September 1, 1998: Yankees’ David Wells flirts with second perfect game of the season

Anticipation grew with each home run. It was late summer 1998, and Roger Maris’s single-season record of 61 homers appeared in reach by not one but two players: the St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and the Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa.

But throughout that two-man race to 62, few had acknowledged another milestone possibility: two perfect games by a pitcher in one season.

David Wells didn’t expect to be that pitcher. Though the 35-year-old, mustachioed, beer-bellied, Metallica-loving New York Yankees southpaw had already done half the work by throwing a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins on May 17 – while hung over nonetheless1 – baseball history was well-established. There had only been 15 perfectos in major-league history and two in Yankees history, including his.2 Never had there been two in a season, nor had any pitcher thrown two in a career.3

And in the hour before his September 1 start against the Oakland Athletics, Wells wasn’t sure he could pitch that night at all. He felt shaky for some reason. Neither his usual bullpen warmups nor his 16-2 record so far nor the confidence from having won his last 10 home decisions seemed to help. “I didn’t think I would last three innings out there,” he said later. “It was a bizarre night.”4

He still felt rough during the pregame ceremony. Joining him on the Yankee Stadium mound was Casey Gaynor, an 11-year-old who had pitched his suburban New Jersey team to a Little League World Series title that summer. As baritone Robert Merrill sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” from behind home plate, Wells gave the kid a nudge.

“How you feeling?” he whispered to Gaynor.

“Great!” the kid replied.

“Your arm’s okay?”

“Yeah!”

“Good, because I stink tonight, and you may have to come in and bail me out.”5

But Wells didn’t need a bailout after all. He struck out his first batter, Rickey Henderson, looking. He struck out his second batter, Ryan Christenson, swinging. Third baseman Luis Sojo’s catch of Jason Giambi’s pop fly retired the side. The starter’s 13-pitch first inning left him hungry for more. “Good fastball, very sharp curveball, cut fastball, the sinker, the change, everything’s cooking tonight,” he said later.6

The Yankees’ offense found its groove early as well, against knuckleballer Tom Candiotti, who took the mound a day after his 42nd birthday. In the bottom of the first, leadoff hitter Chuck Knoblauch and Derek Jeter hit back-to-back singles, then scored on a line-drive double by Paul O’Neill. Tino Martínez’s bloop single past third base brought O’Neill home. A groundball single by Jorge Posada scored Martínez. Even after Sojo swung at what would have been an inning-ending third strike, the pitch went wild, prompting him to run and reach first base. Only after all nine Yankees hitters had batted did Knoblauch ground to Candiotti, who threw to first to end the four-run, six-hit frame.

Wells’s next two innings showed that his first was no fluke. He retired Matt Stairs, Mike Blowers, and Ben Grieve in order in the second, on just eight pitches. After a two-run homer by Bernie Williams gave the Yankees a 6-0 lead in the bottom of the inning, the lefty pitched a one-two-three third.

Gone was the anxiety over pitching badly, soon to be replaced by anxiety over pitching well – very well. Wells had a perfect game going through three innings. His control, according to catcher Posada, was the same as on May 17.7 Giambi, who had gone 1-for-6 lifetime against Wells before that game, went on to say that the pitcher’s mechanics that night showed “the best stuff I’ve ever seen him have.”8 And it just so happened that in attendance were two other left-handers who had thrown perfect games: the Athletics’ Kenny Rogers in the visiting dugout and retired Cincinnati Reds starter Tom Browning in the stands.9

Even the officiating seemed to favor a hitless, walkless night for Oakland. “With umpire Jim McKean running a strike zone about the size of a refrigerator tonight,” Wells said later, “the possibility of another no-no is genuine and thrilling and scary as hell.”10

Emphasis on “scary as hell.” Ambling back to the home dugout between half-innings, Wells told teammates he wanted no part in a second perfect game. To him, the byproducts – public appearances, interviews, autograph requests, a key to the city – had been unnerving and time-consuming enough the first time.11 “This can’t be happening!” he shouted at fellow Yankees starter David Cone. “Not again. Somebody out there better get a hit off me soon, or I’m gonna puke all over the rubber.”12

But Wells’s more competitive side didn’t let him sabotage his masterpiece-in-progress that easily. He started the fourth inning by striking out Henderson looking for a second time. He finished the fifth with a pair of called strike threes, to Blowers and Grieve. At no point in those innings did he trail in the count by more than two balls. And of course, the perfect game remained intact.

