The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  What happened over the next two nights is the stuff of legend, an Americanized King Arthur tale of such improbability that the passage of centuries might leave open to debate its historical accuracy. But it really did happen: not once but twice, the Yankees hit a home run when they were down to their last out and trailing by two runs—and then won the game. Only once before in the 98-year history of the World Series had a team hit a game-saving home run from such a bleak position (and that once-a-century shot happened 72 years ago), and here the Yankees did it two times in a row? It was crazy stuff. It was exactly the kind of stuff a grieving city needed, if only to start believing again in something in a suddenly senseless world.

  The Yankees were one out away from losing Game 4 on Halloween night, 3-1, when Tino Martinez—0-for-the-World-Series, and batting with O'Neill at second base—whacked the first pitch he ever saw from Byung-Hyun Kim off the facing of the bleachers in right-center field. Only Mule Haas of the 1929 Athletics ever before had staved off a World Series defeat from two runs down with two outs by slamming a home run. Jeter won the game with a home run in the 10th that, even for him, represented impeccable timing. Jeter had stepped into the batter's box at the stroke of midnight, then consumed nine pitches and four minutes to get to the game-winner that made a Mr. November out of him.

  At the stadium the next night, somebody held up a sign during Game 5 that said, “Mystique and Aura Appearing Nightly.” Sure enough, the show began at exactly the same time: with the Yankees down to their last out, trailing by two runs, with Kim on the mound. This time Brosius, who had not hit a home run since September 21, and batting with Posada at second base, walloped a home run into the delirious crowd in the left-field seats.

  “He hit that ball,”Torre said,”and it was like,’I don't even know what I'm seeing here.’ “

  Said Jeter, “Unbelievable. You'll never see anything like that again. Never. We did it two days in a row. That was as exciting as anything that has happened here. That and the 2003 Boston game, Game 7—those are the three loudest times I've ever heard it at Yankee Stadium.”

  It wasn't a walkoff homer; it was a knockoff homer. This time the Yankees won on a 12th-inning single by Alfonso Soriano.

  It was hard to make sense of what was going on. The Yankees were batting .177 in the World Series and had scored only 10 runs in five games—and yet they were one win away from winning their fourth consecutive world championship and fifth in six years. The Diamondbacks, meanwhile, left Yankee Stadium down three games to two knowing they had been two outs away from being world champions.

  “This,” Arizona pitcher Brian Anderson said that night, “is beyond nightmare. All I know is that we need to get out of this place. Fast.”

  Mystique and Aura, however, did not travel. Back in Phoenix for Game 6, the Yankees absorbed their worst beating in the 213-game World Series history of the franchise, 15-2. Reliever Jay Witasick, while getting only four outs, gave up nine runs, as many as the Yankees did in the entire 1999 World Series. His pounding took place after Arizona hammered Pettitte for six runs on seven hits, whaling away at his pitches with such assuredness that the Diamondbacks seemed to know what was coming. As it turned out, they did. After the game, injured Arizona pitcher Todd Stottlemyre told his father, Mel, the Yankees’ pitching coach, that the Diamondbacks figured out that Pettitte was tipping his pitches from the set position. They knew every time Pettitte brought his hands to his belt in a high, looping path, he was throwing a breaking ball. If he brought his hands to his belt in a more direct path, it was a fastball. Mel Stot-tlemyre broke the news to Pettitte the next day, before Game 7.

  “Mel wasn't going to tell me,” Pettitte said. “He didn't want to tell me. Todd wanted me to know because we had only one more game and I wasn't pitching. To this day Mel knows what it was. I didn't even want to know. I just changed my whole delivery. I went to a high set. I didn't even want to look. I didn't even want to see it. It just made me sick.

  “Because I never felt so good. I felt real good as far as my elbow. I felt strong that year. I won the MVP the series before against Seattle. I was just on a good roll. My stuff was so good and I felt so strong.

