Ballpark evictions, broken bats and Goliath vs. Goliath: The 10 hottest times in New York baseball history
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David Schoenfield
Don’t tell this to New Yorkers, but baseball wasn’t necessarily invented in the city.
Bat-and-ball games go all the way back to ancient Egypt nearly 4,500 years ago, John Thorn writes in his book “Baseball in the Garden of Eden”, with a game called seker-hemat, or “batting the ball.” In the temple of Hatshepsut, there is a wall relief of Thutmose III holding a ball in one hand and a stick in the other. Thutmose III is regarded as one of the greatest military strategists and warrior pharaohs of all time, but perhaps he was also the Aaron Judge of the Nile.
But in more recent times, baseball has often revolved around New York City — from the famous match game in 1846 between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and the New York Ball Club played at the Elysian Fields right across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, to John McGraw’s transformative New York Giants of the first three decades of the 20th century to the New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to the Brooklyn Dodgers signing Jackie Robinson and on and on, all the way to the present day battle of “Goliath vs. Goliath,” as the New Yorker put it, in reference to Juan Soto and the New York Mets taking on Judge and the Yankees for the hearts and wallets of Gotham City baseball fans.
The teams meet at Yankee Stadium as part of MLB’s rivalry weekend, and the boos that will rain down on Soto will signify a new level of heat between the Mets and Yankees. With this series in mind, let’s go back through history and find 10 times when New York’s baseball rivalries have been at their most fiery.
Jump to a moment:
McGraw kicks Yanks out of Polo Grounds | Ruth builds a house
The Shot Heard ‘Round the World | Willie, Mickey and the Duke
Mr. October in, Tom Terrific out | ’86 Mets take over the town
Interleague play begins | The Subway World Series
New ballparks in Bronx and Queens | Soto flees to Flushing
1920: John McGraw kicks the Yankees out of the Polo Grounds
Here’s how the story goes: McGraw, the Hall of Fame manager of the New York Giants, had built his team into a powerhouse in the National League, winning six pennants from 1904 to 1917, while the Yankees, who leased the Polo Grounds from the Giants beginning in 1913, usually finished near the bottom of the American League standings.
Then the Yankees acquired Babe Ruth in 1920 — and fans flocked to see this new slugging outfielder. On May 14, the Giants — McGraw was now a part-owner of the club — informed the Yankees their lease would not be renewed for 1921. With Ruth on his way to shattering the single-season record with 54 home runs and the Yankees on their way to drawing more than a million fans — something the Giants had never done — McGraw was jealous of the Yankees’ new drawing card. The Yankees had to go.
Is that what really happened? It’s possible, especially knowing McGraw, who was no fan of Ruth or his newfangled style of hitting. But the Yankees had played only 12 home games at that point, arguably too soon for attendance jealousy to set in, and the Giants did relent on the lease for 1921 a week later, albeit at a sizable increase. In the bigger picture, the Giants certainly now viewed the Yankees as a potential rival.
That became clear when the teams met in the World Series in 1921 and 1922. The Giants won both times as Ruth didn’t do much in either series, hitting .313 with one home run in a series that went eight games in 1921, but sitting out the final three games, except for a pinch-hitting appearance, because of an infected elbow, and then hitting .118 in 1922. It would be McGraw’s last World Series title.
1923: The Babe builds a house, turns NYC into a Yankees town
The lease scare of 1920 finally pushed the Yankees into building their own home ballpark, something the American League had reportedly been pressuring the Yankees to do since 1915. “The Yankees will have to build a park in Queens or some other out-of-the-way place,” McGraw reportedly said. “Let them go away and wither on the vine.”
Instead, Yankees owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston purchased the site of an old lumber mill — directly across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds. The groundbreaking for the new ballpark took place in May 1922 and it was completed in less than a year at a cost of $2.5 million. But Ruppert and Huston wanted something more than a ballpark: They wanted a stadium, with a seating capacity larger than any other current venue.
The original designs called for an enclosed stadium with a seating capacity of 80,000, but the design was modified and the upper decks stopped at the foul poles (they weren’t extended into the outfield until 1937). That meant Ruth never actually hit any upper-deck home runs at Yankee Stadium.
He did homer in the first game there on April 18, 1923. “In the third inning, with two teammates on the baselines, Babe Ruth smashed a savage home run into the right field bleachers, and that was the real baptism of the new Yankee Stadium,” the New York Times wrote.
The new stadium became, unofficially, the House That Ruth Built.
The Yankees would draw more than a million fans for a fourth straight season. The Giants drew 820,000 as the two teams met again in the World Series. This time, Ruth delivered. He homered twice in Game 2, was walked eight times, hit .368 and homered again in the clinching victory in Game 6.
The Yankees had their first title. They would win 26 more.
1951: The ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’
The Yankees continued to dominate through the Ruth era. He retired, DiMaggio entered the scene, and the Yankees won four World Series in a row from 1936 to 1939 — including two over the Giants, now in their post-McGraw era.
