THE FIRST POSTSEASON game at Yankee Stadium in fourteen years was played before a frenzied crowd that was in full throat as soon as the home team’s first baseman was introduced in a ceremony before the game.
The unbridled roar that greeted Don Mattingly as he stood beside the other starters along the first-base line seemed like something from another era of Yankees baseball. It was an ovation that shook the franchise from a decade of stagnation, a cheer that both drowned out the painful memories of the early nineties and shouted the franchise’s rebirth.
The usually reserved Buck Showalter, the first Yankee to be introduced, had fueled the crowd’s passion by waving his cap over his head and pumping a fist as he ran onto the field. Like the nearly 58,000 fans in the grandstand—the largest crowd in the history of the refurbished stadium—Showalter, a Yankee minor leaguer when the team last appeared in the American League playoffs, had been waiting a long time to feel good about something in the Yankee universe.
As fervid as the pregame response was, it was nothing compared to the stadium-shaking, thunderous explosion of noise that filled the building when Mattingly ripped a two-out single in the sixth inning to give the Yankees a 3-2 lead over Seattle. “It was like the whole stadium came to see that moment,” David Cone, the winning pitcher in the Yankees 9–6 victory, later said. “I’ve never heard an outdoor baseball stadium sound that loud.”
There were Yankees heroes all over the diamond, as Wade Boggs and Rubén Sierra, who had suffered through a mediocre year as a part-time right fielder, hit home runs.
But the Mariners headliners did not shrink from the spotlight, and it foreshadowed the titanic struggle to come. Ken Griffey Jr. smashed two homers off Cone. Worse for the Yankees, bullpen closer John Wetteland, who had been rocked by Seattle’s hitters in the regular season, came in to protect a five-run lead in the ninth and gave up three singles, a walk and two runs.
But the energy and intensity inside Yankee Stadium had been the highlight of the night. The Yankees were more than relevant again. On a crisp, iridescent night in October, they hosted a prescient scene, a window into the franchise’s gleaming future.
“It reminded me of why every major leaguer used to want to play here,” Mattingly said in the locker room after the series-opening victory. “On a night like this, if you’re a ballplayer, I can’t imagine a better place in the world to be.”
If the crowd for Game 1 of the division series reached rock-concert-like decibel levels, the clamor during the second game, one night later, was a near equivalent, especially in its climactic moment.
Andy Pettitte, who had a 6-1 record and a 3.00 ERA in his final seven regular-season starts, pitched a solid seven innings but left the game with Seattle ahead, 4–3. A solo home run by O’Neill in the bottom of the seventh evened the score, and the game remained tied until the twelfth inning.
That’s when Griffey, who ended a dramatic game in Seattle with a ninth-inning homer off Wetteland on August 24, drove another two-out Wetteland fastball into the seats to put the Mariners up by a run. Showalter pulled Wetteland from the game and turned to Rivera, who ended the inning by striking out the dangerous slugger and ex–Yankees farmhand Jay Buhner.
The Yankees tied the game again when Sierra’s double brought home pinch runner Jorge Posada from second base. Rivera then pitched the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth innings without yielding a run.
At a little past 1:10 a.m. New York time, the Yankees’ Jim Leyritz trudged to the right-handed batter’s box in the bottom of the fifteenth.
Five years earlier, in left field on a windy day in Chicago, Leyritz had staggered under a routine fly ball and failed to catch it, a moment in Yankees history that may never be forgotten. It was a three-run error, a misplay that preserved Andy Hawkins’s no-hitter, even if it led to an ignominious, humiliating defeat.
Since then, Leyritz had endured a bumpy Yankees career. He became one of the many infielders or outfielders that the team converted into a catcher. In the big leagues, Leyritz played for two of his former minor league managers, Stump Merrill and Showalter, and frustrated each with his quirky and self-aggrandizing ways. He was often benched, reprimanded, or both.
