Steve does "the Gang Bang" - first time?
Ah, a Friday night in September, with the Bo-sucks in town. Yankees were a staggering 15 ½ games behind 1st place Boston, but the wild card beckoned. There were actually 35,000 in the park, 20,000 more than there were a couple of days earlier when the Angels were stinking up the town.
This one is a mess. I was obviously drinking hard, being a Friday night and all. But there appears to be a tremendous nod to bleacher history and lore on this very card….unless there was some other “Steve” than the one that was my partner in crime back then...helping to keep score even on this very night and pounding beers on the sidewalk outside in my company, GANG BANG STEVE ACTUALLY SANG THE GANG BANG on this night. Duly noted, in drunken scrawl, is “Steve does Gang Bang.” In 1995….this legend has had a long life.
How is this for a prolific fu*king statement. Before the game while Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter played a simple catch on the outfield grass someone – and I don’t remember exactly who, said confidently, “there they are – the future of the Yankees.” I bet they got some upturned brows in the case of Rivera at least, who came out of nowhere of course, but wow did they ever hit that on the head. I wonder if it was actually a quote of my own, but alas no credit given so I'll take it for now. Go me!
People were calling Fat Daddy Chico “the Fridge” and he was milking it up. He had crashed through a few “goal lines” himself in his day, running away with the money he stole from us with his crooked pools. Since Boston was in town we were playing around with our own shanty accents, saying things like “Pahk the cah in the gah-rage” and stuff. We also paid homage to Boston and their storied history in our normally straightforward “you suck” chants, coming complete with such bon mots as “Jerry Remy sucks!” and “Rick Burleson sucks!”
A fan actually mooned us from the box seats, and was ejected for his efforts. A full moon, complete with ass waving back and forth. We also pointed out a chiseled white-haired relic sitting out there, calling him “Donahue in 40 years.” When I first saw that note on here I was thinking our friend Mike Donahuge and I felt a wispy tear of nostalgia coming in, but this was a bit before his time in retrospect. So Phil Donahue it was. Other interesting fans on hand were a “Chinese guy that looked like Phil Rizzuto” and his fellow Asian friend, known as “Chinese James Earl Jones.”
A Boston fan on hand had his cap stolen and thrown – was Justin accounted for on that night? At some point before his hat went flying and he meekly shuffled his way out of the Stadium Steve noted on the card that “Boston fan gets the kitchen sink thrown at him” Through all of this a Little Orphan Annie lookalike was trying to remain inconspicuous out there, but she was met with “where’s your eyeballs?” chants and queries all night.
They were still having problems with the sound system that left the Stadium silent before the game earlier in the week – at one point between innings they started playing a highlight package of Mike Stanley complete with no music at all. Just as we were commenting on how bogus spliced clips of home runs and nailing guys trying to steal looked without the music accompaniment Eddie Layton started playing a bouncy jig on his organ. “Just doesn’t fit” we decided.
Here’s a funny one. Tim Wakefield, that idiot, was on the mound for Boston and we composed a striking little ditty. Sung as yet another “doo da, doo da” song. Here goes - "Wake-field likes to knuck-le balls, doo-da, doo-da.” “Knuckle balls” heh heh.
Some other useless notes - a toddler on hand took Bear Ass from me and tried to feed it her bottle. That was cute. At some point someone asked me my age, and being drunk I gave the wrong one. I actually had an argument with my friends out there over how old I really was (I was 27...not sure if I was claiming 26 or 28…I couldn’t have been 2 years off, could I??)
Ooooh, boy, I see now that this was during my “tobacco experiment” - Steve noted that “Tom is chewing tobacco and liking it.” Welllll….I may have liked it fine, but my stomach sure didn’t. Not sure if this is the game where as soon as the final out nestled into someones glove I yuked all over the place, but there were not many tobacco chewing nights I had out there that I survived intact. There used to be a guy out there, I think his name was Chris…he had played “minor league ball” - (if I had a dollar for every person out there that told me they played minor league ball I would be paying someone to type these for me right now instead of doing them myself) and he was constantly packing a chaw. Come to think of it, maybe he did play minor league ball….the only other thing I remember about him is he disappeared off the face of the Earth soon after and he was a dead ringer facially for knuckleballer from the era Dennis Springer.
The Yankees won this one, whittling the Sox lead to 14 ½…..it was an 8-4 victory for the local heroes. David Cone started and went 7 strong, upping his mark to 15-7, and Steve Howe stayed clean long enough to notch his second save on the year. Wakefield took the loss for the dreaded foes, but his mark was left at a strong 15-4. He was followed by Matt Murray (?), Brian Bark (making his 3rd and FINAL major league appearance on this night) and everyones favorite, Jeff Suppan.
New York scored their 8 runs on only 5 hits, as Boston pitchers walked 9. Darryl Strawberry blasted a 3-run shot in the first inning, and Paul O’Neill homered later in the game and also plated 3. 6 different Yankees scored runs on the night. The Yankee lineup was 3B Boggs, CF BW, RF O’Neill, DH Strawberry, LF James, 1B Mattingly, C Stanley, SS Fernandez, and 2B Velarde. Geez, do any of you guys remember Dion James getting so much playing time as a Yankee? He’s all over these things.
Boston squirted 7 hits off Yankee pitching, by 7 different batters. Your Sucks lineup looked like this – CF Willie McGee (lol), SS Valentin, 1B Ho-Mo Vaughn, DH Canseco (how bout that), LF Greenwell, RF O’Leary, 3B Naehring, C Haselman, and 2B Alicea. And if you were there like I was you actually saw the MAJOR LEAGUE DEBUT of Scott Hatteberg, who came in for Haselman and ended up going 1-2 and scoring his first run. Cheers to that!
For a profile, how bout we stick with someone people may remember (as opposed to someone like Matt Murray who had a lifetime 9-plus ERA in a short stint) - lets go with Luis Alicea. A tenure from 1998-2002 (sans 89 and 90) - he had only this one year with Boston in 95, playing more games (132) than any year but one. He was mainly a 80-120 game kind of guy. Finished up with a respectable lifetime BA of .260, with a mere 47 jacks and 422 RBIs in his 13 seasons of work. Nice walk to strikeout ration, getting 500 free passes while whiffing 624 times. All this came in 3971 official at-bats. Stolen base ratio not as impressive, as he nabbed 81 bags but was nailed 50 times. A pesky sort, played for the Cardinals (88-94), Boston (95), St Louis again in 86, Texas (98-99) and wrapped it up with the Royals for 2001 and 2002. Born in 65 and a product from Puerto Rico, he was a 1st round draft pick by St Louis (23rd overall) in 1986, out of Florida State University. Baseballreference.com page has 5,173 hits as of 11/9/2010. I will never forgot Luis Alicea!!
As for the 8th, there were 35,896 on hand, and they saw the game played in 2:40. Your umpires on hand were Greg Kosc, Dan Morrison, Al Clark, and Larry Barnett. And in another note of interest on the history side of things, elsewhere around the game Luis Andujar and Kevin Sefcik were busy making his major league debut.
Hey! Thanks for reading!
THE EVER-POPULAR LUIS ALICEA!
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