The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  “As this season went on, I got the disorienting feeling that I didn’t hate them anymore.”

  Then, this season, everything changed. Suddenly, the team had a warmth to offset its cold corporate determination. It had underdogs like Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, returning from exile for a shot at redemption. It had Joe Torre, a hometown boy with a wizened exterior but the hint of a tear forever in his eye.

  “There was just so much about this team that was so poignant,” said Leidner, 48.

  Like Leidner, the fans who rallied around the Yankees during their pilgrimage to the World Series were attracted not merely by the hoopla that inevitably attends an organization on a hot streak or the thrill of associating with champions. The Yankees became a sort of municipal soap opera and, in the end, a symbol of strength through diversity and triumph through tenacity for a city that likes to believe in both.

  “There is a fundamental difference between the way this team did it and the way the Chicago Bulls did it or the way Babe Ruth-era Yankees did it or the way mega-corporations do it,” former Gov. Mario Cuomo said yesterday. “They do it through sheer power and dominance and muscle. The Yankees this year went beyond body and muscle to soul.”

  Indeed, their victory was celebrated not only by people who knew exactly how good the moment would feel, but also by those who never anticipated they would care.

  “As this season went on, I got the disorienting feeling that I didn’t hate them anymore,” said Danny Greenberg, 51, who grew up loving the Brooklyn Dodgers, which meant hating the Yankees, “and I wondered if I was actually rooting for them.”

  Yankees Use Their Home Advantage

  By GEORGE VECSEY | October 1, 1998

  THE 114 VICTORIES DON’T COUNT ANYMORE, but they did one thing for the Yankees—they guaranteed that the extra game in the league playoffs, if needed, would take place in front of the most demonstrative fans in baseball. In typical New York self-involvement, the fans like to believe how important they are. They like to think they cause outfielders to stumble and umpires’ arms to jerk into a called-strike punch-out.

  “Those fans in right field are crazy,” said Shane Spencer, the instant idol, who whacked yet another home run in the Yankees’ 3-1 victory over the Texas Rangers in Game 2 last night. “Thank God I’m doing good.”

  Spencer was starting against a right-hander, Rick Helling, a task that Darryl Strawberry might have had except that Strawberry is undergoing tests for worrisome intestinal problems that have the Yankees concerned. (“Sure, cancer always comes to mind,” admitted Joe Torre, the manager.)

  In the meantime there are the fans, and there is Spencer. He also singled and scored a run, after taking a curtain call to please the crowd, which has been treating him like a reincarnation of Mickey Mantle. If they demand a curtain call, you’d better pop out of the dugout, arms waving.

  “I could hear them yelling, and I said, ‘Oh, here we go,’” Spencer said. “But Joe told me to go out there. If he says so, I will.”

  Scott Brosius, the third baseman, who hit a two-run homer last night, compared it to playing in the Metrodome, the Minnesota Twins’ dismal fabric bubble that holds the noise quite well. He said, “The dome is loud, but you just don’t see fans in other places standing up with two strikes on every batter.”

  Sun Sets on the Old Stadium

  By MANNY FERNANDEZ | September 22, 2008

  The final out of the last game at the old Yankee Stadium on September 21, 2008.

  THE NEW $1.3 BILLION YANKEE STADIUM SAT like a jewel of the South Bronx, its fresh concrete and gold lettering gleaming in the late September sunshine. But it was the old stadium across the street—85 years and 5 months old—that people swarmed around and snapped pictures of and stared at one last time.

  Matt Aquino, 48, who saw his first game there in 1964, told the story about the day he and his father watched Mickey Mantle hit a home run. His father set down his favorite Zippo lighter to pick him up so that he could see. The lighter was lost for good when they sat back down, and his father never let him forget it. He said he thinks about his father, who died 10 years ago, every time he returns to Yankee Stadium.

  Other stories poured forth from people outside the stadium who remembered some small, touching moment in the life of the hulking stadium. The Yankees played their last game there on Sunday night, and tens of thousands of people—fathers and sons, women wearing T-shirts proclaiming, “I was there,” children in Yankee pinstripes—converged to mourn the passing of what many of them considered sacred ground.

