Yankees–Cardinals, 1964: The Rise of the Cardinals. The End of the Yankees Dynasty (for a little while, at least).
Cardinals–Royals, 1985: An all-Missouri World Series, a blown call that is still talked about today, lost tempers, and the Royals win their only World Series.
Yankees–Giants, 1962: So close, San Francisco, but the Yankees win again!
Senators–Giants, 1924: An old-time baseball classic with Game 7 going to extra innings. All-time great Walter Johnson enters the climactic game in relief and earns the win.
Cardinals–Tigers, 1934: The famed and colorful Gashouse Gang, huge underdogs to 101-win Detroit, take another World Series for St. Louis.
The Original
REGGIE JACKSON BECOMES MR. OCTOBER
When Reggie Jackson arrived in New York in 1977, many Yankee players didn’t think the team needed him. After all, the Yankees in 1976 had made the World Series, and even though they were swept in four painful games by the Big Red Machine that was the Cincinnati Reds, those Yankees had reached the World Series for the first time since 1964. It was the longest stretch a Yankees team had gone without reaching the championship since before Babe Ruth arrived in 1920.
But George Steinbrenner, the fiery, impatient owner of the Yankees, believed his team was missing an important piece. So instead of looking into the draft or a trade, Steinbrenner ventured into a new concept called free agency and signed the biggest fish in the game, Reggie Jackson.
Today, everyone is used to players changing teams when their contracts expire, but for one hundred years, baseball contracts didn’t exactly expire. They automatically renewed each year without the players’ consent, and that meant that a baseball player could never change teams by his own choice when his contract was up because, technically, his contract never ended. The only way a player could change teams was to be released or traded by the club that had signed him. It was an unfair system and baseball players were totally at the mercy of it. They had one choice: play for the team that signed you, or don’t play Major League Baseball at all.
All of that changed in 1975, when MLB was forced by an arbitrator to change its rules. It became illegal for players to be restricted to playing for one team only. After their contracts ended, players were now able to play for any team that wanted them, and after losing the World Series in 1976, Steinbrenner wanted Reggie Jackson.
Reggie Jackson had already been a champion. He was the offensive power of the great Oakland A’s teams that won three straight World Series titles from 1972 through 1974. He was a big talker who was completely confident in his ability to play baseball, and he let everyone know it. He was known for being so self-confident that even some of his teammates privately wanted him to fail, just to remind him once in a while to be humble.
Jackson, in so many ways, was the modern-day Babe Ruth: huge in personality, playing in New York, and brought to the city to restore its greatness. The Yankees had never even been to the World Series before Ruth arrived, and similar to the time of Ruth, just before Jackson joined the team, the Yankees hadn’t won the World Series in fifteen years.
Jackson immediately made enemies with virtually everyone. There was his enormous contract, the value of which no one in the sport had seen before—four years for $2.5 million. The core of tough, hard-nosed players on the Yankees, such as team captain Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, and Lou Piniella, didn’t like Jackson’s flashy style, didn’t think he would fit in, and didn’t think the Yankees needed him.
The team’s general manager, Gabe Paul, tolerated Jackson because of Steinbrenner, yet the manager, Billy Martin, made it very clear he didn’t want Jackson on his team. Martin went so far as ask Yankees management to trade Jackson—something he did more than once. Combined with Jackson’s huge personality, it was an explosive mix. Jackson knew people were jealous of his salary, but he didn’t care. He understood the power of New York and said outrageous things that somehow came true.
“If I played in New York,” Jackson said, “they’d name a candy bar for me.”
And they did. The Reggie! bar hit stores in 1977, just like the Baby Ruth had years back.
Jackson and Martin fought right from the beginning, and it didn’t help that the Yankees won only two of their first ten games, landing them in last place. Soon enough, though, the Yankees won games, and lots of them—eleven out of their next twelve.
