The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Rodriguez explained that he just had been running full tilt on the treadmill in the weight room when the belt broke and he went flying off the back end of the machine, skinning his hands and knees as he was thrown into a wall. Who the hell ran at sprinting speed on a treadmill right before a game was about to start? The most talented player in baseball did. That was A-Rod, too.

  “Nobody has ever worked harder in my memory than this guy,” Torre said. “Jeter, I'm sure he does his weight work in the wintertime. In the summertime he gets dressed and gets the hell out of there. He doesn't hang out. Nobody's in better shape than Alex. Nobody works harder than Alex. For a star player, who gets there as early as he gets there, and still he might hear Coach Larry Bowa say, ‘You need to take groundballs.’ And he'll do whatever it takes. He'll do it all the time. He's just a workaholic.”

  Said Bowa, “If he missed a slow roller, the next day he's out there early and we're working on slow rollers. If he missed a backhand, the next day we're working on backhands. This guy would be the first one to admit,’I need to work on that,’ or,’I didn't approach that ball the right way, so let's go work on it.’ And that's why he's such a great player.”

  The hardest worker on the team, however, also established himself as the one requiring the most maintenance. One of the first things Rodriguez did as a Yankee was to ask for his personal clubhouse assistant. The Yankees typically employ four or five young adults in their clubhouse and another three or four in the visiting clubhouse to run all sorts of errands, such as picking up and washing dirty laundry, cleaning and shining spikes, ordering and stocking clubhouse food, etc. They are drones known as “clubbies” to the players. Rodriguez wanted his own clubbie. The Yankees had never heard of such a request. Rodriguez was familiar with one particular visiting clubhouse clubbie from his visits to Yankee Stadium when with Seattle and Texas and asked that the clubbie be reassigned to attend only to his needs.

  “But Alex,” said Lou Cucuzza, the visiting clubhouse manager, “he works for me. I need him.”

  Rodriguez and Cucuzza struck a deal. The clubbie would still work primarily in the visiting clubhouse but also would be considered “on call” for Rodriguez to use him on an as-needed basis. The as-needed part virtually became a full-time job. Rodriguez would have his personal clubbie lay out his practice and game clothes each night, in the manner of a dresser for a king. When Rodriguez needed something—such as a bottle of water during batting practice or stretching—he would call his clubbie and the clubbie would come running.

  One time, in Detroit, where his personal attendant was not available, Rodriguez was jogging off the field after batting practice, saw a Comerica Park visiting clubhouse attendant, a young kid in his first months on the job, and simply barked, “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  “He always wanted his guy assigned to him,” Cucuzza said. “I knew a little bit about what he had in Texas, where there was a strained relationship between his guy and the equipment guy. It can be tough trying to run a clubhouse. But we know Alex wants that. It's a comfort thing for him. When Alex does need something, we try to get it done. The bottom line is to keep the players happy.”

  The championship Yankees, though, never had such a needy player. The maintenance that Rodriguez required was not a huge distraction, but it did raise some eyebrows in the clubhouse.

  “He definitely needs more attention than anybody else,” Cucuzza said.”Does it cause a problem? Early on we had heard the rumors about when he was in Texas, when he was the one-man show. But you come into the Yankees and it's a whole lot different than the Texas Rangers. You still need to fit in. You didn't see that [neediness] with the Yankees. Jeter was a product of the old regime. He's definitely low maintenance. Rocket was low maintenance. He could tell you in May who he was leaving tickets for in August. It was all written down.”

  Rodriguez's neediness included being liked by his new teammates, but the maintenance of Alex Rodriguez required so much work—the look-at-me mannerisms on the field, the personal clubhouse valet, the phoniness of trying too hard to say things to the media that sounded bright or insightful—that it turned off teammates. He was hyperaware of how he looked to others and how he was perceived. It was a self-awareness that crept into his at-bats in clutch situations, causing performance anxiety, and his teammates knew it.

