In baseball, when it rains, it pours. The Yankees must’ve felt like they were sitting in a torrential downpour 25 years ago, not just losing games but dropping them in ways that had fans pulling their hair out. Earlier in the week, the Yankees had seen Mariano Rivera get walked off, then saw an inspired ninth-inning rally fall devastatingly short against the league-leading White Sox.
They looked to get things back on track against a lesser AL Central foe in Detroit, only to suffer heartbreak once more.
June 27: Yankees 6, Tigers 7 (11 innings) (box score)
Record: 37-34 (3rd place in AL East, 2.0 games back)
On the mound for New York was David Cone, once again trying to get his season moving in the right direction. Opposing him was Japanese pitching pioneer Hideo Nomo, who was off to an uneven start to what would be a mostly forgotten one-year tenure with the Tigers.
The two were reasonably sharp to start. Nomo walked a pair in the second but got Chuck Knoblauch to ground out with two down and the bases loaded, while Cone had to work out of a two-on, two-out jam himself in the bottom of the second, but the game went to the fourth scoreless.
Nomo issued another pair of walks, this time to lead off the fourth, and the Yankees made him pay. Ricky Ledée singled to load the bases with no out, and though Chris Turner—making a rare start behind the plate with Jorge Posada resting—grounded into a run-scoring double play to put Nomo an out away from escaping with minimal damage, José Vizcaíno and Derek Jeter each came through with two-out RBI singles, and the Yankees led 3-0.
Cone, who’d entered the day 1-6 with a 6.08 ERA, had a chance to get himself a bit of momentum going. Instead, he allowed a solo shot to future MLBPA head Tony Clark to lead off the fourth and get Detroit on the board, and in the fifth, it all unraveled.
The frame started off auspiciously for the Yankees, as singles from Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez and a walk to Shane Spencer had the bases loaded with no out once again, but this time Nomo buckled down with a strikeout of Ledée before getting Turner to bounce into his second twin killing in as many innings. Instant replay showed that he probably beat the throw to first, but in this pre-review era, there was nothing to be done (manager Joe Torre and bench coach Don Zimmer both argued the call and got ejected).
In the home half, Cone allowed three straight singles to open the frame, and the Tigers had two on with none out and one in. After striking out Juan Gonzalez and walking Clark, Cone faced Dean Palmer with the bases loaded. On a 2-1 count, Cone went breaking ball and hung a bad one middle-middle. Palmer didn’t miss, sending it high into the seats in left for a grand slam:
Cone could do nothing but stand arms akimbo, seemingly in disbelief at how it was all coming undone yet again, as Jason Grimsley came on in relief.
Yet as deflating as that grand slam was, the Yankees hung in the fight. Grimsley came up big, throwing 2.2 innings of shutout ball to give the Yankees time to stabilize. They got back into the game in the seventh, Spencer coming to the plate with two on and none down and scoring one with a groundout. After a pinch-hit single from Posada put runners on the corners, another RBI groundout, this one from Turner, made it 6-5. In the eighth, Paul O’Neill came to bat with runners on second and third and no out, and the Yankees scored once more via an out, O’Neill’s sac fly tying the game.
Mike Stanton and Jeff Nelson combined for a scoreless eighth and ninth, so we went to extras tied at six. But after pounding out 14 hits and 7 walks in regulation, the Yankee offense went dry at the wrong time. They went down 1-2-3 in the 10th, and Williams was caught stealing to erase their only baserunner in extras.
Nelson held the Tigers down again in the 10th, and the Yankees at last went to Mo in the 11th, when things started to turn truly strange. With one on and one down, Shane Halter grounded a hard, tailor-made double-play ball to Derek Jeter. But Jeter, who appeared to be moving to cover second, made an awkward play on the ball, reaching across his body and letting it deflect into left-center field:
The runner, Bobby Higginson, was less than alert, but still managed to slide into third base safely, now just 90 feet from winning the game. On the very next pitch, Robert Fick sent another grounder at Jeter, this one a slow roller. Jeter fired an accurate strike home, and ball and body reached the plate at the same time:
This was, in all, a disaster-class of baserunning from Higginson, but it didn’t matter.
Even after stumbling on second, barely reaching third on the previous play, getting a poor read on this grounder, and missing home plate on the initial collision with Turner at the plate, Higginson snuck his foot in there before the catcher could apply the tag. The game was over, and the Yankees had another crushing defeat on their hands.
This had to be one of the more mystifying losses of the 2000 season for the Yankees, coming at a time when nothing much seemed to be working. They fell to just three games above .500 and two games back in the AL East, all the goodwill from an excellent first month of the season seemingly spent up.
Read the full 2000 Yankees Diary series here.