Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Birth of a Dynasty Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees by Joel Sherman Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees by Joel Sherman. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658bcc81f80d16a1 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Jim Leyritz’s World Series-saving home run helped start Yankees dynasty. Rex Ryan's stale act brought him Jets pink slip. A-Rod's legacy was already tarnished when he reached this rare milestone. The night Wilmer Flores cemented his place in Mets lore. The night Mike Piazza capped off an unbelievable Mets comeback. Earlier in the night, Jim Leyritz was just feeling thankful that at least the Yankees wouldn’t be swept by the Braves in the 1996 World Series. They were down 2-1 in the series and seemingly on their way to a 3-1 hole after Game 4 quickly went off the rails. In the eighth inning, though, the catcher served as a human defibrillator and brought the Bombers back to life. Leyritz came to the plate against flamethrower Mark Wohlers and delivered a game-tying three-run home run to spark the Yankees to a win in 10 innings. Two games later, they were World Series champions. “When I was running the bases, all I could think was we have to win,” Leyritz later told Yankees Magazine. “I was standing right next to the steps when Wade Boggs drew his walk in the 10th inning. We were just pounding the stairs. When we walked into the locker room, before the media came in and it was just us, you could tell that everything had changed. We knew we were going to win.” The Yankees had fallen behind 5-0 after three innings in Game 4 — leading to Leyritz nodding in agreement when Pat Kelly said in the dugout, “Well, thankfully we won yesterday, so we won’t get swept,” The Post’s Joel Sherman reported in his book, “Birth of a Dynasty, Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees.” They had chipped away to make it a 6-3 deficit by the time Leyritz walked to the plate with one out and runners on the corners in the eighth inning. He was using one of Darryl Strawberry’s extra bats, since he only had two of his own left and didn’t want to risk breaking one against Wohlers’ fastball that could reach triple digits. Leyritz fouled off three pitches and worked a 2-2 count before getting a hanging 86 mph slider. He sent it just over the wall in left field to quiet Fulton County Stadium and tie the game 6-6. Jim Leyritz watching his game-tying home run in Game 4 of the 1996 World Series. AP. “I was on the step waiting to go to the on-deck circle and I looked at [bench coach] Don Zimmer, and asked, ‘Zim, what’s this guy got?'” Leyritz told Yankees Magazine. “He said, ‘Jimmy, this guy throws 100 mph. Just get ready.’ I didn’t even know what Mark Wohlers threw. I guessed fastball/slider because that’s what Mariano [Rivera] had. I didn’t know he had a split-fingered pitch and that it was his second-best pitch. Had I known that, I don’t know if I would have hit the slider out. He threw me a first-pitch fastball and then two sliders. Now I had a look at what he had, so I was a little bit better prepared. But again, I didn’t know he had a split. “I always say sometimes it’s better to be ignorant than smart. But he ended up throwing a hanging slider, I hit the home run, and it was a pretty special moment.” Two innings later, Boggs walked with the bases loaded and Charlie Hayes drove in another run when he reached on an error, giving the Yankees an 8-6 lead. John Wetteland shut down the Braves in the bottom of the inning to tie the series at two games apiece. Leyritz had turned in more playoff heroics the year before. In Game 2 of the 1995 ALDS against the Mariners, Leyritz hit a walkoff two-run home run in the 15th inning to lift the Yankees to a 7-5 win. It gave the Yankees a 2-0 series lead, but they dropped the next three games to bow out of the postseason. They didn’t let Leyritz’s clutch homer go to waste in 1996, though, riding it to the first of four World Series championships in five years. Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees by Joel Sherman. This is a "must-read" book that has been published this Spring by New York Post�s Baseball Columnist, Joel Sherman. A link with information about the book and how to purchase a copy can be found below. An excerpt from page 302 can be found under the link. Be sure to focus on the highlighted area when you read it. A portion of David Cone's forward he wrote for the book is also attached. Buy it, you will enjoy it! FOUND ON PAGE 302 : Torre , Zimmer, Mel Stottlemyre and Bob Watson all had just come from the National League, and each admired how Girardi worked a game. But Girardi�s attributes were understated and difficult to sell. He had eighteen career homers, as many as Stanley had the previous season. What Girardi did was harder to quantify and because of