RISING TIDE
SOMETIMES, the doorstep can be every bit as satisfying as the real thing. Maybe the Yankees will fool us. Maybe this infusion of relief pitching really will catapult them to bigger and better things, and maybe they can figure out a way to bypass the Astros and the Dodgers both, win what would have to be one of the most unexpected championships in team history.
More likely, what they are doing is whetting our appetites. More likely this is the appetizer to what will be coming in the next few years — when the kids are fully blossomed, when the starting pitching is shored up, when they have fully formed team that isn’t just capable of winning a title, but expected to.
For Yankees fans, that will be a fun part of the process.
But in many ways, this is, also. In many ways, the doorstep can be more fun, because it hints at what is to come, it tantalizes, it gives you an appetite for wanting more.
We’ve seen a number of those teams around here.
The ’85 Mets are the perfect example of the perfect doorstep team. Just two years removed from languishing at the bottom of the National League, the ’85 Mets featured four players around whom fans could invest their hearts and their souls — two of them in their very prime (Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter) and two of them at the glorious start of what were certain to be glorious careers (Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry).
Those Mets won 98 games, and though they didn’t make the postseason, falling three behind the Cardinals, there was a sense of inevitability around the team, which is probably why Shea Stadium fans gave them a raucous ovation when they were officially eliminated from contention on the next-tolast day of the season.
It was a similar feeling around the ’ 85 Giants, who were just starting to hit their stride, who had won a playoff game the year before and had just about all of the important elements in place on both sides of the ball. Those Giants went 10-6 then beat the defending-champion 49ers at home, and convincingly, and there was a genuine sense that they were the perfect team capable of beating the ’ 85 Bears …
Well, until the wind shifted and the ball fluttered away from Sean Landeta’s foot, and the Bears wound up swallowing them whole, 21-0. Still, the Giants had come a long way from the 3-12-1 record they had posted just two years before. Twelve months later they would finish and ful- fill their destiny.
In that way, they were similar to the ’69 Knicks, who had struggled and scuffled for so long and who had finally made a serious inroad during the 1968-’69 season. That was the year the made the most important deal in team history, acquiring Dave DeBusschere, and they wound up winning 54 games (the most, by some seven games, in franchise history).
It was their first full year in the newest version of Madison Square Garden, and the Knicks were slowly becoming a musthave ticket, and they had every principle player in place. They also weren’t ready to win quite yet.
They did sweep the 57win Baltimore Bullets, and it wasn’t particularly close. But then they faced the Celtics in the final year of Bill Russell’s career, and though the Celtics won just 48 games that year, they stole Game 1 and finished off the Knicks in six.
Yankees fans know the feeling, anyway. The ’95 Yankees went from oblivion to the first-ever AL wild card by going 26-7 down the stretch. That they lost in heartbreaking fashion to the Mariners only seemed to fuel what came next, when they began assembling the team that would win a World Series in 1996, then three more in the next four years.