The Yankees were a good team with few blatant weaknesses. Imbued with the talent of a stocked minor league system that had indoctrinated its developing players with the same baseball tenets, they had the vibrancy of youth and conviction in the merits of their methodical training and baseball education. Moreover, those young players were battle tested because they had spent most of their minor league careers competing for, or winning, championships under managers named Merrill, Showalter, Sherlock and Butterfield.
The 1996 Yankees also had a deft mix of seasoned veterans—players primarily and adroitly acquired by Gene Michael across many seasons. The Yankees may not have won a World Series for eighteen years, but they had been edging closer every year. In prominent ways, the bitter disappointment of the past two seasons had left scars on the 1996 team. But the Yankees had also been hardened by those experiences.
“We headed into the ’96 playoffs quietly confident,” O’Neill recalled. “The ’95 playoff series in Seattle had changed us. We had a little chip on our shoulder because we still believed we should have won the whole thing in 1994 and probably gone farther in ’95, too.
“We knew how far we had come from the early 1990s. But I don’t know if anyone else felt like we were going to go far in the postseason. The way ’94 and ’95 ended made everyone a little leery.”
33
To the Mountaintop
PAUL O’NEILL WAS right about the mood of Yankees fans and those who covered the team. Not many baseball writers, in New York or across the nation, considered the 1996 Yankees a threat to win the World Series. Most didn’t think they could win a playoff series.
The Yankees were the underdogs against their divisional-round opponent, the Texas Rangers, who had surged past the formidable Seattle Mariners to win the American League West. Also waiting in the path to the World Series were the Cleveland Indians, who won their division by 14½ games. The Indians were by far the most feared team in the American League. They had two future Hall of Famers in Jim Thome and Eddie Murray, plus Manny Ramirez, a likely Hall of Famer if he had not been suspended for steroid use later in his career.
As for Yankees fans, there was no question they were approaching the 1996 postseason with an uneasy caution. As usual, the home playoff games sold out in a few hours, but the fans displayed an uncharacteristic reserve born of repeated postseason frustration.
It had been fifteen long years since the franchise had won a postseason series, despite the euphoria of the 1994 season and the 2–0 lead in the 1995 playoff series against the Mariners. Just about everyone in the Yankees’ orbit was unconvinced that the 1996 version of the team was destined for greatness.
But there was a team that fit that category. As the twentieth century was drawing to a close, the pitching-rich Atlanta Braves, the defending World Series champions, were the team that seemed on the verge of a dynastic period of success. When the Braves received their commemorative rings for winning the 1995 World Series, they were inscribed with a motto: “Best Team of the ’90s.”
As the Yankees prepared for their opening series with Texas, the two teams had distinct connections. The Rangers’ manager, Johnny Oates, was a former Yankees minor league manager and player. Oates had been Buck Showalter’s manager in Nashville. When Showalter told Oates he was retiring as a player in 1984, it was Oates who told the Yankees front office that they might want to offer Showalter the minor league manager’s position in Oneonta, New York. The Texas general manager was Doug Melvin, the former Yankees assistant scouting director who in 1985 hid Bernie Williams in a prep school baseball camp near his Connecticut home until Williams was eighteen years old and could sign a professional contract.
In some ways, new and old worlds in the Yankees universe were colliding in the 1996 division series.
“I’m from Texas,” Andy Pettitte said many years later. “And what I remember about that series is that people down there were pretty sure the Yankees were going to be overwhelmed. We weren’t feared like past Yankees teams.”
In the opening game at Yankee Stadium against Texas, the Yankees indeed looked overmatched in a 6–2 loss. But they rallied the next day to win in 12 innings when Jeter ended the game by dashing home from second base on a bunt and a throwing error.
Bernie Williams’s home run helped the Yankees win the third game in Texas, a 3–2 victory that went down to the last strike, as the Yankees’ bullpen kept the Rangers scoreless in the final four innings. The Yankees had gained a crucial edge in the best-of-five series.
The next day, Williams, who hit .474 in the series, slammed two more homers as the Yankees broke open a tied game in the later innings to win, 6–4. After a fifteen-year wait, the Yankees had finally won another postseason series.
