The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “I started crying because it was just too much,” Rivera said. “I needed to be pitching, yes, but that's how awesome the moment was. I didn't want anyone to see me. I didn't want people to see me standing there with tears coming out of my eyes.”

  At that moment, Little was walking to the mound. At last, he signaled for Embree to replace Martinez. In Boston, where more people were watching than saw the Patriots win the Super Bowl eight months earlier, those that did not weep cursed. There had been 1,053 postseason games played in the history of baseball. In only 13 of them did a team lose after leading by three or more runs with no more than five outs to go. And only twice did a team blow a lead that big and that late without using the bullpen. Those two historic postseason meltdowns occurred just three nights apart: first when Cubs manager Dusty Baker lost Game 6 of the NLCS with Mark Prior on the mound against Florida, and then when Little lost ALCS Game 7 with Martinez unable to stop the Yankees. Two losses, three days apart, with matching DNA. Two out of 1,053. A one-tenth of one percent match.

  “That eighth inning rally was what we were all about,” Torre said.”Never giving up and just finding a way. What we were able to do against Pedro was what we always tried to do: just making Pedro pitch and work until you can get to a point in the game where he is vulnerable. Whether he is in the game or not, and you can question the decision either way, what makes that inning possible is all the at-bats before then that made him vulnerable.”

  Embree, of course, and then Timlin proceeded to navigate the rest of the inning without another run scoring. With Martinez out of the game, Torre lifted the now-useless Wilson to have Ruben Sierra pinch-hit against Timlin. The Red Sox intentionally walked Sierra, upon which Torre put his erstwhile starting third baseman into the game to pinch run: Aaron Boone.

  Torre then turned to Rivera to preserve the tie. Rivera did so in the ninth, the tenth and the eleventh innings. It was his longest outing in seven years. Torre had only Gabe White and Jose Contreras, the Game 6 losing pitcher, as his next options behind Rivera.

  “Every inning we thought that was it for him,” Burkett said, “and every inning we were like, ‘Oh, shit, he's still pitching.’ “

  The Boston bullpen didn't blink, either. The Yankees were 0-for-8 against Embree, Timlin and knuckleball pitcher Tim Wake-field, who had entered the game in the tenth inning. Boone, with his two hits in sixteen at-bats in the series, was the first batter of the eleventh for the Yankees.

  “Boone,”Torre said,”was just a mess. He was a good kid. He just couldn't keep his feet on the ground. He was just too excited. He just kept swinging at fastballs all the time. It didn't matter who was throwing it or where it was.”

  Boone did not have to worry about chasing fastballs against Wakefield. He was going to see knuckleballs. Torre called over Boone as Boone grabbed his bat from the dugout rack.

  “Listen,” Torre said. “Just when you go up there, try to hit a single up the middle or right field. It doesn't mean you won't hit a home run to left.”

  Boone nodded and walked to the plate. It was sixteen minutes past midnight on what was now Friday morning. The series and the rivalry hardly could have been more tied. The game was tied at five runs each. The series was tied at three wins each. Each team had scored exactly 29 runs. If you took it back further, back to when the Red Sox were sold and Henry, Werner, Lucchino and Epstein began to run a smarter, more efficient ballclub that wasn't afraid to poke a stick in the Yankees’ eye, New York and Boston had played each other 44 times. The difference between the two of them over 44 skirmishes was only two wins and five runs, each slight edge held by the Yankees.

  Wakefield threw his first pitch to Boone, a knuckleball, slightly inside and up. Boone swung and connected with it, so solidly that he knew in an instant it would be a home run. The baseball flew, as Torre had imagined, toward the left-field seats.

  Inside the Yankees clubhouse, Clemens, who for seven innings had contemplated the possible end to his career, heard the sound of history, like a freight train rumbling through a concrete tunnel. Clemens was sitting in a small side room off the main clubhouse, across a narrow hallway from Torre's office, when he recognized that sound. The sound came above him—the Yankees’ clubhouse was tucked under the first-base stands—and he knew it was the sound of thousands of those blue plastic seat bottoms snapping upright almost simultaneously as the fans jump to their feet. The baseball was still in the air as Clemens dashed out of the room toward the clubhouse door and the narrow ramp leading to the dugout.

