Some things are more important than history
He didn’t care that it was a no-hitter. He just wanted the Yankees to win.
More than five hours after we arrived at Yankee Stadium, my 9-year-old son, Wes, had waited in line for an hour in a pouring rain, picked up his coveted (replica) 1998 Yankees World Series ring, talked me into buying him a T-shirt, visited the Gluten Free Grill twice, mourned Jasson Domínguez’s season-ending injury, cheered Aaron Judge so hard his voice got hoarse, and ignored him every time I told him that Milwaukee Brewers starting forward Corbin Burnes had a great game.
Although rain only delayed Sunday’s game between Milwaukee and the Yankees by 15 minutes, the wet conditions persisted into the first innings and Burnes, the 2021 National League Cy Young Award winner, stunned the Yankees.
After two innings, I texted a Brewers fan to say I was worried the Yankees wouldn’t get a hit. He replied that Milwaukee didn’t have the offense to make it matter.
After 10 innings, we both looked prophetic as the game was tied 0-0 and the Yankees had failed to score a single hit off Burnes or relievers Devin Williams and Abner Uribe.
But Wes, wearing his glove and in the 200 level for the first time, couldn’t care less about the historical significance of the moment. When I tried to explain how rare what we were seeing was—that in the hundreds and hundreds of games I’d attended, as a reporter and a fan, I’d never seen a no-hitter in person—he shrugged and said he just wanted the Yankees to win.
After nearly two decades of watching the game professionally, worrying a lot about deadlines and what the outcome of the game would mean for both teams, it was an incredible reminder of what it means to be a fan above all else.
When Milwaukee’s Tyrone Taylor finally drove in the game’s first run with a single in the 11th, Wes didn’t flinch. Oswaldo Cabrera, his fifth favorite Yankee after Judge, Anthony Volpe, Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole, would be up in the next inning.
Did it matter that Cabrera was a second-year utility player who came into the game hitting .207? That didn’t happen. After all, Gary Phillips had written an article in The Times about the pearl necklace Cabrera is wearing, and the only thing that bothered Wes was that we had left his replica of that necklace at home.
When Cabrera doubled home a run to tie the score and end my chance to watch a piece of baseball history (while also keeping me off the hook for a deadline story), Wes wasn’t even a little bit surprised. I think I got an “I’m sorry, Dad,” but he didn’t mean it.
In the 12th, Milwaukee scored two more runs and the stadium began to empty. I joked that they would all run back to their seats if the Yankees hit a two-run home run and Wes, not understanding that I was joking, nodded. “They’re going to look like IDIOTS.”
On the fourth pitch of the 12th inning, Stanton made them look like idiots. His game-tying, two-run homer from 400 feet to center field sent the remaining crowd into a frenzy and earned me the most heartfelt hug I’ve had in a while.
The only time all day that Wes seemed concerned was when Anthony Misiewicz came on to pitch for the Yankees to start the 13th. Misiewicz isn’t listed on the Yankees’ roster for MLB The Show 23, so Wes didn’t know much about him. Fortunately, Misiewicz, who is pitching for his third team this season, was up to the challenge and kept things even.
As the bottom of the 13th began, Wes was on his feet for Cabrera to win the game. On a long day where we had to wait in so many different ways, we had to wait one more batter. But Kyle Higashioka, who didn’t enter the game until the 10th, came out on top, crushing a double to left that scored Everson Pereira to win the game.
The next few minutes were mostly jumping and screaming as Frank Sinatra sang “New York New York.”
We walked out of the stadium, 6 hours and 24 minutes after arriving, with Wes saying it was the best match he had ever seen.
And his father, who was so sad that he had missed his chance to finally see a no-hitter but so happy to see his son get everything he wanted, received a gift of his own: Sarah Langs, the inimitable numbers wizard of the MLB, posted on social media that it was only the fourth time in Major League history that a team had gone without a hit until the eleventh inning and still won.
We hadn’t seen a no-hitter. We had seen something better.
