by Ian O'Connor
Jeter managed a hit and an RBI groundout in that game, beating out a throw to first on what would have been a lethal inning-ending double play. But it was Williams’s two home runs—one from each side of the plate—and spectacular performances from Mariano Rivera, John Wetteland, and the entire bullpen that allowed the Yankees to overcome a 4–0 Texas lead and claim their first postseason series victory since 1981.
Williams was mobbed in the visitors’ clubhouse, sprayed with champagne and beer as his teammates chanted, “MVP . . . MVP.” He had outlasted fellow Puerto Rican slugger Juan Gonzalez, who had five homers in the series but failed in his most critical Game 4 at-bat, allowing David Weathers, of all people, to strike him out with sliders on 3-1 and 3-2 counts, two on and nobody out in the fourth.
Without warning, the placid Bernie had the look of the devil in this series. Williams had come a long, long way from the day he was a clueless teenager in Buck Showalter’s office threatening to return to Puerto Rico if the manager kept insisting he bat left-handed. Showalter responded by promising to call Williams’s father—he knew Bernie was afraid of his father—and that was that.
“I’m like a volcano,” Williams said after eliminating the Rangers. “You can’t always see it, but I’m emotional.”
The same held true for Jeter, the stoic fueled by the hidden flame within. He went from being a prime bum-of-the-month candidate after Game 1 to a budding Mr. October after Game 4.
Jeter batted .412 in the Division Series and now faced a best-of-seven showdown with the Orioles and their living legend at short. Right after the All-Star break, Jeter was the one who hit the shot heard ’round the American League East, breaking a 2–2 eighth-inning tie with a two-run homer off Mike Mussina that set up a four-game sweep at Camden Yards.
The Yankees left town with a ten-game divisional lead that so unnerved Baltimore’s manager, Davey Johnson, he finally emasculated the Iron Man, Cal Ripken Jr., and inserted Manny Alexander at short. Ripken brooded at third base, Alexander went hitless in seventeen of his eighteen at-bats over six games, and the experiment died a quick and painful death.
The old man was moved back to short, and if he was a fading star in the field, he still had a presence at the plate. Ripken was still Ripken, and Jeter was still uncomfortable taking up space in the same paragraph.
“I haven’t played a full year yet, so putting me there with Cal Ripken is ridiculous,” Jeter said. “It’s like he’s the teacher and everyone else is the student.”
Ripken remained a powerful force on a team that belted more home runs (257) than the ’61 Yankees or any other club in the history of the game. At thirty-six, Ripken had managed 26 homers and 102 RBI. He had hit .345 against the Yanks in the regular season, and .444 against the Indians in the Division Series.
The standings said none of that mattered. New York had beaten the Orioles ten times in thirteen attempts and had gone 6-0 in Camden Yards, reducing them to an unwashed wild card.
“Secretly,” Ripken said, “I’ve been hoping for another matchup against New York.”
His double-play partner was hoping for something else. Roberto Alomar spat in the face of an umpire, John Hirschbeck, during a confrontation on September 27, and he knew Yankee fans would remind him at every turn. But outside of Alomar and Bobby Bonilla, a holdover villain from the other side of the Triborough Bridge, the Orioles were happy to be alive in the Bronx.
“I think it was fated,” said Johnson, who had won it all with the ’86 Mets. “I think this was meant to be.”
Fate? Destiny? Playoff teams in all sports throw around those words as easily as they throw around used towels in a locker room. But in the first game of the last playoff series the great Ripken would play at shortstop, fate and destiny would collide near Yankee Stadium’s right-field wall.
Derek Jeter put the ball in the air. Nobody knew it at the time, but one of Jeter’s idols, Cal Ripken Jr. himself, helped put the twelve-year-old boy in the stands who would deflect that ball into history.
Eric Saland was a Yankee fan raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, a Mickey Mantle fan who went to eight or nine home games a year. So he was thrilled to be holding a ticket to Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series between the Yankees and Orioles, scheduled to be played in the Bronx on October 8.