that he was lacerated more in the media and among the Yankee faithful. At the Yankees annual Fan Festival on February 4 at the New York Coliseum, the mere announcement of his name drew loud booing as it did at the club�s Welcome Home Dinner and home opener. Girardi was devastated. He struggled early in the regular season with just two RBIs in the team�s first twenty- one games. Over and over, the powerful all-sports station in town, WFAN, would play a tape from a previous season of Girardi grounding out weakly to Mets starting pitcher Bobby Jones as a way of defining him as a powder-puff performer. The station also mockingly played a song parody Joe, Joe, Girardi -o played to the same cadence of the deifying Joe, Joe DiMaggio that was performed by Les Brown in 1941. Girardi heeded the counsel of David Cone and Cone�s business manager, Andrew Levy, to call the station unsolicited and display a sense of humor about the whole thing, surmising that would humanize Girardi . That definitely helped. So did Zimmer�s advice a month into the season to stop trying to be Mike Stanley. But time was Girardi�s greatest ally. Because only time would allow all of Girardi�s attributes to be seen. FROM DAVID CONE'S FOREWORD : It is hard to put into words just what 1996 meant to me, so let me try someone else�s: "We play today we win today. Dat�s it." That was the statement our second baseman Mariano Duncan made the team motto as the 1996 season progressed. It was especially fitting that year because of all the adversity and distractions that we encountered. We could have had excuses, but that was not a team for excuse making. It was a team that focused on getting a job done. True genius is sometimes measured by the ability to simplify and Mariano�s statement struck a chord throughout the organization. David Szen , the traveling secretary for the Yankees, started to include this motto at the top of every itinerary for road trips. A lot of people have tried to define or quantify the importance of team chemistry, but this remains one of the mysteries of sport. A bonding and confidence materialized before our eyes that year because everyone bought into a team-oriented concept. Ask me how this happened? Why? Numerous variables came into play, but one constant I remember was no matter who was hurt, who we were playing or what kind of lineup we ran out there, "We play today we win today. Dat's it." It was our rallying cry. It was our soul. ‘JUMBO JIMMY’ COMES UP BIG – JIM LEYRITZ, THE BRASH ANTI-YANKEE, SWINGS INTO BOMBER LORE. “Birth of a Dynasty, Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees,” by Post baseball columnist Joel Sherman, is out in bookstores and tells the story of that poignant championship season. In the second of three excerpts, the good vibes the Yanks experienced from winning Game 3 are quickly squandered in Game 4. Kenny Rogers never recorded an out in the third inning, leaving the Yankees behind 5-0. In uniform, though he was disabled, Pat Kelly turned to his friend Jim Leyritz in the downcast Yankee dugout and said, “Well, thankfully we won yesterday, so we won’t get swept.” Leyritz nodded knowingly in agreement. Leading now 6-0, Denny Neagle and the Braves were 12 outs from a three-games-to one lead, with John Smoltz, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine available for Game 5 and, if necessary, 6 and 7. Derek Jeter led off the sixth by popping a ball into foul territory near the right-field line. Right-field ump Tim Welke turned his back to the field to watch the path of the ball. Right fielder Jermaine Dye chased with his head up. Ump and player never saw each other, and Dye bumped into Welke and could not recover in time to catch the ball. Rather than one out and none on, Jeter capitalized by flipping a single into right field. “I was going to catch it,” Dye says, looking back. “It cost us the game.” The Yanks surged for three runs before reliever Mike Bielecki whiffed Mariano Duncan, and pinch-hitters Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez. All three strikeout victims represented the tying run. But the Yankees had met Joe Torre’s mandate to chip away, and get into both the Braves’ heads and their suspect bullpen. There was one other thing: O’Neill had pinch-hit for Joe Girardi, which meant the Yankees had to send their backup catcher, Jim Leyritz, into the game. Not getting drafted hardly dimmed Jim Leyritz’s opinion of himself. From the moment he joined the Yankee organization in 1986, Leyritz started gabbing, and no one can quite remember him stopping. “Jim was the exact opposite of Bernie [Williams],” says Andy Stankiewicz, Leyritz’s teammate in the minors and majors. “He would always be talking in the clubhouse. Even in [Single-A] Lauderdale, he was talking about playing in the majors. Everyone else at A-ball is trying to figure out life. Jimmy had it all figured out. Even in the