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YES, I SAID IT FIRST.
FORGOTTEN YANKEES
By Patrick Morand, Senior Editor, “YES, I SAID IT FIRST”
As the New York Yankees glow in the aftermath of their 27th Major League Baseball title, a full seventeen more than their closest competition, I have found by reflection in the majesty of Yankees history reasons that debunk that assumption. It would be easier to say that as special as any one team’s only championship may be to that team, its players, and their fans it really is hard for any of them to conceive just how hard winning almost every four years actually is. Therefore they would not be able to understand the satisfaction and need for New York to win that often. It takes great structure and patience, and small painful periods of transition to be able to regularly win those championships. It also takes a constant urging by followers to be the best. Most of those Yankee world titles occurred during two stretches of league dominance in dynasty periods in the 1920s and 1950s. Every group of Yankee brethren are judged next to those traditions of greatness so even before they have even stepped between the white lines of the baseball diamond they have a built in pressure to achieve. Frankly in the case of New York there is added encouragement since everybody else wishes to see them fail. The only way for any season to be successful in New York is to have a world championship trophy added to the lobby after the season. That in itself does not make for the winning to become routine, if nothing else it creates greater inclination to work hard and stay focused as a team. Every day, on the way to work for Yankees’ people, there are reminders of what the forefathers had done. They won and they won and they won. Very few franchises in pro sports has a uniform that so stands the test of time as the Yankees. These players are very aware when they wear that uniform that they risk being the “forgotten Yankees” – guys who never brought it home. There is a place after all even in New York for those who get tired of seeing the same things over and over again and that place is Citi Field in Flushing Meadow where the New York Mets play. If a fan living in New York really wishes to create his or her own tradition of trying to win separate from the Yanks then go watch the Mets. Or do as so many transplanted fans do when they cannot watch their own team and get the satellite package and watch another team. I get that one can get tired of “Yankees Win....Yannnnkkeeeess Win” again and again, and there are (NY) Giants fans and (Brooklyn) Dodger fans still in New York that celebrate ecstatically when their former local teams win on the west coast, but it is hard to make the case that their wins are more special than the Yankees continuing to win in the eyes of a Yankee fan. Sure we cheer for players sometimes, and we all like to see guys get a chance to win near the end of their career, but where do you think they will go to get that shot? New York, just like Mark Teixeira, A.J. Burnett and Alex Rodriguez did. Sometimes these players just need a chance to shine on the big field and sometimes they even fail in that pressure pot. When I was in university I went to a school that had a good football tradition of winning but that tradition was 15 years before I started my freshman year. The Saint Mary’s Huskies were the laughing stock of Canadian Intercollegiate sports. On campus we would make jokes which included the football team as a standard punch line. By my second year they had turned it around becoming about one touchdown short of national supremacy. They continued to attract the best athletes as winning schools usually do and eventually broke through with two championships back to back, but stayed competitive for a period of now 20 years and have been to seven national championships since 1988. Alumni can be very proud of that organization considering many of the players there were not even born when the elite status arrived, but that program is built to win something. It’s not a sure thing. It’s a very hard thing to win every year at that level. Once a school or pro organization starts to win it sets different objectives and nobody ever reflects at season’s end about how well they finished in second. Good organizations expect to win, and want to make dynasties. They want to be the current day dynasty. They want to win back to back and then back to back to back and it is quite a thrill to be able to do that. After the Boston Red Sox broke through the curse barrier in 2004 they were on the national radar, but oh how they arrived on the local Boston meter. Consider that the New England Patriots great teams with three championships in four years were actually overshadowed by one Red Sox victory. The Sox were always a good organization being run by good people who could build a dynasty. Some say that dynasties are different now and that making the playoffs for ten years in succession even if a team doesn’t win is the closest any team will get to dynasty. So the definition might need to change. That is not how they think in Boston. You might think they would with their long drought of baseball winning, but this season I noticed Red Sox fans had tuned out in September and their team was still headed to the playoffs. The excitement of 2004 and 2007 was tempered by knowledgeable fans that realized it would be very difficult with the team they had to pull off three post season upsets. They were not hanging on every pitch in their short series drubbing by the Los Angeles Angels because they just knew it was not their year. While the other franchises in the playoffs like Minnesota or Colorado may have had hope of some miracle I think fans in winning markets accept that “hope” on its own is not a very good strategy. The Yankees won the war with Boston way back in the summer. In an odd way between New York and Boston in baseball there is a game within the game of one-upmanship. It starts in the offseason trying to outbid each other for free agent star players, and then works the best trades to build depth. It meets on the field, but the knowledge by one team and its followers that they are better than the other really is a game beside the game. There was a lot of swagger in the Bronx this year, and especially since August when the Yankees began to look like the 1927 Yankees. An interesting side note to the Yankees November 4, 2009 victory over Philadelphia is that exactly 8 years before the Yankees lost game seven to the Arizona Diamondbacks also on November 4, 2001. Even though New York returned to the series in 2003 and lost to Florida and had made the playoffs since (every year but 2008) there seemed to be