  There was bedlam, and there was relief—relief at having somehow held back this strengthening force that the Red Sox had become.

  “The one thing I saw,” Torre said, “was Manny Ramirez turning around in left field and trotting off the field. Everything after that was blank except for one thing: seeing Mariano out there on the mound, kissing the rubber or whatever he did.”

  Rivera is a deeply religious man. He had prayed in the clubhouse before the game for strength and courage.”A good conversation with the Lord,” is what he called it. He had been humbled into tears in the eighth inning, crying in the privacy of the bullpen bathroom. But this … this victory … it was too much to keep emotions private. He ran straight for the mound and flung himself onto the dirt on his hands and knees. Through tears again, this time for all to see, he thanked the Lord for pulling him through. It was an odd sight: the Yankees jumping upon one another around Boone at home plate while Rivera wept in supplication.

  “That,” Torre said, “was an emotional night. I'm not sure what was most emotional: that game or the three games at Yankee Stadium in the 2001 World Series. In all my years in New York, that Game 7 and the games in 2001 were the best of all.”

  The Red Sox slunk without a word back to their clubhouse. Several players were crying. Once inside, the door still closed to reporters, Little spoke briefly, telling the players they should hold their heads high with pride. Relievers Todd Jones and Mike Timlin also spoke, making a similar point.

  Sometime later, amid the profound sadness in the Boston clubhouse, Little and Martinez shared a hug in a brief, private moment. Then the manager looked at the pitcher whom he trusted more than anyone else and talked about what would come next.

  “Petey,” Little said, “I might not be here anymore.”

  Martinez tried to cheer him up.

  “Why?” Martinez said.”It's not your fault. It's up to the players. Any other situation I get the outs and you're a hero.”

  Little, however, knew too well how baseball in Boston worked. The blood was on his hands, and Boston held little room for forgiveness for those who could be blamed. He couldn't come back. Truthfully, Little had been something of a placeholder anyway, a guy whom the Red Sox players knew and liked, who was available in spring training and who would fill the seat inoffensively until the new owners could establish a new, process-oriented culture around the team and find the right manager to dovetail with it. Little, who didn't totally buy into the growing emphasis on statistical analysis, wasn't that guy. The horror of Game 7 ensured the end of his days, and Little knew it. Martinez tried to comfort Little with the same words generations of Red Sox players and fans practically had made their motto:

  “It wasn't meant to be.”

  So ended the eighty-fifth consecutive season for the Boston Red Sox and their congregation without a world championship. Boston was bound by history and New York empowered by it. The angst of the Sox did not go back to the first century B.C., but the Roman poet Catullus back then captured in an epigram the essence of such frustration when he wrote,”I hate and I love. Perhaps you're asking why I do this? / I don't know, but I feel it happening, and it's torture.”

  The torture of the Red Sox would be no more. Aaron Boone was the last twist of the knife. The rest of baseball had caught up to the Yankees, and the Red Sox were at the forefront of this revolution. There was no way to know it at the time, of course, but the home run by Boone was the ending to more than just one of the grea
test ballgames ever played. It was the very last magical moment of the Torre Era. It was the last time the Yankee Stadium ghosts would come out to play. It was the last time the Yankees would douse one another with champagne at the stadium to celebrate yet another postseason conquest. It was the last time the Yankees could claim a truly superior position over the Boston Red Sox.

  “I felt tremendous disappointment that night,” Epstein said. “I grew up in Boston. I understood and felt the Yankee rivalry and the domination by the Yankees. I felt like I understood it, but sitting there watching Aaron Boone's home run leave the park I felt baptized, immersed in it.

  “I thought our new approach to things was working, even though we ended up losing Game 7 in that fashion. I thought about how far we had come, but in the end we were back where we always were: playing second fiddle to the Yankees. It was pretty obvious where the flaws were. They were in the pitching staff. We had tried to cobble a league-average pitching staff and just hit the living piss out of the baseball. But now we knew that if we could add an elite starter and a dominant closer, that would make a huge difference. That was the quickest way to improve the club. By adding two elite guys, we thought that would close what was left of the gap between us and the Yankees.”

