Yankees legends ... then and now

Pretty much the first thing you see when you get to Yankee Stadium.

You can't be a Yankees fan, or even be aware of the team, for more than about five minutes without being exposed to the history.

A major reason for that, of course, is that there's so much of it between the World Series wins and the number of great players who have worn the pinstripes, but a lot of it is that the team itself puts so much emphasis on its history.

From Babe Ruth Plaza outside the stadium, to Monument Park, to the retired numbers to the fact that Joe Girardi wears No. 28 because that will be the number of the team's next World Series win, the Yankees want you to know this is not a baseball team, but an institution.

Only one single-digit number left, and that'll be gone soon.

My wife and I went to Yankee Stadium yesterday, which coincided with Joe Torre's No. 6 being retired and him getting a monument in Monument Park. Between seeing players like David Cone, Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Hideki Matsui, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez and Andy Pettitte and the video highlights of Torre's years with the Yankees, the ceremony was a reminder that those teams from 1996 to 2007 were really something special.

And yet my wife constantly accuses me of hating Joe Torre. She has a point ... kind of.

No doubt, I have my issues with how Torre managed the team his last few years because I think his calm nature, which was such a positive attribute for years, became laxity. It angers me greatly that he didn't have the Yankees bunt on a one-legged Curt Schilling in the 2004 ALCS, or that he didn't come out of the dugout and do ... something ... when the bugs were eating Joba Chamberlain alive in Cleveland.

And I will never understand why a man who had Bob Gibson as a teammate let pitchers, particularly Red Sox pitchers, hit Derek Jeter over and over with no hint of retaliation.

But with all that being said, Torre was a great manager for the Yankees, their most-successful manager of my lifetime. He's more than worthy of both the Hall of Fame and his place in Monument Park, and I enjoyed seeing him receive the latter.

It's hard to see him, but the passenger in the front of the cart is only one of the handful of greatest catchers ever.

On most other teams, Yogi Berra, who rode in the golf cart with Torre and his family from Monument Park, would probably be the first or second guy you thought of if asked the greatest player in the team's history. With the Yankees, you'd probably think of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle before you thought of Berra, even though Berra is probably one of the three to five greatest catchers who ever played the game. (If you want to say Johnny Bench was the best, who else would you say before Berra? If you have any names, you probably don't have many.)

His biographer Allen Barra goes one further, writing in his book "Brushbacks and Knockdowns" (which I recently reread) that Berra was the most valuable team player in any sport of the 20th century, based on his own success as a player, his team's success and the number of pitchers who had their best (and sometimes only good) years pitching to Berra.

And oh yeah, he was part of the D-Day invasion, so not only is he one of the last surviving links to great Yankee teams of decades past, he's one of a dwindling number of surviving World War II veterans.

Simply put, Yogi Berra is a national treasure. Hopefully, he'll be around for quite a few more years to come.

An all-time great, and I saw him from the start.

Derek Jeter didn't play yesterday, since it was a day game after a night game. All the fans saw of him was him escorting Don Zimmer's wife to her seat for Torre's ceremony.

When I stop long enough to strip away all the debates about how good a fielder he was, the fawning articles about his Jeter-ness or the mocking of same, I realize that for the past 19 years, I've watched the career of someone who's going to be remembered as one of the all-time greats of the game. He's not at the very top of the list with Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron or that class, but he's in that next group or two below.

Once he retires at the end of this season, he's going to be sixth all-time in hits, behind five guys named Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial and Tris Speaker. That's pretty decent company.

While there have been better players than Jeter both throughout the history of baseball and over the course of his career -- the thing that has made him so great is that he was somewhere between very good and outstanding for a long time -- I'm not sure we'll see a star like Jeter for years to come. 

His career has been a perfect confluence of factors: the greatness on the field, all the postseason success, his being in New York his whole career, the good looks, the lack of controversy ... and that's going to be hard to replicate. Mike Trout, who is both a phenomenal player and has "All-American boy" written all over him, is probably closest, but he needs to get himself to October.

For Yankees fans, he is the final person still playing who gave those Torre teams (plus the 2009 team) their identity. Those were the teams of Jeter, Pettitte, Williams, Posada, O'Neill, Cone, Martinez, Matsui and Mariano Rivera, and once Jeter is gone, none of them will be left.

On the field, the Yankees, with Stephen Drew at shortstop, beat the White Sox 5-3. Yet I wonder who will provide the identity of the next great Yankee team, when and if that happens.