by Marty Appel
Generally the team’s left fielder, he filled in capably in center when needed, and ran his consecutive-game streak, covering Japan and the U.S., to 1,768 before fracturing his left wrist diving for a fly ball in 2006. The 518 consecutive games he played in the U.S. to start his career was a major league record, and it was the longest playing streak by a Yankee since Lou Gehrig’s.
The Yankees also signed a four-year deal with Cuban exile José Contreras in 2003, one that didn’t work out as well. Although he was 7–2, 3.30 as a starter, he made four visits to the disabled list and didn’t provide the excitement that El Duque brought. After two seasons, Contreras moved on and achieved greater success with the White Sox.
In their centennial season of 2003, the starting staff, while old, was strong. Clemens and Wells, both forty, were 17–9 and 15–7 respectively. Mussina, thirty-four, was 17–8, and Pettitte, thirty-one, was 21–8. The Yanks won 101 games to capture their sixth straight division title. On June 13, Clemens won his 300th game before a rain-soaked crowd at Yankee Stadium, beating the Cardinals in an interleague game. The game featured the oddity of his also recording his 4,000th strikeout in the process. The Cardinals’ Tino Martinez was about to bat for the first time as a Yankee Stadium visitor, but the applause for Clemens’s accomplishment overshadowed the Martinez at-bat. Not to be deterred, the fans made sure that Tino got his standing ovation in his next at-bat—a “makeup” ovation.
The Yankee players gave Clemens a Hummer as a gift for his 300th win.
Another oddity during the season was a no-hitter thrown by six Houston pitchers on June 11 against the Yankees, as Roy Oswalt, Peter Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner hurled the first no-hitter against the Yankees since Wilhelm in 1958. The no-hitter “by committee” was necessitated by a strained groin muscle suffered by Oswalt in the second inning.
On June 3, with the team in Cincinnati, the Yankees named Jeter captain, a position vacant since Mattingly’s retirement. It felt like a natural transition from untitled team leader. This followed a mild controversy from the previous December in which Steinbrenner had questioned Jeter’s lifestyle, wondering whether the gossip columnists had it right about his being seen “on the town” so frequently. “When I read in the paper that he’s out until 3 A.M. in New York City going to a birthday party, I won’t lie. That doesn’t sit well with me,” said the Boss to Wayne Coffey of the Daily News.
Not only did they patch up the misunderstanding, but they got a clever television commercial out of it for Visa credit cards, which concluded with both of them being in a conga line at a nightclub.
(The Boss’s oldest son, Hank, reprised this theme in 2011 when he said, “I think maybe they celebrated too much last year. Some of the players, too busy building mansions and doing other things, and not concentrating on winning.” The reference was clearly to Jeter, who had just concluded the construction of a thirty-thousand-square-foot mansion on Davis Island in Tampa, known locally as “St. Jetersburg.”)
AT THE JULY 31 trading deadline for the 2003 season, the Yankees decided to trade two players and cash to Cincinnati for third baseman Aaron Boone, a third-generation major leaguer whose father Bob and grandfather Ray had preceded him. (His brother Bret was also in the majors.) Ventura was traded to the Dodgers on the same day, and Boone would handle the position for the remainder of the season.
After winning a sixth straight division title, the Yanks lost the first game of the Division Series to Minnesota, but came back behind Pettitte, Clemens, and Wells to win the next three, Matsui’s two-run homer in the Clemens game providing the margin of victory.
Then came another Yankee–Red Sox showdown in the ALCS, one that would prove among the most memorable. The series, which would ultimately go to seven games, was marked by a bitter fight in the third game in which Pedro Martinez shoved Yankee coach Don Zimmer to the ground. While it was hard to emerge with any sympathy for Martinez with a seventy-two-year-old man lying on the ground, Zimmer admitted later that “it all happened so fast, I didn’t have time to realize what a fool I’d made of myself.”
Martinez had given up a two-run double to Matsui and then hit the Yanks’ Karim Garcia with a pitch that many people thought was intentional. Then he began pointing at his head and yelling at Posada, as though to suggest that Jorge was next to go down.
