Yankees have blueprint to follow after Carlos Rodon kiss saga
Buck Showalter had his back to the home dugout at the previous Yankee Stadium when he heard the volume and vitriol of the crowd intensify. He had just taken out the starting pitcher in the fifth inning of the second game of a doubleheader and the Yankee manager did not want to turn to look to see why the noise had changed.
So Showalter asked Jim Leyritz what was happening since the catcher was following Jack McDowell’s return to the dugout after he had allowed 13 hits and nine runs in 4 ²/₃ innings.
“It’s not good, Buck,” Leyritz said.
McDowell had waved a middle-finger salute at the booing home crowd, ratcheting the anger directed at the righty up to loathing on that July 18, 1995, evening.
It was a moment easy to conjure almost exactly 28 years to the day later, when Carlos Rodon exited after 4 ¹/₃ innings and six runs on July 19, 2023, and blew a mocking kiss at jeering Yankee fans behind the visitor’s dugout at Angel Stadium.
The similarities do not end there.
Rodon, like McDowell after the 1994 season, was the big Yankee addition of the offseason, acquired as a key to end a long championship drought. McDowell had been the fifth pick overall by the White Sox in the 1987 draft. The only times the organization has had a higher pick since was when Chicago drafted Alex Fernandez fourth overall in 1990 and took Rodon third overall in 2014.
Carlos Rodon blew a kiss to Yankees fans at Angel Stadium on Wednesday. USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con
Jack McDowell, pictured in June 1995, flipped off Yankees fans during a game in July of that season. Getty Images
But for the purposes of the here and now, perhaps the most relevant comparison is how it felt around the Yankees at that moment in 1995 and now. McDowell’s poor outing assured the Yankees were swept in the doubleheader and would lose for the eighth time in 12 games and fall to 33-40, 7 ¹/₂ games out in the AL East and eight out of the only wild card, in what was the debut season for a wild card of any type in MLB.
But then the Royals came to town and the Yankees swept them en route to winning seven in a row. That motivated the owner, George Steinbrenner, to break a deadlock between his minor league folks in Tampa who didn’t want to move certain prospects, notably a starter named Marty Janzen, and the New York major league group that did. Steinbrenner pretty much made the deal with Blue Jays president Paul Beeston that brought David Cone to The Bronx.
Still, as late as Aug. 26, the Yankees were just 53-58 in a season reduced to 144 games due to the labor impasse. They were being clobbered for being overpaid and underperforming and were seen as a hopeless mess. However, Showalter remembers now what motivated an MLB-best 26-7 finish that enabled the Yankees to secure the wild card on the final day of that season: “I can tell you a lot of different things, but we just started pitching better.”
In those final 33 games, Cone, McDowell, Sterling Hitchcock, Scott Kamieniecki and Andy Pettitte made 32 starts in which they averaged 7 ¹/₃ innings an outing while going 24-5 with a 3.30 ERA. The lone game they did not start in that timeframe was the final start of Mariano Rivera’s career, on Sept. 5 versus the Mariners.
The 2023 Yankees are being lambasted worse than their 1995 forerunners, but that has to do with all the new megaphones to express displeasure — can you imagine the McDowell incident with social media and one screaming cable show after another?
These Yankees will have a full 162 games to try to solve this and they are not as far out of the wild card (3 ¹/₂ games) as they were on this date in 1995. The Royals are coming to town. Can the Yankees launch a winning streak against them? Can Brian Cashman, an assistant GM in 1995, and Hal Steinbrenner, a non-entity in the organization then, make as meaningful of a deadline acquisition as Cone? Can Rodon show the fortitude of McDowell, who owned up to the wrongheadedness of his finger-flipping actions, but more importantly pitched very well the rest of that season, including with a bum shoulder late?
Can Rodon, Luis Severino, a healthy Nestor Cortes plus ace Gerrit Cole pitch like their 1995 forerunners did late? Can the offense ever wake up and hit like Bernie Williams, Ruben Sierra (another helpful trade-deadline acquisition,) Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs did down the stretch that year?
The New York Post back page for July 20, 2023.
Buck Showalter talks to Jack McDowell during a June game in the 1995 season. Getty Images
Nothing the Yankees have done to this point would inspire that confidence — but it felt the same in 1995, especially in that moment when a hoped-for ace gave the middle-finger salute to the fans. That 1995 club, however, should be a beacon to the current one that this is survivable. But do Rodon and this group have the fortitude of McDowell and that one?
Source: New York Post
