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The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty New Edition: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness | 
 enlarge | Author: Buster Olney
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.72
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New (35) Used (9) from $8.70
Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 91579
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0061672874
Dewey Decimal Number: 796
EAN: 9780061672873
ASIN: 0061672874
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
For six extraordinary years around the turn of the millennium, the Yankees were baseball's unstoppable force, with players such as Paul O'Neill, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera. But for the players and the coaches, baseball Yankees-style was also an almost unbearable pressure cooker of anxiety, expectation, and infighting. With owner George Steinbrenner at the controls, the Yankees money machine spun out of control. In this new edition of The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, Buster Olney tracks the Yankees through these exciting and tumultuous seasons, updating his insightful portrait with a new introduction that walks readers through Steinbrenner's departure from power, Joe Torre's departure from the team, the continued failure of the Yankees to succeed in the postseason, and the rise of Hank Steinbrenner. With an insider's familiarity with the game, Olney reveals what may have been an inevitable fall that last night of the Yankee dynasty, and its powerful aftermath.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 The Cost of Hubris August 6, 2008
This book is a worthy companion to David Halberstam's excellent "October 1964", another book about the decline of another Yankee dynasty. As a Yankee fan, we celebrate the tradition and history of the Yankees, but often bristle at the hubris by which some in the organization think they can create champions by spending money on the wrong players. As Mr. Olney correctly points out near the end of his book (indeed as a theme throughout), it was the unique team chemsitry and not the salaries that made the recent Yankee dynasty. The Yankees won in spite of and not because of Mr. Steinbrenner's hysteria. His contribution to the success of the Yankees has indeed been his driving desire to win and the resources to back that up, but in deferring to his baseball people, Gene Michael, Brian Cashman, and others, he has been held in restraint.
What we have now (the Yankees of 2008) is a team that seems disjointed, not playing together, only the expectation of success driving them. This is a difficult culture to maintain. The dynasty years are over, despite the presence of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. The Yankees are doing what built the dynasty to begin with - developing and promoting young players (with the the passion and camraderie of Joba Chamberlain and Shelly Duncan as examples). When you add smart baseball decisions with the resources and the tradition and the fans - the Yankees are a force to deal with. When they merely survive by clinging to old business models and aging and expensive players, they fail.
Mr. Cashman, Mr. Michael and others in the front office know how to do this, they have done it before. One can only hope that Mr. Steinbrenner's sons can maintain the culture of winning but make smart decisions in the process.
Mr. Olney's book is an excellent baseball book, and not just for Yankee fans. I found many of its lessons applicable in my business career as well.
A MUST READ! March 12, 2008
A must read, ESPECIALLY if you are a Yankees fan (although you would think the opposite!). It gives you insight into all sorts of things about Game 7 (and the Yankees in general) that will have you saying "Wow!" to yourself. There are so many more little "what if's" that could have changed the outcome of that game, long before Torre's decision to play the infield in for Luis Gonzalez's last at bat. You'll also understand why the "winning the World Series is the only goal" attitude worked so well for the 1998-2001 teams, as opposed to the post-2001 Yankee rosters of All-Stars.
You might want to wait until closer to the release of the 2001 World Series boxset however... you will DEFINITELY want to see Game 7 again after reading this book!
One of the BEST SPORTS books I've ever read. February 8, 2008
I loved this book. Olney does a tremendous job of providing background on the many significant parts that contributed to the Yankees success during the late 90s, interpersing them with the historic Game 7 of the '01 World Series. This is not only a MUST-HAVE for any sports and Yankees fan, but anyone who still thinks that baseball isn't the epitome of a TEAM sport.
Still accurate here as we move toward 2008 November 2, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Buster Olney, one of the only sentient and honest people still at ESPN (now that Dan Patrick is gone), has written one the best, most comprehensive sports books of all time.