finality about the 2001 Yankees and newness to the 2009 Yankees.The brass tax is that if you hate the Yankees you might just wish to stop watching baseball for a few years. In 2001 a good team that started winning in 1996 began to come apart and needed revitalization. Older players started leaving the game. Remarkably New York does rebuilding and retooling while still winning most of its games. That is necessary in that marketplace of heavy criticism where every fan and scribe thinks they can do better than any current Yankees General Manager. This season the Yankees conquered a few demons, including the demon of missing the playoffs last year and having a newer manager, and though we think they need another arm or two in the starting rotation they look like they may be able to start another streak with what they have. It’s sometimes easier to do that with a little of the weight off their shoulders. Thanks to Hideki Matsui and C.C. Sabathia players like Rodriguez, Burnett and maybe Teixeira can relax and enjoy the machine of winning. It was obviously not all on them in the postseason. It is not unlike New York to go through spells of great winning, being close but short, and that’s all. Other teams go through the mediocrity stage and the basement draft pick stage that New York does not see. If you buy that another wave of Yankee winning is now here with Rodriguez, and Teixeira the players of 2010 we can define them and championship number 27 next to the groups of Yankee stalwarts from each winning session in their past. Ten years ago the Yankees won four championships over a five year span with names like Tino Martinez, Bernie Williams, David Cone, Roger Clemens, and Chuck Knoblauch. There was some overlap between the last two winning times in players like Andy Pettite, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and of course Derek Jeter, one of the greatest Yankees of all time. It is remarkable that any team could keep a core of players that good together for parts of 10 seasons, and have them all together when it mattered. Prior to the late nineties Yankees fans had to endure much strife watching their team. Before that group of winners we have to go all the way back to the late seventies with the Reggie Jackson era to find two championships. There is a list of forgotten Yankees that came and went in between. Don Mattingly epitomizes the Yankees dark era with his career that spanned 1982-1995. The Yankees lost the 1981 World Series ending the great 70s and were a year away from the Jeter era which began in 1996. So Mattingly is one player who will never wear any of the 27 rings and will be a great answer to trivia. Prior to 1977, it was the Yogi Berra and Roger Maris era Yankees (1950-1960) bringing the success, and so on. The Yankees amazingly have passed off tradition more succinctly than any organization in any sport. Babe Ruth was there before the winning began since he started in 1914 and his career finished in 1935. Ruth is remembered. The very next year, 1936 saw the arrival of Joe DiMaggio and he stayed until 1951. In a career almost the length of Jeter’s Mr. DiMaggio won 9 World Championships. He is remembered. Then in 1951 just as DiMaggio left Mickey Mantle took over, and he was joined by Whitey Ford, the great pitcher and the Yankees won more with both retiring by 1968. The darkest days of Yankees would follow until the late 70s and then darkness arrived in the Mattingly days when the team did not win championships. It appears that 1996 solved that and winning returned consistently. These players today in 2009 all want to win, and their supporters the Yankee fans all want to win for themselves. It may be championship number 27, but for all these guys it is only the first, second, or fifth. That makes it a highlight to most of them. The winning of the past creates a different hunger in New York. These guys want to be able to win again to replicate the teams from the early 1950s and show that they have done their part to provide championships in their era. This current cast of Yankees at their worst in 2008 make for great argument in today’s game that they are by far and away the best Yankees teams ever, and likely will live as storied memories 30 years from now in the same way those 1950s teams do. The “tradition” is winning with all new players and mostly new fans. It is far from a sure thing that New York will win even though the economics of the game suggest they always will. There is definitely a draw factor in New York that is just like college where players will choose New York because they want to win, or want to have a chance to win, and they may want to be remembered as winners. They may want to see how they eternally stack up with Lou Gehrig, Ruth, and others. Try as I may I have trouble remembering the championship roster of the 2005 Chicago White Sox without a list. It was special win for that city, but beyond A.J. Pierzynski and Paul Konerko who was on that team? The reality is that the next time Chicago wins something they will not be motivated to do it better than or as well as those guys. Yankees fans breathe baseball all year round and winning is like oxygen to them. For fans in Cincinnati, a city with a long deep history of baseball itself as the charter city of the National League, winning is like a high from some drug. It does not last and they do not stay that way. It is fun to experience and then they go on. There are fans in great baseball cities that would love to have what New York has, Los Angeles comes to mind, but if it never happens there are so many distractions spread out across a wide area to capture them. In some ways the Los Angeles Lakers are the Yankees in basketball without the high maintenance – and that is the L.A. way. It is not Lakers all the time in L.A. but on sports radio in New York the Yankees come up every day. I am sure that if the Kansas City Royals won a second title (their first was 1985) that the city would party, but then winter would come, and the next year would not start with expectations. In Kansas City they might barely whimper as free agents leave overnight and their winners all dissolve. In New York after getting the first one, in anything it’s all about the clock starting to tick on getting the second one. On November 5 the Yankees started getting the pieces together to have a credible shot at winning number 28. If they get it that city is going to go absolutely wild! from the Media Division of OJC-Inc.
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When a team and its fans are used to winning we sometimes assume that perhaps they do not appreciate winning as much as teams that never win.
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