Meanwhile, the Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers were fighting for National League supremacy. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 and the Dodgers soon added Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe. The Giants signed Negro Leagues star Monte Irvin in 1949 and then called up an exciting rookie named Willie Mays in May 1951.
That season produced the most famous pennant race in history. The Dodgers had a 13-game lead on Aug. 13, but the Giants went 36-8 the rest of the way — it would surface five decades later that the Giants deployed a telescope in center field at the Polo Grounds and rigged a wire going to a buzzer in the bullpen where signals were relayed to the batter — and the teams finished in a tie, necessitating a three-game tiebreaker.
It came down to the bottom of the ninth of the third game, the Dodgers trying to close out a 4-1 lead. After two hits, an out and Whitey Lockman’s RBI double that made it 4-2, Dodgers skipper Chuck Dressen summoned Ralph Branca out of the bullpen to replace Newcombe. Carl Erskine was warming up alongside Branca, but legend has it he bounced a couple of curveballs in the dirt, so coach Clyde Sukeforth advised Dressen to go with Branca to face Bobby Thomson, even though Thomson had homered off Branca in the first game of the tiebreaker.
The first pitch was a called strike. The second pitch was a fastball, high and inside. Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges delivered the call:
“Branca throws … There’s a long fly … it’s gonna be … I believe … the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby hit it into the lower deck of the left-field stands. The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy. I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! I will not believe it! Bobby Thomson hit a line drive into the lower deck of the left-field stands and the place is going crazy!”
New York Herald Tribune columnist Red Smith wrote perhaps the most famous lede in sportswriting history:
“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
(The Yankees won the World Series, their third of five in a row.)
The 1950s: Willie, Mickey and the Duke
Nothing symbolized the golden age of New York baseball more than that great existential question: Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Duke Snider? Three Hall of Fame center fielders, all playing in the same city at the same time. “You could get a fat lip in any saloon by starting an argument as to which was best,” Smith wrote.
All these years later, it’s easy to forget the debate lasted only four years, from 1954 to 1957. Mays and Mantle were rookies in 1951, not yet at their glorious best, but then Mays was drafted into the Army and missed most of the 1952 season and all of 1953. The Dodgers and Giants would then slump off to California after the 1957 season.
Who was best? Their statistics over those four years:
Mays: .323/.397/.627, 163 HRs, 418 RBIs, 110 SBs, 35.5 WAR
Mantle: .330/.453/.625, 150 HRs, 425 RBIs, 39 SBs, 39.0 WAR
Snider: .305/.403/.616, 165 HRs, 459 RBIs, 21 SBs, 29.3 WAR
By modern analytic methods, Snider trails as a distant third, but he topped Mays and Mantle in both home runs and RBIs, and his best season came in 1953, so he gets shortchanged a bit in WAR. He could more than hold his own with Mays and Mantle, perhaps worth a diehard fan risking a fat lip over.
From 1949 to 1958, New York teams represented 16 of the 20 teams in the World Series, winning nine. In this four-year period, Mays’ Giants won in 1954, Snider’s Dodgers in 1955 and Mantle’s Yankees in 1956. Then it was over. For a time, New York became a one-team city, with the Yankees’ dynasty rolling along until 1964.
1977: In with Mr. October, out with Tom Terrific
The Mets were born in 1962, playing in the old Polo Grounds until Shea Stadium opened in 1964. Even though the Mets were terrible in that first season at Shea, losing 109 games, and the Yankees went to another World Series, the Mets outdrew the Yankees — as they would every year the rest of the decade and into the 1970s. Along the way, the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969 and reached another World Series in 1973.
The Yankees, while not terrible, were floundering. They even played at Shea Stadium in 1974 and ’75 as Yankee Stadium received a makeover. In 1976, the Yankees made it back to the World Series for the first time in 12 years. The Mets finished a respectable 86-76. A new era of free agency ushered in the 1977 season and the Yankees had an owner in George Steinbrenner willing to spend money — and happy to grab all the back-page headlines from the Mets.
The Yankees signed Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $3.5 million contract. Suddenly, Mets franchise icon Tom Seaver’s $225,000 salary looked dated. He told reporters he might have been better off not signing the contract and filing for free agency. Mets president M. Donald Grant called Seaver an “ingrate” and complained about the new economic system in the game. Writers sparred in the newspapers. Finally, June 15, The Midnight Massacre: With the Mets mired in last place, the team traded Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds.
That season began a seven-year run of irrelevance and losing seasons for the Mets. The Yankees? They were again the toast of New York, and that fall Jackson became Mr. October when he hit three home runs in the clinching game of the World Series to beat the Dodgers.
1986: The Mets take over the town again
The Yankees reached peak dysfunction in the 1980s while the Mets rebuilt around young stars Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, and veterans Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter. Steinbrenner ran through managers as if they were paper towels, including hiring Billy Martin three different times in the decade (and five times overall). The Mets hired Davey Johnson and built the best farm system in the game.
