The thrill of seeing the Yankees be the Yankees again

The first time I entered the New York Yankees clubhouse, I wasn’t expecting a lot of buzz. The major-league locker rooms I’d been in to that point were quiet workplaces. I anticipated a reverent mood in the Cloisters of Mickey Mantle.

Instead, it was more like a mixer than a pregame. Every player was leaned back in his locker, joshing with two or three reporters. Even the clubhouse attendants were holding court. It was a big room, bigger than was typical, and it was still wall-to-wall in there

You know how you see sports in the movies, with the players telling war stories in complete sentences? This was that. You felt like you had been wandering around the outposts of ancient Europe and had finally arrived in Rome.

These were the mid-aughts Yankees. The Derek Jeter/Joe Torre/Alex Rodriguez Yankees. All great teams are easygoing, and none were greater or more easygoing than that one. They didn’t just expect to win. They expected to do it in style.

Soon after that, the Yankees entered a decaying orbit over Major League Baseball. Jeter left and yanked the heart out of the team. Torre took the brain. Rodriguez, with his slippery drug-related exit, removed its courage. Everybody loves it when a rich guy gets it in the neck, so it was fun watching that dynasty fall to dissolution.

They were still making the postseason. Even the bad Yankees win more than most good teams.

But on occasional visits to the Bronx, you felt the loss of that golden period. The clubhouse didn’t hum any more. It felt like baseball locker rooms everywhere – a mix of anxiety, boredom and resentment. Nobody held court any more. Instead, they took questions.

Every league needs its North Star franchises – ones that never fade, and give the others something to measure themselves against. When the Yankees are diminished for a length of time, baseball is diminished as well.

This is not the same as saying you should root for the Yankees. You should not. They are like the good school – if you want to attend, you have to move there. Anything else is front-running.

For everyone outside the greater New York area, the Yankees are a necessary evil. They give the proletariat a boss to wreck. Resenting them is a useful pastime.

But assuming you were watching on Saturday night, you felt it too, didn’t you? The thrill of seeing the Yankees be the Yankees again.

They were eventually going to beat Cleveland in the American League Championship Series, but once Saturday’s Game 5 got past them, they weren’t going to do it in style. They were going to stagger sideways into their first World Series in 15 years.

Then Juan Soto came to bat with the score tied 2-2 in extras.

The early dope on Soto was that he had come to New York to jack up his free-agency ask. The Yankees’ payroll is always bloated, the team hadn’t won big in ages and the odds of the best young hitter in baseball staying long term were low. Then the 10th inning happened.

Soto’s confrontation with Cleveland reliever Hunter Gaddis was so epic it could have been directed by David Lean.

Gaddis kept chucking them down the middle. Soto kept fouling them off. After each miss, Soto would nod his head in the affirmative. He knew where he was headed.

The final pitch wasn’t a great one to hit – the first fastball he’d seen in the count, up at the shoulders, tailing away from him. Just about anybody else, that’s another foul. But Soto drove it like a beach ball to straight centre. It spent seven seconds in the air – an absolute eternity.

As it cleared the fence, Soto had poised himself halfway between the plate and first base. He was facing the Yankees bench, knees bent, slapping his chest like a silverback.

The Yankees have had more capital-m Moments than any team ever, but this was up there with the best of them.

Propelled by Soto’s three-run homer, the Yankees won 5-2. As of Sunday afternoon, they await the winner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets in the World Series. So it’s either New York vs. New York or Soto vs. Shohei Ohtani. Either way, it’s a wish-upon-a-star scenario for MLB.

From the local perspective, this is already a disaster outcome. It’s now pretty much guaranteed that Soto will re-up as a permanent Yankee. It doesn’t matters what he costs. Unlike other teams we might name, the Yankees are postmoney once they see the door beginning to open.

This lineup, led by Soto and Aaron Judge, will dominate the American League East for the foreseeable future. Which means all the Yankees have to do now is overspend on pitching, which they do whether or not they’re winning.

Forget about re-signing Vlad Guerrero Jr. The Toronto Blue Jays could clone him and they’re still not getting a whiff of the division any time soon.

It’s not a restoration of the natural order. That would be New York and Boston astride the AL East while Toronto, Baltimore and Tampa got the scraps.

But it is a resumption of the big city/big game/big event ethos that held around the turn of the century – arguably sports’ moment of greatest cultural centrality.

When the Yankees are the Yankees (and the Cowboys are the Cowboys and the Lakers are the Lakers and so forth), it feels like you’re living in the middle of an era. That you were there when big, memorable things were happening, the sort they write books about 40 years down the line.

That’s nowhere close to as good a feeling as rooting for a hometown winner, but it’s a comforting consolation.