IT WAS A sunny Sunday in Chicago, and Andy Hawkins, a journeyman pitcher with a career losing record, was only four outs from baseball immortality. Working briskly through the Chicago White Sox lineup that day, July 1, 1990, Hawkins had retired 23 batters without yielding a hit. There were two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning.
For Hawkins, in his second year with the New York Yankees, it was and would be the game of his life. And it had come out of nowhere. Just a few weeks earlier, he trudged off the mound after getting only one out in a starting assignment, trailing 5–0 in the first inning. In another game that month, he faced only 12 batters, with half of them getting hits and a third smacking triples or doubles. At that point, the Yankees planned to either cut Hawkins or demote him to the minor leagues. Only an injury to a teammate had kept him on the team.
But on July 1, the pitching gods had blessed Hawkins. It was shaping up as a milestone performance. Despite his 1-4 record, he flummoxed the White Sox lineup in a scoreless game.
It was a typically blustery afternoon in Chicago, and late in the eighth inning, wind gusts blew debris from the grandstand onto the infield. Play was halted as several white paper wrappers were gathered by field maintenance workers. Hawkins stood motionless on the mound throughout the delay.
“Everything was in control,” Hawkins later said. “I felt good. I didn’t sense anything else. It happened so fast.”
The next batter slapped a crisp grounder to Yankees third baseman Mike Blowers, who bobbled the ball for an error. Two walks and two mystifying errors in the windy outfield followed in quick succession.
It happened so fast.
Just like that, the White Sox led, 4–0. Hawkins retired his twenty-fourth White Sox batter soon afterward. The Yankees then went quickly and quietly in the top of the ninth inning. Game over.
The fans inside Chicago’s rusting Comiskey Park, built in 1910, seemed giddy and confused at the same time. They were celebrating something they had never seen before: a no-hitter by the visiting pitcher and a home victory.
Hawkins’s game of a lifetime, an everlasting memory, became baseball history and an undying nightmare.
A pitcher with an eight-inning no-hitter who lost? It had never happened before in the 114-year history of Major League Baseball. There had been lost extra-inning no-hitters, rain-shortened no-hit games lost and one nine-inning no-hit game when the home pitcher lost. But there had never been anything like what happened—and happened so fast—to Andy Hawkins.
But as a remarkably coherent Hawkins said afterward in the locker room: “It still counts. It’s a no-hitter. They can’t take it away from me.”
Not so fast. In fact, Major League Baseball changed a record-keeping regulation the next season, requiring a pitcher to complete at least 27 outs for the game to count as an official no-hitter. The baseball gods had abandoned Hawkins yet again.
And so a new baseball decade that was just six months old began ignominiously for the Yankees, the most decorated American sports franchise of the twentieth century. The embarrassment of Hawkins’s Chicago outing lingered, the omen for what was to come for the country’s most renowned sports team.
It would turn out to be the dawn of the darkest period in Yankees history, a period willfully forgotten by Yankees fans—with good reason.
How had this happened to the team of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle?
By 1990, the Yankees had won 22 World Series and 33 American League pennants, both major league records. Twenty-six Yankees were already in the Baseball Hall of Fame or on their way there.
The Yankees had been the subject of countless books and motion pictures, television miniseries and Broadway shows. The franchise was likened to titans of American industry—compared to the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s and US Steel in the 1950s.
Yankees jerseys had been the best-selling brand in baseball, and a Yankees cap was still a fixture on streets, subway cars, bars and jet planes around the country. They were the favored team of celebrities, from Jack Nicholson to Bruce Springsteen to Jackie Onassis. The moneyed Yankees had cultivated a reputation synonymous with achievement and prosperity.
And yet, ten years away from a new century, the great Yankees run appeared all but over. Their empire had collapsed and seemed irreparably ruined. The minor league cupboard of budding young prospects was bare. The Yankees, by every measure, were broken.
From 1989 to 1992, the Yankees were the laughingstock of baseball, with a team that not only was at the bottom of the standings, but had the worst four-year record (288-359) since the team first became known as the Yankees, in 1913.
Attendance at Yankee Stadium was down 35 percent, TV ratings had plummeted, and the Yankees were in the midst of the longest World Series drought in team history, a stretch that lasted 14 seasons.
Those are the statistics. But it was so much worse than the numbers. How bad?
The team’s owner, George M. Steinbrenner III, had been denounced as a stain on the game and banished permanently from baseball.
