The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  The Red Sox no longer looked the role of the cartoon coyote against the Yankees. They had grown into a rival of the most authentic, worthy and anxiety-inducing sort. And Torre knew it. Hours before Game 7,Torre sat in his office at Yankee Stadium and wondered if the Yankees could beat Boston one more time, as agonizing and draining as he knew even the victories had been against the Red Sox.

  “Oh, they were better than us in ‘03,” Torre said. “Let's put it this way: they scared me more than they ever did before. Of course, they always scared me. You can't help it when it's the Red Sox. But eventually you say to yourself,’When is this shit going to end? How long do we keep beating them before the law of averages catches up to us?’

  “Growing up in New York, I knew about the wars between the Dodgers and Giants 22 times a year. But not being personally involved in it, other than as a fan, I had never experienced anything like the whole Red Sox–Yankees thing. It was personal. I mean, Don Mattingly said he didn't want his son to be drafted by the Red Sox. That's how deep-seated it is. It becomes personal among the players.”

  Mel Stottlemyre, Torre's trusted pitching coach, stepped into Torre's office before Game 7.

  “You've got Moose in the bullpen tonight,” Stottlemyre said.

  Said Torre, “I've got everybody in the bullpen tonight.”

  Mike Mussina,”Moose,” had started and lost Game 4 three days earlier. Mussina had pitched well, taking the ball two outs into the seventh inning, but Boston starter Tim Wakefield had pitched better. Mussina left with a 3-1 deficit in a game the Red Sox would win 3-2, a game in which Boston manager Grady Little pulled Tim Wakefield after seven innings and 100 pitches so relievers Mike Timlin and Scott Williamson could get the final six outs. Mussina had appeared in 431 games in his professional career entering Game 7, postseasons included. None one of those 431 appearances came out of the bullpen.

  “We might use you out of the pen,” Stottlemyre had told Mussina.”But if we do, we won't bring you into the middle of an inning. We'll only have you start an inning. That way you'll have plenty of time to warm up.”

  One of the beauties of baseball is its forgiveness. There is always another at-bat, another game, another chance to right a wrong, and those redemptive opportunities, unlike in other sports, are made possible on a daily basis. A team plays 162 games in 181 days. A batter will get 600 chances. A pitcher will face 900 batters. A season will offer 750,000 pitches. The sheer volume of opportunity is what gives the game its rhythm and soul.

  Until you get a Game 7.

  Game 7 flips baseball inside out, replacing near-endless opportunity with urgency. Injected with a heavy dose of finality, baseball in a Game 7 scenario is thrillingly different. There have been only 47 decisive Game 7s played in the history of baseball. None were ever more anticipated, none were more fraught with tension and ill will, than Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. The starting pitchers alone guaranteed something historic, if not downright dangerous. The Yankees started Roger Clemens. The Red Sox gave the ball to Pedro Martinez. Between them Clemens and Martinez had won 476 games in the major leagues, a record total for any Game 7 pitching matchup. They had combined to win nine Cy Young Awards. They were not only among the best pitchers of their generation, they also were among the most feared. Both Clemens and Martinez used the baseball not just to beat you but to intimidate you. They threw at and near batters regularly with a frontier justice mentality, the kind of machismo that mostly had disappeared from the game. Clemens liked to use a euphemism for such intimidation tactics;he called it “moving a batter's feet,” and he would say so with the matter-of-fact casualness associated with moving someone's furniture. Martinez, meanwhile, quickly had developed such a reputation for throwing at batters that one of them once charged the mound certain that Pedro had hit him on purpose—a pitch thrown with a perfect game intact. Morever, Martinez and Clemens never cared much for each other.

  Already Game 3 at Fenway Park in Boston had proved the explosive properties at play when you mixed the Yankees and Red Sox and Clemens and Martinez. The two aces started that game and considerable mayhem. The Yankees did not like Martinez, so much so that when Martinez later became a free agent following the 2004 season, several of them would go out of their way to tell Torre the Yankees should stay clear of him.

  “When he was a free agent there was some idle chatter about him coming to the Yankees, but there was genuine dislike from our players,”Torre said.”They didn't want him around and they told me so. We didn't like him. We didn't like him for a reason. I mean, he would get away with throwing at people. There was one game in New York where he hit Soriano and Jeter back to back and put them both in the hospital.

