Don Mattingly never stopped trying to get to the top of the baseball mountain

TORONTO – It’s easy to find the clip online, so you can see what it looks like. Turn up the volume and you might be able to approximate what the 57,126 attendees made that night.

So let’s see if I can make you appreciate how I felt. Bottom sixth. Draw 2-2. October 4, 1995 at Yankee Stadium. This will be the former Yankee Stadium. Not the artificial noise mall they’re playing in now. But the cathedral of baseball – with all the appropriate ages and squeaks. So it moves and swings and bounces in the good moments.

The Yankees haven’t had many good moments for more than a decade, when Don Mattingly was baseball’s great Odysseus, and the playoffs were the unattainable Ithaca. But now he had a team and time, so much so that in September he decided to curse his bad back and swing all the way the rest of the way, and whatever was done was done.

What happened was he hit a young man again in September and October. The Yankees reached the playoffs for the first time during Mattingly’s tenure, with the team rallying around the beloved leader. Now in Game 2 of the AL Division Series, it was him against Seattle’s Andy Benes, a guy from Evansville, Ind., as well. Benes left the 1-0 change deliciously down and inside. Mattingly played him in the stands.