THE YANKEES, in a surprise, did not win the 1997 World Series. They were dispatched in the American League Division Series by the Cleveland Indians after Mariano Rivera gave up a shocking, late home run in what would have been the series-clinching victory.
It proved to be a brief setback. From 1998 to 2000, the Yankees won three more World Series, in consecutive years, something accomplished only three times previously in major league history. In fact, in the final quarter of twentieth-century baseball, the Yankees’ dominance—four World Series victories in five years—was unmatched in baseball. No team had done it since the Yankees of the early 1950s.
But the late-nineties Yankees were not just consistent winners. They were often spectacularly prolific. The 1998 team, for example, won 114 regular-season games and had an 11-2 postseason record, including a World Series sweep of the San Diego Padres.
The next year, the Yankees were even better in the playoffs, losing only once and sweeping the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. In 2000, in the first New York subway series in forty-four years, the New York Mets and Yankees met for five high-energy, riveting games. But again, the Yankees were crowned baseball’s best.
“Once we got on a roll and really learned how to win the big games,” Paul O’Neill said, “it became like a collective will. Don’t get me wrong, it was never easy, but we had a history together. So many games going back so many years.”
In this period, only in 2001 did the Yankees falter in the World Series, losing in seven games to the Arizona Diamondbacks. One year earlier, Buck Showalter had been fired as the Diamondbacks’ manager.
Overall, the Yankees were in the playoffs every season from 1995 to 2012 except one. In what came to be known as the Core Four era of Jeter, Posada, Rivera and Pettitte, the Yankees also won a fifth World Series, in 2009.
The Yankees, the butt of jokes in 1990, did more than regain their footing on the field. They once again became the most influential sporting brand in North America, if not the world. Advertisers and corporate sponsors rediscovered the worth and power of a vibrant, prosperous championship team playing its home games at Yankee Stadium.
And the run of success had ensured that the team’s home would continue to be in New York, as city officials agreed to build a new Yankee Stadium across the street from the original one, a palace that opened in 2009.
“A lot of things went right for the franchise year after year, and there’s no doubt that you can trace it all to the first successful teams of the mid-1990s,” Hal Steinbrenner, who took over the day-to-day control of the team in 2008, said. “And by that I mean the 1994 and 1995 teams as well. There is a continuum, even if the big breakthrough wasn’t until 1996.”
The majority of the protagonists in this now famous Yankee renaissance have existed on both sides of the 1995–96 divide for more than twenty years. Some, like tragic heroes in a Shakespearean drama, saw their Yankee experience end with the devastating 1995 playoff loss in Seattle. They never directly reaped the benefits of their hard work and foresight. The ticker tape parade confetti never cascaded onto their shoulders.
But others continued with the team and lived through the prosperity, as did some who did not arrive until 1996. And yet, their perspectives, with varying degrees of satisfaction or accrued acceptance, are generally similar.
Don Mattingly, for instance, is proud to have been part of what he called “the building blocks of a dynasty.” “You could see what was coming,” he said. “I doubt any of us who left after 1995 were too surprised. It is unfortunate that Buck wasn’t there to see it finish out.”
But Mattingly, who coached for Torre for four seasons beginning in 2004, added, “I also saw that when Joe came along he was the perfect guy for that spot—a group ready to go.”
Torre, who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his four championships as manager of the Yankees, is unequivocal that his initial success was predicated on the foundation laid before he took the job. “I certainly fell into it and inherited some good people who were used to winning at that point,” he said in a 2014 interview. “But there’s a reason for everything that happens.”
Torre’s remarks led to a follow-up question: If there had not been a players’ strike in 1994 and the high-flying Yankees had won the World Series that year, would Torre be the manager in 1996? “No, I don’t believe I would’ve been,” Torre answered. “But if they had won in ’94, then maybe ’95 doesn’t turn out the way it did. Maybe I never manage the Yankees. Who knows what happens?”
Paul O’Neill agreed. “Sometimes I wonder if we had to go through the setbacks to accomplish everything else,” he said. “Maybe we don’t win in ’96 if we don’t lose in ’95.”
It is a lingering question: Would things have played out the same for the Yankees if Showalter had remained the manager in 1996 and beyond? Would there still have been a last, late-twentieth-century Yankees dynasty?
