Chumps to Champs: How the Worst Teams in Yankees History Led to the, 90s Dynasty by Bill Pennington (review)

The Yankees of the late 1990s and early 2000s are rightfully considered a baseball dynasty. As such, books on the teams and the individuals who built, managed, and played for those clubs have been the subject of numerous books over the years. What has gotten overlooked in these works is the fact that those teams were not born out of thin air. They were the end result of a major rebuilding project that took many years to achieve. Thanks to Bill Pennington of the New York Times, who was a Yankees beat reporter during the 1980s and 1990s for the Bergen Record, the story of that project, executed by an "unlikely cast of characters-nobodies in the game of baseball at the time-made it happen" (xii), this very important background is now available in an extremely entertaining and educational format.

Chumps to Champs is broken down into three sections. Each chronicles a specific period in the Yankee rebuild.

The first sets the scene by showing how far the Yankees had fallen during the late 1980s. The event that best encapsulates the frustration of that period, according to Pennington, was the day the Yankees saw their starter Andy Hawkins pitch a no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox and lose. Pennington adroitly shows that "from 1989–1992 the Yankees were the laughingstock of baseball" (xi). The team was listless on the field and leaderless in the front office thanks to the suspension of principal owner George Steinbrenner. Pennington also shows that from this malaise, the framework that rebuilt the Yankees was created. This is done by providing chapters that highlight the rebuilding of the front office under Gene "Stick" Michael, the restocking of the farm system, thanks to the acquisition of the "Fab Five" of Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and pitching phenom Brien Taylor, and the process that led to Michael identifying that Buck Showalter was the Yankee manager of the future after watching Stump Merrill struggle to keep the team afloat.

The second section chronicles the formation of the "Yankee Way," of doing things that would eventually permeate the entirety of the club and become a calling card during the Torre years that followed. Readers will find a mix of chapters on the stocking of the big-league roster with culture changing individuals who cared about the team. Soon, readers are as familiar with Mike Stanley, Matt Nokes, and Melido Perez as they are with the future Yankees who would be the stalwarts of the title teams of the late '90s. Moreover, readers will also learn about the continued maturation (complete with times when future superstars failed) of the team's prized prospects. Almost as importantly, the section also illustrates that the Yankees did not hit on every prospect they signed. They passed on Juan Gonzalez because he was deemed to not be serious enough to be a Yankee. Others, like Taylor, fell by the wayside due to injury. Still others, like Gerald Williams (who was thought to be a better prospect than Bernie Williams) fizzled because of the wrong motivations.

Finally, the third section illustrates how all the hard work of the preceding years started to lead to winning at the big-league level. This culminated with the team's 1995 playoff berth, its first since 1981.

On the whole, Pennington's work is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Yankees. That does not mean that the work does not struggle at certain points. The real strength of the work lies in the first two sections. They are replete with stories illustrating how the Yankees came back from the proverbial dead. Of particular note are the stories that show the fact that players like Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Bernie Williams were not always shoe-ins to be big leaguers. Rivera had a bum shoulder, Pettitte was too skinny, and Bernie...