by Jorge Posada
The best thing to happen to me in 2002 was the birth of our daughter, Paulina, in July. I think she entered the world feisty and funny and fearless, and she’s stayed that way.
Laura and I were relieved that Paulina wasn’t going to have to endure what Jorge was going through. He was holding up well, but having him go through a third major surgery in three years was agonizing for us all. Fortunately, there were a lot more bright spots, including his first All-Star appearance in Milwaukee. Lots of kids were around the festivities, and Jorge was doing so much better that he got to attend the game. I was down on the field when I saw him and Laura. I waved her down and took Jorge from her. He was in a little Yankees uniform with a hat and everything. He hung out with me during batting practice, and I was feeling great about him being there with me. Then I had an idea, but I kept it to myself. I put eye black on his cheeks and then I told him, “When you hear the man say ‘Jorge Posada,’ I want you to run out there.” I pointed to the field, and his eyes lit up.
Of course, I probably should have been a little more specific. He ran out there right on cue, but I didn’t tell him to stop when he got to the other guys on the foul line. I yelled out to Manny Ramírez to grab him and he did. Jorge got a huge ovation. I don’t know how many people there knew the whole story, but being able to be there with my son like that? I can’t even tell you.
He is a tough kid, and having to endure what he’s gone through makes me feel like I had it so easy by comparison, and it’s true. Laura and I remain so grateful to Dr. McCarthy and later Dr. Ernesto Ruas and Dr. David Staffenberg, who all eventually operated on Jorge. It isn’t easy to put your child’s life and future in anyone’s hands, but those surgeons always made us feel like we’d made the best possible choice in trusting them and their guidance. I had a lot to be thankful for in 2002, and with that gratitude to balance my anger and disappointment, I was ready for 2003.
I know that there’s no way to talk about 2003 and the playoffs without discussing what happened against the Red Sox in Game 3. It was a regrettable incident that in my mind had only one cause—Pedro Martínez. There are a lot of unwritten rules in the game of baseball for how we conduct ourselves as professionals. In all our minds, the ones that have to do with not purposely injuring another player trump all the rest. You don’t fuck with a man’s career. You don’t throw behind a man’s head. You do that and you’re not a man, in my opinion. You also don’t throw a 72-year-old man to the ground. I’ll admit that I jumped all over Pedro verbally for what he did on that day. I let my emotions get the best of me. If anybody thinks that I crossed a line for doing so in any way, shape, or form that compares to what Pedro did in taking the risk of hitting Karim García in the head and seriously injuring him, or in tossing Don Zimmer aside, then we don’t exist in the same world.
All you need to know about Pedro Martínez as a person was revealed shortly after he was voted into the Hall of Fame in January 2015. At a time when he was being recognized for his accomplishments as a pitcher, he decided to set himself up as an example of one of those people I mentioned earlier—the great athlete who’s a lousy human being. Why Pedro, who was already being lavished with attention, would choose that moment to come out and talk about deliberately hitting batters isn’t a mystery to me. He loves and needs attention. The spotlight on him wasn’t bright enough, so he decided to intensify it. All he did, stupidly, was to shine the light on the darker side of who he is.
In Game 3, he was being roughed up and he took the coward’s way out. In January 2015, when he was being treated with great kindness and respect, what he chose to do next was not out of character for him. Pedro showed that the best side of him isn’t worthy of respect, admiration, or kindness. Those of us who have played the game at the highest level know that Pedro’s going after opposing teams’ hitters put his own teammates in danger. You can do something that puts your team at risk of losing by doing something to get ejected—like punching a water cooler, a door, or whatever—and that’s stupid and selfish. But when you do something that puts another guy at risk of serious injury, that’s the height of stupidity and selfishness and shows you have no respect for the guys on your side. As a teammate, you’re supposed to have your own players’ backs, not put a target on them. That’s cowardly. That’s stupid. That’s not how you should play the game. When you lose the respect of your peers and your teammates, you’ve suffered the worst kind of loss there is.