Among his offenses, Leyritz liked to showboat, twirling his bat at the plate like it was a majorette’s baton. He talked brashly in the clubhouse and on the field, too, rubbing colleagues the wrong way in each setting. But he also developed a reputation as a dependable clutch hitter, and his teammates came to view him with a certain wonder. He was unfailingly fearless, someone for whom no moment was too big.
“Jimmy is scared of nothing, man,” third-base coach Willie Randolph once said of Leyritz, who wore jersey number 13. “Even when he should probably be scared, he isn’t.”
As Leyritz approached the batter’s box in the fifteenth inning, he was 0-for-5 and had been hit by a pitch. It was a warm October night, with temperatures in the high 60s, and Leyritz’s Yankee pinstripes were soaked in sweat from a game that was more than five hours old. Teammate Pat Kelly was at first base after a walk.
Leyritz did not swing at the first four pitches from the Mariners’ Tim Belcher, three of which were called balls. Leyritz twirled his bat as a light rain began to fall.
Belcher’s 3-1 pitch was outside and thigh high, and the right-handed Leyritz rapped it toward the right-center-field alley. But Leyritz had deceptive power, and the drive kept carrying until it sailed over the outfield wall and fell at the feet of a handful of New York policemen stationed in the Yankees’ bullpen. Circling the bases, Leyritz was met between second and third base by a middle-aged fan who had dashed onto the field and hastily embraced Leyritz before being apprehended by stadium security.
At home plate, the entire team awaited, and Leyritz leaped into the middle of the celebration. As the jumping pile of players rejoiced mosh-pit style, several Yankees, including Jeter and Posada, toppled to the ground and were nearly trampled before quickly regaining their feet.
In the dugout, Showalter remained seated with one leg crossed over the other. “That’s their moment,” he later said. “Not mine.”
In the seats, fans hugged and cheered. Few retreated to the tunnels and concourses as the rain began to fall more heavily. Since the early eighties, the Yankees had made it a tradition to blare Frank Sinatra’s recording of “New York, New York” at the end of every game. But until that night, no Yankee Stadium crowd had ever so enthusiastically sang along to the song as did the fans who remained into the wee hours to watch Jim Leyritz’s walk-off home run give the Yankees a 2-0 lead in their first playoff series since 1981.
“That there is a game I’ll never forget—Yankee Stadium was crazy,” Paul O’Neill said minutes later. “I’m still shaking.”
When O’Neill’s postgame quote was read back to him twenty-three years later, he laughed. By then, he had won four World Series with the Yankees. “Yeah, I was a little excited, but you know what?” he said. “That was the first big October moment for us. The first one.”
Hours after Leyritz’s drive cleared the right-field fence, the Yankees took a chartered jet to Seattle, where they would need only one more victory to advance to the American League Championship Series. Three games were scheduled at the Seattle Kingdome, where in 1995 the Yankees had already lost six times in seven tries, including two games that ended with Seattle’s final swing of the bat. “By the time that plane touched down in Seattle, no one was celebrating anymore,” Randolph recalled. “We were feeling good, but everyone knew what we were going to be up against. No one was fooled.”
If any Yankee had dreams of a series sweep, they were soon dashed by Randy Johnson, who turned over a 7–2 lead to the Seattle bullpen in the eighth inning of the third game in the series. Led by Bernie Williams’s two home runs, the Yankees cut the deficit, but the Mariners had clearly regained their footing with a solid 7–4 victory. McDowell, pitching for the first time in 17 days, gave up three hits and five runs to the resuscitated Mariners.
It did not hurt the home team that a sold-out crowd of 57,944 was supporting the locals with a cacophony that reverberated around the mostly concrete, barren, unadorned Kingdome. As loud as Yankee Stadium had been, the Kingdome was louder, something the Seattle fans were eager to prove. It was like a competition within the competition, and the Seattle fans had a major advantage: Their passionate cheers were contained by the Kingdome’s clamshell-shaped roof.
