The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  The first two pitches were 97-mph missiles that Piazza took each time for strikes.

  “You couldn't even see the plate with all the flashbulbs,” McNamee said. “I was in the bullpen, and you couldn't even see the batter after all the lights.”

  Clemens tried a splitter next, but missed, running the count to 1-and-2. The next pitch was an inside fastball, full of anger and machismo, a buzz saw of a pitch that bore through the handle of Piazza's bat as he tried to hit it. Objects flew every which way in the manner of an explosion. One piece of the bat flew toward the left side of the infield. The handle stayed in Piazza's hands. The ball flew into foul territory off first base. The biggest remaining part of the bat, the barrel, sheared off with a shard at one end, bounced toward Clemens. There was so much going on, so much in his head, so much emotion coursing through his body, that Clemens could not process the inventory of what was happening at that moment quickly enough. He picked up the barrel as if fielding a grounder— in fact, he would say that his first thought was that he was fielding the baseball. And when he realized it was a useless piece of wood in his hands, he threw it—threw it, he said, toward what he thought was a safe area out of play, simply to get this damn piece of wood, by extension, this piece of Piazza, off the field.

  Piazza, however, happened to be right near the flight path of the barrel. Piazza was confused himself. He had no idea where the ball was, so he began jogging toward first base, just in case it might be in play somewhere. The bat careened and cartwheeled not too far in front of him. Piazza was stunned.

  “What is your problem?” he yelled at Clemens. “What is your problem?”

  Clemens did not respond. He spoke to home plate umpire Charlie Reliford about how he thought it was the ball.

  “That was just Roger's pent-up frustration,” McNamee said of the bat-throwing incident, “because that was the first time he saw him since July. He was hyped. That was just emotion. It was nothing. He didn't throw the bat at Piazza.

  “And Roger reads every fucking one of the stories. His sisters read everything and talk to him. He finds out about it. He's got people all over the Internet. That cockamamie story about the ball, that's bullshit. I think he was just so hyped up and focused.”

  Said Torre, “Roger was on another planet, obviously. He gets the bat and he throws it away, just throws it off the field. Piazza, not knowing where the ball was, he started running. Clemens knew it was a foul ball, and he just threw the bat toward the dugout. Turns out Piazza ran into it almost.”

  Reliford moved between Clemens and Piazza. Both dugouts emptied. The situation was quelled quickly. On the next pitch, Clemens retired Piazza on a groundball to second base. Clemens, still highly emotional and amped, ran off the field and kept going, past Torre, up the runway and into the clubhouse. This time it had nothing to do with changing his shirt. Stottlemyre jumped up from eating his cheeseburger with Steinbrenner in Torre's office and made his way toward Clemens.

  “I didn't mean to do that!” Clemens said.

  When Stottlemyre reached Clemens he found a most surprising sight. Clemens, the intimidating warrior who put hot liniment on his balls, who snorted like a bull, who threw 97 miles an hour with more than a hint of danger affixed to his pitches, sat there crying uncontrollably.

  While Clemens, with Stottlemyre's help, pulled himself together, his teammates scored two runs for him. By the eighth inning the Yankees led 6-0 and Clemens was nearly unhittable. He faced 28 batters. Two managed hits, none walked, nine struck out and only five managed to get the ball out of the infield, safely or not. The Mets put up five runs in the ninth off Jeff Nelson and Mariano Rivera—Piazza hit a home run off Nelson—but the night belonged to Clemens and the Yankees, 6-5.

  “Competition,” Mets catcher Todd Pratt said that night, “brings out the best and worst in people.”

  The next day, a workout day before Game 3, Cone asked Torre if he could speak to him for a minute. Torre had not yet announced his starting pitcher for Game 4. He had Orlando Hernandez lined up for Game 3—a game the Yankees would lose, 4-2, when El Duque was touched for two runs in the eighth—but had yet to decide between Neagle and Cone for Game 4.

  “Joe didn't have a lot of faith in Neagle,” Cone said. “Neagle rubbed him the wrong way for some reason. He thought he was a little flighty. There was something about him he didn't like.”

