Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By Compiled by Times staff writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 27, 2000
Newspaper excerpts after Game 5:
Less than a month ago, they were trying to shake a seven-game losing streak and the growing sentiment that their time had come and gone, that it was time for someone else to stand in baseball's winner's circle.
This morning, they are champions. Again.
Not even they can explain how or why. How a team that looked positively inept over the final two weeks of the season could survive three rounds of playoffs and capture its third straight title, its fourth in five years. Why a team can look so overmatched in September and so unbeatable in October.
Don't ask. They're the New York Yankees.
-- Sean Mcadam, Providence Journal
The New York Yankees feel comfortable in the World Series. No one else in baseball does. Certainly not their Subway Series rivals, the New York Mets, whom the Yanks dispatched Thursday night in just five games. Sometimes, that comfort and the confidence, bordering on arrogance that comes with it, makes all the difference.
-- Thomas Boswell, Washington Post
They never played a Game 7.
Not even one during the entire run.
That's as good a measure as any of the greatness of this Yankee team. They won the 26th World Series in franchise history Thursday night by going into the lion's den and emerging with a 4-2 win.
It was their third straight, the fourth in five years, and they won them all without once being forced to go the distance. But only because they played every one in that glorious stretch -- six against Atlanta, sweeps of San Diego and Atlanta again, five against the Mets -- like it was Game 7.
-- Jim Litke, Associated Press
When the brutal blare of the Shea Stadium loudspeakers let up for even a few miserable seconds, you could hear another sound, far more insidious.
Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.
It was the relentless sound of Yankees fans eating Mets lunches, followed by the Yankee players doing exactly the same.
-- George Vecsey, New York Times
One of the major criticisms of interleague play has been that if two teams played during the season, then met in the World Series, the interleague games would detract from baseball's ultimate event. As eager as one might be to find that argument valid, one would be hard-pressed to use this World Series as evidence.
The games between the Yankees and the Mets could not have been more scintillating had they never played each other. Their previous meetings, whether this season or in all four seasons of interleague play, did not dilute the intensity with which the teams -- and their fans -- went at each other in all five games of the Subway Series.
-- Murray Chass, New York Times
Newspaper excerpts going into Game 5:
You want to know why the Yankees have won the last two World Series, and why they're about to beat the Mets to win another? It's Mariano Rivera. He's the star. Through the years, the Yankees have always been led by some larger-than-life hero. Well, Rivera's the Babe Ruth of this team. The Joe DiMaggio. The Mickey Mantle. He's the reason. He's the guy who finishes.
-- Joe Posnanski, Kansas City Star
The length of baseball games has become one of the themes of what should be the most memorable World Series matchup in recent memory -- and with good reason.
This year's Series features two compelling teams playing in a city rich with baseball tradition, but air-raid sirens are sounding at Fox headquarters because ratings have plummeted -- which is more amusing than alarming unless you're a Fox official, a baseball official or a major network advertiser.
Several theories attempt to explain this phenomenon, but those assigned to correcting the problem must consider one pertinent question: How many people in today's hectic world can afford to set aside four hours to watch a baseball game?
-- Neil Hayes, Contra Costa Times
It's ironic that the only place in the city where you can get no information, no update on the Subway Series is ... the subway. That's right. Play-by-play is available while walking the streets of Manhattan at night. The game is carried in bar rooms and bodegas. Wedding receptions and private parties are equipped with big screens in corners of function rooms for "baseball people." News crawls in Times Square furnish updates, and where merchants place TVs near storefronts, people are seen standing outside with noses pressed against the glass to see what's happening at Shea or in the Bronx.
But the subway offers no outlet. No television. Radios and cell phones don't work. If you board the subway during a Subway Series game, you are in a news vacuum until you emerge from underground.
-- Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe
The Yankees had to be dwelling on urgency Wednesday night, if only to remove all possibility of elimination pressure being put on the shoulders of their hard-throwing headhunter and bat-thrower. The Mets, Roger Clemens and Game 6. Clemens started against the Mets in a game that has been celebrated more than any other in their history. Fourteen years later, he is public enemy No. 1 in their clubhouse. That was motivation enough for them to avoid the experience, or at least meet it with a margin of error.
-- Harvey Araton, New York Times