Some of the baseball people close to him believed McGwire’s discomfort with the social aspects of the baseball life threatened his career. He won the AL Rookie of the Year award unanimously in 1987, but always seemed fearful that success came too quickly, too easily, and that he was headed for a crash once big league pitching found his weakness. His insecurities turned out to be self-fulfilling. His home runs remained monstrous, but his batting average tumbled from .289 in 1987 to .201 in 1991. McGwire grew sullen and impatient. It appeared he was losing control of the most important elements of his life. His marriage had dissolved shortly after his first year in the league, ravaged by the temptations of the fast lane. “There were too many things calling Mark’s name,” recalled Kathy McGwire. “Women, fame, glamour.” The baseball life, with its easy favors, rewards, and money, had taken hold of him.
He responded physically, growing a fierce-looking goatee and letting his hair grow long, curling wickedly under his batting helmet. He rebounded in 1992, crushing 42 homers, but the young Mark McGwire, whose boyishness both in his appearance and in his responses to questions had been one of his more disarming features, was gone. The media, once an unfortunate given of the job, were now the enemy. To Reggie Jackson, much of McGwire’s transition was part of the natural order of baseball. Kids turn into men without ever being allowed to make mistakes in private. They grow up with baseball as a game only to be embittered by the business. Boyhood pals fade away, unable to compete or contend with this new life of millions, of publicity, of pressure.
Then injuries began to swipe at McGwire’s effectiveness. Spurs in his left heel limited him to 27 games in 1993, then, two weeks before the 1994 strike, required surgery. He had played a total of 74 games between 1993 and 1994 and had hit just 9 home runs in each year. Even his 39-homer rebound in 1995 was oddly received because he had only appeared in 104 games. If his home runs had never been a question, his health now was.
To Glenn Stout, there seemed to be two different stories of Mark McGwire. The first told of a player who had burst into the league and challenged Maris for the first four months of his rookie season. Who, in his first six seasons, had hit 195 homers and was well on his way to 500. The other tale was less optimistic. “All of a sudden,” said Stout, “he had gone from rewriting the record book to the ‘what could have been’ story. He was starting to look like the guy of whom everyone talked about how great he would have been had he only been healthy.”
McGwire had drifted from the public imagination, eclipsed by younger, fresher stars. Albert Belle had emerged as the league’s most fearsome slugger. Frank Thomas had won back-to-back MVP awards. McGwire had been bypassed in his own division by Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. and in the Bay Area when, in 1993, Barry Bonds signed what at the time was the richest free agent deal ever with San Francisco. Worse, the A’s had reached the end of the glory years. The decline had begun. The new McGwire story was not Bunyanesque, but took on the characteristics of a tragedy.
“THE TRUTH IS,” wrote acerbic Chicago Tribune columnist Bernie Lincicome concerning a rare trade between the White Sox and Cubs just days before the start of the 1992 season, “both teams are happy to be rid of someone they did not want, not counting pitcher Ken Patterson, who could turn out to be the longest-lasting asset of the deal.”
Ken Patterson played one season with the Chicago Cubs. Two years later, just a few months before his twenty-ninth birthday, he was out of baseball. The player who joined him in moving from the White Sox to the Cubs had now been traded twice before his twenty-fourth birthday. His name was Sammy Sosa.
Whereas Mark McGwire seemed destined not just for stardom but to one day challenge Roger Maris, Sosa’s talent was raw and unpredictable. Even when he was a teenager, baseball people were taken by his rare combination of speed, power, and defensive ability. He was, in scouting parlance, the ultimate five-tool player. In his first three major league seasons, however, Sosa was described by his coaches and teammates with less-flattering terms such as “uncoachable,” “undisciplined,” “head case,” and “prima donna.” Some players believed him to be too cocky for having amassed consecutive seasons with batting averages of .257, .233, and .203. His talent was not an issue, but his attitude combined with the way in which the White Sox perceived him was a fatal mixture. In two and a half seasons in Chicago, Sosa had failed to convince his coaches that he would ever be anything more than talented. Hitting coach Walt Hriniak and manager Jeff Torborg especially were frustrated not only by Sosa’s low batting averages, but by the increasing belief that he was becoming more trouble than he was worth. The White Sox people had lost confidence in their ability to reach Sosa, even at the young age of twenty-three. He had been labeled, and in the closed world of baseball, labels stuck like flypaper. By the end of the 1991 season, despite all of his bursting talent and obvious potential, there existed in the front office of the White Sox a surging desire to be rid of Sammy Sosa. Torborg had quit at the end of the 1991 season, but the momentum had reached a critical point. The White Sox had turned on him.
