by Joe Torre
Steinbrenner's declining appreciation for what his team accomplished, however, was taking a toll on the morale of the organization. His scouts and player development people, for instance, did not receive their 1999 World Series rings until more than a year later—until after the 2000 World Series, and when they did receive them they turned out to be fake ones. The ring company eventually sent them word to return the rings so they could correct the “mistake.”
Still, no 2000 World Series rings were forthcoming for the scouts, numbering about two dozen. Morale worsened when they were instructed not to bring up the subject of World Series rings at organizational meetings. It worsened still when they heard or saw Steinbrenner cronies such as actor Billy Crystal and singer Ronan Tynan wearing World Series rings. The daughter of one scout wrote a scathing letter to Steinbrenner about the withholding of rings from the people who worked so hard behind the scenes to help build a championship team. Steinbrenner relented and eventually ordered a ring for that one scout. Another player development official put his request in writing; he insisted that he would not sign his next contract until it included the promise of a 2000 World Series ring.
Nearly all of the scouts, however, never did receive a 2000 World Series ring. The bit of black humor among them, considering how long it took them to receive the 1999 World Series rings, was that the Yankees would have to win another World Series for them to receive the 2000 World Series rings. But no rings were ever forthcoming for the scouts and, in fact, Cashman told Newsday in 2006 after he assumed full authority in baseball operations that those people would not be receiving them. As the years went by, the jilted scouts began to refer to each lost Yankees season after 2000 as the result of what they called The Curse of the Rings. The Yankees have not won a World Series since.
5
Mystique and Aura
In the middle of the sixth inning of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series, Joe Torre retreated to the clubhouse to use the bathroom. George Steinbrenner was waiting for him as Torre walked up a short flight of stairs. The Yankees owner had taken his customary position in the clubhouse to watch his team play in the postseason.
“What do you think?” Steinbrenner asked him.
Torre knew exactly what Steinbrenner wanted: another shot of reassurance. “He was a wreck,” Torre said. Many times over the years Torre had calmed Steinbrenner's jangled nerves and fears. It was Torre's nature to be reassuring, even going back to 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he was in the Air National Guard and was in charge of 50 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. One night while on a march the troops were moaning about the possibility of being sent off to a war. “Don't worry,” Torre told them.”We're not going off to war.”The troops believed him and immediately felt better. Torre had no inside information himself. He simply figured if they did not go to war, he would look smart, and if they did go to war, well, they would have bigger things to worry about than what their dorm chief had told them.
It was the same way with Steinbrenner. Torre told The Boss the Yankees would win with rookie pitchers in a doubleheader against the mighty Indians in 1996, and they did. He told Steinbrenner the Yankees would win four games in a row against the powerful Braves in the 1996 World Series, and they did. He told him Orlando Hernandez was ready to pitch the pivotal Game 4 of the 1998 ALCS, and Hernandez threw a gem. He told him Andy Pettitte was too good to trade, and Pettitte went 75-35 for Steinbrenner.
This time, however, was different. As Torre stood there in the visiting clubhouse of Bank One Ballpark, he looked Steinbrenner in the eye and realized he could not tell Steinbrenner what he wanted to hear. Torre had no words of reassurance this time. Fact was, with Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling on top of his game, and the Yankees’ offense looking mostly anemic throughout the series, not even Torre could muster an optimistic picture to give Steinbrenner. The reassurance well was dry.
“Boss,” Torre said, “I wish I could give you something positive. But I don't know if we're ever going to score a run here. I wish the hell I knew, George.”
That the Yankees were still playing at all, down 1-0 to Schilling and the Diamondbacks in Game 7, was in itself a colossal achievement. The dynasty was running low on fuel. Age continued to bring the Yankees down another notch from their 1998 pinnacle. For the third straight season since that 1998 juggernaut, the Yankees’ run production diminished—they scored more than a full run a game less than they did in 1998 and dipped below an average of five runs per game for the first time since a dismal 1992 outfit that lost 86 games. The 2001 Yankees’ on-base percentage, once the prideful signature of a team that grinded out every at-bat, sunk to .334, which would be the worst in Torre's 12 years with the Yankees and the franchise's worst since that 1992 team.
