Michael E. Ross Reporter • Profile • E-mail

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart,” said A. Bartlett Giamatti, commissioner of baseball, not long enough before he broke ours by dying, at the age of 51.

The last great leader of the national pastime was talking about the game he loved, but for one storied team in particular, he might well have been speaking about life and its never-ending ability to do exactly the same thing.

Once again, the New York Yankees are in a pitched battle for the AL Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox, again their adversaries in that clash-of-the-titans scenario that some have said was the best matchup all along — this year a contest featuring one of the hungriest, most capable Red Sox teams in years.

In the 101-year history of the team, the Yankees have risen to challenges in the face of adversities, some of them almost perversely timed to the postseason or shortly before, but not always. A canvass of their history over just the past 60-odd years shows there’s plenty of grief to spread throughout the calendar.

Any number of untimely visitations from either the Angel of Death or somebody named Murphy are now a rarely spoken facet of Yankee lore, a connection to mortality that (who knows why?) has more impact, more resonance with the Yankees than with any other team in the game.

If history is any barometer, tragedy’s been a too-frequent companion in the Yankee clubhouse for years.

Tragedy in Panama
Most recently, disaster came to call on reliever Mariano Rivera. Two members of his wife’s family were electrocuted Saturday while cleaning the swimming pool of his home in Puerto Caimito, 40 miles east of Panama City, Panama.

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Victor Dario Avila, a cousin of Rivera's wife, Clara, and his 14-year-old son were killed in the mishap, a cousin told the Associated Press.

Rivera's misfortune is only the most recent. You can go back to Lou Gehrig, the Yankee star diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — the disease that would bear his name — in June 1939. He would die two years later. There was the plane crash that killed Thurman Munson in August 1979, the popular catcher and team captain crashing just 600 yards short of the runway in Canton, Ohio.

You want heartbreak? Consider five-times manager Billy Martin’s needless tragic death, in an alcohol-related car accident on Christmas Day in 1989, within a few hundred yards of his own front door. 

In 1996, manager Joe Torre’s brother, Frank, underwent heart transplant surgery during the postseason, as the Yanks moved toward another championship. Outfielder Darryl Strawberry was diagnosed with colon cancer just before the 1998 playoffs started. Then Joe Torre himself had his own serious scare, diagnosed with prostate cancer in March 1999.

Other dramas
That year, 1999, was especially tough for the Yankees. Scott Brosius’ father died in the playoffs; Luis Sojo’s father passed during that year’s ALCS — against Boston. And outfielder Paul O’Neill’s father died during the ’99 Series, hours after the Bronx Bombers won Game 3; who can forget O'Neill's heart-wrenching, all-too-human collapse at the end of that epic?

Who can forget Paul O'Neill's all-too-human collapse at the end of the epic 1999 World Series?

The team dodged a bullet when pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in April 2000; Stottlemyre underwent stem-cell replacement and, happily, continues with the team today, despite the potential for the disease's recurrence.

Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had to endure the death of his mother-in-law on the day of the fourth and final game of the 2000 World Series.

In late August this year, Yankees first baseman and designated hitter Jason Giambi was diagnosed with a benign tumor in his pituitary gland, the latest of a recent series of health problems for Giambi (an intestinal parasite had sidelined him earlier in the month).

And now, Mariano Rivera.

The mystique factor
There's no escaping, of course, the ways in which Yankee lore is an extension of the mystique of New York — the City (always, and especially now in the post-Sept. 11 world, maybe the only place that can justify self-reference to “City” in the upper case).

That capacity for creating both elation and anguish is, while not exclusively, very much a New York phenomenon. Think of the child sent 100 years ago from anywhere on the planet to this country, a youth thrilled at his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty — only to be quarantined or turned away because of a cough the doctors at Ellis Island couldn't diagnose.

Consider the joy in Brooklyn when the city's pride, the Dodgers, won the World Series in 1955; fast-forward to the anguished day, a few years later, when that city lost the team to Los Angeles, ushering in for Brooklyn what George Plimpton years ago recalled, almost tearfully, as “a deep, deep sadness.”

The ones who hate the Yankees almost as a reflex will say it’s all proof of a divine plan of retribution, karmic payback for the team's 26 World Series championships.

Ecstasy to heartbreak
You can likewise debate forever whether there really are angels in the outfield or ghosts in the monuments in Yankee Stadium's center field. In one team's history, from the luckiest man on the face of the earth exiting the face of the earth too soon to Billy Martin's self-made rundown between third and home plate, the Yankees synthesize one of the main reasons we still love baseball:

It conveys life's ability to create those big mood swings, to take any of us in a relative instant from joy to pain, from unbridled ecstasy to absolute heartbreak, on the diamond or in the world.

Bart Giamatti understood that.

The elders of Brooklyn understand it. The Red Sox understand it fiercely, like a virus they'd kill to be rid of.

And whether you love to love them or love to hate them, the Yankees understand it too.

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