by Joe Torre
“They had a taste of the playoffs,” Torre said, “and I think they were grown up enough to know somebody has to make the decisions. Whether you like me or believe me, you have to understand that. They were at the point where they knew in order to win we have to work together. And somebody has to point us in that direction.”
Torre provided a complete contrast to Showalter's micro-management style. He gave his coaches and players a wide berth. One word kept coming up over and over again in the application of his management philosophy: trust.
“What I try to do is treat everybody fairly,” Torre said. “It doesn't mean I treat everybody the same. But everybody deserves a fair shake. That's the only right thing to do. I'd rather be wrong trusting somebody than never trusting them.
“I'm of the belief that the game belongs to the players, and you have to facilitate that the best you can. I want them to use their natural ability. If they're doing something wrong, you tell them, but I'd like it to be instructive, rather than robotic. The only thing I want them all to think about is what our goal is and what the at-bats are supposed to represent. And that simply is this: ‘What can I do to help us win a game?’ “
Players quickly bought into Torre's management-by-trust style, and they did so because its abiding principle was honesty.
“Honesty is important to me. Where does it come from? I don't know, but even when I think back it was always something that was ingrained in me. Even now I may have trouble when I have to tell someone the truth if it's not a pleasant thing, but I won't lie to them. I can't do that. The only way you can get commitment is through trust, and you've got to try to earn that trust.”
Torre applied the same principle to dealing with the media. His work as a broadcaster with the Angels and his gift for storytelling made him a naturally relaxed witness in front of the prosecutorial-leaning reporters and columnists in New York. He was informative without compromising his team. He was refreshingly honest.
“I may have misled the media, but I never knowingly lied to the media,” Torre said. “I may not have answered something directly or changed the subject and gone in a different direction, but I don't remember purposefully lying to somebody.
“I thought it was an important part of the job, the media being such a big part of what goes on in New York. I thought it was my obligation to communicate with them so they would have the information right from me. So I thought it was something that there was no time limit on.
“My one point to the players was they were never going to read something that they haven't heard from me, at least something significant. And that's part of the trust I try to create.”
Before the 1996 spring training camp even began, Torre showed his trust in Cone by naming him his Opening Day pitcher. Jimmy Key Andy Pettitte, Dwight Gooden and Kenny Rogers would take the spots behind him in the rotation. Unbeknownst to Torre, however, Cone was suffering from a mysterious tingling in his fingers. It started when Cone reported early for spring training and simply was playing catch. The tingling grew so progressively worse that the fingernail on his right ring finger turned blue. Cone said nothing about it.
On Opening Day in Cleveland, Cone threw the kind of game that practically defined his Yankees career. It emphasized his flirtatious relationship with disaster, though somehow the two of them never actually met. He walked six Indians batters and none of them scored. In 38-degree weather, Cone threw seven shutout innings in a 7-1 win. As soon as he walked back into the clubhouse, he looked down at his right hand. It was ice cold and clammy, worse than it had been all spring. His entire right ring finger was blue. He approached trainer Gene Monahan and said, “Something's wrong with my hand.”
The Yankees sent him to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York for an angiogram. The head vascular surgeon, Dr. George Todd, was on vacation at the time.
“They couldn't find anything,” Cone said, “so they put me on blood thinners and ran me back out there to pitch again, which in hindsight was probably not the right thing to do.”
The symptoms continued. When Todd returned from vacation and saw the angiogram, he feared something was wrong with Cone—probably an aneurysm, or a clot, somewhere in his circulatory system, a potentially deadly problem depending on where it was located—and they needed to bring him back in for another angiogram.
“I pitched a complete game against the White Sox,” Cone said. “I was pitching great, leading the league in ERA. I couldn't figure it out. I was barely able to feel the ball. I guess I didn't try to overthrow. I was just painting with everything and getting away with it.”
The angiogram was a grueling procedure. As Cone described it, it involved a catheter through the groin, massive painkillers and lying on his back on a steel table for hours. Cone, drugged, sore and tired, saw the doctors and nurses rush back into the room with smiles on their faces after studying the results of the angiogram. “We found the aneurysm!” they announced.