The domed ballpark was also doomed. Although only nineteen years old, the Kingdome had proved to be a boondoggle. An indoor stadium had seemed a good idea for Seattle’s rainy fall and winter seasons, and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks played in the building before sold-out crowds—eight times a year. But in the spring and summer, the weather was usually splendid, even magnificent, and after a winter shuttered indoors, the citizens of the Great Northwest had little desire to spend three hours in a dark, sterile and barnlike atmosphere. Attendance at games was abysmal, abetted by years of inferior Mariners baseball.
By the early nineties, there had been so many dreary baseball seasons inside the Kingdome that the Mariners were determined to leave Seattle. And the city was not begging the Mariners to stay, either. The city council twice rebuffed the Mariners’ request for a new, municipally owned outdoor ballpark. It wasn’t until Griffey came into his prime, along with Johnson, Alex Rodriguez and another future Hall of Famer, Edgar Martínez, that a new ballpark initiative gained steam.
The Mariners’ unexpected, stirring drive to the 1995 playoffs had come along at just the right time as well, rallying the fan base. Eventually, there was sufficient municipal support to fund a new baseball stadium, and that year’s team was credited with saving major league baseball in Seattle. The Kingdome hosted its last game in 1999 and was demolished a year later.
But none of that spared the Yankees in 1995. In fact, they were about to play what were considered the two most memorable baseball games in Kingdome history.
The Yankees led the fourth game of the series 5–0 in the third inning, behind the first of Mattingly’s four hits and a two-run homer by O’Neill. But the Mariners clawed back to tie the score on a three-run homer by Edgar Martínez and two runs scored on sloppy Yankee fielding gaffes.
The game was tied 6–6 in the eighth when Wetteland came in and promptly loaded the bases on a walk, an infield hit and a hit batsman. Martínez, who hit seven homers off the Yankees in the regular season, then rocketed a 2-2 Wetteland fastball over the center-field fence for a grand slam.
Wetteland unhappily stomped off the mound again. He had pitched four and one-third innings in the series and given up eight hits, two walks and seven earned runs. His series ERA was 14.54.
The 11–8 final score in Game 4 sent the series to a place that might have seemed inconceivable just a few days earlier when Jim Leyritz’s home run crashed into the Yankees’ bullpen.
“Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be all along,” Mattingly said. “We’re pretty evenly matched.”
Seattle manager Lou Piniella, a popular, valued cog in previous Yankees championship teams, sat in his office after the game smoking a cigarette. “We’ve already beaten the Yankees three times in a row here this year,” he said with a little cackle. “Shit, we’ve done it twice. I’m not saying we’ll do it again, but we have done it in the regular season.”
Piniella was asked to compare the Game 5 starting pitchers: Cone and Andy Benes, who was 7-2 for Seattle after a midseason trade from San Diego.
Piniella took a drag on his cigarette. “Let’s talk about the bullpens,” he said with a sly smile. “They’ve got their guys. I’m going to have the Big Unit in my bullpen.” The six-foot-ten Johnson, the tallest player in the major leagues, was given the nickname “the Big Unit” by teammate Tim Raines during his rookie year in 1988.
The deciding fifth game, as expected, was taut, protracted and gripping. Behind Cone’s gritty pitching, a Paul O’Neill home run and a two-run double by Mattingly, the Yankees took a 4–2 lead into the bottom of the eighth.
Griffey’s third homer off Cone in the series cut the Mariners’ deficit in half. Cone had thrown more than 125 pitches and was clearly laboring, but Showalter did not yet have anyone warming up in his bullpen.
The reason was obvious. He no longer trusted Wetteland, the man whose job it was to rescue the Yankees in these situations. The reliever had been battered throughout the six-day series. The night before in Game 4, Showalter had surely seen enough of Wetteland when he pitched to just four batters and each of them scored.
Showalter could probably have recited, in order, the results of the last six Mariners whom Wetteland faced in the series: home run, single, walk, single, hit batsman, home run. So Wetteland and his 14.54 ERA were probably not going to be stepping on the pitcher’s mound unless the game went 20 innings.