In 1986, the Mets had one of the best teams in National League history, going 108-54 and drawing more than 2.7 million fans (and topping 3 million the next two seasons). They fought opponents on the field, partied hard off it, destroyed a plane with their boozing and a food fight after winning the NL Championship Series and escaped to win the World Series. The Yankees won 90 games that season but attendance dropped to 2.2 million and Steinbrenner’s constant interference — in part, he was trying to keep up with the Mets — eventually led to a series of bad trades, bad free agent signings and four straight losing seasons as attendance dropped below 2 million.
But the Mets couldn’t stay on top either. Strawberry and Gooden had off-the-field problems (and would both revive their careers as Yankees). Hernandez and Carter got old. They made bad trades. In 1993, they finished 59-103 despite one of the highest payrolls in the sport: The worst team money could buy.
1997: Interleague play begins
Interleague play meant the Yankees and Mets would now meet in the regular season. The rivalry was no longer about getting the headlines and controlling the airwaves but beating the other team on the field. Fans invaded each other’s stadiums. The first game came at Yankee Stadium.
“The capacity crowd was screaming its split personality for all it was worth, with cries of ‘Let’s Go Mets’ and ‘Let’s Go Yankees’ competing on the airwaves, their different rhythms creating a different kind of cacophony than had ever been heard before in the Bronx ballpark,” Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times.
The Mets would win 6-0 behind Dave Mlicki’s shutout. One Yankees fan said he was going to call in sick for work the following day. “I feel like screaming, ‘What’s going on here?'” the fan said. “We’re the Yankees. They’re the Mets.”
One of the most memorable games came on July 10, 1999, when the Mets rallied for two runs to beat Mariano Rivera on Matt Franco’s walk-off two-run, pinch-hit single — following a questionable ball call on an 0-2 pitch. On June 12, 2009, nothing summarized the Yankees’ winning ways and the Mets’ frustrating mediocrity better than Mets second baseman Luis Castillo dropping Alex Rodriguez’s would-be game-ending pop fly, allowing two runs to score and the Yankees to walk off with an improbable victory.
But one interleague moment stands out above all others, because it led to one of the most memorable moments in World Series history. In June 2000, Mike Piazza belted a grand slam off Roger Clemens on the way to a 12-2 Mets win. The teams met again a month later for a day-night doubleheader. In the nightcap, Clemens drilled Piazza in the helmet. Piazza remained on the ground for several minutes and sat out for a week because of a concussion.
The bad blood remained — and ultimately boiled over — as both teams eventually advanced to the World Series, the first Subway Series since the Yankees and Dodgers met in 1956.
2000: The Subway Series ends in a three-peat for the Yankees
“This is gonna break up a lot of families,” Yankees manager Joe Torre said before the start of the series. The Yankees were going for a third straight World Series championship and fourth in five years. The Mets had Piazza, Edgardo Alfonzo and a rookie call-up named Timo Perez with 24 games of major league experience.
New Yorkers had to pick a side. Even objective journalists such as ESPN’s Steve Wulf: “Just when I think I can’t take any more whining from [Chuck] Knoblauch, just when I find the superiority of Yankee fans so insufferable, just when I think I’m ready to throw in the white towel and go over to Mr. Met, I see this face,” Wulf wrote. “It’s a face like a baseball glove: old and new, homely and appealing, resolute and kind. It’s the face of a Giants fan who grew up in Brooklyn. It’s the face of Joe Torre. It’s the face of New York.”
Game 1 was scoreless in the sixth inning and Perez was on first base with two outs when Todd Zeile launched a fly ball to left field. Perez thought it was going to be a home run; it hit the top of the wall. By the time Perez started sprinting hard as he rounded third base, it was too late: Derek Jeter threw him out. The Yankees would go on to a 4-3 victory in 12 innings.
Then came the infamous bat toss in Game 2. Clemens started for the Yankees.
“Clemens’s beaning of Piazza three and a half months ago has hovered over this Series, and although Torre has accused the news media of reopening the wound in the last week, the Mets’ hostility toward Clemens has never really dissipated,” Buster Olney wrote in The Times. “Everything Clemens did … would be seen by the Mets through the prism of that incident in July.”
Clemens faced Piazza in the first inning and the Mets’ catcher dribbled a foul ball, breaking his bat in the process. Clemens picked up the barrel of the shattered bat and fired it in the direction of Piazza, who had started jogging toward first base. Benches cleared.
“There was no intent there,” Clemens would say after the game. “I had no idea that Mike was running.”
In the end: Clemens pitched eight shutout innings, giving up only two hits. The Yankees were up 2-0.
They would win in five games, three World Series in a row, their dynasty secured. No team has repeated as champion since.
2009: Yankees and Mets open new ballparks … in the same week
Back in 1998, a 500-pound concrete-and-steel beam crashed into the seats below at Yankee Stadium. Luckily, it happened when the stadium was empty, but the incident certainly strengthened the hand of Steinbrenner in getting a new stadium. Shea? You could buy tickets for a Mets game and get a seat that literally didn’t exist. If the Yankees were going to get a new stadium, the Mets needed one as well.
