Leave it to the Yankees to have two historic moments occur on the same day. On May 14, 1967, Mickey Mantle blasted his 500th home run. Exactly 29 years later, Dwight Gooden no hit the Mariners in a 2-0 victory at Yankee Stadium.
It was the bottom of the seventh inning with two outs against the Orioles, the Yankees were holding on to a 5-4 lead and The Mick had worked Stu Miller to a full count. Mantle launched a bomb deep into the right field stands, number 500. He joined Babe Ruth, Jimmie Fox, Mel Ott, Ted Williams and Willie Mays as the sixth player ever to hit 500 homers. However, he accomplished something the other five didn’t, he was the first switch hitter to accomplish the feat.
“It felt like when you win a World Series, a big load off your back. I wasn’t really tense about hitting it, but about everybody writing about it. We weren’t doing well and everywhere you’d see, ‘when is Mantle going to hit 500’ instead of about the team winning or losing. Now maybe we can get back to getting straightened out.” -Mickey Mantle
Fast forward to 1996. Dwight Gooden had signed with the Yankees as a free agent. After pitching poorly in April, being demoted to the pen and nearly getting released, he was on the mound against the Seattle Mariners at the stadium. 27 outs later there was a goose egg on the scoreboard for the Mariners under runs and hits. It was the eighth regular season no-no in Yankee’s history, and the first one since Jim Abbott back in 1993.
The Mariners’ lineup was no pushover, either. It featured the likes of Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr, Edgar Martinez and Jay Buhner, this made his performance that much more impressive. What made it even sweeter for Gooden was that his father was having open heart surgery that very day. He got to watch his son’s historic day before going into the operating room.
