The article, ‘The 98 Yankees: Greatest season, but not greatest team‘ by Michael Knisley, originally appeared as the cover story in the Nov. 2, 1998 issue of The Sporting News.
While the champagne-soaked jamboree to fete the Yankees’ latest World Series championship swirls around the visiting clubhouse at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, “The Straw That Stirs the Drink” stays in a hallway and watches the scene unfold some 15 yards away.
The revelry Reggie Jackson sees, while certainly joyous and heartfelt, can hardly be called spontaneous, since this 24th World Series title for the Yankees has been a fait accompli, or so it seems in retrospect, almost from the time New York broke spring training in Tampa late last March.
The Yankees were such a sure thing this summer that they could have been icing down the 1989 Perrier-Jouet Brut Fleur de Champagne, with which they celebrate on this occasion, as early as the end of May when they were already 37-13 and had a 7-game lead over the Red Sox in the AL East. The Padres might win a game or two of the World Series with a different bounce of the ball here or there, but there is never any question that the Yankees are deeper, more balanced, more inventive and, simply, better than San Diego.
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That they sweep the Padres in four games — and wind up with 125 victories, including the postseason — should surprise no one. And so at the end of this remarkable season, the winningest season any baseball team has had in any of the 123 years that major league baseball has been played, Reggie stands a little to the side of the clubhouse merrymaking and with a certain detachment, parries questions about the place in baseball history that the 1998 Yankees ought to occupy.
Are they the best ever? This drink, Reggie chooses not to stir.
“Wherever they fall in history, let time decide,” says Mr. October. “But 125 games, man. That’s a number. They put up a mark. It’s really fantastic. I mean, here’s a team that will go down at the least as having one of the greatest years in baseball. At the least. But let the historians decide where they’re going to fall for greatness.”
In this business of weekly journalism, we don’t often think of ourselves as historians. But on one very important level, history is what we do. That’s especially true at The Sporting News, which has chronicled the events of baseball since 1886.
Reggie may not be thinking about us when he invites the “historians” into the judgment of these Yankees’ accomplishments; but in fact, there may be no better source authority with which to gauge them than TSN’s archival memory bank of yesteryear’s great teams.
So we accept his invitation to decide the merits of the ’98 Yankees next to the best of baseball’s past, understanding that judgments such as these ought never be thought of as a fine science.
Baseball teams in 1998 aren’t constructed in the way that baseball teams were put together in, say, 1927, so the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig Murderers’ Row Yankees from 71 seasons ago aren’t going to provide an easy matchup chart for any comparative analysis. For that reason, science and math aren’t of much use to us here.
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Rather, when we identify four of the top teams in baseball history and find that the ’98 Yankees are not quite their equal, we’re taking our conviction beyond statistics and matchups.
We’re factoring in Reggie’s suggestion, too. We’re factoring in what time will decide about them. And time won’t be as kind to the marvelous Yankees of ’98 — through, really, no fault of their own — as it has been to those four others.
It isn’t likely, for instance, that a player 70 years from now is going to have a sense of the ’98 Yankees that is anything similar to the sense that a player today has of the ’27 Yankees. We find evidence of that even in the New York clubhouse last week, when none of the newly crowned champions of the world — as good as they know they are — lay claim to the title of best-ever.
Among the best, yes, they agree to that. But to a man, they stop short of the hubris to call themselves the greatest of all time, despite their record number of wins overall.
“When I think of the ’27 Yankees,” says Joe Girardi, one of the catchers for the ’98 World Series champs, “I think about guys hitting homers every time up. This team was not like that. This team produced runs. We had to do some different things to produce runs. It seemed like the ’27 Yankees, every time somebody came up, they hit a homer. And they didn’t have closers back then. I mean, they just had starting pitching. The way it’s been explained to me, if you weren’t good enough to be a starter, you were in the bullpen. Now, everything is specialized.”
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The ’27 Yankees, who swept the Pirates in the World Series, naturally, are one of the four greatest baseball teams of all time, in our judgment.
They are joined by the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, who won 104 regular- season games and beat the Cubs in a five-game World Series; the 1961 Yankees (109 regular-season wins), who swamped the Reds in five games in the Series; and the 1976 Cincinnati Reds (102 wins during the regular season), who in turn swept the Yankees. The ’76 version of the Big Red Machine was chosen over the ’75 Reds, who won six more games during the regular season but needed seven games to beat Boston in the World Series.
| 1998 | 2026 |
|---|---|
| 1. 1927 Yankees | 1. 1927 Yankees |
| 2. 1976 Reds | 2. 1998 Yankees |
| 3. 1929 Athletics | 3. 1939 Yankees |
| 4. 1961 Yankees | 4. 1970 Orioles |
| 5. 1998 Yankees | 5. 1976 Reds |
Two of those teams, the ’27 Yanks and the ’29 A’s, played when major league baseball was solely the domain of white players, which immediately undercuts the validity of any effort to evaluate the levels of talent between those teams and the ’98 Yankees.
