Before anyone reads this posting, let it be known that I just hung a photograph on my bedroom wall of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig sitting on the dugout bench together in 1938. "The Iron Man and the rookie."
This photograph was the only piece of baseball memorabilia that survived a horrific kitchen fire in a house my wife Valerie and I owned in Spokane Washington, on January 8, 2007. Everything else I had hung on the walls of that kitchen, including my mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan, taken on the night in 1989 when he threw his 5,000th strikeout, was destroyed. But while picking through the soaked, charred wreckage of the completely-gutted kitchen, I found this photo of DiMaggio and Gehrig, which I had given my late father as a Father's Day gift some years earlier, lying on the floor in a corner. It was badly covered with soot, but salvageable. I cleaned it up, framed it and hung it over my dresser.
Why would I, as dedicated a Yankee-hater as ever stepped into a ballpark, want a photograph of Gehrig and DiMaggio facing my bed? Not hard, as Robert Graves once said. It's right and morally proper to hate and despise evil empires. And as evil empires go, the Yankees rank right up there with the USSR, which squandered 55 percent of its GNP on military hardware. The GNP of the USSR was probably about the same size as the Yankees' payroll.
But hating evil, as personified by people like Stalin and George Steinbrenner, is one thing. Respecting great players is something entirely else. And Gehrig and DiMaggio were great players. DiMaggio, in fact, might qualify as the third greatest player of all time, behind Ruth and Cobb, or Cobb and Ruth, depending on which side of that argument you're on.
'Nuff said. On to the fun.
I've been driving around reading about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for days, owing to the fact that I've been keeping Mike Vaccaro's marvelous book Emperors and Idiots, a history of that rivalry, in my car to give me something to do while waiting out Washington, D.C.'s innumerable (and endless) red lights.
While enduring page after page, chapter after chapter of Yankee strut and swagger and Red Sox agony, I started thinking about the unfortunate, and not terribly accurate overall impression this creates for the average reader who doesn't know much about baseball but who, bombarded with Yankee propaganda from predominantly New York-based news media, is bound to get the impression of the Yankees as a team of unbeatable champions who never lose.
Well, the humiliation that the Red Sox visited upon the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series aside, (and it was truly, madly, deeply a humiliation; not just a defeat, but a crushing of Goliath's testicles by an insolently merry and disrespectful David) and by the way, the bluster of simian Yankee fans who never shut up about the Pinstripes' 26 World Series titles also aside, one intractable fact remains, and I'll go to the mat for it.
The Yankees have spent most of my life in a slump.
I was born in October, 1955. The very year, in fact the very month, that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally managed to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series after all those years of failure. The 1950s were the Yankees' decade, no question about it. Fortunately, not having been born until '55, I pretty much missed out on their glory days.
But, despite the much-vaunted 1956 Yankee "revenge" victory over the Dodgers in the following year, (in which Don Larsen pitched the perfect game which would be the last perfect game pitched by a Yankee until Larsen's fellow alumnus of San Diego's Point Loma High School, David Wells, did it in 1998) The End for the Yankee Dynasty was already in sight.
A premonitory flicker of The End occurred in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the World Series away from the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski's famous bottom-of-the-ninth home run in Game 7. It amazes me when I hear people like Billy Crystal, in Ken Burns' famous documentary film Baseball, talk about Mazeroski's home run as if it were somehow unjust, a case of lese-majeste against their eternally-entitled heroes. Au contraire. That was justice, Billy, not its opposite. That was those oh-so-reliable mills of the gods, grinding deliciously away at New York's trademark arrogance.
The Yankees did come back to win the World Series in 1962, against the Giants. That was the October I turned seven.
I took no notice of it. I was only seven, had just attained the biblical Age of Reason. I was even years away from even becoming a Yankee hater.
But that truly was The End, for a long time.
The Yankees would not win another World Series until 1977, the October I turned 22. 15 years. Not exactly a dynasty. In fact in 1966, the year I played shortstop for the South Bay Little League Shamrocks, the Yankees finished dead-last in the American League. Boston ended the season in next-to-last place, one game ahead of them.
The World Series of 1963 and '64, the first two October classics I was old enough to notice, framed the highly-just end of a Yankee dynasty that had begun in 1949, the year New York took the pennant away from Boston in a cliffhanger of a late season (see David Halberstam's Summer of '49, a truly great baseball book.) But by 1963 it was over. First the '63 Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deadly right-left pitching rotation of Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, throttled the Yankees in four games, and then the '64 Cardinals, fueled by the vicious right-hander Bob Gibson, vanquished them again. And then they were gone, the Yankees. Not to be seen again for a long time.
The Yankees would not even appear in another Series for 13 years.
They won the World Series in 1977, the year I turned 22. They won it again the following year when I turned 23.
They would not win the World Series again until the October I turned 41, 1996. In fact, the last Series in which they even appeared during that 18-year period was 1981, which they lost to the Dodgers.
From '81 to '96 they weren't even there. New York baseball in the 1980s and early '90s, as my book Three Flies Up points out, was all about the Mets. The Yankees were in the wilderness.
Under Joe Torre they had a flurry of successes in the final four years of the 20th century, winning four Series championships between 1996 and 2000. But do the math. I'm 53 now, and since I was seven, the Yankees have won the World Series eight times. Eight victories in 46 years. That's not a dynasty. That's not winning all the time. It isn't even winning most of the time. Yankee fans who gloat about 26 championships are mostly remembering the period from 1920 to 1962.
1962 was 47 years ago. John F. Kennedy was president in 1962. People were dancing the Twist in 1962. Women wore beehive hairdos in 1962.
1962 was a long time ago.
Now, let's move on and take a look at the 21st century, the only one that matters because it's the one we're living in now. The 20th century is history. Gone. Done. Ovah, as big-mouth, hot-air spewing New Yorkers say.
How many World Series titles have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?
Zip. Zero. None.
"What about 2000!!??" I hear Yankee fans screeching.
Sorry, no. Zero is not a positive integer. The new count begins with "1." The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st.
Now that we've settled that, ahem. I ask, how many World Series championships have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?
Zip. Zero. None.
How many World Series championships have the Boston Red Sox won in the 21st century?
Two.
That's Red Sox two, Yankees nothing. And that's not the score from a Thursday night pitcher's duel, that's the score over eight years of the new century. The new century that wipes the slate clean. They say that after the last pitch of the World Series is thrown, everyone is in last place again until next spring.
Ditto when a century turns. When a century turns, the team that blustered and boasted its way through the previous century, buying pennants because it had more money than some countries, is rated exactly the same as all the other teams. On January 1, 2001, everybody in baseball was in last place. No 21st century World Series rings had been handed out yet.
Since then, Red Sox players have earned two. Yankee players, none.
2004 was the annus mirabilis of the 21st century. It will be hard to improve on from the standpoint of good historical precedents. Because it was the year New York's mouth was slammed shut.
And until the Yankees win a championship in this century, it had better stay shut.
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