  The Marlins were not a particularly special team throughout the regular season. They ranked eighth in runs in the National League and seventh in runs allowed, making them the only one of the 28 teams to reach the World Series in the wild card era to rank seventh or worse in both categories. But they became the first success story of commissioner Bud Selig's plan to spread the wealth and success around baseball.

  Of the $49 million the Marlins spent on payroll (ranked 26th among 30 teams; the Yankees were first at $153 million), $21 million came from revenue-sharing checks written by other teams. Of course, no team contributed more to the revenue-sharing pot than the Yankees, who kicked in $52.6 million, and no team except the Montreal Expos, a team owned and operated by Major League Baseball, received a bigger handout than the Marlins. Three years after baseball included the Marlins on its hit list when floating the idea of contraction, the Marlins were beating the Yankees in the World Series with help from the Yankees’ own money. The Yankees were helping to arm the enemy, who signed $10 million catcher Pudge Rodriguez as a free agent and traded for $4.5 million closer Ugueth Urbina, a rental player at that, given his impending free agency.

  If the dynastic Yankees, in their last days then of such exalted repute, were emblematic of the traditional baseball powerhouse, the Marlins were the epitome of Selig's new vision of the postmodern champion. A team that finished 10 games out of first place, was a middle-of-the-pack team in run production and prevention and had 43 percent of their payroll covered by other teams became world champions—that in the season after the Anaheim Angels, another wild card team on the receiving end of the new revenue-sharing system, also ran roughshod through the Yankees in the Division Series on their way to the world championship.

  “This is the first year of a lot of changes,” Selig said to reporters after the Marlins won the World Series.”I told all of you last year the Anaheim Angels were the first real beneficiary of revenue sharing. Now you're seeing this, and I'm delighted.”

  The Yankees actually led the World Series two games to one before a series of critical breakdowns in Games 3 and 4. The first occurred in the 11th inning of Game 3, when Aaron Boone batted with the bases loaded and one out against Braden Looper. Boone failed to put the ball in play, striking out. John Flaherty ended the threat by popping out.

  Torre, having used a pinch hitter in the inning for Jose Con-treras, who threw two shutout innings out of the bullpen, needed a pitcher for the bottom of the 11th. With the first four hitters due up being righthanded, Torre had only two righthanded options: Weaver and Mariano Rivera. Using Rivera in a tie game on the road, Torre figured, did not make much sense. Weaver could cover more innings. He had started 24 times during the season, though his 7-9 record, hangdog demeanor on the mound and trouble adjusting to the New York cauldron of criticism made for a rough year. With Rivera available for a maximum of only two innings, that gave the Yankees only one at-bat, one chance, to hand Rivera a lead to protect. Otherwise, who would close the game after that? Weaver?

  “I had no options,” Torre said. “People say bring in Mariano. I had no options. It was an extra-inning game on the road. There was never any consideration of other options. I never was between anybody, I know that.”

  Weaver was lights-out in the 11th inning. He zipped through three straight Florida hitters with only eight pitches.

  “I was so happy for him,” Torre said. “People were basing their criticism of him in Game 4 on what happened before, when he was bad. But we finally got him to a point where he was controlling his emotions better. But the result reverted to what he was before, so people say, ‘It's the same old guy.’ “

  Weaver's Yankees career ended with one pitch—actually three, if you count the two pitches out of the strike zone to Marlins shortstop Alex Gonzalez to start the 12th. Gonzalez, batting eighth, was a .256 hitter during the season. But with a 2-and-0 count, Gonzalez, a good fastball hitter, turned into Hank Aaron. He was a .636 hitter on 2-and-0 counts, with seven hits in 11 such at-bats. Weaver obliged him with a fastball and the game was over just like that, the ball clearing the left-field wall.

  After the failures by Boone and Weaver, more breakdowns occurred in Game 5, and those were physical. The first happened during batting practice. Torre was standing behind the batting cage on the field when first baseman Jason Giambi, who was in the lineup batting sixth, and who had been taking groundballs at first base, approached him.

  “Skip, my knee,” Giambi said.”I can't move. I can't really move. I know you wanted me to tell you if it was a problem.”