Saland and his son, Matthew, were all set to join another Bergen County, New Jersey family, the Altmans, in Yankee Stadium’s right-field seats. Bob Altman did not buy the tickets for $175 a pop because he was a Yankee fan; he bought them because his son, Brian, had been a Cal Ripken Jr. fan since he was a second grader.
Brian was riveted by Ripken’s Iron Man streak of consecutive games played, and he started collecting the shortstop’s baseball card. But it was Ripken’s simple act of kindness that made Brian a fan for life and set in motion a series of events that, three years later, turned the ALCS upside down and left Jeter the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Brian was nine when his mother, Fern, had a sporting goods store make up an orange T-shirt with Ripken’s name and number, 8, printed in white lettering. Her son would wear it as part of a Halloween costume made complete by eyeblack and an Orioles cap. The following year, with the Orioles in town and the Altmans holding tickets, Brian dug up the T-shirt and threw it on for the ride into the Bronx.
Bob Altman was working for Mike Bloomberg at the time, and one of the company’s vendors had supplied him with seats near the Baltimore dugout. The Altmans arrived early enough to watch batting practice, along with dozens of fellow fans screaming in vain for Ripken’s attention.
“Turn around for a minute,” Bob ordered his son.
“Why?” Brian said.
“Just trust me.”
Brian turned his back toward the batting cage, and in a fleeting moment of quiet that separated one thwack of the bat from the next, his father shouted, “Hey, Cal, check out the jersey.”
Ripken actually looked over, smiled, and started heading straight for the Altmans. Brian’s jaw dropped to his toes as the Iron Man locked his steel-blue eyes on him, this anonymous boy in his orange Halloween shirt.
Other kids buzzed about Brian as Ripken moved toward the railing, but the ballplayer barely noticed. “I was really nervous,” Brian said. “This was my hero approaching.”
Brian was speechless and shaking. He did not know what to do, other than hold out the ball he was carrying in his hand. “I’ll sign your ball,” Ripken told him, “but first let me shake your hand.”
The boy and the ballplayer shook hands; Ripken signed the ball and jogged back to the batting cage while the other young fans begged in vain for him to return.
Right then and there, Brian Altman made a decision. He would not be embracing his family’s allegiance to the Mets anytime soon. He would remain an Orioles fan, at least until the day Cal Ripken Jr. retired.
Three years later, despite his brief demotion to third base, Ripken had no intention of retiring. He had every intention of beating the Yankees in the ALCS and returning to the World Series for the first time since the Orioles won the title in 1983. Brian Altman had every intention of watching him try.
So his father scored the five Game 1 tickets, kept three for the family, and gave two to Brian’s friend Matthew Saland and his father, Eric, who was looking forward to the night out as much as his son.
But just Eric Saland’s luck, the rains came and turned an 8:00 p.m. Game 1 on October 8 into a 4:00 p.m. Game 1 on October 9. Eric worked in the trucking industry, and he had commitments in Hackensack, New Jersey that day. Eric pleaded with his supervisor to let him go to the game, but the man would not budge. They needed to make sure their outbound freight made it out, the boss explained, and Eric was some kind of pissed off.
The Salands had to return one ticket to the Altmans, who suddenly had a big decision to make that night in their Harrington Park, New Jersey home. Who should fill that fifth and final seat in the right-field stands?
The Altmans quickly agreed on the per
fect candidate, a good friend of Brian’s. Fern had met the boy’s mother at the George Street playground and pond in Harrington Park, back when their children were two years old. They started talking, hit it off, and the families grew close. So ten years later, the Altmans decided Brian’s twelve-year-old buddy deserved the first shot at the last Game 1 ticket. They placed the call to nearby Old Tappan.
They had Jeffrey Maier at hello.
The Altmans had already given Jeffrey his bar mitzvah gift the previous weekend, when the Maier party at the Pearl River Hilton was built around a World Series theme. They decided Jeffrey was a good enough kid, and a big enough Yankee fan, to deserve this second gift.
A center fielder and pitcher, Maier was the best twelve-year-old ballplayer in Old Tappan, a good baseball burb. Jeffrey was so hell-bent on chasing and catching the ball, he once stopped a ten-year-old travel game cold by slamming into the outfield fence and cutting open his head in pursuit of a home-run shot.