Both teams would build their new stadiums next to the old ones. The new Yankee Stadium resembled the old one and cost $2.3 billion (about $670 million from the Yankees). The exterior of Citi Field looked like old Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers had played. It cost $900 million ($135 million from the Mets).
“Shea was old when it was new and the old Yankee Stadium never got old,” Tim McCarver, the Fox baseball analyst said when the stadiums opened. “You could have gone on and on and on with the old Yankee Stadium. You could not have done that with Shea.”
The Mets opened first, on April 13, losing 6-5 to the Padres. Seaver threw out the first pitch, but then the bumbling Mets showed up. Pitcher Mike Pelfrey got his cleat caught in the dirt and fell off the mound. Jose Reyes slid past second base and was called out. Ryan Church turned a fly ball into a three-base error.
The Yankees opened three days later — they also lost, 10-2 to Cleveland, as the bullpen gave up nine runs in the seventh inning. But that game was merely a blip in what would turn into a championship season, the franchise’s 27th — and, to date, most recent — title.
2024: Uncle Steve signs Soto away from the Yankees
Before the 2024 season, the Yankees had traded for Soto and he delivered a huge campaign, hitting .288/.419/.569 with 41 home runs and finishing third in the MVP voting. He helped the Yankees reach their first World Series since 2009. Then he became a free agent.
Ever since they signed Reggie Jackson, the Yankees had used their checkbooks to sign the free agents they wanted or trade for high-priced talent: Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson, David Cone, Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, Giancarlo Stanton, Gerrit Cole.
The Mets? Before Steve Cohen bought the team after the 2020 season, the biggest free agent they had signed was Carlos Beltran in 2005. The second biggest? Re-signing Yoenis Cespedes. Third biggest? Jason Bay.
This wasn’t exactly Yankees territory.
The Yankees wanted Soto. The Mets got him: 15 years, $765 million.
“Think about that for a second,” Jeff Passan wrote on ESPN. “A Yankee chose to be a Met. And not just any Yankee: one who helped lead the storied franchise to the World Series this year, one whom the team was equally prepared to pay $700 million-plus over 15 seasons.”
So here we are. Mets-Yankees, Soto and Judge, both teams in first place, a continuation, in a sense, of a New York rivalry that goes back to John McGraw and Babe Ruth.
With Judge the best hitter in the game and Soto starting to heat up with five home runs in May after a slow start, they will be front and center in this series. It reminds us of a McGraw quote before the 1921 World Series.
“Why shouldn’t we pitch to Babe Ruth? We pitch to better hitters in the National League,” McGraw said.
He won that time. Ruth won in the end. Who will win this time?
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David Hale
CLEMSON, S.C. — Dabo Swinney has a knack for finding a silver lining. It has been his defining trait over the past five seasons, as Clemson has hovered near the top of the ACC, but frustratingly far from the run of dominance it enjoyed in the 2010s. In a loss, Swinney found lessons. Even after a blowout, he saw hope. Even in the midst of fan revolt, he found all the evidence he needed of an inevitable turnaround within his own locker room.
Perhaps that’s what’s most jarring about Clemson’s most recent bout with mediocrity. It’s not just that the Tigers, the prohibitive favorite in the ACC to open the season, are 1-3 heading into Saturday’s showdown with equally disappointing and 2-2 North Carolina (noon ET, ESPN), but that Swinney’s usual optimism has been tinged with his own frustration.
“It’s just an absolute coaching failure,” Swinney said. “I don’t know another way to say it. And I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb. It starts with me, because I hired everybody, and I empower everybody and equip everybody.”
Record aside, Clemson has been here before — after slow starts in 2021, 2022, 2023 and last year’s blowout at the hands of Georgia to open the season. And yet, at each of those turns, Swinney remained his program’s biggest salesman.
Now, after the Tigers’ worst start since 2004, not even Swinney is immune to the reality. The questions are bigger, the stakes are higher and the solutions are more ephemeral.
In the aftermath of an emphatic loss to Syracuse in Death Valley two weeks ago, ESPN social posted the historic upset in bold type. The response from former Clemson defensive end Xavier Thomas echoed the frustration so many inside the Tigers’ once impenetrable inner sanctum are feeling.
“At this point,” Thomas replied, “it’s not even an upset anymore.”
Two months remain of a seemingly lost season. There is a path for Clemson to rebound, as it has before, and finish with a respectable, albeit disappointing, record. But there is another road, too — one hardly imagined by anyone inside the program just weeks ago. A road that leads to the end of a dynasty.
“He’s definitely bought himself some time to be able to have some hiccups along the way,” former Clemson receiver Hunter Renfrow said. “He’s an unbelievable coach and leader, and he’ll get it figured out.”
FORMER CLEMSON RUNNING back and now podcaster Darien Rencher banked a cache of interviews with star players during fall camp that he planned to release as the season progressed. Most have been evergreen. At the time he talked with Clemson quarterback Cade Klubnik, that one did, too. Looking back, it feels more like a time capsule, one that can’t be unearthed without a full autopsy of what has unfolded since.
