by Jorge Posada
I took a lot of cuts—off the tee, off the machines, soft-toss, live BP—but always with a purpose. I had a couple of things I wanted to focus on, and the less I played the more important they were to me. My uncle Leo had worked with me to do what he called “compress” but what other people call their “trigger.” Think about firing an arrow from a bow. Before the arrow can go forward, it has to go backward. That was what I needed to do with my hands and my arms. It’s also like throwing a punch. You have a lot more behind the blow if you turn your hips and upper body away from the target before you thrust forward. I also had to focus on keeping my weight back and my head still as I stepped into the ball.
Doing all those drills every day helped me with my hitting mechanics. It was also good that I still spoke regularly with my dad. He had seen my swing evolve from the very beginning, so he was able to see things that even our hitting coaches might not have picked up on. To be honest, though, what I had to work hardest at was filtering all the input and finding consistency among the various things I was being told. Ultimately, it came down to me and what I was sensing with my body. When what I was feeling lined up with what others were observing, then that was usually input I could use. I had to learn the hard way, though, not to go up to the plate dragging too much input with me. In ’98, I was still in the thinking and not responding mode.
One thing I wished that I could have brought with me throughout my career was a device Uncle Leo used with me. We called it the “air tee,” but I don’t know who made it or where he got it. Basically, it was a device like a vacuum cleaner in reverse that pushed air out of a tub with enough force that a ball could balance on it. Because of the airstream and the seams on the ball, your target would move a bit, kind of like a knuckleball. That forced you to concentrate even more on centering the ball to hit it squarely. I’ve taken thousands of swings at that thing, and anytime I was in Miami to work with my uncle, he’d break it out for me to use. I don’t know if he liked using it because he couldn’t throw BP to me, but whatever the reason, the thing really worked.
I also made sure, as did a lot of guys, that I put the two bats I’d selected for a game in the same slots in the rack in the dugout. I also put my helmet in the same slot. I don’t know who I heard this one from, but I also made sure that my bats were both lying flat in there. You never wanted your bats to rest on top of each other or have them be crossed. That was supposed to bring you big-time bad luck. I never questioned that one; I just did it.
That’s the thing about the game. You have to find what works for you and stick with it. Sometimes you don’t find those things and have to steal some ideas. In my first few seasons with the Yankees, as I’ve said, I observed everybody and paid close attention. Wade Boggs, who was such a great hitter but also so different from me in many ways, taught me more about superstition than anything else. Wade became known as the guy who ate chicken every day—both as a superstition and as a way to simplify his life and develop a routine. He also had an interesting quirk that I eventually asked him about. Sometimes I’d be on the bench or in the clubhouse with him before a game, we’d be talking, and all of sudden he’d bolt. That happened once, and I thought it was odd. Eventually, I learned that it was both odd and a number: Wade always wanted to start an activity at a time that ended with the number 7. At 6:47, say, he’d start running his pregame sprints.
I didn’t do things exactly as Wade did, but I had things timed down to the minute. For a 7:05 game, I would leave the clubhouse to get out on the field at 6:41 to do my running. My gear was already in the bullpen, so I only had my glove with me. My gear was already there because prior to going out that final time I’d have spent ten minutes with Gary Tuck working on defensive drills, my equivalent of taking ground balls or fly balls. I’d do around-the-world blocking drills and footwork and exchange drills every day at the beginning of my career and at least five days a week later on.
At 6:46, I would stretch, always doing the same ones in the same order. At 6:47, I would start to loosen up my arm again. By 6:55, I was loose, so I’d have time to get to the bullpen and catch the last few minutes of the starting pitcher’s warm-up session. Before the game started, I had one last routine that was a matter of respect for my family. After the national anthem was over, I would kneel down and make a small cross in the dirt to honor deceased members of my family. One cross for my grandfather, one for my grandmother. As time went on, sadly, that number increased. I did something similar when I came to bat to honor them. I’d tap my bat on each of the four corners of the plate in the shape of a cross. I also was sure to do pine tar, rosin, dirt, in that order, and kept to a routine every time I got in the batter’s box.
Superstitions are supposed to help you keep going well, but they don’t always work. There were times when I had to do some things to get rid of the bad mojo. If I was going through a tough period, I’d get rid of some of my gear—hats, shoes, socks, T-shirts, wristbands, the gloves I wore on my left hand underneath my mitt, even a mitt. I’d toss them in a box, and I’d ask other guys if they had things they were no longer using or wanted to get rid of. I’d send those boxes to Puerto Rico. My dad would distribute the stuff to some of the poorer kids there, or he would take stuff with him on trips to the Dominican or elsewhere in Latin America he traveled. I felt good about doing that. I would also switch out my catcher’s gear if I had a bad day, anything to keep from being infected by bad luck.
