TORONTO — The clip is easy to find online, so you could see what it looked like. Crank the volume and you might even be able to approximate what the 57,126 in attendance that night made it sound like.
So let’s see if I can make you appreciate what it felt like. Bottom of the sixth. Tied 2-2. Oct. 4, 1995, at Yankee Stadium. That would be the previous Yankee Stadium. Not the artificial-noise mall they play in now. But a baseball cathedral — with all the age and creaks to match. And so it would move, sway, bounce in good moments.
The Yankees had not had many good moments for more than a decade, when Don Mattingly was a great baseball Odysseus and the playoffs were his unreachable Ithaca. But now he had a team and a time, so much so that he had decided in September to damn his damaged back and swing all out the rest of the way and whatever happened, happened.
What happened was he hit young again that September and October. And the Yankees got to the playoffs for the first time in Mattingly’s term, the team rallying around the beloved captain. Now in Game 2 of the AL Division Series, it was him against Seattle’s Andy Benes, an Evansville, Ind., guy, too. Benes left a 1-0 changeup delectably down and in. Mattingly golfed it into the bleachers.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
