The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “I came into the clubhouse,” Torre said, “and George was there. He was, like we all were, stunned. I don't think we had any conversation. It was tough after the game because you knew you were saying goodbye to a lot of players. I had a meeting, and then I went over and hugged them all. You weren't going to have Knoblauch back, you weren't going to have O'Neill back, Tino, Brosius—he was another one. Like O'Neill, he went right home, too.”

  Steinbrenner didn't want to linger. He left quickly to congratulate Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo. On his way there he ran into Johnson and Schilling in a hallway. The two pitchers had accounted for all four of Arizona's wins and 59 percent of its outs in the series. They were dripping with champagne. Steinbrenner congratulated them. After shaking hands with Colangelo, Steinbrenner didn't know what to do with himself, except he did not want to go back to the Yankees clubhouse. So he walked to one of the Yankees’ family buses and sat by himself. It was much too soon after the game for anyone else to be there, and when family members finally did begin to make their way out of the ballpark, some would peek into the first bus, see a brooding Steinbrenner, and decide to keep walking to the second bus. It was a difficult loss for Steinbrenner to accept.

  “What do you say?”Torre said.”We had Mariano on the mound with a lead in the ninth inning. Of course, you get the question,’Do you play the infield back?’ Sure—and watch the winning run cross the plate on a soft-hit ball to shortstop. I didn't lose any sleep over it other than the result. There was really nothing. Now, did I do everything right? I don't know. But I know one thing: I wouldn't have done anything different.”

  Rivera stood in front of his locker and answered wave after wave of questions. He was neither angry nor sad. He was matter-of-fact about it all. In other words, even upon blowing the seventh game of the World Series, he was the same old Mariano.

  “I made the pitches I wanted to make and they hit them,” Rivera said. “That's baseball. I did everything I wanted to do. They beat me. They can say they beat me.”

  No one better represented what was being lost than O'Neill. He took off his uniform for the last time and changed into a black shirt and gray pants. He was 38 years old and maybe as willing as ever, but his body was betraying him, as happened in the first inning when he tried to stretch a double into a triple. His legs could not carry him quickly enough. O'Neill's on-base percentage had declined for five consecutive seasons since 1996. The 2001 season was his worst in pinstripes. It was time to go, he decided.

  “Paul O'Neill was a great example of what we were about,” Torre said. “He knew, ‘I've got to find a way to do this.’ And that's the kind of attitude you have to have. Watch Jeter do it. Bernie Williams would do it, even without being an instinctive player. I wish I could explain it better than that. It's just something when you're around guys every day, it's that secure feeling you have to go out there and you're going to let them play.

  “There's a certain amount of keeping track and keeping a little grip on certain things, so somebody doesn't go off half-cocked or somebody doesn't lose their direction, but aside from that you trust these guys to play the game. I can honestly say that when the game's over that you just go home. If it wasn't good enough, it wasn't good enough. You knew they were out there giving it everything they had.”

  For O'Neill, there were no more watercoolers to topple, no more batting helmets to slam, no more bats to heave across the clubhouse toward his locker and no more pitchers who weren't good enough to get him out but somehow did. He was at peace that night, maybe not with the result of Game 7, but that he had given baseball the best effort that he could. After packing his bag he smiled softly as he caught the eye of Nick Johnson, a 23-year-old first baseman who had made his major league debut that August.

  “Did you learn anything?” he asked Johnson. “It's yours now. You've got to keep it going.”

  6

  Baseball Catches Up

  Less than 48 hours after one of the most exciting and emotional World Series ever staged, including that historic Game 7 in 2001, and before the Diamondbacks even had time to stage a victory parade, Major League Baseball owners celebrated the occasion by voting at a meeting in Rosemont, Illinois, to put two teams out of business, beginning with the 2002 season. After watching the Yankees play in four straight World Series with three and even four times as much revenue as ten other franchises, they decided the economics of the game were so out of whack that the bottom of the baseball food chain simply needed to be eliminated. Such teams, they decided, were beyond hope.”There are certain markets where baseball cannot succeed,” commissioner Bud Selig said that day. “Remarkably, there was strong sentiment to contract four teams.”

