The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “You know, we made it look easy,” Jeter said.”We knew it wasn't easy, but we made it look easy. And people automatically assume, ‘Well, your payroll is this, and you've got this player, that player, this all-star, that all-star … you should win.’ No, it just doesn't happen like that. You have to have a lot of things go right. We were in six World Series? It's not easy, you know what I mean? Nowadays? Six World Series in 12 years? That's tough to do, man.”

  8

  The Issues of Alex

  Because Aaron Boone's car was in the repair shop on January 16, 2004, he was unable to get in his daily workout.

  And because he was unable to get in his daily workout, he was apt to say yes when a buddy of his called and asked if he'd like a ride to come with him to play in a pickup basketball game.

  And because he played pickup basketball that day, Boone was running to save a ball from going out of bounds when he suddenly stopped at the sideline and reached to flick the ball back toward him.

  And because Boone stopped short, a friend of his in the game, who also had been chasing the ball but who could not stop in time, plowed into him, tearing the ligaments of Boone's left knee.

  And because Boone blew out his knee, Alex Rodriguez became a Yankee.

  And because Alex Rodriguez became a Yankee, the Yankees’ clubhouse and the personality of the team, already sliding further from the O'Neill-Martinez-Brosius band of brothers comportment, would never be the same.

  Talk about car trouble.

  “When Alex came over it became strained in the clubhouse,” Torre said. “I can't tell you for sure who you can put a finger on there, or if it was just one of those things that was pretty much unavoidable with the strong personalities.”

  Boone's decision to play a little game of pickup basketball was the baseball equivalent of Mrs. O'Leary leaving a lantern a little too close to her cow, or of five small-time burglars breaking into the Watergate complex in Washington. History, Voltaire observed, is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes. The misfortune of Boone changed baseball history, most especially the neo-Peloponnesian War between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.

  “I don't think we're ever going to live long enough to see us outspend the Yankees in the off-season,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said after the Yankees replaced Boone at third base by trading for Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers on February 16, 2004, exactly one month after Boone's idea of a cardio workout ended with his knee shredded. “We'll devote our energies hopefully to a day real soon where we beat them on the field in October.”

  That day would be as soon as possible, which is to say the very next October. The arrival of Rodriguez in New York just happened to coincide with the flipping of roles between the Yankees and Red Sox. Athens would prevail over Sparta at last. The championship banners flew in Boston now, not in New York. Rodriguez hit 208 home runs and won two Most Valuable Player Awards in his first five years as a Yankee. But in those five seasons, the Yankees won zero pennants and went 10-14 in postseason games. The Red Sox, meanwhile, won two pennants in those five years, both of which were capped with World Series triumphs, and went 28-14 in postseason games.

  In the five years before Rodriguez was a Yankee, the Yankees won four pennants and were 42-24 in postseason games; the Red Sox won zero pennants and were 10-12 in postseason games. The roles completely reversed.

  Rodriguez, who played nearly every game and produced at an elite level, at least before October rolled around, surely wasn't the main cause of the role reversal. No team exploited the changing baseball marketplace in those years better than the Red Sox. The ballclub's business acumen produced tremendous gains in local revenues atop the growing national revenues dispersed from the Central Fund pool, and its baseball acumen not only made for a fertile player development program, but also promoted wise spending because of state-of-the-art valuations on players based on complex statistical analysis and old-school scouting methods. At the same time, the Yankees’ fallow player development system and scattershot approach to player acquisition—overpay in the increasingly inefficient free agent market—made for a recipe of their own quicksand. The more they flailed, the more they sunk.

  Nonetheless, Rodriguez was conspicuous by the awesome disparity between his skills and his inability to use them in the clutch. Rodriguez hit .245 in the postseason as a Yankee, or 61 points worse than his career average. From the fifth inning of Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS—the onset of the dynasty's demise—through 2008, Rodriguez hit .136 in 59 postseason at-bats, including 0-for-27 with 11 strikeouts with a total of 38 runners on, every one of whom he left on base. The Yankees went 4-13 in that stretch when A-Rod went AWOL, losing consecutive series to the Red Sox, Angels, Tigers and Indians. Such colossal performance anxiety from such a talented player seemed almost unfathomable, even before one's very eyes.

  “When it comes to a key situation,” Torre said, “he can't get himself to concern himself with getting the job done, instead of how it looks.

  “There's a certain free fall you have to go through when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it's always going to be good. There's a sort of trust, a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to be embarrassed. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And sometimes players aren't willing to do that. They have a reputation to uphold. They have to have an answer for it. It's an ego thing.”

  Fairly or not, Rodriguez, by the sheer timing of his arrival, but also by dint of his outsized talent and knack for calling attention to himself, was the unmistakable shorthand symbol for why the Yankees no longer were champions and suffered at the rise of the Red Sox. Whether hitting 450-foot home runs or sunbathing shirtless in Central Park or squiring strippers, Rodriguez was like nothing ever seen before on the championship teams of the Torre Era: an ambitious superstar impressed and motivated by stature and status, particularly when those qualities pertained to himself.

