We all know how famously focused the late 1990's Yankees were on winning. With four World Series in a five year stretch they took that to a level no team has matched since.
"We had one thing on our mind and that was to win," Derek Jeter told me in a 2019 interview. "We never patted ourselves on the back, we didn't talk about how great any of us were as individuals. It was just how can we get better as a team. We all had the same mindset."
Tino Martinez, who spent his first six years in Seattle, brought a similar intensity with him to New York in 1996.
"When I came here to New York it just seemed that nine, 10, or 11 of the guys on the same team felt the same way," Martinez told me in a 2016 interview. "We didn't care who the star was or who got the big hits. We just wanted to win ballgames every day and that's why we all got along so well."
Occasionally you could see the competitive fire in these two spill into other activities as I happened to witness on a road trip in 2001.
Being that batting practice doesn't start until after 5 p.m. for 7 p.m. road games, players always have a little extra time to kill in the clubhouse. That can involve everything from taking care of physical issues, to going over video and scouting reports, to just relaxing by watching movies or playing cards. That downtime can be important for players so famously intense.
But that intensity lives so close to the surface it can bubble up quickly in the most innocuous activities. Like playing a kids' board game.
One day in Oakland I saw Jeter and Martinez playing Connect Four. And you would have thought I had stumbled upon a chess match between Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer.
For a week straight on this trip to Oakland and Seattle, Derek and Tino prepared for daily battle against their top competitors in the American League by engaging in a game kids have played since the 1970's. If you're unfamiliar, the object is to drop checkers into a vertical grid and being the first player to place four in a row in any direction—up, down, or diagonal.
And these guys were locked in. Other players would come by to watch, or perhaps to heckle. A playful jab from Mike Mussina resulted in Tino snapping back, "This is for non-Stanford educated only, Mussina!"
I didn't keep track of who won or lost, or what the final tally was over the week. All I knew was that I had caught a glimpse into how the intense competitive nature of elite professional athletes could seep into everyday life.
"It wasn't that big of a deal, but you didn't want to lose to each other," Martinez said in 2016. "It got intense at times. And it's kind of the same way now. Derek's retired, I'm home playing golf with him and I hate to lose to him. And he hates losing to me. We don't say it out loud, but it's frustrating and it's always been that way."
Or as Jeter reminded me in our conversation last year, "I don't like to lose in anything."