  The Montreal Expos were one obvious choice for obliteration. They were being owned and operated by the other 29 franchises, a ward of the baseball state. They averaged only 7,643 fans a game and generated a major-league-low $34 million in revenue. The Minnesota Twins, fresh off an 85-win season in which their attendance jumped 70 percent to 1.7 million, were considered the other team most likely to be excised, if only because their owner, Carl Pohlad, seemed to be a willing accomplice. Florida and Tampa Bay, while seemingly weaker franchises, also were mentioned, though stadium leases and threats of lawsuits made their elimination more problematic.

  Not coincidentally, the contraction vote occurred at a time when the owners were trying to reach an agreement with the players association on a new collective bargaining agreement. “No, this is not a negotiating ploy,” Selig said. “It's absolutely not that.”

  If nothing else, the contraction vote put two options in front of the players: either the weaker teams get more money from the richer teams, or they, and the jobs that go with them, get whacked. The Yankees were becoming too good for baseball's own good. Their success at generating gobs of money was blowing up the ideal that baseball afforded all teams a somewhat equal chance of winning. The Yankees generated $242 million in revenue in 2001, more than the Expos, Twins, Marlins and Royals combined. Their payroll had more than doubled since 1996, to $112 million. While other teams saw their narrow windows of building a championship team close because of the cost of free agency, the Yankees kept the core of their team together because they never lost a player they wanted to keep.

  The best such example of the power of their largesse occurred when Bernie Williams nearly signed with the Boston Red Sox after the 1998 season. During that season the Yankees had offered Williams $37.5 million over five years. After the season, their offer was up to $60 million for five years. As a free agent, though, Williams fell into the arms of the Red Sox, who lavished him with a $91.5 million offer over seven years.

  The Yankees, meanwhile, turned their attention to White Sox slugger Albert Belle, whose temper and volatile behavior might sorely have tested the winning camaraderie of a team coming off 125 wins. Torre played golf with Belle in Arizona on a recruiting visit, and came away thinking the Yankees had such a strongly established clubhouse culture that not even Belle could screw it up.

  “I asked him,’What do you require?’”Torre said.”He said,’I just require that you hit me fourth in the lineup.’ I in essence said okay because it wasn't a big deal and I knew over time practicality would bear out that you may have to hit fifth or something on occasion. But that's all he said to me: just playing every day and hitting fourth. He was very easy to talk to. The thing I judged about Albert Belle was he played 160 games a year. How bad can it be? I didn't worry about the clubhouse. You know you usually can hook on to something where you say, ‘Well, let's figure it out.’”

  The Yankees offered Belle the money they offered Williams: $60 million for five years. Belle came back and asked that the deal be restructured for $52 million over four years. Steinbrenner signed off on it. Belle was about to become a Yankee with one simple “yes.” But with the deal in place, Belle changed his mind because of second thoughts about playing under the scrutiny of New York. He ran to the comfort of the Baltimore Orioles and their last-ditch
$65 million offer. Suddenly the Yankees were about to lose Belle to the Orioles and Williams to the Red Sox. What to do? They quickly came up with another $27.5 million for Williams, or $50 million more than what they had offered Williams during the season. Stein-brenner closed the deal himself at $87.5 million over seven years.

  The Yankees had the money to get their way, and it was just as true in 2001 when they needed to replace Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius, Chuck Knoblauch and Paul O'Neill—a first baseman, a third baseman and two corner outfielders. Among the free agents that winter was Barry Bonds, fresh off his record 73 home runs with the San Francisco Giants, but with a reputation for an ego even more outsized than his increasingly enormous body.”I had no interest,” Torre said. “His name may have been thrown around, but there was never any serious talk about him. The one I was interested in was Johnny Damon.”