  Two seasons into Rodriguez's term with the Yankees, word reached Torre that Rodriguez had complained to a team official that he didn't feel accepted on the team. So one day in spring training Torre found Rodriguez alone in the clubhouse food lounge and sat next to him to talk about it.

  “I'm somewhat naïve,”Torre said,”because I'm not in that clubhouse all the time. I'm mostly in my office and when I am out there everybody seems to be on their best behavior when I walk through. But I said to him, ‘Alex, do me a favor: at least go get a cup of coffee by yourself, instead of sending somebody to get you a cup of coffee.’

  “A little while later he goes out of his way to find me. He's carrying a cup of coffee.’Look, Skip’ he said,’I got my own cup of coffee!’ That wasn't even the point. It was just an example. The point was, just be one of the guys. He didn't get it.

  “But see, Alex needs that. He needs to be that level above. That's been the intimidating part of being with the Yankees because he's up there in the rarified air, but so are a lot of those other guys. How much money he makes? That doesn't mean anything to them.”

  By the end of May in the 2006 season, a small group of players were complaining to Torre about how Rodriguez did not fit the team concept of the Yankees. Torre already had engaged in several discussions with Rodriguez to try to help him become “one of the guys.” Nothing seemed to work.

  “His goal was to be the best player in baseball,” Torre said. “He was very much aware of what was going on elsewhere in baseball. He seemed cluttered up with these things.”

  No one doubted that Rodriguez was a hard worker and a great player who wanted to win. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards in his four years playing under Torre and rarely missed a game. But coupled with his will to win was a neediness to be noticed, to acquire as much status as possible, and to be liked—and the best way to measure his quest for such attention was through his individual statistics. In a Yankee clubhouse still vainly trying to hang on to what was left of the core values of the championship teams, the A-Rod way seemed awkwardly out of place.

  “I can relate to some of the things Alex feels,” Torre said. “Obviously, I was never as talented as Alex, but my self-esteem was based on what I did on the field. It feels like that's what's going on with him.

  “He could never walk away from this game and all of a sudden have people talk about somebody else. Jeter could just disappear and go sit on a quiet beach somewhere and not be bothered.

  “And it's sad because I know when I played, even in my good years, if I went 0-for-4 and didn't get a hit in a key situation, I wouldn't even want to go out to dinner. I felt damaged, I guess. I let people down. It took me a long time to get over that. With Alex, it's a lot different because he will conjure up in his mind that it wasn't that way. He'll disappear into his dream world and reason with himself.

  “But Alex is all about the game. He needs the game. He needs all of those statistics. He needs every record imaginable. And he needs people to make a fuss over him. And he's always going to put up numbers because he's too good. It means a lot to him, and good for him.”

  When Rodriguez won his first MVP as a Yankee, in November of 2005, Torre called him to congratulate him. This was right after the Yankees lost the Division Series to the Angels, during which Rodriguez batted .133 with no runs batted in and flogged himself by saying he had “played like a dog.”

  “Alex, this thing is always going to haunt you because people are always going to find reasons not to give you credit, even winning the MVP,” Torre told him. “I'm proud of what you did and you should be proud of what you did. You're never going to satisfy people. Just understand that. It sort o
f makes the criticism easier to deal with.”

  Rodriguez then held a conference call with reporters upon the announcement of the award, and this is what he said: “We can win three World Series (and) with me it's never going to be over. My benchmark is so high that no matter what I do, it's never going to be enough.”

  Torre saw the comments and shook his head.

  “I told him he could never satisfy people to give him perspective. No good could come from him making that idea public. I just wanted him to understand that I and his teammates appreciated what he did.”

  Rodriguez may have had his quirks and foibles, but those were trivial matters compared to the biggest issue his presence brought to the Yankees clubhouse: the uneasy dynamic between him and Jeter. It was a problem for both of them. For Rodriguez, the problem was that he knew he was a better player than Jeter but he could not enjoy anything close to Jeter's preferred status in and out of the organization. Jeter had the Yankee pedigree, the four championship rings, the captaincy, the national endorsements and that off-the-charts likability factor that flummoxed Rodriguez. Jeter didn't hit or field like Rodriguez, so for a guy who measured himself by his statistics, Rodriguez wondered how Jeter could be held with so much more reverence than himself. In his own way, Rodriguez was fascinated with Jeter, as if trying to figure out what it was about Jeter that could have bought him so much goodwill. The inside joke in the clubhouse was that Rodriguez's preoccupation with Jeter recalled the 1992 film Single White Female, in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her.

