N.Y. Gets What It Deserves

Awright! You got 56,000 people singing “Noo Yawk! Noo Yawk!” Every one of them thinks he’s Frank Sinatra.

You thought the world championship was going to go back to have those little town blues?

Fergitaboudit! Eat yer heart out, rest of America!

The Yankees are back where they belong. Babe Ruth can rest easy. Joe DiMaggio can show his face in public again. Reggie Jackson can put the logo on his cars. It’s over, Yogi.

Wade Boggs is riding around on the back of a police horse, waving to a delirious crowd. New York’s finest line the field. The big town hasn’t been this happy since Jimmy Walker was mayor.

You thought Atlanta was going to win this? Gidouddahere!

A world championship is New York’s legacy, its birthright. It’s as much a part of New York as a mugging in Central Park.

I’ll give your regards to Broadway, remember you to Herald Square. They’re dancing in the aisles, spraying champagne in the locker room. They’re blowing horns on Park Avenue, the Battery, Bowery, Tribeca, Flatbush, Soho, Harlem.

It used to be old stuff to this town. This is the Yankees’ 23rd world championship, their 34th appearance in it--far more than any other team.

So, the title is back on Broadway, the Great White Way. They’re going to have the biggest ticker-tape parade since Lindbergh came back.

They had a world championship in this stadium the year it was built and had one about three or four times every decade since.

But not lately. Not in the ‘80s or the ‘90s. This is the first world championship in 18 years for the once-mighty Yankees--and their first pennant in 15. The town was getting kind of cranky.

This wasn’t the Big-Inning Yankees, the ones who used to score more runs in nine minutes than the other team scored in nine innings.

They won really because they returned to their roots, danced with what brung ‘em here. They had a lineup that scuffled for runs like a bag lady, beat you with the small skills. When the Yankees start talking about “beating you with the glove,” you know they have trouble. But they finally put big boppers in the lineup, long-ball threats like Cecil Fielder and Darryl Strawberry. The old Yankees had nine guys like that, but now they looked like one of the teams they used to score 18 runs on in Series games.

Old-time Yankee Series were more executions than contests. This one was desperate, a knife fight in a dark alley.

For the Yanks, it started out like a horror movie. Atlanta won the first game, 12-1. They shut out the Yankees in the second game. In the old days, the Yankees would go whole seasons without being shut out, never mind only two games into a World Series.

Then, they did what Yankee teams always used to do: won four in a row. Only, the old Yankees were never down 0-2 when they started the string.

Atlanta had a lineup of Cy Young pitchers when it started. But baseball history shows you that great pitchers, for some reason, struggle in World Series. Greg Maddux, who lost Game 6, after winning four Cy Young Awards in a row, is in good company.

In the 1929 Series, Philadelphia Manager Connie Mack who had a staff that included the storied Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw and Rube Walberg, knew the series hex and elected to start a 35-year-old pitcher who had won only seven games and pitched only 54 2/3 innings all year. And all Howard Ehmke did was strike out a then-record 13 batters and win, 3-1.

Recall what happened to Sandy Koufax in the last game he ever pitched. He had won 27 games that year and had an earned-run average of 1.73. Nevertheless he lost that 1966 Series game to Baltimore, 6-0, helped by a three-error inning by his center fielder, Willie Davis. Sandy also lost the first World Series game he ever pitched, although he pitched brilliantly in a 1-0 to the White Sox in 1959.

It goes on like that. Is Tom Seaver your idea of a masterful pitcher? Of course. But he lost his Series debut, to the Orioles in ‘69, 4-1. It was the only game the Mets lost in that series.

You like Bob Gibson, Cardinal legend? OK, but he lost Game 7 in 1968 (he won Game 7 the year before) and he lost (to the Yankees) in Game 2 in 1964, 8-3.

So, Greg Maddux, trailing his Cy Young ribbons, was supposed to stop the bleeding for the Atlanta Braves on Saturday night. He had already shut out the Yanks in Game 2.

The jinx was waiting. Old-timers could have told him. Even Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander lost World Series games. Lefty Grove was 31-4 one year and still was only a .500 pitcher in World Series.

Greg Maddux was his usual self, which is to say he made a specialty of getting the batters to hit them where they ain’t. He had only one careless inning, which is to say he threw pitches the batters were expecting. Paul O’Neill hit a double, Joe Girardi hit a triple, Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams singled and that was the old ballgame and the old World Series. One inning undid him. If it wasn’t quite the Big Inning pioneered by Ruth and Gehrig, it was a big inning by present Yankee standards.

Maddux’s teammates didn’t help him. Some audacious, not to say ill-advised baserunning killed a couple of key rallies.

After years of being able to say, Yankee Go Home, baseball has to deal with the haughty pinstripes again. Putting home run hitters at the corners makes pitchers sweat and fidget. The three-run homer or the threat of it still takes the opposition out of its game. Fielder and Strawberry made the ’96 Yankees at least an unreasonable facsimile of the ’27 ones.

So, start spreading the news. The Yankees are back, New York still has them, Yankee Stadium is the Vatican of baseball once again. They almost killed the game with their ruthless excellence once, but this time they may have saved it. For one thing, Yankee haters will have someone to hate again. And that’s good for business.