WHEN OMAR Minaya, then a scout for the Texas Rangers, signed the sixteen-year-old Sammy Sosa in 1985, Sosa hadn’t been honing his baseball skills in high school like virtually all of his American peers. Instead, for the previous three years, he had been stitching soles in a shoe factory. Sosa’s hometown of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic was a place of intense poverty, and the pay at the factory, Sosa later recalled, was “pennies, just enough to survive.” Stitching basketballs or shoes for a few dollars a month was not appealing, but the choices for a Dominican kid were severely limited. There were really just three: the military, the cane fields, or the factories. College was an option only for the upper middle class. But for Sosa, a fourth option opened up when, shining shoes in town, he saw George Bell, the slugging Toronto Blue Jays outfielder, drive by in a brand-new car, shiny and lustrous. That same winter, he caught a glimpse of Pedro Guerrero, the Dodgers World Series co-MVP, polished, and gleaming with jewelry. Sosa would never forget the sight of these men who shared his hometown. He wanted to be them.
By the time he was twenty, Sammy Sosa was already on the Rangers’ forty-man roster, but the Rangers, oddly, began to sour on him. They - didn’t think he was developing fast enough. Throughout the Texas organization, Sosa had frustrated scouts and coaches with his aggressiveness. Pitchers weren’t getting him out so much as he was getting himself out. That year, Sosa played twenty-five games for Texas. He struck out 20 times and hit one home run. On July 29, with the Rangers eight games behind California in the AL West, Sosa and a young pitcher named Wilson Alvarez were traded to the White Sox for infielder Fred Manrique and All-Star designated hitter Harold Baines. Years later, when Sosa had established himself as a player destined for the Hall of Fame, the hurt of those early years never entirely disappeared. He had never understood why Texas and especially the White Sox had given up so quickly on a young player with such enormous potential.
Perhaps more than in any other sport, baseball men tended to be a sour lot, who often focused on what a player could not do, instead of what he could. Part of it was the nature of the game. It was the only sport in which failure was an acceptable part of the game. A quarterback who failed to complete 70 percent of his passes or a basketball player who missed 70 percent of his shots would be selling dishwashers at Sears. But a baseball player who failed in 70 percent of his at-bats would be at the top of his profession. The other part was how the game was played. Scouts and coaches tended to focus on what a player could not do, because that’s what good pitchers and good hitters would do, mercilessly exploiting one another’s weaknesses. A hitter with a hole in his swing was going to see pitches in that same location until he proved he could reach them. A pitcher without a breaking ball would watch hitters sit and feast on the fastball. But this constant negativity had a crippling effect on the fragile psyches of young players, especially those playing in a different country, speaking a different language, under great pressure to suc
ceed, with failure resulting in a return to suffocating economic conditions.
It was believed among many in baseball that had Sosa, a black Dominican, been white, or at the very least American, he never would have been allowed to slip through the clutches of two organizations so early in his career. Latin players would dominate the major leagues in the 1990s, but they were also a source of labor so cheap that most organizations did not have the financial incentive to practice patience with them. Because Latin American players were not subject to the draft, teams could sign hundreds of them for the same price it would cost to sign a single American player from either college or high school. In 1985, Minaya signed Sosa for the incredibly low sum of $3,500. By contrast, thirty-six years earlier, with no amateur draft to raise a player’s leverage, Willie Mays had signed with the New York Giants for $5,000. Sosa later said Minaya’s offer felt like millions.