Willie Randolph, who coached for Showalter but also stayed on as Torre’s third-base coach for the next nine seasons, thinks not. “It’s a tough question, but with all due respect to Buck, I really feel like Joe was probably the one we needed at that time,” Randolph said. “I think he’s the only one who could have done what he did. Because it wasn’t just 1996, it was every year after that for a long time. Joe being a New York guy and being around for a lot of years, he understood how to handle all the different parts of the job that kept changing.”
At the same time, Randolph is certain Torre’s path to success would have been rocky and perhaps impassable without the way having been cleared for him before 1996. “Buck, Stick Michael, the scouts, the minor league managers and the big league coaches built that team from the ground up, and most of all, they had to absorb that really tough loss in 1995,” Randolph said. “And I’m a firm believer that devastating disappointment is a great teacher for champions. Every championship team usually has to endure some serious heartache and heartbreak before winning it all.
“That’s what Buck, Stick and the 1995 team did for the franchise. They took that bullet. The bad taste it left in everyone’s mouth became the motivation for reaching higher the next season and all the seasons after that.”
Showalter, meanwhile, has always given Torre the credit. “Joe took it to another level,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have done what Joe did.”
George Steinbrenner, who made the decision to switch from Showalter to Torre, and then changed his mind, told me in a 1997 interview at his Tampa hotel that he regretted how he handled Showalter’s exit. But in retrospect, he was not second-guessing himself either.
Steinbrenner could still smile and frown at the same time.
“I regret how it played out at the time,” he said. “But sometimes things don’t go as smoothly as you want them to go. It happens. I do wish it had been easier on everyone. But Buck is in a great place right now. He’s going to do great things, you’ll see. And we won the World Series with Joe.” Steinbrenner shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands as if to say, What do you want me to say?
He added, “That’s how it worked out.”
As the Yankees’ World Series victories and playoff appearances accumulated in the succeeding seasons, and with Steinbrenner having sworn off the tabloid spotlight years earlier, the owner who had been bitterly lampooned for his bombastic ways took on the aura of a beloved patriarch.
It was a welcome metamorphosis for many in his inner circle, including those he had once warred with, like Gene Michael. “New York began to love him,” Michael said. “As much as they hated him for a while, people forgave him. It was because of all the winning teams and because he stayed away from harassing people publicly.
“It helped his image and everything else. And he knew that. He knew that among Yankees fans he was now beloved. At the end of his life I was happy he knew that.”
On a stage in the locker room in the wake of the team’s 1998 World Series, Steinbrenner wept uncontrollably when handed the trophy signifying the victory. The hearts of Yankees fans melted. This was the Boss?
A few years later, Steinbrenner was standing on a makeshift platform in Yankee Stadium’s left field, conducting a television interview half an hour before a home season-opening game. Fans in the nearby outfield bleachers spotted him and began chanting, “Thank you, George!”
Although he was wearing dark sunglasses, viewers could see the tears roll down Steinbrenner’s cheeks on live television.
By 2006, Steinbrenner, beset by a series of health problems, withdrew from public appearances. He relinquished his substantial input in the team’s affairs by 2008. Ten days after his eightieth birthday, in 2010, Steinbrenner had a heart attack at his Tampa home and died in a local hospital.
The tributes poured in, especially from the thousands that his philanthropy had benefited.
“I’m sure people can debate parts of his legacy,” Hal Steinbrenner said of his father. “I’m know I’m biased, but I don’t know if he gets enough credit for what he did across the decades with the Yankees. Go back to 1973 and see where the team was then and where it is now.”
Gene Michael, who in 2017 joked that he wished he could have dinner with Steinbrenner again so he could “tell him off one more time,” agreed that Steinbrenner’s imprint on the Yankees would be perpetual. “He made me get my hair cut as a player in 1973 and we still have that policy on long hair, right?” Michael said with a grin. “George doesn’t go away.”
After he was pushed out as general manager in 1995, Michael took on a variety of roles in the Yankees organization. Initially called the director of scouting, he became more like a guru who was consulted on everything from major league trades to the outfield wall dimensions of the new Yankee Stadium.
“A fountain of knowledge because he had done it all—player, coach, manager, general manager, scout,” said Randolph.
Michael, who had moved to the Tampa area, was still assessing talent and advising the Yankees on September 7, 2017, when he died of a heart attack. He was seventy-nine.
Buck Showalter, who was managing the Orioles, was driving to Baltimore’s Camden Yards for a game against the Yankees when his wife, Angela, called with the news of Michael’s death. “There are moments in your life when you hear something and you just have to stop whatever you’re doing to gather yourself,” Showalter said. “And that was one of them. I had to pull the car over and just cry right there.