Winning didn’t make life easier, though. It certainly didn’t help when Jackson gave an interview that insulted Munson, and the two ended up fighting like fifth graders at recess. Jackson also referred to himself in a magazine as “the straw that stirs the drink.” This made everyone in the clubhouse mad, because baseball is regarded as a team game, and it appeared that Jackson was putting himself above everyone else.
Things went from bad to worse: the Yankees eventually came back to earth and began losing games. In a particularly bad loss to Boston, Jackson and Martin got into a fight in the dugout on national TV and had to be separated by Yankee players and coaches. Everything was falling apart. Most people who had watched sports had seen periodic fights between teams, but these guys were on the same team!
But Jackson still had his flair for the big stage, just like Babe Ruth, and he hit a game-winning home run in Detroit in the eleventh inning that calmed things down, and the Yankees began soaring again.
The Yankees were winning, holding off Boston and Baltimore during the season, but Jackson had made few friends on the team. Martin and Munson still didn’t like him. Even as the team won, Jackson would sometimes think coming to New York had been a big mistake.
The Yankees wound up winning 100 games and the division. Yet winning the division wasn’t good enough. Only one thing, Jackson knew, would make all the negativity go away: coming up big in the playoffs.
The Yankees beat Kansas City in the American League Championship and were back in the World Series, this time facing their old rivals, the Dodgers. After five games, the Yankees led three games to two and headed home to New York with a chance to win the World Series for the first time since 1962. All of New York was watching. And after a season of talk and turmoil, all of New York was watching Reggie.
In the fourth inning of Game 6, with a runner on, Jackson launched Burt Hooton’s first pitch for a two-run home run, giving the Yankees the lead.
In the fifth inning, Jackson came up again, this time against Elias Sosa.
Sosa threw one pitch.
Jackson hit that pitch for another two-run home run. The Yankees led 7–3.
The next time Jackson came up, it was against Charlie Hough, the knuckleballer.
Hough threw one pitch.
Jackson hit it 450 feet to the moon, over the center field wall for another home run.
It was like something out of a movie. The fans were going crazy, shouting “REG-GIE! REG-GIE!” Jackson came out of the dugout and gave a curtain call, as if he were an actor on stage. Then he looked into the television camera and put up three fingers.
Three pitchers.
Three pitches.
Three home runs.
And the Yankees won the World Series.
Only one other man had ever hit three home runs in a World Series game—of course, it was the man in whose footsteps Jackson followed, the man who, like Jackson, had been a star and a champion before but made himself a legend in New York—none other than the legendary Babe Ruth.
Jackson was the first player ever to score ten runs in a World Series. He wound up hitting .450, with five home runs in the six-game series. For everyone who disliked him during the season, for everyone who was mad at him for his big talk, he had won them over.
Jackson had conquered New York and more. He’d made good on all of his crazy promises. Because of Jackson, New York was once again the center of the baseball world. The city had something it hadn’t had since Babe Ruth: a larger-than-life star on the field and of
f who did his loudest talking with his bat.
He was also given a new nickname: Mr. October.
Reggie did something else, too: he created a blueprint that every future big-money player, acquired either by trade or free agency, from Dave Winfield to Rickey Henderson to Carlos Beltran to Alex Rodriguez, would try to do—come to the big city and deliver a championship.
“I didn’t come to New York to be a star,” Jackson said. “I brought my star with me.” They say it isn’t bragging if you can do it, and nobody backed up big talk like Reggie Jackson, Mr. October, that night in 1977.
Reggie Jackson
TOP TEN LIST
Reggie Jackson’s three-homer game in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series revived the Yankees name and made Reggie a New York icon. In a sport full of them, here are ten more iconic and infamous World Series moments.
1954, Game 1: Willie Mays of the New York Giants robs Vic Wertz with an unbelievable catch in center field.
1975, Game 6: Boston’s Carlton Fisk hits a twelfth-inning home run to beat Cincinnati and force a deciding Game 7.
1932, Game 3: Fifth inning, Babe Ruth’s “called shot.” He pointed to the outfield and then hit a home run to the exact spot.