  “Alex monopolized all the attention,” Torre said. “I don't think that's important. We never really had anybody who craved the attention. I think when Alex came over he certainly changed just the feel of the club, whether or not that was because of certain assumptions people had just made by Alex being there, that he was this kind of player.

  “For me success was still going to be about pitching. But seeing his personality concerned me because you could see his focus was on individual stuff.”

  About midway through that 2004 season, for instance, Rodriguez was walking past Torre in the dugout toward the bat rack. Torre offered him some encouragement to help him relax.

  “You know, you'll be fine,” Torre told Rodriguez. “It just takes a little time to adjust to playing here.”

  Said Rodriguez, “Well, my numbers are about the same as this time last year.”

  Torre was disappointed in his response.

  “I wasn't talking about numbers,” Torre said. “I was talking about getting used to playing in this environment and what you were expected to do. The expectations with the Yankees are about winning, and people aren't really concerned about what your stats are.”

  Maybe there was some risk introducing Rodriguez to the Yankees culture, but how risky could it really have been to add the most talented player in the game, who was only 28 years old, who had hit no fewer than 41 home runs for six years running, and who had won two straight Gold Gloves at shortstop? Truth be told, the Rangers had come to realize that Rodriguez, or at least his $252 million contract, was a mistake they needed to unload. They were a last place team with him, and they wanted out from the financial commitment so badly that they first tried to trade him to Boston in December—the deal to renegotiate Rodriguez's contract downward fell apart over a difference of $15 million over seven years—and then they kicked in $67 million to ship Rodriguez to the Yankees for the dynamic second baseman Alfonso Soriano. How badly did Texas want Rodriguez gone? By 2025, when the last of his deferred payments to Rodriguez is due, Rangers owner Tom Hicks will hav
e paid Rodriguez $140 million for only three years of service, all of them on last-place teams. Hicks found that alternative more bearable than keeping him.

  The Yankees had tried to replace Boone with Los Angeles third baseman Adrian Beltre, but they could not work out a trade with the Dodgers. The Yankees signed journeyman Mike Lamb to play the position. On February 8, about three weeks after Boone tore up his knee and one week before spring training was to begin, agent Scott Boras called Brian Cashman to talk about one of his clients, first baseman Travis Lee. The conversation included some idle chatter about the state of the Yankees.

  “I'm having trouble finding a third baseman,” Cashman told Boras.

  The agent made a little joke, kidding on the square, about how maybe Cashman should be interested in another client of his: Alex Rodriguez, who only two weeks earlier had been named captain of the Rangers, if for no other reason than to cover up the fact that the team had just tried to ship him off to Boston.

  Cashman was immediately interested, if slightly surprised. Rodriguez was a shortstop. With Jeter firmly entrenched there with the Yankees, and with Boone out for the season, Cashman wondered if Rodriguez would be willing to move to third base. Boras said he would get back to Cashman. He called Rodriguez.

  “You'd have to decide what the position means to you,” Boras told him, referring to shortstop,”and understand what you'd be giving up for a chance to win. Think about it.”

  Rodriguez called Boras back the next day.

  “Let's do it,” he said.

  The next day the Rangers, still trying to put on a happy face after their forced reconciliation with Rodriguez, held a conference call with Rodriguez, Boras, Hicks, general manager John Hart and manager Buck Showalter. The idea was to say wonderful things about the future of the Texas Rangers, with their newly named captain at the forefront in shaping the direction of the team.

  Boras just happened to throw a bomb into the room. He made sure to mention on the conference call that Rodriguez might consider a trade to New York. Hicks scoffed at the idea.

  “Alex isn't going to play third base,” Hicks said. “He's always said that.”

  “Alex,” Boras said, as if asking the question for the first time, “what do you think about third base?”

  “I wouldn't rule it out,” Rodriguez said. “It's something I'd consider.”

  Silence fell over the line.

  “Frankly,” Boras said at the time, “Tom Hicks was stunned.”

  The next day Hart and Cashman were negotiating the framework of a deal to send the newly minted Rangers captain to New York. Within 72 hours it was done. Rodriguez was a Yankee, even if an accidental Yankee at that. Of course, he said all the right things then about yielding his alpha status with the Rangers to a more deferential one with Jeter's Yankees.

  “Once Scott brought it to my attention, it made perfect sense,” Rodriguez said about moving to third base in order to be a Yankee. “I began to think about the pinstripes. I felt the allure of the tradition and opportunity to win and asked myself, ‘Why not do it?’

  “You know the best part? Getting there while I'm still young and knowing I have seven years to play with Derek and set my legacy as far as being a part of Yankees history. Getting there at 37 and playing two years wouldn't be the same.”

  “I began to think about the pinstripes?” “The allure of the tradition?” “Set my legacy?” Who spoke like that?

  You could have shined the entire fleet of New York City cabs for a year with all that polish. The only problem with such a rose-colored view was that putting Rodriguez and Jeter in the same clubhouse was in itself a risk. The two of them were once close friends as young stars in the 1990s, often staying at one another's apartment whenever Jeter's Yankees played Rodriguez's Mariners. But a rift developed in spring training 2001 with the publication of a story in Esquire magazine by Scott Raab about Boras and Rodriguez. In the piece, Rodriguez went out of his way to take shots at Jeter. Indeed, it was Rodriguez who brought Jeter into his conversation with the writer, doing so decidedly without any polish whatsoever.