  “This is a guy who can put the ball where he wants. And he certainly has the right mentality: that if you're going to pitch somebody in, you miss in and hit them. I don't see anything wrong with it. It's better than missing over the plate and the guy hits a home run. That's what you try to teach and not a lot of guys can do that. We used to hate Clemens for the same reason when he was on another team.”

  Beside his penchant for pitching inside, Martinez irritated the Yankees with his bench jockeying, another old-school tactic that seemed out of place in the modern game. He would insult the Yankees from the Boston dugout. Catcher Jorge Posada was a favorite target. Martinez would question Posada's intelligence and call him “Dumbo,” a reference to the catcher's prominent ears. It was a shrewd tactic, for Martinez knew that Posada was an emotional player, and the more Martinez riled Posada the more Posada became distracted. Posada was a career .191 hitter against his tormentor entering the 2003 ALCS.

  In Game 3, however, the Yankees would not let Martinez have his way with them. Boston staked Pedro to a 2-0 first-inning lead off Clemens, but the Yankees, led by the fiery Posada, fought back with aggressive hitting against Martinez. Posada opened the second inning with a double and later scored on a single by journeyman outfielder Karim Garcia. Derek Jeter hit a home run in the third inning to tie the score. And by the fourth inning, the Yankees were so emboldened by their hacks against Pedro that they turned the tables and were razzing him from their dugout.

  “You've got nothing!” they yelled at Martinez.

  It was Posada who started another rally in the fourth, this time with a walk. Nick Johnson followed with a single off the Green Monster in left field, a shot that sent Posada to third. Hideki Ma-tsui drove the next pitch into right field for a ringing double that bounced into the stands, scoring Posada. Now the Yankees, led by Posada, were all over Martinez with catcalls from the dugout. Martinez was facing Garcia, a lefthanded batter, with first base open and a righthanded hitter on deck. His first pitch to Garcia was a fastball that whistled straight for Garcia's head. Garcia ducked, and the ball glanced off his left shoulder.

  The Yankees were outraged. The way they saw it, Martinez threw at Garcia intentionally, having grown frustrated with their aggressive swings and mouthing off from the dugout.

  “Was Pedro trying to make a point? I'm sure he was,” later said one of Martinez's teammates, pitcher John Burkett. “Roger does it, Randy Johnson does it at times and Pedro does it. I don't think he was trying to hurt him. He was trying to send a message. It was, ‘Fuck this, I've got to put a scare into somebody.’ And he did.”

  Martinez claimed the pitch carried no intentions. It simply got away from him.

  “Why am I going to hit Karim Garcia?” he said. “Who is Karim Garcia? Karim Garcia is an out. He's not the out I want to let go.”

  The catcalls continued from the Yankee dugout. The next batter, Alfonso Soriano, hit a groundball to shortstop that the Red Sox turned into a double play, but not before the enraged Garcia slid hard into second baseman Todd Walker in an attempt to disrupt the pivot and to vent his anger at being hit. Garcia picked himself up off the dirt and glared angrily at Martinez as he jogged across the infield toward the third base dugout. Martinez rightfully interpreted Garcia's stare as a message that Garcia believed M
artinez had purposefully tried to hit him.

  “Why am I going to try to hit you?” Martinez yelled at Garcia. “You're my out!”

  “Motherfucker!” Garcia yelled back.

  “You're the motherfucker, you dirty bastard!” Martinez shouted.

  “When I said that,” Martinez said, “Posada jumped up on the dugout steps and started screaming at me in Spanish. I could hear him yell at me and then he made a comment about my mother. Posada is Latin. He should know if you don't want to fuck with someone you don't say anything about their mother.

  “One thing in the Dominican culture you have to be very careful about is saying anything about someone's mother. You say something about someone's mother, you're picking a fight right away. If I even see someone raising his voice to his mother, you're going to get slapped in the mouth. Posada is from Puerto Rico. Being Latin, he should know that.”