1988, Game 1: Bottom of the ninth, two out, Dodgers down a run to the A’s. An injured Kirk Gibson hits a game-winning, pinch-hit homer to beat Oakland, then limps around the bases.
1956, Game 1: Jackie Robinson steals home against the Yankees.
2011, Game 3: St. Louis’s Albert Pujols hits three home runs against Texas.
1968, Game 1: Bob Gibson is dominant, striking out 17 against Detroit.
1956, Game 5: Yankees’ Don Larsen throws the only perfect game in World Series history.
2012, Game 1: Pablo Sandoval hits three home runs. Giants beat the Tigers.
1986, Game 6: Red Sox–Mets: With the Sox one out away from winning the championship, Mookie Wilson’s ground ball goes between Bill Buckner’s legs for an error! The Mets go on to win the series.
“Don’t Give Us a Chance”
THE 2004 BOSTON RED SOX
To win a best-of-seven playoff series, one team has to win four games. By midnight after Game 3 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the New York Yankees demolished the Boston Red Sox 19–8 to take a 3–0 lead and climb one win away from going to the World Series for the second year in a row, no one in Boston would have minded if they just skipped the fourth game. Maybe no one in Boston would have cared if baseball had never been played again, ever.
For Red Sox fans, it was all too much: too much pain and not enough victory. The people of Boston were fiercely loyal to their beloved Red Sox—there was so much caring about the team, so many years of winning only to lose at the end, and often in the worst possible ways. Too many years invested, every summer of sun and hope and fun for as long as anyone could remember only to end in heartbreak. The worst part was that so much of the losing was to the same team: the hated Yankees.
They liked to call it a “rivalry,” but was it really? A rivalry is when one team wins one year, and the other wins the next. This Yankees–Red Sox relationship was more like the hammer and the nail—a whole lot of hurt in Boston at the hands of New York.
What was the point of continuing? The result was always going to be the same, because it hadn’t changed in more than a century. Even during years when the Red Sox were great, the Yankees were better. The Red Sox just couldn’t find a way to beat them. It wasn’t that the people of Boston stopped caring—it was that they cared too much only to have their hearts broken.
Fans had to go back—way back!—to a time before their parents and grandparents were born to remember when it wasn’t this way. The Yankees had beaten the Red Sox when Boston traded a pitcher named Babe Ruth to New York in 1920, and not only did he become the greatest player of all time, but the Yankees became the greatest team of all time. Before the Ruth trade, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series. The Yankees never even reached the series until Ruth arrived.
Then, from 1919 to 2003, the Yankees won twenty-six World Series. The Red Sox won zero.
When the Red Sox won 96 games in 1949, the Yankees won 97 and went to the series. The Sox would win 94 games the following season . . . but of course the Yankees won 98 games and again went to the series. In 1978 the Red Sox had a 14-game lead over the Yankees with two months left in the season. The Yankees would go on to tie Boston in the regular season and then beat the Sox in a one-game playoff to decide the division winner. The Red Sox went home, heartbroken, while the Yankees went on to win the World Series.
In 1994 Major League Baseball changed its playoff format. For the first time, a wild card team that failed to win its division would qualify for the playoffs. In the first five years of the wild card format, the Yankees and Red Sox claimed four of the five slots in the American League. This gave the two teams a chance to meet in the playoffs. It finally happened in 1999 when they met in the American League Championship Series. The result? The Yankees won in five games and went on to win the World Series.
The Yankees and Red Sox would go on to meet once more with the World Series on the line, in 2003. Despite finishing second to the Yankees in the American League East Division, the Red Sox believed they had the better team. This was to be a classic American League Championship Series. It went to seven games and only ended when the Yankees’ Aaron Boone hit a series-winning home run in the bottom of the eleventh inning, leading the Yankees to yet another World Series.
The 2004 Red Sox team was supposed to be different. They had to wait an entire year for the opportunity to get revenge. Now, here they were, exactly where they had envisioned themselves—playing the Yankees for another chance to get to the World Series. Yet they were now down 3 games to 0. No one gave them much chance to come all the way back and win.