Jeter had seven hits in the four games, second baseman Mariano Duncan drove in four runs, and six Yankees relievers pitched 20 innings and yielded just two runs.
But most of the media focus was on Williams, the center fielder who now looked worthy of patrolling the same ground once trod by DiMaggio and Mantle. “Bombs Away Bernie!” the New York Daily News back-page headline bellowed on the morning after the Yankees advanced to the American League Championship Series. Another headline read, “Burn Baby Bern,” which was also the home run call concocted for Williams by the Yankees’ longtime radio broadcaster John Sterling. It would become a staple of the team’s broadcasts for another decade, during which Williams would hit 208 regular-season and 22 postseason home runs.
The Yankees’ ALCS foe was a shocker, as the wild-card-berth Orioles upset the mighty Cleveland Indians, who went home after winning 99 regular-season games.
The first game of the ALCS was notable, and ultimately renowned, for Jeter’s eighth-inning home run, which famously fell into the hands of twelve-year-old Yankees fan Jeffrey Maier, who appeared to reach into the field of play to snag the ball. The disputed home run tied the contest, which went into extra innings. Less remembered is that Mariano Rivera held the Orioles scoreless in the tenth and eleventh innings in relief of Wetteland. That allowed Williams—who else?—to win the game with a leadoff, walk-off homer in the bottom of the eleventh.
The teams traded victories in the next two games. In the fourth game of the series, O’Neill and Williams, who would be named the series’ Most Valuable Player, each slugged two-run homers. Darryl Strawberry added two home runs in an 8–4 victory that put the Yankees up 3-1 in the series.
The next day, the Orioles were vanquished on a warm evening at Camden Yards, with Pettitte giving up just three hits and two runs in eight innings. The game ended in a dramatic, changing-of-the-guard moment when Cal Ripken Jr., the American League’s preeminent shortstop since 1983, bounced a ground ball into the hole on the right side of the infield. Jeter, who was four years old when Ripken played his first professional game, chased it down, pivoted and fired a strong throw across the diamond that just beat Ripken, whose postseason career ended with a jarring, futile, head-first slide into first base.
Leyritz homered in the game, as did Cecil Fielder, a veteran, powerful slugger who would have a stellar postseason for the Yankees.
The talented Yankees farm system had been instrumental in the acquisition of Fielder in July 1996. The Yankees traded Matt Drews, a six-foot-eight pitcher who had been the team’s first-round draft pick in 1993, to the Detroit Tigers along with outfielder Rubén Sierra for Fielder. Drews did not have the career he imagined and never made the majors. Fielder proved to be a valuable power hitter for the Yankees for parts of two seasons.
But in mid-October 1996, with the Orioles defeated in five games, Fielder was most beloved in New York for helping the Yankees earn their first American League pennant since 1981. Finally and happily, Yankees fans were no longer fretting about the bad postseason karma that had seemed to accompany the franchise in 1994 and 1995.
Then the World Series against the Atlanta Braves began.
In the opening game, the first at Yankee Stadium since Reggie Jackson, Lou Piniella and Dave Winfield were
Yankees, Pettitte was hammered in a 12–1 loss. “I felt certain I had blown the whole series and let everyone down—teammates, fans, my family, just about everyone,” Pettitte said years later of his inaugural World Series start.
The second game was not much better for the home team. Atlanta’s Greg Maddux shut out the Yankees, 4–0, with Key taking the loss.
The series shifted to Atlanta for the next three games, with the Braves needing only two victories to win back-to-back championships and at least partly live up to the slogan etched inside their World Series rings.
Before the third game of the series, an Atlanta newspaper columnist, Mark Bradley, insisted that the series with the “overmatched” Yankees was over. “We are no longer watching a competition,” Bradley wrote. “We are witnessing a coronation.”
And that’s when things really got interesting.
The Yankees won Game 3 in Atlanta, 5–2, but not before Torre, in a near repeat of the situation facing Buck Showalter one year earlier inside the Kingdome, endured a gut-wrenching decision about whether to replace a tiring David Cone with the game on the line.