  During the World Baseball Classic in 2006, a clothes designer who was friends with Gary Sheffield gave some USA players designer jeans in a hip-hop style. Jeter and Rodriguez received their jeans in Tampa. One day, while Team USA was working out in Arizona, Rodriguez noticed the designer jeans hanging in Jeter's locker. “Oh, you're wearing those?” he asked Jeter. Rodriguez promptly had his jeans overnighted from Tampa to the team's training base in Arizona.

  “I think Alex fit into the clubhouse that first year,” Borzello said. “I just don't think he fit in anywhere else. I don't think he fit in, especially with the media. It just didn't work. He didn't understand it. I think he had to realize that what you had done up to that day didn't mean anything to the fans. I mean, you didn't do it here so no one cared. I think that was something he had to adjust to.

  “Plus, he didn't do all that well by his standards. I just think it was a constant struggle for him to do like Roger tried to do, show everyone how good I am.’You guys know, but watch.’ And trying to do it, we weren't able to succeed that year for the most part.”

  The problem for Jeter with Rodriguez in his clubhouse was not so much the Esquire article. Those quotes were three years old by the time the two of them became teammates, though as Borzello said, “Derek is a very stubborn person, and he doesn't have a lot of people he allows close to him. And when he does, if you burn him, I think he's very resentful of that. He opens the door for so few people that when he does open the door for you and you screw him over, in his mind, he becomes much more guarded.”

  The bigger problem for Jeter was discovering what Rodriguez was like as a teammate. Jeter already was chagrined to see the camaraderie of the championship teams disintegrating around him ever since O'Neill, Brosius, Martinez and Knoblauch left after the 2001 World Series. He could look around the clubhouse in 2004 and 2005 and see random veterans who just seemed to be passing through, people such as Kevin Brown, Kenny Lofton, Randy Johnson and Tony Womack. Rodriguez, with his hyper self-awareness, was the most visible and controversial symbol of the Yankees moving further away from what Jeter knew as the definition of championship teams. Jeter and Rodriguez were wired way too differently— saw very different versions of what it took to win—for the Yankees to recapture that togetherness of the championship years.

  “Their motivations are completely different,” Mussina said. “It will always be that way. I mean, there's nothing wrong with either one of their motivations. It's just that it's not the same motivation. And I think that group that Derek learned to play with—O'Neill and Tino and those guys—the motivation was all the same. They knew they weren't the greatest players in the league, but they knew if they did their job as a group, they could win.

  “Derek's not the greatest player in the league. Even in his best years. But he knows how to win. He knows how to get the hit in the big spot. He knows what it takes. He knows how to run the bases. And he's got pedigree now. And it doesn't matter to him what the consequences of failure might be. There's no fear of that.

  “Alex may end up calling attention to himself, but he's not loud about it. Alex has this motivation to be the best player in the game. When all is said and done, he wants to be the best player ever. That's his motivation in this. That's fine. That's good. Everybody needs a motivation, whatever it is.”

  The dynamic between Jeter and Rodriguez never was an open war that sent collateral damage flying about the rest of the clubhouse. Indeed, they operated more along the lines of a cold truce. But everybody in the clubhouse could feel the frost emanating from the Jeter-Rodriguez dynamic.

  “I don't think it's helped the team,” Borzello said. “That team is a machine, though. It's resilient. You deal with so much there that most things don't faze you. You come in, do your thing. There are enough guys who do get along well that I don't think anyone is fazed by it. I don't think other players care that those two got along. It was never arguing or shouting. It was just sort of a cold shoulder.

