On November 1, 2001, Scott Brosius Delivered Yankee Stadium's Second Miracle in as Many Nights

One night after Tino Martinez and Derek Jeter had authored one of the most improbable comebacks in World Series history, nobody in Yankee Stadium quite believed it could happen again. But on November 1, 2001, in Game 5 of the Fall Classic against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the ghosts of October — or by now, early November — showed up right on schedule, this time wearing third baseman Scott Brosius's number 18.

Lightning Twice

The Diamondbacks carried a 2-0 lead into the ninth inning, with closer Byung-Hyun Kim on the mound looking every bit as dominant as he had the night before — right up until the moment he wasn't. With two outs and a runner aboard, Brosius drove a 2-2 pitch deep into the New York night, a two-run homer that tied the game and sent a crowd still raw from the September 11 attacks into disbelief. It was almost an exact echo of Martinez's game-tying blast twenty-four hours earlier, down to the pitcher on the mound and the inning on the clock.

The Yankees finished the job in the twelfth inning, winning 3-2 to take a 3-2 series lead, a feat that pushed their season total of walk-off postseason magic to a level baseball had rarely seen. Arizona would eventually win the title back home in Game 7, but for two surreal nights at Yankee Stadium, a battered city found something to roar about, and Kim walked off the mound having surrendered the same gut-punch blow in consecutive games, a coincidence too strange for fiction.