“A month and a half ago, we’re talking about him being a front-runner for the Heisman, a top-five draft pick,” Rencher said. “I mean — my gosh.”
Any unspooling of what has gone wrong at Clemson must start with the quarterback.
Klubnik’s career followed a pretty straight trend — a rocky rookie season primarily as the backup to a sophomore campaign filled with growing pains to a coming-out party last season that ended with 336 passing yards and three touchdowns in a playoff loss to Texas. The obvious next step was into the echelon of elite QBs — not just nationally, but within the pantheon of Clemson’s best, alongside Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence.
Instead, Klubnik has looked lost.
“It can’t be physical unless he’s got the yips, which maybe he does,” former Clemson offensive lineman and current ACC Network analyst Eric Mac Lain said. “It’s bad sometimes. You’ve got guys screaming wide-open, and he’s looking at them, and the ball’s just not coming out. That’s the unexplainable thing.”
Through four games, Klubnik has nearly as many passing touchdowns (six) as he does interceptions (four).
There are, however, more than a few folks around the program who believe they can explain the struggles — for Klubnik and other stars who underwhelmed in September.
“We don’t got no dogs at Clemson,” former All-America defensive end Shaq Lawson posted in early September. “NIL has changed everything.”
It’s telling that even Swinney also has been vocal in his critique of Klubnik.
“It’s routine stuff. Basic, not complicated, like just simple reads, simple progression,” Swinney said of Klubnik’s play in Week 1, a performance that has been mirrored in subsequent games. “Holding the ball and running out of the pocket. Just didn’t play well, and so I didn’t have to talk to him. He already knew. He knows the game.”
This is a different era of college football, and while Swinney often sought a measure of patience with his players before, Klubnik is, by most reports, the second-highest-paid person inside the football building after Swinney, so the expectations have changed.
“If [Klubnik] ain’t a dude, we ain’t winning,” Swinney said after the loss to LSU in Week 1. “Dudes got to be dudes. This is big boy football.”
That massive NIL paydays and equally immense hype might underpin Klubnik’s struggles is not without anecdotal evidence. Look around the country and there are plenty of others — Florida‘s DJ Lagway, Texas‘ Arch Manning, UCLA‘s Nico Iamaleava, South Carolina‘s LaNorris Sellers and LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier — who’ve endured rough starts to seasons that were supposed to be star turns.
And yet, for Klubnik, this feels like a hollow excuse. He is, according to numerous coaches and teammates, unflinchingly competitive and talented. If anything, the knock on Klubnik the past few years has been his eagerness to play the role of hero, to do too much.
Perhaps the bigger impact of NIL on Klubnik’s performance comes in how far he has been from earning the paycheck. The millions could be an excuse to relax or a burden to live up to, and Klubnik’s tape through four games shows a QB scrambling to look the part rather than simply playing the game as he always has.
“It’s a tough sport and a team sport. There’s no perfect quarterback,” Klubnik said. “For me, I’m not paying attention to how other quarterbacks are playing, but I’m competitive whether we’re good or not, and I’m going to fight to the very end. I feel like the tape shows that, but you ask anybody in this facility about who I am and who this team is, we’re going to fight and we’re not going anywhere.”
SWINNEY HAS OFTEN bristled at outright criticism of his own performance, like his tirade in response to one apoplectic Clemson fan — Tyler from Spartanburg — who called into Swinney’s radio show after a 4-4 start to the 2023 season demanding change. Swinney’s rant was largely credited as inspiring a five-game winning streak to end the year, an emphatic rebuke to those ready to write his epitaph.
“He’s done it his way,” Renfrow said of Swinney. “And he’s built a really good roster. Three months ago, everyone was crowning us as the best team to play this year.”
The narrative has quickly changed, and Swinney isn’t arguing.
“Everybody can start throwing mud now,” Swinney said even before this latest round of mudslinging began in earnest. “Bring it on, say we suck again. Tell everybody we suck. Coaches suck, Cade stinks. Start writing that again.”
During Clemson’s past four seasons — years of 10, 10, nine and 10 wins — the underlying narrative was that the Tigers remained good, but they were slowly falling behind the competition due to Swinney’s stubborn insistence on remaining old-school. He was tagged as reluctant to embrace the NIL era due to comments he made in 2014, seven years before NIL began (though Clemson was heavily invested in its players via its collective at the time), and for multiple seasons, he refused to deal in the portal, retaining the vast majority of his recruited talent but adding nothing in the portal until this offseason.
And yet, Swinney has evolved — even if a bit more gradually than most coaches.
“One of the lazy takes on Swinney is he hasn’t changed,” Rencher said. “He did what he needed to do to give them a chance. He went and got the best offensive coordinator [Garrett Riley] in the country to come to Clemson. He got one of the most renowned defensive coordinators [Tom Allen] in the country who was just in the playoffs to come to Clemson. He went in the portal and got a stud D-end [in Will Heldt]. He paid his guys, retained his roster. These guys got paid.”
Even amid the hefty criticism coming from former players, little has been directed at Swinney. They played for him, they know him, and they’re convinced he’s not the source of Clemson’s struggles.
