Finishing the season off against Tampa Bay gave New York an excellent opportunity to stack wins as they headed into the playoffs. Through the first two games of this series, they’d done exactly that. For game 161, they sent David Cone to the mound.
Coney was sitting at 19 wins on the season, so if he could manage to hold up his end of the bargain there was a solid chance he’d get to 20 wins for the first time in a decade, since he’d done so for the crosstown Mets in 1988. He delivered and, thanks in large part to another chapter in the Legend of Shane Spencer, he got to 20 and the Yankees got to 113.