The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness

For an extraordinary handful of years around the turn of the millennium, the Yankees were baseball's unstoppable force. With four World Series championships in five seasons and a deep bench of legends and comers -- Clemens, Rivera, Williams, Soriano, Jeter, O'Neill -- they dominated the major leagues. For the members of the team, though, baseball Yankees-style was a pressure cooker of anxiety, expectation, and infighting. As the spending and emotion spiraled, careers were made and broken, friendships began and ended, and a sports dynasty rose and fell. In The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty , Buster Olney tracks the Yankees through these tumultuous seasons and into the scandals and disappointments of 2004, providing insightful portraits of the stars, the foot soldiers, the coaches, the manager, and the Boss himself. With unparalleled knowledge of the game and an insider's familiarity with the team, Olney also advances a compelling argument that the philosophy that made the Yankees great was inherently unsustainable, ultimately harmful to the sport, and led inevitably to that warm autumn night in Arizona -- the last night of the Yankee dynasty. “Vivid, informed, and gracefully written, The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty is sports writing at its very best.” - David Halberstam “The best and clearest view yet inside the secret society that is the New York Yankees.” - --John Feinstein, author of Season on The Brink and Caddy For Life “The best contemporary book about baseball in several years. Yankee fans and haters alike will find it riveting.” - New York Sun A remarkably prescient work … Olney’s observations are eerily germane to … [2004’s] postseason meltdown. - Wall Street Journal A well-mulled, highly atmospheric, and richly versed story of the Bronx Bombers’ great 1996-2001 ride. - Kirkus Reviews The definitive treatise on the great Yankee teams of the last seven years. - Peter Gammons, ESPN “A wonderful story about money, power, and baseball that will keep you reading until the bottom of the 9th.” - Mike Lupica, New York Daily News “Buster Olney... has chronicled the definitive story of the Bronx Bombers at the end of the 20th century.” - New York Post “…An astonishing richness of detail here that you simply won’t find anywhere else.” - Boston Globe Well-mulled, highly atmospheric, and richly versed …both subtle and opinionated... - Kirkus Reviews For an extraordinary handful of years around the turn of the millennium, the Yankees were baseball's unstoppable force. With four World Series championships in five seasons and a deep bench of legends and comers -- Clemens, Rivera, Williams, Soriano, Jeter, O'Neill -- they dominated the major leagues. For the members of the team, though, baseball Yankees-style was a pressure cooker of anxiety, expectation, and infighting. As the spending and emotion spiraled, careers were made and broken, friendships began and ended, and a sports dynasty rose and fell. In The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty , Buster Olney tracks the Yankees through these tumultuous seasons and into the scandals and disappointments of 2004, providing insightful portraits of the stars, the foot soldiers, the coaches, the manager, and the Boss himself. With unparalleled knowledge of the game and an insider's familiarity with the team, Olney also advances a compelling argument that the philosophy that made the Yankees great was inherently unsustainable, ultimately harmful to the sport, and led inevitably to that warm autumn night in Arizona -- the last night of the Yankee dynasty. Bestselling author Buster Olney covered the Yankees for four years at the New York Times . He is a senior writer for ESPN: The Magazine and an analyst on Baseball Tonight .