October 9, 1998: Bartolo Colón’s pitching, Cleveland’s home-run barrage sink Yankees in Game 3

The New York Yankees won an American League record 114 games during the 1998 regular season, finishing first in the AL East Division by 22 games.1 They opened their fourth straight postseason appearance with a three-game sweep of the Texas Rangers in the AL Division Series.

The Cleveland Indians won 25 fewer regular-season games than the Yankees, but the club’s 89-73 record was good enough for its fourth straight AL Central crown. The Indians won three of four ALDS games against the Boston Red Sox to reach the AL Championship Series.

AL champions in 1995 and 1997, Cleveland lost both World Series, including a Game Seven, extra-inning heartbreaker to the Florida Marlins in 1997. The last time Cleveland won the World Series was in 1948. The Yankees, World Series champions in 1996, lost to the Indians, three games to two, in the divisional round of the 1997 playoffs.

“We’re the underdogs, we know that,” said Cleveland catcher Sandy Alomar. “They’re going to be out to get us because we beat them last year. The only way we can win is to go out there and be aggressive.”2

New York won Game One of the 1998 ALCS at Yankee Stadium, 7-2. With the second game tied, 1-1, the Indians scored three runs in the 12th to win, 4-1. Pinch-runner Enrique Wilson scored the go-ahead run on a bunt play that the Yankees complained was baserunner interference.3

Indians manager Mike Hargrove named 25-year-old Bartolo Colón (14-9, 3.71 ERA) as the starting pitcher when the series shifted to Cleveland on October 9. Selected to his first career All-Star Game with a 9-4 record (2.46 ERA), Colón struggled during the second half of the season (5-5, 5.65 ERA). He started the fourth game against Boston, allowing one run over 5⅔ innings in Cleveland’s 2-1 win.

The Yankees countered with 26-year-old lefty Andy Pettitte (16-11, 4.24 ERA). The winning pitcher in New York’s Game Two defeat of Texas, he allowed one run and three hits in seven innings. But in 1997 he lost his two postseason starts against Cleveland, giving up 15 hits and 11 earned runs in 11⅔ innings (8.49 ERA).

“For some reason we score runs on Pettitte,” said Cleveland hitting coach Charlie Manuel. “When we make him come over the plate is when we have success. If we don’t chase balls out of the strike zone, we have a good chance.”4

New York scored quickly against Colón. Chuck Knoblauch singled to lead off the game, moved to second on a sacrifice bunt, and took third on a groundout. Bernie Williams singled to left, driving in Knoblauch for a 1-0 lead.

Jim Thome led off the bottom of the second inning with the Indians still trailing 1-0. In the first two games, Yankee pitchers limited Thome – who had hit 30 regular-season home runs despite missing five weeks with a broken hand – to a single and a walk in nine plate appearances, striking him out four times. Thome blasted Pettitte’s 3-and-1 pitch 421 feet into the Cleveland bullpen in right-center.5

Switch-hitting Mark Whiten, starting in left field to give the Indians another right-handed batter, followed Thome’s homer with a double down the left-field line.6 After moving to third on a groundout, he scored on Wilson’s single, putting Cleveland ahead, 2-1.

The Yankees put a runner on base in each of the next three innings, but failed to score. One-out walks in the third and fourth were erased by double plays. In the fifth, Knoblauch hit a two-out infield single, but Derek Jeter followed with a groundout to short.

Pettitte walked Manny Ramirez, Cleveland’s leadoff hitter in the third inning, then retired the next eight batters he faced. With two outs in the fifth, Ramirez, whose 45 homers in 1998 were fourth in the AL, hit a 0-and-1, low-and-away fastball over the right-field wall into the Yankees bullpen.7

“I thought I threw him a decent pitch, but Manny just hit it out,” said Pettitte. “I knew it was going out. The guy is locked in. That team feeds on momentum.”8

Pettitte got two quick strikes on Travis Fryman, but walked him. Thome drove Pettitte’s first pitch over the top of the wall in right. “I thought I jammed him,” said Pettitte of Thome’s second home run. “He popped it up and it still went out.”9

Whiten, who played 69 games for the Yankees before being released in 1997, followed with a 416-foot blast over the left-field wall. Whiten tossed his bat high in the air after he made contact. “That wasn’t rehearsed,” he said. “It just happened.”10

With the Yankees suddenly down by five runs, 6-1, manager Joe Torre replaced Pettitte with Ramiro Mendoza. Mendoza and reliever Mike Stanton held the Indians scoreless for the rest of the game, but Colón retired the Yankees in order in each of the final four innings to put Cleveland up two games to one in the Series.

