The Best Part of This Season Is the Yankees

There is already the idea out there that nothing the Yankees are doing matters if they do not win the World Series, close the deal. George Steinbrenner says it, a lot of people do. We talk all the time about how the Yankees play their next meaningful game in October.

Only the Yankees never look at things that way. Every inning is meaningful to the Yankees. You saw it as clearly as you could ever see anything in sports when they scored nine runs in the ninth inning against the A’s Tuesday night. Every day is the World Series for this team. It is why this could end up the greatest regular season any team has ever had in professional sports.

The best and most important part of the season isn’t Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. and the rest of them, no matter how glamorous the home run still is. The best part of the season is the Yankees.

“This team has put the focus exactly where it should be in sports,” Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau said. “The focus is on today’s game. They’re like Michael Jordan that way. The only thing that matters to them is winning today.”

I was calling Hirdt to see if we could come up with a list of the best regular-season records in all the major sports. Just because the Yankees’ season keeps getting bigger. We keep comparing them with the other great baseball teams of the century, but maybe that is not enough anymore.

The Yankees have a chance to get to 117 regular-season victories, which would break the Cubs’ record of 116-36 in 1906. But the real magic number for these Yankees, because their season is 162 games long, should be 120. They can chase 120 the way the Bulls chased 70 wins in the spring of 1996. And if they make it, they can say at the beginning of October that no one has ever had a better regular season, not even some of those undefeated teams from football.

Maybe the Yankees won’t make it to 120. Maybe by September Joe Torre will be resting people all over the place and giving kids a look and getting ready for the playoffs. For now, though, they show no signs of slowing up or letting up. In the ninth inning the other night, the A’s looked as scared against the Yankees as other fighters once did did once against Tyson.

The Yankees came into the game with 80 wins and 28 losses. The numbers continue to jump you like an alarm, telling you to appreciate the what you are watching, every single game.

Of course October is another matter. If the Yankees win 120 and don’t win the World Series, then they go in with teams like the ’34 Bears, who were 13-0 in the regular season and lost the title game to the Giants. Or the ’54 Indians, winners of 111 regular-season games and then losers to the Giants in four straight in the World Series. But all of that is down the road.

The grandeur of these Yankees is today. In the age of the wild card, when the postseason is so busy it becomes a silly season, they bring honor to baseball’s long season. They justify our interest in it, our passion for it. In The Boston Globe the other day, Peter Gammons dismissed the notion that October has to be all-or-nothing for a team like the Yankees. What about the people who spend $20 for a midweek game between the Yankees and the Royals? Gammons wrote. Tell them these games don’t matter.

You know who really looks out for the people buying those tickets? Paul O’Neill does. And Derek Jeter. And Tino and Curtis and Darryl Strawberry. No one values the season more than they do. What they are doing here, getting to 80 wins the first week in August, is bigger than 72-10 for the Bulls. The basketball season is half as many games, that is one thing. In basketball, you don’t change a key player every day the way baseball does with a pitcher. And it is not just that in baseball. Mostly it is six games a week, just about every week, from April 1 to October 1. It is the longest and most significant test in all of sports.

The Yankees came into the game with a winning percentage of .741. It is what the Pirates finished with in ‘02, when they were 103-36. The Cubs in ’06 were .763. The Yankees won’t get there. If they get to 120-42, the winning percentage would be .741. And for my money, it would put them ahead of the rest of the field, in anything. Even those football teams with a regular-season winning percentage that is absolutely perfect.

The Dolphins of ’72 were 14-0 in the regular season. The Yankees will play 11 times that many games before the playoffs.

In New York, we get a front-row seat to the baseball version of the 72-10 Bulls, just without a Jordan on the team. Or the ’27 Yankees without Ruth and Gehrig. The Big Red Machine without Bench and Morgan and Rose. Eighty wins on Aug. 4. Nine runs in the ninth to get there. Never a season like it.

They do exactly what teams like this have always done in sports, all the way back, back through Ruth, back to the beginning of the century: They make today’s ticket to the ballpark feel like gold.