In 1990, at the age of twenty-one, Sosa drove in 70 runs for the White Sox. The man who traded for him, White Sox general manager Larry Himes, was convinced he would be not only a star, but a superstar. All he needed, thought Himes, was a strong environment and the confidence of his organization. He was given neither with the White Sox. Himes was fired in 1990, and Sosa was exposed to a hostile White Sox organization in which he had few if any allies.
Feuding with Walt Hriniak didn’t help matters. More than just a hitting coach, Hriniak was a hitting guru, and a godlike figure to those players who embraced his style. Wade Boggs, Carlton Fisk, Harold Baines, Ron Kittle, and Dwight Evans were all students of Hriniak, who himself was a disciple of the great hitting coach Charlie Lau. It was easy to spot a Hriniak man: head down, weight back, resting almost entirely on the back foot, with only the toes of the front foot touching the ground. At the pitch, the Hriniak hitter shifted forward, releasing the top hand off the bat on contact, giving the look of a one-handed swing through the zone.
Even in the late 1990s, after he had been out of the game at the big league level for years, Hriniak disciples would seek him out to straighten out their problems. During a prolonged slump in 1999, Tony Phillips found his old mentor at the All-Star break to correct his mechanics, much to the anger of Oakland hitting coach Dave Hudgens. “Fuck that. He didn’t help me. He doesn’t know me,” Phillips said. “The only person who can get me straight is Walter.”
But there were those who did not agree with the Hriniak approach. No less an authority than Ted Williams always said the Lau-Hriniak theory set hitting back twenty-five years. Some of the stronger hitters believed releasing the top hand off of the bat diminished a hitter’s power. They also believed that resting completely on the back leg put a hitter’s weight off-kilter, with impossibly little time to readjust. Weight distribution was everything to a hitter.
When Sosa rejected Hriniak’s theories, he was considered a malcontent. He wanted to do it his way, which was more in the Williams style: even weight distribution, generating power from the hips and rear. “Everybody’s got to do what he wants them to do,” Sosa said. “He changed a lot of people, but it caused me a lot of problems when he changed me. He tried to teach me—and I liked that—but everybody - isn’t the same way. Everybody can’t hit with his head down.” In the eyes of the White Sox front office, Sosa had not enjoyed enough success to disagree with a man as revered as Walter Hriniak.
Convinced they could not reach him, the White Sox spent the winter following the 1991 season trying to trade Sosa, but the organization was still fearful of being embarrassed later: What if the kid puts it all together? What if he becomes what his tools suggest he could? What if we trade him and he becomes a Hall of Famer? Baseball men were always afraid of this possibility, for it exposed them to endless criticism from their fans. How could you let him go? How come we can’t get players like that? The White Sox had already turned down two trades when the Cubs offered an established hitter, a slugger they wouldn’t have to hope reached his potential. The Cubs’ GM, none other than Larry Himes, had always been convinced not only of Sosa’s gifts, but of his ability to apply them, to become great. Himes offered the White Sox George Bell, the same Bell whose presence in San Pedro de Macoris more than a decade earlier had transformed Sammy Sosa’s life. When the White Sox agreed, Himes hungrily made the deal. The trade liberated Sosa. “That made me real happy,” he said. “Like getting out of jail.” Sosa often told intimates that Larry Himes had saved his career. Knowing that one person had taken an interest in his success and simply allowed him to play was invaluable. Himes did not tell many people what he thought of acquiring Sammy Sosa for the second time in three years, but he told just enough. He had engineered a steal.
