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Look back at: Divisional Playoffs |
League Championship
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Saturday, October 28
Yankees' run as Series champs qualifies as legend
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- It ended the way every World Series seems to end nowadays.
With Mariano Rivera throwing one last pitch.
With the men in the storied dark blue caps looking for someone to hug.
|  | | In what's becoming an October ritual, Yankees manager Joe Torre is carried off the field as a World Series champion. This year, Bernie Williams, left, and Roger Clemens did the lifting. |
With Joseph P. Torre, manager of men, wiping away the tears.
And with all of us amateur historians heading back to the record books to try to put these astounding feats by these astounding New York Yankees in some sort of perspective. Again.
We have been watching the Yankees perform these same rituals October after October after October. We got to watch them one more time Thursday night, after the riveting 4-2 victory over the Mets that will send them on their third straight parade route down the Canyon of Heroes.
Three straight parades. Three straight World Series trophies. Let's pause now to run down the list of teams that have won three straight World Series. It won't take long.
There are the 1972-74 Oakland A's. There are the 1949-53 Yankees, winners of five in a row. And there are the '36-39 Yankees, winners of four in a row.
And that's all, friends.
Those teams are up there on the Mount Rushmore of baseball. And now this team joins them.
To win once is the accomplishment of a lifetime. To win three times in succession is an accomplishment of legend.
"If this team is not the best ever, it's up there," said David Justice, a man who joined this party in midseason and turned into their second-half MVP. "It's hard to compare differerent decades. But this is definitely one of the best teams ever assembled. And this has been one of the best runs in history."
It is one thing to win three World Series in a row. It is quite another to do it the way these Yankees have done it.
In those three World Series, they won 12 games -- and lost one. Roll that around your tongue for a moment. Three World Series. One loss (to the Mets in Game 3 on Tuesday night).
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Kings of the Threepeat
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Winning percentages of the teams that have won three World Series titles in a row:
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Team
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Regular season
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Postseason
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'98-00 Yankees
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.616
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.805
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'72-74
A's
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.578
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.636
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'51-53 Yankees
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.636
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.632
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'50-52 Yankees
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.630
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.706
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'49-51 Yankees
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.634
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.800
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'37-39 Yankees
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.672
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.923
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'36-38 Yankees
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.660
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.800
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The last team to threepeat -- that vaunted Oakland outfit -- lost seven times in its era. Only one other team besides this one -- the 1937-39 Yankees of Gehrig and Dickey and DiMaggio -- was able to go through a three-year World Series run with just one loss.
But that was a slightly different time, wasn't it? It was a time not just of afternoon baseball and two-hour ball games, but a time nearly 40 years before free agency.
Those '37-39 Yankees needed to have only five different pitchers win a World Series game. The '98-00 Yankees divided their 12 wins among nine different pitchers: From David Wells to Ramiro Mendoza to the great El Duque Hernandez. From David Cone to Andy Pettitte to the new Batman, Roger Clemens. And to their three bullpen assassins, Rivera and Jeff Nelson and Mike Stanton.
Include the Yankees' fourth World Series title -- the first one, from 1996 -- and they actually got wins from 11 pitchers (add Jimmy Key and Graeme Lloyd to the list).
So they've had their share of bodies rushing in and out of the stadium doors. But through it all, it was those pitchers who were always at the heart of this blitzkrieg. And now that they look back on it, it's astonishing even to them.
"To come within one game of sweeping three in a row, to come within one game of winning 16 World Series games in a row (dating back to '96), that's incredible," said Nelson. "It's incredible because we were playing the best teams in the National League. We played Atlanta two times. We played San Diego. And we played the Mets. You just don't walk over teams like that."
Yeah, those weren't exactly the Piedmont Boll Weevils they were beating.
Of the 19 World Series games the Yankees played from '96 through this Series, they had to face 20-game winners in 12 of them, Cy Young winners in six of them and pitchers who at least had made an All-Star team in 18 of them.
And despite that, despite facing many of the best pitchers alive, the Yankees spotted the Braves the first two games in '96 -- and then went 16-1. In the World Series. Over a 162-game season, that's the equivalent of going 152-10.
"That's a phenomenal record, no question," said Mets GM Steve Phillips. "It's tough enough just to get to the World Series. To win that many and to have that sort of streak -- what is it, 16 out of 17? -- I'd say that's pretty good. And that's a major understatement."