The Yankees resorted to stealing bases—they stole 161 bases, the franchise's second-most since 1916—and trusting that their pitching would carry them through close games. Clemens won the Cy Young Award with a 20-3 record, while Mike Mussina, the free agent prize signed to replace Cone, led the staff in innings, ERA and strikeouts. Mariano Rivera saved 50 games while the Yankees went 30-18 in one-run games, the first time the Yankees won so many games by the slimmest possible margin since 1980. The youthful Athletics, with 102 victories and a dynamite rotation that recalled the 1995 Braves and the deep, resourceful Mariners, with a league-record 116 victories, were the ascendant teams, the Yankees’ likely successors.
The Yankees, on their way to 95 wins, went largely unchallenged in the second half in the American League East, thanks to a long fade by the Red Sox.
On the morning of September 11, Torre woke up to a comfortable 13-game lead over Boston. He was getting out of bed when his phone rang. It was his car service, calling about a scheduled appointment to take Torre to an appearance in Manhattan later that morning.
“I guess it's canceled,” the man from the car service said.
“What's canceled?” Torre said.
“You haven't heard?”
The man told him about the plane that had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Torre turned on the television, only to see a second plane strike the other tower.
“My first thought was my daughter,” Torre said. “She was not quite six yet. I was trying to flip the TV stations around to make sure she had some cartoons or something. My wife was working out, and she came up and I told her. She had the TV on in the kitchen and me and my daughter were in the living room. It was absolutely frightening.
“I thought about my son. He used to be at the World Trade Center. I tried to get a hold of him on the phone. My sister-in-law Katie, one of Ali's sisters, was a flight attendant with American Airlines. She was in another country. That was our priority at that point, to find out where everybody we knew was. My son was living in New Jersey at the time. He was just on the other side of the Holland Tunnel, the Jersey side.”
Life inAmerica was put on anxious hold. Many of the mundane pursuits of everyday living, such as air travel and Major League Baseball, were meaningless in the great vortex of grief and anxiety that consumed the country. Some of the players fled to their families. Roger Clemens, for instance, drove from New York to Texas. On September 15, the Yankees who were still in town gathered after a workout to visit the Jacob Javits Center, which had been transformed into an emergency staging area, St. Vincent's Hospital, where survivors were expected to be treated, and the New York Armory, another staging area that had become a gathering place for families looking for lost loved ones. Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Chuck Knoblauch and several of the coaches joined Torre on the goodwill mission.
“It was obviously emotional,”Torre said.”You go to St. Vincent's Hospital and there was nobody there. I think we went up and saw a firefighter who had smoke inhalation. But no people from the building that were in it when the plane hit.
“The most emotional part was the Armory. You go to the staging area and you see the workers and you shake their hands. And there were peop
le waiting on results, DNA results, to see where their loved ones were. That was the toughest one, because we walked in—I didn't even want to go in. But then I remember that Randy Levine sent somebody in, or he might have gone in, just to see what the mood was. And the people who were in there wanted us to go in there.
“I think I realized at that point in time there was a purpose for us being there. We didn't know all these people, who were certainly devastated and huddled around in different groups. You'd look around and see that they had counselors or priests or rabbis in different family settings. We sort of just walked in there and looked around. And then somebody looked up and sort of waved us in, a family member. They brought out pictures of the family members they were waiting on, pictures of them wearing Yankee hats. Big Yankees fans, which was pretty moving.”
The Yankees were a part of their community at a time of great need. Williams, for instance, walked up to one grieving woman.
“I don't know what to say,”Williams said,”but you look like you need a hug.” And the center fielder of the Yankees reached out and embraced her.
“I realized at that point,” Torre said, “we had to take a certain perspective for the rest of the season.”
Word reached Torre that the Yankees would fly to Tampa the next day, a Sunday, to play the Devil Rays for one game only on Monday, and then fly to Chicago after the game for a series against the White Sox.
“I thought, That doesn't make sense. I don't have players here,” Torre said. “I argued with George and he relented.”
