You can start with Lazarus. Nobody ever made a bigger comeback than him.
Richard Nixon is on the short list, too, since all he did after vowing we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore was gain the Presidency of the United States within six years. Bill Clinton came back after Gennifer Flowers, and Hillary came back after Iowa. Sideburns made a strong comeback, as did goatees, and so did WCBSFM. Leisure suits have not, yet, although in closets all across the nation, millions of them are aging like fine wine, waiting for the call.
Total Yankees Coverage
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There is nothing like a great comeback. It was Frank Sinatra who once said, “There’s something to be said for keeping at a thing, isn’t there?” and who once sang, “Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race,” and who made a stunning comeback in the 1950s and a surprising one in the ’60s and an epic one in the ’70s.
Comebacks aren’t always thrilling, and they aren’t always wanted. Joe Louis came back, and wound up on the wrong side of the ropes. Michael Jordan came back once and cemented his greatness, then came back again and chipped away at it. Elvis came back wearing leather and was idolized, then came back again wearing jump suits and became a cartoon.
Tricky thing, comebacks.
Mets Coverage
* ‘You Gotta Believe’ Mets Surge From Worst to First
Yet both of New York’s baseball teams will be attempting comebacks this year, appropriate in a year in which both will celebrate anniversaries of the greatest comebacks in their respective histories- 35 years since the “You-Gotta-Believe” Mets of 1973, 30 since the ’78 Yankees. And the psyches and the summers of eight million baseball fans will be riding on their respective abilities to pull them off.
The Mets’ task is the greater, grander challenge, of course, because the Mets weren’t simply knocked out of the ring last September, they were very nearly run out of town. A winter of deep breathing and Johan Santana have steadied the nerves, but to remember what Flushing was like in the final hours of last season is to recall a baseball panic rarely seen in these parts, or anywhere else.
“What I remember most of all,” David Wright said earlier this spring, “was the last game of the year, against Florida, at Shea, and it finally hit me: we’re not going to the playoffs. We really blew this thing. We were seven games ahead, and then we were a game behind, and then we were tied, and now we were getting hammered and it was all really happening. It was brutal.”
The Mets may be in virgin territory with the enormity of their plight -nobody has ever crafted a blueprint for coming back from something like that, because no one has ever had to come back from something quite like that – but their burden is a shared one, because the Yankees have their own coming back to do.
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* Joel Sherman’s Predictions for NL
* AL Preview: Bosox Best of League
Think about where we were just four short years ago, entering the 2004 season. The Yankees were defending American League champions, qualifying for a sixth World Series in the previous eight years, and while they may have been upset by the Marlins, there was no reason for panic. Surely, they would get another chance. Who was going to stop them, the Red Sox? What about The Curse? What about the goblins, the ghosts, the demons, the cherubs? The Sox were as dead as the Spitzer Administration. No one could come back from what they’d endured.
Funny thing, though. They came back. They won a World Series. And a second. They made the greatest comeback in baseball history in the 2004 ALCS, while the Yankees, simultaneously, were suffering the greatest choke in baseball history.
The Yankees?
We’re still waiting for them to come back from 2004. That Red Sox debacle was the first of four straight postseason series the Yankees dropped, the last four Joe Torre would ever manage, the most recent four that sting the memories and stun the membranes of Yankee faithful. At some point, you would think, the Yankees have to come back from that.
At some point.
You would think.
“I believe in this team,” Derek Jeter said a few weeks ago. “I believe in the guys on this team. I think we’ve gone through a lot of hard times the past few years, and we’ll be better because of it. We were left for dead in June and July last year, still made the playoffs. We came back from that. We can come back from this.”
We’ll find out soon enough, of course. About the Yankees. About the Mets.
“I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been,” the great Billie Holiday once said. The Yankees and the Mets have no worries. They know where they’ve been, and where they want to get. The next six months will be all about getting there. Getting back there. If they can.