Just on the basis of that World Series streak alone, this team stacks up with any team from any era. But let's remember that in order to win these three straight World Series, these Yankees had to do something no other team has ever done.
They had to win nine postseason series in a row. Nine.
They beat Pedro and the Red Sox. They beat A-Rod and the Mariners.
They beat an Indians team that made them reach for the Pepto Bismol. They battered Pudge and the Rangers twice.
And they survived their frequent-flier marathon to outlast a low-budget A's team that almost sent them home three weeks ago.
Whoever was put in front of them pretty much got trampled. Over three postseasons. Over nine postseason series. And their postseason record, at the end of those three Octobers, was 33-8. Play that kind of baseball over 162 games, and you go 130-32.
"I would put this era's Yankees team on a par with any team ever," said Steve Hirdt, the esteemed baseball historian from the Elias Sports Bureau. "And I say that as someone who wasn't in the rush of people who wanted to proclaim that '98 team the best ever. It was hard to do that based on one year, to compare them to those teams from the '30s, because so much has changed since that era.
"But over the sequence of years, I think this team, on any level playing field, would hold its own against any other team. When you consider that to win three straight World Series now, you need to win three straight postseason series in three straight years, that, in my mind, trumps winning four in a row from '36 to '39. And I think it's at least on a par with winning five in a row in the late '40s and early '50s."
This certainly wasn't the greatest Yankees team ever. And you can look that up.
It was the first Yankees team to enter a World Series with fewer than 90 regular-season wins.
It was the first team -- pinstriped or otherwise -- to make it into the postseason after finishing its season by losing 12 of 15.
And its 87 wins were the second-fewest in a non-strike season by any World Series team ever (behind only the 85 wins of the 1987 Twins).
But that stumble to the finish line seemed like it happened a century ago when they got to October, when they found a way to wriggle past the A's. Then they were able to rediscover the essence of what has made them what they are. And the train began rolling.
Asked to describe that essence, Justice couldn't help but laugh.
"This," he said, "is a team that can get it done, baby."
They got it done again Thursday night, in a typical Yankees grand finale. Pettitte pitched his guts out, for seven innings and 129 heart-pumping pitches. When someone needed to step up and hit a game-tying home run in the sixth inning, Jeter volunteered.
And when they got to the ninth inning -- two outs, no one on, Al Leiter pitching like Sandy Koufax, Shea Stadium shaking like a giant No. 7 train -- they still found a way.
Jorge Posada drained Leiter's tank with a tremendous nine-pitch walk. Scott Brosius -- owner of a .391 lifetime average in World Series games -- punched a single into left on Leiter's 141st pitch of the night.
Luis Sojo, rescued in waiver-wire trade just a couple of months ago, bounced a game-winning single through the middle, past Kurt Abbott's desperate lunge. And then on came Rivera to do what he always does: finish the job.
Oh, he gave them one little scare -- leaving an 0-1 cutter out over the plate, where Mike Piazza could unleash one last furious hack at it.
There was a man on base. So Piazza represented the tying run. And when the baseball took off into the electrified night, "my heart ran in the dugout," Justice said.
But then Bernie Williams retreated toward the track and raised his glove. And they knew.
Posada leaped into the sky. Rivera began pumping his fists. Jeter raced toward Sojo and wrapped him in a bear hug. And the New York Yankees had done it again.
"This was the toughest Series of them all," Jeter said, after becoming the first player in history to win an All-Star Game MVP award and a World Series MVP award in the same year. "It was up and down, back and forth. It seems like it's been one long, continuous day. I haven't slept for a week."
But he can sleep now, all right. He can sleep secure in the knowledge that at the ridiculous age of 26, he has traveled to a place few players in the history of his sport have ever visited.
And so have they all. So they hugged and they partied and they poured their champagne, knowing a significant chunk of this group won't be back for the next run.
"You've got to savor every moment when you do this kind of stuff," said Tino Martinez, "because even though we've done it a lot, you still don't know if it will ever happen again."
This may well be this team's last hurrah. But these are the Yankees. They have money. They have brains. They have Jeter. They have Rivera. And they have an owner who might fire everybody if they don't go undefeated.
So when someone asked George Steinbrenner if even he thought this was the last hurrah, his face turned redder than the big Shea Stadium apple.
"Don't bet your house on it," said Boss Steinbrenner.
And from the look on his face, it was hard not to think you'll be witnessing these same scenes in many an October to be named later.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.
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