The plan changed. The Yankees would not fly to Tampa. They would fly to Chicago to work out Monday and resume the season Tuesday. Torre held a brief meeting with his team before the game.
“The ‘NY’ on our caps,” he told them, “is all about New York, and not about the Yankees.”
Orlando Hernandez, the Cuban émigré who had come to America for its freedoms, stymied the White Sox that night with seven shutout innings as the Yankees won, 11-3. The Yankees had become not just New York's team, but also America's hometown team. “There were lots of big banners in Chicago supporting New York,”Torre said.”It was like an out-of-body experience watching all that stuff. You didn't know how important it was, what we were doing. It was just sort of feeling your way through it.”
Clemens was the Yankees’ starting pitcher the next night.
“I remember him getting focused,” McNamee said.”When it's a big game we can have a 20-minute conversation and he won't remember it. He knew what it represented. I said, ‘Listen, man. You understand the importance of this game.’ We always talked like this. Sometimes it would get in, sometimes it wouldn't. That's how I worked. That's how I would treat a guy in preparation. We talked, and it was huge. I just tried to make sure that he didn't try to do too much, which he's capable of trying to do. That's how the conversation went, but he had that look on his face, just a glare. The next day we'd talk about it and he wouldn't even know what the fuck I said.”
Clemens, following the lead of Hernandez, pitched well, taking the ball into the seventh inning as the Yankees won again, 6-3. The White Sox stopped them the next night, 7-5, in a game in which Chicago pitcher Kip Wells hit Williams in the head with a pitch. Williams’ mother, who was at the game, rushed to the trainer's room to check on her son. Williams checked out fine. He returned to the Yankees’ bench in the fifth inning in good spirits.
“You know when you get hit in the head and they check your eyes and ask you different questions?” Williams said to Torre in the dugout.
“Yeah, sure,” Torre said.
“Well, the doctors asked me questions,” Williams said. “They asked me what day it was and I said I didn't know. When they looked concerned I said, ‘But I never know what day it is!’”
Baseball, with its leisurely pace and everyday rhythm, slowly returned to normal, and maybe even provided a small diversion to help bring the country closer to its normal bearings. The Yankees treaded water the rest of the season, winning nine times, losing eight times and tying once. Fact was, the wreckage of the twin towers still smoldered at Ground Zero and rescue workers and emergency personnel still combed through the debris. Every time the crowd sang “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium, Torre would tear up, just knowing the world was a changed and darker place.
“I got choked up because the camera would always find children,” Torre said,”and having a young child myself, you realize these children are not going to have the freedoms that I had. They're not going to be as trusting as I was. And that was sad. Still is.” In the Division Series, the Yankees again drew Oakland, a dangerous team one year wiser and one year more experienced. The Athletics won the first two games at Yankee Stadium, needing only one win in the next three games, with the next two at home, to knock out the three-time defending world champions. Torre held a team meeting on the workout day when they arrived in Oakland. He wore a cap given to him by Yogi Berra that said “It Ain't Over til It's Over,” which he carried for the rest of the postseason.
“Let's not think about how we have to win the rest of the games in this series,” Torre said. “Let's just win one game. Trust me, if you win one game your momentum switches and there's an element of doubt on the other team's side.”
The Yankees turned around the series by winning Game 3, the Flip Game, 1-0, behind the pitching of Mussina and the timely im-provisational skills of Jeter. By the third inning of the next game they were comfortably ahead, 4-0, on their way to a 9-2 victory to bring the series back to Yankee Stadium and a decisive Game 5. Once again, Clemens would get the ball in a big spot.
“Clemens’ locker was next to mine,” Donahue said. “I remember him coming in that day. He was trying to take off his T-shirt, and he was struggling just to do that. I said, ‘Holy shit. He's hurting.’ I said something to him about how he was feeling. He just said, ‘I'm okay.’ “
A short time later, Torre confronted Clemens in the trainer's room. He needed to be convinced by Clemens that he could help the Yankees win the game, give them five decent innings, and not just go out there gamely with a bum shoulder and cranky elbow for the sake of being able to say he gave it a shot.
