The automatic default is always 1965. That’s the year when the Yankees — quoting Elston Howard here — “all seemed to get old at the same time.”
A 99-win team in 1964 tumbled to a 77-win team in 1965. A true mega-dynasty that had stretched all the way back to 1921 — 29 pennants and 20 championships, with winning seasons in 45 of the previous 46 seasons dating from 1918 — was kneecapped. The Yankees finished sixth, beginning a postseason drought that extended until 1976.
But 1982, in its own way, was another seminal moment for the Yankees, and one that is beginning to feel more relevant to this season.
After they won two championships and made the postseason in five of the previous six years, the Yankees went 79-83, fifth place, 16 games behind the pennant-winning Brewers in the old AL East alignment.
“There were a lot of hellish seasons,” Graig Nettles said a few years ago. “But 1982 was the season from hell.”
And 1982 is in the news again because when the Yankees fell to the Nationals on Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium, 2-1, it was their ninth straight loss. The last Yankees team to lose nine straight were those 1982 Yankees, who went 0-8 on a road trip through Baltimore and Milwaukee in mid-September, then added a loss to Cleveland at home.
Dave Winfield — who was his usual excellent self in 1982 and was usually the only one playing at that level (.280/37/106) — summed it up best: “The best we can do is to get to the end of the season.”
(Sort of like Aaron Judge — minus the ultra-truthful quote — is generally the one 2023 Yankee who can provide a genuine and regular window of better days ahead, as his three-homer, skid-busting performance in a 9-1 win Wednesday night reminded us.)
It isn’t just the losing streak that conjures up 1982, though. Again, the plunge of 1965 is the one that’s always pointed to, but that one was easy to explain.
The Yankees, for decades, had their pick of every top available amateur player. As much as the financial clout of big-market teams seems a wedge in the game now, it was preposterous in the days before the entry draft was instituted — no coincidence — in 1965. The Yankees had also been slower than most to integrate, and that also caught up with them by 1965. What followed was, in essence, a 12-year penance while the Yankees caught back up with the rest of baseball.
There were no such factors in 1982, when things fell apart a year after the Yankees came within two games of a championship, initiating another playoff drought that extended to 1995. A lot of things befell the Yankees in those years, many of them a result of a slipshod organization that rarely built rosters that were complete or sensible.
But 1982 was the template for that, and this is the part to remember, and the part that feels ominous: it was built, almost entirely, upon hubris.
In 2023, that has sprung both from an organizational-wide stubbornness to resist moving off an analytics-dominant approach that is clearly not working, an unspoken reality that smacks of “we’re smarter than everyone else, you’ll see, just give it time.” And that arrogance has even spread to manager Aaron Boone, not by nature a supercilious man, who for years now has talked about other teams “closing the gap” on the Yankees when, in truth, it has been the Yankees on the wrong side of that gap, which is growing ever wider.
Forty-one years ago, it was George Steinbrenner who set the tone. He rid himself of Reggie Jackson, signed outfielder/first baseman Dave Collins, talked about the “Bronx Burners” replacing the Bronx Bombers and declared in spring training: “This is the greatest team I’ve ever assembled.” Later, he guaranteed that manager Bob Lemon would be given the whole season in what he planned would be his final year in baseball.
“I gave Bob my word on that,” Steinbrenner said.
His word lasted 14 games, long enough for the Yankees to start 6-8 and for Steinbrenner to summon Gene Michael (already in line to manage in 1983) to replace Lemon. Michael lasted exactly 86 games, going 46-42, before he, too, was dismissed and Clyde King was brought in to ride out the string.
(NOTE TO THE IF-ONLY-GEORGE-WERE-STILL-ALIVE CROWD: That is what it was like when George was alive. A lot.)
That season was probably doomed from the start; Opening Day was postponed for five straight days because of a springtime snowstorm that hit New York. And it easily could’ve been worse: the Yankees finished one game clear of Cleveland and Toronto, who shared last place. The Yankees were broken. And it took a good long while to fix.
That’s the way it was the last time the Yankees lost nine straight. That’s the way it looked. It never does look very pretty.
