New York, NY (WFAN) -- 5. Reggie Jackson's 3 home runs-October 18, 1977.
The Yankees hadn't won the World Series in 15 years. With the Yankees leading the Dodgers three games to two, on the verge of clinching the World Series in New York, Reggie Jackson cemented the legend of Mr. October with his three home run night. The Yankees beat the Dodgers 8-4 in the clinching Game 6 and Reggie was the toast of the town.
With the Yankees down 3-2 in the 4th inning, Jackson belted a 2-run homer off Burt Hooton to give the Yanks a 4-3 lead. His two-run shot in the 5th inning off Elias Sosa extended the lead to 7-3. Leading off the 8th against Charlie Hough, Jackson crushed a solo home run to give the Yanks an 8-3 lead. Three swings, three home runs, each one further than the other.
Here is how he remembers it, from Yankee Stadium:
The Official Retrospective:
When I was rounding the bases after each home run, I signaled to The Boss, George Steinbrenner, who was watching the game from his office. I tipped my cap to him because he had brought me to New York, and we had a special bond. That was the first success we had together.
When I think about that night now, it was certainly a great event in sports, but at the time I was just having a great day in my career. I felt like I was just honoring the contract I signed.
I was in what athletes call "the zone" that night. The game did slow down for me. I could see everything that mattered. I couldn't see who was in the stands or hear what anyone was saying. It was me, the pitcher, and the ball that night. That's all I could see. When he let it go, I was ready to do something with it.
I started out as a young man just trying to be successful. The cards fell into place for me. God touched me on the shoulder a few times, which made me a part of the history of the Yankees. It is one of the greatest things that has happened to me in my life. I am honored to be part of a franchise that is as significant as the Yankees are in America. To have been part of it, to be mentioned as one of the special players who accomplished something that everyone knows about, and that is a part of the Stadium's history, I will always be grateful.
Jackson spent only five of his twenty-one seasons in Yankee pinstripes. But this is the night he is remembered for. The Yankees are known for big stars, big moments, and big wins. Reggie Jackson brought all three to the party in 1977.
4. Chris Chambliss wins the pennant-October 14, 1976.
Chris Chambliss has won the American League pennant for the New York Yankees!
--Howard Cosell's call of the home run that sent the Yankees to the World Series for the first time since 1964.
From 1923, when Yankee Stadium opened, through 1964 the New York Yankees captured 27 American League pennants and 20 World Series Championships. But starting in 1965, a steep decline began and the Yankees fell from grace. By 1966 they were dead last in the American League.
The late 1960's and early '70's were periods of great frustration for Yankee fans. The players were wearing the familiar pinstripes, but the legends and the championships were missing. Original Yankee Stadium closed in 1973 with a 4th place team. When the Stadium re-opened in 1976, the Yankees were back.
Three games into the 1976 season the Yankees grabbed first place and they never let go. Led by a new group of legends like Thurman Munson, Catfish Hunter, and manager Billy Martin the Yankees won 97 games. And when Chris Chambliss hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the 9th inning in the deciding Game Five of the ALCS against Kansas City, the Yankees went back to the World Series. It signaled the start of a new Yankee era and because it did, Chambliss's home run is arguably the most important home run in Yankee Stadium history.
In the then best-of-five ALCS, the Yankees and Royals had battled to a two-two tie after four games. In Game 5, the Yankees fell behind 2-0 in the first, but quickly came back and led 6-3 after 6 innings. Roy White was the Yankees left fielder. "It was a game we thought we had won," White recalled recently. "I thought we had it in the bag and was thinking about the Series already."
But destiny was interrupted in the 8th inning when George Brett hit a 3-run home run off Grant Jackson to tie the game 6-6. "That was a deflating home run right there, brought you back to reality," White said.
Kansas City almost wrestled the lead away from the Yankees an inning later. Top of the 9th, there were runners at first and second and two outs when Jim Wohlford hit a grounder to third. Graig Nettles fielded and threw to second and got the force out on a close play. If the out wasn't made, the Royals would have had the bases loaded and Brett coming back to the plate. But the Yankees did get the out and the inning was over. Buck Martinez, the Kansas City catcher who was standing on 3rd base when the final out was made, then noticed something unusual.
"For some unknown reason Yankee fans started throwing stuff onto the field," Martinez said recently. "And there was about a ten minute delay while the grounds crew cleaned it up. Looking back now we should have gone off the field. But we just stayed on and (Mark) Littell kept throwing and throwing and throwing."
Chris Chambliss came to bat and hit Littell's first pitch over the fence in right-center field for a pennant clinching home run. "We couldn't get Chambliss out the whole series," Martinez said. "Going into the series all the talk was about keeping Mickey Rivers off base and watching out for Thurman Munson. But Chambliss (11 for 21, 8 RBIs) was the guy that killed us."
As soon as the ball went over the fence, fans began pouring onto the field. "It turned from great happiness and glee into a scary situation," White said. Chambliss raced around the bases. Things got out of hand so quickly that went Chambliss reached home, delirious fans had already stolen the plate. Fans engulfed Yankee Stadium as the team celebrated a 7-6 victory and their first trip to the World Series in a dozen years. The victory was especially sweet for White, who signed with the Yankees in 1961 and joined the major league team in 1965.