WITHIN THE first weeks of the 1998 season, Willie Randolph was convinced the Yankees were in the midst of achieving something special. On its face, it did not appear to be a profound insight. The Yankees began the season losing their first three games of the season, but by May 8 were 23-6. It didn’t take a genius to notice that the Yankees were a good club. Yet to judge the Yankees by their gaudy record, Randolph thought, was to miss a critical component of that team. The Yankees were dominant, but in an odd sort of way. They did not possess the kind of firepower that awed clubs. “There wasn’t a lot of ‘wow’ to that club,” Randolph recalled. If the great Yankee teams of the past had demolished their opponents with a constant bombardment of hitting, Randolph found himself most impressed with the way these Yankees could pressure a club simply by executing flawlessly and ruthlessly exploiting any minor mistake by the other team. The ’98 Yankees played the best fundamental baseball in Randolph’s memory. Usually such praise was cliché. Every year, on the first day of spring training, every team says it is going to preach fundamentals. This team, however, did exactly that. An opposing team might beat them on a given day, but they were not going to beat themselves with the type of mental errors that tear at a baseball club.
The Yankees of 1998 were also highly motivated. A year earlier, as defending champions, they had lost a bitter five-game Division Series to Cleveland. They were leading the series two games to one and were five outs away from moving on to the American League Championship Series when manager Joe Torre called on Mariano Rivera to nail down a 2-1 lead in the eighth inning of Game Four. Rivera would go on to become the greatest finisher in the history of the postseason, but in 1997, his first season as the Yankees’ closer, Rivera’s greatness was not a given. Entering the inning with one out, Rivera retired the first man he faced, Matt Williams, on a fly out to right to bring the Yankees within four outs of victory. Then Sandy Alomar homered to tie the game. In the bottom of the ninth, Cleveland manufactured a run against Rivera’s cousin Ramiro Mendoza to tie the series, forcing a deciding fifth game, which they would also win.
Entering the 1998 season, it was Cleveland that dominated the American League. In the three years since the strike, the Indians had won 285 games, been to the World Series twice, and begun a streak of what would ultimately be five consecutive American League Central titles. The Yankees, meanwhile, had won the World Series in 1996, but as underdogs needing a stirring comeback over Atlanta to do so. In 1995 and 1997, they didn’t even win their own division, entering the playoffs as the wild card both years, only to be eliminated in the first round in heartbreaking fashion by Seattle and Cleveland. They were not yet the Yankees to be reckoned with, the Yankees who won every time, the ones who intimidated with reputation as much as by talent.
By July 4, the Yankees were 60-20. They were tearing apart the American League and were clearly on a historic pace, but Brian Cashman was worried. He had been with the Yankees since he was a teenager and, at the age of thirty, was promoted to be the team’s general manager. Cashman recalled feeling vulnerable each day on the job, and in an odd way, the Yankees’ winning seemingly every day frightened Cashman all the more. He was convinced his team could be had. “I was sure someone - could have picked us off,” Cashman said. “We were winning, but I didn’t feel comfortable. I remember during that summer worrying that Cleveland was going to g
et Randy Johnson when we didn’t. And if they had, even with all of our wins, I think they might have been the ones hanging a championship banner, and not us. We ended up going 125-50, but you wouldn’t have known it talking to me.”
There was, however, another part of Cashman that enjoyed the confusion he heard in the voices of other executives and baseball pundits when they described the Yankees as obviously great but not overwhelming on paper. The 1998 team truly was more than the sum of its parts. Cashman remembered the team’s most apparent personality trait was its toughness. In May, there was an ugly brawl with Baltimore that seemed to galvanize an already focused club. For Cashman, it was one of the first years when the team actually came first. Willie Randolph agreed. “What I remember most about 1998 was how much of a team we were. I remember the Scott Brosiuses and the Tino Martinezes. All the guys that were part of that team really knew how to play the game. It was the first time in a long time I was proud of a team in the truest sense.” The Yankees were certainly not devoid of individual stars, but even those players would come to reflect their team commitment. The ’98 Yankees led the American League in runs scored, on-base percentage, ERA, shutouts, and complete games. Yet only one player, batting champion Bernie Williams, won an individual award. Derek Jeter led the league in runs, but to Cashman, even that individual honor was emblematic of team success. Jeter hit just 19 home runs, but scored 127 runs. Someone had to drive him in those other 108 times. Other than Williams and Jeter, no other Yankee would finish in the top five of any major offensive category.
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