My Game: Cap Day for the Hit Man
Baseball season is here, and with it, On The Couch Sports presents My Game, a series highlighting a moment that helped define our passion for America’s Pastime.
At some point in your youth, you have to make choice that will stick with you for what hopefully is the rest of your life. Being that my dad and his family are Boston Red Sox fans, many people expected me to root for the Sox. Others thought that because my uncles on my mom’s side were huge Philadelphia Phillies fans, I would root for the Phils. They were all wrong. Growing up in New Jersey pretty much equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia, I had a few options to choose from.
Being the young kid in the neighborhood, all of my friends there were about three years older than me. My buddy Glenn who lived right across the street was a big time New York Yankees fan. At this point in the early 1990’s, the Yankees weren’t very good and they hadn’t made the playoffs in over a decade. None of this mattered to me. Glenn liked the Yankees, so I started liking the Yankees. I know he didn’t like it, but a huge shout out to my Dad for never trying to sway me from rooting for his team’s biggest rival. He respected my choice and I think it has worked out for the best for both of us over the past 25 years.
Now that I liked the Yankees, I had to pick my favorite player. Don Mattingly was the Captain, so he became my guy. He was a career Yankee and had been with the team through one of the worst stretches in the team’s illustrious history. Don Mattingly was the the 1985 AL MVP, a six-time All Star and a nine-time Gold Glove winner over at first base. When the work stoppage happened in 1994, things were looking up for the Yankees but not so much for my guy Donnie Baseball. He had a bad back and he was starting to break down. He knew the end was near and so did us fans. There wasn’t much time left for me to see him play so I went every chance I could.
It was July 23, 1995 and I was headed up to Yankee Stadium with Glenn and my parents. At this point, my mom is now a Yankees fan because her son is a Yankees fan. So my dad is driving three Yankees fans up to the Bronx for a game versus the Texas Rangers. It happened to be Cap Day at the Stadium so Glenn and myself were pretty excited. We got our giveaway Yankees hats and headed up to our seats in the loge section of the old stadium. The Yankees were up a run in the sixth with a man on and the Captain coming up to the plate. Then this happened….
It was only his third home run of the season, but it might as well have been his 40th. The crowd, Glenn and I included, went nuts. As Mattingly trotted around the bases, everyone started throwing their hats onto the field. Being that I was only six at the time, I wasn’t going to throw my brand new Yankees hat onto the field and neither was Glenn. We stood there in amazement as our guy Don Mattingly was getting a hero’s celebration with hats raining down from the upper deck and all over the ballpark. He went back into the dugout but the crowd was still in a frenzy as he came out for a curtain call. The game was soon delayed for a couple minutes so that the grounds crew could pick up all of the hats on the field and crowd got a chance to take in what had just occurred.
It was a fitting send off in Mattingly’s final season but it was even more fitting that the Yankees won the first ever American League Wild Card and Donnie Baseball finally reached the postseason in 1995. The Yanks got knocked out in a thrilling five-game ALDS against the Mariners, and that was the end for Don Mattingly and his playing career. It may have been the end for the Hit Man, but it was just the start for the Yankees.
