September 30, 2001: Cal Ripken and fans get nothing at Iron Man’s last road game as Orioles, Yankees end in a tie

The New York Yankees-Baltimore Orioles game on September 30, 2001, promised everything and delivered on nothing.

When Cal Ripken Jr. announced his retirement in June 2001, fans frantically looked at the schedule to catch one last look at baseball’s Iron Man.1 The Orioles, mired in mediocrity, were slated to end their season on September 30, at Yankee Stadium.

The remaining 20,000 tickets for that day sold out before sundown and shot up into the thousands of dollars on eBay.2

At that time, the three-time defending World Series champion Yankees were 2½ games behind the Boston Red Sox in the American League East Division, and the promise of another tight division race between rivals appeared as if it could play out late into the season.

Then the Red Sox fell apart,3 and baseball’s schedule was reconfigured after 9/11. The games that were canceled in the wake of the attacks were bumped to the first week in October.

Meaning that on Sunday, September 30, the Yankees had already clinched the division title—with a comfortable 14½-game lead over Boston—and Orioles fans still had seven subsequent opportunities to see Cal Ripken … at home. Though if it were any consolation prize, Yankee Stadium marked his last road appearance.4

Five hours later, a cold, wet, exasperated crowd of 55,351 fans, hoodwinked into believing they might be witnessing history, were served a 15-inning, 1-1 tie, and all Cal got was a golden sombrero. He went 0-for-7 with four strikeouts.

Perhaps it was very Ripkenesque indeed for him to stay until the last inning despite the conditions. The end of his farewell tour with the fourth-place Orioles was going with a whimper. He did not get a hit in the three-game set against the Yankees, part of a 0-for-33 slump between September 25 and October 4. In Ripken’s final 12 big-league games, he was on base just five times—two singles, two walks, and a hit-by-pitch—in 50 plate appearances, an .043 batting average.

But fans showed up to celebrate the 41-year-old future Hall of Famer’s career, anyway. So many Orioles fans made the pilgrimage to New York on September 30 that the Baltimore tradition of shouting “O!” during the appropriate lyric in “The Star-Spangled Banner” was noticeably audible to Bronx ears.

Before the game, Ripken ran warmup laps with his children, Rachel, 11, and Ryan, 8, and the Yankees held a 20-minute ceremony honoring Ripken, emceed by broadcaster Michael Kay. The ALS Association awarded Ripken a plaque recognizing his work in fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Jeweler David Yurman presented him a gold watch, and representatives from Kodak and MBNA America also came bearing gifts. Don Mattingly, the Yankees’ most recently retired captain at the time and a contemporary of Ripken’s, showed up to pay his respects.

Standing behind home plate in front of a giant blue interlocking NY outlined in red and flecked with white stars—less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks—Ripken delivered prepared remarks.5

“This is gonna be a lot harder than I thought it would be,” he started. He marveled that Yankee Stadium had a “presence that was almost magical,” and of visiting Monument Park—“the plaque of Lou Gehrig, it blows you away. As a fan of baseball, you realize that the history of baseball, period, is very rich. But Yankee history is a very, very big part of that history.”

He struggled to put into words the “certain feeling” he felt playing at Yankee Stadium for 21 seasons. “Every reaction is tremendous,” he said, noting that “having the honor to play on this field, I simply say that it’s baseball at its very best.”

Then he rattled off a list of “great Yankee players that I’ve played against” – “Graig Nettles making all those diving catches”; Ron Guidry, Goose Gossage –“didn’t like facing them much, though”; Willie Randolph; Dave Winfield; Mattingly; “Derek Jeter, covering all the space on the left side of the infield; Mariano Rivera, game’s over; Joe Torre’s calm leadership; and of course, Jeffrey Maier out there in the right-field seats.”

The last, in reference to the 12-year-old boy who reached out of the stands to transform an apparent Jeter flyout into a controversial game-tying home run in the 1996 AL Championship Series, aroused a vociferous mixture of cheers and boos.

“I know there’ll be many things I’ll miss about baseball,” he concluded, “but coming to New York and playing here at Yankee Stadium will always be at the top of that list. Let’s get to the game.”

Challenger the Eagle flew out to the mound,6 and the Ripken family threw out the first pitch.

Then Roger Clemens took the mound for the Yankees. The Rocket, who had already won his 20th game and went on to pick up his sixth AL Cy Young Award that fall, allowed one run on four hits and five walks, striking out seven, in six innings. His opponent, José Mercedes, allowed one run on two hits and four strikeouts through six.7

Both runs came on solo homers – Bernie Williams’s 23rd of the season to left in the fourth for the Yankees, and Chris Richard’s 15th to right to lead off the sixth for the O’s.

And that was all the scoring. Clemens worked out of a sixth-inning jam after Baltimore loaded the bases with two outs. Yankees reliever Ramiro Mendoza pitched out of a similar predicament in the eighth after hitting Jerry Hairston to load the bases, with Casey Blake and Geronimo Gil on second and third with two outs.

