The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Change, however, did not come immediately to the Henry-Werner-Lucchino Red Sox. During the first half of the 2002 season, Port and his baseball operations people and scouts would hold frequent conference calls that sounded not very different from the way virtually all clubs had conducted business for generations. One of those conferences included a discussion about acquiring an outfielder.

  “Hey,” one scout piped up, “how about that Doug Glanville? He's pretty good.”

  “How about Marquis Grissom?” interjected another scout. “I've always liked him.”

  The conference call went on in the same manner: baseball men talking baseball, trusting their gut and little else. (The Red Sox eventually traded for Montreal outfielder Cliff Floyd, giving the Expos pitching prospects Sun-Woo Kim and Seung Song.)

  “That was pretty much the methodology,” Epstein said. “People would sit around talking about the players they heard of and who might be a good fit. There were no numbers studied, just subjective analysis. Old school? It was really old school. And not good old school. So we basically started to integrate some new techniques behind the scenes.”

  In the back offices at Fenway, Epstein, Jed Hoyer and other young assistants in player development were running their own kind of lab, crunching numbers and asking questions in their new-school way. For instance, it was the statistical analysis done by Epstein and the back-office upstarts that helped lead to the Red Sox trading for lefthanded relief pitcher Alan Embree in June of 2002. The Red Sox gave up two pitching prospects of little import to San Diego to get Embree, a journeyman making $500,000 who had bounced from the Giants to the White Sox to the Padres to the Red Sox within 12 months. But Epstein liked Embree's strikeout rate— more than one per inning. Embree would be an important part of Boston's bullpen over four seasons.

  “We weren't empowered to make the final call,” Epstein said of the back-office analysts. “But gradually over the course of the year we started to integrate some of these techniques. It became rather obvious what John Henry was looking for in a new GM, and because of John's thinking, I felt empowered to create a new system.”

  Henry believed in numbers. They made him a rich man. In 1981, at the age of 31, Henry established an alternative asset money management firm that proudly took human emotion and subjective analysis out of play. It made trading decisions based on a proprietary, objective system that analyzed trends in each market. By 2005 John W. Henry & Company, Inc. held assets of $3.8 billion. By 2006 Henry was estimated to have a net worth of $860 million. Henry saw no reason why data-based analysis should not work in baseball, too. After all, he had long been a baseball fan himself, and about 20 years earlier had discovered the work of statistical analyst Bill James and other so-called sabermetricians.

  “We took our cues from the way his mind works,” Epstein said. “He's really an empirical-based thinker. Very logical, very analytical, very objective. That led him down his career path, where he figured out trends in the market and discovered a formula. His belief is that you can look at the market objectively and the trends lie in the numbers, and even if you get battered in the short term, ultimately it's going to work out. It's empirical.

  “Sabermetrics really appealed to him. He saw a great analogy between the financial markets and baseball. He understood the worst decisions to be the subjective ones, the older-school decisions, and he wanted someone to approach baseball operations in the same systematic way he knew from the markets. He's even more devoted to a systematic approach than I am. I take a more balanced approach.

  “Right around then the landscape was definitely changing around baseball when it came to decision making. The default modus operandi in the game, the old school approach, was about to undergo a sea change. It was a time of great change, and you saw a change in the type of people making the decisions.”

  The 2002 Red Sox won 93 games, but still missed the playoffs in what was a transitional year in the organizational culture. Henry still needed a point man to run the baseball operations in a manner that dovetailed with his objective analytical approach to the markets, and by November he knew exactly who that person was: Oakland general manager Billy Beane, but Beane turned him down for family reasons.

  He considered J. P. Ricciardi, who had been Beane's righthand man in Oakland, but Ricciardi had been hired only a year earlier by the Toronto Blue Jays to be their general manager, and he wasn't about to walk away from that contract, not even to be the general manager for a team in his home state of Massachusetts. Henry then turned to his third choice, who also happened to be the one Billy Beane recommended: Epstein. On November 25, 2002, one month before his 29th birthday, Epstein was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox. That same month, Henry hired James, the high priest of the sabermetric movement, and the next month he hired Josh Byrnes, a 32-year-old Haverford College graduate who had served under Mark Shapiro in the Cleveland Indians front office. The cultural shift in Boston was now complete. The Red Sox would run their organization with a heavy emphasis on statistical analysis to help find and exploit undervalued markets. They were the Athletics, only with a lot more money. With the new ownership and with Epstein's youthfulness, they also now had the bravado to be a true rival to the Yankees. They were now equipped to compete with the Yankees on their turf, even if that turf was in Nicaragua.

  On Thanksgiving, only days after being named the Red Sox general manager, Epstein telephoned his girlfriend from Logan Airport in Boston. He was supposed to be enjoying Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ home.

  “Sorry, but I can't make it,” Epstein said. “I'm on my way to Nicaragua.”

