One of the hardest things to do in sports is to throw a no-hitter. To take it a step further, to throw a perfect game, especially at Yankee Stadium, is almost supernatural. On this day (July 18, 1999) David Cone achieved this incredible feat.
What made it even more incredible was that the game had been interrupted halfway through by the rain. Most pitchers don’t even come back to finish most of these games in that situation. Well, Cone did.
The thing that will always fascinate me was that when the weather started to clear Cone asked the first living breathing person around him to warm him up. In this case, it just happened to be batboy Luis Squeegee Castillo. Squeegee was a nickname that was given to him a year earlier by Derek Jeter.
They first started throwing in the hallway, when the ceiling was too low they took the action outside. Cone always told me that this was very important to him because it helped set up his rhythm for the rest of the game.
Well as faith would have it David Cone would go on to pitch the last perfect game in Yankee history with the assistance of the Yankees batboy Luis Squeegee Castillo.
Twenty-three years later this Dynamic Duo are still very close friends and Squeegee is still assisting Cone in big moments.
Last week Cone had hip replacement surgery and Squeegee still had his right shoulder there to lean on.
Batboys are superheroes and there is nothing better in life than a great friendship.