Todd Walker, the Red Sox second baseman who was an unfortunate victim of Pedro’s stupidity, put it best. When asked about Karim García going into him to break up the double play like he did, he said, “The intent was not to take me out but to do damage, and I was very upset about that. But if I were him, I’d do the same thing in that situation.” Todd Walker understood what Pedro had done to him, just like we understood it. He understood that we couldn’t let Pedro get away with throwing behind a hitter’s head. Somebody was going to have to pay for what Pedro had done, and Pedro wasn’t going to bat. I respect Walker for saying what he did, just like I respect their manager, Grady Little, and the rest of the Red Sox who acknowledged that the pitch that set things off, a fastball inside to Manny Ramírez, was nowhere close to hitting him. Why did Manny act like a pitch had low-bridged him? Because he apparently believed that we were going to retaliate, so on a pitch that wasn’t even close to him, he reacted like he did, hoping that would be the end of it. It wasn’t, thanks again to Pedro Martínez.
It’s too bad that fight took attention away from what was a great series and a great Game 7. That game has been described as a case of the “Curse of the Bambino” for the Red Sox, but it was more about the patience and determination of the Yankees as we came back from a 4–0 deficit to tie them in the ninth. Jason Giambi came up big for us, homering twice off Martínez in the fifth and seventh innings to bring us close. Bernie’s single in the eighth brought us back to within two after David Ortiz homered. Our eighth-inning rally started with Derek doubling off an 0-2 pitch. Bernie singled, Hideki Matsui doubled, and I came up. I could hear Derek shouting at me, urging me to stay back. We all could see that Pedro was losing something off his fastball, and on a 2-2 count, I got enough of one to double to center field to score both runners and tie the game.
No matter who was on the mound, that was an incredibly satisfying moment in one of the tensest situations I can recall. After what we had let happen in 2002, we had to reclaim our title of American League champions, and we had to get to the World Series. And if it meant using a Muhammad Ali strategy to rope-a-dope an opponent, so be it.
With all that had happened before, having the game-winner come from Aaron Boone, who hadn’t started the game and was struggling a bit with the bat, was sweet. It happened so quickly that I felt like one second I was coming into the dugout and the next I was running back out onto the field. I knew what had just happened, but that crazy disconnected sense of not really being in my body happened again, and I loved it.
All that intensity of the ALCS made what happened in the World Series that much harder. I can never accept losing, and the loss in that Series especially was one that I refused to accept on nearly every level. I didn’t have a good Series at the plate, and I didn’t do my job with the pitching staff. Congratulations to the Marlins, and bad on me. Bad on all of us. Time to turn the page.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Painful Changes
On a personal level, the end of the 2003 season and the loss to the Marlins was a huge disappointment because I’d had the best regular season of my career to that point: All-Star, Silver Slugger, 30 home runs, 101 runs batted in, a .286 average, and a career single-game high of seven runs driven in. Those better power numbers (a .516 slugging percentage) didn’t come at the expense of my on-base percentage (.407). I thought that not only was that the best regular season of my career, but that I deserved some votes for the Most Valuable Player Award (I finished third in the balloting). I wasn’t even thinking about the award until Bill Madden, one of the sportswriter
s for the New York Daily News, sat near me in the dugout during a playoff game and said to me, “I voted for you as the MVP.” I looked at him and felt a chill.
One of the other reasons I was upset about how 2003 ended, and in particular how I ended it—hitting only .222 with seven runs driven in during 17 postseason games—was that I had spoken my mind after the 2002 postseason and said that the Angels wanted it more than we did. Derek was the captain—and deserved to be—but it wasn’t like him to come out and say something publicly. I said what I did in the heat of the moment, but also because I wanted to give the rest of the guys as well as myself something to think about for the next season.