  “The thing about [New York Daily News columnist] Mike Lupica that pisses me off,” Rodriguez said in the story, “is that he makes me look like the biggest dickhead in the world, and then he takes a guy like Jeter and just puts him way up there.”

  Rodriguez then added this infamous dagger: “Jeter's been blessed with talent around him. He never had to lead. He can just go play and have fun. And he hits second—that's totally different than third or fourth in a lineup. You go into New York, you wanna stop Bernie and O'Neill. You never say, Don't let Derek beat you. He's never your concern.”

  Jeter was hurt. The demeaning attack was unprovoked from someone he had considered a friend. Rodriguez drove two hours from the Rangers’ spring training camp to apologize to Jeter, but it was too late. Jeter requires fierce, unqualified loyalty from friends and teammates. You are either with him or not, and there is no allowance for switching sides or absolution. In that sense he is demanding, even coldly so, with the requirements of his inner circle. Rodriguez was forever compromised in Jeter's eyes. Putting them on the same team, on the same side of the infield, with Jeter manning Rodriguez's natural position, holding the captaincy and the unquestioned alpha status in the clubhouse, was a chemistry experiment of such flammable possibilities it was best approached with a haz-mat suit and titanium safety goggles. It did not go well for the better part of three years, with a kind of begrudging neutrality becoming the best possible outcome by year four. By 2007, battleworn and still suffering by comparison at Jeter's most-favored-nation status in New York and in the clubhouse, Rodriguez took to keeping the earbuds from his music player in his ears whenever walking around the clubhouse, mostly to prevent the media from engaging him. Of course, inauthenticity even dripped from that simple act; Rodriguez later admitted he often did not have music playing while doing so.

  Back in 2004, at first Rodriguez did his best to try to fit into the Yankee culture—his cloying, B-grade actor best. He slathered on the polish. People in the clubhouse, including teammates and support personnel, were calling him “A-Fraud” behind his back.

  “He was phony,” said Mike Borzello, the former Yankees bullpen coach and one of Rodriguez's close friends, “and he knew he was phony. But he didn't know how to be anything else at that time. Then he started to realize what it's all about and what people feed off of, and thought, ‘Hey, I can really be myself.’ “

  Put another way, New York could sniff out a phony in a heartbeat.

  “Right,” Borzello said, “and eventually he realized,’I don't have to rehearse. I can just do it in one take if I just say what I really feel and show the emotions that I really have as opposed to acting like I don't care or knowing your questions before you ask them so I can give the answer I think you want to hear.’ He stopped doing that. But sometimes he'll revert back, and that's when guys make fun of him. We made fun of him about everything.

  “I used to tell Alex all the time, I said,’You come to the stadium and you try to get everyone to look at you. Meanwhile, they already are looking at you. You're Alex Rodriguez. I don't understand that.’

  “And he would say, ‘Well, I like to play with a certain style.’ Bullshit. I said, ‘You do things on the field that draw attention to yourself that are unnecessary, and you want people to know how good you are, how smart a baseball player you are. And we already know that. Just play. Stop saying,’Look at me.’ We're already looking.”

  Players notice. For instance, one Rodriguez self-styled flourish that irritates other players is how he recognizes the depth of outfielders when on second base. Players are taught in that situation to gauge where the outfielders are positioned before the ball is hit. If the right fielder, for example, is playing especially deep, the runner may be more apt to break for home on a bloop in that direction or, under the direction of the third-base coach, to anticipate continuing home on a base hit toward that side. It is part of basic baseball funda
mentals that requires only a quick look at each outfielder before the ball is pitched. Rodriguez, however, would turn that subtlety into a grand gesture for everyone to notice. He would turn and make an obvious pointing motion toward each outfielder, in a manner not unlike a football referee signaling a first down three times. You couldn't miss it, which is exactly why it drove other players nuts. One spring training, for instance, while one American League team was reviewing good base-running habits, the instructor and several players gave over-the-top parodies of Rodriguez's triple-point technique in the middle of the drill, mocking the obviousness of it. Everyone cracked up.

  “He points to make sure you know how smart he is, that he checks the outfielders,” Borzello said. “So now, if you remember in center field at Yankee Stadium, there was a window in the bullpen. I'd be sitting there and when he would get to second I would do it. So it got to the point where he'd get to second and immediately look out, and I would point. And he would go ahead and point. I said, ‘What are you doing? Stop it. Stop it. It looks so stupid. We know you're smart. We know you know the game’—because he does.”

  Rodriguez did impress his teammates with a relentless work ethic. They found him to be the baseball equivalent of a gym rat. He knew everything going on around baseball and he never stopped working. One night in 2007 he showed up in the dugout 10 minutes before the first pitch with blood dripping from his hands and knees.”What the hell happened to you?” somebody asked.