"I was expecting to be in the World Series every year once I got up there," White said. "I was the guy who cherished that moment the most. I still wear the '76 AL Championship ring. It has special meaning to me. I had that stuff building up over the years-last place, a lot of bad teams, being laughed at and ridiculed. I was the one that saw the whole evolution of the team from losers back to winners."
Two days after Chambliss's home run, the Yankees were in the World Series. They ended up being swept four straight by Cincinnati's Big Red Machine. "We just weren't prepared or mentally ready," White said. "We probably needed a couple days off. It was all brand new for us. The Reds were a great team. They might have beaten us anyway, but they probably weren't four games to none better."
But the moment Chris Chambliss sent the Yankees back to the World Series still rings out for fans that lived through the down years the way White did. The Yankees went on to win World Series titles in 1977 and 1978. But the 1976 team was about restoring Yankee glory and tradition. It also marked the true beginning of the George Steinbrenner Era. Free agency was born and Steinbrenner, embarrassed by the World Series sweep by the Reds, lured Reggie Jackson for the 1977 season. The next era of Yankee greatness was upon us.
3. Lou Gehrig Day-July 4, 1939.
While playing in 2,130 consecutive games from 1925-1939, Lou Gehrig became known as The Iron Horse. It is the cruelest of ironies that the disease that today bears his name robbed Gehrig of the very strength that made him such a great baseball player.
On May 2, 1939, Lou Gehrig took himself out of the Yankee lineup. In stunningly swift fashion, he never played for the team again. A month later he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS is now known as Lou Gehrig's disease). On June 21st the Yankees announced Gehrig's retirement and on July 4th they celebrated his career with Lou Gehrig Day. His number 4 became the first uniform number retired by any major league baseball team.
Over 60,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium to salute Gehrig. This is the full text of his speech:
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manger in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.
When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift-that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies-that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter-that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body-it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed-that's the finest I know.
So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for.
In December 1939, in a special election by the Baseball Writers Association of America, Gehrig was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Less than two years later, on June 2, 1941, Lou Gehrig died. He was 37 years old.
In 1942 Gehrig's life was immortalized on film and to this day Gehrig is still known by the film's title. He is forever
The Pride Of The Yankees.
2. Colts vs. Giants NFL Title Game-December 28, 1958.
Fifty years later, it's still called The Greatest Game Ever played.
The New York Giants vs. the Baltimore Colts in front of 64,185 fans at Yankee Stadium and nationally televised. Johnny Unitas engineered a furious game-tying drive to force the first sudden death overtime in the sport's history. Alan Ameche scored the game-winning touchdown. Colts 23, Giants 17.
Here is how Tex Maule described it in Sports Illustrated on January 5, 1959:
It was a game which had everything. And when it was all over, the best football team in the world had won the world's championship. The Baltimore Colts needed all their varied and impressive talent to get the 17-17 tie at the end of the regular four quarters. Then, for eight and one quarter minutes of the sudden-death extra period, in which victory would go to the first team to score, all of the pressure and all of the frenzy of an entire season of play was concentrated on the misty football field at Yankee Stadium. The fans kept up a steady, high roar. Tension grew and grew until it was nearly unbearable. But on the field itself, where the two teams now staked the pro championship and a personal winners' share of $4,700 against a losers' share of $3,100 on each play, coldly precise football prevailed. With each team playing as well as it was possible for it to play, the better team finally won. The Baltimore Colts, ticking off the yards with sure strength under the magnificent direction of Quarterback Johnny Unitas, scored the touchdown which brought sudden death to New York and the first championship to hungry Baltimore.
In 2007, Frank Deford described it this way for Sports Illustrated:
In a very real way, this game was a door between two eras. On the one hand, before this game, the NFL was still the poorer football cousin. College football reigned. Baseball had no national rival. Many of the so-called "professional" football players still had to hold second jobs during the season to make ends meet. Everybody played. There were no coddled specialists.
And it was this game that not only advanced the NFL to the sports forefront in the nation, but which established Unitas as an heroic figure. His drive in the waning seconds to tie the game essentially created the two-minute drill. The modern position of quarterback was born in the gloaming at Yankee Stadium that late December afternoon. For that matter, nothing in the NFL was ever the same again. The game was not merely fabulously competitive with extraordinary performances at the end. It changed football and sport in America.
More than a dozen Hall of Famers were part of the game, including Baltimore's Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry. That combo hooked up 12 times for 178 yards. Giants linebacker Sam Huff told the New York Times in 1998, "Johnny knew where to attack," Huff said. "He found the weakness in our defense and exploited it to perfection. It was Unitas to Berry, Unitas to Berry. After 40 years, that still rings in my ears. Unitas to Berry."
Some years later, Unitas was sitting with Ernie Accorsi, the erstwhile fountain of sports history as well as former NFL general manager. Accorsi asked Unitas to walk him through the game-tying drive at the end of regulation and the game-winning drive at the end of overtime.
