by Joe Torre
“He looked scared to death,” Torre said. “He was just sitting there, staring.”
Torre learned to interpret such a look from Pettitte as intense focus. Pettitte pitched magnificently against Baltimore, allowing the league's top home-run-hitting team just two runs over 8⅓ innings. Pettitte did leave trailing, 2-1, but the Yankees rallied to tie the game in the ninth and win it in the 10th, 3-2.
“One thing I learned about Andy,” Torre said, “is he thought you weren't allowed to be nervous. Jeter, as far as handling the pressure, is the best I've ever seen. But Andy, in spite of getting excited, managed to handle it the right way. The game never sped up for him.
“He's so honest, which is so refreshing, because not too many people own up to their shortcomings. He does. Whether it's a particular at-bat or pitch, he'll tell you. Andy is very honest.
“In fact, I remember when I talked to him about the possibility of coming back to the Yankees after he pitched those years in Houston. He said, ‘I thought I had everything where I wanted it: coming home, being with family … I just didn't have fun playing. There was no fire. Just the thought of going back to New York has gotten me excited.’ Probably the worst word in sports is being ‘comfortable.’ There's something about comfort that doesn't seem to fit with what you need to do. Andy missed New York. Andy was great. I think he taught Roger how to pitch in New York. And Roger taught Andy how to be stronger. Back then Andy was a little soft physically, but not mentally, that's for sure.”
The trade for Clemens, meanwhile, did not turn out the way the Yankees expected. Clemens missed three weeks early in the season with a leg problem, and when he did pitch he looked nothing like the best pitcher in baseball as he had been in Toronto. He was 8-4 with an unseemly 4.98 ERA through the middle of July. He struck out 10 batters in a game only once. He looked far too ordinary.
“Roger struggled early on,” Cone said. “He was getting booed at Yankee Stadium. Roger was always kind of aloof. He was kind of shy and insecure. People don't realize that about him. A lot of superstars are like that, surprisingly so. Roger was like that. He struggled to fit in. He struggled with New York. He was not pitching too well and in fact had trouble just hanging out. He would be disappearing before games. He was always hiding in the weight room or on the couch in the traveling secretary's office. Just kind of hiding out a lot. During the game he wasn't on the bench very much. He got better as he started to pitch better and got used to the guys.”
One day in August, while the Yankees were in Seattle, Clemens asked Torre if he could use his office to call his mother. Torre said of course. A while later Torre stepped into the office to retrieve something and heard Clemens tell his mom, “I'm still just trying to fit in and be one of the guys.”
When Clemens was done with the call Torre told him he wanted to speak to him.
“ ‘Fit in’ my ass,” Torre told him. “You be who you are. Be Roger Clemens.”
“I know,” Clemens said. “That's what my mom is always telling me.”
“Listen,” Torre said, “you're allowed to be selfish. We traded for you because we wanted the guy who was pitching in Toronto, not somebody different. Not somebody who is just trying to fit in. You're just trying to sort of blend in here and that's not what we want. That's not what we traded for. You're too tentative.”
Clemens agreed with Torre's assessment and vowed to be more assertive, though the Yankees still didn't see the dominating version of Clemens. He pitched only marginally better over his final 11 starts, going 5-6 with a 4.34 ERA.
“The thing with Roger that I found was you loved him,” Torre said. “There are all the bells and whistles that you get with Roger but his heart was always in the right place. He was a good teammate, and that sort of surprised me, because before he got to us he had this reputation about being able to go home and not be around the team. And I told him. ‘You can't do that,’ and it was never a problem.
“He was a cheerleader in between starts. And he reminded me of Bob Gibson when he did start. We wouldn't be scoring for Gibby and he'd go, ‘You guys … you've got to be shittin’ me.’ And he'd go inside the clubhouse. Roger would do that. He was very outgoing, and yet it wasn't an act. If it was, he had himself convinced of that.
“He also had tremendous belief in himself and his pitching. If you don't believe that pitch is going to go exactly where you want it, then it's not going to go there. Roger believed every pitch was going where he wanted it to go.”