minors, Jimmy had swagger, and he always wanted to be up there with the game on the line.” Leyritz clashed with managers throughout his tenure, none more than Buck Showalter, who managed Leyritz at three minor-league levels and again in the majors. He thought Leyritz was the antithesis of all the Yankees were trying to instill. Unlike Williams, Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera, Leyritz lacked modesty and dignity and would never let his bat do all of his talking. Leyritz did not know his place. The first time on the Yankee team plane, he saw the beer in the back where the veterans congregated, and he naturally thought this was his place to be. “Rookie, get the hell out of here,” Dave Righetti told him. Don Mattingly nicknamed him “The King” and others called him “Jumbo Jimmy.” Leyritz not only did not mind, he loved it. “You could tell Jim Leyritz to shut the (bleep) up and it wouldn’t bother him,” says Rick Down, both a minor league manager and major league hitting coach for Leyritz. Few adored the big-league life like Jumbo Jimmy. Leyritz stayed out too late and was a clubhouse lawyer, but most stunning was that he would plead guilty to the charges with a smile. Torre was generally more tolerant than Showalter, but he shared Showalter’s dislike of Leyritz’s antics. Leyritz did not fit the professional profile Torre wanted his Yankees to project. And Leyritz, as always, was never satisfied with his status as a reserve. Jim Leyritz looked in the mirror and saw a star. “Joe made it clear as the season went along that you did it his way,” Leyritz recalls. “You had to buy into the team concept. He always considered me a pain in the ass because I wanted to play more.” Leyritz had two attributes that saved him to the point where, amazingly, he was the senior Yankee: He could really hit a fastball and, because he imagined himself a star, he craved pressure situations when the spotlight belonged exclusively to him. He loved being Jumbo Jimmy. Bielecki had settled down the game for the Braves with two hitless innings. However, Braves manager Bobby Cox turned to his closer, Mark Wohlers, to try for a six-out save, figuring this was the chance to drop the hammer on the Yankees. Wohlers touched 100 mph on occasion. During the regular season, he struck out 100 batters in 77 1/3 innings while registering 39 saves. In the first two playoff rounds, Wohlers had pitched 6 1/3 innings and yielded one hit while striking out eight in going five-for-five in save chances. In his only appearance of this World Series, he had struck out the side in Game 2. Wohlers was fully rested and pitching great. Charlie Hayes topped the first pitch of the eighth inning down the third-base line. Normally a ball that begins that close to the line spins foul, but Wohlers and third baseman Chipper Jones watched and watched, and the ball never deviated from a straight line. Darryl Strawberry followed that bizarre hit with another single. It was first and second with no outs. Cox had sent Rafael Belliard in to play shortstop for defensive purposes an inning earlier, replacing Jeff Blauser. Duncan hit a routine double-play ball at Belliard, but the shortstop bobbled and got only the force at second. So rather than two out and a runner on third, Leyritz was coming up as the tying run. Leyritz was Andy Pettitte’s personal catcher, so he knew he would start Game 5 against John Smoltz the next night. He had just two game bats remaining and, having seen Smoltz’s hard and harder repertoire in Game 1, realized he might need both. So even with the World Series in the balance, he oddly did not want to risk breaking a game bat against Wohlers’ heat. So he grabbed one of Darryl Strawberry’s bats, which were 35 inches and 33 ounces, just like his, but had thinner handles. Leyritz thought a thin handle enabled him to whip the bat quicker through the strike zone, an asset he definitely needed here. Leyritz had yet to take a swing in Game 4 and nevertheless fouled Wohlers’ first pitch, a 98 mph fastball, straight back, usually a sign that a hitter has the pitch timed. Nothing had changed. Jim Leyritz could hit a fastball. So Wohlers came back with two straight sliders, both high, to fall behind in the count. Wohlers’ best pitch was his fastball; his second best, a splitter. On the Fox broadcast, analyst Tim McCarver said, “I think Wohlers is going to the breaking ball too much. . . . If you get beat, you want to get beat with your best pitch, not your third-best pitch.” Wohlers returned to his fastball, this one 99 mph, and Leyritz again fouled it straight back. Even if it was his third-best pitch, Wohlers’ slider was no ordinary slider. He threw it in the high 80s, speedier than the two starters in Game 4, Rogers and Neagle, delivered fastballs, and Leyritz barely tapped an 86 mph slider down the third-base line to stay alive. The duel had now reached its sixth pitch. Leyritz