Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera came up together in 1995 and spent nearly two decades winning together. Five championships each, seven pennants, and a run of loyalty no modern franchise will match.
DID YOU KNOW?
Jeter, Posada and Rivera played 17 consecutive seasons together (1995-2011) - the longest continuous run by any trio of teammates in the history of North American professional sports.
Before they were the Core Four, they were kids at the Yankees' minor league complex in Tampa. Jeter was the sixth pick of the 1992 draft, a skinny shortstop from Kalamazoo. Posada was a converted second baseman drafted in the 24th round in 1990. Pettitte was a 22nd-round pick, signed out of junior college. Rivera was a $3,000 amateur signing from Panama who topped out at 88 mph as a minor league starter.
The Yankees drafted or signed all four of them - and, nearly as remarkable in the free-agency era, kept all four of them.
The Foundation
All four debuted in 1995. By 1996, three of them were central to the title that ended an 18-year drought: Jeter was Rookie of the Year, Pettitte won 21 games and Game 5 of the World Series, and Rivera was the most dominant setup man anyone had ever seen before becoming the greatest closer in history. Posada arrived for good in 1998, and the group was complete. From that point on, every great Yankees moment of the era ran through at least one of them.
What followed was the most successful sustained run in modern baseball. Four World Series in five years from 1996 to 2000 - including the 125-win machine of 1998 - and seven American League pennants across the era. When the fifth ring finally came in 2009, nine years after the fourth, it was the Core Four at the center of it again.
Why It Was Different
Stars win games; the Core Four set the terms of an entire era. The shortstop was the captain. The closer was automatic. The left-hander took the ball in every must-win October - Pettitte retired with a record 19 postseason wins - and the catcher ran the room the way Munson once had. Around them, rosters turned over completely, twice. The constant was the four of them and the expectation that came with wearing the uniform.
Even their one departure proved the rule: Pettitte spent three seasons with the Astros from 2004 to 2006, thought it over, and came home to the Bronx, where he belonged.
They left the way they came - together, more or less. Posada played his last game in 2011. Pettitte and Rivera went out together in 2013, Pettitte's final start a complete game in Houston. Jeter's last act, in 2014, was a walk-off single at the Stadium, because of course it was.
The dynasty had plenty of hired guns. But the spine of it - the thing the Yankees actually were for 20 years - was four homegrown players who never wanted to be anything else.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Core Four history and records) · New York Times (retrospectives on the group's departures) · Baseball-Reference.com (career and postseason records)
Photo: [Arturo Pardavila III](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Core_Four_2015.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons, [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).
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