Lots of milestones:

Pettitte allowed three hits over 7 1/3 innings to earn his 250th career victory, leading the Yankees to a 3-1 win over the Seattle Mariners. The 47th pitcher in major league history to reach that milestone, he will turn 41 on June 15. But what happened just as the game ended meant even more to him. His first-born son, Josh Pettitte, a right-hand pitcher for Deer Park (Texas) High School, was drafted by the Yankees in the 37th round in the Major League Baseball draft.
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But the same advice worked so well for Doc Gooden!

How different would Mariano Rivera’s career have been if baseball’s all-time saves leader had mastered what Mel Stottlemyre was teaching in the spring of 1996?

In his first year as Joe Torre’s pitching coach, Stottlemyre was doing his job when he tried to add off-speed pitches to Rivera’s explosive fastball.

“We didn’t know what we had but the fastball, and we wanted to work on a curveball and changeup,’’ Stottlemyre said ...

Only, at the end of this night, Rivera would make history of an entirely different kind. He’d appeared in 1,071 regular-season games and saved a record 626 of them, but in his 19 seasons in the bigs, Rivera had never blown a save without recording a single out until he faced that hallowed Mets Murderers Row of Daniel Murphy, David Wright and Lucas Duda.

“It was a great game,” Rivera would say at his locker, “until I got into the game.”

There should be a hotline for former star athletes to call. They would use it just for emergencies, just for those moments when they have this interesting thought but are not sure if they should make that thought public. For instance, before doing an interview like this with Newsday, Goose Gossage might call the hotline.

Goose: So, I’m thinking about talking again about how you can’t compare Mariano Rivera to relievers of our time.

Hotline: Don’t do it.

Goose: No, this time I’m going to ...

Fermin had, of course, already been traded for a future Hall of Famer…

Yes, general manager Brian Cashman said, the unthinkable nearly happened.

It was spring training 1996, and the Yankees weren’t sure what they had at shortstop.

“We were going to go with the young shortstop that turned out to be Derek Jeter,” Cashman said Saturday. “Derek wasn’t having a good spring training.”

Cashman said there were some people in George Steinbrenner’s “circle” who raised concerns about ...