.

The game is a reminder to a national audience that it will soon be time to say farewell to a landmark. The American League standings provide more poignancy, since the Yankees are trailing by sizable margins in the division and wild-card races. Unthinkable as it might seem — the Yankees, after all, have been in the postseason for 13 straight years — there may not be any October baseball at the Stadium this season, which means Tuesday night’s game could be the Stadium’s final one on a national stage. “I think that it should steal the attention, rightfully so,” Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, said of the place he has always called home in the major leagues. “This place is as special as it gets.”