David Cone, Yogi Berra, Don Larsen and a Yankees perfect game

David Cone wasn’t much of a believer in baseball destiny when he took the mound on Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium 25 years ago Thursday. But before that game, Don Larsen had thrown out the first pitch. And after Cone threw a perfect game against the Montreal Expos, matching Larsen’s 1956 World Series feat against the Brooklyn Dodgers, it got him wondering.

“That day certainly shook me up and made me think about those sorts of things,” Cone said in an interview last week. “I ended up with 88 pitches on Yogi Berra Day and there’s a big number 8 painted behind home plate” to commemorate the Hall of Fame catcher’s uniform number. “So that makes you think as well. It was just an incredible day all the way around — the further removed I get from it, the more I appreciate it.”

Curt Schilling once famously mocked New York Yankees “mystique” and “aura” as the names of nightclub dancers, but it was hard to deny something was in the air July 18, 1999. As the team’s shortstop, Derek Jeter, said in “It Ain’t Over,” a documentary about Berra: “I’ve always said that there’s ghosts in Yankee Stadium because it seems like just strange things happen all the time. And for there to be a perfect game on Yogi Berra Day? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense — you know what I mean? But I think some things happen for a reason, and that was one of them.”

A long-awaited return

The improbable result had a New York backstory. Angry about how owner George Steinbrenner had him fired as manager after just 16 games in 1985 — sending GM Clyde King to carry out the act — Berra stayed away from the ballpark for 14 years. But Yankees broadcaster Suzyn Waldman negotiated a rapprochement in which Steinbrenner apologized, paving the way for the midsummer Berra tribute.

As he warmed up in the bullpen, Cone watched Berra and his wife, Carmen, riding around in a convertible before the game.

“I remember being carefree and not even thinking about my warmup or who I was facing or what I was going to do,” he said. “I was completely a blank page. Just kind of enjoying the moment.”

Larsen, 69, was there to throw out the first pitch to Berra, 74, his catcher in the World Series perfect game. Cone stood next to Larsen and told him, “You’re going to run in there, jump into his arms.”

But Larsen corrected him.

“He said: ‘Kid, you got it backwards. It’s the other way around. He jumped into my arms,’” Cone recalled. “I felt a little sheepish getting the history wrong at that point, but it was definitely kind of a light and funny moment, especially with Don’s bellowing, heavy voice coming back at me.”

In an Oct. 9, 1956, front-page story in The Washington Post, Shirley Povich famously wrote: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”

Plenty had changed in baseball since then, and the 1999 season was just the third year of interleague play, with this matchup pitting franchises from different leagues going in opposite directions. The Yankees were in the midst of a late-’90s dynasty, on the way to their second of three consecutive World Series titles. The Expos were headed to their third straight fourth-place finish in their division and would move to Washington in 2005.

Offense was ascendant in 1999, which made Cone’s feat even more impressive. The MLB batting average was .271, compared with .243 this year. Cone faced a Montreal lineup that featured future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero, one of four Expos with an OPS over .800. Rondell White and José Vidro came into the game hitting .321 and .317. But it was also a free-swinging crew that lunged at Cone’s slider all afternoon.

After Larsen threw out the first pitch, he and Berra sat in the owner’s box.

“Usually, I’m gone after three or four innings,” Larsen said in the Berra documentary. “… But as time went on, they made us stay. We both stayed and watched him do his marvelous performance.”

‘Coincidence of coincidences’

It was 98 degrees in the Bronx that afternoon. The heat didn’t bother Cone.

“I actually thrived in hot weather,” said Cone, who now works as an analyst for ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” and YES Network Yankees games. “I was 36 years old at the time and the heat helped to keep my arm loose, with all the wear and tear and miles on my arm.”

Had it not been for an outstanding play by right fielder Paul O’Neill at the beginning of the game, Cone’s perfect moment would have ended early. The second batter of the game, Terry Jones, hit a flyball into the right-center gap, and O’Neill chased it down with a diving catch, capped by a somersault.

Cone mowed through the Montreal lineup, interrupted only by a 33-minute rain delay in the third inning. As he piled up the perfect innings, the Yankees started giving Cone the silent treatment in the dugout — a classic baseball tradition.

After Cone retired the first batter in the top of the seventh, Fox 5 announcer Tim McCarver asked his broadcast partner, Waldman, “Can’t happen, can it, Suzyn?”

Waldman: “No, it can’t.”

McCarver: “No way. Come on!”

Waldman: “Why not?”

McCarver: “Now that would be the coincidence of coincidences.”

Then, in his trademark, high-pitched, incredulous tone, he added, “I mean, my gosh!”