“Bartolo was obviously outstanding,” said Hargrove. “He was overthrowing his four-seam fastball early in the game. Mark Wiley (Cleveland’s pitching coach) went out and talked to him and then he started throwing a nasty two-seamer.”11

Pettitte, who fell behind in the count on seven of the first 10 batters he faced, seemed to settle down after the second inning. “It looked like he had straightened himself out,” Torre said, “and then in the fifth inning, it looked like he started muscling the ball a little bit.”12

Cleveland’s three home runs in the fifth tied an ALCS record for the most in one inning. The team’s four home runs in the game also tied an ALCS record.13 Thome, Ramírez, and Whiten were a combined 7-for-11. The trio either scored or drove in all of Cleveland’s runs.

But the next night proved to be a different story. New York won the fourth game of the ALCS, 4-0. Yankees starting pitcher Orlando Hernández (popularly known as El Duque) and two relievers held Thome and Ramírez to 0-for-7, including five strikeouts.14

New York never trailed in the following two games against the Indians, winning 5-3 and 9-5, to capture the AL pennant, four games to two. The Yankees’ four-game sweep of the San Diego Padres in the fall classic was the first of the club’s three straight World Series championships.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin. 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org. for box scores/play-by-play information, player, team, and season pages, pitching and batting game logs, and other data:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE199810090.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1998/B10090CLE1998.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNwUEdGf1g – TV Broadcast of the entire game

Photo credit: Bartolo Colón, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 The previous AL record of 111 wins was set by Cleveland in 1954 over a 154-game regular-season schedule. When the AL expanded from 8 to 10 teams in 1961, the regular season expanded to 162 games. In 2001 the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, but Cleveland’s 1954 winning percentage of .721 remains the highest in AL history.

2 Steve Marantz. “Yes, the Yankees Are That Good,” The Sporting News, October 12, 1998: 60.

3 Second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, covering first base on Travis Fryman’s bunt, argued that Fryman interfered with the throw from Tino Martinez while the ball trickled past the infield, allowing Wilson to score and Fryman to go to third. NBC television broadcast, “1998 ALCS Gm2: Wilson Scores on Knoblauch’s Miscue,” YouTube video (MLB.com), 2:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8WXdHzvAdc. Accessed July 9, 2024.

4 Steve Marantz. “Yes, the Yankees Are That Good.”

5 Joe Maxse, “Pettitte Gets Caught in 5th-Inning Crossfire,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 10, 1998: 36.

6 Paul Hoynes, “Arms and Hammers Colon, Homers Lift Tribe,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 10, 1998: 33.

7 Buster Olney, “After a Long Struggle, Pettitte Comes Apart,” New York Times, October 10, 1998: A1.

8 Joe Maxse, “Pettitte Gets Caught in 5th-Inning Crossfire.”

9 “Pettitte Gets Caught in 5th-Inning Crossfire.”

10 Paul Hoynes, “Arms and Hammers Colon, Homers Lift Tribe.”

11 “Arms and Hammers Colon, Homers Lift Tribe.” Colón pitched the first complete game in the postseason by a Cleveland hurler since Bob Lemon’s extra-inning loss in the opening game of the 1954 World Series. It was also the first recorded in the ALCS since Wilson Álvarez and the White Sox defeated Toronto in the third game of the 1993 ALCS.

12 Buster Olney, “After a Long Struggle, Pettitte Comes Apart.”

13 Paul Hoynes, “Arms and Hammers Colon, Homers Lift Tribe.” As of the end of 2023, teams had hit four home runs in an ALCS game 16 times. The last to do it was Texas, against Houston on October 23, 2023. No team has ever hit five homers in an ALCS game. Two teams had hit three homers in an inning during an ALCS game before 1998, New York (vs. Baltimore in the third inning on October 13, 1996) and Baltimore (vs. Cleveland in the third inning on October 12, 1997). Through the end of 2023, only one other ALCS team had hit three homers in an inning. Boston hit three consecutive home runs against Cleveland in the sixth inning on October 16, 2007.

14 Brian Giles, who started in left field in place of Whiten to add another left-handed batter to the lineup, was 0-for-3. Cleveland’s best chance to continue the momentum from its win in the third game occurred in the bottom of the first inning. Thome came to bat with two runners on and two outs. He hit a 3-and-2 changeup that looked as if it was a three-run homer when it left the bat, but the ball didn’t carry and was caught at the base of the wall in right field. Paul Hoynes, “A Quiet Night at Home Yankees Shut Out Tribe,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 11, 1998: 15.