History of the World Series – 2000

History of the World Series – 2000

By Michael Knisley
The Sportng News

“You’ve just got to tip your hat to them. They get out there, and they get after it. They get it done. They play good, sound, fundamental baseball. They do all the little things, and that’s what it takes to win championships. Not that we didn’t, but there are some places along the road where we stumbled a little bit. They do what it takes. They did what it takes.” — Mets pitcher Turk Wendell

Something about the Yankees rings the same bell year after year. Wendell may not realize it, but he’s tapping into a baseball tradition that’s become as predictable as the seventh-inning stretch, the ceremonial first pitch and World Series games ending so long after midnight that even the vampires are tucked back into bed before the last out is made.

The Yankees are world champions now for three years running and for four out of the last five. That’s a truly remarkable feat in this era of free agents and tiered playoffs. Because players have the freedom to change teams now and because a World Series winner needs to beat three clubs in October now to finish on top of the heap, the Yankees’ string of titles looks more formidable than the Oakland A’s three straight from 1972 to ’74, the last time a team was this dominant.

In fact, Yankees manager Joe Torre makes a case, a strong case, for the 1996-2000 Yankees’ being baseball’s best team ever, and any counter to that argument isn’t going to be entirely persuasive.

So the team wins consistently. But it’s the consistency of the way it wins that really distinguishes the Yankees. You score one; they score two. You throw a play away; they make you pay. You get picked off first; they snuff your rally. It happens over and over and over, and it happens year after year after year.

It happened to the Mets almost exactly as it happened to the Braves in 1996, to the Padres in 1998 and to the Braves again last season.

The Mets put up a bold front in their five-game loss. They lost four games by a total of five runs. Every game was in doubt until the very end. A break here, a break there and maybe the overall outcome would have been different. Todd Zeile, for instance, came within a total of perhaps two inches of hitting two home runs, but instead wound up with a double and a long out in Games 1 and 2. The Mets lost both games by a single run.

Yankees shortstop and Series MVP Derek Jeter simply may be practicing Subway Series diplomacy, but he sent kudos in the direction of Shea Stadium when he said, “We made it look easy in three out of the last four years, but this one was a little bit of a struggle for us. It’s been up and down. It seems like it’s been one continuous game. I haven’t slept in a week.”

The Mets did manage to end two notable Yankee streaks. When they took Game 3 (by a 4-2 score), they stopped both the Yankees’ unprecedented 14-game World Series victory string and pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez’s personal postseason unbeaten record. He was 8-0 in nine starts.

Hey, it’s something.

And yet, as the Mets’ Wendell stood in front of his locker late last Thursday night and delivered his postmortem, his comments were practically indistinguishable from the analyses of other National League representatives who had fallen to the Yankees in previous years.

A season ago in a hushed visiting clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, Braves infielder Keith Lockhart said, “It’s hard to take anything away from that team. You can start to turn the tide just a little bit, and it’s like they just smell blood over there. They just keep battling and battling. You can’t just shut down one or two guys in their lineup and beat them. They’re all tough outs.”

In 1998 the appraiser was Padres right fielder Tony Gwynn and the scene was Jack Murphy Stadium, but the meaning of the words were the same. “Just as soon as you get the lead, they turn it around,” Gwynn said. “They get two and then three, and you’re in the hole again. So, yeah, it’s frustrating as hell.”

Even in 1996, when the Yankees dropped the first two games to Atlanta, they came back and won four straight and captured the Series, employing the embryonic stages of the modus operandi they’ve used over the last three seasons.

“Sooner or later,” said Braves general manager John Schuerholz back then, “somebody has to say to that team over there, ‘Well done, guys. You’re the champions, and your play and your fight and grit demonstrate that.’ I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m surprised and disappointed we didn’t win. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that those guys in the other uniforms over there battled their hearts out.”

It doesn’t seem to matter much whom the Yankees play in the World Series. All comers walk away shaking their heads. They all walk away in awe. They all walk away losers.

The Yankees have been doing this for so long that it’s almost as if they win by rote. Even their jubilation scene near second base after this year’s Series-clinching, 4-2 victory seemed more pure reflex action than true joy. They came running together in a teamwide huddle with the requisite jumping up and down, but none of them even hit the turf.