The new coordinators — Riley was hired in 2023, and Allen was hired this offseason — and current players, however, are a different story.
“They want to win more than we do,” former edge rusher KJ Henry posted amid Clemson’s stunning loss against Syracuse.
The outpouring of frustration from former players — many, such as Henry, who endured a share of setbacks during Clemson’s more rocky stretch in the 2020s — has been notable.
Heldt said he has not paid much attention to outside criticism, but he understands it.
“They’ve earned the right,” Heldt said. “They put in the time and have earned the right to say how they feel, but I don’t put too much thought into that.”
If the commentary hasn’t seeped into the locker room, the message still seems clear.
Swinney’s scathing review of the coaching staff — himself included — this week was evidence that the whole culture is off. Swinney was lambasted for years for an insular approach to building a staff, hiring mostly former Clemson players and promoting from within, but those hires at least maintained a culture that had driven championships. But now, the disjointed play and lack of any obvious identity on both sides of the ball has made Riley and Allen feel more like mercenaries than saviors, and the result is a sum that is less than its individual parts.
Riley’s playcalling has been questioned relentlessly. In the second half against LSU, with Clemson either ahead or within a score, the Tigers virtually abandoned the run game entirely.
Allen was brought in to toughen up a defense that was scorched last season by Louisville, SMU, Texas and, in the most embarrassing performance of the season, by Sellers and rival South Carolina. And yet, with NFL talent such as Heldt, Peter Woods and T.J. Parker on the defensive line, Syracuse owned the line of scrimmage in its Week 4 win in Death Valley.
Meanwhile promising recruits such as T.J. Moore and Gideon Davidson have yet to look ready for the big time, and the transfer additions beyond Heldt — Tristan Smith and Jeremiah Alexander — have offered virtually nothing.
Start making a list of all the things that have gone wrong, and the frustration is apparent.
“Dropped balls, Cade misses a guy, the offensive line gets beat, Cade has PTSD and rolls out when he shouldn’t — it’s just all these things,” Rencher said. “You can blame a lot of things but it’s just too much wrong to where it can’t be right. It’s too many things everywhere so it can’t come together. You can overcome some things, but they’re just all not on the same page.”
BEFORE HIS GAME against Clemson, which Georgia Tech ultimately won on a last-second field goal, Yellow Jackets coach Brent Key set the stage for what he knew would be a battle, despite the Tigers’ rocky start.
“No one’s better at playing the underdog than Dabo,” Key said.
Swinney has resurrected his teams again and again, swatted away the critics, stayed true to his core philosophies and emerged victorious — if not a national champion.
So, is this year really different? Has Clemson lost its edge? Has Swinney lost his magic?
“I see an extremely talented team,” Syracuse defensive coordinator Elijah Robinson said. “Those guys are dangerous. I don’t care what their record is. That’s not just a team, that’s a program. Dabo Swinney does a great job, and they went out and lost the first game last year and went on to win the conference. A lot of these kids, when I was at Texas A&M, we tried to recruit them. People can think what they want when they look at the record. I’m not looking at the record at all.”
Added another assistant coach who faced Clemson this season: “It wouldn’t surprise me if they run the table the rest of the way.”
Winning out would still get Clemson to 10 wins, a mark that has been the standard under Swinney. Winning out would likely shift all the criticism of September into another offseason of promise, such as the one Clemson just enjoyed. Winning out is still possible, according to the players there who’ve said a deep breath during an off week has been a chance to reset and start anew.
“The college football landscape has changed so much over the last 10 years,” Renfrow said. “But developing, teaching, coaching, bringing people together — that hasn’t, and Swinney’s as good as I’ve been around at those things.”
That’s largely the lesson Florida State head coach Mike Norvell took from his team’s miserable 2-10 performance a year ago. In the face of a landslide of change and criticism, the key is doubling down on the beliefs that made a coach successful to begin with, not a host of changes intended to appease the masses.
“The dynamic of college football and being a part of a team and the pressures that are within an organization now are greater than they’ve ever been,” Norvell said. “You put money into the equation, and you have all the agents and people surrounding these kids, when things don’t go as expected, you’ve got to really stay true to who you are and make sure you’re connected with these guys at their needs. The example we had last year, we didn’t do a great job at that because as the tidal wave of challenges showed up, it’s critical to refocus and revamp the guys for what they can do. It’s not fun to go through, but I think you’ll continue to see more and more.”
The game has changed, and Clemson, for all of Swinney’s steadfast resolve, has been swept along with the currents.
There’s a legacy at Clemson, one it helped build, and for all its faith in Swinney’s process, it’s not hard to see the cracks in the façade.
Never mind the record, Rencher said. Maintaining the Clemson standard is what’s at stake now.
“That, more than any loss, would be the most disappointing thing, if they didn’t respond,” Rencher said. “Swinney’s optimistic. They’re built to last. He said they’re going to use all these things people are throwing at us to build more championships, and I believe him. Clemson is built on belief and responding the right way. It would be unlike Clemson to not respond. That would be so much more disappointing than going 1-3 if we just laid down. If this is the class that just lays down, I can’t imagine that.”
