Yesterday, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and several dozen of their fellow Hall of Famers paraded up Sixth Avenue on a red carpet 18 blocks long, celebrating the All-Star Game and saying farewell to Yankee Stadium. Hundreds of thousands cheered them, as well as the modern stars who accompanied them, as if they were royalty. Try to imagine New York blocking off two miles of Midtown Manhattan on a summer day for the benefit of some old-school basketball players saying goodbye to the Garden, and you’ll have a good sense of the difference between the kind of fame you earn in baseball and the kind you can earn elsewhere.

Even baseball has its limits, though. Monday night, a reporter passing by a club on the West Side marveled as Joba Chamberlain passed by a knot of autograph collectors unrecognized (and perhaps unrecognizable) without his pinstripes and flat-brimmed cap. If the most famous pitcher in New York can go unnoticed by people staked out behind a velvet rope waiting for him, that tells you something about what being the most famous pitcher in New York means, at least when compared to being Willie Mays.

If Yankee Stadium were a ballplayer, it would be much more like Hank Aaron than Joba Chamberlain, which is why this past week, in which it has been honored loudly and at length, has mattered. As a ballpark, as a piece of architecture, and as a work of urban engineering, the stadium has its flaws, but these seem to matter less and less as the last game here draws closer, and not to matter very much at all when watching awe cross the faces of children seeing it for the first time. A parade, a festival at the Javits Center, a Bon Jovi concert in Central Park, and endless lines to watch batting practice at the stadium may all have seemed a bit much before they started; but once they had, they didn’t seem enough at all.

This is probably because the grand and glorious July send-off may after all not be just a prelude to a last dance in October, but may in itself be the real thing — the last time the park holds the attention of everyone who cares about baseball, and the last chance many will have to see it off. One hardly needs to get sentimental to think the people who have filled the stands there all these years deserve to see some final playoff games, even some with a 27th World Championship on the line. One would, though, have to get sentimental to think there’s a very good chance of it.

Of course the Yankees are hardly out of it, but their odds just aren’t good going into the second half. With 67 games left to play, the team is not only in third place and six games behind Boston, but more tellingly is five and a half behind Tampa Bay, losers of seven straight. The pitching staff at times seems to consist solely of Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera, its delegation to last night’s game. And with Hideki Matsui and Johnny Damon, two of the team’s three best hitters in the first half, on the disabled list, and the lineup having hit .223 in the two weeks before the All-Star break, it isn’t as if the pitching staff’s failings are irrelevant next to the might of a new Murderer’s Row.

Maybe no team’s fans deserve a championship (if any do, they live on the north side of Chicago), but that just doesn’t seem so while sitting watching baseball in the Bronx these days. From most angles in the park, it’s difficult to see the 16 luxury boxes that line the loge level, which were essentially an afterthought in its design. In the new Yankee Stadium, there will be 60 of these boxes, around which the park will be built, and there will be about 10% fewer seats than there are in the old one.

No park that charges $9.50 for a 16 oz. bottle of sugary beer can be described as a citadel of the working class, but there are people who now attend games and even hold season tickets — real fans, for whom baseball holds a central place in their lives — who will barely be able to afford mustard at the new park. Worse things could happen than these people having a last chance to take in a World Series.

Even before an endless procession of Hall of Famers, the oldest of them born during the Great Depression, took the field, one could be sure that this would be one of those moments in which baseball transcends itself, and honors the kind of fame that men such as Mays and Aaron have earned. The kind of moment that seems to take place more often at Yankee Stadium than elsewhere; something too large for almost every other park and every other city. A third ridiculously improbable second-half Yankees comeback in four years could make for an even more transcendent moment; soon enough, the Yankees will be playing somewhere more befitting the presence of Joba Chamberlain than Yogi Berra. If that isn’t entirely a bad thing, you’d have to be a fool to pretend nothing will be lost.