Jeffrey felt the back of his skull and saw the blood trickling down his right hand. He was more upset he did not catch the homer than he was about a gash that would require seven stitches to close.
His parents were vacationing in Bermuda when they sent back word that their son was not to play in another travel game until they returned. On arrival in Old Tappan, Dick and Jane Maier were told by their housekeeper that Jeffrey was at his team’s game, watching in the stands.
Dick and Jane headed to the field, only to find that their son was refusing to talk to them. You did not take baseball away from ten-year-old Jeffrey Maier without paying a heavy price.
Nothing had changed two years later, when Jane Maier wrote a note to the principal of Charles DeWolf Middle School asking that her son be excused from his final October 9 period, a gym class, because he had an appointment with his orthodontist.
She had no idea Jeffrey had a date with destiny instead.
“I should’ve known we were in trouble,” Fern Altman said, “when Jeffrey got in our car with his mitt on.”
His black Mizuno mitt. Jeffrey’s parents had challenged him to bring home a ball. His grandmother, up from Florida for the bar mitzvah, had told him that morning, “If the Yankees don’t know how to do it, you show them how.”
Jeffrey was a Derek Jeter fan making it to Yankee Stadium for the second time. The year before, he had joined his father at a Yanks-Indians game played on August 13, hours after Mickey Mantle died inside Baylor University Medical Center. Jeffrey persuaded Cleveland’s Dennis Martinez to sign his glove.
Dick Maier loved Mantle; he had his basement decorated with testaments to the Mick and Joe DiMaggio and other baseball icons. Growing up in Washington Heights, listening to every game he could find on the radio, Dick made his first trip to Yankee Stadium for a Red Sox game, hoping he would catch a foul ball from DiMaggio or Ted Williams.
He caught one from Jerry Coleman instead.
Some forty-five years later, Dick’s son had failed to catch a David Justice foul ball during a Braves-Mets game at Shea. Jeffrey wanted desperately to get one. His black Mizuno had served him well on the Little League fields of Old Tappan, so he figured it might do the same around the great lawn of the Bronx.
Before Jeffrey jumped into the Altmans’ car wearing his Emmitt Smith T-shirt (“E=TD2” read the vague tribute to the Dallas Cowboys’ star) and his mitt, his father gave him a piece of homespun advice about sitting in right field. Jeter likes to go the opposite way, Dick told Jeff. Whenever there’s a hard-throwing pitcher on the mound and Jeter at the plate, be ready.
The Altmans crossed the George Washington Bridge, drove down the Major Deegan, and pulled into a Stadium parking lot. Their five tickets were divided—three in the front row, and two five rows back. Bob and Fern decided the three boys—their son, Brian, Jeffrey, and Matthew Saland—should stay together, and that they should keep their eyes fixed on the kids from the rear.
Through seven and a half innings Ripken had a couple of hits, making Brian a happy—if isolated—face in the crowd, and the Yankees were down by only a 4–3 count, leaving Jeffrey and Matthew hopeful the home team could still pull this off.
But from their seats in the sixth row, Brian’s parents were growing concerned over the hostile vibe being projected around them. The fans in right field, Fern Altman said, “were out for blood. As time went on, everybody was getting very drunk and the atmosphere was way too rowdy for us.”
The Altmans were not about to leave; the boys would never have allowed it. So when Jeter came to bat against Armando Benitez with one out in the eighth, nobody on, Jeffrey Maier had one thought in his head as he sat in Section 31, Box 325, Row A, Seat 2:
This is the situation Dad talked about. Jeter in the box, power thrower on the mound, a talented boy with a glove in the right-field stands.
“I was on high alert,” Jeffrey would say. “I was ready to go.”
So was Jeter. He already had two infield singles and a stolen base to his Game 1 name, but he had stranded two runners on his most recent trip to the plate.
This time around, he lashed at the second pitch he saw from Benitez, a high 94-mile-per-hour fastball that drifted from left to right and over the heart of the plate. The ball sailed high into the black Bronx night, toward the right-field wall. Tony Tarasco, the Orioles’ defensive replacement for the banged-up Bonilla, carefully worked his way back to the Nobody Beats the Wiz sign.
