WASHINGTON — Alan Greenspan, a die-hard sports fan as well as chairman of the Federal Reserve, got a baseball glove on his last day at the central bank. And a standing ovation.

In return, Greenspan provided a pep talk, urging Fed employees to keep up the good fight to protect the value of the dollar against the ravages of inflation.

"We have a very special mission," Greenspan told about 1,500 employees who filled the two-story marble atrium at the Federal Reserve headquarters.

"We are in charge of the nation's currency, and the central bank, because of that, is involved in everyone's daily lives. We are the guardians of their purchasing power," Greenspan said.

There was some official business to take care of on his last day. Greenspan presided over his 149th meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed panel that meets eight times a year to set interest rates.

He was greeted with a standing ovation when he entered to preside for the last time at the Fed's long conference table. The group, as expected, raised interest rates again.

Greenspan was presented with an old-fashioned baseball glove signed by the bank presidents. He also was given his board chair with his name engraved on a brass plaque, and the flag that flew over the central bank's headquarters yesterday.

Greenspan, a onetime jazz band musician, is going out on a high note.

From behind oversized glasses and sometimes in undecipherable language, he shepherded the economy through one of the most prosperous periods in U.S. history. In the more than 18 years Greenspan held the reins of the Fed, the economy enjoyed a 10-year economic expansion, the longest in history, and had just two brief recessions that were the mildest since World War II.

Inflation is now at a low, more-manageable level than when Greenspan took over. Helped by low interest rates, 69 percent of Americans own their own homes, a record. And the United States' position as the No. 1 economy in the world remains solidly intact.

All that came despite a number of serious shocks to the economy, including the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the 1987 stock market crash and the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

"The extraordinary events of the time make a person," JPMorgan Chase senior economist James Glassman said. "He'll be bigger than life because of that."

In a USA Today poll taken Jan. 20-22, 65 percent of the 1,006 surveyed said they approved of the job Greenspan did as chairman. He was popular across the board: A majority of Democrats and Republicans, higher-income and lower-income, and college-educated and those who did not go to college approved of the job Greenspan did at the Fed.

Although Greenspan wasn't the sole force behind the economy's success, the 79-year-old gets much of the credit. That has in part created a larger-than-life, oracle-like persona for a man who once dreamed of being a baseball player and later trained at New York's renowned Juilliard music school.

"He's been a giant," said Greg Valliere, chief strategist at Stanford Washington Research Group.

But Greenspan's career at the Fed was not without controversy. Some economists blame him for not doing enough to try to stop the stock market bubble from developing in the late 1990s.

In perhaps the loudest criticism, some economists and politicians say Greenspan got too involved in political issues, at one point backing tax cuts and at another supporting some privatization of Social Security. Those issues were too far outside the Fed's domain and threatened the much-revered independence of the marble-walled institution, detractors say.

But even those who criticize Greenspan say his flaws are far outweighed by his successes.