But what were Showalter’s other bullpen choices?
Steve Howe had pitched one inning in the series and given up four hits and two runs. Bob Wickman had pitched three innings and been knocked around for five hits. Sterling Hitchcock had pitched one and two-thirds innings and yielded two hits, two walks and two runs. No wonder Piniella had been cackling the night before.
There was, of course, the quiet, self-assured Rivera, who had been effective in two previous outings. But at that point in his career, Rivera’s experience as a pitcher in the postseason was limited: four and two-thirds innings. Cone had pitched 50 innings in baseball’s postseason.
Clearly, as Griffey’s eighth-inning home run underscored, Cone was exhausted and no longer had much life on his fastball. Cone was pitching almost entirely on guile. Showalter knew that, but sitting in the dugout, he made a gut-check decision. “I stuck with Cone based on experience and track record,” Showalter said twenty years later, sitting in his denlike office just inside the front door of his Dallas home. “David had a track record; Mariano did not.”
Rivera would become the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history.
“But at that moment, none of that is a given,” Showalter said. “Nor does it necessarily apply to that situation, that night.”
Revisiting the subject, Showalter stood up behind his desk, silently paced around his home office for a minute and then plopped back down in a chair. He was transporting himself back inside the Kingdome on October 8, 1995. “It’s two entirely different things to sit there then and to sit here now,” he said. “You can’t travel back in time with the knowledge of the future. And if I had made a different decision, it’s not a given that things would have turned out differently.” Showalter looked away, gazing out a bay window into his front yard.
Cone stayed in the game, and things went from bad to worse. With two outs, he loaded the bases on two walks and a single.
In the Yankees’ bullpen, Glenn Sherlock, the team’s catching instructor who was Rivera’s first minor league manager in 1990, had placed his hand on the phone that was connected to the dugout. Sherlock was waiting to feel the vibration of the ringing phone, because it would be the only way he would know that Showalter was calling. The roars of the Kingdome crowd would make a ringing phone inaudible.
“Certainly, that’s a call you can’t afford to miss,” Sherlock recalled in 2018.
Asked to describe the mood in the bullpen, Sherlock answered: “Tense. I mean, yeah, real tense. Guys were literally on the edge of their seats. I don’t remember anything being said. I don’t think there was any conversation at all.”
McDowell was one of ten Yankees pitchers or coaches in the bullpen, which was no more than three benches, a tub of Gatorade and a pitcher’s mound in foul territory near the right-field stands. “What I remember is that everybody was just silently rooting for the third out,” McDowell said. “You’re just like, ‘Come on, one out.’”
Eventually, Sherlock felt the phone vibrate. Rivera was instructed to begin warming up. And only Rivera.
In a private suite overlooking the field, George Steinbrenner was fuming. Not because he had any particular faith in Rivera. The owner had been peeved for most of the game by dozens of things transpiring on the field. He was joined in his suite by Gene Michael; Brian Cashman, the assistant general manager; the team’s chief operating officer, David Sussman; and Frank Dolson, a native New Yorker, Yankees fan and a friend of Steinbrenner’s who had recently retired as a sports columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“That box with George was not a place you wanted to be,” Cashman said. “Watching a game with him was the worst. Everything was so negative. It was full of stress, tension and sweat. It was horrible.”
Cashman called Dolson a sweetheart of a man but a rabid Yankees fan whose brand of rooting would stoke some of Steinbrenner’s worst tendencies. “All Frank was doing was making George even more mad,” Cashman said. “He’d be like, ‘Oh, what’s the manager doing? What kind of move is that? That player sucks.’ I wanted to choke Frank.”
Sussman recalled how Steinbrenner was convinced that Piniella was managing circles around Showalter, and that it was going to cost the Yankees the series. “George was continually berating Buck. He would say things like, ‘Our guy is completely outclassed,’” Sussman said. “Or he’d say, ‘It’s so obvious that Lou is a better manager than this kid.’ Or, ‘Our guy is just not up to the task; in a key game he’s getting his clock cleaned by a more experienced guy.’