  One of the legendary pitchers in Cuba, Jose Contreras, had defected the previous month while in Mexico pitching for the Cuban national team. He was in Nicaragua essentially to skirt major league draft requirements and become a free agent. The Yankees badly wanted the man Fidel Castro himself had dubbed El Titan de Bronze (The Bronze Titan) as an homage to the courage of 19th-century Cuban general Antonio Maceo. The Red Sox, however, conceded nothing to the Yankees. Indeed, Epstein's trip to Nicaragua was a symbolic beginning to Boston's mission to go eye-to-eye with the Yankees.

  “Our scouts loved him,” Epstein said.”They thought he could be a number-one starter in the big leagues, with some risk involved. You could not do the same statistical analysis as you could with a major league pitcher, and the issue of leaving his country and family was part of the risk. But right then two things became clear about us: we wanted to have no fear, and we wanted to be the type of organization that could take a risk and not back away because it might make us look bad. We didn't want perception to be part of the decision-making process. For too many years this organization was obsessed with tomorrow's newspapers and the Yankees. There was such a focus on what the Yankees were doing and looking silly in the newspapers that it almost paralyzed the club.”

  Before Epstein left for Nicaragua, he received a call from Louie Eljaua, his director of international scouting. Eljaua had arrived there first, taking one of the 12 rooms at the hotel in the remote Nicaraguan town where Contreras and his agent, Jaime Torres, were staying.

  “Hey, man, it might be good if you booked a room not just for yourself, but book all the rooms in the hotel,” Eljaua told Epstein. “That way other teams won't be able to stay here. The nearest place is miles and miles away.”

  Epstein loved the idea. The Red Sox bought up all the rooms. When he arrived there Epstein could not believe how well the plan worked. They had the place to themselves, he and Eljaua stayed up late with Contreras and Torres, drinking whiskey, smoking Cuban cigars and talking about a new life in Boston with the Red Sox. Epstein told Contreras that the Red Sox employed a bullpen catcher who was born in Cuba and would provide him with daily support and friendship.

  “We probably won't be the ones with the highest offer,” Epstein said, “but other teams won't give you the support and welcome that we will.”

  Contreras loved everything that he heard about the Red Sox. The
y enjoyed more conversation, whiskey and cigars before finally turning in.

  “I went to bed sure he would sign with the Red Sox,” Epstein said.”The next day I see two shadowy figures going in and out of his room. They're from the Yankees. I see him on his cell phone.”

  The Yankees had dispatched two operatives with a simple order: don't come back unless you have Contreras signed. If you don't sign him, your jobs won't be here when you get back. It wasn't long before Contreras asked to see Epstein. El Titan de Bronze had tears in his eyes.

  “It's nothing personal,” he told Epstein. “I had a better offer. They wouldn't take no.”

  The Yankees gave Contreras $32 million over four years, blowing away Boston's offer of $23 million over three years. Legend has it that Epstein reacted by heaving a chair in his room and breaking furniture, a story he denies.

  “I did not break anything,” he said.”I may have thrown a few of my possessions across the room.”

  Lucchino, speaking to the New York Times then, reacted by throwing insults.

  “The Evil Empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America,” Lucchino said.

  The Red Sox had lost to the Yankees. Again. Dog bites man. But Epstein saw victory in this defeat.

  “We were bold,” Epstein said. “But we still had to be disciplined and focus on value. We did that with our offer. Our goal in player acquisition was to set a value and never get into a free agent bidding war. Don't get in without a strong sense of what our walking away point was. It's almost like a small-market approach to get the most bang for every buck. At the same time, we had showed we had changed. We were really following through on our goal to be really bold and not worry about looking stupid if things didn't work out.”

  What followed in the immediate wake of the Contreras imbroglio was one of the most fertile and efficient off-seasons in the history of the Red Sox, a haul that would soon make possible the attainment of their Holy Grail, the world championship more than eight decades in the waiting.

  The 2002 Red Sox had finished second in the American League in runs and third in on-base percentage, but nonetheless gave far too many at-bats to inefficient hitters such as Tony Clark, Rey Sanchez, Jose Offerman, Carlos Baerga and Shea Hillenbrand. Epstein knew his team needed hitters who were better at getting on base. In the next three months Epstein added designated hitter David Ortiz, first baseman Kevin Millar, second baseman Todd Walker, third baseman Bill Mueller and outfielder Jeremy Giambi while also adding pitchers Mike Timlin and Bronson Arroyo. The seven players cost him a total of three nonprospects from his minor league system and $13 million in salary for the 2003 season. Epstein operated in the manner of an expert serial pickpocket. He was so good the rest of baseball didn't even know what hit them, especially months before Moneyball would tip off the old-school guys on what the new-school guys were up to.

  “The quick application of some basic principles yielded immediate results in 2003,” Epstein said. “We took a look at the roster and we saw we had superstar talent on the top of the roster. But after our 10 best players there were a lot of areas that needed improvement. We thought if we could get above-league-average players at getting on base we'd be much better off. We needed guys to get on base. We had too many dead spots in our lineup. We also knew at that time you could get guys who got on base inexpensively. You could still find those guys and they were still good values. You can't now. But back then batting average correlated to salary, not on-base percentage. Now it's the opposite. All those guys had great years and had a really dramatic effect on our offense.”