  Cone, though, was far from a sure thing. He had pitched only one inning in the ALCS against Seattle, a mop-up inning at that in a 6-2 game. The body of the inspirational leader of the championship Yankees teams was breaking down. Cone suffered through a dreadful season, going 4-14 with a 6.91 ERA.

  “I got to a point in my career where I learned how to manage the pain,” Cone said. “I learned how many Advil I had to take or when I really got in trouble I could take something heavier, Indocin or other anti-inflammatories. I had been through it enough that I knew how to manage the pain. What I didn't know was how short my stuff was getting. I almost got too good at managing the pain, because I didn't recognize my stuff got short. Lots of hanging sliders that year. My slider just stopped breaking.”

  Toward the end of the season Cone dislocated his left shoulder diving for a ball.

  “I shouldn't have been on the playoff roster,” he said. “I was throwing with one arm. You really need that drive from the front side. For the rest of the year I had nothing.”

  Cone threw no harder than 85 miles an hour in that one inning against Seattle. He knew Torre was considering a start for him, which is why he asked to speak with the manager on that workout day.

  “Hey, look, Joe,” Cone told him. “I'm pretty comfortable I can give you a couple of innings of relief. But I'm not sure what I can give you as a starter.”

  Said Cone, “That was the first time I ever admitted that. To anybody. To admit that I can't do it.”

  Torre thanked him for his honesty and announced Neagle as the Yankees’ Game 4 pitcher.

  Jeter hit that important first-pitch home run off Bobby Jones to begin Game 4. The Yankees pushed the lead to 3-0 by the third inning, but Neagle gave back two of the runs by serving up a home run to Piazza in the bottom of the third.

  It was still 3-2 in the fifth when Piazza came up with two outs and nobody on base. Torre walked out to the mound. Neagle was one out away from qualifying for a World Series win. But Torre wanted no part of watching Neagle pitch to Piazza a second time. He signaled to the bullpen.

  Torre managed postseason games with cutthroat urgency, a policy that began in his first postseason series as Yankees manager with advice from Zimmer. Torre starter Kenny Rogers was getting hit hard by the Rangers in the second inning of Game 4 when Zimmer turned to Torre and said, “You might want to get someone up in the bullpen.”

  “What?” Torre said. “It's only the second inning.”

  “You can never let these games get away from you,” Zimmer said.

  Torre pulled Rogers after only two innings, down 2-0. The Yankees won the game, 6-4. He never forgot Zimmer's lesson.

  In Game 4 of the 2000 World Series, Neagle was the latest version of Rogers. He handed Torre the ball and walked off dejectedly. Neagle would later explain, “I'm a victim of not having done it long enough for Joe.”

  The bullpen door swung open, and out jogged the clubhouse rascal whom O'Neill wanted to maul before the game, the same guy with the 4-14 record, the 85-mph fastball, the dislocated shoulder and the heart of a lion. It was time for one last Yankee moment for David Cone.

  “He couldn't get me or you out,” Torre said, “but I knew you plant some thoughts in Mike Piazza's head. ‘Oh, shit. Now I've got to look for more than one pitch.’ When a certain hitter like Piazza knows he's going to get that one pitch eventually? He'll kill you. But with Coney, he goes out there and throws buckshot at you. He's all over the joint.”

  Cone figured at some point in the game he might be called on to face Piazza. He just didn't figure that point would come with Neagle one out away from qualifying for
a World Series victory.

  “It just goes to show you: Joe didn't care,” Cone said. “One thing Joe set the tone on early on was that he was not going to play favorites. Yeah, he was a little bit of a riverboat gambler in terms of strategy. But he was going to put the team on the field that gave him the best chance to win at that point. If that meant sitting Tino in the postseason, sitting Boggs, taking Neagle out with two outs in the fifth and not letting him face Piazza one more time, he was going to do it. He didn't care who you were or what was going on. He was going to do whatever he was going to do to help the team win. Guys didn't like it, but too bad. Tino didn't like it. But he accepted it. He dealt with it.”