“Every move that was made or was not made, George was second-guessing his manager.”
Sussman, who had worked for Steinbrenner since 1989, saw something deeper in Steinbrenner’s esteem for Piniella and censure for Showalter. “He had a real fondness for Lou, and there’s a psychological thread that runs through that,” Sussman said. “He was affectionate about his emotional, fiery managers, like Lou or Billy Martin. George’s kind of manager was someone who would throw bats out of the dugout or would kick dirt at umpires. George viewed that as standing up for his players or for the owner. He wanted a manager who was demonstrative. That wasn’t Buck, who was a very cerebral intellect. You couldn’t ask for a more dramatic contrast of styles, and in terms of styles, Buck was not a George guy.”
With the bases loaded and the Yankees leading 4–3, Cone had thrown three balls and two strikes to pinch hitter Doug Strange, a switch-hitting middle infielder who was a lifetime .233 hitter.
Again, Cone eschewed a fastball and tried a sinking forkball, hoping to induce a swing and a miss or a weak ground ball as the pitch dropped out of the strike zone.
But Cone’s weary arm did not deliver the pitch with enough force. It started losing velocity too soon and bounced in the dirt in front of home plate. Strange did not swing; the game was tied.
Cone had thrown 147 pitches by the time Showalter walked to the mound to replace him with Rivera, who needed just three pitches to end the inning. Seattle’s Mike Blowers took one fastball for a strike, fouled back another and watched the third pitch for a called strike on the outside corner.
In the top of the ninth, the Yankees put two runners on with no outs. But the threat was squashed when Piniella did as he promised and summoned Randy Johnson, who retired Wade Boggs, Bernie Williams and Paul O’Neill on just eight pitches.
Showalter called Sherlock again. Pettitte and Jack McDowell, who had pitched five and one-third innings two days earlier, began throwing in the bullpen.
In the bottom of the ninth, Rivera gave up a leadoff single, and the runner was sacrificed to second base with Griffey in the on-deck circle. Again, Showalter had a choice. He decided to intentionally walk Griffey and lifted Rivera for McDowell.
Throughout August and September, when McDowell had won seven of his nine starts, Showalter had repeatedly referred to the 1993 Cy Young Award winner as a “warrior” or a “seasoned warrior.”
History, or hindsight, would certainly indicate that it might have been wise to let Rivera face more than a few batters. But that would also be overlooking Rivera’s final six relief appearances in the regular season—when he had an ERA of 4.50.
Showalter said he relied on his available pitchers’ past body of work and made a judgment. “What if Mariano stays in and loses the game?” Showalter asked in 2017. “Does that change history? Is his career the same after that?”
With two runners on base, McDowell faced Edgar Martínez, who was hitting .579 in the series. McDowell’s torn rib cage muscle had swelled to include a golf-ball-size bulge, but McDowell overpowered Martínez with two blazing pitches, then struck him out with an outside breaking ball. McDowell then got twenty-year-old Alex Rodriguez to end the inning with a ground ball to shortstop.
“Adrenaline can mask a lot of discomfort, whether it’s your arm or your rib cage or whatever,” McDowell said.
The game remained tied until the eleventh, when the Yankees took a 5–4 lead on a walk, a sacrifice and a single. The Yankees had finally gotten to a tiring Johnson. “I think everyone felt pretty good about our chances right then,” Bernie Williams recalled. “We bounced out of the dugout. Three outs and we win.”
But like the tall and gangly Johnson, the six-foot-five, lanky McDowell was reaching his limit in the first relief appearance of his major league career.
Joey Cora, a speedy, five-foot-seven, 150-pound switch-hitting middle infielder, was the inning’s leadoff batter. In the previous day’s game, while batting left-handed, Cora dragged a bunt between the pitcher’s mound and first base. Mattingly, the nine-time Gold Glove first baseman, fielded the ball and then blundered.
