The season was over. You could sense it. And you could see it — on the field, in the eyes of the players and, most starkly of all, in the standings. The Yankees dropped an excruciating 4-3 decision to the Royals in front of 23,595 angry fans at Yankee Stadium on the evening of Aug. 28, 1995.
It was the Yankees’ ninth loss in 10 games. It sank them to 54-59 on the year. They fell a full 16 games behind the Red Sox in the AL East, and even though this would be the first time the brand-new wild card would be available (since the ’94 strike had wiped it out the previous year) even that was dire: they were 4 ½ games behind Texas, but with 28 years of perspective, that wasn’t the ominous number, though it was impossible to know that at the time.
Over at the top of the AL West, the Angels were 67-47, eight games up on the Rangers, and some 12 ½ games clear of the Yankees, who had just 31 more games left in the truncated 144-game season.
All of that seemed silly, anyway. The Yankees were dead. They were buried. Across the locker room that night they seemed to be writing their own obituaries.
“I’m really out of answers,” Paul O’Neill said.
“You don’t get games like this back,” Jack McDowell said.
And to add to the misery, Don Mattingly hinted he was pondering playing the next year in Japan, because baseball in the U.S. — specifically The Bronx — had grown so miserable: “I’m interested in having fun playing baseball. I don’t think what we’re doing to the game over here anymore is a sport.”
Yet even amid his gloom, it turned out that The Captain was also a prophet:
“We haven’t played well and things don’t look great,” Mattingly said. “But we still have an opportunity. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think we can make this thing happen. We’re not folding up.”
We bring up this merry stroll down memory lane for obvious reasons, of course. It was 1995 when the prospect of September looked as ominous for the Yankees as this one did. And as bad as the Yankees’ playoff chances were this year with 31 games to play — for the record they were 63-68, 19 games behind Baltimore in the East and 11 games out of the wild card — things were even grimmer then.
By the start of Thursday’s season finale with Detroit, the Yankees had already shaved 4 ½ games off that margin, even if the arithmetic still lists their playoff hopes as minuscule, and even if the Tigers helped pump the brakes on the Yanks’ momentum with a resounding 10-3 thumping. But that was still enough of a gain, over a short enough period of time, to consider three things that happened to the 1995 Yankees — and what those elements could mean for the 2023 Bombers seen through a best-case prism.
- The ’95 team got scorching hot: over those final 31 games the Yankees went 25-6. If the ’23 Yankees can duplicate that, that would make them 88-74, which is exactly where wild-card records tend to be.
- Even as hot as they were, the Yankees still would’ve been out of luck, except the Angels — who seemed to be cruising to the AL West title — completely collapsed. After Aug. 28 they lost 19 of their next 25 games before remarkably winning five straight to close out the season and force a one-game playoff with Seattle for the AL West division. There were four other teams who could’ve also seized on the Angels’ collapse; only the Yankees did.
- The Yankees made up ground on the Angels quickly, and actually caught them in the standings on Sept. 22, with eight games to spare.
The Yankees have sure started to emulate the first part of that equation, winning eight out of nine before Thursday’s loss. The Rangers have played the part of the ’22 Angels quite nicely, having already surrendered what for much of the season was a comfortable lead in the West lead to the Mariners (and the third wild card to the Blue Jays) thanks to a 19-game stretch in which they’ve gone 4-15. And since the Yankees hit rock bottom they’ve already picked up four games.
And with all of this, there’s still so much to go: the Yankees not only need to worry about the Rangers and Jays (who get to feast on the A’s and Royals this weekend while the Yankees are occupied with the Brewers) but the Red Sox, too. They are playing their best ball of the season right now; this has to last three more weeks.
Still, as Don Mattingly once said of another grim and seemingly lost season: “We still have an opportunity. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think we can make this thing happen. We’re not folding up.”