Clemens did not come close to replacing Wells’ production with the 1999 Yankees. He finished 14-10 with a 4.60 ERA, the worst ERA of his 24-year career. The Yankees still won the AL East with 98 wins, four more than second-place Boston. On the final weekend of the season, Torre sat down with Stottlemyre to map out their pitching plans for the playoffs when Torre decided to include Clemens in the discussion. Clemens, by reputation, was a protypi-cal Game 1 starter, but in reality he had not been that kind of pitcher for the Yankees all year. Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez had led the staff that season with 17 wins. Torre decided he wanted Clemens to recognize that reality himself.
“Roger, who do you think should start Game 1?” Torre asked him.
“Duque,” Clemens said.
Torre was a bit relieved to know he would not have to convince Clemens otherwise.
“What I like to do is see if people evaluate the same way I do,” Torre said. “I figured, As much as he thinks of himself, let's see what he said.’ “
If Clemens had said he deserved the ball for Game 1, Torre said, “we would have talked him out of it. We would have explained why that's not true. I always liked to believe that you could always try to make sense to people. I always try to make these guys understand there is another perspective other than theirs.”
Clemens was Torre's number three starter, behind Hernandez and Andy Pettitte. The Yankees blew through the Texas Rangers in the Division Series again, allowing only one run in the three-game sweep. Torre used the same order of pitchers in the American League Championship Series against Boston, an arrangement that left Clemens returning to Fenway Park to pitch against Pedro Martinez in Game 3. The game was promoted in the manner of a heavyweight fight, a bout between Clemens, the expatriate Red Sox star, and Martinez, his replacement in Boston as the best pitcher in baseball and the soul of the franchise. The crowd arrived with the meanness and edginess of a mob. Indeed, before the day was done packs of fans would climb over themselves trying to claw down a canvas mural hung in one of the concourses in celebration of Clemens’ two 20-strikeout games with Boston.
Clemens, a shell of himself all season, failed miserably amid the hostility. Torre removed him only one batter into the third inning with the score 4-0. Clemens walked off the mound and down the dugout steps gingerly, having something of a ready-made excuse because of some back stiffness. Clemens was charged with five runs in what became a 13-1 Boston victory, its only one of the ALCS. In the middle innings, with Clemens long gone and Martinez cutting apart the Yankees lineup, the crowd mocked Clemens by chanting, “Where is Roger?”
Part of what made Clemens great as a pitcher was his inflated sense of self, the same trait that prompted Torre to check with Clemens before aligning his postseason rotation. There is almost no concession in the man. He enjoyed not just being Roger Clemens, but also playing the role of Roger Clemens.
“He is needy, and he's got his own world he lives in. As far as competing, they're different people. Roger's always going to go out there and have that positive attitude. That's the way he has to think.”
Said Brian McNamee, Clemens’ former personal trainer, and the one who told baseball special investigator George Mitchell in 2007 that he injected Clemens with steroids, “The worst day was the day after Roger lost a game. Because he would blame everybody on the field. It was the umpire, it was the fielders, it was Jeter can't go to his left, it was the outfielders playing back too deep … it was always something. The ball. The ball's too slick. Oh, Posada? All the time. It was
just a nightmare.”
Torre never knew Clemens to look for excuses. He understood that Clemens’ knack for ignoring reality at the cost of preserving his grand sense of self would not play well in the wake of his debacle in ALCS Game 3 in front of the Boston mob. Blaming his third-inning knockout on a stiff back, for instance, would invite his critics to diminish him further. Torre was concerned about what Clemens might say to reporters after the game.
As Torre took Clemens out of the game, he told him on the mound, “Just do yourself a favor. When they come in and talk to you, just tell them you were horseshit. Because I know you're hurting. You know you're hurting. But that won't play well.”
After the game, first the reporters asked Torre if Clemens, by evidence of the pained look he gave leaving the mound, was diminished by an injury.
Said Torre, “I think the score was making him grimace.”
