The cruelest ending! One fan's grab ends the Yankees' season
It was the most painful way imaginable for a season to end. With one swing of the bat, the New York Yankees thought they had tied their playoff lives; with one reach over the wall, one of their own supporters took it all away.
Details: In the sixth inning of Game 3 of the American League Division Series against the Tampa Bay Rays at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, with two outs and rookie George Lombard Jr. on first base, Yankees second baseman Anthony Volpe turned on a 95.9 mph sinker from Griffin Jax and launched it 357 feet toward the left-field wall. The ball was initially ruled a game-tying two-run home run, but after a lengthy replay review, Major League Baseball determined that a fan in a navy blue Yankees jacket had reached over the outfield wall and interfered with the ball, which ricocheted off his hands and into the stands. The call was overturned: spectator interference, no home run, no catch by Rays left fielder Victor Mesa Jr., one run scored, and Volpe placed at second base with an RBI double that cut Tampa Bay's lead to 4-3.
The scoreboard never changed again. New York went quietly the rest of the way, and the Rays completed a 4-3 victory and a clean three-game sweep of the best-of-five series to march into the American League Championship Series. The bitter irony was not lost on anyone in the stadium: in the top of the sixth, Mesa had broken the game open with a two-run homer off Max Fried, and just minutes later he was the fielder pleading for fan interference at the wall. The fan who reached for the ball was escorted out of Yankee Stadium by security and police, while a section of the left-field crowd responded by throwing debris onto the field. Nearly everyone involved agreed the umpires got the ruling right, including Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who said they did the right thing, and Aaron Judge, who admitted he knew the moment he saw the side-angle replay. Mesa himself believed the play could have even been ruled an out.
It's worth noting that the play invited an immediate and haunting comparison: almost exactly 30 years ago, 12-year-old Jeffrey Maier reached over the same right-field wall at the old Yankee Stadium and deflected a Derek Jeter fly ball that became a game-tying home run in the 1996 ALCS against Baltimore, a call that stood only because there was no replay review in baseball at the time. Then, a fan's intervention carried the Yankees to a championship. On Wednesday night, at the same stadium, the story ran in reverse: a fan's intervention ended New York's season by a single, phantom run.
Reminder: RIP. An era has come to an end! The man who returned Spain to the Tour de France podium has died.
Miguel Solomons
Dailysports's expert
