If you want to find something comparable, you have to go back to Tampa, Fla., and the evening of Feb. 17, 1999. Brian Cashman took great care that night to note the exact time of the transaction — 11:42 p.m. — because of the enormity of both the moment and the player he had just acquired.
The Yankees were four months removed from winning their 24th World Series and, more notably, for winning 125 games in doing so. Nobody in baseball history had ever come remotely close to that number. The ’98 Yankees were instantly hailed as the greatest team in baseball history, and it was hard to muster a serious argument against that reality.
And now, they added Roger Clemens.
Moreover, they were adding Clemens at what was clearly the second peak of an extraordinary career. He’d just won his second straight Cy Young Award for the Blue Jays, giving him five overall. He’d gone 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA, struck out 563 hitters in 498 2/3 innings across 1997 and ’98. He’d also grown restless in Canada, and had made it known he’d welcome a trade.
And now he was joining the Yankees.
“Like Mick Jagger joining the Beatles,” David Cone would say a few days later.
“You can equate this with getting Michael Jordan,” is how George Steinbrenner put it. “We’re getting a man who makes this a notable day in Yankees history.”
That’s where you have to go to find something comparable to what happened Monday, when Kevin Durant set off his own gross of Fourth of July fireworks that were felt and heard all over the country, announcing on The Players’ Tribune that he was leaving Oklahoma City and joining the Warriors — the same Warriors who won 73 games this year, more than any team has ever won in the regular season, then added 15 more in the playoffs, falling a minute shy of winning a second straight NBA championship.
One of the NBA’s top five players is joining one of its all-time franchises, same as Clemens teaming up with the ’98 Yankees, same as if Jagger joined the Fab Four in ’69.
It was hard for anyone (outside the Yankees’ cocoon, of course) to feel good about Clemens — who’d done everything in his career except win a championship by February 1999 — tagging along for the ride, though it would have been significantly more egregious if he hadn’t at least had the Toronto buffer separating his time in Boston and his time in New York. And it was harder still when Clemens wound up collecting those elusive rings in both 1999 and 2000, and when he won his sixth (of seven total) Cy Youngs with the Yanks in 2001. But even inside that Yankees’ bubble: It never looked right seeing Clemens in pinstripes after spending so many years dreading and detesting him (even before the PED shadows began stalking him later on).
Hasn’t stopped him from wearing his rings, though.
And there is little that will stop Durant, either, if he follows the blueprint and wins a title next year with Golden State, and maybe a few more after that, too. LeBron James created the basketball template, of course, back in 2010, when of his own volition he decided to leave Cleveland for Miami, creating a super team alongside his friends Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, ultimately winning two championships and qualifying for two other Finals. But even James didn’t latch on to an archrival, as Durant has, joining forces with the same team he had down three games to one just a few months ago — a team most would have figured he would have had a hell of a shot to beat next year if he’d stayed in Oklahoma.
So in that sense, it’s the Clemens deal that summons the closest link. Clemens’ last year in Boston, 1996, coincided with the Yankees’ return to glory. He never had been able to push the Sox to the finish line, and though he’d dominated in Toronto, the Jays weren’t in the same area code as the Yankees in either of his years there. He couldn’t beat them. So he joined them. And it paid off handsomely for Clemens and for the Yankees.
“I know the tradition,” Clemens said the day the trade was consummated. “I love it. I love pitching at Yankee Stadium, the monuments, all the stuff that goes with it.”
Durant has to know all the stuff that goes along with him joining the Warriors, and all the wrath and clamor and curiosity that will follow him too, same as they followed Clemens in 1999, same as they followed LeBron six years ago. We can safely assume he wouldn’t mind following the rest of the script, either.