821. NEW YORK YANKEES VS TEXAS RANGERS
AMERICAN LEAGUE DIVISION SERIES
GAME ONE
OCTOBER 1, 1996
YANKEE STADIUM
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.51
DRAMA—5.84
STAR POWER—7.58
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.85
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.45
LOCAL IMPACT—8.33
TOTAL: 43.56
“THE OTHER RANGERS”
Certain weirdos see a kinship between baseball’s Texas Rangers and New York’s hockey Rangers, based on the fact that the icemen originally got their name from the ruler of the old Madison Square Garden, Tex Rickard—the wise guys in the press liked to call the team “Tex’s Rangers” and the nickname stuck.
Otherwise, but for the fact that Billy Martin managed the team before he came to the Bronx, precious few New Yorkers ever gave the baseball club from Arlington, TX much thought. That changed in 1996, when the Yankees played the Rangers for the first time in the postseason, in the AL Division Series. It wasn’t merely the first matchup between the teams in the playoffs—it was the first postseason appearance for Texas ever, full stop.
After capturing the A.L. East title, the main feeling in the Bronx was relief they didn’t have to mess with Seattle, who fell 4.5 games shy of Texas. The Mariners would have brought not only Ken Griffey, Jr. and Edgar Martinez, and Jay Buhner, and their great rookie shortstop, Alex Rodriguez, but also the dread thoughts of the previous season, when the M’s beat the Yanks in five breathtaking games in the 1995 ALDS, winning the series on a walkoff hit by Martinez in a deafening Kingdome (which remains the apex moment in Seattle horsehide history).
By contrast, facing the neophyte Rangers was like playing the JV squad. That wasn’t to belittle the A.L. West champs, however, who featured a potent lineup including Juan Gonzalez, Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, Rusty Greer, and Mickey “Mantle” Tettleton. But their pitching staff didn’t awe anyone, made apparent when they started 31 year-old John Burkett, acquired at the trade deadline from Florida, in Game One. Burkett went just 11-12, with a 4.54 ERA, in 1996. He was to face David Cone, a big name hurler for a big game moment. A mammoth crowd of 57,205 turned out for the bloodletting, the postseason beginning on a crisp and clear Tuesday night at 161st Street and River Avenue, October 1, 1996. A franchise with exactly zero playoff history walking in to the House That Ruth Built? C’mon, man…
Right on cue, the Rangers surrendered a run in their first-ever playoff inning, on an RBI groundout by Bernie Williams, and the Yanks got another off Burkett in the fourth. But somehow, in between those innings the Rangers blitzed Cone for five runs. Coney had given up just one baserunner the first time through the lineup, but ran into trouble immediately in the top of the fourth. Pudge Rodriguez inside-outed a single to start the frame, and Rusty Greer walked on a 3-2 pitch. That brought the highly dangerous Juan Gonzalez to the plate, and he smashed a liner the other way, down the left-field line. The ball hooked around the foul pole for a three-run shot, and Texas took the lead.
With the raucous crowd silenced, the Rangers pounced on the wounded carcass that was Cone. Will “The Thrill” Clark singled up the middle on the very next pitch, and with one out, Dean Palmer lifted another fly to left. Tim Raines went back to the fence, leaped, and seemingly caught the ball—but when he checked his glove, it was empty. The ball had just cleared the wall, and it was now 5-1 Rangers.
The Yanks lineup was certainly capable of coming back, but somehow, someway, Burkett kept them off balance and off the scoreboard. Other than leaving the bases loaded in the sixth, New York never really threatened. Burkett went the distance, scattering ten hits, and won the game 6-2.
For Yankees fans, it was a deflating opener for such an anticipated game. On the other hand, it was a totemic moment in the history of the Rangers franchise.
AFTERMATH:
The loss set up an all-important Game Two for New York, which they managed to eke out in 12 innings. The Bombers then went to Texas and took a pair of tough games to win the series in four games, and of course went on to win their first World Series title since 1978 a couple of weeks later, with Cone winning a crucial Game Three in Atlanta after falling behind 0-2 in the World Series (a game I was fortunate enough to attend).
As for the Rangers, the Game One win was the only postseason W for the team until 2010. The extreme anonymity of the franchise changed at last in the fall of 2023, when Texas won the first World Series in their 62 seasons on the diamond.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“It was long ball at Yankee Stadium and Cone and the Yankees were on the wrong end of it…Cone had pitched 21 2/3rds postseason innings for the Yankees, this year and last, and had now given up 14 earned runs, six of them coming on home runs…numbers that made a lie of his reputation as being some kind of Bob Gibson in this month of the baseball year.”
—Mike Lupica, New York Daily News
FURTHER READING:
Seasons In Hell by Mike Shropshire
VIDEO:
820. NEW YORK GIANTS VS NEW YORK YANKEES
WORLD SERIES
GAME TWO
OCTOBER 5, 1922
POLO GROUNDS
QUALITY OF PLAY—5.05
DRAMA—4.57
STAR POWER—8.88
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—9.15
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—6.63
LOCAL IMPACT—9.29
TOTAL: 43.57
“SISTER-KISSING”
As (hopefully) most of you know, I wrote a good deal about the 1922 Series as part of book that mainly focused on 1923, The House That Ruth Built. The critical matter is that the Babe was manhandled by New York Giants pitching in the ’22 Series, as he had mostly been in the 1921 Series as well by the almighty G-Men, to the point he was called “an exploded phenomenon” and other ridiculous-in-retrospect epithets. After a winter spent rededicating himself to fitness and sobriety in the Massachusetts snow, Ruth came back with one of his best overall seasons in ’23 and helped capture the Yankees’ first world title, at the expense of his arch-enemy John McGraw and the Giants.
