Thirty years ago tonight - October 26, 1996 - the New York Yankees beat the Atlanta Braves 3-2 in Game 6 and won the World Series for the first time in 18 years. An entire generation of Yankees fans finally got to see what the old-timers kept talking about.
DID YOU KNOW?
Wade Boggs, the 38-year-old third baseman who had waited his whole career for a championship, celebrated by climbing onto a police horse and riding around the Yankee Stadium field. It remains one of the most joyful images in franchise history.
The drought was the whole story coming in. Eighteen years since Reggie's three homers in 1977 and the back-to-back titles. Eighteen years of collapses, cameos and Don Mattingly's bad back. Then the Series opened with the defending-champion Braves hanging a 12-1 beating on the Yankees in the Bronx and taking both games at the Stadium. The drought looked like it had legs.
Then the Yankees won four straight - three in Atlanta, including the Game 4 comeback that broke the Braves' grip, and then the flight home for one more night in the Bronx.
The Game
Game 6 matched Jimmy Key against Greg Maddux - the best pitcher of his generation, brilliant all night except for one inning. In the third, the Yankees strung together four hits and three runs, all the offense they would get and, it turned out, all they would need.
Key and the bullpen made it stand. The Braves managed a run and trailed 3-1 into the ninth, when John Wetteland came on for his fourth save of the Series. Atlanta scratched out a run and pushed the tying run aboard before Wetteland finished it: Mark Lemke lifted a popup toward the third-base stands, and Charlie Hayes squeezed it in foul territory. 3-2. Champions.
The Celebration
Wetteland was the Series MVP - four saves in four wins. Joe Torre, who had spent a lifetime in baseball as a player and manager without ever reaching a World Series, finally had his ring. And Boggs found that horse.
For the young core watching it happen - Jeter, Posada, Pettitte, Rivera - it was ring number one. For the city, it was the end of the longest wait between championships in franchise history since the drought before 1923.
What It Started
The comeback three nights earlier made it possible; Game 6 made it real. The 1996 title was the 23rd in franchise history and the first of four in five years - the start of the last true dynasty baseball has seen.
Thirty years on, ask anyone who was in the Bronx that night what they remember. It is not the box score. It is the sound when Hayes closed his glove - eighteen years of waiting, leaving all at once.
Watch: The Yankees win the 1996 World Series - Game 6 highlights (MLB)
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Sources: Baseball-Reference.com (1996 World Series Game 6 box score and series page) · MLB.com (1996 World Series recap; Charlie Hayes retrospective) · New York Times (October 27, 1996, "Comeback Is Complete")
Photo: clare_and_ben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Bernie Williams, the 1996 ALCS MVP) - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernie_Williams_1999.jpg
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