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Before the 2001 baseball season started, a column in this space asked the question: "Why are people Yankees fans?"
I think I'm starting to get it.
Not that I'll be running out to buy a Derek Jeter jersey or Joe Torre's memoirs. But this pinstriped postseason, whether or not it ends with New York's fourth straight world championship and fifth in six years, has already embodied what makes the Yankees the Yankees every bit as much as the previous three.
If not more.
The Yankees don't win because they have superior players at every position, or because their aging rotation shuts down every opponent.
They win because they know how. And regardless of where your lifelong baseball loyalties lie, it's getting harder and harder to ignore the beauty imbued in that knowledge.
Down 2-0 to the Oakland A's, baseball's hottest team since the All-Star break? No problem.
Headed to Seattle to open a series against a squad that tied the all-time record for wins? So what?
Previous Yankee powerhouses featured individual titans, whether it was Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the late 1920s, Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio on the team that won four straight series from 1936-39, DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle overlapping their Hall of Fame careers in the course of the five-peat from 1949-53, or Mantle and Roger Maris in the early 1960s. Even the 1977-78 Yankees had the self-proclaimed "Straw that Stirs the Drink," Reggie Jackson.
To the most recent dynasty, though, individual accolades and pure numbers are incidental. This is the first Yankees team in their current run to feature anyone with 35 regular-season home runs in Tino Martinez (David Justice doesn't count, since almost half of his 41 blasts last year came before his trade from Cleveland).
Fittingly for this New York team, Martinez has gone from big gun during the regular season to virtual non-entity in the postseason, hitting just .138 overall through their first eight games, with a single home run and a pair of RBI's.
And still, the Yankees roll on. While postseason slumps by the likes of Barry Bonds have directly led to the elimination of his teams in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, in New York, somebody else just steps up. They win when the heart of the order is slumping. They win despite nights when their highest-profile members -- starting pitchers Roger Clemens, El Duque Hernandez, Andy Pettite and Mike Mussina -- are less than brilliant.
While none of New York's hitters pile up staggering stats, that doesn't mean there aren't any superstars. Derek Jeter proved that in Game 3 against Oakland, when his spectacular save of a missed cut-off throw saved New York's 1-0 win over the A's, turning the series around in the process.
Jeter's play demonstrated the blend of smarts and physical talent that personify the modern Yankees. First, his awareness of the situation put him in position to make the play. Then his body control took over, allowing him to not only flip the ball in the opposite direction from his momentum, but put it in the perfect spot for Jorge Posada to catch it and make the tag on Oakland's Jeremy Giambi.
"If he was standing around like every other shortstop in the world, it's a tie game," Giambi said.
But Jeter isn't like any other shortstop in the world. And the Yankees, as ever, aren't like any other team.