THE 1998 NEW YORK YANKEES
On Monday April 6, 1998, panic struck the heart of New York City.
The Yankees had lost their first two games of the season.
People went nuts. There were 160 games left, but the season was obviously over because the Yankees were 0 and 2.
These were the Yankees of George Steinbrenner, who spent millions upon millions of dollars each season to ensure his team won. The Yankees, who had won 96 games the previous season and 92 the season before. Winning and reaching the playoffs wasn’t just expected, it was demanded.
Yet they lost again and were 0–3.
After a win and another loss, an 8–0 beatdown by the Mariners, they were 1–4.
The April 7 New York Times headline screamed.
“YANKS SLIDE CONTINUES.”
Nothing seemed to work. When the pitchers struggled, the Yankees got creamed. When they pitched well, the hitters didn’t hit. When there were runners finally on base, the star players like Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill couldn’t get that clutch hit that would score runs. Making matters worse, in the 8–0 loss to the Mariners, not only did Seattle superstar Alex Rodriguez hit a home run off Andy Pettitte, but later in the game, the Yankees’ best relief pitcher, Mariano Rivera, got hurt and would miss the next two weeks. Everything that could have gone wrong to start the season did go wrong. And it sent fans wringing their hands in dread.
It wasn’t just that the Yankees were supposed to win, but that 1998 was supposed to be the year they rebounded from the heartbreaking way the 1997 season had ended. The Yankees had won the World Series in 1996 for the first time in eighteen years and, in 1997, fully expected to repeat as champions. Despite those ninety-six wins, they had played a very dangerous, very talented Cleveland team in the playoffs, and Rivera had given up a home run to Sandy Alomar in the eighth inning of the deciding fifth game. The season, suddenly, was over. This year was supposed to make up for the disappointment and restore the team to the top.
Yet now they could barely win a game.
When you lose game after game, you hope that eventually something, anything good will happen. A day after their 8–0 loss, the Yankees and Mariners played again. Jim Bullinger threw his second pitch of the game and Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ second baseman, hit a home run. Then the talented young shortstop, Derek Jeter, doubled. O’Neill continued the rally with a double of his own. Tino Martinez hit a single, then Darryl Strawberry hit a home run, and Jorge Posada hit another home run. Before the very first inning was over, the Yankees led 6–0.
They won that game, and just like that, things were looking up. “When you lose,” manager Joe Torre said, “you don’t think too big. You just want to win a game, just one game.”
But it wasn’t just one game. They won again the next day, and the day after.
And then the next.
After two more wins in Detroit, it was eight in a row.
And now, the team that couldn’t win suddenly couldn’t lose.
By May 21, the Yankees were 31–9. They had won 30 of their last 35 games, but it wasn’t just the winning, it was the magic that lived within the winning. On May 17, David Wells took the mound against Minnesota. He faced twenty-seven Minnesota Twins batters, and got all twenty-seven out in a row. Nobody reached base. No hits. No walks. No wild pitches and no errors by his defense. It was the first time in the ninety-five-year history of the Yankees that a pitcher threw a perfect game during the regular season.
New York is a big place, eight million people strong, with so many people from so many different places. There are tall buildings throughout the world, but no other city is filled with giant skyscrapers quite like New York. The personalities of the Yankees were just as big. There was right fielder Paul O’Neill, the tall kid from Ohio with a bad temper, who smashed the water cooler with his bat when he was frustrated, but played to win every day. There was Derek Jeter, the rising superstar, who as a little kid had said he wanted to play shortstop for the Yankees when he grew up—and then was so good he actually made it happen. There was Bernie Williams, the center fielder from Puerto Rico, who could hit both right-handed and left-handed, and was also an excellent guitar player. There was Darryl Strawberry, all six-foot-six of him, who hit baseballs so far they looked like they’d land on the moon. There were the fearless and carefree starting pitchers, David Wells and David Cone.
And then there was Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, who had come to the Yankees after escaping his homeland of Cuba on a small boat, hoping to pitch in the Major Leagues. Hernandez was a star pitcher in Cuba, but was accused of being disloyal for refusing to give the government information on a teammate who had previously left the country. Once a national hero, he had been prohibited from playing baseball by the country’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Fearing for his future, he left the country, too, for America.
The leader of the team was the manager, Joe Torre, who had begun his major league playing career in 1960. He had been a nine-time all-star, had played alongside legends like Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews and Bob Gibson, had won an MVP Award as a player, but had never won a World Series title until 1996 with the Yankees. Even Torre was a beloved celebrity in New York.
Each of the key players on the team may have come from a different place, but they all had one thing in common: Each was so tough-minded that, together, the Yankees were a fearsome team to play.
The funny thing was, for all of the winning, the Yankees in 1998 weren’t even the biggest story in baseball. That title belonged to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who seemed to be hitting home runs every day, chasing the single-season home run record of 61, set by Roger Maris in 1961. While McGwire and Sosa captivated the nation, the Yankees, almost quietly, just kept winning.
At the All-Star break, the Yankees were easily in first place in the American League East, with an eleven-game lead over the Red Sox. A month later, the lead was twenty games. They went into Kansas City and Tim Raines, Tino Martinez, and Bernie Williams all hit home runs. The Yankees won 7–1, and their record was a staggering 91–30.
This type of winning, it should be noted, almost never happens in baseball. The reason is the game itself—how difficult it is for an entire team to be consistently good. Unlike the star of a basketball or football team, the best pitcher on a baseball team doesn’t pitch every day. It’s difficult for any one player to take over an entire game, day after day, the way a LeBron James or a rifle-armed quarterback like Peyton Manning can.