Cone said he can still remember seeing the tension on his teammates’ faces in the late innings, saying “it was palpable; you could feel it.” If there was one player who seemed the best candidate to botch the perfect game, it was second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who suffered a well-publicized case of the “yips” as he struggled to throw the ball to first base. That season, he would commit a whopping 26 errors. So when he made a nice backhand play on Vidro’s hard groundball up the middle with one out in the eighth, Cone was worried Knoblauch would throw it away.

“I think the whole stadium was,” Cone said. But the second baseman steadied himself in the outfield grass and threw a rocket to first to nail Vidro. “And that was probably the loudest cheer of the day, other than the last out,” Cone said.

A late-game pep talk

After Cone struck out Brad Fullmer for the final out of the eighth inning, he went into the clubhouse bathroom to give himself a pep talk.

“It was probably a reaction to the superstitions of everybody else staying away from me and a need to vent a little bit to kind of get things out,” he said. “And I ended up talking to myself out loud, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. It was pretty simple things, along the lines of, ‘This is probably your last chance to do something like this.’”

Cone noted he had been close to a no-hitter a few times — most notably in 1996, when he made a dramatic return from surgery by tossing seven no-hit innings against the Oakland Athletics. But Manager Joe Torre removed him out of concern for his surgically repaired shoulder. Closer Mariano Rivera gave up a hit in the ninth.

Three years later, with a shot at the far more significant — and rarer — perfect game, Cone told himself, “You can do it, you got this, your stuff is great.” But he also had doubts: “How are you going to react if you blow it?”

“This is going back and forth in my mind,” he noted. “It’s good cop, bad cop or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t anything really profound, but it was more along the lines of just kind of psyching myself up and talking myself into it and kind of setting the stage.”

The Yankees added a run in the bottom of the eighth inning to make it 6-0, and Cone went back on the field to face the bottom of the Expos’ lineup in the ninth.

“The adrenaline rush was so extreme,” he said. “It was like nothing that I’d ever felt. Walking out for the ninth inning, my head was on fire. I used the expression that I could feel my hair growing. You feel like your whole body is electric.”

Cone fanned the first batter, Chris Widger. Next up was Ryan McGuire, pinch-hitting for Shane Andrews; McGuire poked a flyball into left field. Left fielder Ricky Ledée awkwardly pursued the ball in the sun-splashed outfield, and the roughly 42,000 in the stands held their breath. Cone wondered whether Ledée had lost it in the sun. The left fielder had his glove facing up until the last second, then flipped it down to make a “look-what-I-found” two-handed basket catch.

“Oh, boy!” McCarver exclaimed on the Yankees broadcast. “Oh, boy!”

Cone needed just one more out.

“Orlando Cabrera, 0 for 2 this afternoon,” McCarver announced, then added sarcastically, “No kidding.”

On a 1-1 pitch, Cabrera popped it straight up in the air, and third baseman Scott Brosius crossed into foul territory, just past the third base line.

“At first I wasn’t sure it was going to be made because when I looked up I got blinded by the sun,” Cone said, and he pointed up in the air, adding that was the first time he had done that on an infield popup. “I couldn’t actually see the ball, and then when I saw Brosius had it measured, that’s when I knew that this is going to happen.”

After Brosius caught the ball, catcher Joe Girardi charged the mound, embraced Cone and pulled him down to the turf, almost like a linebacker tackling a quarterback — albeit with much more tenderness — and their teammates joined in. The TV broadcast panned to Larsen in the owner’s suite, clapping and smiling.

“I remember being down on the ground for a while thinking: ‘Okay, that’s enough. Let’s get up,’” Cone said. “It felt like we were down there forever.” His teammates carried him off the field like a bunch of Little Leaguers, as Cone thrust his arm upward in celebration. The scoreboard flashed: “IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN …”

Echoing Povich, Cone told reporters, “I probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than this happening today.” Noting Larsen’s presence on Yogi Berra Day, he added, “It makes you stop and think about the Yankee magic and the mystique of this ballpark.”

Torre, who was celebrating his 59th birthday, had been at Larsen’s perfect game as a 16-year-old. After the game, Cone went into his office, and there was someone on the phone. No, not President Bill Clinton. It was Toronto Blue Jays pitcher David Wells, who had thrown a perfect game for the Yankees the previous season before being dealt in an offseason trade.

“Boomer’s on the phone,” Cone said, using Wells’s nickname. “He welcomed me to the club and said he was going to fly in and party with me tonight, so I’m expecting him any minute.”

A little later, Cone came upon Larsen in the tunnel between the dugout and the clubhouse.

“At that point, Don and I didn’t really know each other all that well,” he recalled, “but I remember seeing him and the look on his face after the game and I just ran to him and bearhugged him, gave him a big hug for a long time, and it was something that I think that he appreciated and that he understood what I was going through. And just the way he received me, it was almost fatherlike.”

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Chauncey Koziol

Update: 2024-08-26

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