  It was perhaps a testament to the stadium’s pull that some fans did not even have tickets to the game. “I just wanted to say my proper goodbye,” said Robert Liebowitz, 48, a post office manager from Brooklyn. He sat outside, next to a placard he had made that listed his first game (June 11, 1967), last game (June 22, 2008) and hot dogs eaten (many).

  One man said they should have called the new stadium something different, anything but Yankee Stadium.

  “The new Yankee Stadium will never be like this one,” said another fan, Al Fekety, 46, of Staten Island. “It’s kind of like when you fall in love. You fall in love once, and you fall in love with one stadium.”

  Another Record: Mets Lose *116th

  By ROBERT M. LIPSYTE | September 23, 1962

  EVEN IN THE AUTUMN OF THEIR PATHETIC despair, the New York Mets cannot escape history. Each step and misstep seem destined to remain forever in the dusty recesses of major league archives.

  Yesterday, at the Polo Grounds, there were at least four such footnotes. They obscured the Mets’ 116th defeat, a dreary 9-2 drubbing by the Chicago Cubs.

  The saddest of the four is what Met officials disregard as a “negative statistic.” Al Jackson, one of the two best pitchers on the club, was clobbered for five runs on seven hits during the two and a third innings he pitched.

  The slim left-hander was charged with his 20th loss of the season in 28 decisions. This is the first time since 1936 that a National League club has had two 20-game losers.

  The second footnote, also negative, was predictable: The Mets have now lost more than any other National League club in this century. They are within one of tying the modern major league record of 117, set by the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.

  The third footnote is the happiest: Ed Kranepool, a 17-year-old husky recently graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx, made his major league debut, relieving Gil Hodges, at 38 the oldest Met, in the seventh inning. Kranepool batted only once, in the eighth, and grounded out.

  Footnote No. 4 was certainly the most memorable for the 3,744 fans. Richie Ashburn, who at 35 has played 14 seasons of distinction in various outfields around the National League, played an inning of glorious second base.

  It was his first time at any other position besides the outfield. It almost showed.

  Nelson Mathews, the first batter in the ninth, was struck by one of Craig Anderson’s pitches. He immediately stole second. Ashburn dropped Choo Choo Coleman’s throw, but he fell on Mathews, making further advance impossible.

  The next batter lined back to Anderson, the fourth Met pitcher of the afternoon. Anderson threw to Richie to double up Mathews, but Richie dropped the ball.

  Mathews went on to steal third and scored on Alex Grammas’s single for the ninth and last Cub run. Grammas, thinking Ashburn a pushover, lit out for second, but a fine throw from Coleman and a splendid tag by Ashburn erased his hopes.

  In the ninth, Ashburn doubled to right, proving his worth at any position.

  *In 162-game season.

  The Mets Trade “Tom Terrific”

  By JOSEPH DURSO | June 16, 1977

  IN AN ERA OF SUPERSTARDOM IN PROFESsional sports, when a basketball franchise totters if Julius Erving is traded, when a football franchise makes Page One if Joe Namath departs from Broadway—the baseball franchise of the New York Mets finally shook the firmament, too.

  Trade Tom Seaver? No Santa Claus? Yes, Virginia, the Mets went to t
he very brink and beyond in the “war” between their celebrated pitcher and the chairman of the board of directors, M. Donald Grant. It was one thing to trade away stars like Nolan Ryan, Amos Otis and Rusty Staub; to dismiss Yogi Berra, to get into a public quarrel with Willie Mays. But it was unthinkable to trade Tom Terrific, who had arrived in 1967 when the Mets were always finishing in last place and who led their climb to respectability and to the “impossible dream.”

  They ran dead last in five of their first six summers while they fixed themselves i n the public’s affections as warmly comical ragamuffins. Then, without warning in 1969, the year men walked on the moon, the Mets marched to the world championship—and George Thomas Seaver led the march, winning 16 games and becoming the first man on a last-place club to be voted rookie of the year.

