AMERICA AT LARGEAs Yankee Stadium faces the wrecking ball fond memories are the order of the night, writes George Kimball

FOR THE better part of a century, the bitter rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees has been the fiercest this side of Glasgow. With Yankee Stadium slated for the wrecking ball at the conclusion of the present season and the home side all but eliminated from the play-off chase, tonight's meeting between the old foes will almost certainly be the last to take place in the ancient "House that Ruth Built". The attendant memories will outweigh the absence of dramatic implications to the Boston team's final visit to the historic venue.

Earlier this month another convocation of Red Sox and Yankees at a minor league ball park in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had produced an abundance of misty-eyed memories. Billed as the "Legends Reunion", an abbreviated five-inning game between doddering members of the 1978 editions of the Boston and New York clubs drew over 8,000 spectators to PNC Field, and if the erstwhile Boys of Summer had gone a bit grey, the nostalgic aspects of the occasion compensated for the three-decade erosion of athletic skills on the part of the principals.

The shared history of the Red Sox and Yankees is a tale intertwined with that of the 85-year-old venue in the Bronx. Before the 1920 season, when Boston owner Harry Frazier dispatched George Herman "Babe" Ruth to New York for $125,000, the Yankees had been poor second cousins, tenants-at-sufferance of the National League's Giants at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan.

With the arrival of the man who would become the most accomplished slugger in the history of the game, the Yankees were shortly outdrawing their landlords, resulting in the construction of a palatial home of their own on the mainland.

For partisans of both clubs, the conclusion of the 1978 season represented the Boston-New York rivalry in microcosm. The Red Sox had won 12 of their last 14 games to draw even with the defending world champions at 99-63, and on October 2nd the teams met at Fenway Park in a one-game play-off to decide the American League East. Boston held a 2-0 lead in the seventh inning when, with two runners on base, the light-hitting New York shortstop Bucky Dent hit a Mike Torrez pitch over the left field wall to give the Yankees a lead they would never surrender.

When Yankee Stadium opened on April 18th, 1923, the Red Sox were on hand for the christening, and went down to a 4-1 defeat, largely on the strength of a home run by Ruth. Beginning with their first season in the new stadium, the now-rechristened Bronx Bombers would go on to win 26 World Series titles over the next 77 years. The Red Sox, who behind Ruth had won their fifth world championship in 1918, didn't win another until 2004.

If October 2nd, 1978, is celebrated as a national holiday in Yankee-land, the day's events remain a source of lingering resentment to legions of Boston fans. An entire generation of Red Sox fans grew up with the tale, resulting in a new middle name for the day's arch-villain. New Englanders never speak of Bucky Dent, but rather of "Bucky F***ing Dent".

The 1978 game had been preceded by a decade's worth of eye-gouging, bench-clearing brawls between the teams. In one of these rumbles, at Yankee Stadium two years earlier, New York third baseman Graig Nettles had body-slammed Boston pitcher Bill (Spaceman) Lee, resulting in a dislocated shoulder that put the Spaceman on the disabled list.

Lee, who had won 17 games in each of the previous three seasons, was never the same pitcher again, and in the run-up to the recent Old-Timers' game had vowed to exact revenge the first time he faced Nettles. (Most people assumed Spaceman to be joking, but the fact remains that Nettles took himself out of the line-up and never came to bat against Lee in Scranton.)

Even though the promoters had guaranteed the participants $5,000 apiece just to show up for the Legends Reunion, each side barely scraped together a nine-man complement, and when they did the Red Sox line-up included five players who had been pitchers (Lee, Torrez, Bill Campbell, Luis Tiant, and Dick Drago) and the Yankees' five outfielders (Mickey Rivers, Roy White, Jay Johnstone, Oscar Gamble, and Ron Blomberg.)

Other 1978 alumni were clearly unavailable: Thurman Munson, the catcher and captain of that Yankees team, was killed in a plane crash a year later. Lou Piniella, who played right field in the historic play-off fame, is now the manager of the Chicago Cubs, and on the verge of claiming the National League Central in his first year in that position.

The Red Sox old-timers drew first blood when Lee doubled and scored on a clean single by Torrez, but shortly thereafter déjà vu descended upon PRC Field in the bottom of the first when Chris Chambless singled and White reached on an error, bringing Bucky F***ing Dent to the plate against Torrez with the same two runners on base who had been there 30 years earlier.

Torrez playfully send Dent sprawling with his first pitch, but then obligingly served up one down the middle of the plate. Dent hit a shot to left that might have been off the wall in Fenway, but with a pair of baserunners between them 123 years old, on this day it didn't even score a run.

"There wasn't a lot of testosterone in evidence," said Lee after the Red Sox had gone down to defeat 3-2. "But there were a lot of candidates for Flomax and Viagra commercials out there today."

The current version of the Red Sox opened their valedictory visit to Yankee Stadium Tuesday night with a 7-3 win that left the Yanks 9½ games behind Tampa Bay in the AL East and six games back in the chase for the wild-card spot, and with a month to go it looks as though the demolition crew may get an early start.

A flood of memories has been unleashed by this week's final Boston, among them a recollection of the concluding series of the 1951 season by the venerable retired New York Times columnist Dave Anderson.

The Yankees had the AL pennant safely in hand by the time the Red Sox came to town for back-to-back double-headers that year, and in the first game, on September 28th, New York pitcher Allie Reynolds was just an out away from pitching a historic no-hitter as he faced Ted Williams.

After Reynolds induced a pop fly in foul territory, near the first- base line, he rushed over to where Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra was waiting to catch the ball, but it inexplicably popped out of Berra's glove, giving the most dangerous batter in the Boston line-up one more chance to spoil Reynolds's masterpiece.

Pitcher and catcher conducted an earnest conference on the mound, after which Reynolds returned to work: Williams lofted an almost identical pop fly, and this time Berra caught it.

In the midst of the subsequent celebration, reporters flocked to Berra seeking details of that heartfelt tete-a-tete on the mound. Had Yogi been apologising for the miscue that gave Williams another chance, or was he merely trying to settle down a pitcher who by now must have been a nervous wreck? Neither, it turned out.

"What I was telling him," said Berra, "was 'Hey, you stepped on my foot!'"