"He took me through every play," Accorsi said. "He called every play-almost all of them at the line of scrimmage-by name, and gave me the reason why he called each play based on every defense the Giants were in. Fascinating. I said to him, 'At any point, John, were you nervous?'"
Unitas replied, "Ernie, you don't get nervous when you know what you're doing"
So before Joe Montana and Tom Brady, there was Johnny U. Super cool on the field at Yankee Stadium.
Giants Hall of Fame defensive end Andy Robustelli told Giants.com recently, "That game, I believe, was the crystallization of what pro football was all about…[it] was on national television and from what I heard later, more than 10 million homes had the game on their televisions that day…I don't think pro football was nearly as popular in the United States before that game as it was after."
Today it's hard to imagine a time when the NFL wasn't the biggest game in town. In the late 1950's however, boxing and horse racing were considered major sports and, as Deford noted, college football was the more popular form of the game. The Colts and Giants changed all that. It is the most important game in pro football history, with Super Bowl III a close second.
Great baseball players, teams, and games make up most of the rich history of Yankee Stadium. But it seems awfully fitting that football's biggest game, The Greatest Game Ever Played, took place on the very same grass and dirt.
1. Don Larsen's perfect game-October 8, 1956.
It has happened one time in 1,199 postseason games and it happened at Yankee Stadium. It happened at a time when baseball was the number one sport in America and New York was the sport's capital. It happened during the last Subway Series of that era. Not only has it never happened since, but no one has even come close. Don Larsen threw the only no-hitter, let alone perfect game, in postseason history. For all it represents, it is the single greatest moment in the history of Yankee Stadium. This is part of Larsen's recollection, as printed in Yankee Stadium:
The Official Retrospective:
Truth is, I didn't know I would be pitching that day. We were tied with Brooklyn two games apiece in the 1956 World Series, so Game 5 at the Stadium was hugely important. In those days, I started as many games as I relieved. I had had a decent season, and my last four starts were pretty good, so Casey Stengel gave me the chances to start Game 2 at Ebbets Field. But I wasn't good at all. A pitcher should be able to hold a 6-0 lead, but I was wild and got pulled in the second inning. We wound up losing, 13-8. I was pretty mad-mad at myself and mad at Casey for the quick hook. I was boiling in the clubhouse because I probably blew my chance. I never thought I'd start again in the Series.
White Ford and Tom Sturdivant won the next two games at the Stadium to tie it. I had no idea what Casey was thinking. For some reason, he chose not to tell anyone who was starting Game 5. Back then I lived in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, which was about a mile from the Stadium. I awoke that morning at eight o'clock, not by choice. I usually liked sleeping later, but Casey had told me to be in the clubhouse by ten. When I walked to my locker stall, I saw a baseball in my spikes. That was the Yankees' ritual of telling a pitcher he was starting. To say I was shocked would be putting it mildly.
Click here for the box score of Larsen's perfect game at baseball-reference.com
By the sixth or seventh inning, I knew I was pitching a no-hitter. I didn't realize it was a prefect game until someone told me later on. In the late innings, I tried to talk to some of the guys on the bench, but they avoided me like the plague. It's an old superstition: don't talk to a pitcher who is working on a no-hitter. Still, I felt kind of alone and tried starting some conversation. In the seventh, Mickey was in the corner, getting a drink of water, and I went over to him and said, "Look at the scoreboards, Mick. Two innings to go. Wouldn't it be something if I made it?" And he got a little spooked and walked away. The whole dugout was real quiet.
By the ninth inning, the tension was surreal. You could feel it in the crowed, almost like an eerie silence. Then there were loud roars after every pitch. There were late afternoon shadows, a smoky haze hanging over the field. I was three outs away, and more importantly I was three outs from giving the Yankees a three-games-to-two lead in the World Series. Now I was nervous. My legs were rubbery, and my fingers didn't feel like they belonged to me. I wasn't too religious or a praying man, but I said to myself, "Please help me get through this."
Larsen retired Carl Furillo on a fly ball to right, then got Roy Campanella on a ground ball to second base. The final batter was pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell.
He was a lifetime .300 hitter, a good contact hitter who knew the strike zone well. My first pitch was a fastball for a ball. All day, I'd been getting ahead of the hitters, and now I was behind on the last batter. The next pitch was a called strike, and then a swinging strike. Then Mitchell fouled one off to the backstop. On a one-and-two count, Yogi called for another fastball. It came in letter-high on the outside corner, a called strike three. Mitchell kind of half-swung, then turned to argue, but the umpire, Babe Pinelli, was already gone.
I was stunned as I walked off the mound. Yogi rushed toward me and jumped into my arms. It was all too hard to believe. It was almost too preposterous. Like I said to one of the reporters afterward, I expected an alarm clock to ring any minute and to hear someone say, "Okay, Larsen, it's time to get up."
You can purchase the commemorative coffee-table book Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective by visiting
www.yankees.com or by calling 1-800-GO-YANKS.
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