THE LAST NIGHT OF THE
YANKEE DYNASTY
THE GAME, THE TEAM, AND
THE COST OF GREATNESS
By Buster Olney
352 pp. New York:
Ecco. $26.95
By Kevin Baker
On
November 4, 2001, the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks
met in the seventh and deciding game of baseball’s 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 losing runs on a couple of
bad pitches and his own fielding errors.
Rivera was and is a singularly elegant, riveting
performer, a wraith-like 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, of course, 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
which is sports at its best. Buster Olney, who covered the Yanks
for this paper for five years and who is now a senior writer at
ESPN, has done a fine job of recreating both the game and the
context for us; mixing up 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, and The Last Night of the Yankee
Dynasty is filled with enough inside baseball to please any
fan. He is adept at revealing all the minute elements of chance
and skill that constitute any single baseball game—and which
make the game in general 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;
or how it was that a throwback strip of dirt between the pitchers’
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. Olney keeps the tension
of the game crackling, and his descriptions are often wonderfully
vivid: Joe Torre inserting a pinch-hitter, “used him like
a dagger”; “a halogen thought” fills a pitcher’s
head; another pitcher in a fielding drill gathers picks up balls
“like a child gathering Easter eggs.”
Even more compelling, though, are Olney’s
intimate portraits of the men who were the dynasty. They come
off as an extraordinarily focused, idiosyncratic group of athletes,
including, (among many others) Paul O’Neill, so driven and
self-critical that he despairs, “I’ll never get another
hit, I can’t hit anymore,” while his teammates try
to hide their laughter. The enigmatic, fearless “El Duque,”
Orlando Hernandez, a pitcher with the flexibility of a ballet
dancer and the paranoia of a spymaster. The almost frighteningly
indomitable Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ captain and core,
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 was broken. And the tightly wound, mystically
Christian Rivera, who worked his way up from a Panama childhood
so impoverished that he learned to throw using rocks instead of
baseballs.
There is Torre, the canny manager, and his intricate,
often poignant relationships with his players and especially his
pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, as both men battle through cancer.
And there is the sage shortstop-turned-general-manager, Gene Michael,
and his brilliant, long-suffering successor, Brian Cashman, who
built the dynasty by convincing the irascible Yankee 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 the team clubhouse to televise 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
because Steinbrenner’s deepest desire so closely reflects
that of his most dedicated athletes and, above all, the fans.
Unlike almost every other owner in professional sports today,
George Steinbrenner is more interested in winning than simply
making money.
He has, in fact, made plenty of money, but above
all, George wants to win; that irrational, romantic, entirely
artificial construct that is the goal of all games—and 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 George 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 aims, and his demands that his players perform,
but 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 get 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 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, and Jeter,
and the great Rivera—and yes, even blustery old George—more
than we now suspect.
Kevin Baker is the author of the historical
novels Dreamland and Paradise Alley.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
