The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty

The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness

By Buster Olney

Illustrated

Ecco/HarperCollins

346 pages

 

On Nov. 4, 2001, the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks met in the seventh and deciding game of the World Series, a contest that seemed fraught with meaning well beyond the big game. The Yankees were representing a city that still reeked, literally, of burned airplane fuel from the site of what had been the World Trade Center. They had made a gutsy, improbable run through the first two rounds of the playoffs, and on that November night they would claw their way within four strikes of a championship — only to see their incomparable relief pitcher, Mariano Rivera, give up the winning runs on a couple of bad pitches and his own throwing error. Rivera was and is a singularly elegant, riveting performer, a wraithlike figure who refuses to betray even the slightest emotion on the mound beyond a certain relentless pride. He had come to epitomize a remarkable team that had won four World Series in five years. To me, as a Yankee fan, watching him finally lose an important game felt like watching a great knight being pulled off his horse and hacked to death by peasants.

That characterization is, of course, unfair to the Diamondbacks, a poised, talented team that had outplayed the Yankees in every aspect of the game.+And it is very easy to weight a baseball game with more meaning than it can possibly carry. A World Series title would have been no real compensation at all for the horrors of 9/11.  Yet that seventh game was a moment when the whole city, and much of the country, gratefully gave itself over to the blessed distraction that is sports at its best. In The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, Buster Olney, who covered the Yankees for four years for The New York Times and is now a senior writer at ESPN, does a fine job of recreating both the game and the context, mixing his inning-by-inning account with profiles of the players, managers, coaches, general managers—and, above all, the owner—who built what may have been the last great sports dynasty of our time.

Olney is a skilled and lucid writer. He is adept at revealing all the minute elements of chance and strategy that constitute any single baseball game and that make the game such a constantly surprising, frustrating, even excruciating obsession. We learn why so few batters can hit Rivera’s cut fastball even when they know it is coming and how it was that a throwback strip of dirt between the pitcher’s mound and the plate in the Diamondbacks’ home park, and a freak, passing thunderstorm rolling in over the mesas, played critical roles in deciding the outcome of the seventh game. Olney keeps the tension of the game crackling, and his descriptions are often wonderfully vivid: the Yankees manager, Joe Torre, inserting Darryl Strawberry as a pinch-hitter, “used him like a dagger”; “a halogen thought” fills a pitcher’s head; another pitcher, after a fielding drill, picks up balls “like a child gathering Easter eggs.”

Even more compelling are Olney’s portraits of the men who were the dynasty. They come off as an extraordinarily focused, idiosyncratic group of athletes, including Paul O’Neill, so driven and self-critical that he says despairingly, “I’ll never get another hit, I can’t hit anymore,” while his teammates try to hide their laughter; the enigmatic, fearless Orlando Hernández, El Duque, a pitcher with the flexibility of a ballet dancer and the paranoia of a spymaster; the almost frighteningly indomitable Derek Jeter, who would not even consider leaving the last inning against Arizona, although he was in so much pain from a collision with a base runner that he thought his foot might be broken;+and the tightly wound, mystically Christian Rivera, who worked his way up from a Panama childhood so impoverished that he learned to throw by using rocks instead of baseballs.

There is Torre, and his intricate, often poignant relationships with his players and especially his pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, as both men battle cancer. And there is the sage shortstop turned general manager, Gene Michael, and the brilliant Brian Cashman, longest-suffering of Michael’s successors, who built the dynasty by persuading the irascible principal owner, George Steinbrenner, to finally stop throwing money at free agents and listen to people who actually knew something about baseball.

It is Olney’s contention that the Yankees’ latest dynasty is over because Steinbrenner, incensed over the loss in Arizona, has reverted to his improvident ways. Certainly, Steinbrenner stands exposed (again) as a blustery bully, a man whose obsession with winning can be both appalling and hilarious.+At one point late in the seventh game in Arizona, he tells a clubhouse attendant, “If we lose this, it’s all your fault,” because he “jinxed” the Yankees by letting Fox Television set up a platform in their clubhouse to broadcast the team’s presumed victory celebration. Other deliberate humiliations of subordinates are a good deal less amusing, to the point where one wonders why anyone still puts up with this lout. The answer, I think, is precisely that Steinbrenner’s deepest desire so closely reflects that of his most dedicated athletes and, especially, the fans. Unlike almost every other owner in professional sports today, Steinbrenner is more interested in winning than in simply making money.

He has, in fact, made plenty of money, but above and beyond anything else, Steinbrenner wants to win — that irrational, romantic, entirely frivolous objective that is the goal of all games, which is why we find them so diverting in a world full of terrorist bombers and bottom liners. Winning with grace and generosity would be preferable, of course, but at least Steinbrenner pours much of his profits back onto the field, where the fans can enjoy them.

Olney, like too many New York sportswriters in recent years, solemnly deplores the innate monetary advantage that Steinbrenner enjoys in pursuing this aim, and his demands that his players perform. These objections strike me as overwrought. Major-league baseball today, by any objective measure, is more competitive than it has ever been, and fans are flocking to see the Yankees in record numbers both at home and on the road. And since when did true New Yorkers become so squeamish about demanding the best or using their big-city edge to get it?

Contrary to Olney’s title, it is not clear yet that the Yankees’ dynasty is over, but it most likely will end sometime in the near future, when Steinbrenner passes from the scene and the team is acquired by the same sort of faceless corporate ownership that has reduced almost all other New York teams to such boring mediocrities. This will be a shame, and not only for Yankee fans. As Roger Angell, the longtime dean of baseball writers, wrote in regard to a previous Yankee dynasty, having a different team win every year “would breed in me the suspicion that baseball was too capricious, too easy and too much subject to luck or chance for anyone to care about it very long. Dynasties can be loved only after they have been overthrown, but they add zest and danger and seriousness of purpose to each day during which they remain in power.”

It says here that we will miss Torre, Jeter and Rivera—and yes, even blustery old George—more than we now suspect.