Said Cone, “I was like, ‘Fuck you. Don't tell me that way!’ They were so happy because they found it. ‘You've got an aneurysm!’ I was drugged up, but that's when I really got scared. I knew something was wrong. I just thought it was something in my hand. I didn't know it was up there.”
The aneurysm was found in the upper area of the arm, in the shoulder region. On May 11, in a three-hour surgery, doctors cut two arteries, removed the aneurysm, and took a piece of a vein from his thigh to patch the connection and restore blood flow. The Yankees were 20-14, in first place, but without their ace and leader. No one could be sure when or if Cone would be back that season.
Cone had thrown 147 pitches in his final game of the 1995 season, the Yankees’ Game 5 loss at the Kingdome in Seattle against the Mariners. On his last pitch, he walked in the tying run. Cone was so tired and depressed after that game that he barely left his Manhattan apartment for days. His arm was so sore that even combing his hair was painful. Doctors could never draw a direct link between those 147 pitches and his aneurysm, but Cone was left to wonder about the possible connection.
“I don't think there's any way to know for sure because of the wear and tear,” he said. “It's like a flat tire. When do you get it? But it had to have something to do with it, because I showed up the next spring and immediately had tingling in my fingers when I started throwing the ball again.”
The 1996 Yankees, though, were an extraordinary team precisely because their fate did not rest with any one player. Nobody on the team hit 30 home runs, collected 200 hits or stole 20 bases. The offense was below average, ranking ninth in the 14-team league. The pitching was good, though not spectacularly so. It ranked fifth in ERA. The Yankees never won or lost more than five games in a row. Their strengths were their resourcefulness, the ability to find any crack or crevice in any game or any opponent and exploit it, and a lockdown bullpen that made winning on the margins not nearly as risky as it appeared to be. Rivera and Wetteland typically could be counted on for the final nine outs with little trouble. The Yankees made the most of a mediocre offense to win 92 games. They hit .293 with runners in scoring position. They were 25-16 in one-run games. They were 70-3 when they led after six innings.
Resourcefulness, however, was an art form not fully appreciated by Steinbrenner. An aficionado of football, military history and intimidation, Steinbrenner wanted to crush opponents, not just carve them up with singles and one-run wins. Even as the 1996 Yankees racked up many of those efficient victories, Steinbrenner would call up Torre to complain. Steinbrenner, however, could not bully this manager.
“I was so excited to be managing a club that had a chance to win that whatever he dealt out to me, I was in a great frame of mind with it,” Torre said. “We'd be winning games and he'd be semi-embarrassed because we'd win on a squeeze bunt or a base hit. He wanted to mutilate people.”
On Tuesday, June 18, Steinbrenner summoned Torre to his office at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees would win that day to improve their record to 39-28 and their first-place lead over the Orioles to 2½ ga
mes. Steinbrenner, though, remained uncomfortable, particularly with the Yankees, racked by injuries to their pitching staff, leaving for a four-game series against the hard-hitting Indians (a team that would lead the league in wins with 99). Steinbrenner was concerned that Torre planned to use two rookie emergency starters pulled from the bullpen, Brian Boehringer and Ramiro Mendoza, in a doubleheader. The rookies were followed by two starters from the back of the rotation, Rogers and Gooden. Steinbrenner wondered if there was somebody else, anybody with experience, who could pitch, even if it meant calling up someone from the minor leagues.
“I had no idea how we were going to win against Cleveland, with the pitchers we were sending to the mound,” Torre said. “But I told him everything was going to work out.”
Eventually Steinbrenner stopped roaring and said to Torre, “Fine, but it's your ass that's on the line.”
It was a scenario that would be repeated many times over in Torre's years managing the Yankees. Steinbrenner was always nervous or anxious about something. Torre, banking on his optimism and his trust in his players, would soothe the restless, fearful Steinbrenner with some assurance that things would turn out just fine for his team. The calming influence that Cone and the players took note of from the first day of spring training was as vital a trait for Torre while dealing with Steinbrenner as it was while in the dugout and clubhouse dealing with his players. The lion would roar menacingly and Torre calmly would stick his head into the animal's mouth and come out smiling and unscathed. The Yankees won all four games in Cleveland, three of them by one or two runs.
