Jimmy Key

Jimmy Key threw the last pitch of a Yankees rotation start that hadn't looked like an ace's season all year -- 12-11, a 4.68 ERA, a guy a year removed from major shoulder surgery -- and it turned out to be exactly the pitch the franchise needed. On October 26, 1996, Key outlasted Greg Maddux for 5⅓ innings in Game 6 of the World Series, and when John Wetteland got the final out, the Yankees had their first championship in 18 years.

I'll be honest -- Key wasn't the best pitcher on that staff. Pettitte had the Cy Young-caliber numbers that year. But when Torre needed someone to take the ball in the biggest game of the season, he handed it to the guy who'd already done this once before. That's not nothing.

Path to the Bronx

Key grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, the son of a NASA secretary and an Army engineer, and turned down a White Sox draft offer out of high school for a scholarship to Clemson (he's still the only player in school history to make First Team All-ACC at two different positions in the same season -- pitcher and DH). Toronto took him in the third round of the 1982 draft, and he broke into the majors in 1984 as a reliever, setting a Blue Jays rookie record with 10 saves before ever settling into the rotation.

He became exactly the pitcher his coaches always said he'd be -- not a thrower, a pitcher. Average fastball, sharp sinker and curve, a cutter with real life on it, and command that made all of it play up. His best year in Toronto came in 1987: 17-8, a league-leading 2.76 ERA, runner-up to Roger Clemens for the AL Cy Young. Five years later, he beat Atlanta in the World Series -- won Game 4 as a starter, then got the win in relief in the Game 6 clincher -- as the Blue Jays claimed the first championship in franchise history.

He signed with the Yankees that December, a four-year, $17 million free agent deal, arriving in the Bronx in 1993 as a proven winner with a ring already in hand.

Yankees Career

Key's first two years in pinstripes were genuinely great. He went 18-6 with a 3.00 ERA in 1993, then led all of baseball with 17 wins in the strike-shortened 1994 season, finishing runner-up to David Cone for the Cy Young (Cone was pitching for Kansas City at the time -- a fun detail once the two of them wound up as rotation mates a year later). Then, in May 1995, his season ended after just five starts. What looked like tendinitis turned out to be a torn rotator cuff, and Key needed surgery that put his career in real doubt.

He came back in 1996 having missed only four starts all year, which by itself is a small miracle for a 35-year-old a year removed from shoulder reconstruction. The results weren't vintage Key -- 12-11, 4.68 ERA, the highest ERA of his career to that point. But when Cone went down in May with an aneurysm that required emergency surgery, Key became the rotation's senior presence by default, the guy who'd mentor a young Pettitte on his pickoff move and steady a staff that badly needed a veteran anchor.

October 1996

Key started ALCS Game 3 against Baltimore and won it, 5-2, in a series the Yankees closed out two games later behind Pettitte and took 4-1 (Key didn't pitch in the clincher -- that one belonged to the bullpen). Then came the World Series, and it opened about as badly as it could, with the Braves winning the first two games at the Stadium by a combined score of 16-1 before the Yankees won four straight to flip the whole thing.

Game 6 fell to Key. Yankee Stadium, October 26, Maddux on the mound for Atlanta. The Yankees scored three runs in the third -- a Marquis Grissom misplay in center, then RBI singles from Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams -- and Key made it stand up. Three scoreless innings to open, then a jam in the fourth that he escaped by getting Terry Pendleton to ground into an inning-ending double play. He went 5⅓ innings, allowed one run on five hits, and handed the ball to the bullpen with the lead intact. Wetteland closed it, his fourth save of the series, and was named World Series MVP.

Final score: Yankees 3, Braves 2. Eighteen years of nothing, over.

It was Key's last start in a Yankees uniform -- and the second time in five years he'd been the winning pitcher of a World Series-clinching game against Atlanta, having done the same thing for Toronto in 1992. Not many pitchers in history can say they closed out two different franchises' championship droughts against the same opponent. Key can.

Legacy

Key left the Yankees after 1996, signed with Baltimore, made a fifth All-Star team in 1997, and helped the Orioles win the AL East before retiring in February 1999 rather than undergo a third shoulder surgery. He finished with 186 career wins, a 3.51 ERA, and two rings with two different franchises -- both times as the guy who got the last win.

He's not in Cooperstown, and I don't think the case is really there by modern standards. But Toronto put him in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2024, and the Bronx remembers him for one specific thing: with the season on the line and a Hall of Fame arm standing across from him in Maddux, Torre didn't blink handing Key the ball. Key didn't blink either.