This weekend, to celebrate the Yankees' win I guess (yay!!!), MLB Network has been airing these... sorta documentaries of the various World Series wins by the team, up to 2000. The summaries of the pre-'90s WSes were mostly just boring overviews (the stuff with Reggie Jackson was interesting, though), but during the dynasty years, the shows take more of a documentary feeling and... wow. Just wow. I've seen them before, but I haven't seen them in a really long time.
There were just so many moments. David Cone's return from shoulder aneurysm surgery in 1996, only to find himself pitching in a must-win World Series Game 3 in Atlanta, while his family watched (it's adorable that both his dad and brother called him "Coney"). From 1998, they had the team dedicating the win to Darryl Strawberry, who was suffering from cancer, El Duque describing what pitching in the World Series meant to him after escaping from Cuba, and Andy Pettitte carefully writing "DAD" on his hat in honor of his hospitalized father before pitching the clinching game of the Series (and I'll fully admit I actually shed tears when they had a clip from John Sterling calling the series and, after Andy pulled a big double play to end an inning, Sterling said "And there's a very happy man in a hospital in Houston right now." I have a huge soft spot for Andrew Eugene, what can I say). 1999 had Paul O'Neill's father dying right before the clinching game, as well as Roger Clemens talking about how moved he was to get a standing ovation from the Yankee Stadium crowd (that made me actually cry too, and I don't even LIKE Roger Clemens!). Just... wow. Yeah.
It really made me realize... I am so lucky to be a fan of the New York Yankees. All Yankee fans have a bit of Lou Gehrig in them in that way, I suppose. The Yankee "mystique and aura" may just be "dancers at a nightclub," as noted genius Curt Schilling once said, but it's hard not to get choked up over stories like these... and those are only from three years in the team's history.
Here's to many more than merely #27 and the stories yet to come...