  “Then by the time you get to the last start of your season, and you'd lost the other one in Game 2—and they made me work so hard over the first three innings—that by Game 6 I was just worn down. They wore me down. I didn't think anything had happened as far as tipping pitches. I just chalked it up to I had a bad outing. It's tough to swallow.

  “That was brutal. But again, everything happens for a reason. It makes you want it more the next time. But you hate it because you know how precious those opportunities are.”

  Game 7 came down to a clash of titans, Clemens and Schilling, marking only the fourth Game 7 matchup of 20-game winners. Clemens, 39, was the oldest Game 7 starter ever. Schilling was pitching on three days and exceeding 300 innings for the year. The duel unfolded as good as advertised, much to Steinbrenner's nervousness. It was scoreless until the bottom of the sixth, when Danny Bautista smacked a double off Clemens to drive in Steve Finley.

  The Yankees answered back, nicking Schilling for the tying run in the seventh on singles by Jeter, O'Neill (on what would be his final plate appearance as a Yankee) and Martinez. Clemens struck out Schilling to start the bottom of the inning, but when he yielded a single to leadoff hitter Tony Womack on his 114th pitch, Torre removed him. Mike Stanton pitched out of the inning to preserve the tie, but now Torre had a decision to make with Stanton's spot in the batting order due up third in the eighth inning.

  “Who's going to come in and pitch the eighth inning?” Zimmer asked him.

  “Mendoza,” Torre said.

  “You can't bring in Mendoza,” Zimmer said. “You've got to bring Mo in.”

  “We're on the road,” Torre said. “Who the fuck am I going to save this game with?”

  “I know. But you'll kick yourself in the ass if you never get Mariano in the game.”

  “But what the hell am I going to do? Who am I going to trust with a lead?”

  “So, what about Mariano now?”

  “Yeah, sure—if Sori hits a home run here. It'll solve the whole problem.”

  Torre barely had finished getting the words out of his mouth when Soriano golfed a pitch from Schilling over the wall in left-center field to give the Yankees a 2-1 lead. Now, with a lead, the decision was obvious: it would be Rivera, the ultimate weapon, for the last six outs.

  Rivera was devastating in the eighth inning against the heart of the Arizona order. Steve Finley did manage a groundball single, but Rivera fanned the other three hitters, Luis Gonzalez, Matt Williams and Bautista. He threw only 14 pitches in the inning.

  The Yankees went quietly in the ninth against none other than Randy Johnson, who came out of the bullpen in the eighth inning the night after throwing 104 pitches in his Game 6 victory.

  So it came down to this: Mariano Rivera on the mound with a one-run lead against the bottom of the Arizona lineup. Steinbrenner was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, combing his hair, preparing to soon accept the Commissioner's Trophy for a fourth straight year. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Steinbrenner, Fox technicians slipped through a side door of the clubhouse and began hanging lights and cable to prepare for the postgame celebration. A Yankees security official, carefully, so as not to tip off Steinbrenner, whispered to them to try to shoo them away.

  “You know, you can't be in here,” the official said.

  “We've got to set up,” one of them said. “It's the ninth inning.”

  “But you can't be in here! The Boss will go nuts.”

  Well, this one did look like a lock for the Yankees, even with the television crew defying Steinbrenner's superstition. These were the forces in the Yankees’ favor:

  Rivera was undefeated in 51 career postseason games.

  Rivera successfully had converted 23 consecutive postseason save opportunities.

  The Yankees were 155-1 (.994) in franchise history when
leading a postseason game after eight innings.

  The Yankees were 45-0 under Torre when leading a postseason game after eight innings.

  The Yankees’ bullpen was undefeated in 52 consecutive postseason games (10-0).

  The Yankees were undefeated under Torre in postseason games decided by one run (10-0).

  The Yankees were 11-0 in postseason series since 1998.

  What happened next was as stunning as the paranormal events of Halloween night and its follow-up at Yankee Stadium. There were no home runs this time. The Diamondbacks, borrowing from the Yankees’ Championship Baseball 101 textbook, formed the equivalent of an emergency bucket brigade—employing eight players in a span of 14 pitches to hit, bunt and run their way to one of the greatest endings to one of the greatest games of all time.