  Three times he was voted the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the National League. Four times he pitched more than 20 victories in one season, including 25 in the year of the “miracle.” Five times he pitched one-hitters. He also could hit and field, and for a decade he reigned—proudly, even a bit pompously to some observers—as “The Franchise.”

  Even before the free-agent “revolution” last year, he became one of the leaders in the recurring labor wars between the players and club owners. He finally took the offensive against Grant by declaring that his first obligation was to his family and that he would play out his option unless the Mets paid more. Grant replied that Seaver was an “ingrate,” and Seaver’s private war was on.

  Mets Win the World Series, 5-3, And a Grateful City Goes Wild

  By JOSEPH DURSO | October 17, 1969

  Fans storm the field after the Mets capture their first World Series title in 1969.

  THE METS ENTERED THE PROMISED LAND yesterday after seven years of wandering through the wilderness of baseball.

  They defeated the Baltimore Orioles, 5-3, for their fourth straight victory of the 66th World Series and captured the championship of a sport that had long ranked them as comical losers.

  They did it with a full and final dose of the magic that had spiced their unthinkable climb from ninth place in the National League—100-to-1 shots who scrounged their way to the pinnacle as the waifs of the major leagues.

  At 3:17 o’clock on a cool and often sunny afternoon, their impossible dream came true when Cleon Jones caught a fly ball hit by Dave Johnson to left field. And they immediately touched off one of the great, riotous scenes in sports history, as thousands of persons swarmed from their seats and tore up the patch of ground where the Mets had made history.

  The deciding run was batted home in the eighth by Ron Swoboda, who joined the Met mystique in 1965 when the team was losing 112 games and was finishing last for the fourth straight time.

  But, like most of the Mets’ victories in their year to remember, the decision was a collective achievement by the youngest team in baseball, under Manager Gil Hodges—who had suffered a heart attack a year ago after the Mets “surged” into ninth place.

  The wild, final chapter in the story was written against the desperate efforts of the Orioles, who had swept to the American League pennant by 19 games as one of the most powerful teams in modern times.

  The ’86 World Series: Mets Win It, City Loves It

  By PETER ALFANO | October 28, 1986

  MOOKIE WILSON STOOD IN A CORNER OF THE Mets’ clubhouse, just enjoying the view. He has seen World Series celebrations before, the champagne being sprayed like a tugboat fire hose on the Fourth of July, joyous teammates hugging in a moment all baseball players dream about but few ever experience.

  “I know what it’s like to be in the cellar, to be at home during this time of year watching the World Series with a pizza and beer,” Wilson said of his early years with the Mets. “You have to give credit to the young guys on this club. They showed the world you don’t need 10 years’ experience and three in the playoffs to win.’’

  The Mets celebrated as a team. But to each player, the World Series championship had a special meaning. The Mets won 116 games this season, but the final eight victories in the National League championship series and World Series were excruciating.

  So Tim Teufel breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that the error that cost the Mets the first game of the World Series against the Red Sox, 1-0, would be a footnote overshadowed by the sixth and seventh games.

  Their comeback in Game 6 claimed a number of victims, even on the winning team. Darryl Strawberry was removed from the game in a lineup switch with the score tied because Dave Johnson, the Mets’ manager, could not afford to use another pitcher. Strawberry was angry in victory and said he did not think he could communicate with Johnson ever again.

  Strawberry said he still was hurt by the manager’s decision but will try to understand the reasoning. “Davey is a fine man and we just disagreed on some things,” he said. “I know I’m a clutch player, and after three and a half years here, I didn’t think that kind of thing could happen to me anymore. I’m just happy I could contribute that home run tonight. To hit one in a World Series is a great thrill.”

  Gooden Fans 16 And Sets Record

  By JOSEPH DURSO | September 13, 1984

  IN A DAZZLING DISPLAY OF VIRTUOSO PITCHing by a 19-year-old rookie, Dwight Gooden fired the Mets to a 2-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates, striking out 16 batters and hurtling past strikeout records set by Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan and Herb Score.

  The tall and taciturn right-hander from Tampa, Fla., overpowered the Pirates on five hits, gave no walks, pitched his second straight shutout and seventh straight victory and ended the evening with more strikeouts than any other rookie in history.