I never gave my belt away for some reason. The belt I first wore in 1997 was the same one I wore until my last game in 2011. It had to be resewn and even releathered toward the very end, but I wanted to keep that thing as a reminder. I still have it, and it sits in my office along with other baseball memorabilia I’ve acquired over the years. I don’t want to make too much of the symbolism or the significance of that thing. With the complicated relationship that my dad and I had, and the development and deepening of that relationship over the years, I guess I keep it around as a way to remind myself of where I came from and how far I’ve come. And also as a reminder that the right kind of discipline and approach, the right way of focusing your emotions and your efforts, can produce great things.
It seems appropriate to me to look back at that ’97 season, now 17 years in the past, and see those Wade Boggs sevens come up. Sometimes you do everything you can to control your fate and things still don’t work out for you. I think it also says something about how fortunate I was to play with the Yankees during that time that I can view a 96-win season as a failure. I think that every team starts out spring training saying and thinking that the goal is to win it all. Since I never played for any other team, this might be an incorrect assumption, but I don’t think that every team actually believes they have a realistic shot at attaining that goal. One hundred and sixty-two games is a long season, and you can do all kinds of things to help or hurt your chances of winning, performing whatever routines and rituals, but given that number of games, you’d think that in the end luck wouldn’t play much of a part in the outcome.
The mental side of the game is fascinating to me, but in the end the numbers tell the story—the numbers on the scoreboard, but mostly just the number of runs. We went into the Division Series against Cleveland that year thinking that we were going to win, that we should win, that we were prepared to win, but in the end we didn’t. If my first full year in the big leagues was an extension of my baseball education, if it was my time serving an apprenticeship, then I didn’t learn the answer to one question that fans, management, and even we as players were struggling to understand: why did we lose? The only thing I can say for sure is that in three out of those four games, Cleveland scored more runs than we did. Well, there is one other thing that I can say about it. It sucked to lose. It sucked to look back over a season and have it feel like it was a failure. And it was. You could point out all the good things, put them on a list of pros and cons, but that one item on the list of cons wiped out everything—we didn’t win the World Series.
Seeing how
hard those guys took losing, the guys who would be the heart and soul of the Yankees—some for a long time, some for a short time—eventually taught me something that I thought I already knew. I always knew I hated losing. I just didn’t realize how strong that feeling could get. I guess that was the price we paid for getting to the heights we did. Anything short of the top was going to feel like plummeting to the ground and being buried. It was going to take something like that happening to eventually help me gain a better perspective on life and on the game, but there were some glory days ahead of my city finding itself in ruins.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wins and Losses
It’s hard for me to put into perspective, even after being retired now since 2011, just how much glory there was during my years with the Yankees. I’m not even sure that numbers can tell the story, but here goes.
The lowest number of regular-season wins we had during that span was 87 in 2000. We made up for that by winning the World Series, so I guess you could say we paid our penance. In that time, we missed the playoffs completely only once, in 2008. Oddly, we won more games in the regular season that year than we did in 2000, but still didn’t qualify.
When it mattered most, we won four out of six World Series in that same span of time, for a .667 winning percentage, winning 21 of 33 games (.636). You know what, though, I understand that Yankees fans will look at those numbers with a mixture of pride and frustration. That was a sustained period of success, but it included failure as well. As I said, we went into every season believing we could win it all. We did that four times in that stretch from 1997 to 2011, and that’s just not good enough.
That’s not to say that I’m not proud of what we accomplished, but I wanted to win more. I got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from winning as frequently as we did, and a whole lot of disappointment when we didn’t. As time has passed, the disappointment is still there, and I’m glad it is. Yes, events outside the lines helped put those wins and losses in better perspective, but in isolation the losses still hurt and disappoint, and that’s a good thing. I think it shows how much we cared, how deep that desire to be the best and to improve every year, to get better at our craft, meant to me and to the vast majority of the guys I played alongside.
We lost the first three games to start the 1998 season. The veterans held a meeting to remind us that we didn’t want to go through what we’d already been through the previous year. David Cone spoke up, so did Paul O’Neill, and a number of other guys added their thoughts. They understood that we needed to set the tone. Despite a baseball season being a marathon—as it’s so often referred to—and not a sprint, we didn’t want to get too far behind too soon. I always loved the movie The Natural with Robert Redford. It has a scene where the Knights call in a psychiatrist of some kind and he repeats over and over again, “Losing is a disease.” We didn’t want to catch that illness, and we didn’t want losing to feel natural.
On a personal level, I think that the 1999 Yankees media guide sums things up nicely: “Saw increasing playing time in ’98, establishing himself as the team’s primary catcher by year’s end.” Starting 91 games behind the plate was gratifying, but it wasn’t like I became instantly comfortable back there, especially when it came to catching certain pitchers.
To put it bluntly, I was intimidated by David Cone. Not because of how David treated me, but because of his experience and certainty about how he wanted to go after hitters. That year he was 35 and coming off shoulder surgery, and as with all the pitchers, I felt responsible if he didn’t do well. It wasn’t that their success depended entirely on me, but if I didn’t call a good game or handle their pitches properly, I felt like the loss should have gone beside my name. Even as my career advanced and I grew more confident with pitch selection and every other aspect of catching, I kept that same attitude. Wins belonged to the pitchers, but losses were sometimes my responsibility. The pitching staff’s successes were easy for me to forget, while the failures stuck with me.
