The 1998 Yankees won 114 regular-season games - an American League record - and then kept winning. Their final count, 125 victories, remains the number every "greatest team ever" argument has to answer to.
DID YOU KNOW?
Catcher Jorge Posada's answer to the greatest-team question is the definitive one: "I don't look at 114. I look at 125." The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 regular-season games - and lost in the playoffs. The 1998 Yankees finished the job.
Two years removed from the 1996 title that started the dynasty, the 1998 Yankees were not built on star power. That was the scary part. They won 114 games and finished 22 ahead of a 92-win Boston club, without a single 30-homer hitter. They won with depth, defense, and a rotation where the number four starter would have been an ace anywhere else.
The Machine
The season's signature day came May 17, when David Wells - reportedly still feeling Saturday night's party - threw a perfect game against Minnesota at the Stadium, the first by a Yankee since Don Larsen. Bernie Williams won the batting title at .339. In July, a 26-year-old Cuban defector named Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez showed up and immediately pitched like a postseason veteran, going 12-4.
They ran the AL East by the Fourth of July, won seven walk-off games, threw 16 shutouts, and absorbed Darryl Strawberry's late-season cancer diagnosis with the same flat-line professionalism they showed everything else. The lineup ground out at-bats nine deep, the bullpen shortened games to six innings, and Torre trusted every man on the roster. Joe Torre's club did not do drama. It did 1-0 fastballs on the black and four-pitch walks with the bases loaded.
October
The playoffs were a formality with one scare: the ALCS against Cleveland, the defending league champs who had bounced the Yankees in 1997. Cleveland won two of the first three in the Bronx and looked ready to do it again. The Yankees won the next three straight.
The World Series against San Diego was a coronation. Game 1: down three runs in the seventh, Tino Martinez hit a grand slam off Mark Langston on a pitch that should have been ball four. Game 3: Scott Brosius hit a three-run homer off Trevor Hoffman - the best closer alive - in the eighth to win it. Game 4: Andy Pettitte outpitched Kevin Brown to complete the sweep. Brosius, who hit .471, was the MVP.
The Case
Count it up: 114 wins in the regular season, 11-2 in the postseason, 125-50 overall. The 1927 Yankees had Ruth and Gehrig. The 1961 Yankees had Maris and Mantle. The 1998 Yankees had no one player to pitch around - and no weaknesses anywhere. Ask the men who played on the great Yankees teams which one was best, and the answer keeps coming back to '98.
They were not the most talented Yankees team ever. They were the best one. There is a difference.
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Sources: Baseball-Reference.com (1998 Yankees season and postseason records) · MLB.com ("'98 Yankees: Best of the best") · Wikipedia (1998 New York Yankees season)
Photo: [Chris Ptacek](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Wells_in_the_bleacher_section.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons, [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).
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