  The prize attraction for the Yankees, however, was Damon's Oakland teammate, Jason Giambi. Giambi was a devastating all-fields hitter who won the 2000 Most Valuable Player Award, was the MVP runner-up in 2001, and improved his batting average in every one of his major league seasons: .256, .291, .293, .295, .315, .333, .342. Giambi, who was drafted as a skinny infielder who was projected to hit about 15 home runs a year, grew into a monster of a hitter who slammed 47 doubles and 38 home runs in 2001. If there was a downside to Giambi it was that he was about to turn 31 years old and seemed to be growing larger and increasingly less mobile, with an impending future as a designated hitter written all over him.

  Cashman and Steinbrenner asked Torre what he thought about the Yankees’ signing Giambi. Torre told them he was against the idea. Torre told them he preferred to bring Martinez back for one year while grooming Nick Johnson to take over as his replacement at first base and to spend the big money on an outfielder such as Damon.

  “I liked Giambi,”Torre said.”In Oakland he hit the ball the other way, got as many walks as he got … he was great. I just thought at the time you had Tino and you had Nick Johnson. I just felt Giambi would sort of hamstring us. Even though he was a first baseman, he wasn't part of what we prided ourselves on: playing well defensively. He ties your hands. The biggest problem we had was a lack of flexibility. Once you have a guy who is basically a DH, you eliminate a lot of flexibility and the ability to utilize more players.

  “They wanted Jason. George really liked the big boppers. I was outvoted, which was fine.”

  Steinbrenner asked for everyone's opinion in writing. Torre knew that when players did not perform well for the Yankees, Steinbrenner liked to blame him and Cashman, telling one of them, “He's your guy! You wanted him!” In 2003, for instance, Torre would suggest that the Yankees sign 37-year-old Todd Zeile for their bench. Zeile could play third base, first base, pinch hit and even provide some insurance as an emergency catcher. “I knew he could handle pressure and I just thought he'd be a good addition for us,”Torre said. The Yankees did sign Zeile and he was awful. He batted .210 before the Yankees released him in August.

  “Whenever you lose a couple of games George would look to punish you by getting rid of a person,” Torre said. “He did it with Billy Martin and Art Fowler, Billy's pitching coach. That year it was ‘Zeile, Zeile, Zeile.’ That's all I heard. It was like he was the reason we were losing. He wasn't even playing. I remember telling George one day at one of those luncheons at Malio's in Tampa, ‘I recommended Todd Zeile. I thought he'd be good. I still think, batting average aside, that he's a good extra guy on this club. It's not like he runs errands for me. I didn't want him to get coffee for me. I got him here to try to make us better.’ “

  When it came to Giambi, Torre wanted to avoid Steinbrenner laying his buyer's remorse on him. He was happy to have his objections on the record, Torre wrote down and handed to Steinbrenner that his idea was to stick with Tino for one more year while grooming Johnson, rather than signing Giambi. Sure enough, two years into the deal, as Giambi's batting average plummeted almost one hundred points from where it had been in Oakland, and especially in the third year, as Giambi's steroid-jacked body began falling apart, Steinbrenner wanted to blame Torre for the signing of Giambi.

  “Cashman stood up for me,” Torre said. “He told him, ‘No, no. He didn't want him.’ Because he was blaming me for Giambi. He kept blaming people for shit that didn't work.”

  The Yankees signed Giambi to a seven-year contract worth $120 million. One day, while Torre was in Hawaii, Cashman called and said the signing came with one condition on which Giambi had insisted.

  “In order to get him we've got to take his trainer, Bobby Alejo,” Cashman said.

  “Why do you do this to me, Cash?” Torre said half-jokingly. “That makes my job tougher. How can I tell the other guys on the team they can't bring in their guy if he gets to bring in his guy?”

  Said Torre, “Obviously he needed somebody to push him, his father or somebody.”