  Cone's savvy served him well. He knew, for instance, that Piazza was the type of hitter who liked to take a strike. “To me that's half the battle,” Cone said, “knowing which guys will spot you a strike or not.”

  So even after Cone missed with his first pitch, he came back with a fastball that caught a lot of the plate. Piazza took it for strike one.

  “That,” Cone said, “was a pitch he could have mashed. But I was really confident he wasn't going to swing at the 1-and-0 fastball. And once I got the strike I threw him two sliders, one he swung at and missed and one he barely fouled off. Decent sliders—kind of sweeping, Frisbee sliders.

  “Then Posada called a fastball in, so I thought maybe I'll miss in with it. It got a little more of the plate than I wanted. It was up just enough. The last thing he was looking for was a fastball anywhere in there. It was just luck of the draw. He reacted late and just missed it—popped it up.”

  Said Torre, “He was looking off speed, and he threw him an 85 mile an hour fastball down the middle and he hit a pop-up.”

  It was a triumph of trust. Torre wanted Cone on Piazza even with an 85-mph fastball. And Cone came through for him. It was the last pitch Cone would throw in his great career with the Yankees. Cone was going to pitch another inning, but Torre used Jose Canseco to pinch hit for him with two outs and two on. Canseco whiffed. Nelson, Stanton and Rivera took care of the final 12 outs to keep the final score at 3-2.

  The Yankees the next night won the World Series for the last time under Torre. It was the perfect coda, straight out of the 1996-2000 Greatest Hits songbook. There was, of course, a comeback; they trailed 2-1 in the sixth inning. There was Jeter playing the superhero again; he tied the game with a home run. There was terrific starting pitching; Andy Pettitte allowed two unearned runs in seven innings. There was the prototypical game-winning rally of Yankee ingenuity; the Yankees had two outs and nobody on base in the ninth when Posada drew a nine-pitch walk from Al Leiter. Brosius added an infield single and Luis Sojo added a groundball single that, coupled with an error, sent two runs home for a 4-2 lead. And, of course, at the end there was Rivera, getting the final out on a fly ball by Piazza, the potential tying run.

  After Sojo's game-breaking hit, technicians and carpenters from Fox hustled to the Yankees’ clubhouse to begin erecting the platform for the presentation of the Commissioner's Trophy. But there was a problem. The door was locked. They knocked on it, announcing themselves.

  Steinbrenner shouted, “Don't let those bastards in!”

  He was superstitious about having anyone assuming the Yankees had the world championship in hand. No one, he decided, was coming into his clubhouse until after the last out. Commissioner Bud Selig, with word reaching him in the stands, was apoplectic. His television partners needed to get in! Kevin Hallinan, Major League Baseball's director of security, called a Yankees official in the clubhouse and told him that the Yankees were risking an enormous fine from Selig if Steinbrenner didn't open the door immediately. Steinbrenner sent word that the only person he would talk to was Paul Beeston, one of Selig's assistants and a friend of Stein-brenner's from Beeston's years running the Toronto Blue Jays. Beeston, in fact, was friendly enough with Steinbrenner to have pulled a prank on him a few years earlier when he helped arrange an owners meeting in which all of the owners came dressed as Steinbren-ner: gray slacks, navy blue blazer, white turtleneck.

  Beeston banged on the door. “George. It's Beeston! Open the door,” he called out.

  Steinbrenner opened the door a bit, just wide enough for Beeston and no one else to slip through before he slammed it shut. Beeston calmly negotiated with Steinbrenner to open the door and let the TV people do their job. Steinbrenner eventually relented, but not without warning Beeston, “But if anything goes wrong, this is on you!”

  Only a few minutes later, Rivera leapt in the air after getting Piazza to fly out to Bernie Williams. Steinbrenner was crying on the shoulder of a very relieved Beeston. Soon the champagne was flying yet again. It never grew old. Every champagne celebration was full of exuberance and joy, though with each year more and more relief crept in there as well.