It was not the only bad karma shrouding the team after seven decades of mostly uninterrupted triumph.
It started with Hawkins’s losing no-hitter. A year later, a prized Yankees draft pick with a 100-mile-an-hour fastball—in an era when almost no one threw that hard—got in a bar fight that ruined his career. Promising trades turned out to be embarrassing flops.
In the midst of four successive losing seasons, the entire Yankees roster had exactly one player, Don Mattingly, who had ever been to an All-Star game. But Mattingly’s shining light was soon enveloped by a darker mood, too. An aching back was betraying him and would soon sap him of his greatest gifts.
At this juncture, the obituary for the once great, conquering Yankees was being written across the country. The Yankees were dated, worn and lacked new ideas or a modern operating philosophy. Their players had been sullied and humiliated. Even the team’s physical plant appeared to be outmoded. The once groundbreaking Yankee Stadium, refurbished a generation earlier, was aging and had been surpassed by a host of newer, more imaginative and entertaining ballparks in Baltimore, Toronto, Chicago, Texas and Minnesota, outposts that now mocked the declining Yankees.
The Yankees were like a once proud transatlantic ocean liner or a too-big-to-fail corporation—a hearty symbol of a robust America in perhaps the country’s greatest century—that was now slowly sinking or deteriorating brick by brick.
But in fact, and as hard as it was to see at the time, the seemingly vexed Yankees were about to embark on a revival that ended with the last great baseball dynasty of the twentieth century.
And so, this is a story of a wholly unexpected resurrection and rebirth. It is the story of the unlikely cast of characters—nobodies in the game of baseball at the time—who made it happen. They were baseball lifers, a mix of wandering scouts and their bosses, cubicle-bound analysts, untested coaches and junior executives led by the then obscure, first-year manager Buck Showalter and the team’s general manager Gene Michael, two cogs buried deep in the organizational structure.
If Showalter and Michael were the duo who helped revive the Yankees, soon they were a trio. On July 9, 1992, I broke the story that George Steinbrenner would soon be reinstated by Commissioner Fay Vincent. It seemed impossible, and some of my colleagues called my scoop a bunch of hooey. But thirteen days later, Vincent announced that Steinbrenner could resume his Yankees ownership duties in March 1993.
Steinbrenner was going to ride a white horse into the Yankee spring training complex in Florida that day—like Napoleon returned from the Isle of Elba—but he changed his mind at the last minute, saying it was too showy. The mercurial shipbuilding magnate instead landed his private jet just beyond the outfield walls and walked through a gate near a sea of The Boss Is Back! placards.
That was George’s idea of making a small entrance.
What transpired next is an untold story of ingenious, counterintuitive thinking that presaged baseball’s analytics era. It is a story of stirring, plucky, startling triumph—a stunning rejuvenation that put a new face on an old franchise. It is also a story of heartrending disappointment, since the Yankees’ rousing comeback, which brought them within sight of the pinnacle of the sport, ended in another devastating setback. The 1994 players’ strike canceled the World Series and thwarted the most promising Yankees season in nearly a generation. It was one of many painful lessons absorbed, and these unheralded Yankees of the early to mid-nineties showed the perseverance to rally yet again.
And fail again in 1995.
Then, unbelievably, from 1996 to 2000, the Yankees won three of the next four World Series. From 1996 to 2012, they would play in baseball’s postseason every year but one.
Even the Yankees of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s could not match that postseason streak.
The story of that unmatched success—the championship teams of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada—cannot be told without understanding the underexamined, pivotal seasons that preceded it. With the hindsight of roughly twenty-five years, those seasons did indeed foreshadow what was to come, especially if you added a little good fortune.
I was a close witness to this period, as a Yankees beat writer and syndicated columnist at the Bergen Record in New Jersey and later as a sportswriter at the New York Times. I have remained in contact with the principals involved and spent the past two years revisiting them, to both help them recall their memories and listen to perspectives gained through the prism of history. In scores of interviews, they have helped me reconstruct an unobserved phenomenon that forever altered baseball’s twentieth-century narrative.
The Yankees of 1990 were treated as a wasteland by the baseball community. But surreptitiously, the quietest of revolutions was taking place, an uprising that would conquer every unsuspecting opponent in the sport and install a new ruling force in baseball for years thereafter.
It is the dynasty no one saw coming, spawned by the worst teams in New York Yankees history. It was a time when a phoenix rose unforeseen from the ashes.