TDLibrary: The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty
You may have heard of Buster Olney as a frequent “contributor” to Fire Joe Morgan. Olney is a writer deeply entrenched in classical baseball stuff — Wins are important, OBP is dumb, VORP is something evil dreamed up by people who hate the sport. In fact, the only reason I read this book is because my buddy Hulse told me it was very good. The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty tells the story of Game 7 of the World Series… only if it was dramatized with Lost style flashbacks giving you history on all the Yankee players. Olney takes the game, describes it inning by inning, and describes the players in building the dynasty and, ultimately, how it ended.
If anything, I was pleasantlly surprised at how engaging it was. I’m not a huge fan of Olney and I’m not a huge fan of the Yankees, but Olney describes the game in a way that anyone who is a baseball fan can get into. Unlike most Met guys, I’m not an active Yankee hater — though frequent-commenter Doug tells me that I IMed him after this game to goof on him which I don’t recall, but I’ll take his word for it. I remember this game primarily because it was the first championship game of any sport that I watched in a bar. Previously, all World Series games were watched in a college dorm room. This was the only World Series that happened when I was at RPI and the school isn’t really known for its jocks. In fact, only one guy I knew there was a baseball fan of any kind. My friend Matt and I watched this game at Peabody’s, a bar known for (at the time) being the only actual sports bar in Saratoga Springs, having the best wings in town, and being the place where we went on an unprecedented 4-hour run at a pool table. The book describes the game in such a dramatized fashion that two things happen 1) You start thinking this might have been the greatest baseball game of all time and 2) I really, really wish I could watch it again. Oddly, I can’t find it in the Yankees Classics rotation on YES.
As someone who lived in New York outside the Yankee thing, it’s also a pretty good revisiting of just how good those Yankee teams were. Like, as he was describing the 1998 team, I had pretty much forgotten how absurdly awesome that team was. I had forgotten it had taken them until late May to lose their 10th game and that they’d run away with the division by mid-July. I’d also forgotten how agonizingly hard Mike Piazza crushed the ball that led to the last out of the 2000 World Series*.
I’d also kind of argue with Olney’s contention that this particular World Series was the end of the dynasty. The Yankees would go on to win the division every year until 2007. I think you could successfully make the argument that the dynasty ended with Josh Beckett and the Marlins in 2003 or, even worse, with The Comeback in 2004. For artistic reasons, I understand why he chose this game — neither of those elimination games were particularly dramatic. In 2003, Beckett just made them look bad in game 6. In 2004, the doors were blown off game 7 by the 3rd inning. Only in 2001 did you have the added drama of most of the dynasty guys (Scott Brosius, Paul O’Neill, David Cone, etc) still on the team and playing in their last game, a gem of a game from both Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, a team full of guys who were not expected to do much against this juggernaut, and, most damning, the best closer of our era giving up a crap hit to sneak in the winning run.
Recommended if you’re not a Yankee fan.
—-
* - cheated