Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  A second before the ball dropped into Hayes’s glove, Derek Jeter jumped straight into the air with both arms raised over his head.

  Bernie Williams was sprinting in from center field. When Hayes squeezed the final out of the game, Wetteland raised his right index finger over his head. One of the first to embrace him from behind was Williams. Rivera, charging from the dugout, was not far behind.

  There was soon a pileup of Yankees in the center of the diamond. Paul O’Neill leaped awkwardly on top of the first-base side of the celebration and did a somersault that left him lying in the grass at the feet of Andy Pettitte on the third-base side of the infield.

  In the dugout, Torre, who had been a steadying force since midsummer, was mobbed by his coaches. Torre had waited 4,278 games as a player and manager to be part of a World Series champion.

  It was a Saturday night in New York City, and the festivities were just getting started. Police officers on horseback had formed a cordon around the edges of the field to keep the fans away from the players.

  One of those mounted police was Lieutenant Jim Higgins, a Bronx native and Yankees fan whose grandfather, another New York mounted policeman, had brought him to Yankees World Series games in the 1960s. “I was watching Derek Jeter going nuts on the field when someone tapped me on the back,” Higgins recalled in 1998. “It was Wade Boggs, and he asked, ‘Can I get up on your horse?’”

  Giving horseback rides was against police regulations except in emergencies, but Higgins considered Boggs’s request a special circumstance, and he helped Boggs onto the back of his 1,400-pound gelding, Beau. Boggs, despite a lifelong fear of horses, took a ride around the ballpark until Higgins dropped him off at home plate.

  At roughly the same time, spurred by Torre, Jim Leyritz gathered his teammates and suggested the entire team take a victory lap. Led by Leyritz, the only player still on the roster from the 1990 Yankees, the champion 1996 Yankees waved and saluted fans in a playful jog around the stadium’s warning track.

  David Cone remembered running up to O’Neill and shouting: “Do you believe this? It’s almost like this season was destined to happen.”

  George Steinbrenner was being hugged by family and friends in a private box. His son Hal saw something he had never seen before: tears in his father’s eyes. “I had never seen him cry, but eighteen years is a lot of waiting,” Hal Steinbrenner said in 2017. “He had faced a lot of criticism in many of those years. And he knew that; he read the newspapers. I never asked him, but it had to be a good feeling for him.

  “It was tears of joy. But tears are tears. I just think that it was that emotional. And a great, great moment.”

  Gene Michael celebrated in his mezzanine suite with some other members of the front office. While Boggs was taking his first trip on a horse, Michael was pointing at him on the field and laughing along with everyone else. Then he retreated to his office overlooking the field with a handful of other executives of the team. The group helped themselves to a bottle of champagne, as well as other, stronger libations. “We had a pretty good party—that was a fun night,” Michael said with a chortle.

  He eventually made his way down to the clubhouse, but he didn’t remain there long. “I wanted to congratulate Joe and some of the guys, but you know, that was their moment, not mine,” Michael recalled in a 2017 interview. “But it was wonderful to see us back on top after all the really hard, really long, losing years.”

  Michael paused as if trying to summon every recollection from that night in 1996. “Later, there was a time to think about everything that was done from 1990 up until that moment—and all the people who were a part of that,” he said. “The ’96 team did a great job, that’s all on them. And on that night, you’re just all smiles. But there’s always so many things that go into a championship. I knew that. We all knew that.”

  Meanwhile, Brian Cashman, Michael’s assistant since the early nineties, made a note to himself about a phone call he wanted to make the next day.

  “At about 8 a.m. on that Sunday morning after the ’96 Yankees won the World Series, my home phone rang and it was Brian Cashman,” said Bill Livesey, the Yankees’ director of player development and scouting from 1990 to 1995. “He called to thank me. And that made me feel pretty good.”