Yankees manager Joe Torre noticed. That’s why, to start the sixth inning, he replaced 38-year-old left fielder Tim Raines with 29-year-old Chad Curtis. Torre explained later that the decision was strictly about defense: “I couldn’t have lived with myself if someone had hit a bloop.”13

Wells didn’t see the move that way. He recalled September 24, 1995, the last time a manager had tweaked a lineup during one of his near no-hitters: After Wells, then with the Reds, tossed six hitless innings against the Philadelphia Phillies, skipper Davey Johnson benched left fielder Ron Gant – and a seventh-inning ground-rule double and run-scoring single followed.14 Wells concluded that Johnson had jinxed him, and he figured Torre’s lineup change might do the same.15

Either way, Wells proceeded with a dominant sixth. He struck out Scott Spiezio looking. He retired Miguel Tejada on three consecutive strikes. And with the Tuesday night crowd of more than 36,534 standing and cheering a two-strike count on A.J. Hinch, Wells ended the frame with a called strike three – his 11th punchout of the night and his fifth in a row.16

Hinch threw his bat down.17 It was clear he didn’t think that third strike was anywhere near the zone. Within seconds, umpire McKean ejected him from the game.

Oakland manager Art Howe ran out to defend Hinch. In the style of the late Athletics and Yankees skipper Billy Martin, Howe kicked enough dirt to bury home plate. “With the strike zone you’re calling, you don’t need this,” he recalled telling McKean. “He asked me if I wanted to get thrown out, and I said, ‘Yes, I’m tired of watching this.’”18 So the ump ejected Howe as well.

By the seventh a repeat of perfection looked increasingly inevitable. Wells entered the inning having thrown only 12 balls to Oakland’s first 18 batters. Despite falling behind to Henderson, 3-and-0, he got the future 3,000-hit-club member to fly out to right. He struck out Christenson swinging for the second out. And after 20 up and 20 down, he had two strikes on Giambi.

The next pitch was a curveball, a tad high but still in the strike zone.19 The lefty-hitting Giambi pulled it off the end of his bat. He lined it up the middle, past second baseman Knoblauch. It dropped for a single.

David Wells’s shot at a second perfect game was over. So was the stress that had come with it.

“Thanks, buddy,” he told his future Yankees teammate Giambi from the mound.20 “You took a lot of pressure off my ass.”

“No problem, dude,” replied the laughing slugger at first base. “Anytime.”21

But Wells wasn’t fully at peace. After a grounder by Stairs initiated a force out to end the Oakland seventh, the pitcher returned to the dugout and cornered Torre. He called the 58-year-old manager out for his sixth-inning defensive change: “You made the switch and you jinxed me. You absolutely jinxed me. You know what that means?”22

It meant the same as it had on September 24, 1995, when Wells reacted to Johnson’s switcheroo by head-butting the Reds’ manager. “Davey’s not gonna be the only one to get the satisfaction of a head butt,” he told Torre.23

Wells began head-butting Torre moments later. He finally stopped after, as he recalled, bench coach Don Zimmer began “closing in behind me, ready to crack me in the snout with a Louisville Slugger.”24 The manager wound up with a bump on his head, though he figured Johnson had probably gotten hit harder back in ’95.25

A few at-bats into the Yankees’ seventh, the altercation became a thing of the past. Martínez’s 24th home run of the season sailed past the right-center-field wall, adding a seventh run to New York’s lead.

Wells had no problem protecting the score. He retook the mound in the eighth, and despite surrendering a leadoff line-drive single to Blowers, he retired the final six Athletics in order. The ace nabbed his 17th win of the season and handed the 1998 Yankees their 99th victory.

The weeks that followed brought their own history. McGwire hit his record-breaking 62nd home run of the season on September 8; Sosa followed with his 62nd on September 13. McGwire closed 1998 with 70; Sosa with 66.