  He passed that milestone in the sixth inning when he struck out Marvell Wynne. It was his 11th strikeout of the night and the 246th of his brief career in the big leagues, and it broke the record set by Score for the Cleveland Indians 29 years ago.

  But there was more. By the time he had finished, Gooden had a total of 251 strikeouts in 202 innings in 29 games. He also had broken Ryan’s club record of 14 strikeouts by a rookie in a game, set in 1968, and Seaver’s one-season record of 13 games with 10 or more strikeouts, set in 1971. And he struck out more batters in a game than any Met pitcher in 10 years.

  “Sometimes, you think about it,” Gooden said later, in a rare touch of personal reaction. “You think about it going home, or lying in bed before falling asleep. You think, ‘Am I dreaming?’ It’s a great, great feeling.’’

  Gooden pitched his classic to a rookie catcher, Mike Fitzgerald, who rushed out to the mound when Score’s record fell as the crowd of 12,876 gave Gooden a standing ovation. “Congratulations,” Fitzgerald said. “Let’s not stop here.”

  Yanks and Mets Ready For a Wild Ride

  By BUSTER OLNEY | October 21, 2000

  Special “Subway Series” subway trains ran in October of 2000. The Yankees went onto to win the series, 4 games to 1.

  IT HAS BEEN 16,083 DAYS SINCE THE END OF the last Subway Series, when the Yankees shut out the Dodgers in the final game of the 1956 World Series, and a city is on edge. It has been five days since the Mets, who have lived in the shadows of their Bronx big brothers for most of the last decade, clinched the National League pennant. It’s been four days since the Yankees, the nearest thing to a dynasty that baseball has seen in a quarter-century, wrapped up the American League.

  “There is a lot of buildup,” Yankees pitcher David Cone said, “almost like a Super Bowl atmosphere.’’

  “There is a lot of buildup,” Yankees pitcher David Cone said, “almost like a Super Bowl atmosphere.’’

  Al Leiter, who started the last World Series game not won by the Yankees—as a member of the Florida Marlins, in 1997—will face Pettitte. The Mets’ Mike Piazza, the starting catcher for 124 games in the regular season, will be the designated hitter in Game 1, and Todd Pratt—who has had one at-bat in this postseason—will start at catcher.

  Pettitte is left-handed, and in explaining his decision, Mets Manager Bobby Val
entine said Pratt was the best right-handed hitter among his reserves. Pratt is generally considered a better defensive catcher than Piazza, who said, “I know I’ll get my action behind the plate before the series is over.’’

  Finding ways to beat Leiter and Mike Hampton, the Mets’ other left-handed starter, is what the Yankees must do if they are to become the first team since the Oakland Athletics of 1972, ‘73 and ‘74 to win three consecutive titles. The Yankees’ starting lineup will include three veteran left-handed hitters who can all hit left-handers, but Leiter held lefties to a .118 batting average in the regular season, the second-lowest figure in the last 25 years, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

  As the Yankees finished batting practice yesterday, some of the Mets filtered from their dugout and onto the field for their workout. Some coaches from the two teams chatted, and there were a few waves across the field by the players, but mostly, there was little contact. Second baseman Edgardo Alfonzo stood behind the cage, stoic, a blank expression.

  Why so quiet? “What do you think I’m feeling inside?” Alfonzo asked, his face splitting into a grin. “I’m about to play in my first World Series. I’m just trying to keep my emotions inside.”

  National Pro Football Title Is Won by Giants, 30-13

  By ROBERT F. KELLEY | December 10, 1934

  IN ONE OF THE MOST WILDLY EXCITING periods that any football game has ever seen, the New York Giants scored 27 points in the final session of play at the Polo Grounds to come from behind and defeat the Chicago Bears, 30 to 13.

  Trailing on the short end of a 13-to-3 score when the last quarter opened, the Giants roared through to an amazing victory while 37,000 fans went wild with excitement. Four times the Giants crossed the Bears’ goal line for touchdowns in that final period as they captured the national professional championship and toppled the Bears from the throne they have occupied since 1932.