When He Hurts, so Do Yankees

I never thought I’d live to say it, but I almost felt sorry for the New York Yankees the other night.

It was almost like watching a guy who had been an archduke working as a doorman at a tea room, or a guy in a frayed fur collar, stained Homburg and dirty spats spearing cigar butts in the gutter with a toothpick.

You remember the Yankees? The lords of all baseball. The most successful franchise this side of the Roman Empire. The terminators. Five o’clock lightning. Murderers’ Row.

They won 20 World Series championships in 39 years. They won 33 pennants.

They didn’t beat you, they destroyed you. They won pennants by 19 games, which means they clinched by Labor Day. They won World Series games, 18-4, 16-3, 13-1.

They weren’t a team, they were an apocalypse. They were the first--and for years, the only--team in the big leagues to draw a million. They were the first to draw 2 million. The rich got richer.

Somebody always took up the slack. The purchase of Babe Ruth made the team--and the dynasty--but when he was phasing out, there was Lou Gehrig.

After Gehrig came Joe DiMaggio. After Joe, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. They left and Reggie Jackson came on the scene.

They haven’t won a World Series since 1978. They haven’t won a pennant or a championship of any kind since 1981.

They aren’t the Yankees any more. They’re not exactly bag ladies, but they got shut out at Anaheim the other night by an Angel pitcher, Julio Valera, who was 10-10 at Tidewater last season. The old Yankees went years without being shut out.

Where has the Yankee mystique gone? How did they go from Murderers’ Row to Death Row? Where are the new DiMaggios, Mantles, Berras, never mind the Ruths and Gehrigs?

When Don Mattingly came along in ‘84, it looked as if the baseball fates had provided them with the successor, the messiah who would lead the Yankees back into glory and power.

Mattingly was the best hitter in the game since Stan Musial and Willie Mays. He had the powerful sloped shoulders of the born hitter, the sweet, quick swing, the sharp eye. He could hit for average and he could hit for power. He did things that hadn’t been seen around Yankee Stadium since Reggie and Thurman Munson left.

He led the league in batting his first full year at .343. He also led the league in hits with 207, doubles with 44, and was the first left-handed batter to hit more than .340 since Lou Gehrig.

He got 211 hits the next season and led the league in runs batted in with 145, and he was the first Yankee since Joe DiMaggio, no less, to get 200 hits in consecutive seasons.

It got better. The next year, he got 238--count ‘em--hits, led the majors. That was the most any Yankee--Ruth, Gehrig, DiMag, Mantle, Berra--ever got. He batted .352. He was the American League MVP.

He became the first player to lead the Yankees in hits, doubles and RBIs since Gehrig did it 53 years previously. He hit home runs in eight consecutive games, tying a major league record. He hit six grand slam homers in one season, breaking an American League record. He got an extra-base hit in 10 consecutive games, breaking a league record--set by Babe Ruth, no less, in 1921.

He was on his way to Cooperstown with flags flying and bands playing. When you start putting records in the books they have to go back to Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio to match, your next step is to be a statue in center field with them.

The Yankees had lucked out again. Their Moses wore No. 23. Another ballplayer for the ages. Then about three years ago, a telltale new series of phrases began to creep into the Mattingly resume-- back spasms, lower back pains, tests taken at NYU Medical center revealed a disk problem. And so on.

The Yankees didn’t always get lucky. Ruth never had anything more serious than a bad stomachache, but Gehrig came down with a terminal illness. DiMaggio played with a painful, but not otherwise debilitating bone spur in his heel. Mantle was an osteomyelitis victim, but it somehow remained dormant through most of his career.

With most people, you can tell they are ailing by a temperature, an accelerated or arrhythmic heart rate, an elevated blood pressure.

With Don Mattingly, you read a different chart. You knew by the RBI table--he fell from 113 one season to 42 the next--something was seriously wrong.

When the batting average tumbled to .256, it was time for the oxygen tent. When Don Mattingly has only 42 runs batted in, that is a bigger warning sign than a high cholesterol count. When he has only five home runs in a season, that is more alarming than a low blood count.

Mattingly doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I don’t want to be rude about it, but I’m sick of the what-happened-to-Don Mattingly stories,” he said at Anaheim Stadium the other night. “I’m fine. I’m just trying to play through and get back to winning.”

The Yankees made him captain last year, only the 12th in the club’s history. It is a high honor and a measure of his worth to the grand old name, Yankees.

Does he think it is possible to get back to the glory days of the Yankees and could anyone dominate the game the way they once did again?

“I don’t think so,” Captain Mattingly admitted. “I think free agency and the kinds of player shifts we get now argue against it.”

The Yankee dominators of yore came in duplicate--Ruth had Gehrig, DiMaggio had Berra, Mantle had Maris. Mattingly has to work more or less solo.

Until or unless Mattingly’s unacknowledged physical problems work out--he is only 31--the Yankees are going to be like the guy who sits in the bar with his scrapbook under his arm--”Hey! We were the Bronx Bombers!”--and wants to talk of past glories, only nobody wants to listen. Or say, like Brando in “On The Waterfront,” “If Mattingly don’t get hurt, we coulda been contenders!”