Several Yankees did hoist a visibly emotional Torre to their shoulders to carry him toward the dugout, but the on-field celebration was over almost as soon as it began.

Could be that they were too exhausted for more. Each game, as Jeter suggested, was close and tense, including Game 5, in which the Yankees didn’t score the winning runs until the top of the ninth inning. The pressure on both teams to win the first Subway Series in 44 years was draining. Lose to the crosstown Mets, and much of what the Yankees built over the last few years would be undone.

Could be, though, that this is just old hat to them, as it apparently is to much of the nation outside New York City. Fox’s ratings for the World Series were astronomical in New York but dreadful elsewhere, partly because of the length of the games, partly because of the provincial flavor and, probably, partly because baseball fans didn’t see much new from the Yankees this time around.

In some ways, the games played like a series of reruns, a too-familiar show already in syndication and playing in a late-night time slot. As close as each game was, the ratings were by far the worst in the 40 years the World Series has been televised.

This in a year in which Major League Baseball set a new single-season total attendance record.

In any event, these Yankees aren’t exactly an openly emotional bunch. They don’t readily provide the golden video moments, save maybe for Torre’s post-Series tears and Roger Clemens’ irresistible impulse to hurl a broken bat in the direction of Mike Piazza.

“This team is very low-profile,” said first-base coach Lee Mazzilli. “These are mild, low-key people. You get on a bus or a plane with us and you would not know if we won, 10-1, or lost, 10-1. We don’t get too high, and we don’t get too low. That comes from the Godfather in there (Torre), and it funnels down. They don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves.

“That’s just the experience we have. I think if the experience factor wasn’t there, if these guys hadn’t been here before, they may not have been able to make the adjustment from the regular season to the postseason. But when we enter the postseason, I can honestly say that we expect to win. It’s a confidence thing. This team believes. I mean, this is not a cocky team. They don’t pop off. They don’t talk much. They just believe.”

Winning is a learned behavior, and the Yankees seem able to call on the lessons they’ve learned whenever they come up against a postseason opponent who isn’t as familiar with the process — which, of course, by now is every postseason opponent.

As much as anything, that was the difference between the Yankees and the Mets.

The Mets, for instance, played charitably in Game 1, when they made four baserunning blunders that kept a 3-2 late-inning lead from being any bigger. Two of those mental errors were committed by young outfielders Timo Perez and Jay Payton, neither of whom had been in a major league playoff game until this year. When the Yankees tied that game in the ninth, somehow you knew they were going to win it. In the 12th, they did.

The Mets, who hadn’t been in a World Series in 14 years, essentially gave that one away. There was no give-back from the other dugout in any of the other meetings. After that first game and in the context of the Yankees’ past performances, the Series carried a sense of inevitability with it through closer Mariano Rivera’s two saves (he now holds the World Series career record with seven) and the Yankees’ two-run rally in the ninth inning that won the deciding fifth game.

It isn’t fair to say they play on autopilot because baseball is a very difficult, very cerebral game that demands concentration as well as physical tools. Nobody just goes through the motions and wins a World Series, and that includes the Yankees. Torre, a former National League manager, still knows the National League game and kept as much pressure on the Mets as possible with that style — hit-and-run plays, moving runners, manufacturing runs. It’s a good, exciting brand of ball.

But the Yankees are so efficient in October after October that at times it seems they’re sitting back in their seats with the cruise-control button pushed.

“I would say this club is one that knows how to win,” says Reggie Jackson, Mr. October himself and now a Yankees front-office employee. “They feel like, ‘If I get beat, I get beat. But I’m not going to lose.’ They don’t strike out at the wrong time. They don’t throw the ball away. They keep themselves close, and they bite and scratch and claw. The wrinkles go out of the uniform when you do that. This club understands that.”

The Yankees have done this so often in October that even the unpredictability of their offensive heroes is becoming predictable. It was Jim Leyritz in 1996, light-hitting third baseman Scott Brosius in 1998, reserve outfielder Chad Curtis in 1999.

