The following is excerpted from CHUMPS TO CHAMPS: How the Worst Teams in Yankees History Led to the ’90s Dynasty by Bill Pennington. Copyright © 2019 by Bill Pennington. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
In the dark, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera checked into a gritty budget hotel next to Newark Airport and glumly walked across the street to Bennigan’s, an Irish pub-themed casual dining chain popular in the New York area during the mid-1990s. It was the kind of New Jersey place that would have been filled with Yankees fans on this evening, June 11, 1995. But no one recognized the two players who had just been dispatched to the team’s farm system after…
