The-uh-uh-uh Yankees Win!

By Roger Rosenblatt

"The Yankees cannot lose." "But I fear the Indians of Cleveland." --Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

No, of course I wasn't worried. Just because the Indians of Cleveland had the Yanks down 2 games to 1 in the American League Championship Series and stuck at unfriendly Jacobs Field for the next two games? Because the Yankee second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch, had decided to recall his Little League days in Game 2 by arguing with an ump while the ball lay on the field for 7 sec., allowing the lead run to score? Because even after the Yanks won Games 4 and 5, their Nos. 1, 2, 4 and 5 hitters were batting a barely breathing .164 and the whole team was batting .198? Because had it not been for walks, errors and pitching, this essay would be about the pride of Cleveland? What, me worried?

But oddly, the sloppy, scary pennant series with the Indians explains how the Yankees were able to do what they did all this remarkable year. John Sterling, the radio announcer, said it in his curious quaver 114 times: "The-uh-uh-uh Yankees win!" They have demonstrated that winning in baseball sometimes consists of perfect games and of grand-slam home runs, but more often of base stealing, of advancing runners in hit-and-run situations, of fouling off ball after ball until the pitcher gets careless, of studying the field like a botanist on every play, of watching and anticipating and thinking.

And please let me not hear from bitter Yankee haters who have spent their shriveled lives missing the Brooklyn Dodgers, or from Boston fans who make bad poetry of the beauty of losing. The Yanks did not lose a series for 23 regular-season series. They were leading in the game for 47 straight games. They outscored opponents by a total of 300 runs.

For personal heroics, there was David Wells' perfect game. There was the 12-game-winning "El Duque," born Orlando Hernandez, the young man and the sea, who paddled away from Cuba and Castro. And Shane Spencer, who descended from Krypton to hit three grand slams in September. Manager Joe Torre moved players in and out of the lineup all year, and no one ever complained about playing time. Since professional sports is almost wholly made up of prima donna billionaires (see the NBA lock-out), that is a rare achievement.

Torre is a picture of calm and brooding. His tired brown eyes seem to darken as a game progresses. One glimpses him in the dugout with pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre and general adviser Don Zimmer, whose Cabbage Patch grandfather face is all of baseball: part catcher's mitt, part kid. This trio forms a living argument for retaining the custom of dressing coaches and managers in players' uniforms. They confer and fret like 12-year-olds. How Torre managed to create a sum greater than its parts was evident in a small way in the fifth Cleveland game. After a couple of early bumps, Wells was sailing along with one out and nobody on in the eighth. There was no fissure that showed either in his mechanics or results: his fastball had not lost 1 m.p.h.; he was still hitting the corners; and he had struck out three in a row. To the mound walks Torre, which almost always signals a pitching change, since Stottlemyre attends to nursing and instruction. Wells, who understood his fate but naturally resisted it, told Torre, "I have something left. Send [relief pitcher Jeff Nelson] back." Torre smiled and said, "Go off and get your round of applause"--a wild expectation in Cleveland. Wells smiled too, walked to the dugout, and tipped his cap to the not entirely booing crowd.

What made the moment indicative of Torre's managerial competence was first that there was nothing overtly logical about his decision to remove Wells; he was simply following a pattern of using middle relievers that had worked in the past. Yet Wells took the decision amiably (it turned out to be correct). The huge, unkempt, Babe-Ruth-worshipping Wells, who is an emotional transparency, had an early-season run-in with Torre when he openly berated fellow players on the field for making an error. Torre informed Wells that teammates don't do that. From that point on, Wells has been a teammate.

Yankee fans have come to appreciate the ways their team makes gold out of lead. At the stadium they often function as a second Yankee pitcher whenever there are two outs and the official pitcher has two strikes on a batter. They rise, roar and clap to ride that third strike in. Indian outfielder Dave Justice showed less appreciation of the Yankee fans before Game 6, by telling reporters that New Yorkers could not get more menacing "unless they showed up with Uzis." True to their spirit of murderous fun, the fans did show up with Uzis, making posters with pictures of the guns to signify each of David Cone's strike-outs.

So it's on to the World Series. If it's poetry one wants, one may write a celebratory ode to a baseball field in New York City or San Diego, and the lights that blaze like a giant's necklace, and the stirrings of memory as the country stays young as long as possible into late October. For myself, I dream a scoreboard with Yankee numbers higher than other numbers, and a bunch of guys in pinstripes piling on their pitcher in the ninth, and a nutty voice on radio telling me the only news I wish to hear.