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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1835335, member: 289"] A DEFINITION OF EXCELLENCE Balance is a fine thing but a sport needs a definition of excellence. People aren’t just curious about what will happen. They want to marvel at it. People might resent a dynasty’s success but it gives them something to focus on: to beat the best. A great season is wonderful but people respect it more if you repeat it. If somebody new wins every year, that’s nice but it seems to send a message that a sport is mired in mediocrity, (even if others might see it as elevated by competiveness). Baseball emerged from this apparent mediocrity in the late 90’s. After having no repeat champions for twenty years, we had a team with three straight titles- and four in five years. And that team was baseball’s traditional powerhouse, the New York Yankees. The Yankees had themselves been wandering through the woods. They’d spent over a decade out of the playoffs from 1982-1993. There were no playoffs in 1994 due to the strike but the Yankees had the best record in the American League. George Steinbrenner had been suspended from running the team for paying a gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield. He was reinstated in 1993 but his baseball people had been given an opportunity to build a team through the minor leagues and Steinbrenner, even after he returned, didn’t interfere with their work as much as he had previously and the result was one of the great teams in baseball history. That team was initially famous for being a team without stars, although, of course, as time passed and wins and numbers built up we have come to look at them as a star- studded team. What was meant at the time was that the Yankees didn’t have anyone hitting 50-60-70 home runs. What they did have was a line-up of 9 straight batters that could hurt you, 9 guys who could field their positon, guys on the bench who could start for other teams, a solid pitching rotation and the best closer of all time in the bullpen. This was always the template for Yankee greatness. You’d think that the Hall of Fame would be full of guys who played all or most of their career with the Yankees but there aren’t really that many, considering all their success. It starts with Ruth who was later joined by Gehrig, Lazzeri and Combs and the pitchers Hoyt and Pennock. Then in the 30’s came Dickey and DiMaggio and the pitchers Gomez and Ruffing. In the 50’s it was Mantle, Berra, Ford and Rizzuto. In the 70’s they had Jackson, who is ateelast as famous for his tenure with the A’s and Gossage in the bullpen. The Yankees never had entire line-ups of Hall of Famers. What they could do was fill out a 25 man roster better than anybody else. It’s interesting to contrast the Yankees with the team they lost to in the 1995 playoffs: the Seattle Mariners, a team loaded with stars. They had the greatest talent in the game, Ken Griffey Jr. Jay Buhner, a guy who hit 40+ home runs three years in a row, the unrelated but similarly productive Edgar Martinez, who hit .312 lifetime with over 300 homers and Tino Martinez, who the next year replaced Don Mattingly with the Yankees and put up Mattingly-like numbers, a good-looking rookie named Alex Rodriguez and Hall-of-Famer Randy Johnson on the mound, going 18-2. Everybody thought THIS would be the dynasty that dominated baseball in the coming years. But all those stars couldn’t match a team that could put an above average player at every positon. That’s the way of baseball: Why weren’t the Cubs a dynasty with Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ferguson Jenkins? They were arguably as good a quartet as any baseball team has had. But the 25 man roster wasn’t good enough to carry them to a championship. Neither was the Mariners’. The Yankees also had great chemistry, probably because so many of their key players came up through the minor leagues together: Jeter, Williams, Posada, Pettie, Rivera. You can’t get that if you constantly trade prospects for veteran players. They also did something the old Yankees were famous for: recycling other team’s stars late in their careers as role-players: Wade Boggs, Tony Fernandez, Danny Tartabull, Ruben Sierra, David Justice, Jose Canseco and, in a touch that must have pleased Steinbrenner, ex-Mets Dwight Gooden, David Cone and Darryl Strawberry . I was asked to compare the 1998 Yankees to the 1q986 Mets and jokingly replied “The 1998 Yankees ARE the 1986 Mets”. They weren’t of course: unlike the Mets, they sustained excellence. The Yankees were a very efficient and opportunistic team. Every time my Mets played them I knew that every mistake the Mets made would be taken advantage of and that the Yankees would give the Mets nothing to take advantage of. Finally, the Yankees of the late 90’s won because they knew they were going to win. If things didn’t go their way, that was temporary: an anomaly. If they lost they woke up the next day knowing that they were going to win that day’s game. They were the Yankees and you weren’t. It was an arrogant attitude that caused other teams to resent them but it was a big reason they won so many games and championships and you had to admire that. (I saw the same quality in last year’s Royals: let’s see if they can sustain it.) They key to life isn’t so much avoiding adversity: it’s how you react to it. That’s also the key to baseball. The 1998 Yankees, maybe the best team ever, lost 50 times, as many as Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne, who retired that year, had lost in 25 years. But they never let any of those defeats erode their confidence that the next game was theirs. That’s a great team. After not getting a chance to win a championship in 1994 due to the strike and being beaten by the Mariners in 1995, the Yankees went 92-70 in 1996 and won the AL East. They then beat the Rangers 3-1 and the Orioles 4-1 before facing the defending champion Braves in the World Series. People had been waiting for the Braves dynasty to begin because they had the best pitching staff in years with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Steve Avery, (who at one time was regarded as their ace), and Mark Wohlers, who had a 100MPH fastball, 100 strikeouts in 77 innings and 39 saves in the bullpen. They also had the Jones boys: dazzling center fielder Andrew Jones and outstanding third baseman Chipper Jones As well as Fred McGriff at first, Javier Lopez catching, and Ryan Klesko, Marquis Grissom and Jermaine Dye in the outfield. The Braves had swept the Dodgers 3-0 