Give Dave Righetti the choice of any hitter from the 1983 baseball season and Wade Boggs would have been last on the list. Boggs was just the type of high-average, contact hitter Righetti didn’t need. Not with one out between Righetti and baseball immortality.
Yet there Boggs stood at Yankee Stadium’s home plate, his menacing bat poised to break up the no-hitter that was one out from completion.
There Boggs stood on that sweltering July 4 afternoon, his role in the boiling Yankees-Red Sox rivalry destined to be forever linked to this final at-bat.
There he stood with a runner on second, his team’s last hope to erase a 4-0 deficit and spoil the birthday of the dreaded opposing owner, George Steinbrenner. There he stood, the fourth batter of the inning, who managed to get up because Righetti walked leadoff man Jeff Newman and because Glenn Hoffman beat out a potential double-play ball.
There he stood, holding the hopes of a rollicking Yankee Stadium in his hands.
“I grabbed the ball and walked to the mound and I knew Boggsy was coming,” Righetti recalled recently, taking a quick break from his duties as the San Francisco Giants’ pitching coach. “I remember thinking about so much. As a left-hander I had a tendency to fall off toward third base and my fear was that he’d tap it between me and first base.
“I worried about that, especially on a breaking ball.”
Catcher Butch Wynegar wasn’t concerned with all that, focusing instead on how effective Righetti’s signature slider had been all day.
As the two men worked Boggs to a 2-2 count, Wynegar, now a hitting coach with the Yankees’ Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre club, didn’t hesitate about what pitch No. 138 was going to be.
“He had all four of his pitches working, but his go-to pitch all day was his slider, and with lefty against lefty, I knew I was going for the slider,” Wynegar said. “When we came out for the ninth inning, I remember thinking clearly that No. 1, we had to get the win.
It was Mr. Steinbrenner’s birthday. Two, I wanted to preserve the shutout. And third, it would be nice to get the no-hitter. And I knew with Boggs due up fourth, it would be great if we could do this 1-2-3.”
The fact that the 1-2-3 didn’t happen put all three goals in jeopardy. Now you had Boggs up with a runner in scoring position and sluggers Jim Rice, Tony Armas and Dwight Evans looming. Yankees closer Goose Gossage was warming in the bullpen.
“The game was far from over,” Wynegar insisted.
“Two other times during the game I threw him breaking balls that were up enough that he hit them to center field,” Righetti said. “I wanted it to be low enough for Boggs to hit it on the ground. I actually tried to bounce the last pitch.”
Righetti was looking for a swing and a miss.
And that’s exactly what he got.
He had just pitched the first no-hitter by a Yankee since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the first ever by a lefty in Yankee Stadium.
The place erupted. Righetti, physically and emotionally exhausted, barely had the energy to raise his arms to the sky. Wynegar sprinted to the mound, holding the precious ball. The two embraced.
“For me, that memory lingers on,” Righetti said. “I think my No. 1 thing was winning the pennant (in 1981), but as a singular moment, nothing comes close.”
Boggs might have indeed been Righetti’s last choice to face in that moment.
But in the end, Boggs’ strikeout only amplifies the magnitude of the accomplishment. Boggs had a league-leading 101 hits before the all-star break, which began the next day, and was on his way to winning the first of five batting titles. He didn’t strike out twice in one game (he was called looking in the first inning) again the rest of the season. He finished his career with 3,010 hits and a first-ballot Hall of Fame plaque.
“It’s a feather in my cap that it was him,” Righetti said.
The next day’s edition of The Record described Righetti as a “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
At 24 years old, he was the new star in town, his triumphant face gracing the front and back of the New York tabloids. Righetti got a first glimpse of one of them later that night on a stage in Atlantic City.