When Clemens threw high and tight to Manny Ramirez in the last of the fourth, both benches emptied. This is when Zimmer charged onto the field in search of Martinez. All Pedro could do was to shove him aside in self-defense.
It was thought best to get Zimmer to a hospital for precautionary X-rays, so there was Zimmer, being hauled out of Fenway Park on a stretcher, the latest drama in the Yankee–Red Sox wars.
Martinez tried to apologize the next day, but Zimmer said, “What does he have to apologize for? I was the guy who charged him and threw the punch!”
In game seven, the Yanks scored three times in the eighth to create a 5–5 tie, allowing a massive sigh of relief from the full house in Yankee Stadium. Many felt that Red Sox manager Grady Little had gone too deep into the game with Martinez, and the game-tying hit was a two-run double by Posada that finally drove Pedro out. (Little was fired by the Red Sox after the season.)
During that inning, Boone, who had been benched, ran for Ruben Sierra, then took over at third for Enrique Wilson.
Rivera set down the Sox in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, a rare three-inning stint. Now the Yankees came up to face Tim Wakefield in the last of the eleventh, with Boone to lead off with his first at-bat of the night. It was 12:16 A.M. Bret Boone was a Fox broadcaster, watching his brother come to the plate. Aaron had gone 2-for-16 in the series and had six homers in 54 games during the season.
Boone swung at Wakefield’s first pitch—and it was into the left-field seats for a pennant-winning home run, reversing a game in which Boston had been just five outs from going to the World Series.
“It was the greatest moment I’ve been here for,” said Brian Cashman more than seven years later.
Boone’s unlikely heroism sealed his place in Yankee history, reviving memories of Chris Chambliss and Bucky Dent. It brought the Yankees their thirty-ninth American League pennant, and sent them into the World Series against the surprising Florida Marlins.
As with most things Yankee-Boston, anything that followed felt anticlimactic. Beating the Red Sox felt like winning the World Series. But that wasn’t how the rules worked. And Florida, like Arizona two years before, would leave the Yanks with a pennant, but not a world championship. Up three games to two and playing at a hushed Yankee Stadium, hosting its one hundredth World Series game, Josh Beckett topped Pettitte 2–0 with a complete-game triumph, bringing the Marlins a second world championship in just eleven years in the league. The Marlins hit only .232 in the six games and were outscored by the Yankees, but there would be no seventh game for the Yankees to recover.
That would be Joe Torre’s last trip to the World Series as a Yankee. Zimmer, his relationship with Steinbrenner deteriorating since his interim managing stint in 1999, resigned. A lot of people thought his pairing with Torre in the Yankee dugout was an important ingredient to the Yankee success in the nineties and beyond. He didn’t miss a thing.
It was also thought to be Clemens’s farewell to the game, and he did nothing to discourage talk of his retirement. He accepted standing ovations in his last starts throughout the majors, and even got one from the Marlin players after departing game four, trailing 3–1, in what was believed to be his last time on the mound. Even the fans in Boston, known to despise him, had begrudgingly stood and cheered him in his “final” Fenway Park start during the LCS.
IN DECEMBER 2003, George Steinbrenner collapsed while attending the funeral of his friend Otto Graham, the great Cleveland Brown quarterback. While he recovered quickly, to many it was a milestone, signifying the start of a gradual health decline. His outbursts about performances would be less frequent. His availability to the media beca
me more limited. An outside spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, was often the one who issued responses when requests were made. Newspapers took to assigning reporters just to follow Steinbrenner out of the stadium after games, hoping to catch a newsworthy remark. But he could no longer be counted on to be at home games or, in fact, at owners’ meetings. His son-in-law, Steve Swindal, assumed a higher profile and was designated by Steinbrenner as his ultimate successor. (Unfortunately, a split from Jennifer Steinbrenner derailed those plans.)
Late in 2004, Steinbrenner was a guest on YES Network’s Centerstage program, with Michael Kay interviewing him. It didn’t go well. The old bombast was gone, and the questions were generally repeated as answers. He never did another such interview again. For a man who had learned to use the press to advance his agenda, to criticize a player or a manager, to chide another owner—it was a big void in the New York papers.