Once again, Mariano Rivera was available in the bullpen as Cone, trying to protect a one-run lead, loaded the bases. Exhausted, Cone was faltering, and Torre knew that if the Yankees fell behind in the series by three games, there was little chance they could come back with four consecutive victories.
But like Showalter before him, Torre had faith in Cone’s experience and guile. Rivera remained in the bullpen. This time, Cone got out of the inning with the Yankees still ahead.
Showalter and Torre had made the same decision in a taut playoff game. For Showalter, it probably cost him his job. For Torre, it might have been his salvation on the job.
Rivera came on in the next inning and held the Braves scoreless. In the eighth inning, Jeter singled and Bernie Williams, batting left-handed, stroked a home run to deep right field for a three-run lead the Yankees never relinquished.
Williams clubbed his homer using Joe Girardi’s bat. As Joel Sherman reported in his 2006 book, Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees, it was another case of “Bernie being Bernie,” as his teammates liked to say. Williams had left for the road trip to Atlanta without packing any of his bats.
In Game 4 the next night, Kenny Rogers looked rattled, and pitched like it, as the Braves took a 6–0 lead into the sixth inning. But Jeter and Williams each reached base and scored on Atlanta defensive misplays. By the eighth inning, the Yankees had trimmed the Atlanta lead to 6–3 when two singles brought backup catcher Jim Leyritz to the plate as the tying run.
Twirling his bat, Leyritz battled Atlanta’s hard-throwing Mark Wohlers for nearly three minutes, until Wohlers threw a hanging 2-2 slider that Leyritz lofted toward left field. The drive carried just beyond the wall and tied the game, instantly silencing a raucous home crowd.
The thirty-two-year-old Leyritz had already been on the scene, and in the middle, of a host of prominent moments in Yankees history.
Since he signed as an undrafted amateur free agent in 1985, he had frustrated scores of Yankees minor league coaches and managers. That group included Showalter, who managed him with three different minor league teams—and won a championship with Leyritz in each season. Leyritz, the part-time, converted catcher, always seemed to find a way to contribute in myriad ways.
He had also played a major role in Andy Hawkins’s lost no-hitter in Chicago. He had hit the dramatic, fifteenth-inning home run that put the Yankees ahead by two games in the 1995 division series, and he was the catcher fielding the baseball a millisecond too late as Ken Griffey Jr. scored the series-clinching run that eliminated the Yankees and ultimately led to an off-season of upheaval and firings.
But on October 23, 1996, Leyritz tied the fourth game of the World Series with a stunning home run that so flustered the incandescent Braves that they never recovered—perhaps forever, since the powerhouse team assembled in Atlanta never won another World Series.
Two innings after Leyritz’s home run dropped over the left-field fence, Wade Boggs, as a pinch hitter, drew a bases-loaded walk for the winning run in the tenth inning. John Wetteland gave up a single in the bottom of the inning but retired the final Braves batters for his second save of the series. The Yankees’ six-run comeback was the second largest in World Series history. Only Connie Mack’s 1929 Philadelphia Athletics had rallied from further behind.
In the next game, the Yankees’ starter was Andy Pettitte, and he was determined to earn redemption. “I couldn’t believe I was getting the chance to make up for how bad I pitched in my first World Series game,” he said. “I wasn’t going to mess it up again.”
In the fifth game of the series, and the final game at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium—the Braves were moving to Turner Field in 1997—Pettitte outdueled Atlanta’s ace, John Smoltz, as the Yankees won, 1–0. The lone run of the game scored on another Braves defensive mistake when the four-time Gold Glove center fielder Marquis Grissom dropped a routine fly ball. (The Yankees were no longer cursing their bad playoff karma.)
Atlanta’s best scoring opportunity in the game came in the sixth inning when two singles put Braves runners at first and second base with no outs. Atlanta second baseman Mark Lemke bunted, but Pettitte dashed off the mound to corral the ball bare-handed and in one motion threw to third base to get the force out. The next batter was Chipper Jones, the first overall pick of the 1990 amateur draft.
Pettitte flummoxed Jones with a sharp, inside slider, which Jones tapped back to the mound. Pettitte nimbly pounced on the grounder and threw to second base to begin an inning-ending double play.