  Giambi feared that he could not defend against the bunting ability of Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo, the speedsters at the top of the Florida lineup. He feared his mobility was not good enough to get to groundballs. “The infield there in Florida is really fast,” Giambi said. The way Giambi saw it, this was no time to play the role of the tough guy and see if the knee would hold up, even if it was the World Series.

  “What happened was I had blown out my knee that year,” Giambi said.”That was the year Derek went down, Bernie had gone down, Nick Johnson had gone down earlier that year. That's where Joe was:’I need you to play. I need somebody to anchor this lineup.’ I hit fourth all year and my knee was torn to shreds. Joe and I had talked before. ‘When we get to the playoffs, you're the DH, and if we get to the World Series, we'll just talk about it.’ Because Nick was back and he's a great defensive player.”

  So Torre told Giambi he would take him out of the lineup, which already had been announced to the media, and replace him with Johnson.

  “Okay,” Torre told him, “I'll just tell the press it was my decision.”

  Torre told reporters, “I saw him limping around. I asked him about his knee. He hemmed and he hawed, and I said, ‘Why not just play Nick Johnson?’”

  Giambi told the media, “I didn't want to cost us on defense.”

  It was a decision that was both difficult and curious, depending on the angle from which it was viewed. On the one hand, Giambi believed he might hurt the team if he tried to play. On the other hand, he took himself out of the lineup of the fifth game of the World Series—his first World Series, and a World Series that was tied at two games each.

  “Of course, Jeter would come up to me and say, ‘What happened to Giambi?’” Torre said. “He could never understand how people could do that. He had no patience for that stuff. ‘What happened to this guy?’ if he didn't play. ‘What's the matter with him?’ for somebody, anybody. He had absolutely no patience for that stuff.”

  Said Giambi, “You wait your whole life for that, but that's kind of how I was brought up in Oakland. ‘Hey listen, we need to win as a team.’ It breaks your heart, trust me. But sometimes you have to think not about yourself, but abou
t the team.”

  Giambi did come off the bench as a pinch hitter that night. He hit a home run.

  There was yet another major problem before the game even started. Torre was standing next to Mel Stottlemyre during the national anthem when the pitching coach told him,”You may need to get another pitcher ready.”

  Minutes earlier, Wells had told Stottlemyre that his back was stiff and that he might not be able to pitch. Wells threw a one-two-three first inning with a 1-0 lead, walked off the mound, threw his glove on the bench, announced “I can't go,” and kept walking right into the clubhouse. Only 24 hours earlier at a news conference, Wells had bragged to the media about his lack of conditioning when someone asked him to reveal the secret to his success. “Goes to show you don't need to bust your ass every day to be successful,” he crowed. The audience broke into laughter.

  Boomer's act wasn't so funny in Game 5, not when he stuck the Yankees bullpen with eight innings to pick on the night after a 12-inning game. Contreras coughed up four runs in three innings, Brad Penny pitched well for the Marlins, and the Yankees lost again, 6-4. Watching Giambi and Wells go down was like getting hit on the same commute by not one, but two flat tires. The timing was awful and the results were worse. The Yankees were done, though there still was the formality of a Game 6 to wrap up the series. Florida righthander Josh Beckett took care of the clincher with a five-hit clampdown on the Yankees, 2-0.

  Oddly, the Yankees outhit, outhomered, outscored and out-pitched the Marlins in the series. Their vaunted rotation lived up to its preseason cover billing, posting a 1.91 ERA in the series (though the Wells exit was harmful because of its brevity). Still, the Yankees lost. Why? The series could have gone either way. A sacrifice fly here, a hit there, a little back and core maintenance training regimen there, and who knows? Maybe it simply was the karmic tariff for all those October nights and weeks that had fallen their way, the stuff that made bright, reasonable people believe in the forces of mystique and aura. Maybe the Marlins were a collection agency sent by the baseball gods, or possibly Bud Selig, whose new world order of baseball democracy was just dawning. Eight different franchises would play in the next five World Series—none of them having been there since 1987 and none of them being the 26-time world champion New York Yankees. Maybe by somehow losing the 2003 World Series, the Yankees actually provided a reminder of just how great and prolific were those championship Yankees teams.