Buster OlneyOct 31, 2025, 07:00 AM ET
- Senior writer ESPN Magazine/ESPN.com
- Analyst/reporter ESPN television
- Author of “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty”
When Joe Torre was the manager of the last major league team to win back-to-back championships and the New York Yankees faced moments like the Los Angeles Dodgers face now, at the precipice of elimination, he would remind the players how great they were.
“It was always one of the biggest parts of Joe Torre’s speeches,” recalled Paul O’Neill, the right fielder for the Yankees at that time. “He’d say, ‘The talent in this room is good enough to win this.’ When he said it, you believed it.”
The accomplishments of those Yankees teams are presented neatly in the record book, like perfectly boxed museum relics: Those Yankees won the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000 — three consecutive seasons, the heart of a dynasty bookended by the 1996 championship and a Game 7 loss in the 2001 World Series. Four championships in the span of five years; five World Series appearances in six years.
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But in building that legacy, the Yankees were repeatedly pushed to the brink, and through the long regular seasons and the short intense rounds of playoffs, they intermittently looked older or tired or vulnerable — as the Dodgers have to some rival evaluators over the past 72 hours.
In conversation last week, Torre recounted how the Yankees won 114 games in the regular season in 1998, and suddenly played very tight in the American League Championship Series. As they dropped two of the first three games to Cleveland in the best-of-seven series, he sensed they were more focused on validating their summerlong accomplishment than on the postseason business at hand. Torre called a meeting and remembers saying, “Guys, you got to have some fun. You’re trying to prove the 114 wins are not a fluke.'” After the meeting was over, O’Neill found Torre and said, “Skip, it’s not fun unless you win.”
In 1999, Torre left the team to be treated for cancer and the Yankees played listlessly in his absence, drifting into second place before rebounding. At the end of the 2000 regular season, the Yankees lost 15 of their last 18 games and each of their last five games, clinching only because the Boston Red Sox had lost a game — and Torre had to remind them to celebrate, to recognize an accomplishment built over the long season. In the division series against Oakland, the Yankees lost Game 4 in Yankee Stadium and flew across the country overnight to play a winner-take-all Game 5. They won, barely surviving an A’s team that seemed younger, faster, better. In the end, there was another championship parade, another foundational piece in a legacy.
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Whether the Dodgers can respond similarly and become the first team in a quarter century to win back-to-back titles will be decided in the next two days. Like those Yankees teams, they are loaded with stars, some future Hall of Famers, and so much postseason experience that its impact is tangible. O’Neill explained that through the dynasty, Yankees players learned to trust each other and believe that in tough moments, they would respond, individually, collectively. “You just come to believe everybody will do their part,” said Darryl Strawberry, part of the Yankees’ championships in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
David Cone was a leader on those teams and believes that the pitching was a separator for the Yankees, a backbone of the success. “Overall pitching, and Mariano [Rivera] at the back end of games,” he wrote in a text. “We really had four No. 1 starters, similar to the Dodgers’ rotation.”
Roger Clemens, part of that rotation in 1999 and 2000, noted the inherent good fortune required to repeat as champions, avoiding the injuries that can take down a team. “Throughout the season, you use 50-plus players just to get through the marathon of the year,” he texted. “Once you have the pieces like the Dodgers have, it’s about executing and taking advantage of opportunities that arise in each game.”
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Strawberry said, “You’ve just got to keep your focus. That’s not always easy.
“Joe always reminded us how good we were, and to keep a foot on the gas.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts has a long-standing friendship with Torre, who reaches out to him from time to time, checking on him, encouraging him. Under the circumstances, it’s possible that Roberts’ words to his team before Yoshinobu Yamamoto takes the mound for Game 6 of the World Series will echo a lot of what Torre said in his years as the Yankees manager.
In Torre’s first year as Yankees manager, he told the players, “I don’t want to win one World Series. I want to win three in a row.”
Torre recalled, “I said that just to let them know, ‘Once you win, that’s fine. But you have more work to do. I don’t care what line of work you’re in: Once you stop to admire what you’ve accomplished, you stop doing it.”
The 2025 Dodgers may have reached that crossroads, and as Torre did, Roberts could remind the Dodgers how extraordinary they’ve been and how they have more to do. Heritage construction can be — and must be, at times — a messy business.
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