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Alden Gonzalez
WHEN THE LOW point arrived last year, on Sept. 15 in Atlanta, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts broke character and challenged some of his players in a meeting many of them later identified as a fulcrum in their championship run.
This year, he attempted to strike a more positive tone.
It was Sept. 6. The Dodgers had just been walked off in Baltimore, immediately after being swept in Pittsburgh, and though they were still 15 games above .500, a sense of uneasiness lingered. Their division lead was slim, consistency remained elusive and spirits were noticeably down. Roberts saw an opportunity to take stock.
“He was talking to us about the importance of what was in front of us,” Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas said in Spanish. “At that time, there were like seven, eight weeks left because we only had three weeks left in the regular season, and he wanted all of us, collectively, to think about what we were still capable of doing, and the opportunity we still had to win another championship.”
Later that night, Yoshinobu Yamamoto got within an out of no-hitting the Baltimore Orioles, then he surrendered a home run to Jackson Holliday and watched the bullpen implode after his exit, allowing three additional runs in what became the Dodgers’ most demoralizing loss of the season. The next morning, though, music blared inside Camden Yards’ visiting clubhouse. Players were upbeat, vibes were positive.
The Dodgers won behind an effective Clayton Kershaw later that afternoon, then reeled off 16 wins over their next 21 games — including back-to-back emphatic victories over the Cincinnati Reds in the first round of the playoffs.
It took a day, but Roberts’ message had seemingly landed.
“We needed some positivity,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez said, “to remove all of the negativity that we were feeling in that moment.”
As they approach a highly anticipated National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the Dodgers once again look like one of the deepest, most fearsome teams in the sport.
But the journey there was arduous.
A Dodgers team many outsiders pegged as a candidate to break the regular-season-wins record of 116 ultimately won only 93, its fewest total in seven years. Defending a championship, a task no team has successfully pulled off in a quarter-century, has proven to be a lot more difficult than many Dodger players anticipated. But they’ve maintained a belief that their best selves would arrive when it mattered most. And whether it’s a product of health, focus, or because the right message hit them at the right time, they believe it’s here now.
“We’re coming together at the right time,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said amid a champagne-soaked celebration Wednesday night, “and that’s all that really matters.”
BUSTER POSEY’S San Francisco Giants became the most dominant team in the first half of the 2010s, during which they captured three championships. They won every other year — on even years, famously — but could not pull off the repeat the Dodgers are chasing. To this day, Posey, now the Giants’ president of baseball operations, can’t pinpoint why.
“I wish I could,” Posey said, “because if I knew what that one thing was, I would’ve tried to correct it the second, third time through.”
Major League Baseball has not had a repeat champion since the New York Yankees won their third consecutive title in 2000, a 24-year drought that stands as the longest ever among the four major North American professional sports, according to ESPN Research. In that span, the NBA had a team win back-to-back championships on four different occasions. The NHL? Three. The NFL, whose playoff rounds all consist of one game? Two.
MLB’s drought has occurred in its wild-card era, which began in 1995 and has expanded since.
“The baseball playoffs are really difficult,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “You obviously have to be really good. You also have to have some really good fortune. The number of rounds and the fact that the very best team in the league wins around 60% of their games, the very worst team wins around 40% — now you take the upper-echelon in the playoffs, and the way baseball games can play out, good fortune is a real part of determining the outcomes.”
The Dodgers, now 11 wins shy of a second consecutive title, will hope for some of that good fortune this month. They’ve already encountered some of the pitfalls that come with winning a championship, including the one Posey experienced most vividly: the toll of playing deep into October.
“That month of postseason baseball — it’s more like two or three months of regular-season baseball, just because of the intensity of it,” Posey said.
The Dodgers played through Oct. 30 last year — and then they began this season March 18, nine days before almost everybody else, 5,500 miles away in Tokyo.
“At the time, you don’t see it,” Hernández said, “but when the next season starts, that’s when you start feeling your body not responding the way it should be. And it’s because you don’t get as much time to get ready, to prepare for next season. This one has been so hard, I got to be honest, because — we win last year, and we don’t even have the little extra time that everybody gets because we have to go to Japan. So, you have to push yourself to get ready a month early so you can be ready for those games. Those are games that count for the season. So, working hard when your body is not even close to 100%, I think that’s the reason. I think that’s why you see, after a team wins, next year you see a lot of players getting hurt.”
The Dodgers had the second-most amount of money from player salaries on the injured list this season, behind only the Yankees, the team they defeated in the World Series, according to Spotrac. The Dodgers sent an NL-leading 29 players to the IL, a list that included Freddie Freeman, who underwent offseason surgery on the injured ankle he played through last October, and several other members of their starting lineup — Will Smith, Max Muncy, Tommy Edman and Hernández.
