He didn’t care that it was a no-hitter. He simply wished the Yankees to win.
Greater than 5 hours after we arrived at Yankee Stadium, my 9-year-old son, Wes, had waited in line for an hour in a rainstorm, collected his coveted (duplicate) 1998 Yankees World Collection ring, talked me into shopping for him a T-shirt, visited the Gluten Free Grill twice, mourned the season-ending harm to Jasson Domínguez, cheered Aaron Decide so loudly that his voice was getting hoarse and disregarded each single point out I made that Corbin Burnes, the starter for the Milwaukee Brewers, was throwing an unbelievable recreation.
Whereas the rain delayed Sunday’s recreation between Milwaukee and the Yankees solely quarter-hour, the soggy situations endured by way of the early innings and Burnes, the winner of the Nationwide League Cy Younger Award in 2021, had the Yankees baffled.
After two innings, I texted a Brewers fan to say I used to be anxious the Yankees can be no-hit. He replied that Milwaukee didn’t have the offense for it to matter.
After 10 innings we each regarded prophetic, because it was a 0-0 tie and the Yankees had not managed a single hit off Burnes or the relievers Devin Williams and Abner Uribe.
However Wes, carrying his glove and sitting within the 200 degree for the primary time, didn’t care concerning the historic significance of the second. After I tried to elucidate the rarity of what we had been seeing — that within the lots of and lots of of video games I’d attended, as a reporter and as a fan, that I’d by no means seen a no-hitter in individual — he shrugged and mentioned he simply wished the Yankees to win.
After practically 20 years of watching the sport professionally, worrying rather a lot about deadlines and what the sport’s outcome would imply for both workforce, it was an unbelievable reminder of what it means to be a fan above all else.
When Milwaukee’s Tyrone Taylor lastly drove within the recreation’s first run with a single within the eleventh, Wes didn’t flinch. Oswaldo Cabrera, his fifth favourite Yankee after Decide, Anthony Volpe, Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole, can be up within the subsequent inning.
Did it matter that Cabrera was a second-year utility participant who got here into the sport hitting .207? It didn’t. In any case, Gary Phillips had written a characteristic in The Instances about the pearl necklace Cabrera wears, and the one factor that bothered Wes was that we had left his duplicate of that necklace at dwelling.
When Cabrera doubled in a run to tie the rating and finish my probability at watching a little bit of baseball historical past (whereas additionally getting me off the hook for a deadline story), Wes wasn’t even a bit stunned. I believe I acquired a “Sorry, Dad,” however he didn’t imply it.
Within the twelfth, Milwaukee managed two extra runs and the stadium began to empty. I joked that they’d all run again to their seats as quickly because the Yankees hit a two-run homer and Wes, not understanding that I used to be joking, nodded. “They’ll appear like IDIOTS.”
On the fourth pitch of the twelfth inning, Stanton made them appear like idiots. His game-tying, 419-foot two-run homer to middle area despatched the remaining crowd right into a frenzy and earned me essentially the most earnest hug I’ve had in ages.
The one second all day during which Wes appeared involved was when Anthony Misiewicz got here on to pitch for the Yankees to start out the thirteenth. You see, Misiewicz just isn’t on the Yankees’ roster in MLB The Present 23, so Wes didn’t know rather a lot about him. Fortunately Misiewicz, pitching for his third workforce this season, was as much as the problem, holding issues tied.
As the underside of the thirteenth began, Wes was on his toes for Cabrera to win the sport. On a protracted day that had concerned ready in so many alternative methods, we needed to wait another batter. However Kyle Higashioka, who didn’t even enter the sport till the tenth, acquired to be the hero, crushing a double to left that scored Everson Pereira to win the sport.
The subsequent a number of minutes had been largely leaping and screaming as Frank Sinatra sang “New York New York.”
We walked out of the Stadium, 6 hours 24 minutes after we’d arrived, with Wes saying it was the best recreation he’d ever seen.
And his father, having been so unhappy to have missed his probability to lastly see a no-hitter however so completely satisfied to have watched his son get every thing he wished, acquired a present of his personal: Sarah Langs, M.L.B.’s inimitable numbers wizard, posted to social media that it was solely the fourth time in main league historical past {that a} workforce had been no-hit into the eleventh inning and proceeded to win.
We hadn’t seen a no-hitter. We had seen one thing higher.