Former Yankees pitcher Jim Abbott, born without a right hand, reflects on his improbable 1993 no-hitter

His was a career filled with great accolades and accomplishments. He won the 1987 Golden Spikes Award as the nation’s top collegiate baseball player and pitched a complete game as the United States won the gold medal over Japan at the 1988 Olympics. He was a first-round pick in the 1988 MLB Draft and finished third in voting for the 1991 American League Cy Young Award after winning 18 games.

However, Jim Abbott carved a spot in baseball’s annals and will always be remembered for his feat at Yankee Stadium on this date in 1993.

The lefthanded pitcher who was born without a right hand crafted a no-hitter against a fearsome Cleveland lineup that included Kenny Lofton, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle and Carlos Baerga as the Yankees earned a 4-0 victory.

Abbott was swarmed by celebrating teammates after the final out, had a pair of curtain calls and arrived in the clubhouse to find a bottle of champagne in his locker. But it was a shared moment with third baseman Wade Boggs when the significance of the achievement started to land.

“Wade was a character and a great player and he really loved baseball and had this great appreciation for the history of it,” Abbott said Wednesday from the family’s summer home in Harbor Springs, Michigan, in an exclusive interview with Newsday. “He had this happiness for me and the moment and I felt this sense of shared pride in the accomplishment. And I can’t deny that the pinstripes and the Stadium and adding a little history to an organization like the Yankees really added to it.”

Far less memorable was the start he made against virtually the same lineup in Cleveland six days earlier, when he got battered for seven runs and didn’t make it out of the fourth inning. For Abbott, acquired from the Angels in an offseason trade, the performance was another discouraging event in a disappointing first season with the Yankees.

“It’s one of the crazy aspects: the same team and pretty much the same lineup from less than a week before . . . and it did not go well, so this start came with a little extra nerves, to be honest,” Abbott said. “[Catcher Matt] Nokes wanted a little different approach. [He] wanted to throw a few more off-speed pitches. He was telling me to ‘just trust — you’ve got to believe and just throw it.’

“I was traded to the Yankees. You know that year I hadn’t done as well as I had hoped to do up to that point . . . so it was good to get that reminder of ‘the stuff is good.’ ”

Abbott recorded the last out on Baerga’s routine grounder to shortstop Randy Velarde. It was easy to read Abbott’s lips as he exclaimed, ‘’How about that, baby!’’ Then he pulled Nokes from the dugout to take the second curtain call with him.

Abbott lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and got home that Saturday evening to find the celebration that had started at the Stadium was still going on in the rest of the city.

“It was insane when I got to my neighborhood,” he said. “There was a bar — Cronie’s — that my wife and I went out to and we got such a [reception]. Because it was a Saturday night, all the early editions of the papers were [hitting] newsstands with the picture from the game on the front. People were running across the streets to have me sign some of them. Taxicabs were honking at us.

“I draw the comparison of how it felt being in Cleveland that previous game, that dejection and real frustration to this celebration and this moment of joy in the city . . . I never really appreciated how much people would connect to that game — kids, regular baseball fans and, of course, Yankee fans — but that connection made with the city and the team means everything to me now.”

Abbott had been growing a different following in his ascent to the national consciousness. Because he’d been born without a right hand, children facing a similar situation and their families had begun to look at him as a sort of beacon of hope. They wrote him letters, sought to meet him and followed his career.

Abbott always had sought to be viewed as just a baseball player — and he was — but it probably was unavoidable. The no-hitter further enhanced his significance to those people and, looking back today, he said, “I love the example.”

He added, “I played baseball differently — I grew up with one hand — but I wanted the message from my career to be that you can play differently and still go beyond participation, that you could be good and you can affect the game and a team in a very impactful way. That game kind of came to represent that. [That] moment of achievement really gave me something to point to and, I think, a lot of people born similarly to me something to look to.”

Abbott acknowledged that the no-hitter stands out as the best day of his big-league career but said he might not call the 119-pitch effort a “masterpiece.” One aspect of his pitching that he remarked on was that as he neared completing the gem, he grew calmer and felt the game slowed down for him instead of speeding up.

“I walked five guys and didn’t have that many strikeouts [three] and there were some hard-hit balls,” he said. “That trust [Nokes] talked about kind of established itself as the game progressed . . . to where, by the end of it, I was feeling really confident.”

He attributed that to a pair of previous experiences.

One was having Bo Jackson break up his no-hit bid that May 29 with one out in the eighth. Ron Karkovice hit a two-run home run in the next at-bat. The lesson learned from losing concentration for even a moment came back to him.

The other was pitching that final game against Japan in the 1988 Olympics, a game in which “we were on the cusp of . . . an outcome that I really wanted and had the same emotions, and it gave me the sense of ‘this is going to happen,’ ” he said.

Of the final inning that day, first baseman Don Mattingly told reporters afterward, “I got goosebumps.”

“He defied the laws of baseball,” Boggs said in the 2025 ESPN documentary “Southpaw — The Life and Legacy of Jim Abbott.” “That’s the sign of a true champion.”

Today, Abbott, who recently received the prestigious Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the 2026 ESPY Awards, does speaking engagements. The no-hitter is almost always the first thing mentioned. He talks about how living with what seems like a deficit doesn’t have to define you. “I just wanted to be the very best I could and I felt like I was born with a lot of talent as well as being born with one hand,” he said. “I love the fact that it speaks to being able to do things differently but still do them just as well as anybody else.”