Mattingly had many athletic gifts, but being fleet of foot was not one of them. So it was a mismatch when he tried to pivot and chase Cora, who was streaking down the first-base line. Cora eluded Mattingly. Worse for the Yankees, second baseman Randy Velarde was standing on first base and could have easily received the throw from Mattingly in time for the out.
As Cora dug into the left-handed batter’s box, Willie Randolph was standing in the Yankees’ dugout screaming at Mattingly, who was just 70 feet away and playing several steps in front of first base. Randolph, a former All-Star second baseman who was in charge of the infield’s defensive positioning, wanted Mattingly to take a few more steps toward Cora. “I was yelling as loud as I could, but the crowd was too loud and Donnie never heard me,” Randolph said. “I hated that Kingdome.”
Cora placed his bunt perfectly, and Mattingly once again grabbed it, wheeled to his left and made a diving attempt to tag Cora, who used every inch of the baseline to avoid the tag. Showalter was on the field an instant later, protesting that Cora had left the baseline. He made an impassioned, face-to-face plea with first-base umpire Dan Morrison, who shook his head side to side and shouted his response. Showalter turned his head so his left ear—his good ear since he was beaned in Oneonta ten years earlier—was inches from Morrison’s mouth.
“The umpire had already made his call, and it wasn’t like there was instant replay back then,” Showalter said. “If I stayed out there any longer, all I would have done is distract my own pitcher.”
Griffey, a lifetime .217 hitter against McDowell, was up next and slapped a ground ball to the right of second base, a ground ball that Yankees second baseman Pat Kelly was probably more used to fielding on grass, but the Kingdome’s artificial turf was old, worn and rock-hard. The ball bounced just past the diving Kelly into center field, and the Mariners had runners on first and third base with no outs.
Martínez came to the plate and took a well-placed outside fastball for a strike. The next pitch was a split-finger fastball, and catcher Jim Leyritz put his mitt on the outside half of the plate as a target for McDowell. “We called the same pitch that I used to strike out Edgar two innings earlier—a split-finger fastball,” McDowell said in 2018. “But I was now going through their lineup a second time.”
McDowell’s pitch looped and missed its target, hanging inside, about belt high to Martínez. “A horrible hanging split,” McDowell said.
Martínez rapped the pitch down the left-field line.
The game was tied as Yankees left fielder Gerald Williams chased down the ball near the outfield wall. Bernie Williams, who first teamed up with Gerald in a Yankees minor league outfield in 1987, sprinted over from center field. He stole a glance toward the infield where he saw that Griffey was almost at third base already.
“Home! Home!” Williams shouted. “He’s going home!”
Since he signed with the Yankees as a raw prospect out of the backwoods of Louisiana, Gerald Williams always had the best outfield arm in the Yankees organization. He fielded the ball cleanly and fired a bullet to shortstop Tony Fernández in short left field.
The backup cutoff man behind Fernández was third baseman Randy Velarde, who had an especially strong arm, the best in the Yankees infield. Afterward, several Yankees coaches conceded they were rooting for Williams’s throw to float over Fernández so it could have ended up in Velarde’s hand.
Fernández, who had an unconventional, almost sidearm throwing motion, inexplicably paused for just an instant as he turned toward home plate. His throw was no match for the streaking Griffey, whose slide into home barely brushed aside the left foot of Leyritz.
A millisecond later, the ball reached Leyritz, who gloved it and then sagged onto his hands and knees as he bowed his head toward the dirt in front of home plate. From Martínez’s swing to Griffey’s game-winning slide, 9.8 seconds had elapsed.
Across the decades since, Buck Showalter has never purposely watched a videotape of the play that clinched the series for the Mariners and sent the Yankees into an off-season of tumultuous change. He has instead avoided it.
A couple of times, while jogging on a treadmill at home and watching a baseball game or sports show on television, Showalter has seen the highlight clip of Martínez’s swing and Griffey’s sprint around the bases. He has always turned his head away from the screen before Griffey slides. “I’ve looked at the tape of the game to review the things I wanted to see and improve on,” he said. “But to watch what happened at the end? To dwell on it?”
