The year that gets thrown around a lot, by amateur historians and professional Yankees fans, is 1965. That was the year the Beatles released “Rubber Soul,” the year of Maria von Trapp and Dr. Zhivago, the year Dean Martin started crooning for his dinner on NBC.
And the year the Yankees suddenly forgot how to be the Yankees.
In “The Sun Also Rises,” Bill asks Mike: “How did you go bankrupt?” And Mike responds: “Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.” That was the Yankees of ’65, the roster filled with players who’d helped extend to 44 years the franchise’s uninterrupted period of dominance. They started losing. They kept expecting they’d get better. And before anyone knew it, it was 1975.
Fans, even Yankees fans at heart, are worriers to their core. And so 1965 is never far away from their minds, and neither is ’65’s close cousin, 1982, the start of another fall from power. And yet even as the Yankees of the past three years have taken a step back — playing (and losing) only one postseason game — they have still managed to win 85, 84 and 87 games.
To a generation raised to believe 95 wins was a Yankees birthright, these may feel like the hungry years. But fans who lived through 1965 (77-85) and 1982 (79-83) know better.
As the Yankees convene in Tampa to begin pitchers and catchers on Thursday, I am thinking of an altogether different year: 1993.
In the context of the greater Yankees canon, that 88-74 club does not appear on anyone’s list of greatest Yankees teams (and probably doesn’t crack the top 40). But for those old enough to remember, 1993 was the last time the Yankees were truly viewed as anyone’s definition of an underdog.
And in so many ways, they laid the groundwork for so much of what followed.
There are plenty of reasons to link the two. For starters, the Yankees were chasing the Blue Jays then, as they do now. There had been a key offseason acquisition of a quality National Leaguer who’d fallen out of favor with the team he’d grown up with; the name in ’93 was Paul O’Neill. In 2016 it is Starlin Castro.
Both teams had veterans who were both physically suspect (Don Mattingly and Mike Stanley then, Mark Teixeira and Carlos Beltran now) and eager to prove they hadn’t left their best years behind forever with the filthy Red Sox (Wade Boggs, meet Jacoby Ellsbury).
Mostly, they are connected by this: That ’93 team was the last Yankees team we’ve known that didn’t enter a season with massive expectations trailing behind it. The prior four Yankees teams had all finished below .500, and George Steinbrenner’s reinstatement from suspension that spring hadn’t exactly brightened anyone’s mood.
Twenty-three years later, there is some Steinbrenner-centric grumbling among the faithful — but because the present steward, Hal, seems too aloof, rather than too involved. And there are those three straight seasons that ended with win totals in the low and mid-80s, which look like typos.
A few years ago, sitting in the visiting dugout at Citi Field, Mattingly was chatting breezily about the old days with a small handful of writers, and someone brought up those ’93 Yankees.
“A fun team, a fun summer,” he said. “That was when you realized we were heading in the right direction again. And you could sense that the fans saw that too. They started to make the Stadium sound the way it had when I first came up in the ’80s. And the way it would sound later on, too.”
So much of what happened later on can be traced to that summer of ’93, when “Whoomp! (There It Is)” was blaring from every car radio, when “Jurassic Park” stuffed theaters, when “Seinfeld” first became appointment television, and when the Yankees suddenly remembered how to be the Yankees again.
It wasn’t enough to catch the Blue Jays — and, as things look now, it probably won’t be enough this time around either. But the chase was an awful lot of fun. So was having the bull’s-eye attached to someone else’s back.
And the future? Well, in ’93, Bernie Williams was already here, the Core Four on the way. There are a half-dozen kids the Yankees have high hopes for now, and it is no secret Bryce Harper dreamt as a little kid of wearing pinstripes, and there are all those fat contracts due to fall off the books soon.
It took those ’93 Yankees three years to become champions, and there are some who would faint at the notion of waiting until 2019 for a return to glory.
Still beats 1965. Still beats 1982. Still not a bad place to be, all things considered.