  Don Mattingly watched the clinching game of the series on television. But more than twenty years later, when Mattingly was asked where he had been when the Yankees won their first championship since 1978—or eight months before he was drafted by the team—he said he could not remember. But, Mattingly said, “I was so happy for those guys on the ’96 team; they finally got there and won it. And that was great. Those were some of my really good friends.

  “At some point, you have some thought that, you know, that didn’t happen for you. But not for too long. I was happy for them. It was a good thing.”

  Mattingly went on to become a coach for the Yankees under Torre and the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Florida Marlins. Over the next five to ten years, he conceded, whenever he ran into Buck Showalter, the two men would exchange a knowing look, a silent recognition of their shared past. “Nothing is said. Nothing needs to be said.”

  They were vital cogs in the last baseball dynasty of the twentieth century. They just weren’t there for those Yankees championships.

  Buck Showalter was at home in Arizona on the final night of the 1996 World Series. He watched the games and saw what he expected to see. “Paul or Bernie would get a big hit and I’d say to myself, ‘Yep, there it is; that’s what I thought would happen,’” Showalter said. “I saw Andy Pettitte pitching shutout innings, and I thought, ‘Yep, that’s him.’

  “It was the same with Mariano and Derek. You say, ‘See, that’s why we didn’t trade those guys in all those years.’ I wasn’t surprised by what occurred at all. So all that was good to see. I was pleased.”

  Showalter leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his chest. “Now I know what you’re thinking—that I’m just saying what I have to say,” he said. “But you have to believe me when I tell you this: It was not painful to see the Yankees do well. It makes you feel good that you were able to project that. That’s what we went through the tough times for.”

  Showalter, however, acknowledged that watching those World Series games was a personal, poignant journey. “Yeah, I remember watching each game in private,” he said in 2107. “I was in the house watching by myself. I’m sure people wonder if I was thinking about whether that should have been me in the Yankees’ dugout. People say it’s human nature to think that. But I’m telling you the truth when I say I didn’t have that emotion. I didn’t. I remember feeling proud of them.

  “Life isn’t fair. It’s also too short. You can’t go around feeling the wrong way about something good that happened. We all had a role in it. I was happy about that.”

  But when the final out settled into the glove of Charlie Hayes, Showalter did not watch what transpired next. The job was done. Showalter shut off the television and left the room.

  The Yankees celebration went on late into the night. Two days later, there was a ticker tape parade through lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes. Along the same avenue that had once paid tribute to everyone from Jesse Owens to Apollo astronauts to the freed hostages from the American embassy in Iran, the Yankees were feted by more than three million people. It was a joyous, animated and exuberant throng.

  It was, notably, a youthful crowd, as most of the people lining the streets were in their twenties and thirties. A new generation of Yankees fans now had a World Series victory that was theirs alone, as well as a team made in their image.

  The twenty-two-year-old Derek Jeter was about to become an incandescent figure in the sport. Rivera, twenty-six, would soon establish himself as the greatest reliever, and one of the most dominant pitchers, of all time. The connection to the long lineage of Yankees championships was reborn with new homegrown stars. And the party was just beginning.

  The Yankees empire, mocked
as a wasteland in 1990, had made it all the way back to baseball’s promised land. The resurrection was complete. The worst Yankees teams in history had evolved into the best team in baseball—with much more success to come.

  The phoenix had risen from the ashes.

  Epilogue

  THE YANKEES, in a surprise, did not win the 1997 World Series. They were dispatched in the American League Division Series by the Cleveland Indians after Mariano Rivera gave up a shocking, late home run in what would have been the series-clinching victory.

  It proved to be a brief setback. From 1998 to 2000, the Yankees won three more World Series, in consecutive years, something accomplished only three times previously in major league history. In fact, in the final quarter of twentieth-century baseball, the Yankees’ dominance—four World Series victories in five years—was unmatched in baseball. No team had done it since the Yankees of the early 1950s.

  But the late-nineties Yankees were not just consistent winners. They were often spectacularly prolific. The 1998 team, for example, won 114 regular-season games and had an 11-2 postseason record, including a World Series sweep of the San Diego Padres.

