2025 World Series: Dynasty Yankees on how Dodgers can repeat - ESPN

When Joe Torre was the manager of the last major league team to win back-to-back championships and the New York Yankees faced moments like the Los Angeles Dodgers face now, at the precipice of elimination, he would remind the players how great they were.

«It was always one of the biggest parts of Joe Torre's speeches,» recalled Paul O'Neill, the right fielder for the Yankees at that time. «He'd say, 'The talent in this room is good enough to win this.' When he said it, you believed it.»

The accomplishments of those Yankees teams are presented neatly in the record book, like perfectly boxed museum relics: Those Yankees won the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000 — three consecutive seasons, the heart of a dynasty bookended by the 1996 championship and a Game 7 loss in the 2001 World Series. Four championships in the span of five years; five World Series appearances in six years.

But in building that legacy, the Yankees were repeatedly pushed to the brink, and through the long regular seasons and the short intense rounds of playoffs, they intermittently looked older or tired or vulnerable — as the Dodgers have to some rival evaluators over the past 72 hours.

In conversation last week, Torre recounted how the Yankees won 114 games in the regular season in 1998, and suddenly played very tight in the American League Championship Series. As they dropped two of the first three games to Cleveland in the best-of-seven series, he sensed they were more focused on validating their summerlong accomplishment than on the postseason business at hand. Torre called a meeting and remembers saying, «Guys, you got to have some fun. You're trying to prove the 114 wins are not a fluke.'» After the meeting was over, O'Neill found Torre and