mentally dismissed the slider. Wohlers threw too hard to sit on a breaking ball with two strikes. If Wohlers came with a slider, Leyritz decided, he would react the best he could, like he just had on a 2-2 slider. But the advantage clearly belonged to Wohlers. “I called a fastball, but Wohlers said no,” Braves catcher Eddie Perez recalls. “And I was good with that. I really wanted a slider, too, but a good slider. I wanted the slider down and away. Wohlers wanted to throw the slider because he thought he was going to throw a better slider.” Smoltz was sitting in the TV room adjacent to the Braves dugout, watching a monitor to study the Yankee hitters for the following day. He saw Perez switch to the slider sign and cringed. “Baseball gets confusing when it looks like guys are on pitches, but they aren’t,” he says, looking back. “It seemed like Leyritz was locked in on the heater because he was fouling it back. But he really wasn’t on the heater.” Tom Glavine remembers, “Watching that at-bat, I thought to myself that the only pitch Leyritz would be able to hit was a slider.” The theory of the two Braves starters was that Leyritz would never generate enough bat speed to hit Wohlers’ fastball fair with authority, but by having to be ready for that pitch, it made him extra quick with his swing should something slower come along – something like a slider. Perez squatted with half his body off home plate on the outside corner and his glove perched at knee level. Leyritz initiated his high front-leg kick even before Wohlers had released the ball. It was Leyritz’s timing mechanism, and he knew that with Wohlers he had to start early. In his attempt to throw an even better slider than the last one, Wohlers muscled up. His 86 mph pitch did not break as he wanted, down and away, but rather stayed up and headed in the opposite direction, backing up toward the middle of the plate. Leyritz recognized he was not getting heat and was able to keep his hands back just long enough to drive a belt-high pitch toward left field. Just as Smoltz had fretted when he saw the sign for the slider, Leyritz’s bat had sped up to where he could drive a pitch. But Leyritz had not been able to get his full body into driving the pitch. The ball was hit so high that a stadium full of spectators and players rose to watch its flight with uncertainty. Andruw Jones was in left. He leaped and tried essentially to walk his way up the wall. But the ball struck a restraining wall beyond the left-field fence. The noise drained out of the stadium. Eddie Perez remembers just one sound: “the Yankee wives screaming.” Game 4 was tied. Yet, in truth, everything had changed to the Yankee favor. Tim Welke’s inadvertent pick on Jermaine Dye, Hayes’s groundball hugging the third-base line, and Belliard’s bobble on the double-play ball had furthered the sense that the Yankees were enjoying an inexplicable magic in this postseason. Leyritz’s homer merely galvanized the growing feeling that the 1996 Yankees were special. When asked nearly a decade later what he remembers best about this World Series, Chipper Jones stares with an incredulous grin at the inquirer for nearly 10 seconds before saying, “What do you think?” Jones then adds, “We’re up 6-3. If we get Jim Leyritz out, we’re out of that inning, and I am pretty certain we win that game 6-3. Then we have Smoltzy going in Game 5. I believe we win one of the last three games in that series if we win Game 4. The momentum swung on one swing of the bat. It was enough to lift them to another level. The last 2½ games they played like a different team.” The momentum certainly was on the Yankees’ side. Still, there was that little bit of unfinished business. They had to win Game 4. (In Part 3 tomorrow, the Yanks complete their stunning Game 4 victory. ) Reprinted from Birth of a Dynasty: Behind the Pinstripes with the 1996 Yankees. Mel Hall is bound for prison . . . and it is certain he won't be well received. Syracuse, N.Y. -- He makes the short list on any roundup of the greatest high-school athletes ever produced in this area. Simply, there can be no questioning the physical wonders of Mel Hall, the one-time Port Byron Panther who could do just about anything in any game. And his ceiling? It was way, way up there. After being picked in the second round of the 1978 draft by the Chicago Cubs, the guy played in all or parts of 13 seasons in the big leagues. And, statistically, he did some damage. Why, in a three-campaign run with the Cleveland Indians, Hall drove in 77, 76 and 71 runs. In six different full seasons, he batted .280 or higher. He had 81 RBIs in 152 games for the (admittedly wretched) New York Yankees in 1992.So, Mel Hall, who finished third in the National League's Rookie of the Year voting in 1983, could play a little bit. And for his efforts, both in this country and Japan, he was paid a total of more than $10 million.