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David Cone on how it impacted ’98 season
Long after the last out was secured, after his teammates carried him off in celebration of his perfect game, David Wells was summoned back onto the field at Yankee Stadium.
His friend and roommate David Cone dragged Wells out to absorb all those zeroes.
“I just knew it was a career-altering event for him,’’ Cone said in an interview with NorthJersey.com. “That a day like that could really have an impact on him, and I wanted him to kind of soak it all in.
“Look at the scoreboard. Look what you did. Nobody can ever take that away from you.’’
Wells had a 5.23 ERA over his first eight starts when he took the mound 25 years ago, on a Sunday afternoon against the Minnesota Twins.
And he wasn’t on the best of terms with his manager Joe Torre, as well as some players in his own Yankee clubhouse.
In a one-for-the-ages year that ended with 114 regular-season wins and a world championship, May 17, 1998, was a major turning point for Wells.
Because from that day forward, “he was arguably the best pitcher in the league,’’ says Cone.
In his recently published book, “The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever,’’ YES Network analyst Jack Curry writes about Cone’s personal impact on Wells’ season.
The brotherhood between David Cone and David Wells
A series of early-season events came to a head on May 6, a steamy night in Texas, when Wells was knocked out early, and Torre questioned the big lefty’s fitness.
It was a rare public rebuke by the manager, “and Boomer was really hurt by it,’’ Cone, now a YES Network and ESPN “Sunday Night Baseball” analyst, recalled this week at Rogers Centre in Toronto, where the Yankees are playing the Blue Jays.
“Boomer was ready to blast him back, he was going to go to the media,’’ Cone said. “And I saw a potential war brewing.’’
So, Cone suggested he and Wells room together on the road, at a hotel away from where the team would stay.
“It helped me keep him out of jail. That was priority number one,’’ Cone said with a laugh. “But all kidding aside, we had a lot of fun that year, we talked a lot, we stayed up late.
“There was a lot of baseball talk.’’
Despite differences in personalities, both starting pitchers were night owls, and fierce competitors on the mound, and they formed a brotherhood.
“I ended up really getting close to him. I didn’t anticipate that,’’ said Cone. “I kind of started off with, let’s see if we can get him going and kind of turn the corner in his relationship with Torre and the team and kind of befriend him a little bit.
“And it ended up the other way around, he ended up carrying me at the end of the year.’’
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To what degree Wells was nursing a hangover from night before, partying with some cast members from “Saturday Night Live”, might never be fully known.
Cone knew that Wells wasn’t in perfect shape before his perfect game, but “Boomer wasn’t the kind of guy who needed a lot of sleep.
“He bounced off the walls, just couldn’t sit in his room and stare at the ceiling,’’ Cone said. “He kind of embellished at times too, but apparently (the hangover story) is true.’’
The quest for perfection
By midafternoon, with Wells’ sharp control keeping the Twins’ lineup in check, the string of zeroes couldn’t be ignored.
That’s when Wells began being ignored by all of his teammates, except Cone, who wouldn’t play into the ancient superstition.
“I tried to loosen him up. I just sensed that he needed it that at that point,’’ said Cone, who at one point told Wells to break out a knuckleball (a pitch that was not in his arsenal).
“He kept looking at me to say something to him and I’m not a big superstitious guy. But he laughed. I’m sure he appreciated it.
“I just wanted to make sure he was loose and could give it his best shot to close out that game.’’
One year later, Cone was involved in his own quest to pitch a perfect game – which he achieved on the same Yankee Stadium mound, against the Montreal Expos.
“The contrast of actually doing it and watching it, I’m not sure exactly which one was worse,’’ said Cone. “I was a wreck for him because I knew how much it meant to him and how much it meant to our team to see him have a game like that, that could really propel him.’’
That October, Wells followed Orlando “El Duque’’ Hernandez’s clutch Game 4 American League Championship Series win at Cleveland, tying the series, with a Game 5 victory at Cleveland.
Cone closed out the pennant with a Game 6 win at Yankee Stadium, but he credited Wells with providing that momentum.
“We might not get by Cleveland without him because he made all their switch-hitters bat right,’’ Cone said, especially Roberto Alomar.