Standing in the quiet of his backyard in 2017, Showalter looked down at his feet. “No, I haven’t. It’s painful,” he said. “Painful.”
Mattingly, in what would be the last few seconds of his career, watched Griffey circle the bases from the middle of the Kingdome diamond. “You see it happening, slowly at first and then faster and faster,” he said. “But you’re powerless to do anything about it.”
Paul O’Neill’s view was from right field. “An awful memory,” O’Neill said in 2018. “It still makes me sick sometimes.”
Randolph looked across the field at Piniella, his former teammate. “Lou had a wide, wide grin on his face,” he said. “But I wanted to start crying. Everybody on the bench was looking stunned. Did we just see that? Did that just happen? I closed my eyes and opened them up again, hoping it was just a bad dream.”
Slowly, the majority of the Yankees marched back to their clubhouse. The Kingdome was louder than ever as Griffey, who had been tackled at home plate by a mob of celebrating teammates, leaped to his feet and began an abbreviated victory lap around the stadium. He was trailed by dozens of teammates. The Mariners, in their first postseason series, didn’t want to leave the field.
Randolph noticed that Jeter, Pettitte and Posada did not leave the Yankees’ dugout. “Those guys were sitting there watching the other team jumping up and down,” he said. “That showed me something. They weren’t lost in the moment. They were soaking it in.
“They hadn’t really played much, but you could see they were thinking, ‘OK, this is what it feels like to win and what it feels like to lose.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”
When reporters were admitted into the Yankee locker room after the game, the scene was disquieting, uncomfortable and poignant.
In the visiting manager’s office, Showalter was sobbing face-down at his desk, his head buried in folded arms.
Mattingly, who had batted .417 and had six RBI in the series by swinging with abandon despite the stabbing pain it elicited in his ailing lower back, repeatedly choked back tears as he spoke. But he remained at his locker for nearly half an hour. “I want to remember it all,” he said. “Every second.”
McDowell recalled that he avoided glancing at Mattingly. “I was in tears and it was just too hard to look over at him,” he said. “It was killing me. It took me a long time to compose myself.”
The equipment staff was hastily packing bags and lugging them out the door into a waiting truck. A winning locker room is a place of warmth and joy where people want to linger. A losing locker room is stony and cold, a setting that instinctively leads everyone to flee.
Less than an hour after Griffey had blazed around the bases, the Yankees began to file out of the clubhouse. After the second game of the series, as a perk, the Yankees had flown the players’ wives from New York to Seattle on the team’s chartered jet.
Outside the locker room in Seattle, players and their families were reunited, and in groups of two, four and six, the assembly began walking across the turf field of the now empty Kingdome toward a loading dock beyond the left-field wall. It was there that they would board a bus to the airport.
“Quietest bus I had ever been on,” said Sherlock, the bullpen coach.
The flight back to New York was no better.
“It was a flying funeral—people crying, so sad,” said Michael Kay, the longtime Yankees broadcaster. “And like a funeral for Mattingly’s career. People were overcome with emotion.”
McDowell walked to the front of the plane and talked briefly with Showalter. “He told me, ‘Jack, I’d do the same thing all over again,’” McDowell said.
Angela Showalter had not flown on the team’s chartered flight often, and the scene made a lasting impression. “It was just heartbreaking,” she said. “There were so many hopes, so much hard work and so many plans for the future all wrapped up in that one game. I think a lot of the guys knew things would never be the same again.”
Gene Michael sat near the front of the plane, a few rows behind George Steinbrenner. The two had not talked much since Martínez’s double and Griffey’s dash.
Michael, the crafty card player who always liked to be two moves ahead of everyone else and a baseball lifer who saw himself as a farsighted architect, was filled with troubling uncertainty. “As I sat there,” Michael remembered years later, “I knew that if we had beat Seattle, everything would have been all right. All of us would come back the next year. But now I didn’t know what was going to happen.”