  Martinez no longer cared about Garcia. He turned his attention to Posada in the dugout. Martinez raised his right index finger and pointed it to the right side of his head and yelled something in Spanish at him. Martinez said he yelled, “I'll remember what you said.” Posada and the Yankees heard and interpreted something very different. They saw Martinez's actions as a clear threat that he was going to hit Posada in the head with a pitch the next time he batted.

  Clemens, of course, would not let such actions go unanswered. The question was not if he would respond with a militant pitch— just a little something “to move somebody's feet”—but when. A jam in the sixth inning of a close game, with one out, a 4-2 lead and the tying runs on base, did not appear to be the proper opening for retribution, but Manny Ramirez figured differently. The Yankees always discussed in their pregame scouting report meetings that Ramirez was uncomfortable with inside pitches. The reports said you could get Manny off his game by occasionally throwing balls on his hands, off the plate. Such warning shots could make Ramirez less bold about diving into outside pitches. (The reports also included notations that such pitches typically had no effect whatsoever on David Ortiz, Boston's other big slugger and confirmed Yankee-killer. Ortiz would respond to any such pitches simply by spitting into his palms and resuming his customary, aggressive place practically on top of home plate. Unlike Ramirez, the Yankees regarded Ortiz as unable to be intimidated.)

  Clemens uncorked a high fastball that, while somewhat inside, did not come all that close to hitting Ramirez. Still, Ramirez, sensing as all of the Red Sox did that Clemens would not let the fourth-inning incident with Martinez go unchallenged, thought Clemens threw at him. Ramirez ducked and then, bat in hand, stormed toward the mound. The players and coaches from both dugouts immediately dashed toward the middle of the field—except for one 72-year-old Yankees coach who made a straight line toward the Boston dugout. Don Zimmer had seen and heard enough of Martinez. This incident, Zimmer figured, was caused by Martinez and his years of throwing at hitters and mouthing off at the Yankees. He saw Pedro in his red warmup jacket across the field and that's where he headed. Zimmer didn't know what he was going to do when he got there; he just knew he was fed up with Martinez.

  “The only thing I remember,” Torre said,”is when I was going out of the dugout Zimmer was on my left and maybe a step or two below me. I was going to say,’Zim, you stay here,’ but I knew it was fruitless. I mean, me stopping him, or anybody stopping him, it wasn't going to happen. It's the last I remember Zim. And then I was in the middle of the scrum with everybody else in the middle of the field, and I heard Zim or somebody yell something near their dugout, and I look over. He's already on the ground.”

  Zimmer had charged Martinez in the manner of a bull in a ring, and a stunned Martinez had responded in the manner of a matador. He sidestepped Zimmer and pushed Zimmer to the ground.

  “He reached for my right arm,” Martinez said. “I thought, Is he going to pull it? Is he trying to hurt me? I tossed him down.”

  The sight of this 72-year-old man tumbling to the ground, his bald pink head, capless, against the dark green grass in front of the Boston dugout, was so jarring as to effectively end what otherwise might have been a full-scale brawl. (Clemens said at first he thought the prone, round body might have been that of teammate David Wells.) Zimmer was unhurt, though the Yankees would insist he be strapped to a gurney and hauled away in an ambulance to a hospital. Zimmer was, however, deeply embarrassed. He called a news conference the next day and, through tears, apologized for his actions. His contrition did not stop New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg from suggesting that Martinez would be arrested if he had acted that way in New York.

  “Whatever kind of baseball they want to play, we're going to play, but we didn't start that,” Clemens said after the game, barely containing his anger toward Martinez. “Sometimes when you get knocked around the ballpark, you get your ticket punched. I've had it many times. These guys have done it to me. If you don't have electric stuff and you're not on and guys are hitting balls they shouldn't be hitting, you might stand somebody up. But just because you are getting whipped, you don't hit [somebody] behind somebody's neck …

  “I wasn't a part of all that. I went in there and I was trying to strike Manny out, and bottom line is he started mouthing me and the ball wasn't near him. If I wanted it near him, he'd know it.”

