Randy Teltoe can't remember when he hasn't rooted for the Yankees.

So when a business trip brought him to Evansville from Indianapolis, he knew exactly where he'd be watching New York's opening game of the American League playoffs against the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday night.

Where else could he go but to the House that Don Built?

"When I called my wife and told her where I was, she said, 'I guess I know where to call in case of an emergency,' " Teltoe said from his corner chair at Mattinglys' 23 restaurant.

"Whenever I come down here from Indianapolis, I usually wind up here."

Tom and Sheila Austin joined Teltoe and about 150 others - about double the usual Tuesday night crowd in Mattinglys' - to watch the game on the bar's big-screen TV, and the Evansville couple plan to return for every game as long as the Yankees stay alive in the post-season.

"It might get expensive eating out every night, but it'll be worth it to me," Austin said. "I've always been a Yankee fan. When we'd play pick-up baseball games when we were kids, I always made believe I was a Yankee player. I guess I could have watched the games at home just as easily, but it wouldn't have the same kind of atmosphere. You want to be around other Yankee fans. Being here is the next-best thing to being there (Yankee Stadium) in person."

Austin isn't the only Yankee junkie in the family, either. Both of his children - daughter Jamie, 18, and son, Justin, 16 - work at the restaurant. Jamie also baby-sits Mattingly's three children.

Don Totten of Evansville sat in the middle of a table of about 20 vocal Yankee fans. He and most of the group have been coming to the bar regularly since it opened eight years ago.

"There was no question where we'd be tonight, and who we'd be cheering loudest for," said Totten, who has become such a close friend of Mattingly and his family that he called Don at his New Jersey home on Sunday to congratulate him on making the playoffs for the first time in his career.

Totten's table had plenty to cheer about. The Yankees posted a 9-6 victory. And Mattingly, whose streak of 1,785 games without a post-season appearance had been the longest among active major-leaguers, contributed with a run-scoring double and a single.

Kevin Edmonds, Mattinglys' assistant general manager, said he had at least 60 reservations for Tuesday's game. "That's a little unusual, especially for a Tuesday."

Even more unusual was that not all of the requests were from Yankee fans.

"We had quite a few calls asking if we were going to show the Cleveland Indians or Cincinnati Reds games," Edmonds said.

"I told them that we've got a lot of TVs in here, but the crowd will dictate what game we have on.

"I said I had a pretty good idea what our crowd was going to dictate, and then I wished them good luck finding a place that would be showing their teams because it probably wouldn't be here." BY TIM KAISER, Assistant sports editor

Copyright© 1995 The Evansville Courier, a Scripps Howard newspaper