The Baltimore bullpen did not allow a hit until the bottom of the ninth, when Tino Martinez’s single off Buddy Groom put the winning run—Williams (who walked)—90 feet away. But Randy Velarde’s groundout stranded him at third.8

In extras, the Yankees had two runners on in the 11th and the 13th they could not bring past second base. Melvin Mora was also stranded at second in the top of the 13th for the Orioles.

Each Ripken at-bat was met with flashy posters (“Thanks Cal” “Baltimore Loves Cal & NYC” “See #8 in the Hall”!) and an ovation. But after hitting a long fly to center that might have been a double if Williams hadn’t run it down in the second,9 Ripken had nothing, including four swinging strikeouts in the fourth, sixth, ninth, and 12th. A foul pop to Jeter to lead off the eighth prompted the fans to urge for a curtain call.10 (Ripken reluctantly acknowledged them.)

With the weather worsening and the scoreboard showing zero after zero, Yankees third base coach Willie Randolph made his plea to Ripken somewhere between the 13th or 14th inning: “Don’t tell anybody I said this,” he said, “But why don’t you go deep and get this over with?”11

Ripken flied out to left to end the Orioles’ 14th.

At the end of the 15th, with conditions so slippery that the Yankees’ final hitter, Gerald Williams, lost his grip on his bat twice before striking out, the umpires signaled for the tarp.

Forty-five minutes later, the game was called, nullifying the impact beyond the box score of the Yankees and Orioles bullpens’ 18 combined innings of shutout baseball.

Ripken remained positive. “It’s exciting, and I want to soak it up and enjoy it, because it’s the end,” he said afterward, perhaps alluding to the puddled field.12

Fans that day were just left soaked.13

Author’s Note

The author was one of the sorry fans sitting in left field that day. The giveaway was a commemorative ticket, but symbolically by the time she arrived the Yankees had run out, so she took home an empty pouch on a lanyard. She left in the 13th inning with her teeth chattering and doesn’t regret it.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Ray Danner and copy-edited by Keith Thursby.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball Reference and Retrosheet for pertinent information, including the box score and play-by-play.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA200109300.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2001/B09300NYA2001.htm

Notes

1 Coincidentally, the date of Ripken’s announced retirement, June 19, would have been the 98th birthday of Lou Gehrig, whose heralded consecutive games streak Ripken surpassed in 1995.

2 Murray Chass, “BASEBALL: Ripken, the Iron Man, to Retire at Season’s End,” New York Times, June 20, 2001, D1, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/20/sports/baseball-ripken-the-iron-man-to-retire-at-season-s-end.html.

3 The Red Sox lost 13 of 14 games from August 25 through September 9, turning a three-game divisional deficit into 13 games.

4 After the game ended in a tie, though, even that was a maybe. The Yankees had canceled a rainout against Boston on September 10, meaning the tie—for which the statistics counted, but didn’t affect won-loss records—would give them two fewer decisions than the AL Central-leading Cleveland Indians. If the Yankees had finished the season tied with or a game better than Cleveland in the loss column, the Orioles (and Red Sox) might have had to return to the Stadium the Monday after the season ended to decide playoff seeding. The Yankees made that a nonissue by finishing four games ahead of Cleveland in the win column.

5 For a recording of most of the ceremony, and Ripken’s speech almost in its entirety, see “Cal Ripken Jr. Final Game Yankee Stadium,” YouTube video (Mike August), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOBNJMeahGI, last accessed August 8, 2026.

6 Known as “The Most Famous Bald Eagle in America,” Challenger was the first bald eagle in history trained to fly over stadium events. His presence generally signified a special occasion, such as Opening Day or certain games in the postseason. He retired in 2019. “Challenger,” American Eagle Foundation, accessed August 13, 2026, https://eagles.org/meet-our-birds/bald-eagles/challenger/.

7 Mercedes led the American League that year with 17 losses and had a league-high 5.82 ERA among qualifying pitchers (162 innings or more).

8 Orioles reliever John Wasdin, who came in with two outs in the seventh, recorded six outs, all of them strikeouts.

9 Williams mused afterward that the catch was because he was excluded from Ripken’s speech. Joe Strauss, “Ripken’s Road Finale Hits Bump in N.Y.,” Baltimore Sun, October 1, 2001, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2001-10-01-0110010315-story.html.

10 Michael Morrissey, “Yanks Honor Classy Cal,” New York Post, October 1, 2001, https://nypost.com/2001/10/01/yanks-honor-classy-cal/.

11 Buster Olney, “A Long Goodbye for Ripken Leaves Things a Bit Unresolved,” New York Times, October 1, 2001, 55, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2001/10/01/438294.html?pageNumber=55.

12 Olney, “A Long Goodbye for Ripken Leaves Things a Bit Unresolved.”

13 Ripken’s final career game—his 3,001st as a big-leaguer—was a 5-1 home loss to the Boston Red Sox on October 6. The Yankees won their fourth straight AL pennant but lost the World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks in seven games.