Behind Tarasco, behind the blue wall, a kid wearing a dark T-shirt and a black glove scrambled out of his seat and down a small flight of stairs as he tracked the majestic flight of Jeter’s shot.
Jeffrey Maier was going after the ball as fearlessly as he had gone after it the day he gashed open his head on the jagged edges of a Little League fence.
The New York–born Tarasco settled under the ball right next to the Wiz sign, lifted his glove, and pressed the small of his back against the padding on the wall. Tarasco did not jump. He did not think he had to jump. The ball was heading right for the webbing of his mitt, until it wasn’t.
A boy’s glove had beaten a man’s glove to the spot.
Maier had reached over the wall, following a twelve-year-old’s instinct rather than the grown-up ordinances that prohibited spectators of all ages from interfering with the game, never mind a crucial play in the ALCS. Jeffrey felt the baseball smack into the heel of his glove and watched it bounce free as he tried to bring it into his body.
A dangerous scramble ensued on the Maier side of the wall, while a nasty argument broke out on the Tarasco side. Rich Garcia, the right-field umpire, was jabbing his index finger toward the sky to signal a home run as Jeter circled the bases. Tarasco immediately got up in the ump’s face and berated him.
An enraged Benitez ran all the way from the mound to confront Garcia next, before Orioles manager Davey Johnson arrived to pull his reliever away. As Johnson jumped all over Garcia and earned his own ejection, Jeffrey Maier was receiving high-fives from dozens of fans and being lifted onto the shoulders of a stranger.
Maier had lost the fight for the loose ball he had knocked over the wall; Marc Jarvis, a thirty-five-year-old Connecticut man, came up with the prize. “I was at the bottom of the pile with the ball in my bare hand,” Maier would say, “and I was getting absolutely pummeled.”
One man kept yelling at Jeffrey that what he did was wrong, that he should not have interfered with the game, but the other adult fans were treating Maier as if he were Derek Jeter himself.
Five rows behind this chaotic scene, Bob and Fern Altman were ready to have a stroke. “It was a mob mentality,” Fern said. “It was very scary to be responsible for three children in that situation.”
Bob Altman pushed through a widening knot of fans to get down to the three boys and found Jeffrey on the stranger’s shoulders, riding high as he pumped his arms.
“Holy shit,” Bob told himself, “that guy is going to drop Jeff onto the field.”
Bob immediately pulled Maier down to safety and looked the boy
in the eye.
“Jeff, what happened? Did you stick your hand over the wall?” he asked.
“No,” Maier answered. “I just looked up and stuck my hand out and I went for the ball.”
“OK. That’s your story. Stick to it.”
A columnist from the Daily News was the first media member on the scene, followed by one from Newsday, and then by dozens of reporters, photographers, broadcasters, and cameramen. Security guards told the Altmans they needed to move Jeffrey out to the corridor if he wanted to conduct any interviews, and out to the corridor the scrum went.
“And then it was lights, camera, action,” Fern Altman said.
Suddenly Jeffrey Maier was on NBC with Jim Gray. Wave after wave of reporters came at the Yankees’ angel in the outfield, and the kid answered their questions with an innocent smile.
“I’m a Yankees fan,” he said, “but I didn’t mean to do anything to change the outcome of the game or do anything bad to the Orioles.
“I feel like something amazing just happened. I didn’t think anything like this would ever happen to me. It’s pretty cool . . . I usually make those catches in Little League. But this time, I don’t care that I dropped it.”
A Yankees public relations official eventually led Maier, the Altmans, and Matthew Saland to an office where all phone lines were blinking red. Good Morning America was on hold, and so was Letterman. The PR official asked the Altmans if they wanted to talk to the shows’ producers, and Bob and Fern said they just wanted to return to their seats.
“You can’t,” the official told them. “The game is under protest, and we can’t guarantee your safety. The best thing for everyone is if you guys left the game right now.”
The official gave the Altmans a phone number, told them to dial it in the morning, and then had the party of five escorted to the Stadium exits. They started driving back to Bergen County, New Jersey, turned on the radio to catch the end of the game, and forgot that Jeffrey had given the press his parents’ unlisted number.