  The endgame began when Mark Grace, choking up on his bat as a defense against Rivera's great cutter, fought off Rivera's signature pitch for a single to center field. David Dellucci pinch ran for Grace. The next batter, Damian Miller, dropped a bunt near the left side of the mound. Rivera, a slick, athletic fielder, pounced on it, wheeled and threw hard to Derek Jeter covering second base in an attempt to get the force-out.

  Rivera made his great career with the cutter, a pitch that bores toward the hands of a lefthanded batter, away from a righthanded batter. But a fielder trying to quickly make a play on a bunt has no time to worry about grip. Amid the randomness of reaching into his glove and pulling out the baseball as it came to rest in the leather, Rivera incidentally came up with a grip that approximated a two-seam fastball, a pitch that has the exact opposite movement of his cutter, a left-to-right action. Rivera's throw began tailing, tailing, tailing away from Jeter's glove hand. Jeter began to position himself and stretch for it.

  But something wasn't quite right.

  As the Yankees took the field for the bottom of the ninth inning, Jeter had moved noticeably slower and stiffer. Maybe this was a perfectly awful time to be paying the price for his nonstop hustle. Jeter had ended the regular season on a hitting tear, and carried it into the Division Series against Oakland. Over 15 games he batted .375, including .444 against the Athletics in the playoffs. He was playing some of the best baseball of his life at the peak age of 27. And then, in the eighth inning of Game 5 of that series, Terrence Long of the Athletics lifted a foul pop fly toward the seats near the left-field line at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were leading, 5-3, and were five outs away from advancing to the ALCS, but Oakland had one runner on base against Rivera. Jeter hauled after the pop-fly, knowing he was nearing the stands. Just as he caught the ball, Jeter smashed into the padded concrete wall with his hip and flipped into the stands, landing hard.

  The Yankees won the game, but Jeter, just like that, suddenly stopped hitting. He was 2-for-17 against the Mariners and then 4-for-27 against the Diamondbacks, making him a .136 hitter after falling hard into the stands. If he was hurt, Jeter, of course, told no one, not even Torre. But as Rivera's two-seam throw to second base tailed away from him, Jeter was unable to stretch enough to catch it while keeping one foot on the base. The throw flew wide of his glove. It was an error on Rivera, and now the Diamondbacks had runners on first and second with no outs rather than having a runner on first base with one out—one play that essentially tripled Arizona's run expectancy from 0.54 runs to 1.51, according to 2007 run-expectancy models.

  “He couldn't extend to get that throw,” Torre said.

  Even in an interview seven years later, Jeter was not about to make even the slightest concession to any injury limitation.

  He was asked if he was hurt in Game 7.

  “I was all right.”

  Told it looked like he was dragging his legs going out to the field, he replied,”I was all right.”

  Pushed, he said,”You know what? You get to a point, especially that late in the season, everybody's got something wrong with him.”

  He was reminded he had banged into the stands to get a pop-up versus Oakland.

  “I was all right.”

  It's not an excuse if it was an injury, but Jeter still insisted.

  “I was all right.”

  He paused.

  “No, I was all right. I don't remember. It was a long time ago.”

  If he was healthy, would he have caught the throw from Mo? Got a glove on it?

  “No. Mo threw a two-seamer … Maybe … No, I don't think. Nuh-uh. Even if I caught it we wouldn't have got him. I think it was Dellucci. We probably wouldn't have got him.”

  When Jeter was 24 years old and after the Yankees won the 1998 World Series, George Steinbrenner gave a book to him as a present: Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare. Steinbrenner inscribed it, “To Derek. Read and study. He was a great leader just as you are and will be a great leader. Hopefully of the men in pinstripes.” When it came to physical ailments, Jeter lived a philosophy that was Pattonesque. For it was Patton who said, “If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”

  Jeter was all right.

  Just after Dellucci slid into second, putting the tying run in scoring position, Steinbrenner walked around a corner of the Yankees’ clubhouse and was stunned by what he saw: television crews setting up for the trophy presentation!

