Sports Watch
THANKS, major league baseball needed that. A feel-good experience for a change as the New York Yankees won the exciting World Series in heartwarming fashion. Yankees gave us a feel-good kind of experience
As Yankee pitcher David Cone said after the joyous Yankee celebration following the title-clinching sixth game, "There are so many human interest stories on this team." You can include Cone, who overcame a career-threatening aneurysm.
There were so many heroes, so many stories for the Yankees. No wonder one fan at Yankee Stadium held up a sign that read, "It's DestiNY."
Fate obviously played a role. There's no other way to explain the Yankees' remarkable comeback against the Atlanta Braves. It began intervening when 12-year-old Jeffrey Maier played hooky to turn an apparent out into a home run, which helped beat Baltimore in the American League Championship Series.
But of all the human interest angles, none was more compelling than the Joe Torre Story.
WHO will ever forget that Torre finally made it to the World Series after waiting 4,272 games , and then won it all? Not bad for someone who had been fired three times, including the year before by the St. Louis Cardinals.
"This is the man who made people around the country love the Yankees," said baseball commentator Pete Gammons.
This was a Yankee team that you had to like despite its $60 million payroll, the highest in baseball.
Even diehard Boston Red Sox fans were pulling for the Yankees. I found myself actually caring. A disquieting feeling indeed. I felt a lot better when I found out that even Ted Williams had been rooting for the Yankees to win the World Series.
All of this because of Torre, whose quiet leadership had a profound effect on his players. They were hardly the petulant, temperamental Yankees of old. So different were the '96 Yankees that when it was over, Wade Boggs, John Wetteland, Darryl Strawberry and Joe Girardi were thanking God first.
For them, even champagne was an out-of-body experience. The post-game comments by Wetteland, the Series' MVP, sounded like the Sermon on the Mound. Why, even Yankee fans were on their best behavior.
Adding to the feel-good celebration was the news that Torre's older brother, Frank, had undergone a successful heart transplant the night before the Yankees' storybook finish.
Torre said Frank had watched the last game from his hospital bed. "The doctor said, 'If he could watch it with his old heart, he could watch it with a new one.' "
I still remember Frank Torre. Not only from the time he played first base for the Vancouver Mounties in the Hawaii Islanders' very first baseball game in 1961 at the old Honolulu Stadium. But also when he sold me tickets to the 1967 World Series between the Red Sox and Cardinals.
Frank Torre played on two championship teams with the Milwaukee Braves, including the one that beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series. He was a life-long National Leaguer and wasn't familiar with Fenway Park at all.
So he had these two sets of tickets, one in section 2 and another in section 28. Torre figured the lower the number, the better the seats.
He wasn't trying to pull a fast one. Because in the opener, there we sat together in section 2 - in bleacher seats down the right-field line. It turned out that the tickets in section 28 were back of third base - choice seats for the same price.
"I didn't know," Torre shrugged as we got to our seats. But it was a pleasure, sitting with him during all four games at Fenway - even the seventh game, which the Red Sox lost, naturally.