“Roger, I need you to pitch today,” he said.”But I don't need you coming off the mound, limping or whatever, and taking your hat off and being a hero. I need a fucking win. I don't need somebody who tried.”
“Joe,” Clemens said, “I can do it.”
Clemens lasted until there was one out into the fifth inning, leaving with a 4-2 lead and two runners on, one of whom would score. The Yankees went on to win, 5-3. Rivera, Torre's ultimate postseason weapon, secured the final six outs on 23 pitches, all but five of them strikes.
“I thought in 2001 we had narrowed the gap,” Oakland's Beane said. “They were the better team. We almost got lucky. Everyone likes to say the key game was the Flip Game, that if Jeremy Giambi slides he's safe. Let's assume he does slide and is safe. That only makes it a tie game. And Rivera could probably go two or three innings.”
The Yankees then stopped cold the 116-win Mariners, disposing of them in five games, including a 12-3 blowout in the clincher. Seattle had scored the most runs and allowed the fewest in the American League, but the Yankees in October seemed to operate on postseason muscle memory. Martinez, Williams and O'Neill—all Old Guard stalwarts—each hit home runs. Cone, viewing the Yankees from afar that season as a member of the Boston Red Sox, gained a greater appreciation for his former fellow soldiers, with whom he had shared many foxholes, as they again somehow found a way back to the World Series.
“It was definitely bizarre seeing it from the other side,” Cone said.”I learned that with the Yankees involved, it was a typical Red Sox year. We were in first place half the year looking in the rear-view mirror the whole time. Plus we had injuries. You could see it coming.
“The thing I appreciated more and more from the other side was how good Bernie and O'Neill and Jeter were after facing them. How good Bernie was really caught me. Watching
Bernie all those years we always thought, tremendous talent, batting champion, but when we always asked him, ‘What are you thinking about when you're hitting, Bernie?’ you'd get, ‘Nothing. I'm blank.’ And that was Bernie.
“So facing those guys you see how talented they really were— how tough an out Jeter was, Tino, O'Neill, Bernie … It was about how good they are, how tough they are and how much they can grind it out, especially for a pitcher like me who throws a lot of pitches and is trying to trick them later in my career. I got a really good appreciation for how many good at-bats they get, which leads them to grind it out, and they just keep coming over the course of the year.
“That was Joe's big saying over the years: ‘Keep grinding it out.’ I really felt it on the other side. I appreciated it much more. I saw it sitting there. It's a little more stark reality when you're facing them trying to get them out. And if it wasn't this guy, it was the next guy. It was somebody different every day. I really got the sense of that, too.”
The 2001 World Series, the first major sporting event after 9/11, began in Phoenix under such heavy security that all manhole covers in the vicinity of Bank One Ballpark were welded shut. Then Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson applied the same procedure to the Yankees’ offensive. The Diamondbacks won Games 1 and 2, 9-1 and 4-0, while allowing the Yankees a total of six hits—the fewest ever over the first two games of aWorld Series except for the clampdown job by the deadball-era 1906 Cubs on the White Sox. So chipper were the Diamondbacks feeling about themselves that as the series shifted to Yankee Stadium, Schilling famously dismissed the nearly supernatural powers associated with the Yankees’ home-field advantage. “When you use the words mystique and aura,“ Schilling said,”those are dancers in a nightclub. Those are not things we concern ourselves with on the ballfield.”
The Yankees didn't hit all that much better back at Yankee Stadium for an emotional Game 3, a night that began with President George W. Bush throwing out the first ball, a declarative strike down the heart of the plate, from the pitcher's rubber. (Torre knew something was different when he saw a seventh, unfamiliar umpire at home plate when the teams exchanged lineup cards; it was an undercover Secret Service agent.) The Yankees scratched out two runs on seven hits, but that still was good enough for a 2-1 victory because Clemens threw three-hit ball for seven innings, allowing only one run. When Torre removed him—Rivera, with his two-inning high-tech weaponry, would close it out with six uninterrupted outs—he grabbed Clemens and told him,”You never have to prove yourself again.”