Yankee Stadium had seen perfect games before. It had just never seen one arrive as a party favor. On July 18, 1999, the Yankees set aside a Sunday afternoon to honor Yogi Berra, brought Don Larsen out to recreate the most famous battery in baseball history, and then watched David Cone go out and match it. Eighty-eight pitches. Twenty-seven Expos up, twenty-seven down. On Yogi's day, in the heat, with the ghosts in attendance, Cone threw the sixteenth perfect game in Major League history and made the old building feel like it was scripting the whole thing.
DID YOU KNOW? The number eight followed Cone all afternoon. He needed only 88 pitches to finish the perfect game on a day honoring No. 8, Yogi Berra, and he never once ran a three-ball count on any of the 27 Montreal hitters he faced.
A Day Made for Legends
The afternoon was built around a reunion. Berra and George Steinbrenner had finally repaired a fourteen-year rift - Berra had refused to set foot in the Stadium after Steinbrenner fired him as manager in 1985 - and the Yankees chose to honor him with his own day. With Joe DiMaggio gone that spring, Yogi was the greatest living Yankee, and the club marked the occasion by bringing back Don Larsen, whose perfect game Berra had caught in the 1956 World Series, to throw the ceremonial first pitch to his old catcher.
Cone, never shy about history, asked Larsen beforehand if he would run and jump into Yogi's arms to recreate the famous photograph. "You got it wrong, kid," Larsen shot back. "He jumped into my arms."
It was 95 degrees in the Bronx, 41,930 fans in the seats, and it happened to be Joe Torre's 59th birthday. The opposition was the Montreal Expos, 33-54, owners of the fewest wins in baseball (a world removed from the 1998 juggernaut Cone had fronted a year earlier), riding a five-game losing streak, and exhausted - their bus had rolled into New York at 3:30 that morning.
Twenty-Seven Up, Twenty-Seven Down
Cone struck out Wilton Guerrero looking on three pitches to start the game, and then his defense announced this would not be an ordinary afternoon. Terry Jones drove a ball into the right-center gap that Cone was certain was a triple, and Paul O'Neill ran it down with a one-handed, somersaulting catch. Ricky Ledee chased down Rondell White's drive near the track in left-center. Inning over, and everyone in the park exhaled.
The Yankees gave him room in the second. Chili Davis walked, Ledee homered into the upper deck in right, Scott Brosius took one off the backside and scored on Joe Girardi's double, and Derek Jeter capped the five-run inning with a home run in front of Monument Park. Then the sky opened. A 33-minute rain delay hit in the third, and Cone spent it playing catch with the batboy to stay loose.
He came out sharper. He struck out the side in the third. In the seventh, Brosius stabbed Guerrero's chopper up the middle. In the eighth, Chuck Knoblauch - whose throwing had deserted him all season - ranged onto the outfield grass to grab Jose Vidro's hard grounder, spun, and fired a strike to first. In the dugout, teammates kept the traditional superstitious distance. Only Chili Davis broke the silence, squatting in front of Cone one inning: "I used to catch in the minor leagues. I could catch your stuff."
The ninth belonged to history. Chris Widger went down on three sliders. Pinch-hitter Ryan McGuire flied to Ledee in shallow left. And on a 1-1 count, Orlando Cabrera popped one up along the third-base line. Brosius settled under it, and when the ball hit his glove for out number 27, Cone dropped to his knees, hands on his head. The final line: 88 pitches, 10 strikeouts, 13 flyouts, four groundouts, zero baserunners - and never a three-ball count.
Watch: the official Yankees recap of Cone's perfect afternoon.
The Deal With the Devil
The perfect game was the second time Cone came within reach of a no-hitter in pinstripes. In September 1996, returning from an aneurysm that nearly ended his career, he threw seven no-hit innings against Oakland before Torre pulled him on a strict pitch count, weeks before the night the drought ended. "I'll never wonder if this could have been my last opportunity to throw one," Cone said then. Three years later, there was nothing left to wonder.
In the pressroom afterward, Cone embraced Larsen "as if he was my father," and tried to explain the odds of pitching a perfect game on Yogi Berra Day, with Larsen watching: "You probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than this happening."
What followed was cruel enough that Murray Chass of the New York Times later wrote that Cone had "sold his soul to the devil." He went 2-5 the rest of 1999, then 4-14 with a 6.91 ERA in 2000, and never again approached that afternoon. Maybe that's the price of perfection. Or maybe July 18, 1999, was simply one of those days the old Stadium decided to keep for itself - Yogi's day, Larsen in the house, and David Cone, 36 years old, pitching the game of his life.
It remains the only perfect game ever thrown in regular-season interleague play, and one of the great afternoons in the history of the old ballpark.
Sources
- SABR Games Project, "July 18, 1999: With Don Larsen watching, David Cone channels perfection for Yankees"
- Baseball Almanac, David Cone perfect game box score, July 18, 1999
- New York Times, "On Day Made for Legends, Cone Pitches Perfect Game," July 19, 1999
- New York Post, "My Head Was on Fire: David Cone Relives Perfect Game," July 17, 2014
Photo: clare_and_ben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0