Then the reporters approached Clemens. Would he blame the results on his back? Was the ball too slick? This time, thanks to Torre's intervention, he actually revealed some concession.
“I think the thing for me tonight was location,” Clemens said. “I didn't have good command, I fell behind and they made me pay for it.”
Pettitte, the man Steinbrenner wanted gone, immediately righted the Yankees in Game 4. With little room for error, he brought the ball and a 3-2 lead directly to Mariano Rivera. Pettitte allowed the Red Sox only two runs in 7⅓ innings. The Yankees broke open the close game with six runs in the ninth to win, 9-2. After the game Steinbrenner visited Torre in the tiny visiting manager's office at Fenway Park. Torre was happy for Pettitte, and he was also happy for Joe Girardi, the selfless catcher who had been Torre's first recommended acquisition when he was hired in 1995. Problem was, Steinbrenner knew Girardi was one of Torre's soldiers and he would criticize Girardi often.
“Did you see how well Andy pitched?” Torre said to Steinbrenner. “And he couldn't have done it without Girardi!”
Torre started breaking down. Tears were coming down his cheeks. Steinbrenner didn't know what the hell was going on.
Said Torre, “I was on hormones for my radiation treatment, and I was emotional. I remember George had been trying to dump Girardi from just about day one.”
The next morning Steinbrenner called up Torre at the team's hotel.
“Do you want to have lunch?” Steinbrenner asked.
“No, Ali's here,” Torre said.
“Well, bring Ali.”
“No. We just want to be by ourselves here. I'm going to go work out and then we're going out to eat.”
And then Torre hung up the phone.
Torre took the hotel elevator down to the floor with the fitness center. When the doors opened and he stepped out, he saw Steinbrenner standing there.
“You all right?” Steinbrenner asked.
“Yeah, I'm all right,” Torre said. “Just emotional, that's all.”
Said Torre, “That was the fun part about George. His bark was worse than his bite. He cared a lot.”
That night Hernandez followed Pettitte's gem with one of his own: he allowed one run on five hits over seven innings. The Yankees clinched the pennant so easily, 6-1, that Torre did not even have to use Rivera.
As with San Diego the previous season, the Yankees stormed through their National League opponent in the World Series, even if it was a Braves team with a renowned rotation of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and Kevin Millwood. The Yankees out-pitched the famous Braves’ staff, permitting Atlanta nine runs in a four-game sweep. Maddux held a 1-0 lead in the eighth inning of Game 1 and Glavine held a 5-2 lead in the seventh inning of Game 3 and yet the Yankees came back against both pitching greats.
With a three games to none lead, the Yankees could comfortably give the ball to their new number four starter, Clemens, who had fallen in line behind Hernandez, Pettitte and Cone. That morning, Torre received a phone call with sad news: O'Neill's father had passed away at about 3 a.m. Charles O'Neill was 79 and had been suffering from heart disease. Torre immediately called Paul. O'Neill's wife, Nevalee, answered the phone.
“Paul's not home,” she said. “Oh, Joe, I don't know how we're going to get him to the ballpark. But we've got to find a way to get him there. That's where he needs to be.”
O'Neill did make it to Yankee Stadium for Game 4, and batted third in the lineup. He went 0-for-3, but his teammates picked him up by jumping on Smoltz in the third inning with another of those quintessential Yankee rallies: one walk, two infield singles and two opposite field singles. They added up to three runs.
The Yankees would win 299 regular season games and three consecutive world championships from 1998 to 2000 without ranking among the top three home-run-hitting teams in the league and with no player hitting more than 30 home runs. Every other team in baseball over those three years had someone hit more than 30 homers at least twice. Viewed another way, there were 113 times a player hit more than 30 homers in those three seasons—none of them were Yankees.
