N EW YORK | Two construction workers are taking a break, puffing cigarettes and talking baseball at the corner of 161st and River in the Bronx. One says Alex Rodriguez is too focused to be distracted by divorce and Madonna, and is about to start playing like a $300-million ballplayer.</p><p>The other thinks it&#8217;s all about pitching, and he&#8217;s not sure the Yankees can overtake the Rays, and before he can make his point, a group of a dozen or so business-types in navy blue Yankees hard hats walk out of the construction site.</p><p>&#8220;Big time,&#8221; the A-Rod guy says. &#8220;This place is gonna have lots of big time.&#8221;</p><p><em>This place </em>is new Yankee Stadium. It sits across 161st Street from old Yankee Stadium, which Rockies manager Clint Hurdle calls &#8220;a baseball museum.&#8221;</p><p>As the baseball world converges here for the All-Star Game, folks are tripping over themselves to eulogize the old Yankee Stadium in its last year before progress takes the Yankees &#8212; and a Hard Rock Cafe and martini bar &#8212; to the new palace.</p><p>But all the love letters are missing something obvious. It&#8217;s like this everywhere with baseball stadiums. A Detroit contractor expects to make $1 million selling pieces of the demolished Tiger Stadium. Lawsuits are filed every year to protect the charm of Wrigley Field. Red Sox fans formed a massive campaign to save Fenway Park.</p><p>Heck, even dumps like old Comiskey Park in Chicago had people in tears when the wrecking ball came.</p><p>Football may long ago have sped past baseball as America&#8217;s passion, but no sport enjoys a bond with its bricks and mortar like baseball. The reasons are embedded in baseball&#8217;s DNA and history &#8212; and make new construction a delicate and multi-billion-dollar industry.</p><p>&#8220;I call it the spirit of the place,&#8221; says Earl Santee, heading HOK Sport&#8217;s design team for Kauffman Stadium&#8217;s renovations, new Yankee Stadium and others. &#8220;You want people to sense they&#8217;re at someplace different than any other place they can be in that city. While it&#8217;s about baseball, it&#8217;s kind of about the place, too.&#8221;</p><p>Even so, there are some who wonder if the same things that make fans&#8217; marriage with stadiums so unique might also leave the sport behind for future generations.</p><p>&#8226;&#8226;&#8226;</p><p>Gil Brandt is a football man, and he will defend his beloved game until death. He started scouting pro football in the 1950s, pioneering techniques that are still used today.</p><p>In the nearly 30 years he was an executive with the Dallas Cowboys, his teams played at Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium, among several other baseball parks. On those days, Brandt remembers players pointing into the stands, surprised, like, <em>Hey, I can see my mom and dad up there</em>. The ballpark boom that&#8217;s dominated major-league baseball the last 15 years has touched football as well, and even with the NFL&#8217;s new construction it still can&#8217;t approach baseball&#8217;s intimacy.</p><p>&#8220;Football is such a captivating sport,&#8221; Brandt says. &#8220;But if (intimacy) is an advantage, they&#8217;ve got it. It&#8217;s a lot easier for the baseball fans to touch hands with a baseball player than it is with a football player.&#8221;</p><p>There are seats at Kauffman Stadium that are as close to home plate as the pitcher. You can spend fewer than $20 and be closer to some of the players on the field than their teammates.</p><p>In football, the first 10 or so rows are bad seats. You&#8217;re blocked by the players and can&#8217;t see the game.