The Yankees spent a billion dollars on a new stadium and nearly half a billion on free agents, then went out and won the whole thing. The 2009 championship - number 27 - remains the franchise's last, and it ended with the most fitting possible farewell.
DID YOU KNOW?
Hideki Matsui drove in six runs in the clinching Game 6 - tying a World Series single-game record - in what turned out to be his final game as a Yankee. He hit .615 for the Series and was named MVP.
The drought had gotten embarrassing by the Yankees' standards. No title since 2000, a playoff miss in 2008, and a gleaming new Yankee Stadium opening in 2009 that deserved better tenants. So the club acted like the Yankees: CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira arrived on contracts worth over $400 million combined, with the marching orders made plain by the team's spring slogan - "Win it for The Boss." George Steinbrenner was fading, and everyone in the organization knew what that season meant.
The Season
The 2009 Yankees won 103 games, most in baseball. Alex Rodriguez, carrying years of October criticism, drove the whole run - including a Game 3 World Series homer that became the first call overturned by instant replay in postseason history. They beat the Twins, then the Angels, and then ran into the defending champion Phillies and the one pitcher who seemed to own them, Cliff Lee.
Lee beat them in Game 1, and the Series turned into a street fight. Pedro Martinez - Pedro Martinez, of all people - started Game 2 at Yankee Stadium to a chorus of "Who's Your Daddy" and lost to Burnett. Game 4 was saved by Johnny Damon's ninth-inning double-steal rally. And then it came back to the Bronx for Game 6.
The Goodbye
Joe Girardi gave the ball to Andy Pettitte on three days' rest. Hideki Matsui, the 35-year-old DH playing out his contract, gave him everything he needed: a two-run homer off Pedro in the second, a two-run single in the third, a two-run double in the fifth. Six RBIs, tying the World Series record, in the last game he would ever play for the Yankees.
Pettitte ground through five-plus innings for his record 18th postseason win, and Mariano Rivera got the final five outs - Shane Victorino's groundout to Robinson Cano, and bedlam. Championship number 27. MVP: Matsui, who hit .615 with three home runs.
What It Meant
It was the fifth ring for each of the Core Four - Jeter hit .407 that Series - and the first for the expensive new guard. Most of all, it was the last title of the Steinbrenner era in its truest sense: the Boss handed the trophy that night in November and was gone by the following July. They won it for him, right on schedule.
Seventeen years later, the Yankees are still trying to win number 28. Ask anyone in the Bronx how patient they remain.
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Sources: MLB.com ("Matsui powers Yankees to World Series title in 2009") · Baseball-Reference.com (2009 World Series statistics) · New York Times (Game 6 coverage) · Wikipedia (2009 New York Yankees season)
Photo: [edogisgod](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hideki_Matsui_World_Series_parade_2009.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons, [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).
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