The bullpen that carried the Dodgers through last fall might have paid the heaviest price. Several of those who played a prominent role last October — Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, Evan Phillips — either struggled, were hurt or did not pitch. It might not have been the sole reason for the bullpen’s struggles — a combined 4.94 ERA from free agent signees Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates played just as big a role — but it certainly didn’t help.
“I don’t know if there’s any carryover thing,” Treinen said Sept. 16 after suffering his third consecutive loss. “I don’t believe in that. We just have a job, and it’s been weird.”
IN FEBRUARY, ROJAS made headlines by saying that the 2025 Dodgers could challenge the wins record and added they might win 120 games at full health. An 8-0 start — after an offseason in which the front office added Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Michael Conforto, Hyeseong Kim, Scott and Yates to what was arguably the sport’s best roster already — only ratcheted up the expectations.
The Dodgers managed a 53-32 record through the end of June — but then, they went 10-14 in July, dropped seven of their first 12 games in August and saw a seven-game lead in the National League West turn into a one-game deficit.
From July 1 to Aug. 14, the Dodgers’ offense ranked 20th in OPS and 24th in runs per game. The rotation began to round into form, but the bullpen sported the majors’ highest walk rate and put up a 1.43 WHIP in that stretch, fifth highest.
The Dodgers swept the San Diego Padres at home in mid-August, regaining some control of the division, but then Los Angeles split a series against the last-place Colorado Rockies and lost one in San Diego. The Dodgers swept the Reds, then lost two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks, dropped three in a row to the Pirates and suffered those back-to-back walk-off losses to the Orioles.
Consistency eluded the Dodgers at a time when it felt as if every opponent was aiming for them.
Before rejoining the Dodgers ahead of the 2023 season, Rojas spent eight years with the Miami Marlins, who were continually out of the playoff race in September and found extra motivation when facing the best teams down the stretch. Those matchups functioned as their World Series.
“I think that’s the problem for those teams after winning a World Series — you’re going to have a target on your back,” Rojas said. “And it’s going to take a lot of effort for your main guys to step up every single day. And then, at the end of the regular season, you’re going to be kind of exhausted from the battle of every single day. And I think that’s why when teams get to the playoffs, they probably fall short.”
Travis d’Arnaud, now a catcher for the Los Angeles Angels, felt the same way while playing for the defending-champion Atlanta Braves in 2022. There was “a little bit more emotion” in games that otherwise didn’t mean much, he said. Teams seemed to bunt more frequently, play their infield in early and consistently line up their best relievers. Often, they’d face a starting pitcher who typically threw in the low-90s but suddenly started firing mid- to upper-90s fastballs.
“It’s just a different intensity,” said A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher for the Chicago White Sox teams that won it all in 2005 and failed to repeat in 2006. “It’s hard to quantify unless you’re playing in the games, but there’s a different intensity if you’re playing.”
BEFORE A SEASON-ENDING sweep of the Seattle Mariners, the 2025 Dodgers were dangerously close to finishing with the fewest full-season wins total of any team Friedman has overseen in these past 11 years. Friedman acknowledged that recently but added a caveat: “I’d also say that going into October, I think it’ll be the most talented team.”
It’s a belief that has fueled the Dodgers.
With Snell and Glasnow healthy, Yamamoto dialing up what was already an NL Cy Young-caliber season and Shohei Ohtani fully stretched out, the Dodgers went into the playoffs believing their rotation could carry them the way their bullpen did a year earlier. Their confidence was validated immediately. Snell allowed two baserunners through the first six innings of Game 1 of the wild-card round Tuesday night, and Yamamoto went 6⅔ innings without allowing an earned run 24 hours later.
“For us, it’s going to be our starting pitching,” Muncy said. “They’re going to set the tone.”
But an offense that has been without Smith, currently nursing a hairline fracture in his right hand, has also been clicking for a while. The Dodgers trailed only the Phillies in slugging percentage over the last three weeks of the regular season. In the Dodgers’ first two playoff games, 10 players combined to produce 28 hits. Six of them came from Mookie Betts, who began the season with an illness that caused him to lose close to 20 pounds and held a .670 OPS — 24 points below the league average — as recently as Aug. 6. Since then, he’s slashing .326/.384/.529.
His trajectory has resembled that of his team.
“We had a lot of struggles, really all year,” Betts said. “But I think we all view that as just a test to see how we would respond. And so now we’re starting to use those tests that we went through earlier to respond now and be ready now. And anything that comes our way, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already gone through.”
The Dodgers still don’t know if their bullpen will be good enough to take them through October — though Sasaki’s ninth inning Wednesday night, when he flummoxed the Reds with triple-digit fastballs and devastating splitters, certainly provided some hope — but they believe in their collective ability to navigate it.
They believe this roster is better and deeper than the championship-winning one from last fall. And, as Rojas said, they believe they “know how to flip the switch when it matters most.”
“It’s been a long year,” Muncy said. “At this point, seven months ago, we were on the other side of the world. We’ve been through a lot this year, and to end up in the spot we’re in right now — we’re in a great spot. We’re in the postseason. That’s all that matters. That’s what we’ve been saying all year. Anything can happen once you’re in October.”
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