  The next year, the Yankees were even better in the playoffs, losing only once and sweeping the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. In 2000, in the first New York subway series in forty-four years, the New York Mets and Yankees met for five high-energy, riveting games. But again, the Yankees were crowned baseball’s best.

  “Once we got on a roll and really learned how to win the big games,” Paul O’Neill said, “it became like a collective will. Don’t get me wrong, it was never easy, but we had a history together. So many games going back so many years.”

  In this period, only in 2001 did the Yankees falter in the World Series, losing in seven games to the Arizona Diamondbacks. One year earlier, Buck Showalter had been fired as the Diamondbacks’ manager.

  Overall, the Yankees were in the playoffs every season from 1995 to 2012 except one. In what came to be known as the Core Four era of Jeter, Posada, Rivera and Pettitte, the Yankees also won a fifth World Series, in 2009.

  The Yankees, the butt of jokes in 1990, did more than regain their footing on the field. They once again became the most influential sporting brand in North America, if not the world. Advertisers and corporate sponsors rediscovered the worth and power of a vibrant, prosperous championship team playing its home games at Yankee Stadium.

  And the run of success had ensured that the team’s home would continue to be in New York, as city officials agreed to build a new Yankee Stadium across the street from the original one, a palace that opened in 2009.

  “A lot of things went right for the franchise year after year, and there’s no doubt that you can trace it all to the first successful teams of the mid-1990s,” Hal Steinbrenner, who took over the day-to-day control of the team in 2008, said. “And by that I mean the 1994 and 1995 teams as well. There is a continuum, even if the big breakthrough wasn’t until 1996.”

  The majority of the protagonists in this now famous Yankee renaissance have existed on both sides of the 1995–96 divide for more than twenty years. Some, like tragic heroes in a Shakespearean drama, saw their Yankee experience end with the devastating 1995 playoff loss in Seattle. They never directly reaped the benefits of their hard work and foresight. The ticker tape parade confetti never cascaded onto their shoulders.

  But others continued with the team and lived through the prosperity, as did some who did not arrive until 1996. And yet, their perspectives, with varying degrees of satisfaction or accrued acceptance, are generally similar.

  Don Mattingly, for instance, is proud to have been part of what he called “the building blocks of a dynasty.” “You could see what was coming,” he said. “I doubt any of us who left after 1995 were too surprised. It is unfortunate that Buck wasn’t there to see it finish out.”

  But Mattingly, who coached for Torre for four seasons beginning in 2004, added, “I also saw that when Joe came along he was the perfect guy for that spot—a group ready to go.”

  Torre, who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his four championships as manager of the Yankees, is unequivocal that his initial success was predicated on the foundation laid before he took the job. “I certainly fell into it and inherited some good people who were used to winning at that point,” he said in a 2014 interview. “But there’s a reason for everything that happens.”

  Torre’s remarks led to a follow-up question: If there had not been a players’ strike in 1994 and the high-flying Yankees had won the World Series that year, would Torre be the manager in 1996? “No, I don’t believe I would’ve been,” Torre answered. “But if they had won in ’94, then maybe ’95 doesn’t turn out the way it did. Maybe I never manage the Yankees. Who knows what happens?”

  Paul O’Neill agreed. “Sometimes I wonder if we had to go through the setbacks to accomplish everything else,” he said. “Maybe we don’t win in ’96 if we don’t lose in ’95.”

  It is a lingering question: Would things have played out the same for the Yankees if Showalter had remained the manager in 1996 and beyond? Would there still have been a last, late-twentieth-century Yankees dynasty?

  Willie Randolph, who coached for Showalter but also stayed on as Torre’s third-base coach for the next nine seasons, thinks not. “It’s a tough question, but with all due respect to Buck, I really feel like Joe was probably the one we needed at that time,” Randolph said. “I think he’s the only one who could have done what he did. Because it wasn’t just 1996, it was every year after that for a long time. Joe being a New York guy and being around for a lot of years, he understood how to handle all the different parts of the job that kept changing.”