But while McGwire’s Cardinals and Sosa’s Cubs went home, Wells’s Yankees sailed to postseason glory. The pitcher followed up on his 18-4 regular-season record by winning all four of his playoff starts, including Games One and Five of the American League Championship Series and Game One of the World Series. None of those October games were perfect, but they were enough to help his team secure the major leagues’ closest-to-perfect year: 125 overall wins and a 24th world championship.26

Acknowledgments 

This article was fact-checked by Victoria Monte and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for the box score and other material.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA199809010.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1998/B09010NYA1998.htm

Photo credit: David Wells, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Wells wrote this in his 2003 autobiography, Perfect I’m Not: “As of this writing, 15 men in the history of organized baseball have ever thrown a perfect game. Only one of those men did it half-drunk, with bloodshot eyes, monster breath, and a raging, skull-rattling hangover. That would be me. Never in the history of professional sports has a feat so difficult been accomplished by an athlete so thoroughly shot.” David Wells with Chris Kreski, Perfect I’m Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball (New York: William Morrow, 2003), 273.

2 Aside from Wells’s May 17, 1998, performance, the only other perfect game in Yankees history up to that point had come from Don Larsen during Game Five of the 1956 World Series. Wells and Larsen, by coincidence, had both graduated from Point Loma High School in San Diego, California, albeit more than three decades apart.

3 Through 2024, no pitcher has thrown two perfect games in a single season, though six have pitched two no-hitters in a season: Johnny Vander Meer (1938 Reds), Allie Reynolds (1951 Yankees), Virgil Trucks (1952 Tigers), Nolan Ryan (1973 Angels), Roy Halladay (2010 Phillies). Nick Aguilera, “Two No-Nos in One Year? These Guys Did It,” MLB.com, May 21, 2021, https://www.mlb.com/news/pitchers-with-two-no-hitters-in-the-same-season.

4 Mark J. Czerwinski, “David Like Goliath, Shuts Out A’s in Two-Hit Gem,” Bergen (New Jersey) Record, September 2, 1998: S01.

5 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 290-91.

6 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 290.

7 After the September 1 game, a reporter asked Posada to compare Wells’s outing to his May 17 perfect game. “It was the same,” Posada answered. “He had everything. He was the same. He almost did it.” Jack Curry, “Wells Waltzes with Pitching Immortality,” New York Times, September 2, 1998: 1.

8 Murray Chass, “Too Nice, Too Perfect to Come True Again,” New York Times, September 2, 1998: 3.

9 Browning pitched a perfect game on September 16, 1988. Rogers pitched one on July 28, 1994, as a member of the Texas Rangers. Curry, “Wells Waltzes with Pitching Immortality.”

10 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 291.

11 Wells told one reporter after the game, “I couldn’t go through that again. I’d have to ask Mr. Steinbrenner for time off to go on tour.” Jack O’Connell, “Torre Ends Up Feeling Sore,” Hartford Courant, September 3, 1998: C5.

12 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 291.

13 Curry, “Wells Waltzes with Pitching Immortality.”

14 Aside from a walk to Kevin Flora to start the Philadelphia fourth, Wells did not allow any baserunners for 6⅓ innings on September 24, 1995.

15 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 179-181.

16 Though the game’s official paid attendance was 29,632, news reports from subsequent days noted the additional presence of Little Leaguers from Toms River, New Jersey. Curry, “Wells Waltzes with Pitching Immortality”; O’Connell, “Torre Ends Up Feeling Sore.”

17 David Lennon, “Wells, Wells; Perfect for 6⅔, Zips A’s,” Newsday (Long Island, New York), September 2, 1998: A82.

18 Lennon, “Wells, Wells; Perfect for 6⅔, Zips A’s.” See also: Steve Kettmann, “Howe Gets Tossed in A’s Loss,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 1998: B5.

19 Chass, “Too Nice, Too Perfect to Come True Again.”

20 Giambi signed with the Yankees on December 13, 2001. Wells rejoined the club on January 10, 2002, following two seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays and one with the Chicago White Sox. They played together in New York during the 2002 and 2003 seasons.

21 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 291.

22 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 291.

23 Peter Botte, “Not Perfect, but Not 2 Bad: Wells’s Bid Ends in Seventh; Wins 17th,” New York Daily News, September 2, 1998: 71.

24 Wells, Perfect I’m Not, 291.

25 Torre told reporters the following day, “At least I’ve only got a bump on my head. I’m told Davey was flattened.” O’Connell, “Torre Ends Up Feeling Sore.”

26 The Yankees finished the 1998 regular season with a 114-48 record before winning 11 postseason games. The 2001 Seattle Mariners broke the Yankees’ AL record for regular-season wins with 116, though as of the end of the 2024 season, the ’98 Yankees’ 125 overall wins remain a major-league record.