The Greatest Ever?

By Joel Stein

It's not going to be easy explaining to your grandkid that the 1998 Yankees were the best team ever. It will be difficult to recount the starting lineup. After looking it up, you'll have to report that their World Series MVP was Scott Brosius, a guy who looks like he should be fixing your computer. None of the players were the best in their position in the American League. Tino Martinez wasn't even the best Martinez (Pedro, Boston). Or the second best (that would be Edgar, Seattle). No, Timmy, that wasn't the year Reggie Jackson was on the team. And Mark McGwire played for somebody else. As did Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey, Barry Bonds, Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens. Your best bet is to try to distract Timmy with candy. In the future, candy will be even better.

If pressed, go with the morality lecture. Though we talk about teamwork and selflessness, we don't find that stuff exciting. We prefer individual stars. The truth is, we're a Rambo culture that talks a Saving Private Ryan game. We're a republic that turns out only for presidential elections. We lured Ginger out of the Spice Girls.

We are so unaccustomed to actual team spirit that manager Joe Torre, after the Yankees won their championship on Wednesday night, awkwardly called them "a great team team." They were. Every single player contributed, big time. While most good teams have three solid starting pitchers and a rotating journeyman, the Yankees had six great starters: David Wells, David Cone, Andy Pettitte, Orlando Hernandez, Hideki Irabu and Ramiro Mendoza. Their bench could have beaten other teams. The Yankees, in contrast to the attention-grabbing McGwire-Sosa home run race, got wins and bad Nielsen ratings by playing "small ball": by massaging the first run over the plate, and then another and another. Batters patiently waited for hittable balls and forced pitchers deep into the count. Coaches stressed on-base percentage over home runs. Everyone played crisp, robotic defense and opportunistic offense, waiting for the other team to make a mistake.

The Yankees nibbled their way to massive leads, 50 come-from-behind victories and a league record 114 wins in the regular season, with a .714 winning percentage. Then in the play-offs, facing better teams, they improved, at 11-2, to an .846 winning percentage. This team can find competition only from earlier Yankees: in 1936-39, or Babe Ruth's 1927 squad. But those teams were whites-only, shielded from the dominant players of the Negro Leagues; today's players comprise the best of the entire world: blacks, Hispanics, Japanese pitchers who can't speak English, the entire Dominican Republic. Athletes are paddling over in rafts to be in this league.

This year's champions were not really Yankees. Yankees are Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson. Yankees are guys who like nothing better than hitting home runs, except for talking about hitting home runs. Yankees don't understand strategy because they're too good, too lazy and too drunk to bother. Yankees don't steal bases, paint the corners or run out routine grounders. And Yankees never, ever avoid the media. Of his team, Torre says, "They all want to get the game-winning hit, but they don't want to talk about it." These aren't Yankees. These guys are likable.

These Yankees didn't even make it to the top of most SportsCenter highlights. After all, what would you show them doing? Executing a perfect rundown? Shifting the right way in the outfield? Laying down a really neat bunt?

The 1998 Yankees' one great moment was pitcher David Wells' perfect game, in which not one of the opposing Twins got on base. This was an individual accomplishment for which Wells had to rely heavily on teammates: an error, or even a weak effort, would have ended it. But many fans who saw the game of a lifetime weren't there because of the Yankees; the game was sold out because it was Beanie Baby day. The Yanks' starters couldn't even get in fights alone; their two bench-clearing brawls--one with the underperforming Orioles and one with a frustrated Toronto club--were dominated by guys off the bench. All the players shared time and didn't complain. They're not fun to write about.

At the beginning of the season, they were. They lost the first three games, and the press went nuts, digging up the statistic that no team ever had lost the first four games and then won a World Series. Shortly thereafter, a giant expansion joint crashed down in Yankee Stadium, forcing the team to play temporarily at Shea Stadium.

Then it came together. Joe Torre treated his players with dignity, something few NBA coaches have figured out. After a David Wells tirade against a fellow player for a botched play, Torre calmly explained to the brawling, beer-swigging pitcher that he owed his teammates an apology. Even at the very end of the season, when they were embarrassing the Padres in the Series, there was catcher Joe Girardi, squatting on the field while pitchers nailed his body with wild throws that he could block only with his body--a practice drill-hazing ritual that most catchers perform only during spring training.

The team did have lots of that heart tugging. Several of the players' parents were in the hospital: Brosius' dad with cancer and Pettitte's with heart trouble. Yankee fans rallied around Wells after he suffered "your mama" jokes from opposing fans who didn't realize that his mother had recently died. Strawberry, the recovering troublemaker, was hospitalized with colon cancer in the middle of the play-offs. So everybody stitched his number on their hats, even ex-teammate Jim Leyritz, who played on the opposing Padres. Hernandez pitched his first American season after paddling on a boat to escape from Cuba. His family was permitted to leave Havana for a ticker-tape parade in New York City. Even Fidel Castro is a softy for this team.

Still, the 1998 Yankees are a hard story to tell, because when talented individuals actually fold themselves into a group, it's harder for their personalities to shine. To be sure, Derek Jeter, the previously Mariah Carey-dating shortstop, seems kind of slick, and Paul O'Neill has a warrior self-hatred thing, banging into walls and throwing down his helmet whenever he grounds out. And Shane Spencer, a lifetime minor leaguer who was called up at the end of the season to hit a barrage of grand slams, seemed like the Natural. But this team kept even Strawberry and Wells politely restrained. They got the ridiculously self-monikered Rock Raines to go back to Tim Raines. None of them wanted to take the microphone during the ticker-tape parade, not even Wells.

They're just low wattage. Bernie Williams, the most talented member of the ball club, is a jazz-guitar player in a rap world. He's a nice guy, but he's not exactly being courted by William Morris agents. When Bruce Springsteen visited the Yankee clubhouse toward the end of the regular season, he gave Williams a signed guitar. When reporters asked Williams if he had given Springsteen an autographed ball in return, Bernie had to tell them that Springsteen hadn't even asked.

And Williams is probably not coming back. Like most great teams in the era of free agency, the Yankees could be broken up and sold for parts. Maybe that's why, in the locker room after the team clinched the Series, widely reviled owner George Steinbrenner provided one of the most frightening moments on network television: standing in his white turtleneck and double-breasted blue suit, his voice cracking, he tried to force a tear.

So just tell Timmy that baseball, for once, showed people how to live. While America's leaders disgusted them and the economy frightened them, they got a wholesome epic. McGwire and Sosa congenially ribbed each other into amassing 136 home runs while Cal Ripken ended his fantastically mundane consecutive game streak by silently slipping away because it was time to let someone new have a turn. And the Yankees played hard, worked together and won a lot of ball games. We got everything we wished We hope, when you tell this story, America won't need baseball as badly as it did in 1998.