In 2000 the incomparable Jeter was the World Series Most Valuable Player for his .409 batting average, his two key home runs and his sparkling play in the field. But Jose Vizcaino, obtained only for bench depth at midseason, collected four hits and drove in the winning run in the 12th inning of Game 1. And utility infielder Luis Sojo, cut by the Yankees last offseason and dropped even by the Pirates this year, accounted for the winning runs in both the fourth and fifth games.

All that said, we’ve probably seen the last of some of the core group of players that won those four world titles in the last half-decade. Even though at the end of the postseason the Yankees appear almost as invincible this year as they did in years past, they won only 87 regular-season games. Eight other teams won more than that.

Torre himself points out their good fortune to have played in the American League East. In either of the other AL divisions, an 87-74 record wouldn’t have even made them the wild-card playoff team. Nor would it have been good enough to qualify from the National League.

“If we were in a different division,” Torre says, “we’d have a pipe sent down to see daylight.”

And at that, they won a handful of regular-season games with little more than a wing, a prayer and Yankees mystique. They won on a phantom double play in Texas, on boneheaded baserunning by the Indians in Cleveland, on a bases-loaded walk in the 10th inning against Tampa Bay. In September they were abysmal. They lost 15 of their last 18 regular-season games and were taken to the limit in the first round of the playoffs by the A’s.

Joe Sparks, a scout for the Cardinals, watched the Yankees in the first two rounds of the postseason and was completely baffled by their September.

“All of a sudden they’re good,” Sparks said at the end of the ALCS. “Two weeks ago, they were worried to death about everything. I’ve watched them play two series now, and I can’t imagine those guys struggling at all. I can’t imagine them losing all those games. I think the big story is how quickly they went from being real bad to real good. There was no middle ground in there. I mean, you just don’t go from one extreme to the other like that, from playing awful to playing like I’m seeing them play now.

“I’m glad I didn’t write my report two weeks ago. If I did, I’d have to change it. I’d have said they were pushovers.”

The Yankees are what in the corporate world is known as a mature business. In other words, they aren’t going to get any better than they’ve already been unless they make significant changes. The front office knows that and knew it even before the 2000 season began. For the first time in recent years, the club purposely avoided negotiations with its potential free agents during the season, presumably to keep options open for major changes this winter.

Now, management is unencumbered by unattractive contracts to players such as Paul O’Neill (who is 37), David Cone (also 37), Dwight Gooden (36 on November 16), Jose Canseco (36), Glenallen Hill (35) and World Series Game 4 starter Denny Neagle, whose hold on a spot in the rotation is tenuous at best.

At the expense of some of those veterans, principal owner Steinbrenner and general manager Brian Cashman will work to free up the cash to sign some of the high-priced free agents on the market, primarily outfielder Manny Ramirez and either Mike Mussina or Mike Hampton, both pitchers. They’ll have to sign Jeter, who can be a free agent after next season, to a new contract, too, and after his performance in 2000, that contract likely will be worth considerably more than the $ 118 million, seven-year deal that didn’t get finished last spring.

The Yankees already are by far the highest-salaried team in the game, which likely is another factor contributing to World Series disinterest from the country at large. That isn’t going to change. The payroll will move in 2001, and the movement won’t be in a southerly direction.

Brosius may not be back at third, Chuck Knoblauch may not be back at second, and Tino Martinez may not be back at first. The Yankees have at least three prospects who probably are majorleague-ready in infielders Alfonso Soriano and D’Angelo Jimenez and first baseman Nick Johnson, who missed the 2000 season with an injured wrist but has begun hitting against live pitching again in Florida this fall.

And they’ll regain the services of two of their younger stars-in-waiting, left fielder Shane Spencer and starter/long reliever Ramiro Mendoza, both injured this season.

The Yankees may be back in the World Series again next October. But if they are, it will be with a decidedly different look than they took into the 2000 postseason. Ramirez replacing O’Neill in right field? Mussina replacing Neagle in the rotation? In the afterglow of their championship celebration, someone broached the likelihood of another championship with Steinbrenner.

“Isn’t this the end?” Steinbrenner was asked.

“Don’t bet the house on it,” he said.

“Well, then, how long can it go on?”

“I don’t know. I hope forever.”

That is not, it’s probably safe to say, the hope of the National League. Or Fox Sports.