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.