“Well, you're doing it with mirrors!” Steinbrenner barked at Torre.
“We're playing solid baseball, Boss,” Torre said. “We stay in the game and our bullpen wins it for us. That's the whole thing: we shorten the game. We turn it into a six-inning game with the guys we have coming out of the bullpen.”
The Yankees built a lead over the Orioles that grew to as large as 12 games on July 28, only to shrink to 2½ games with 14 games to play after a 21-24 regression. The Yankees, though, held on with six wins in their next nine games while Baltimore stumbled. The winning pitcher in the clinching game was none other than Cone, who had come back in September from the aneurysm surgery.
The postseason became a 15-game version of their regular season. The Yankees capitalized on any opening and their bullpen was virtually unbeatable, losing only one game. The Texas Rangers had the Yankees six outs away from a two-games-to-none deficit in Game 2 of the best-of-five Division Series when the Yankees flashed their resourcefulness again. Bernie Williams began the eighth inning with a single, alertly moved to second on a deep fly ball, and scored on an opposite-field single by Cecil Fielder. They won in the 12th inning on a sacrifice bunt by Charlie Hayes, which third baseman Dean Palmer threw away, allowing Jeter to score from second base. It wasn't the kind of baseball Steinbrenner preferred, but it was smart, unselfish baseball and it was working. The Yankees’ fortuitous play continued against Baltimore in the American League Championship Series, a series the Orioles might have led two games to none but for another strange eighth-inning comeback by the Yankees in Game 1. With the Yankees down to their last five outs, trailing 4-3, Jeter lofted a high fly ball to the right-field wall, where Orioles right fielder Tony Tarasco began to reach for it. Before the ball could come down into Tarasco's glove, however, a 12-year-old kid named Jeffrey Maier reached over the wall and deflected the baseball into the stands. Right-field umpire Rich Garcia ruled a home run. There could be no doubt about it now; the Yankees were getting help from above. The game was tied. The Yankees would win in the 11th inning on a home run by Williams. They also would win all three games in Baltimore, sending Torre to the first World Series in his life. Upon the final out, Torre broke down in tears in the dugout.
Disaster awaited Torre at the World Series. Playing for the first time in seven days, and against a red-hot and favored Atlanta Braves team, the Yankees were blown out in Game 1 at Yankee Stadium, 12-1. They were staring at Greg Maddux, the best pitcher in baseball, in Game 2 when Steinbrenner walked into Torre's office about 90 minutes before the game, fishing for some of that familiar Torre assurance.
“This is a must game,” Steinbrenner said.
Torre barely looked up at him.
“You should be prepared for us to lose again tonight,” he said nonchalantly. It was hardly the assurance Steinbrenner wanted. But then Torre continued: “But then we're going to Atlanta. Atlanta's my town. We'll take three games there and win it back here on Saturday.”
Steinbrenner didn't know what to say. Here was Torre saying the Yankees would lose again, but then sweep four straight games from the Braves and their all-time great rotation that included Maddux, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine? It was crazy talk. Sure enough, the Yankees lost to Maddux, 4-0. They had been outscored 16-1, the worst combined beating in the first two games in World Series history.
Steinbrenner grew more fearful. He worried about getting swept and being “embarrassed,” always one of his great worries. Steinbrenner was always talking about being “embarrassed.” He called up Torre in his office before Game 3 in Atlanta. “Let's not get embarrassed,” a nervous Steinbrenner said.
“We're fine,” Torre told him.
Not everyone felt that way. Mike Borzello, the bullpen catcher, remembers standing in the outfield during batting practice before Game 3 with Boggs and Martinez. All of them had the same thoughts as Steinbrenner.
“We were talking about how we just didn't want to get swept,” Borzello said. “We were all saying, ‘We've got to get one, because it will be embarrassing to go four and out. But this team is so much better than we are.’ Really, that's how we felt until the tide turned.”
