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Sporting News, The, Nov 1, 1999 by Dave Kindred

Snow covered the blood in December 1944. Six months after D-Day, his army in retreat across the Rhine, the madman Adolf Hitler still sent tanks and men on an offensive from Germany into the south of Belgium. The offensive became the Battle of the Bulge, and in that snowy hell "we were actually surrounded by the Nazis," the great old lefthanded pitcher Warren Spahn says.

All these years later, Spahn sat warm in a glittery hotel. Sandy Koufax had said major league baseball's All-Century team would be no team without Warren Spahn as its lefthanded pitcher. How many games did Spahn win? Three hundred sixty-three. How many years did he pitch? Until he couldn't.

And wouldn't you have pitched forever if you'd made it out of the snows of Bastogne? "I don't think the Germans even knew they had us surrounded. They certainly didn't take advantage of it, thank God, or I wouldn't be talking to you now. Thing is, we didn't trust anybody, even men in American uniforms. The Germans were stealing uniforms, boots, rifles, dog tags. And some of them could speak English well."

So the Americans developed a code they used to tell good guys from bad guys. The code included a wonderfully American question. "Anybody we didn't know we'd ask, `Who plays second base for the Bums?'"

And if there came no answer?

"If the German wasn't a baseball fan," Spahn says, "he was dead."

Warren Spahn here. Willie Mays in the next room. Bob Gibson saying, "Koufax wouldn't throw me a fastball. I'd hit it. Threw me nothing but hooks." Brooks Robinson saying Pete Rose doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame if he bet on baseball games. Across the ballroom, Yogi Berra says, "These Yankees, this year, they're like our old teams. They all pull together. They're having fun."

Talking baseball at the World Series. Talking with the immortals. Now Yogi: "In my 17 (full) seasons, we never had a fight in the clubhouse. We'd even have our own meetings. We'd tell Casey (Stengel) later. We'd get together and say, `Hey, guys, we need a new wing on the house.'" Meaning they wanted another World Series check.

There are no such money concerns for today's players, for whom a World Series check is tip money, but Yogi insists these Yankees are the '50s Yankees all over again.

"I do think that, I do," he says. "they play the game right. They make the bunt, they make the cutoff, they make the right play. They're baseball players."

And there is the beauty of this World Series. To say these Yankees are baseball players is to confirm the skilled worker's commitment to a craft worth such a worker's passion. In Boston this October, steely-eyed manager Jimy Williams said of his steely-eyed shortstop Nomar Garciaparra: "He's a baseball player. Every day he comes to play baseball." These Yankees work with a simplicity and attention to detail that always identifies the true craftsman.

We should remember Paul O'Neill's at-bat in Game 1. A lefthanded hitter batting .190 against lefthanded pitchers this season, he came to an eighth-inning, bases-loaded, no-out, game-tied, infield-in moment when the game could be won--and he stood in against the Braves' action-hero reliever, John Rocker, a lefthander who brings incinerating heat.

But O'Neill is a professional hitter who gave Rocker none of the help the kid needed in his first, adrenaline-running World Series appearance. So the count went to three balls, one strike--a hitter's count, and yet even here O'Neill had no Mr. October imaginings of glory.

"Lefthanders aren't going to make their living against Rocker," he says. "I just wanted to put the ball in play." That is, be a baseball player. Hit it somewhere, anywhere, and force the Braves to make a gut-check play. On a Rocker fastball, O'Neill did it--a ground ball to the first base side. Nothing heroic, as even O'Neill would admit later: "If the ball finds a hole, we win. If they turn a double play, we might still be playing."

O'Neill's ground ball became a single driving in two runs. "We got a break," he says. Yes, the Yankees got a break when the ball bounced between the first and second basemen. But they created the circumstances that made the break possible. Atlanta's infield was in, increasing the chances of a ground-ball single, because the hitters preceding O'Neill had done everything right to score the tying run and load the bases, forcing the Braves into the high-risk defensive maneuver.

Chili Davis is the Yankees' designated hitter. He's also a baseball player who has been places and seen things. When he sees Paul O'Neill drive in the winning runs of a World Series game, he sees the moment as definition of the 1999 Yankees.

"Nobody on this team is thinking he needs to be the star," Davis says. "But we trust each other to step up when someone needs to step up." So O'Neill, all but helpless against lefthanders this season, stepped up against one of the game's most formidable lefthanders. And afterward said not one word intended to raise himself to heroic proportions. "Paul is not a Barry Bonds, he's not always in front of a camera," Davis says. "He just wanted to play."