In Winning Two in a Row, Yankees Show They’re Special

They won this for last year and the last decade and for their place in the whole century, actually. And, if you think about it, these Yankees won their place in the heart and mind of Yankees fans and baseball fans still unborn.

Some day somewhere a grandfather and his son will go to a baseball game with the son’s son--it doesn’t have to be in New York--and they’ll talk about the great teams from the pages they read, and of the toughness of the Yankees of the ‘70s, and they’ll stop and marvel at what the Yankees of this time accomplished. And how they did it.

Only if they’re very astute will they appreciate the interlock of the pieces, and how likeable this team is. This really is the stuff of legend now. The present has caught up to the past. “I’m very happy to validate last year,” Joe Torre said, standing behind his desk in a champagne-soaked shirt, surrounded by family, celebrities, dignitaries and functionaries.

Think about that. Nobody can say there are flukes in this trophy case. They won 125 games last year and it was magical. Everything went right, and the number could be diminished because everything had to go right, and you might even say there are so many bad teams in expansion baseball. And how good could this team be when it doesn’t have even one Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle or Reggie Jackson or Michael Jordan?

They had the “ghosts” Torre invoked. Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Reggie Jackson came into his office for champagne. “If you argue our place in history,” David Cone said, “we don’t compare to Ruth and Gehrig, but if you play for the Yankees you want to do something to carry on the tradition.”

Maybe that’s the point of the exercise. They don’t have a single identified brilliant star--the measure of Derek Jeter is yet to come--and yet they’re so good. They didn’t have a starting All-Star--one through 10--but they may have 11 through 20, and a bench. Maybe we--and that included me--didn’t realize how good they are. We should now. They come directly from the coaches’ theoretical on how to play any game. They appear to be overachievers, but that’s an evaluation of a team that makes one surprise run at the crown. This is no surprise.

When the Yankees popped eyes by coming back to beat the Braves in 1996, it reminded of the story--baseball has a trove of stories -- that young Willie Mays made a particularly brilliant catch and crusty Brooklyn Manager Charlie Dressen said: “I’d like to see the so-and-so do it again.’

Well, the Yankees did it again. They beat the good teams. They swept two World Series in a row and that hadn’t been done in 60 years. They have won 22 of 25 postseason games these two years. Stunning. “It could only be done because they,” the manager said with a nod toward the clubhouse, “have ability and know what to do with it.” They are adults managed as adults.

Again they turned the World Series into a training film. The demonstration was the third game when the Braves took a 5-1 lead and appeared to be putting themselves back into the Series. Then the bullpen stopped the Braves and the Yankees got a run. Then another. Two runs behind? The Yankees can beat that. They got two to tie in the eighth and the Braves certainly weren’t going to score off Mariano Rivera. So Chad Curtis, who was an extra man all season, hit the home run to win the game.

You remember what they did when they came from far behind to beat the Phillies, 9-8, in a landmark July game in 1998? They did it again. “We grind,” Torre explained. “We play nine innings. That’s the highest compliment I can give.”

In defeat the Braves gave credit. And the Braves are a very good team.

Chipper Jones said he reflected to himself after the comeback game that it was the first time in his pro career that the Braves had done everything they had to do, “and they still beat us; that was kind of scary.”

Torre is so good at handling the grinders--recognize what it meant that Luis Sojo rushed back for the third game from his father’s funeral in Venezuela and Torre got him into the game in the late innings of the finale--that he has tamed the owner into appearing to be George Steinbrenner, the person. With no place to interfere in Torre’s domain, the owner has been That Man the ogre in private with Brian Cashman, the nominal general manager who has done nothing but help win. Another appropriate story is of Dick Howser managing when That Man had a snit with a hotel telephone operator. “So the day shouldn’t be a total loss,” Howser said, “George had somebody fired.” Success on the field has hidden all that.

Torre’s big-league brother Frank advised he’d have to be crazy to take the Yankees’ job “and having to face abuse or whatever the hell you’re supposed to face when you’re managing in New York,” Torre said. “I’m having more fun than I ever had in my life.”

No, he said, he isn’t thinking about walking away. Then where do they go from here? “Do it again,” he said. It’s in the pinstripes.