Do-or-die, winner-take-all playoff baseball games bring a certain kind of stress. You’ve invested in this team over the course of 162 regular season games, and everything can come down to one pitch or batted ball being inches away from a good outcome or not. You’ve spent hours and days following a team, and their fate can be decided by just a few minutes.

Your team immediately coming out and scoring a bunch of runs can take a lot of that stress out, and that’s what the Yankees did this day 25 years ago, using an early outburst to outlast the Athletics at the Coliseum.

October 8: Yankees 7, Athletics 5 (box score)

Playoffs: Yankees win ALDS 3-2 (90-76 record overall)

Having split the first two games of the 2000 ALDS on the road in Oakland, the Yankees won Game 3 and had a chance to clin

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