and beaten the Cardinals 4-3 in a series where they had won the last three games by a total score of 32-1. The Braves picked up where they had left off against the Yankees, winning the first two games 12-1 and 4-0. That’s an absurd 48-2 run against the top teams in the game! After the Yankees finally broke through with a 5-2 win in game 3, the Braves took a 6-0 lead in the fourth game. They seemed unstoppable. But momentum is a strange thing. It can change suddenly and not turn back. The Yankees rallied for three runs in the 6th, two of them coming on an error by Dye. Then Bobby Cox elected to bring in Wohlers in the 8th for a two inning save that would give the Braves a 3-1 lead. A dribbler that wouldn’t go foul, a line drive single and a fielder’s choice brought up catcher Jim Leyritz, who hit a Wohlers slider over the left field fence to tie the game. The Yankees never looked back. They won that game 8-6 in 10 innings, the next one 1-0 behind Andy Petitte over Smoltz and the title game 3-2, back in Yankee Stadium, Jimmy Key beating Greg Maddux. I remember seeing Wade Boggs riding around the big ballpark of a police horse, imagining what that sight must have looked like to Red Sox fans. A while plater, at the ESPYs, I was amazed to see the Yankees voted “team of the year” in sports over the 72-10 Chicago Bulls. Two years later, they became what the Bulls were. In 1997, they actually had a better record than in 1997, 96-66 but they lost the “division series” 2-3 to the Indians. They got off to a lousy start the next year, They started with two games in Anaheim, which they lost by a total of 3-14. They then traveled to Oakland, where they lost again 3-7. They final broke through with their first win, 9-7 in ten innings and moved on to Seattle, where they got beat 0-8. They stood at 1-4 and had been outscored 15-35. I remember hearing speculation about just when George Steinbrenner, who loved to fire coaches, would fire Joe Torre. Then the Yankees: - Won the last two games of that series, 13-7 and 4-3 to win that series - Came home to sweep a three game series form the A’s - Won a single game against Anaheim. - Beat the Tigers twice in Detroit to extend their winning streak to 8 before losing the finale of a three game series. - Swept a 3 game series in Toronto. - Swept a two game series from the Tigers back home. - Split a 2 game series from the Blue Jays. - Swept a two game series form the Mariners. - Swept a three game series in Kansans City. - Swept a 2 game series in Texas - Won 2 of 3 in Minnesota. - Beat the Royals in a single game at home. - Split a two game series with the Rangers. - Won 2 of 3 from the Twins - Swept the Orioles in 3 games. - Won 2 of 3 in Boston. - Beat the White Sox 2 of 3 in Chicago. - Split 4 games with the Red Sox at home. - Swept two from the White Sox at home. - Swept two from the Devil Rays. - Swept the Marlins in three games - Won 2 of 3 in Montreal. - Beat Cleveland in a single game at home. - Lost two of 3 in Baltimore. To this point they had won or tied a major league record 23 consecutive series, winning 46 of 56 games. - They went through an 8-6 stretch. Then they won 10 games in a row to go to 65-20. They had a 3-5 stretch, won 6 of 7, lost, won three in a row, lost, won three in a row, lost, then won 9 in a row to go 60 games over .500 at 89-29. Then they lost and won three in a row. It’s hard to get going full blast when you’ve blown away the competition and a stretch of genuine mediocrity followed in which the Bronx Bombers lost 18 of 33 games. Then gearing up for the playoffs, they closed the regular season with seven straight wins to finish with a 114-48 record, most wins since the 1906 Cubs had gone 116-36. Joe Torre was not fired. In the post season, they did something the 06 Cubs could not do- and they did it three times. They beat the Texas Rangers in the Division Series, 3-0. Then they met the team that had eliminated them the year before, the Cleveland Indians. The Yankees won the opener. 7-2 but lost the next two games, 1-4 and 1-6. Were the Yankees on the ropes? No, they won the last three games of the series and then swept the surprising San Diego Padres in the World Series to finish at 11-2 in the post season and 125-50 overall, the best record anybody has ever had. Then they did it again. Well, not quite. In 1999 they only went 98-64 in the regular season but again swept through the playoffs, this time going 11-1 and sweeping the once-intimidating Braves in the World Series. The wheels seemed to have come off late in the 2000 season; On September 13 they were 84-59 and had a 9 game lead in the AL East. They then lost 14 of their last 18 regular season games, including by scores of 1-11, 4-15, 3-16, 4-15, and consecutive games of 1-11, 1-12, 2-13 and 1-9. Had they forgotten how to play baseball? Would Torre be fired? No. The Yankees put it back together for the playoffs. They beat the Athletics 3-2 and the Mariners 4-2 before disposing of my Mets 4-1 to win their third straight World Series, only the fourth time that had been done in baseball history. The Yankees won four straight from 1936-39 and five straight from 1949-53 but those teams only had one post season series to win. The Athletics won three straight from 1972-75 and had two post season series to win each year for a total of 6. The 1998-2000 Yankees had to win nine post season series to win their championships, as many as the 1936-39 and 1949-53 Yankees combined. George Steinbrenner went back to his old habit of making headlines with major free agent signings, such as Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez, that made their payroll top-heavy, thinned out the roster and also aged it. The Yankees kept pounding out the wins, winning a total of 9 straight AL East titles, hitting the hundred win mark in 2002, 2003 and 2004. They made it back to the World Series in 2001 and 2003 but were no longer invincible. They seemed to finally slipping when they went 89-73 and finished 3rd in2008 but then came roaring back to go 103-59 and win their 27th World Series in 2009. They continued to win at least 95 games a year through 2012. From 1996-2012 the Yankees averaged 97 wins a year, won 13 divisional titles, made the playoffs in every year but one and won 5 World Series. But by then, baseball had returned to its trend of the free agency era: different winners each year, (15 years in a row as of this writing. We lack that definition of excellence, the team that everybody wants to beat. Maybe we can get along without it. [/QUOTE]

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