  Torre pulled Clemens after he pitched out of that sixth inning by getting Ramirez to ground into a double play. Clemens might have lasted longer, but Torre figured Clemens had spent himself physically and emotionally in such fitful battle. He had noticed the veins bulging on Clemens’ neck. The Yankees couldn't get through the game without one more fight, this one a bloody one in the New York bullpen between a Fenway Park security guard, pitcher Jeff Nelson and right fielder Garcia, who hopped the fence. The rivalry had become sheer madness, so when Torre needed order restored, he turned to the reliable coolness of Mariano Rivera. The closer took care of the final six outs of a 4-3 victory with no runs, no hits and no incidents, requiring just 19 pitches to do so.

  The outrageousness of Game 3 established the animosity and competitiveness of the series that would build toward the seventh game. Starting with Game 3, the teams alternated wins over four games in which each one hung in the balance into the ninth inning. So it would come down to this: the Yankees and Red Sox playing each other for the 26th time that year—the most two teams had seen of one another in baseball history—and a Yankee Stadium reprise of the Martinez-Clemens pitching matchup. To add to the drama, the game stood a chance to be the last time Clemens pitched in the big leagues. He had announced his intention to retire after the season, an intention that actually took four years to consummate. But the expectation at the time was that this might be his last game.

  Martinez did not sleep well before Game 7. For one reason, his body clock was askew from a weary travel schedule. In the previous 19 days he had flown from Boston to Tampa to Oakland to Boston to Oakland to New York to Boston to New York. For another reason, Martinez was anxious, even fearful, of the hostility he might find in New York after the incidents from Game 3. He read and heard comments that he should be thrown in jail for what he did to Zimmer, and that fans were going to come to Game 7 armed with rocks and batteries to throw at him in the bullpen. His brother, the former pitcher Ramon Martinez, wanted to watch his kid brother pitch with the pennant on the line at Yankee Stadium, but Pedro would not allow it.

  “Stay in Boston,” he told Ramon. “Anything can happen.”

  Martinez made certain not to leave his hotel room while in New York. On the day of Game 7 he ordered some Dominican food delivered to his room rather than venturing out for lunch. He took the team bus to the ballpark, rather than trust a New York cabbie to bring him safely to the ballpark. The Yankees never liked Martinez much, but now he felt the wrath of the citizens of the city for having flung an old, huggable man to the ground.

  Burkett, knowing this was likely to be his final season, had toted a video camera throughout the playoffs. It was rolling in the clubhouse before Game 7. One of h
is favorite images, taken unobtrusively, is of Martinez, sitting alone, facing into his locker, his face taut with concentration and anxiousness.

  Martinez embraced the challenge, clearly outpitching an ineffective Clemens in the early innings. Boston whacked Clemens for three runs in the third inning, while Martinez was giving the Yankees nothing. Kevin Millar ripped Clemens’ first pitch of the fourth inning for a home run, and it was 4-0. The Red Sox didn't stop there. Trot Nixon walked and then Bill Mueller lashed a single to center field. The Yankees were on the cusp of getting blown out, already down four runs to a sharp Martinez with Boston runners at first and third and no outs. Torre had little choice but to pull Clemens from the wreckage before it grew even worse. Clemens walked off the field in that slow, ambling cowboy walk of his, but the Yankee Stadium crowd was in too foul of a mood to send him off to his retirement with polite applause.

  When the bullpen door swung open, an accidental reliever walked out. It was Mussina. There he was making the first relief appearance of his professional life and having to do so by parachuting into the middle of an inning—exactly the scenario Stottlemyre had told him would not happen. Trouble was, Stottlemyre did not tell Torre he promised Mussina he would relieve only at the start of the inning. All Torre knew was that the game was on the line right now and it was time to break glass in case of emergency. Mussina was his best option.

  Mussina first had to face Boston catcher Jason Varitek. He struck him out on three pitches. Next up was center fielder Johnny Damon. Mussina induced a groundball to Jeter, who turned it into an inning-ending double play. Just like that, with six pitches to two batters, Mussina had authored his signature moment as a Yankee. Until then he had acquired the reputation of a nearly great pitcher. Reliable, yes, but always somehow short of real greatness. He had never won 20 games in a season, had come within one strike of throwing a perfect game against Boston in 2001, and had lost four straight postseason decisions for the Yankees, including two in the 2003 ALCS alone.