It's Gone! Goodbye!

To commemorate the story, Negron commissioned a painting in the room of a seated, weeping Gehrig, to which the likenesses of Thurman Munson and Jeter have since been added in the background, and the reconstruction of an old wood-slatted seat such as the one Gehrig would have sat in.

Morante, the stadium historian, says he is familiar with the story, "but I can't document it."

You can say this much for sure about the storage room: It's the place where the Yankees stashed Billy Martin to hide him from the press and set up one of Steinbrenner's most outrageous stunts. At the 1978 Old-Timers' Day festivities the Yankees stunned the crowd when Sheppard announced that Martin, who had resigned in disgrace only five days earlier, would return to manage the team in 1980. (Steinbrenner wound up bringing him back a season early.) Martin ran out of the storage room through an opening in the outfield wall and onto the field to wild cheers.

Another relic that's still around is in the trainers' room off the Yankees' clubhouse, in a back corner: a massive antique scale, on which every Yankee has weighed himself since ... well, like a lot of things about me, no one is sure, but probably since at least the late 1940s or early '50s. Gene Monahan, the team trainer since '73, found a small service tag on the back of the scale with 1958 printed on it. Now, in this case, I can say that Jeter has stood in the footsteps of DiMaggio. "It's going with me to the new stadium even if I have to walk it across the street myself to make sure it gets there," Monahan says. "Just think of all the great Yankees who have stood on it. We use it every day. Cal Ripken heard about it and wanted to buy it."

Also in the trainers' room, Monahan has kept some ointments, liniments, elixirs and bottles from my pre-'73 makeover, the smells of another era, including essence of peppermint, maybe the kind of stuff they would rub on the Mick's achy knees. But for Monahan there is something else in that room that is even more powerful: a huge chunk of his life. I see Monahan every day three hours before any players arrive, about six hours before a game. He is the last one to leave. He has done so every year for 36 years. "It's sad," he says, standing outside the door to the trainers' room. "Now as I look back, I realize most of my adult life was spent there. It's sad in a way to know that, because my marriage suffered and my kids didn't have the time with me that they should have. I can't make up for any of that time. Night games, day games, games just about every day ... most of my adult life is here."

Not 10 minutes later Yogi is standing in the same spot where Monahan stood. Berra played 18 seasons for the Yankees, from 1946 through '63. He coached and managed the Yankees. He visits me often these days. Now that I think of it, I don't think there is any living Yankee who has spent more time with me. The clubhouse may look very different now from what it did when Yogi played, but Berra points a finger toward a wall of lockers that includes those of Alex Rodriguez, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte.

"I was over there, with [Moose] Skowron," he says. "Mickey was over there too. We didn't have food in the clubhouse back then like they do now. Nothing. Maybe ice cream on a hot day. Beer. We had beer.

"I'll miss this place," Yogi says, his eyes moist. "My life is here."

Wooo, boy. September 21 is going to be hard. Damn hard.

MY HEALTH took a turn for the worse on April 13, 1998. It was only a couple of hours before they were to open my gates for a game against the Anaheim Angels. I felt something loosen, almost in the way a tooth would for you, beneath the upper tier near leftfield. It was a 500-pound expansion joint, a rocker beam, which helped allow the upper deck to give when everyone above it was jumping up and cheering madly. After all those crowds over all those years, the thing just kept wiggling loose until the day it broke free and obliterated seat 7, loge section 22.