  “Get out of here!” he shouted. “You're jinxing me! Get out of here!” And he quickly shooed them out a door and into a hallway.

  The Yankees were in trouble now: no outs, two on and another bunt play in order. Torre walked out to the mound, where he and the infielders converged around Rivera.

  “Get an out,” Torre told them. “I'm not worried about second and third with Mariano. Just get an out.”

  A pinch hitter, Jay Bell, bunted the next pitch. Rivera fielded quickly and fired a strike to Brosius at third base for the force-out. Brosius let himself relax as soon as he caught the ball for the out, never bothering to consider a throw across the infield to try to also get Bell at first base.

  “I don't know if I planted the seed with Brosius when I said, ‘Get an out,’”Torre said.”The guy at first base, he's out easily. What a surprise that was, because he caught the ball and he sort of just walked in, and the guy was like two-thirds of the way to first base. All he had to do was throw it. And we had a double play. But he was so good instinctively, and it was right there in front of him. It wasn't like he had to turn. He just never threw the ball. The game may have wound up with the same result. Who knows? But it would have been a little tougher for them because they would have had two outs.”

  Another pinch runner, Midre Cummings, replaced Miller as the lead runner at second base. The next batter, Tony Womack, turned hard on a 2-and-2 pitch, sending it into right field for a double. Cummings sped home with the tying run. Bell, carrying the winning run, stopped at third base on the double. Rivera hit the next batter, Craig Counsell. Now the bases were loaded, there was one out, and Luis Gonzalez was the hitter. Torre had a choice to make: play the infield back to try for a double play, or play the infield in to try to cut down at the plate the potential winning run of the seventh game of the World Series.

  “I had no choice,” Torre said. “At that point you play the infield up. If someone hits a groundball off Mo it's going to be an 87-hopper somewhere. You're not going to get a double play. And I hate to think of watching the winning run cross the plate while we're trying to get a double play, I don't care how slow the runner is.”

  Since Rivera became the Yankees’ closer in 1997, hitters had taken 33 plate appearances against him with the bases loaded. In those situations they batted just .071, with just two hits, four sacrifice flies, one walk and just one double play.

  Gonzalez had struck out and grounded out meekly against Rivera in the World Series, employing his usual wide-open stance in which his right pinkie and ring finger rest on the knob of the bat. This time, employing the Diamondbacks’ default defe
nse mechanism against Rivera's cutter, Gonzalez choked up two inches on the bat.

  “It was the first time I choked up all year,” he would say later.”I told myself, Whatever you do, just try to put the ball in play somewhere.”

  Gonzalez fouled off one pitch. The next pitch was a classic Rivera cutter, boring toward Gonzalez's hands. He swung. The bat cracked deeply just below the trademark upon contact. The baseball floated toward the left of Jeter and over his head. He was powerless to do anything about it, though he lunged in vain as the ball seemed not so much to fall but to parachute to a soft landing where the infield dirt meets the outfield grass. Bell bounded home happily with the winning run.

  It was over. The World Series was over, sure. But the championship Yankees as everyone had known them, as they knew themselves, ceased to exist, too. From 1998 through 2001, seven players took almost 15,000 at-bats for the Yankees, representing 67 percent of the team's total at-bats on four straight pennant-winning teams: Posada, Martinez, Knoblauch, Jeter, Brosius, Williams and O'Neill, or as they were known familiarly inside the walls of their clubhouse, Sado, Tino, Knobby, Jeet, Bro, Bernie and Paulie. The Old Guard. Each year the Yankees could dicker with left field and the designated hitter spots, but the Yankees essentially were a set team for four years—and Martinez, Jeter, Williams and O'Neill even traced their Yankee roots to at least the 1996 championship, too. The Yankees were a remarkably tight group and a remarkably durable group. But as they took off their uniforms after the Game 7 defeat, they knew it would never be the same again. The contracts of Martinez, Knoblauch, Brosius and O'Neill were all expiring. O'Neill had made known his intention to retire.