Nor would it be fair, anyway, to fiddle solely with statistics to make a case either for or against a contention that the ’98 Yankees (114 regular-season wins and another 11 in the postseason) are the best team ever.
The ’27 Yankees, as an example, hit 158 home runs, small potatoes next to the 207 hit by this year’s World Series champions. But all those home runs in 1927 (Ruth hit 60 and Gehrig had 47 with 175 RBIs) came in a transition year between the “dead ball” era of the early part of the century and the juiced-up baseballs that became a constant in both leagues by 1930 or so.
Further complicating the issue is the caliber of competition those teams faced at their particular points in baseball’s time line. This season was an expansion year, which diluted in some measure the concentration of talent that the ’98 Yankees faced across the American League and baseball as a whole. Would they have won 114 games in an American League made up of only eight teams, even if those eight teams were exclusively white? It’s impossible to know and silly to conjecture.
Give the 1999 Yankees a Vaughn and a Johnson or a Kevin Brown, all of whom are free agents, and another 125 wins, and we’ll call them the greatest team of all time.
The same caveat must be applied to the great 1961 Yankees team led by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, which had the expansion Los Angeles Angels and the newer incarnation of the Washington Senators on its schedule.
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Nonetheless, we fully expect someone — more than one, probably — to respond here in the next few weeks with detailed computer printouts to back up these ’98 Yankees as the greatest of all baseball teams. Or with well-thought-out theses that attack our logic and methodology in denying them that distinction. We welcome it.
That sort of give-and-take is part of what makes our world go ’round. So bring it on.
All four of the teams we’re putting ahead of the ’98 Yankees already have weathered the tests that time administers to applicants for greatness. A big part of those examinations is the shelf life of their stars.
Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Hoyt, Combs, Pennock from the ’27 Yanks.
Foxx, Simmons, Cochrane, Grove from the ’29 Athletics.
Mantle, Maris, Ford, Berra from the ’61 Yankees.
Morgan, Bench, Rose, Perez, Foster from the ’76 Reds.
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The legacy of the ’98 Yankees, who quite likely will fade into baseball’s annals without sending a single player to the Hall of Fame (shortstop Derek Jeter is the most promising candidate, but he has played for only three seasons), will simply be a number: 125.
But that’s a hell of a number. We certainly don’t dismiss 125 wins against only 50 losses.
Think of the game in its entirety as a pie chart. The Yankees’ ability to play well in nearly every aspect of it covers a greater portion of the pie than any team we remember. They get the most out of the game.
“When I was at Detroit with Sparky Anderson, he used to tell me he didn’t need to have a bunch of .300 hitters to win,” says Bill Lajoie, the Atlanta scout who prepared the report on the Yankees for the Braves in anticipation of a World Series matchup. “He always said he could get runs if he had guys who hit .260 and could hit behind runners and move the ball on hit-and-runs and just make contact. He could get people across the plate that way, as long as he had unselfish players who would do those things. That’s what the Yankees have.”
That’s the way to win 125 games. But it may not be the way to go down in history as the greatest team of all time.
Not a single member of the 1998 Yankees was elected to start in the All-Star Game, although lefthander David Wells was named the starting pitcher by American League manager Mike Hargrove of the Indians. By that benchmark, the real stars of the game, the ones whose names may survive well past their days in uniform, are playing for other teams.
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New York’s front office seemed to understand that when it made an unsuccessful bid to acquire the Mariners’ Randy Johnson just before the trading deadline at the end of July. At the time, the Yankees were 76-27 (a winning percentage of .738) and 15 games up on the Red Sox. Even during the World Series sweep and an 11 -2 breeze through the postseason, rumors bubbled up, and weren’t squelched, that Boston first baseman Mo Vaughn may be headed to New York via free agency this offseason.
Give the 1999 Yankees a Vaughn and a Johnson or a Kevin Brown, all of whom are free agents, and another 125 wins, and we’ll call them the greatest team of all time.
Girardi’s sense of the greatness of the ’27 Yankees has been shaped by what time has decided should be remembered about them: the home runs.
Time forgets that in their Series sweep of the Pirates, the Bronx Bombers hit only two home runs, both by Ruth.
The ’98 Yankees hit six home runs in their sweep of the Padres, two of which came at critical junctures. Tino Martinez hit a grand slam in the seventh inning to win Game 1 for New York, and Scott Brosius, the Series’ most valuable player with a .471 batting average and six RBIs, hit a decisive three-run home run in the eighth inning of Game 3.