Pettitte pitched into the ninth inning, although Wetteland was needed to get two outs in that dicey inning. With two Braves on base, the victory was not assured until Paul O’Neill, limping noticeably from a strained hamstring, ran down and snagged a deep drive near the wall in right-center field for the game’s final out. O’Neill barely got to the ball in time, and he slapped his right hand and glove against the padding of the wall at the end of the play. The catch meant that John Wetteland had saved each of the three games in Atlanta.
Everything seemed to be falling into place for the 1996 Yankees. Pettitte outpitched Smoltz, who had lost only once in 17 previous postseason appearances.
The series returned to Yankee Stadium, where Maddux and Key would be the Game 6 starting pitchers. In December 1992, Gene Michael was certain he had persuaded Maddux, who was a free agent after several stellar seasons with the Chicago Cubs, to sign with the Yankees. Maddux had been wined and dined and feted at a Broadway show. When Maddux left New York, Michael thought he had a done deal.
Maddux shocked the Yankees by signing with the Braves. That winter, Michael instead turned to Key, who left Toronto for a four-year Yankees contract. Since then, Key had won 49 games for the Yankees, but most notably, he had been a crucial, early figure in the cultural makeover of the team’s clubhouse initiated by Michael and Showalter. Key had helped significantly reshape the roster in ensuing years by enticing O’Neill, Boggs and Cone to play for the Yankees. He had set a tone with his professionalism and with his even comportment under pressure.
How cool was Jimmy Key in big moments?
In the hours before his start in the sixth game of the 1996 World Series, with a championship on the line, he had proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Karin Kane. Key was apparently not worried that later that Saturday night he might be celebrating his engagement despite an ill-timed defeat on the mound of so pivotal a game. “Actually, I figured it would be a fun way to always remember a World Series victory,” he later said.
Key gave up just one run and five hits in nearly six innings of work that night. By then, a triple by Girardi and RBI singles by Jeter and Williams had put the Yankees ahead, 3–1.
The bullpen did its job, including Rivera, who pitched two scoreless innings while facing only seven batters. In the postseason, Rivera had allowed one run in 14⅓ innings. Throughout the
regular season and playoffs in 1996, he had given up one home run in 122 innings and struck out 140.
The ninth inning was turned over to Wetteland, and the Braves cut the Yankees lead to 3–2. With two outs, Atlanta had runners on first and second base with Mark Lemke at the plate.
The home crowd was on its feet—roaring, jubilant, nervous and ready to erupt. In their souls, Yankees fans instinctively feel a direct connection to all of the franchise’s many championship teams. To be a Yankees fan is to be part of a lineage that dates back to the World Series teams of Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Thurman Munson.
But it had been 18 seasons since the last Yankees championship.
The Yankees had won 22 World Series to that point in the twentieth century. But the intimate link to those prolific Yankees teams was growing frayed. There had been too many bad teams, too many indifferent teams and too many good teams that had nonetheless fallen short in October.
The franchise desperately needed a twenty-third championship. With two outs in the ninth inning on October 26, 1996, Yankees fans cheered and stomped until the old Yankee Stadium, whose foundation was poured months before the team’s first championship season of 1923, began to shake and sway.
Swinging at a 3-2 pitch, Lemke lofted a soft fly ball in foul territory behind third base and a few feet from the first row of the grandstand. Third baseman Charlie Hayes backpedaled until he was standing beneath the pop-up. After the humiliating 1991 Yankees season, in one of Gene Michael’s first trades, Hayes was acquired for a minor league pitching prospect. The Yankees lost Hayes a year later in the expansion draft when Michael gambled by leaving him unprotected. But the Yankees never forgot about Hayes’s poise and unruffled manner in the high-pressure New York environment, and in 1996 they reacquired him for another minor league pitching prospect.
As Hayes waited underneath Lemke’s foul ball, Michael was watching from a mezzanine-level private box. “I was really glad it was Charlie,” Michael said years later. “You go after reliable guys like him because they’re the ones you want the last out hit to—because they’ll catch it.”
Chumps to Champs Page 37