For some reason, hours before Game 4 the next afternoon, near the home dugout at Fenway Park, Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar was in a surprisingly great mood. “All I’m going to say is, don’t give us a chance,” Millar said. “If they’re going to beat us, they better beat us tonight, because in Game 5, we’ve got Pedro going, and if we get that game, then we go back to New York. If we go back to New York, then all the pressure is on them, because they’ll know they have to win. If we go back to New York, that’s bad enough for them, because it’s not supposed to go back there. And if it gets to a Game 7, no way will we lose.”
Millar walked away. Meanwhile, Red Sox officials were talking about how the game was sold out but many people were trying to sell their tickets and were even having trouble doing that, because no Red Sox fan wanted to witness losing yet again to the Yankees.
The Yankees had Orlando Hernandez on the mound. Hernandez was one of the great playoff pitchers of his time. He had eleven postseason decisions and had won nine of them. The Yankees were in a good position.
New York jumped out to a 2–0 lead when Alex Rodriguez, considered the best player in all of baseball at the time, hit a two-run homer off of Derek Lowe in the third inning. Before the season had even begun, the Red Sox and Yankees had competed in a bidding war to acquire Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers. The Red Sox thought they had struck a deal with Texas, but then, at the last second, the deal was nullified. The Yankees swooped in, traded for Rodriguez and, in a different sort of contest, beat the Red Sox yet again.
Even down 2–0 thanks to Rodriguez, the Red Sox were far from ready to call it quits. Boston chased El Duque by scoring three two-out runs in the fifth, including a go-ahead two-run single by David Ortiz. But in the next inning, the Yankees took the lead right back with two runs and led 4–3.
It stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth. Three more outs and Boston would be finished. Another year, another gut-wrenching loss to the Yankees. Mariano Rivera, the great Yankees closer, the greatest closer to ever play, was on the mound. He had shut the Red Sox down in
the eighth and now faced Millar to start the ninth.
Then things began to change. Millar worked a walk, and was replaced by pinch-runner Dave Roberts, a speedy backup outfielder who had been acquired from San Diego late in the season. Roberts had one job: to steal second. When he took off, it looked like he would be caught. The throw by the catcher, Jorge Posada, beat Roberts . . . but he slipped in just under Derek Jeter’s glove: safe!
The next batter, Bill Mueller, the Red Sox’s third baseman, stepped to the plate and singled up the middle. Roberts came home to score and the game was tied, 4–4!
The Red Sox looked about to win the game right there. Mueller went to second on a bunt and then to third on an error, but Rivera regrouped and escaped without further damage.
The two teams went to extra innings. They remained tied until the twelfth inning, when David “Big Papi” Ortiz homered off Paul Quantrill, giving the Red Sox a 6–4 victory.
A great win, but still, winning Game 4 was just one game. The Red Sox could not lose again. They couldn’t afford any big mistakes or they would be going home. The great Pedro Martinez, maybe the greatest pitcher of his time, pitched Game 5 for Boston, while the excellent Mike Mussina pitched for the Yankees.
The Red Sox quickly scored two in the first, but the Yankees remained unfazed and came back to score four runs off Martinez, including three in the sixth inning, giving them a 4–2 lead.
But momentum began to shift the Red Sox’s way. Martinez had lost the lead, but with two on and two out in the sixth, Boston right fielder Trot Nixon snared a sinking line drive by Hideki Matsui that would have scored at least two more runs. Nixon’s catch kept the game within reach.
After a long season and the grueling extra-innings game the night before, the Yankees’ bullpen was weary. Nixon’s catch in the sixth inning grew even more important when Ortiz, who had won Game 4, hit another home run in the eighth to make it 4–3, cutting the Yankees’ lead to just one run. As the pressure mounted, Yankee pitcher Tom “Flash” Gordon walked Kevin Millar and gave up a single to Nixon, putting the speedy Dave Roberts at third base.
Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Baseball Page 10