  At the same time, Randolph is certain Torre’s path to success would have been rocky and perhaps impassable without the way having been cleared for him before 1996. “Buck, Stick Michael, the scouts, the minor league managers and the big league coaches built that team from the ground up, and most of all, they had to absorb that really tough loss in 1995,” Randolph said. “And I’m a firm believer that devastating disappointment is a great teacher for champions. Every championship team usually has to endure some serious heartache and heartbreak before winning it all.

  “That’s what Buck, Stick and the 1995 team did for the franchise. They took that bullet. The bad taste it left in everyone’s mouth became the motivation for reaching higher the next season and all the seasons after that.”

  Showalter, meanwhile, has always given Torre the credit. “Joe took it to another level,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have done what Joe did.”

  George Steinbrenner, who made the decision to switch from Showalter to Torre, and then changed his mind, told me in a 1997 interview at his Tampa hotel that he regretted how he handled Showalter’s exit. But in retrospect, he was not second-guessing himself either.

  Steinbrenner could still smile and frown at the same time.

  “I regret how it played out at the time,” he said. “But sometimes things don’t go as smoothly as you want them to go. It happens. I do wish it had been easier on everyone. But Buck is in a great place right now. He’s going to do great things, you’ll see. And we won the World Series with Joe.” Steinbrenner shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands as if to say, What do you want me to say?

  He added, “That’s how it worked out.”

  As the Yankees’ World Series victories and playoff appearances accumulated in the succeeding seasons, and with Steinbrenner having sworn off the tabloid spotlight years earlier, the owner who had been bitterly lampooned for his bombastic ways took on the aura of a beloved patriarch.

  It was a welcome metamorphosis for many in his inner circle, including those he had once warred with, like Gene Michael. “New York began to love him,” Michael said. “As much as they hated him for a while, people forgave him. It was because of all the winning teams and because he stayed away from harassing people publicly.

  “It helped his ima
ge and everything else. And he knew that. He knew that among Yankees fans he was now beloved. At the end of his life I was happy he knew that.”

  On a stage in the locker room in the wake of the team’s 1998 World Series, Steinbrenner wept uncontrollably when handed the trophy signifying the victory. The hearts of Yankees fans melted. This was the Boss?

  A few years later, Steinbrenner was standing on a makeshift platform in Yankee Stadium’s left field, conducting a television interview half an hour before a home season-opening game. Fans in the nearby outfield bleachers spotted him and began chanting, “Thank you, George!”

  Although he was wearing dark sunglasses, viewers could see the tears roll down Steinbrenner’s cheeks on live television.

  By 2006, Steinbrenner, beset by a series of health problems, withdrew from public appearances. He relinquished his substantial input in the team’s affairs by 2008. Ten days after his eightieth birthday, in 2010, Steinbrenner had a heart attack at his Tampa home and died in a local hospital.

  The tributes poured in, especially from the thousands that his philanthropy had benefited.

  “I’m sure people can debate parts of his legacy,” Hal Steinbrenner said of his father. “I’m know I’m biased, but I don’t know if he gets enough credit for what he did across the decades with the Yankees. Go back to 1973 and see where the team was then and where it is now.”

  Gene Michael, who in 2017 joked that he wished he could have dinner with Steinbrenner again so he could “tell him off one more time,” agreed that Steinbrenner’s imprint on the Yankees would be perpetual. “He made me get my hair cut as a player in 1973 and we still have that policy on long hair, right?” Michael said with a grin. “George doesn’t go away.”

  After he was pushed out as general manager in 1995, Michael took on a variety of roles in the Yankees organization. Initially called the director of scouting, he became more like a guru who was consulted on everything from major league trades to the outfield wall dimensions of the new Yankee Stadium.