  “We had a blast afterward,” McNamee said. “I was sitting on top of the refrigerator in that little room. And George came up to me and shook my hand. Said, ‘Congratulations!’ I don't think he knew who I was. I just know for like a good 30 minutes after the champagne was gone almost everybody on the team was in that room. Guys were laughing. And every five minutes somebody would say, And this is for Turk Wendell!’ So we toasted him like 10 times. Like we'd be talking, ‘Hey isn't this great?’ and then some guy would raise his hand and go, ‘To Turk Wendell!’ And everybody would be cheering. It was pretty funny. They might have had a chance if he didn't open his mouth. Oh, he pissed everybody off. That Yankees team was not that good.”

  Didn't all the October nights in those years seem to end the same way? Watching the Yankees in the postseason those years was like watching a Gilligan's Island episode. No matter what outrageous plot twists and red herrings were thrown into the opening minutes of the show, you knew how it was going to end: Gilligan was still going to be on the island when they ran the credits. Likewise, no matter if the Yankees fell behind or were tied or were confronted with a rally, you knew they were going to come out ahead.

  From 1998 through 2000, the Yankees won three consecutive world championships by playing .805 baseball in the postseason, going 33-8. Even as their talent waned, they seemed to know their way around the postseason better than anyone else, as if they had the only map to the buried treasure. Pitching, of course, was their compass. They allowed zero, one or two runs in 23 of those 41 games. But there was something else, something else that existed inside and between these players. It was something so strong that they took all the common logic of “small sample sizes,” the randomness of when two good teams meet in the playoffs, and the difficulty of having to get through three rounds of playoffs, and they blew up all of what is now that conventional wisdom. Those three Yankees teams, for instance, were 15-3 in playoff games decided by one or two runs. Were they that lucky? Or were they that good?

  “The randomness existed then,” said Beane, the father of the modern philosophy that the playoffs are “a crapshoot.” “But at some point you are like UCLA basketball under John Wooden. They won, what? Twelve titles in a postseason where you can get knocked out in one game? At some point a team becomes so good that they overcome the randomness. The ‘98 Yankees were one of the greatest teams I ever saw. That team was almost as good in ‘99 and 2000. They were without a doubt the UCLA of baseball in that time. They had everything you'd want a baseball team to have, and they were young, and let's face it, when you're that good it's a pretty overwhelming environment for another team to go in and try to beat them. They were that much better than anybody else.”

  Four times in all, Torre's Yankees rode down the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan while honored with a parade. Four times they added to the Yankees’ legacy as the most prestigious franchise in sports, with 26 world championships in all. Yet there was a downside to the glory. Steinbrenner, who was desperate for a winner when Torre arrived, having endured 17 years without a title, now had come to expect these championships. Each title brought him a little less joy. The Yankees could do no better than to fulfill an obligation.


  A short time after the 2000 World Series, with the Yankees having dispatched their crosstown rivals in a bitterly fought series, and the YES network cleared for launch with what remained the preeminent team in sports, Torre and his wife were getting ready to board a plan for Europe when his phone rang. It was Steinbrenner.

  “I'm not giving the coaches a bonus this year,” The Boss said.

  Steinbrenner had handed out $25,000 bonuses to Torre's coaches when the Yankees won in 1996, 1998 and 1999.

  “George,” Torre said. “How can you give the coaches a bonus when we beat San Diego and then when we beat the Mets you can't give them a bonus? That's crazy.”

  “Well,” Steinbrenner said. “They're expected to win.”

  A few weeks later, Steinbrenner called Torre again. It was New Year's Eve.

  “I'm going to give the coaches a bonus,” Steinbrenner said.

  Who knew what changed his mind? All Torre knew was that he was happy for his coaches, but still angry that Steinbrenner didn't believe they deserved a bonus in the first place.

  “Still, you go through the same act with George,” Torre said. “You thank him, you tell him what a great owner he is, and how much you appreciate it. You mean it, but you're also thinking, Why is this necessary? But see, that's the only control he had. That's what he used to get my attention. Because he wanted to see me squirm. So it was basically a game.

  “At least you had access to him. I worked for Ted Turner and I worked for August Busch, and it was easier to work for George because you had access to him. You could talk to him. You could get to him. You could get your point across. You could never get to those guys to talk to them.”