  Every hitter Epstein obtained in those heists was better than league average at getting on base. Walker (.353 OBP in 2002) and Giambi (.414) were obtained in minor trades. Mueller (.350) was signed as a free agent. Ortiz (.339) was signed for $1.25 million after the Minnesota Twins cut him rather than pay him about that much in arbitration. Millar (.366) was signed after the Florida Marlins had placed him on waivers to allow him to play in Japan; the rest of baseball interpreted those waivers as the necessary formality of a player leaving the States, while the Red Sox saw the move as an opening to grab yet another player who could get on base. Other teams were angered at having been caught napping, or, in their minds, simply respecting the unwritten rules in the game.

  “It gets back to our first priority: be bold,” Epstein said.

  Giambi would break down with injuries, but Walker, Mueller, Ortiz and Millar were major contributors. Epstein's stealth offseason brought an immediate and huge impact. The 2003 Red Sox won the wild card playoff spot with 95 victories (six fewer than New York) and were the greatest slugging team in baseball history, knocking the 1927 Yankees out of the record book with a .491 slugging percentage. They hit a franchise-record 238 home runs and led the league with 961 runs, the second most in franchise history. A club-record six teammates hit at least twenty homers: Millar, Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon. Of Boston's 95 wins, 40 of them were comeback victories, including 13 in which they had trailed by three runs or more.

  “The ‘03 team had a bunch of guys that just didn't know any better,” Epstein said. “It didn't matter how badly we pitched, we knew we could kick your ass and beat the ball around the park.”

  Within two years, the savvy ownership of the Red Sox had assembled a true rival to the Yankees with team-building tools and know-how that were ahead of the curve. In 2003, the Red Sox, little more than a cooperative sparring partner for the Yankees during New York's championship years, were good enough and cocky enough to push the Yankees to the brink of a tipping point: one game to decide the American League championship, if not the arrival of a new paradigm coming to baseball. One game. It was, quite simply, one of the greatest baseball games ever played.

  7

  The Ghosts Make a

  Final Appearance

  David Wells had been a colorful nuisance during his first stint with the Yankees, and the same was true when he rejoined the team in 2002. He might sometimes throw his arms up in burlesque disgust if a teammate made an error behind him, he might quarrel with Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, he might let himself get too heavy and he might stay out at night a little too late, but the incidents, even one involving a police report in 2002, mostly could be written off as the incidental cost of his immaturity, like bothersome toll booths on the highway to his usual 17 wins or so. The 2002 incident, for instance, occurred at an East Side diner where a heckling fan punched Wells, knocking out his two front teeth and bloodying him. Wells had pitched one of his classically efficient games that Friday night, September 6, beating Detroit, 8-1, in a complete game with no walks that took just 2 hours, 28 minutes—all the quicker so Wells could get to the business of trolling the Manhattan bar scene. Wells threw back shots of tequila at a Soho club before heading to the diner for something to eat, not expecting it to be the flying fist of a five-foot-seven diner patron.

  Torre called Wells into his office the next day.

  “What time did this happen?” he asked Wells.

  “It was about a quarter to one or something,” Wells said.

  It was a boldface lie. Wells apparently forgot that 911 emergency calls, of which he had placed one that night, are dated and placed in public record. “I just got my teeth knocked in, all right?” he barked at the 911 operator during a two-minute screed in which he slurred his words and repeatedly cursed at the operator. “Nine motherfucking one one,” he spat out through his bloodied mouth.

  It was soon apparent beyond any doubt that Wells had lied to Torre about when the incident occurred. He was off only by about five hours. Wells had placed his 911 call at 5:49 a.m.

  “I had no report at the time to the contrary,” Torre said. “I always want to believe my players, but he just out and out lied.”

  Lying tore at the trust between Torre and his players, which was the very foundation of his entire managerial philosophy. Wells’ lie immensely bothered Torre because of that willful destruction. It encroache
d upon the absolute worst kind of betrayal in Torre's book between a manager and his players: insubordination. In 1981, for instance, Torre was managing the Mets when he and Bob Gibson, his pitching coach, saw two players, Ron Hodges and Dyar Miller, in the bar of the team's hotel, which was off limits to the players.

  “Go over and tell them to finish their beer and leave,”Torre told Gibson. “I'm not looking to catch people, but just tell them to finish up and go out.”

  The players told Gibson they would take their time with their beer, thank you. They did not leave.

  The next day, Torre called Hodges and Miller into his office. They were joined by Rusty Staub, the respected clubhouse leader, whom Torre invited to have on hand as a witness, as a form of documentation.“Guys,”Torre told Hodges and Miller,”I'm sending you home. I told the clubhouse guy to get your luggage off the truck. You're not going with us to Philadelphia. You're going home.”

  As Torre explained,”I hated doing it. But I had to. It was insubordination.”

  Miller looked in astonishment at Torre and, referring to Mets general manager Frank Cashen, said,”Does Frank know about this?”

  “Not until I tell him,” Torre said.

  Torre told Cashen about it while the two players were on their way back to New York.

  Cashen asked Torre the next day, “Do you realize this thing was over one beer?”