Game 3, as well as the entire World Series, reached critical mass in the sixth inning when the Braves loaded the bases against Cone with one out, trailing the Yankees, 2-0. Fred McGriff, the Braves’ lefthanded slugging first baseman, was due up. Graeme Lloyd, a lefthanded reliever, was throwing in the Yankees’ bullpen. Torre walked to the mound, still not sure whether he would leave Cone in or replace him with Lloyd. The book move was to go lefty-on-lefty Torre looked Cone squarely in the eye.
“This is very important,” Torre said. “I need the truth from you. How do you feel?”
“I'm okay,” Cone said. “I lost the feel for my slider a little bit there, but I'm okay. I'll get this guy for you.”
But then Torre grabbed Cone and pulled him closer so that they were practically nose to nose.
“This game is very important,” Torre said. “I've got to know the truth, so don't bullshit me.”
Said Cone, “I had anticipated what the questions were going to be. Basically, ‘Hey are you okay?’ ‘Yeah, I'm fine.’ ‘Okay how are we going to go after this guy?’ He basically said, ‘No, that's not good enough,’ and turned me around nose to nose. He said, ‘No, I need to know you're okay,’ almost imploring me to tell the truth. He made eye contact with me and made me look him in the eye. He got closer and closer and grabbed me to pull me closer. He said two or three times, ‘No, I need to know you're okay.’
“That's the first time I heard a manager do anything like that, saying it that way. I was fine, as good as I was going to be for a guy who rushed back to the team from surgery. I was not fully all the way back at that point. But I always thought I could make a pitch, a splitter or something. It's like playing golf where you think you can make a shot. Somehow, someway.”
Cone convinced Torre to leave him in the game. He made a pitch to McGriff, who popped it up. Cone then walked Ryan Klesko, forcing in a run. “It was a borderline call,” Cone said, “but if you make a mistake there he can juice one.” Cone ended the inning by getting Javy Lopez on a pop-up, preserving a lead for the Yankees, who would go on to win, 5-2.
As important as Game 3 was, Game 4 would become the signature game for the 1996 Yankees. Down 6-0 in the sixth inning, Torre gathered his players in the dugout for an impromptu meeting and advised them,
“Let's cut it in half right here. Take small bites. Do the little things to get one run at a time. Let's put a little pressure on them.”
No Yankees team ever had won a World Series game by coming from that far behind. Only one team ever overcame a bigger deficit in the World Series, Connie Mack's 1929 Philadelphia Athletics. The Yankees immediately responded to Torre's advice. They scored three runs with their first four batters of the inning, stitching together three opposite-field singles and a walk for the quintessential ‘96 Yankees rally.
The game-tying rally was more bombastic: a three-run home run by Jimmy Leyritz off Atlanta closer Mark Wohlers with one out in the eighth, a blast made possible when Wohlers made the mistake of throwing a hanging slider because Leyritz looked as if he were timing his 99 mph fastballs by fouling them off. The Yankees won, 8-6, in the 10th inning with the tie-breaking run scoring on a pinch-hit walk by Wade Boggs, the last position player left on Torre's bench. Torre used seven pitchers, five pinch hitters and one pinch runner. He used every one of his players except three starting pitchers, Cone, Key and Pettitte. It was the fourth time in 13 postseason games that year that the Yankees won a game after staring at defeat from the close proximity of six or fewer outs away.
The series was tied at two games each, with the Yankees giving the ball to Pettitte in Game 5 and the Braves going to Smoltz. Torre had some difficult decisions to make with his lineup, the first of which he actually made immediately after Game 4. Torre told Leyritz he would catch Pettitte rather than Girardi, the defensive specialist.
“I said to Leyritz, ‘You know what? I'm going to catch you with Pettitte tomorrow,’ “ Torre said. “ ‘And the only reason you're catching Pettitte is because you hit a three-run homer. I wasn't going to catch you. So just make sure you do the right thing.’ Because he always wanted to do things his way. He didn't want to follow the game plan of how we were going to pitch people. But that was his personality. ‘The King.’ “