Sponsored Post: The Core Four Dynasty

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Last night, Derek Jeter played his final game at Yankee Stadium, and his career will come to a close this Sunday in Boston, putting an official end to the era of the Yankees Core Four: Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada have already sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. And certainly, this particular Yankee dynasty will go down as the premier team of their time.

Over the last 20 years, since those four debuted together in 1995, the Yankees have won 1,897 games, and have a chance to push that to 1,900 total wins with a strong finish this weekend. This mark is easily the best of any team during the Core Four’s reign, 63 wins ahead of the second place Braves and more than 100 wins. This is the group that returned the Yankees to their historical place atop baseball’s landscape, and re-established the franchise’s legacy for a new generation.

And what a legacy it is. This isn’t the Yankees first 20 year stretch of dominance, of course, and the end of the Core Four era allows us to look back at some of the other dominant runs the Yankees have had throughout their history.

Of course, any story about the Yankees history has to start with the Babe Ruth era. After posting just one winning season in the eight years prior to acquiring Ruth from the Red Sox, the team won more games than they lost in 14 of the 15 years Ruth wore the pinstripes. Before acquiring Ruth, the franchise had never reached the World Series; they did it seven times during his time with the team, including their first four championships. During the Ruth era, the Yankees won 61 percent of their games, and dominated baseball in a way that it hadn’t been dominated before.

Of course, things didn’t exactly fall apart when he left, either. With Lou Gehrig around to keep the torch lit, the Yankees won four consecutive World Series titles from 1936-1939, putting an emphatic cap on the two decades of the Ruth/Gehrig combination. From Ruth’s Yankee debut in 1920 to Gehrig’s forced retirement in 1939, the Yankees went 1,903-1,156, good for a remarkable .622 winning percentage. And, of course, the eight World Series championships. The Ruth/Gehrig Yankees were baseball’s first true dynasty, and perhaps remain the most famous dynasty in baseball history.

But if we’re judging Yankee dynasties on their regular season record, the Ruth/Gehrig era teams actually don’t sit atop the pile for the best two-decade run the franchise has ever seen. That belongs to the run of teams that began with the first Gehrig-only championship in 1936. From that point through 1955 — when a center fielder named Mickey Mantle was beginning to blossom into one of the game’s true legends — the Yankees went 1,927-1,142, good for a .628 winning percentage.

They reached the World Series 14 times in those 20 years, and they won 12 of those 14 appearances. Even their down years during this stretch were incredible; in 1954, they went 103-51, but missed the playoffs because the Cleveland Indians won 111 games, setting the American League record for wins in a season. That’s what it took to keep the Yankees out of the World Series in those days; win more games than anyone ever has before.

From that peak in 1955, the team’s rolling 20 year winning percentage began a slow, steady decline, and the team went through some relatively lean years in the 1970s and 1980s; from 1965 to 1984, the team won just three World Series titles in 30 years. One championship every 10 years might be cause for celebration in another city, but compared to the standards that had been set with Ruth’s arrival in New York, it simply wasn’t what Yankee fans had come to expect.

But the Core Four put the franchise back on track. Beginning with their arrival in 1995 through this season, here are the rolling 20 year winning percentages for the Yankees:

Playing in the modern baseball landscape doesn’t allow for quite so much dominance as the sport used to allow — more teams, more playoff spots, free agency, and tools like the luxury tax have made the game far more balanced — but the Jeter-led Yankees restored the Yankees as baseball’s premier franchise, and created a dynasty that will be remembered as one of baseball’s best.

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