Of course, when your team and your pitching staff earn 114 wins during a regular season and only lose 48, those failures are few and far between. It wasn’t a perfect year by any means, but we did have a perfect moment on Sunday, May 18, against the Twins when David Wells threw a perfect game.
The day after the game I read a couple of news stories about it, and Mel Stottlemyre, our pitching coach, was quoted as having said, “Wow!” when he came into the dugout after David finished warming up in the bullpen. According to Mel, David had looked really good before the game, with a nasty, sharp, breaking curveball. The funny thing is, when I’d gotten out to the pen to finish up the last ten minutes of his pregame, I’d also thought, Wow!—but not in a good way. David was everywhere with those pitches—he had no command at all. In fact, he’d gotten so frustrated at one point that he took the ball and threw it out of the Stadium. Somehow, David being David, that seemed to settle him down, or at least got him to focus, because after that his session went much better. So, my “Wow!” was more like, What am I going to do with this guy tonight, he’s so inconsistent? Which of those two pitchers am I going to have out on the mound to start the game?
I can’t say that I thought that he was going to throw a no-hitter or a perfect game based on his stuff in the bullpen. Even in my young catching career, I’d seen it enough times when guys looked super-sharp before the game and then got lit up, and vice versa. Most of the time I didn’t say much to a pitcher when he was warming up, especially not about his mechanics. A pitcher knows when his delivery is off; and especially before a game, he doesn’t need anyone doing or saying anything that might aggravate him. In fact, in some ways it’s a good thing if a guy is a bit erratic in his bullpen session. If a pitcher keeps missing in the same spot all the time, he’s not making any adjustments to his arm angle, his release point, or any other aspect of his delivery. When I did say something to a pitcher during his warm-up, usually I was pointing out what he was not doing—not making an adjustment—rather than pointing out some flaw.
David was very much a feel pitcher anyway. He had to figure out things for himself, so based on that pregame warm-up, I was just going to go with the game plan until I could get a better read on his pitches. By the third inning, when he struck out the side, I could tell that he was on and that the two of us were in synch. I’d put down a sign, and almost instantly David was rocking back and firing. He was doing a great job of changing the hitter’s eye level. By that I mean that his fastball was up in the zone and really moving, but his curveball had real bite to it, starting up and then breaking sharply down. It isn’t always a matter of working side to side to keep hitters off-balance; David’s ability to work up in the zone sometimes really helped him, but sometimes it also hurt him. That day it didn’t hurt him at all.
The other thing that didn’t hurt was that Tim McClelland, the home plate umpire, was being pretty generous with the pitches upstairs. You have to take what you’re being given, so we stuck with that, especially since, to a predominantly right-handed hitting Twins team, David’s fastball was tailing away from them and his cutter worked in on them. Up and down. In and out. Hard and then soft. David had it all going.
He was getting ahead of hitters and putting them away pretty quickly. He went to a 3-2 count once in the third and then again in the seventh, facing the great Paul Molitor. We got him on a biting curveball that he went after. The ball hit in front of me, and I blocked it, then stood up and threw him out at first. A routine play, but when it was over the Stadium just went nuts. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but then I looked at the scoreboard. No runs. No hits. And then I realized that David hadn’t walked anybody either.
That’s when my baseball etiquette/superstition took over. You don’t ever say anything to a pitcher who’s got a no-no or a perfect game going on. So I walked past David, didn’t even make eye contact with him, and went to the far end of the bench. Boomer liked to talk, and he later said that it was torture for him that I wouldn’t sit by him. Darr
yl Strawberry got up and left him alone, so there was poor David Wells getting the silent treatment, sitting there looking around and bouncing his legs up and down, asking somebody to please talk to him.
The funny thing is, there was a lot of that going around—the silent treatment I mean. Early in May, David had gotten knocked out early in a start, and Joe Torre had questioned David’s fitness level. He was basically stating the obvious, but still, David was pissed about it. The good thing was, in his next start—the one immediately before the perfect game—he really put things together in a kind of “I’ll show you” manner. I didn’t catch that game in Kansas City, a tight 3–2 win, but I watched as the game went on, and David, as if saying I’ve got your fitness right here, got stronger and retired the last ten guys he faced before Mariano closed out the win. I could see Boomer’s point. With that win, he was 4-1 on the season, so that one bad start could have just been that. I could also see Joe’s point. David wasn’t in the best shape, and maybe his poor performance was tied to that. And maybe it was also a way to address what became widely known later on when David went public about his fondness for the night life and a less-than-perfect diet. Whatever the case, David made it a point to not speak to Joe for a while.
No matter, because Coney came to Boomer’s rescue. I sat there and watched as our leader sat by David and said something that had Boomer laughing. Later I found out that David Cone had told Boomer that this was the perfect point in the game for him to break out his knuckleball.