The Last Night
The Last Night
By Brad Snyder
It turned out to be the last night of the baseball season, and the last night of a season of my life.
It was August of 1994, the summer before I would go away to college. With a spot secure at the university where I would spend the next four years, it was a rare period of my life in which the word “carefree” could apply. I went to a dozen night games that summer and saw Jimmy Key dominate opponents like no Yankees left-hander had since Ron Guidry, a pitcher whose prime years I knew only from the highlight reels.
I had been coming to Yankee Stadium since I was a child, my father taking me to games at a time when the neighbors were mostly Mets fans, and many of the remaining Yankees fans on Long Island avoided trips to the Bronx. The Yankees I grew up with were not known for championships and parades but instead for a couple of second-place finishes and years of futility, with players like Wayne Tolleson and Steve Balboni wasting the remaining seasons of Don Mattingly, my favorite. At the Stadium, my father always came back to stories about Mantle—how strong and graceful he was, how he was capable of doing anything a baseball player could do, and how painful it was to watch him hobble through the end of his career on long-injured knees.
As that summer marched on and it became clear that the players would strike over the owners’ plans to institute a salary cap, there was no question that my friend and I were going to drive to the Stadium for the chance to see the Yankees play one more time. My father, no fan of night games, would watch from home. With the strike looming, Yankee Stadium on that warm summer evening was electric and desperate. The Buck Showalter era Yankees found themselves comfortably in first place where they had not ended a season since 1980. So the feeling of possibility, and angst for what could slip from our grasp, was new.
We chanted “No strike, No strike” as if our voices could convince the players and owners to come to their senses. Some fans cried. All of us, young and old, were, in a way, like children, clinging to the illusion that sports—especially baseball—was still immune from the ills of the outside world. At the very least, we told ourselves, they’d get together in time for the playoffs. A World Series hadn’t been missed since 1904.
The Yankees fell to the Orioles with Jimmy Key taking a rare loss. I joined the trudging masses of fans who walked down the Stadium’s corridors towards the exits and into the night. The Yankees would play one more game, another loss during a day game with the Toronto Blue Jays, and then the strike would wipe out the remainder of the season. Mattingly, at .304, would finish above .300 for the first time since 1989. My father and I would miss our chance during my remaining days at home to soak up a pennant-chasing summer. Within a few weeks I would be at school in Boston surrounded by Red Sox fans who were gleeful that the season had been canceled when the Yankees were running away with the division. Instead of October baseball, I’d focus on the crush of coursework.
Baseball finally returned the following spring, but Mickey Mantle died during the summer. My father and I were back at the Stadium during a moment of silence in his honor. I watched my father’s eyes water, his lips purse like he was holding something inside. He was shaken. A hero of his was dead, and a season of his life was over too. The cruelty of the strike, Mantle’s death and my heading off to college, all combined to peel back some of the innocence of our baseball traditions. We were still father and son at a baseball game, but life was moving.
To my great sadness, our lives would grow busier, and our annual trips to the stadium would end sometime in my thirties. We’ve gone to the occasional game since then, but it’s lacked the ritualistic beauty of the early years. In 2009, the closing down and eventual demolition of the stadium that my father and I visited so many times together, which was linked to the stadium of his youth and games with his own father, broke apart a generational chain.
Mattingly would finally appear in the playoffs for the Yankees in 1995 and bat .407. The Yankees exited the postseason after losing all three games in Seattle, a five-game series so exciting that some people say it saved baseball in Seattle and perhaps baseball overall. By the following year, Mattingly would be retired and unable to taste the champagne sprayed in the Yankees clubhouse in celebration of their first World Series victory since 1978.
I was away at college at the time for my junior year. My father and I spoke every day of the Yankees’ march through that magical October. When Charlies Hayes secured the final out in his mitt, I thought of my father and our days together at Yankee Stadium. The first time he took me to a game and the green of that storied field popped into Technicolor. The yearbooks my father would buy me year after year and the small replica Yankees bat that all remain in my possession forty years later. The time we refused to join the chorus of boos that rained down on Mattingly as he struggled with a back injury that robbed him of his power. Of all the times that baseball was our refuge—before the strike, before Mantle died, and before Mattingly retired—all of it before I grew up.
Charlie jumped for joy the moment he caught that ball. I jumped for joy. And I knew that back home in New York, my father was jumping for joy too.
Brad Snyder is an essayist and humor writer whose recent nonfiction work has appeared in the Gay & Lesbian Review, Multiplicity Magazine, and The Dillydoun Review. Brad is pursuing his MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Bay Path University. He lives in New York with his husband and daughter along with his sometimes warring cat and dog. For more of his work, visit bradmsnyder.com or follow him on Instagram @bradmsnyderwriting and Medium @bradmsnyder.