Cardinals notch first Yankee Stadium win since … the 1964 World Series

The last time the St. Louis Cardinals beat the New York Yankees in the Bronx, Bob Gibson was involved. Until Saturday.

For the first time since Game 5 of the 1964 World Series, the Cardinals notched a road win against the Yankees with a 6-5 victory to even their current series. The team was previously 0-7 on the road since the series immortalized in the David Halberstam classic “October 1964.”

Per MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch, the Cardinals were the only team to have not recorded a win at the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009.

MLB’s changing interleague rules allowed Cardinals’ Yankee Stadium drought

How does a drought like that happen? The explanation is also a good lesson in the history of interleague play in MLB. Obviously, the Cardinals and Yankees never met again in the World Series or the rest of the postseason. That leaves interleague play as the only possibility.

There was no interleague play until 1997, and that began with AL East teams playing NL East teams and NL Central teams playing AL Central teams. MLB didn’t mix up the schedule until 2002.

So the Cardinals’ first road series against the Yankees was in 2003, and they naturally got swept. Their next two series in 2005 and 2014 (the periods between interleague meetings can be sporadic) were both in St. Louis, then they made the trip again in 2017. Where, again, they were swept.

The next two series in 2022 and 2023 were again in St. Louis.

Streaks like this are going to be much rarer going forward, however, as MLB adjusted its scheduling in 2023 by expanding the number of interleague games for each team from 20 games per year to 46, giving every team a home-and-home series against every other team, AL and NL. So the Cardinals will have a chance to notch another win in Yankee Stadium every year going forward.

Cardinals nearly choked away their streak-breaking win

The Cardinals were sitting pretty in the eighth inning on Saturday, holding a 6-1 lead via rallies in the third and sixth inning.

Reliever Matthew Liberatore opened the bottom of the eighth by allowing a Gleyber Torres single then erasing it with a Juan Soto double play. Then things went pretty sideways, starting with, of course, Aaron Judge. The MVP frontrunner was the first of five batters to reach base.

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Anthony Volpe and Giancarlo Stanton finished the rally with RBI hits to push the score to 6-5, at which point Andrew Kittredge, who came in for Liberatore before allowing a double to Stanton, got the final out against Alex Verdugo.

The ninth inning was thankfully less dramatic, with closer Ryan Helsley working around a double by Soto for his MLB-leading 42nd save.