A Reluctant Tribute

Matt Bruce

Congratulations to the Yankees, but what more is there to say? A pretty good team wore down a less talented team that had out-performed it over the regular season. A group of champions stayed on top. A proud franchise -- you get the idea.

Major League Teams' Last Four Titles
Team	Last	Last 2	Last 3	Last 4
Yankees	2000	1999	1998	1996
Athletics	1989	1974	1973	1972
Dodgers	1988	1981	1965	1963
Cardinals	1982	1967	1964	1946
Reds	1990	1976	1975	1940
Tigers	1984	1968	1945	1935
Pirates	1979	1971	1960	1925
Giants	1954	1933	1922	1921
Red Sox	1918	1916	1915	1912
Braves	1995	1957	1914	1898
Cubs	1908	1907	1886	1885

Four championships in five years is no small feat. For all but one major league team, it's unheard-of. Only the Florida Marlins -- rather, only Sandy Alomar's home run against Mariano Rivera before he gained his aura of invincibility -- present any historical obstacle to a five-time dynasty. Again, this is something unheard-of for all but one franchise.

Yankees' Dynastic Runs
Year	Record	Result		Year	Record	Result
2000	87-74	World Champ		1953	99-52	World Champ
1999	98-64	World Champ		1952	95-59	World Champ
1998	114-48	World Champ		1951	98-56	World Champ
1997	96-66	Lost ALDS		1950	98-56	World Champ
1996	92-70	World Champ		1949	97-57	World Champ
				1948	94-60	3rd place
1981	59-48	Lost WS		1947	97-57	World Champ
1980	103-59	Lost ALCS
1979	89-71	2nd place		1943	98-56	World Champ
1978	100-63	World Champ		1942	103-51	Lost WS
1977	100-62	World Champ		1941	101-53	World Champ
1976	97-62	Lost WS		1940	88-66	3rd place
				1939	106-45	World Champ
1964	99-63	Lost WS		1938	99-53	World Champ
1963	104-57	Lost WS		1937	102-52	World Champ
1962	96-66	World Champ		1936	102-51	World Champ
1961	109-53	World Champ
1960	97-57	Lost WS		1928	101-53	World Champ
				1927	110-44	World Champ
				1926	91-63	Lost WS
				1923	98-54	World Champ
				1922	94-60	Lost WS
				1921	98-55	Lost WS

What makes the Yankees so good over time? Every New Yorker who doesn't root for the Mets, Dodgers or Giants could probably give a long, smug answer to this question. What makes them go bad every now and then? That's what the Player-Haters really want to know.

Before 1921, the men in pinstripes were just another American League team, staring up at the Red Sox and going home after the last game of the regular season. We all know what happened to change the relative fortunes of those two clubs. According to BaseballReference.com (the highly recommended source for all the data in this column), Mr. Ruth led the club in OPS every year but one from 1920 to 1932.

Ruth spent several weeks of the 1925 season in the hospital after he collapsed at the end of spring training. That year, his team finished in seventh place, its final sub-.500 season in 40 years. This would not be the last time that illness brought the franchise down to Earth: 1939, the final season in a run of four straight championships, was also the end of the career of one Lou Gehrig. Even then, the team won two more titles in the next four years.

Despite the presence of both Ruth and Gehrig, those early Yankees actually went seven years with "only" one World Series appearance. As the U.S. entered the Great Depression, two other temporarily great teams, the Philadelphia Athletics and Detroit Tigers, had their successive moments. After the Bronx Bombers had once dominated their opponents, the rest of the league caught up with the offensive explosion.

The manpower required for World War II brought the Yankees into brief parity, but the rest of the team's history features recurring patterns where it would innovate and then dominate until its rivals caught up. They were the undisputed kings of New York until the Dodgers rose up to challenge them in the late 1950s (the Yankees were still excellent then, as throughout 1949-64, but you've heard entirely too much about that era lately anyway).

They were the first team to take advantage of free agency, fueling their mini-run of the late 1970s. Then the rest of the league figured out how (and how not to) take advantage of the process, leading to the period of unprecedented competition that was the 1980s. Lately they were the first team fully to exploit the power of the base on balls in prolonging a rally. Money permitting, this is the path that Oakland hopes to take even further until the rest of baseball, yet again, plays catch-up.

One thing worth pointing out here is that free spending had far less to do with Yankee success than most people think. Anyone who religiously read Jim Bouton's Ball Four remembers how stingy his team was to him. Tom Yawkey, by contrast, showered cash upon the Red Sox, to no avail. Remember also that it was the CBS television network, flush with money, that bought the Yanks and drove them to their first long dry spell from 1965-75. (Are you paying attention, Fox Dodgers?)

Not that CBS is entirely to blame: Lean years will happen. This dynasty too shall pass. Remember how Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa rewrote the home run records in 1998-99? What did they do this year? Sosa led all of baseball with "only" 50 homers, one ahead of Barry Bonds and three ahead of the American League champ. Can anyone name the home run king of the Junior Circuit? Don't everyone answer at once, but it was none other than Troy Glaus.

Is this ebb and flow good for baseball? Undoubtedly. Greatness is as newsworthy as it deserves to be, then it fades and yields to other forms of greatness. When and where I was a kid, people cared much more about the 1985 Royals than about the 1978 Yankees or even the 1980 Royals. I can imagine raising my own children in a Yankee-free era some day, but if the team makes a run in their formative years, I'll think of it as a form of immunization.

Maybe the game would be better off if some other teams had broken the hegemony -- heck, the Marlins won it all, collapsed, and now are already good again. On the other hand, maybe baseball's history would be more complete had one of the 1980s Yankee teams broken through the logjam that was the AL East. We just don't know, because it didn't happen that way.

Instead, grudgingly salute the defending champs, acknowledge a level of greatness that stands out even for that franchise, and wonder just how unlikely they are to do it another time. They were on the brink of elimination just once this year, a game I attended (and will revisit without warning this winter). A few more teams will get a chance to slay them next year.

Imagine Nick Johnson 15 years from now, the longtime Yankee first baseman ("Nicky Baseball"?), finally playing in his first post-season series...

about the author

Matt Bruce recently built a shrine to Steve Balboni, hoping it will bring the Yanks as much success as Balboni himself once brought to the team. Suggest adding a Ken Phelps wing at mb@strikethree.com.