But that would come later—for the moment Game Two of the 1922 Series was upon New York City, and the Polo Grounds was the epicenter of sport. The Harlem park was home to both the Giants and the Yankees, and even though Ruth had come in over the last couple of years to steal attention with his power hitting, the senior circuit club was still the main show. The park itself was almost as important, the third version of the edifice at Coogan’s Bluff, the familiar one we think of as the oddly-shaped theater of dreams in upper Manhattan.
As Jimmy Breslin wrote, “I start squeezing and pushing…because the moment I get near the top of the subway stairs I can look around and see the ballpark, the Polo Grounds…and for me that was the best part of the whole day at a baseball game, coming up the stairs and seeing the park for the first time.”
For the moment the Yanks were still tenants of McGraw and the Giants, and hated ones at that. McGraw greatly resented Ruth’s style of play, his popularity, his boorishness, and—mostly—the financial threat he represented. As such, the Giants tossed the Yanks out of the Polo Grounds, in hindsight a colossal mistake that forced the A.L. team to construct the Yankee Stadium right under McGraw’s nose. Construction had barely begun across the Harlem River a stone’s throw away, thanks to delays enforced on the Yankees by the city government ruled by Tammany Hall and in thrall to McGraw.
1922 was a down year in many ways for the Yankees but they were still strong enough to roll to the pennant, and the Giants easily captured their second straight N.L. crown as well, setting up another all-Polo Grounds Series (you couldn’t really call it a subway series if no travel was required).
The Giants stole Game One, scoring three times in the bottom of the eighth for a comeback 3-2 win. The decisive run scored on a sacrifice fly by Ross “Pep” Youngs, the great outfielder who would die tragically from Bright’s disease (a kidney infection) in 1924.
That set the stage for Game Two, with the Yankees as the home team, held on a cloudless and hot Thursday afternoon, October 5, 1922. Jesse Barnes, who had thrown a no-hitter earlier in the season and was for a spell one of the game’s top pitchers, got the start for the Giants, while Bob “The Gob” Shawkey, who would start the first ever game at the Yankee Stadium a few months hence, went for the Yanks. A new City record crowd of 37,020, including Lord Louis Mountbatten and a host of lesser British royalty, piled in to the Grounds to see the game, and would be on hand to castigate a controversial and unpopular ending.
At three PM Shawkey took the mound in his favored fiery red jersey, a throwback to the days when the Yanks were called the Hilltoppers and the Highlanders and red was the team color (scandalous as it seems now). The Giants scored thrice in their last ups in Game One, and now in their first chance in Game Two, the McGraw Men scored three more times. Irish Meusel, the less-heralded Meusel brother (Bob, the Yankees slugger, was generally considered the better player), slugged a three-run shot into the left-field bleachers, and the Giants took a quick lead.
They wouldn’t score again, however, as Shawkey bore down and the Yanks chipped away. They got an unearned run in the bottom of the initial frame, another in the fourth on an Aaron Ward home run, and tied the game in the eighth, when Bob Meusel, feeling a sense of sibling rivalry, doubled home the Babe.
The game went into extra innings, with the enormous crowd living and dying with (and gambling upon) every pitch. Both Barnes and Shawkey remained in the game, and cruised through the tenth inning. The pitchers got some help from the increased gloaming, as the sun lowered and the field became encased in shadow and a late haze. Still, at a quarter to five in the afternoon there was still a decent amount of light in the sky as the 11th beckoned—but not enough for umpire George Hildebrand, who called the game a tie on account of hazy darkness.
The crowd and both teams erupted as the announcement was made by ushers with loudspeakers circulating the crowd. A large mob formed in front of Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who was in attendance, demanding to know why the game had been called. Fearing for his ancient and lanky bodily safety, Landis raced to Hildebrand to ask “why in Sam Hill did you call the game??!!” Hildebrand pointed out the conditions and the increased risk to the players—in fairness, the game was held scarcely two years after a wayward fastball had killed a batsman right there at the Polo Grounds, a tragedy that was fresh on everyone’s minds. Still, the cynics pointed to the day’s immense gate receipts and wondered if the fix was in to secure more.
Landis was apoplectic but he couldn’t overrule the umpire, who by rule and tradition was in command of the game itself. He went over to Lord Mountbatten to explain as the game was officially entered as a 3-3 tie.
As for Mountbatten, he reportedly consumed “six ice cream cones, two bags of peanuts and drank four soda pop bottles” in a Ruthian display of consumption that left him in a daze, not especially caring about the lack of a victor.
AFTERMATH:
The public outcry was such that Commissioner Landis ordered the $120,000 or so in gate receipts to be donated to WWI veteran charities. Subsequent rule changes ensured that this would be the last ever tie in World Series history. Meanwhile, this was the closest the Yankees came to competing in the Series. The Giants took the next three games as Ruth was held to a .118 batting average, and swept away their little brothers to repeat as champions. It was probably the acme of McGraw’s legendary career. The hammering sounds from across the river that winter as the Yankee Stadium arose bothered his sleep not a wit.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“In the opinion of the mob who had paid big prices to see a battle there was absolutely no reason for such action. The clock showed that it was exactly seventeen minutes to five o’clock when the umpires called the game. The sun didn’t set for nearly an hour. It was a rather hazy day but it wasn’t cloudy…the umpires will say that this series is for the championship of the world and should be played under proper conditions…sound reasoning, but it isn’t according to custom. The fans have seen battles go on other occasions until the street lights on distant hills began to twinkle. They wanted things according to custom.”
—James Crusinberry, New York Daily News
FURTHER READING:
The House That Ruth Built by Robert Weintraub