Buoyed by the 3-0 lead, Clemens brought the championship home from there. He pitched well two outs into the eighth inning, allowing the Braves only one run in the 4-1 clinching victory. The Yankees had their second straight world championship and their third in four years, and Clemens at last had his first. The Yankees streamed out to the mound after Rivera retired Keith Lockhart on a fly ball to Chad Curtis in left field. Across the crush of players, O'Neill found Torre and walked over to his manager. He threw his arms around Torre and hugged him, sobbing uncontrollably on his shoulder.
Clemens enjoyed the party as much as anyone. He was so excited by the title that he arranged for his teammates to receive a second world championship ring, this one he commissioned out of platinum. This is why he had asked Beeston to get him out of Toronto, to jump aboard the Yankees’ championship train while it was still rolling. Including the postseason, the Yankees won 109 games in 1999. It wasn't the record of 125 wins from 1998, but it was staggering nonetheless, especially when you consider their postseason dominance. The 1999 Yankees were 11-1 in the postseason, allowing only 31 runs in those 12 games and coming within one start by Clemens at Fenway Park from running the table without a loss. The championship did fill a void in Clemens’ prolific career.
“Roger was what he was coming out of high school,” Torre said. “In a lot of ways, he's like Alex: they didn't let the advance notices down. Coming out of high school and college people expected big things and he delivered right away. He's a guy that doesn't know negative. Doesn't know failure. He paints a different picture of failure than a lot of people.
“Roger is a guy who, when I got to know him, I realized what a bulldog he was. Before, it looked like it was ability but the guy steering the ship wasn't a guy I'd put in the class of pitchers such as Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale and Ryan—until I got to know him. Now, in my mind, he belongs there.”
3
Getting an Edge
The 1998 baseball season was a party of epic proportions, the equivalent of an all-nighter with the music cranked and every care in the world, or at least the anger and bitterness of the 1994-95 players’ strike, easily forgotten. The 1998 Yankees, the winningest team of all time, were just part of the fun for Bud Selig, whose caretaking role as interim commissioner finally ended in midsummer. Bud Selig, who had owned the Milwaukee Brewers, was the ultimate insider.
It was an expansion year, with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks adding two more television markets, $260 million in expansion fees, and another 324 games to the inventory of moneymaking possibilities. Attendance jumped 12 percent, with almost seven and a half million more people paying their way into ballparks. The per-game major league average improved by 4 percent to 29,054, the best it had been since before the strike hit. The ratings for games televised by Fox improved by 11 percent.
It was the year David Wells threw his perfect game, a rookie Cubs pitcher named Kerry Wood struck out a record-tying 20 batters and the age-defying Roger Clemens, while in the emplo
y of the Toronto Blue Jays at that stage of his pitcher-for-hire phase, became the first pitcher to strike out 18 or more batters in a game for the third time.
Most of all, it was the year that belonged to hitters, who just happened to be growing cartoonishly large and hitting baseballs into parts of ballparks where no baseballs had gone before. It was a freak show and baseball loved it. It was the first season in history in which four players hit 50 home runs. Greg Vaughn and Ken Griffey Jr., half of the 50-plus bombers that year, were dwarfed in size, production and attention by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both McGwire, with 70 home runs, and Sosa, with 66, blew away the record 61 home runs of Roger Maris that had stood as the standard for 37 years. America was captivated by the two huge men and the great home-run race. Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, praised McGwire and Sosa as the “home-run kings for working families in America.” McGwire, with forearms the size of a grown man's neck, 17 inches around, was a gate attraction unto himself, a modern wonder of the world. Ballparks opened their gates early and called in concession staffs to clock in early just to accommodate the thousands of fans who wanted to see him take batting practice. On September 9, Fox scrapped the season premieres of its prime-time Tuesday night shows to televise the game in which McGwire would hit his record-breaking 62nd home run. More than 43 million people watched.
Baseball was awash in goodwill, national attention and money like it had not seen in many years. The Los Angeles Dodgers garishly flaunted such largesse after that season by giving Kevin Brown, a pitcher soon to turn 34 years old, an age when players traditionally had neared retirement as their bodies gave out, a seven-year contract worth $105 million, sweetening the deal with private jet service back and forth from his Georgia home.