The 1998 Yankees return to the Stadium: Ecstasy, meet agony
Darryl Strawberry looks at the video board during the 75th edition of Old-Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. Credit: Errol Anderson
As if the 2023 Yankees don't have enough self-esteem issues, Derek Jeter and the Core Four rolled into the Bronx for Saturday’s Old-Timers’ Day.
Headlining the festivities? A 25th anniversary celebration of the 1998 Yankees. You know, the guys with the World Series rings sporting the inscription “Best Ever.”
Put it this way: The timing of these particular Old-Timers could not have been much worse. This year’s last-place Yankees (70-71) had just kicked away their Hail Mary hopes of contention by virtue of back-to-back buzzkill losses to the Tigers and Brewers, again leaving them in very real danger of finishing with the club’s first losing record since 1992.
And who shows up on their 161st Street doorstep? Oh, right. The deified centerpiece of the late 1990s dynasty, as close to an undefeated team as you can get in baseball: 125 total wins, World Series sweep, Canyon of Heroes parade.
Fast-forward to the present-day Yankees, for whom success during this soon-to-mercifully-end road to nowhere is measured in Martian homers and Gerritt Cole polishing his Cy Young Award candidacy. We stopped keeping score a while back. But for the record, these Yankees entered Saturday trailing the first-place Orioles by 19 1/2 games.
No wonder general manager Brian Cashman picked this weekend to scout Japanese ace Yoshinobu Yamamato roughly 7,000 miles away in Tokyo. The only place farther from Yankee Stadium would have involved hopping a ride on one of Elon Musk’s rockets.
Cashman wasn’t going to step into that pinstriped lion’s den at the Stadium. And neither did Hal Steinbrenner, who was in the building for Saturday’s ceremony but chose to remain out of the public’s view. Both got a hint of what surely awaited them, however, when Aaron Boone was introduced for Old-Timers’ Day and his highlight reel was aggressively booed.
That’s a tough crowd, booing a walk-off homer that beats the Red Sox for a trip to the World Series. But the vibe surrounding the current Yankees oscillates somewhere between apathy and anger, two places you would prefer the fan base to steer clear of. Welcoming back the ’98 Yankees was akin to spraying lighter fluid on the dumpster fire this season has become, reminding everyone just how long ago those glory days were.
“What makes this organization great is the respect they have for history,” Jeter said. “And when you have as much success as we were able to have as a group, fans never forget it regardless of where you are. I run into New Yorkers every day and they’ll say 'thank you' for the championships that we won.”
Jeter collected five rings during his two decades in the Bronx. Incredibly, that includes the Yankees’ last trip to the World Series in 2009 — five years before he retired. They’re now on to Season No. 14 without sniffing the Fall Classic, a remarkable streak of futility that Saturday’s returning Yankees simply couldn’t relate to.
When history is the main attraction but you’re charging fans exorbitant prices to watch your daily failures in real time, that’s a big problem — one that Steinbrenner already has pledged to investigate this offseason. The Yankees may have 27 championships on their resume, but they’re raising a current generation of fans that know them only as the team that keeps losing to the Astros in October. The Giants have won three titles since ’09, the hated Red Sox two. Even the Royals and Nationals each got one.
Among the ’98 alumni on hand Saturday was David Wells, who was responsible for almost as much grief as glory during his Yankees tenure. Wells drove Joe Torre nuts with his antics but went 18-4 that season, pitching a perfect game and later being named ALCS MVP. Despite all the headaches Wells caused — he stayed on brand Saturday by covering his jersey Nike logo with tape (“too woke,” he said of the company) — the lefty agitator still talks regularly with Cashman and rallied to the GM’s defense in talking about the Yankees’ current malaise.
“Cashman is getting beat up,” Wells said. “It always seems that the GM and the managers are getting fired and getting blamed — and it’s the players. If you’re not doing the job out on the field, if I was the GM, I would start sending a message. I don’t care who it was — send him to Triple-A. Give him a wake-up call. They did it to a lot of us back in the day. I don’t care how much money you’re making.
“I think nowadays they coddle them too much. They baby them. And it’s up to your peers to make you better.”
Wells recalled how Jorge Posada slammed him up against a clubhouse pillar after both he and Roger Clemens bombed in back-to-back starts. But rather than get furious at his teammate, Wells got the point. Accountability was a common term used by returning members of the ’98 roster, but not something you hear as often these days. And it’s hardly a coincidence that winning soon fades when that word disappears from a team’s vocabulary.
“What’s important? What’s the task at hand here? We’re here to win,” said Darryl Strawberry, who brought some brash ’86 Mets attitude to the Bronx. “But you have to believe that. And that’s the thing — we knew we could win. And it didn’t matter who got it done.”
Once upon a time, the Yankees did win a World Series. Many of them. That was the prevailing theme of Saturday’s 75th Old-Timers’ Day, which made being young and a Yankee feel that much worse.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