They won their one hundredth game of the season on September 4, the fastest team ever to win a hundred games in baseball history. By the time the season ended, the Yankees were 114–48, the most wins in American League history, breaking Cleveland’s 1954 record and second only to the 1906 Chicago Cubs, who won 116 games. It was a summer of winning.
When the playoffs began, however, the Yankees were tense. Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, was so nervous he thought he would go crazy. Everything thus far had worked: Bernie Williams had won the batting title, hitting .339. Jeter hit .324, scored 127 runs, and stole 30 bases. Cone won 20 games. Rivera proved he could stand the pressure of being the closer. His 1.91 ERA was so small you needed a microscope to see it. El Duque was a fantastic surprise, so good and so fearless he even stared down and beat the great Pedro Martinez, who was the best pitcher in baseball at the time, in a classic Red Sox–Yankees duel at Yankee Stadium.
Everything was great—and that made Cashman feel even worse, because now they had to win the World Series. Anything less and that amazing season—all those wins—would be forgotten in a giant wave of disappointment.
Cashman was so anxious about the Yankees’ situation that it brought up an interesting question: Is it worse to have a terrible season with no chance of winning, or to have one of the greatest seasons of all time, win all summer long, and then not win the championship?
It wasn’t just Cashman who had such thoughts. Jeter would say that failing to win the championship made a season a failure. Sure, the Yankees had won all summer, but another team could get hot. Or his team could get cold at the worst possible time. One opposing pitcher, like Martinez if they played the Red Sox, could have the game of his life. What if the ball went through Knoblauch’s legs in the ninth inning of a tie game? What if the umpires made a bad call that cost them a game? What if Jeter got hurt or if Mariano wasn’t perfect when he needed to be?
Cashman was nervous, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have a reason to be. There were other great teams who had mashed everybody in the regular season, then lost in the playoffs and ended up forgotten over time. The 1954 Cleveland Indians had won 111 games but were swept in the World Series by Willie Mays and the Giants. The 109-win Baltimore Orioles lost the World Series in five games to the “Miracle” Mets in 1969, one of the great upsets of all time. The 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers had Jackie Robinson, won 105 games, but lost to the Yankees in the World Series. The 1946 Red Sox had Ted Williams, won 104 games, but lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals.
And the team that won the most games of all time, those 1906 Chicago Cubs from so long ago? What happened to them? They won 116 games and lost the World Series to the Chicago White Sox.
It happened. Would it also happen to the Yankees?
At first, it didn’t seem so. In the first round of the playoffs, the Yankees blitzed through Texas in three straight games and then met the dreaded Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series—the rematch they’d waited for all year. The Yankees crushed the Indians in the first game of the American League Championship Series—and then, in Game 2, the unthinkable happened . . .
Tied 1–1 in the twelfth inning with a man on first, Tino Martinez fielded a bunt by Travis Fryman and turned to throw to first. Fryman, running to first, was in the way. Martinez’s throw hit Fryman in the back and rolled away. The Yankees thought Fryman should have been called out for interfering with Martinez’s throw—but he wasn’t. Meanwhile, Enrique Wilson, who had been on first, kept running and running while the Yankees were complaining and complaining. By the time Knoblauch finally picked up the ball, Cleveland had already scored the go-ahead run. They would score twice more and win 4–1 to tie the series. Then the Indians went to Cleveland and won again in Game 3. All of a sudden, the Indians needed just two more wins to end the Yankees’ season for the second straight year—and had the next two games at home to do it. All of the Yankees’ fears were coming true: the bad call, the unlucky bounce, now put them behind two games to one to a team that did not fear them.
The whole season now sat on the shoulders of Orlando Hernandez, a pitcher who hadn’t even been with the team when the season started. The pressure was enormous, and El Duque responded by hanging out with the waiters and waitresses at the restaurant in the Yankees’ hotel in Cleveland, just to speak Spanish because it reminded him of being home. The rest of the Yankees wondered if Hernandez knew how big a game he was pitching. In the United States, pitchers don’t even talk to their own teammates much on the day they pitch, and here this guy was, doing dishes at the hotel!
When the game started, the fiery O’Neill homered in the first inning to give the Yankees an early lead. In the bottom of the inning, with two outs, Jim Thome, the Cleveland slugger whose arms and legs looked as large as tree trunks, hit a ball so hard it appeared it would wind up in the Atlantic Ocean. O’Neill stood and watched the ball sail toward him, on its way out of the stadium. It was a sure home run, Thome thought, and he continued what he expected to be a home run trot—when suddenly . . . suddenly . . . the wind caught the ball and began to bring it back into the stadium . . . and into O’Neill’s glove for the final out of the inning. To this day, Thome still doesn’t know how that ball he hit wasn’t a home run!
That one play seemed to change the tide.
For the rest of the game, El Duque shut down Cleveland. The Yankees won the game 4–0. When it was over, Torre said it was the hard life lessons that Hernandez had endured—facing prison if he did not tell on his friends, facing death in the ocean all those nights on a little raft escaping Cuba—that allowed him not to be scared or worried about pitching in such a big game. “When you’ve been through what he’s been through,” Torre said, “this is just a baseball game.”
The Yankees wouldn’t lose again for the rest of the season. After having their revenge against the Indians, they went on to destroy the San Diego Padres in four straight games to win the World Series.
As time would pass, scandal eroded much of that magical 1998 season. Instead of remembering the great McGwire and the joyous Sosa, both would have their names linked to steroids and cheating rather than record breaking. The great home run chase that made so many people fall in love with baseball again turned out to be a moment fans would remember with regret and shame.
One aspect of that season did endure, however, and it was the historic performance of the New York Yankees. When the year finally ended, the team had played 175 games and won 125 of them, including the most important game—the last one. No team has won as much since and none may again for a very, very long time. If ever.