After 2007, Hank, forty-nine and the eldest son, stepped into the lead role, but a year later, acknowledging that Hal “has the head for this,” the family moved Hal into a leadership position. Both Hank and Hal had gone to Culver Military Academy, as their father and sisters Jennifer and Jessica had. Hank, forty-nine, then went to Central Methodist College, and worked in the Yankees’ front office in the eighties, but was generally occupied with management of the family’s Ocala-based horse farm. Hal, thirty-eight, graduated from Williams College (like his dad) and got an MBA from the University of Florida. He served as chairman and CEO of Steinbrenner Hotel Properties.
Publicly, both children continued to defer to their father.
Chapter Forty-Three
THE OFF-SEASON OF 2003–04 WAS both controversial and momentous.
Andy Pettitte, coming off his 21-victory season and his game-six loss to Beckett, signed a three-year free-agent contract with Houston on December 16. An opportunity to pitch near his hometown of Deer Park, Texas, proved too enticing to refuse.
As soon as he signed, speculation began that Clemens would “unretire” and join him, which he did. The two had a close friendship, a shared workout routine, and a chance to get Houston to its first World Series: The Astros began play in 1962 and had never won a pennant. They finally won in 2005 with Clemens and Pettitte winning 30 games between them.
The Yanks replaced them with Javier Vazquez, whose 4.91 ERA would be a disappointment; Jon Lieber, only slightly better; and the heralded Kevin Brown, who was 10–6 in 22 starts, limited by a bad back. Tom Gordon came aboard as the eighth-inning setup man, a position in which he excelled over two seasons.
Brown had won 197 games over seventeen seasons with five teams. The Yanks got him in a trade with the Dodgers on December 13 and assumed his contract of nearly $16 million a year. He was not, however, a pitcher who was able to adjust to diminishing skills, and his Yankee stay was not a happy one.
The Yanks thought they would have David Wells back, having reached a verbal agreement. The next thing they knew, he signed with San Diego, spurning the Yankees as he had spurned the Diamondbacks two years before in similar circumstances.
“I’m not complaining,” said Cashman. “This can happen when you’re negotiating with David.”
The Yanks also added Gary Sheffield, signing him as a free agent six days after the Brown trade. This was a deal primarily done out of the Tampa office, where Doc Gooden, Sheffield’s uncle, had Steinbrenner’s ear. In New York, Cashman had been pursuing Vladimir Guerrero.
The Braves, for whom Sheffield had produced two strong seasons, wanted him back. He decided to meet with them at Malio’s, a favorite Tampa restaurant of Steinbrenner’s; he wanted the Boss to see him dining with the Braves. His plan worked. Steinbrenner saw him with the Braves, and met with him right afterward. After a couple of tough negotiating sessions (which Sheffield did without an agent), he made a deal.
“The truth was that I wanted to play in New York and nowhere else,” wrote Sheffield later. “I had to get New York out of my system.”
In 2004, he finished second in MVP voting—to Guerrero—with a .290/36/121 season.
IN FEBRUARY 2004, Aaron Boone, the toast of New York, was playing a pickup game of basketball and tore a ligament in his knee. It was a violation of his contract. He’d be out all year.
A lot of other players would invent ways to explain how they had gotten hurt. Not Boone. He called Cashman and told him the truth, knowing he would likely be released.
“He was man enough to admit what happened,” said Cashman. “But I had to do my job.”
Boone left with the distinction of being the first Yankee since Joe DiMaggio to be married to a Playboy Playmate of the Month. But now the Yankees needed someone to play third.
On February 16, they swung one of the most dramatic trades in the history of the franchise. They traded Soriano, their talented second baseman, to the Texas Rangers for Alex Rodriguez.
A-Rod was already one of the great players in baseball history. He led the league in home runs in each of his three seasons in Texas. With Jeter and Boston’s Nomar Garciaparra, he was considered one of a trio of superstar shortstops that the American League had been blessed with in one era. With the Yankees he would have to move to third base, a move he willingly embraced, ceding short to Jeter.
His salary was another issue. Tom Hicks, the Rangers’ owner, had given him a ten-year deal beginning in 2001 for a colossal $252 million—way more than anyone else was offering. As such, the deal was baffling to observers and seemed well out of line with what was necessary to sign him. Of course, A-Rod had jumped at it.