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During the regular season, eight Yankees hit 15 or more home runs, and 10 players hit at least 10 homers. But none of them hit as many as 30. There was no Ruth or Gehrig, or Mantle or Maris, or Jimmie Foxx or Al Simmons from the ’29 A’s, on this team.
More than home runs, the lasting characteristic of this year’s Yankees is the variety of methods they used to win. In the World Series clincher against San Diego, for instance, they beat a series of high choppers into the ground for infield hits and scored their three runs on a groundout, a single and a sacrifice fly.
This was not a Murderers’ Row, but a lineup of something closer to white-collar criminals in the way they finessed the opposition. Maybe an Embezzlers’ Row.
“You look back on it,” says Padres hitting coach Merv Rettenmund, “and playing them is a little like playing against Greg Maddux. You know, you feel pretty comfortable against them. You just don’t end up doing very much.”
We find the ’98 New York club even hard for inveterate Yankee haters to despise. Lord knows, few baseball fans straddle the fence when it comes to the Yankees. Until this year, you either loved ’em or loathed ’em. But while this bunch of players and coaches, as well as the manager, killed you just as dead as the good Yankees teams of the past did, they did it with a workmanlike restraint that engenders admiration, if not affection.
That sentiment might even extend as far as the owner’s office, from where George Steinbrenner managed to low-profile his usual bluster for most of the season.
“I think this is a very professional group that over 114 wins never bashed anybody’s head or danced on anybody’s grave,” says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. “They went about their business. They demonstrated respect for the other players, and I think they all recognized that every team had a chance to beat them.”
That, too, may keep the ’98 Yankees from being remembered for the sort of panache that attaches to the ’27 Yankees, the ’29 A’s, the ’61 Yankees and the Big Red Machine teams of the mid-1970s. If you aren’t going to be dazzled by their statistics, you at least want a little swagger from your immortals, and this team didn’t have it.
The Yankees simply played smart, efficient baseball.
Years from now, baseball fans may remember Brosius’ game-winning home run against Padres closer Trevor Hoffman in Game 3 of the World Series, but they won’t recall the particulars of Brosius’ genius, counterintuitive approach to that at-bat.
Hoffman led the majors with 53 saves and posted a 1.48 earned-run average in 1998, and he did it with a devastating changeup, his out pitch. Hoffman sells the deceit in a changeup, which looks like a hare out of the pitcher’s hand but reaches the plate at the pace of a tortoise, more convincingly than anyone in baseball. At some point in any critical at-bat against him, a hitter knows he will see Hoffman’s changeup. Most hitters take their best swings at it because it’s the one pitch they can anticipate, even if the odds of hitting it haven’t been so good.
“Brosius did it the other way,” says San Diego’s Tony Gwynn, one of the best hitters of our generation. “Hoffman threw him a couple of changeups, and Brosius wouldn’t bite. Then Hoffy threw his fastball, and he took a good hack and hit it out of the park. When you see that you have to appreciate the job they’ve done. I saw it from them all Series long.”
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Gwynn continued: “You watch those guys long enough and you begin to wonder. What’s the formula? What is it you have to do to beat them? I’m still wondering. You know, it’s not very often that you get to play against a club that just does everything well. They don’t overwhelm you with their talent I mean, individually. But when you put them together, man, it’s tough. The pieces fit. Yeah, it’s frustrating as hell.”
Frustrating, we suggest, in the same way it was frustrating for Gwynn to play the Tigers in the 1984 World Series.
That was one of those Sparky Anderson teams chock full of unselfish players who found ways to win without a lineup of dazzling stars. Those Tigers had only one hitter over .300 (Alan Trammell at .314) and one slugger over 30 home runs (Lance Parrish at 33), and no pitchers with 20 victories. Jack Morris won 19, and Dan Petry and Milt Wilcox won 18 and 17, respectively. Detroit won 104 times in the regular season and finished 15 games ahead of the second-place Blue Jays, then beat the Padres in a five-game World Series. But that team, while certainly a powerhouse, isn’t remembered in a class with these other four.
The Yankees who just won the World Series will find a place in history’s amorphous ranking of great teams on a level higher than the 1984 Tigers.
But if time is the ultimate umpire here, then the ’98 Yankees are destined to be remembered with something just less than the reverence accorded the ’27 Yankees, the ’29 Athletics, the ’61 Yankees and the ’76 Reds.
In the bubbly-drenched clubhouse at Qualcomm Stadium, we make one more run at Reggie in the search for perspective. What, we ask him, has time decided about the wonderful Oakland A’s teams on which he played in the early ’70s. Those teams won three consecutive World Series titles and featured three future Hall of Famers in Jackson, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers.
“Take a look,” he says. “Take a look at what it’s done for me. Take a look at what it’s done for any of the great players.”
Time made them … well, timeless. We don’t think that will happen to the 1998 Yankees. We think the greatest season of all time doesn’t necessarily make them the greatest team of all time.