  It made for a whole different dynamic in the Yankees’ clubhouse. The team famously packed with grinders, all-around players and self-starters had just paid $120 million for a slugging DH in training who needed his personal trainer with him at all times. The Yankees put Alejo on the payroll essentially to be Giambi's personal assistant. The days of Paul O'Neill and the low-maintenance grit he represented were officially over.

  “We were in the dugout during a rain delay once,” Torre said. “Jason was at one end, toward the first base side. Alejo comes out of the runway and said to him, ‘Go ahead. Run.’ From one end of the dugout to the other he yells. There's no shame here? You need to be self-motivated here. You don't need somebody to push you. He had to tell him everything. Jason relied on that. You knew it was going to be the start of something different.

  “Jason was a good guy, a good, huggable bear. He can get along with anybody as far as I'm concerned, a team concept guy who knew individual numbers didn't amount to a whole lot. He was a gamer. The pressure of the game didn't bother him, even if he didn't always work hard enough. In spring training I would remind him, ‘To be a regular player you've got to take your regular complement of groundballs.’ And then I'd have to remind him two or three times during the year.”

  As the Yankees were wrapping up the Giambi negotiations, Giambi lobbied the Yankees to sign his buddy Damon to play left field. The Yankees decided they had a better idea; they signed Ron-dell White for $10 million over two years, leaving Damon to sign four days later with the Red Sox for $31 million over four years.

  “Giambi tried to talk them into signing me,” Damon said. “Rondell beat me to the punch. I heard there was one person who didn't want me there.” Damon declined to identify the person with the Yankees who did not want him.

  White was 29 years old and coming off a .309 season with the Cubs, but he was a major injury risk. White averaged only 109 games per year over the previous four seasons in what should have been the prime of his career. When the New York press asked him about his expectations for the 2002 season, White replied, “To stay on the field.” It was an answer that hardly rang with inspiration.

  Cashman admitted at the time, “Is there a risk associated with Rondell? Certainly. Maybe a little higher than some players. But given the choices on the market, he's a better risk than some others.”

  Both Giambi and White, as the Mitchell Report would uncover, also happened to be symbolic of how performance-enhancing drugs were changing the game and the difficulty in how durability could be evaluated by baseball front offices. According to the Mitchell Report, White bought human growth hormone and the steroid Deca-Durabolin starting in 2000 from former Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski. The report said, “Radomski recalled teaching White ‘a lot about steroids and HGH’ and ‘walking him through the HGH injections for two hours on the phone one night.’”

  What kind of player were the Yankees getting in Rondell White? As a young player with the Expos he once stole 25 bases in 30 tries. But as he broke down more he ran less and, according to what Radomski told Mitchell, turned to drugs to “stay on the fi
eld.” Or were the drugs contributing to the muscle problems that kept him off the field? Were the Yankees getting a player in his peak years or a steroid-addled injury risk?

  As it turned out, White was finished as a top-flight everyday player. The White-over-Damon decision turned out to be spectacularly awful for the Yankees. White played in 126 games for the Yankees in 2002 and batted .240 with a .288 on-base percentage. He was so bad that only two Yankees outfielders were ever worse at getting on base while playing that many games in one season: Andy Kosco in 1968 and Wid Conroy way back in 1907. The Yankees dumped White on the Padres after just one year of watching him make out after out.

  The Yankees had been such a set team in their championship years that all they required was tinkering around the edges. But when they faced the challenge of making major alterations after their core broke up after the 2001 season, the results were mixed, with the mistakes leading to more mistakes. This is what they came up with: Giambi replaced Martinez; Robin Ventura, who was turning 35 years old and who was acquired in a trade with the Dodgers, replaced Brosius; White replaced Knoblauch and a platoon of Shane Spencer and John Vander Wal replaced O'Neill. They also added setup reliever Steve Karsay, another known injury risk, who, after giving them one good year, was paid $17 million to pitch 12⅔ innings over the next three years.