He later revealed that he used steroids in Texas, attributing it to the pressure the contract brought. He seemed well on the way to breaking Bonds’s career home run record, an event baseball would celebrate to cleanse Bonds out of the record book. The future steroid revelation would complicate that, but to break the record as a Yankee, restoring the career record to Babe Ruth’s team, seemed like a terrific idea.
He had always worn Babe’s number 3, but as that was retired on the Yankees, he would wear 13.
The move was not as great a salary upheaval to the Yankees’ payroll as it might have been. Not only were the Yankees shedding Soriano’s contract, over $5 million in 2004, but the Rangers agreed to pay $67 million of the $179 million remaining on A-Rod’s pact, which left the Yankees giving him about $16 million a year. Miguel Cairo would play second base and earn just $900,000. So they were only “adding” a net $12 million in payroll. This they could do.
BORN IN WASHINGTON HEIGHTS but raised in Miami, Rodriguez soon became the greatest third baseman in Yankee history. His right-handed power dwarfed even that of DiMaggio, who always seemed thwarted by the left-field dimensions of old Yankee Stadium. A 2005 home run by Alex, deep into the old visitors’ bullpen, where the ambulance now parked, was thought to have traveled 487 feet. In the remodeled stadium, this was topped by only five players: Kirk Gibson (500 feet to the top of the right-field bleachers in 1985), Barry Bonds (500 feet into upper deck in right in 2002) Jay Buhner (492 in 1991), Juan Encarnacion (490 in 2001), and Fred McGriff (490 in 1987).
Rodriguez would bring eccentric moments to the field—yelling “Ha!” or “I got it!” to try to get an infielder to drop a pop-up, trying to slap a ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove while racing him to first base in a Yankee-Boston playoff game, and annoying Oakland pitcher Dallas Braden, over whose mound he ran after making an out.
He dated starlets, including Madonna, Kate Hudson, and Cameron Diaz, and was a gossip-column regular. He did endorsement deals for private jets, but lacked the easy rapport that Jeter always enjoyed with the public.
No one doubted he was a unique talent, but even his friendship with Jeter had soured a bit while he was at Texas, after he told a magazine that Derek wasn’t the guy in the Yankee lineup that people feared. It wasn’t what friends did. Sometimes the on-field camaraderie between them seemed false.
The 2004 season was going to be a test of Torre’s leadership. Good chemistry couldn’t be counted on. It helped that
old hero Don Mattingly returned as a coach after eight years away from the game, but the team was still a bit more like the old Yankees for Yankee haters.
Yankee haters, of course, were most in abundance in New England, and the rivalry between the Yanks and the Red Sox would call for both teams to step back and ban vulgar T-shirts and banners that fans brought into both parks. Scuffles in the stands were not uncommon; security was always tightened. Rhythmic, obscene chants were impossible to stop and became a part of the soundtrack for games between the two clubs. The team owners, who certainly enjoyed the sellouts created by the rivalry, didn’t always stand back. In December 2002, Boston CEO Larry Lucchino referred to the Yankees as “the Evil Empire” after they signed José Contreras, a term that had been used by President Reagan in 1983 in reference to the Soviet Union.
Steinbrenner responded to Lucchino’s charge by saying, “That’s how a sick person thinks. I’ve learned this about Lucchino: He’s baseball’s foremost chameleon of all time. He changes colors depending on where he’s standing. He’s been at Baltimore and he deserted them there, and then went out to San Diego, and look at what trouble they’re in out there. When he was in San Diego, he was a big man for the small markets. Now he’s in Boston and he’s for the big markets. He’s not the kind of guy you want to have in your foxhole. He’s running the team behind John Henry’s back. I warned John it would happen, told him, ‘Just be careful.’ He talks out of both sides of his mouth. He has trouble talking out of the front of it.”
THE YANKEES RESPONDED to “Red Sox Nation” by creating “Yankees Universe” in 2006, selling merchandise that benefited pediatric cancer research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. (The Yankees Foundation, a charitable arm formed by Steinbrenner in 1973, benefits projects in the Yankee Stadium neighborhood. A Yankee fantasy camp in Tampa is among the revenue streams that feeds the foundation.)