“So many memories. So many things I would have thanked him for one more time.”
Michael’s funeral was held three days later at the Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida, and a host of players attended, including Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams.
Brian Cashman, who spoke at the funeral, told the congregation: “Gene was someone who saw something in everybody that was good. He wanted to help everyone somehow.”
And Cashman recalled Michael’s self-assurance during the most adverse times. “When I think back to the darkest days in the early 1990s,” he said, “I can still hear Stick saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get this fixed up.’ He had a plan.
“There weren’t a lot of believers at the time. But he convinced those of us working with him. We followed him and he turned out to be right.”
Michael had remained close with Showalter, whose nomadic baseball journey took him to managerial jobs in Arizona, Texas and Baltimore. “Whenever I came to New York or Tampa, Stick would always arrange to get together, or he’d poke his head into my office for twenty minutes,” Showalter said. “And if things were going bad, that’s when I could really count on him to reach out to me.”
As an example, Showalter remembered the day he was fired by the Diamondbacks in 2000. The team had an 85-77 record, and one year earlier, in the expansion franchise’s second year of existence, the Diamondbacks had won 100 games and the National League West championship.
Michael was among the first to call. “What a bunch of horseshit,” he said into the phone. “They should be kissing your ass for having any chance to win after only two or three years. Nobody’s done that.” Michael also told Showalter he could have his pick of another two or three major league managerial jobs if he wanted them.
But Showalter wanted a break from the dugout to ponder his next move. He took a job as a postgame analyst with ESPN.
And that’s how Showalter happened to be perched in a makeshift television studio just beyond the outfield walls of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix on November 4, 2001, as the Yankees and the Diamondbacks prepared to play the seventh game of the World Series.
By the end of the night, one team would be celebrating. It would be either the team Showalter helped build into a perennial World Series contender in the early to mid-1990s in New York or the franchise he helped create in the Arizona desert from 1996 to 2000.
Or as Showalter quipped to reporters before the game, “Somebody told me I’m going to watch someone else walk my daughter down the aisle again.”
That game would later be chosen by Sports Illustrated as the best postseason game of the decade, with starters Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling pitching into the late innings of a 1–1 game.
Randy Johnson, ever the Yankee killer, made a crucial relief appearance for Arizona despite having pitched the night before. In the end, in the bottom of the ninth, Luis Gonzalez of the Diamondbacks lofted a bloop single over a drawn-in Yankees infield to drive in the series-clinching run against Mariano Rivera.
Showalter talked on the air for ESPN for about forty-five minutes, then left to walk back to his hotel, which was about four blocks from the ballpark. “I was walking through all these fans celebrating in the streets,” he said. “Arizona had never won a professional championship in any sport. It was like Mardi Gras out there.”
He passed through the crowds unnoticed.
The next day, one of his colleagues on the ESPN broadcast, the former major league infielder Harold Reynolds, called with a question: “Do you think anybody got what you were going through last night? After the game, that had to be pretty intense.”
Replied Showalter: “It’s OK. I’ve had practice at this.”
But years later, Showalter believed it helped him. “It made it a lot more natural,” he said, sitting in his Dallas home office. “I could see firsthand how much it meant to everybody—the Yankees fans, the Arizona fans—all the people that had embraced me in those places. I was part of the process, not separate from it.”
Sitting in the stands of the Yankees’ spring training complex in 2017, Gene Michael said he knew how Showalter felt. “You’re left with the positives,” he said. “Some people work just as hard and get nowhere. You have to see the whole picture. Look where we ended up.”
On Saturday, June 22, 2014, the Yankees held their sixty-eighth annual Old-Timers’ Day. Before a benevolent, appreciative crowd, scores of retired Yankees were introduced in a grand on-field ceremony. A brief old-timers’ exhibition game preceded a regular-season game. It was always a hot ticket and 2014 was no different, with 47,493 fans flocking to Yankee Stadium.
On that day, the Yankees’ regular-season opponent was Showalter’s Baltimore Orioles.
Showalter had not been in uniform at Yankee Stadium for Old-Timers’ Day since he was the Yankees’ manager in 1995.
During the pregame festivities, Gene Michael, wearing jersey number 17 as he had as a player, emerged from the home dugout to join all the other Yankee old-timers already congregated on the field.
But before joining the other honorees, Michael jogged over to the visiting dugout. Showalter stood to meet him on the top step. Michael and Showalter hugged, as several generations of Yankees and Yankees fans watched, and applauded.