  “It doesn't help. You would rather that the stars are in the same place, pulling together, but I don't think it affected the other players. It just affected the feel in the clubhouse, and it separates the team off the field because Alex is going to go one way with a group of guys, Derek is going to go another way with a group of guys, and it's never going to be a group of 10 or 12 or 15 guys together.”

  Said Bowa about the relationship between Jeter and Rodriguez, “I think it's workable, but it is what it is. I saw the article they're all talking about, and obviously Derek took it real personal, and if Alex could do it over again, he'd probably redo it. He wouldn't say that. I think Jeet has gradually forgiven him a little bit, but I don't think they're ever going to be, as they say, buddies.”

  The bottom line was that Jeter and Rodriguez were vastly different people. Jeter did not care too much about his statistics and place in history; Rodriguez was consumed not only about his status in that regard but all things baseball.

  “He's a fan of baseball first, and he happens to be a great player,” Borzello said. “But he's a baseball fan. Whether he ever made it in baseball, he would be watching baseball all day long if he could.

  “I'm telling you, we'd go from Yankee Stadium after the last out, get in the car, talk about the game, go to his house and watch the West Coast games on the baseball package.

  “I remember him going to Derek Jeter's house once, me and him. He was going to get a haircut. Jeter had someone who cut hair at his house. So we went over there and we sit down and Alex turns on the TV, waiting for the guy. And Jeter's walking around. And Alex goes, ‘Where's the baseball package? Jeet, what channel is the baseball package on?’ And Jeter goes, ‘I don't have that stuff.’ And Alex goes, ‘How come you don't have the baseball package?’ He couldn't believe it, like, ‘What else do you do?’

  “So it was just so funny because Derek will never watch a baseball game other than the one he's playing in. They're just complete opposites. I remember Alex's reaction to it was like, ‘How is that possible?’ “

  The third year of Jeter and Rodriguez living under the same clubhouse roof was the worst—”I could feel the tension,” Bowa said—and never more so than on the afternoon of August 17, 2006, for a game at Yankee Stadium against Baltimore. The Orioles hammered the Yankees that day, 12-2, dropping the Yankees’ first-place lead over the Red Sox to 1½ games on the eve of an enormously important five-game series in Boston. In a signature moment
, easily the worst moment of the blowout defeat to Baltimore, neither Rodriguez nor Jeter attempted to catch a pop-up between the two of them on the left side of the infield. When the ball plopped to the infield dirt, neither bothered to immediately retrieve it. Instead, in silence, they sort of turned their backs to one another, each one of them as if in protest for not just letting the ball drop without an attempt to catch it, but for adhering to a completely different doctrine on what it took to win. They seemed at that moment, with a baseball landing between them, to have absolutely nothing in common.

  Torre kept the clubhouse door closed after that game to air out his team, while specifically calling out Jeter and Rodriguez.

  “I don't know who wants to catch that thing,” Torre said, “but somebody has to catch the son of a bitch. It looks horseshit. It looks like you don't care. I don't know whose fault it was and I don't care. The only thing I know is that it can't drop. So you guys better figure it out.

  “Now we all have two ways to go from here, going up to Boston. If you take this up there, the way you just played, you're in trouble. Basically, you better leave this shit here. This was shitty. There's no excuse for it. We stunk. Now let's see what we're made of.”

  The Yankees would sweep all five games from Boston in Fenway Park, essentially salting away another division title.

  After the game with the pop-up debacle, Cashman consulted with Torre on not only that play but also the Jeter-Rodriguez dynamic.

  “Cash totally blamed Jeter on the basis of the shortstop having priority on a pop-up,”Torre said. “There were times I had to defend Jeter. Cash went over backwards sometimes thinking the captain should be more proactive than what Jeter wanted to be in the relationship with Alex. I know I'm a little partial to Derek, so you have to take it into consideration, plus he's hurt and he still plays. He never looks for anything more than going out and playing. I'm not saying he does things one hundred percent of the time that he should do. But as far as competing, he's always there for you.”