I didn’t back up my own words in the 2003 playoffs, that’s for sure. As I tried to diagnose what had gone wrong at the plate, I struggled to come up with a convincing answer. Although preparing for the pitching matchups in the playoffs was a priority, I didn’t think that I’d reverted back to doing what I’d done early in my career, when I focused so much on my defense that my offensive contributions suffered. Sure, the pressure is more intense in the postseason, the scouting reports are more detailed, and more is at stake with each pitch that you call, but I approached regular-season games with the same intensity, and I’d been doing that for years. All I could guess was that perhaps I was burned out—maybe I’d let my intensity and passion get the best of me.
I thought of myself in 2003, and even after, as baseball young for my age. Because I made the transition to catching later in my career, I didn’t feel like I had as much wear and tear on my body as somebody my age who’d caught his entire career. Joe was great about giving me strategic rest breaks and letting me in on deciding when to take them. He would come to me and we’d review the schedule and go over when it made sense for me to take a break from catching by taking a day off entirely, working as a designated hitter, or playing first base.
Over the years I’d heard both Joe and Derek telling me some version of the same thing: I needed to relax. I needed to stop putting so much pressure on myself. That wasn’t who I was, though, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to do that and whether you should ever try to be someone you’re not.
I didn’t hear anything about easing up or relaxing from my dad. Mostly, we talked about my hitting stroke. If he noticed anything, he’d point it out, but he wasn’t going to give me big-picture kind of advice like that. Maybe the pressure I was putting on myself had resulted in some swing flaw or being overaggressive or too defensive, but my dad—ever the scout—usually focused on the mechanics of my swing and not my mental approach. He’d ingrained in me the habit of working hard and the perfectionist approach. That approach had gotten me to a good place in my career, so in his mind, it had paid off and there was no reason to stop now.
Whether it was a problem with my swing or my intensity level, I didn’t really think that burnout was my problem. Tough as that season was, I didn’t think that I was any different from any major league player who got to the end of the season and then spent the first few days mostly collapsed in bed.
I know that’s an interesting word choice considering what happened in 2004 in the playoffs against the Red Sox. If I thought we had a strong lineup in 2003, getting Alex Rodríguez in exchange for Alfonso Soriano only made us even better. Like Rocket before him, Alex came to us with a long track record of success. We all knew what he could do, and he did just that in 2004. In the first four years he was with us, he won the MVP Award twice. That wasn’t surprising if you knew that from 1996 to 2010 he received at least some votes for that award every year.
Despite all of the talk of the rivalry between Alex and Derek that preceded his arrival, Alex fit in well with us. He’s a friendly guy, and even though we weren’t real tight, I liked him and really liked how he played the game and approached his job.
Besides, we were used to having a lot of different personalities on the team. While there were several of us who seemed to remain constant, each year the makeup of our team changed a bit, just like every other team’s roster changed. Everybody on those Yankees teams knew that, because of how the Yankees operated and some of the rules we had, they had to fall in line. Nobody had to lead anyone else by the hand or say, “This is how we do things here”; guys picked that up immediately. It wasn’t like we were robots and didn’t have personalities and express them, but we conducted ourselves a certain way on the field. As long as you did that and performed at your best, no one had any kind of problem with you. Whether that’s true on all teams, I don’t know. Things worked well for us, and I don’t think any of the turnover or changes contributed to our struggle to win another World Series title.
Still, whether it was because of our personnel or our playing, those struggles remained. Looking back on the Red Sox series in 2004, I know that I had no doubt in my mind that we were going to beat them. Whether that was in four, five, six, or seven games, the answer would be the same. We were going to win that series. Obviously we didn’t, and I still don’t have any real answers as to why.