Proof of this is how accurate his prognosis for the next seven years of Yankee mediocrity has become. It takes insight to determine this, and Olney succeeds. The personal stories/flashbacks are great---as is this book. A must read for any baseball fan, and I am FAR from a NYY fan.
Pinpoint Control October 1, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
A recent personal project required that I read a half dozen books on baseball over the course of about as many weeks. Buster Olney's cool, lapidary prose made a nice sorbet with which to chase down the overweening lyricism of one of the game's Grand Old Men of American Lettahs, and the pomposity of a second. (I resist, with difficulty, the temptation to name names.)
The first thing to do is to set aside that contentious title. Olney, who covered the Yankees for four seasons for the New York Times, is a nonpartisan, or does a fine impression of one. His book is neither the inflammatory crowing of a Yankee hater nor the pessimistic keening of a demoralized loyalist. He uses the seventh game of the 2001 Yankees/Diamondbacks World Series as the springboard for a close analysis of the franchise's history in the years approaching and following the turn of the 21st century, and the treatment is both dispassionate and compassionate. The book's structure has a cinematic quality, with players taking their turns in focused, background-providing flashbacks generated by the inning-by-inning action on the field. Olney's narrative is not an innovation, but with his scrutiny of the decisions (good and bad) that led up to this game, and his attention to the personalities involved, he achieves something rare and tricky. He reminds us that every big game, like every snowflake, is distinct from all others, and suggests that the outcome of Game Seven was foreordained by the confluence of circumstances and people (both on the field and at the executive level) representing the clubs on this night. Put another way, a big game is never one big story; it's a significant point within dozens of smaller stories -- the stories of the uniformed people you see on the field, businesspeople you may recognize in the boxes and clubhouses, and others whose names you might never have heard. If anyone were removed from the tapestry, the whole would be altered. All the obvious slides get their time under the microscope -- Roger Clemens, Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, George Steinbrenner, et al -- but the author also finds space, in a crisp 355 pages, for pertinent and illuminating studies of relative peripherals: the intellectually brilliant but fatally detached former Red Sox GM Dan Duquette; the obsessive-compulsive early/mid-1990s Yankee manager Buck Showalter; the gifted, infuriatingly undisciplined former Yankee pitcher David Wells, whose "bloated body camouflaged exceptional athleticism," in Olney's words.
The book, as suggested above, casts a wide net, but every one of its portraits has the subtlety and finish of a fine aquarelle. Indeed, some of Olney's most eloquent passages are those devoted to men who were not on the field for the game in question, but who played important parts in seasons leading up to it. I think here particularly of the section on the gracious and articulate yet driven David Cone, a Yankee starting pitcher nearing the end of a distinguished career and attempting (sometimes successfully, other times not) to do with guile and sheer force of will what he could no longer do with velocity and power. And the chapter on substance-abusing Darryl Strawberry's many second chances, and many subsequent relapses, makes something poignant out of material grown hackneyed in both news and fiction. "[T]hrough addictions, incarcerations, and hearings, he had never lost the beautiful buggy-whip swing he'd had when the Mets picked him first in the 1980 draft," writes Olney, and that unshowy yet felicitous phrase (especially that splendid description of the swing) finds just the right note with which to begin a chapter on a man of prodigious natural gifts and abysmal judgment, a package made up of the extraordinary and the dismayingly, even tragically ordinary.
I have taken pains not to reveal my own allegiances, because they are not really at issue here. Whether one roots for or against the Yankees, this is an engrossing and educational book, a potent blend of anecdote and psychology from the perspective of an astute insider. Go along with the author or not on his central point that the seventh-game loss to the Diamondbacks in 2001 was, by itself, of epochal character; but he compellingly makes his case that this franchise, historically restless and overachieving from the top down, was in some way due for sobering disappointment, retrenchment and reevaluation. Though occasioned by a bruising postseason loss, this taking of stock need not have been an entirely bad thing. For baseball franchises, as in life in general, survival is renewal.
Likely to become a classic within its field.
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