If I differed with Alex on anything that year, it was about his statements going into Game 6 and then after we lost in Game 7. He used the word “embarrassed” both times. I’m not saying that he was wrong, just that I had a different way of looking at it. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was angry and frustrated, but embarrassed wasn’t in the mix. I take too much pride in what I do and the effort I gave, and I think most of the guys felt that way. I don’t want to make too much of those statements Alex made because I know that he’s a proud guy and he played well and we all lost together. I just want to make a point about how we all differ in our perceptions of things. I think that Derek said it best after the game when asked about why we weren’t able to put the Red Sox away. “It’s not the same team. We’ve had teams that have been good at it, but this team is not the same team.”
Derek wasn’t just commenting on the makeup of the roster, but on how we performed. This wasn’t the same group of guys that were relentless in going after teams and putting them away. It’s not completely the same as a pitcher trying to put a hitter away, but it has some similarities. We had the “stuff” to do that—to go after a team and put them away as quickly and efficiently as possible—but it isn’t always stuff that allows you to do that. You have to have that mind-set, that experience, and we had not completely demonstrated that ability like we had in our run from 1998 to 2000. You can go back and look at those numbers again, but I’ll quickly restate them here: We were 16-1 in those three title-winning series. Maybe that 2004 team needed to learn not just how to win but how to have a sense of urgency. More likely, I think, is that, as talented as we were in later years, there was something about those earlier teams that was rarer than we knew.
Good chemistry on a team often comes from winning, but it also comes from other sources that aren’t always identifiable. Joe Torre was better than anybody else when it came to providing an environment for us to be successful. He helped us to find the other ingredients of that magic formula. That’s all a manager can ever do—create for players the opportunities and environment that give them the best chance to succeed.
Before each playoff series began, Joe would sit down with us and have a meeting. At the end, he’d ask me, “Georgie, how many more games do we need to win it?” I’d tell him the number, and then he’d ask, “How are we going to do it, Georgie?”
“Grind it,” I’d answer.
And that was how we approached those games. “Grinding it” meant paying attention to every detail, giving it your all, and doing anything and everything it took to win. It didn’t have to be pretty. It didn’t have to be spectacular. You just had to compete as hard as you could all game every game. Even when we lost, I still felt like we were grinding it, but maybe I was hoping more than seeing. All I know is that in ’98 we had the term “grind it” engraved on the inside of our World Series rings, not visible to anyone seeing it on my hand but there for me as a reminder.
That we didn’t succeed to the greatest extent possib
le, both in 2004 and in subsequent years, is on us, on me, and not on Joe or anyone else in the organization. We didn’t rise to the occasion; in 2004 the Red Sox did. Our bad. Congratulations to the Red Sox for their title run.
Similarly, there’s no easy explanation for our early exits from the playoffs in 2005 and 2006. Over the years we added some really talented guys to the mix—Robinson Cano and Hideki Matsui in particular—but just didn’t get it done. It was great to have Tino back on the ball club, but he didn’t have the kind of year that was typical of him in his prime. He was still combative, still wanted it, but I got the sense that if he couldn’t perform the way he wanted to, then he’d leave the game, and he did.
At 41 years old, Randy Johnson joined us, and his stuff was still nasty. I think that, like me, Randy needed to be angry to perform well, and he seemed to find a lot to be pissed off about in New York, including me. He would show me up by raising his arms in frustration when he was looking in for a sign and didn’t like what I was putting down. That didn’t happen all the time, just mostly when he was struggling. I was willing to take responsibility for the staff and how they performed and to shoulder the burden or the blame, but I didn’t like, and wouldn’t tolerate, having someone else put it on me. In one game in Detroit, I got really pissed off and confronted him. We almost fought but Joe pulled me away. Randy apologized the next day. John Flaherty took over catching him. I didn’t like the idea of giving up, but I needed rest days, so that approach seemed to work for everyone.
Those kinds of things will happen, and it’s funny to look back and realize that I was once intimidated by some of the veteran guys on the staff but later got to a place where I wasn’t going to put up with another veteran’s shit. I guess that meant I was a veteran myself.