The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Cashman was already miffed with Torre and Jeter for not throwing enough public support toward Rodriguez during a three-month slump that summer in which fans at Yankee Stadium booed the third baseman with gusto. Rodriguez hit .257 over the slump and played awful defense, kicking groundballs and bouncing throws. The New York newspapers reflected his poor play with headlines such as:

  “Do You Hate This Man?”

  “Personal Hell for Alex Is Getting Worse by the Day”

  “E-Rod”

  “K-Rod”

  “Alex gets a hit …”

  Cashman looked to Torre and Jeter to help get Yankees fans off Rodriguez's back. He told Torre,”You've got to tell Derek he has to come out and support Alex and tell the fans to leave him alone.”

  “I can't do that,” Torre said. “Because if you ask Jeter to do that and he starts doing it, then people will say, ‘Why didn't he do that last year?’ I can't do that. He's a teammate. He and Alex know each other. It's not like he needs to get to know this guy or he's misreading him. They've been together long before we met them.”

  Torre wasn't going to ask Jeter to tell the fans to ease up on Rodriguez. He wasn't going to ask Jeter to do something he didn't want to do anyway.

  “My job as a player is not to tell the fans what to do,” Jeter said then. “My job is not to tell the media what to write about. They're going to do what they want. They should just let it go. How many times can you ask the same questions?”

  Jeter was asked if he had seen anyone criticized as much as Rodriguez.

  “Knobby,” he said, referring to error-prone former second baseman Chuck Knoblauch. “Clemens for a whole year. Tino.”

  Has A-Rod's treatment been worse?

  “I don't know,” he said. “I don't think about that. I'm just concerned with doing what we can to win. That's it. I don't worry about that other stuff.”

  Shortly before the pop-up episode, Rodriguez agreed to meet with Reggie Jackson over dinner. Jackson was concerned that Rodriguez was tone deaf to what was happening in his own clubhouse. Jackson knew that players were trying to help Rodriguez to get on track, whether it was at the plate or fitting into the team structure, but that Rodriguez wasn't getting the message because he was convinced that everything was perfectly fine.

  Jackson began by telling Rodriguez he knew what it was like to struggle as a Yankee, and knew it to be much worse than what Rodriguez had known. Jackson said teammates would leave notes in the clothes in his locker telling him they didn't want him on the team. He told Rodriguez that manager Billy Martin so beat it into his head that he was a bad defensive player that on the night he famously hit three home runs in the 1977 World Series Jackson played a routine double to right field into a triple out of sheer passivity caused by fear he'd screw it up. Jackson also relayed a story that he once was mired in such an embarrassing, horrific streak of strikeouts that when he stepped into the batter's box he said to Tigers catcher Lance Parrish, “Tell me what's coming and I promise I'll take a turn right back into the dugout no matter where I hit it. I just want to look like a pro a little bit.” (Parrish replied, “Fuck you;” Jackson, to his immense satisfaction, managed to ground out.) Reggie wanted A-Rod to know he really didn't have it that bad.

  Jackson later told this parable to make a point about how Rodriguez refused to admit he was struggling or to accept the advice of teammates: A man is trapped in his house as floodwaters rise. Twice he refuses help, once from rescuers in a boat and then, when the man seeks refuge on his roof, from rescuers in a helicopter.

  “No, thanks. I've got faith,” the man said each time.

  The next thing he knows the man is face-to-face with God in heaven.

  “But I put my faith in you!” the man cried.

  “Yes,” God replied, “and I answered your faith and tried to help you twice!”

  The Yankees soon reached the point of frustration in their effort to help Rodriguez. Jason Giambi came to Torre and said, “Skip, it's time to stop coddling him.”

  Recalling that conversation, Torre said, “What Jason said made me realize that I had to go at it a different way. When the rest of the team starts noticing things, you have to get this fixed. That's my job. I like to give individuals what I believe is the room they need, but when I sense that other people are affected, team-wise, I have to find a solution to it and take an approach that is a little more serious.”

  Torre asked Rodriguez to sit down with him in his office in the visiting clubhouse in Seattle. He wanted to snap back Rodriguez from this false world he lived in, to have Rodriguez recognize what everybody else in the room did: that he was struggling and needed help.

  “This is all about honesty,” Torre told Rodriguez. “And it's not about anybody else but you. You can't pretend everything is okay when it's not. You have to face the reality that you're going through a tough time, and then work from there.”

  That night, batting as a pinch hitter, Rodriguez struck out to end the game. He pounded the dugout railing with his bat on his way back to the dugout, walked up the runway and into the clubhouse and picked up a folding chair and threw it.

  The trouble for Rodriguez as a Yankee was that everything he did, and especially everything that he didn't do, such as hitting in the clutch, winning a championship or staying out of tawdry gossip items, was compared and contrasted to Jeter, the Yankee template. Rodriguez, though recognized as the more talented player and certainly the far better slugger, could not win the comparison. With the Yankees under Torre, for instance, Jeter outhit Rodriguez with runners in scoring position, .311-.306, outhit him with runners in scoring position with two outs, .316-.274, outhit him in the postseason, .309-.245, and outhit him overall, .317-.306. Cashman, who had traded for Rodriguez and understood the value of his enormous production at bat, wanted to believe in Rodriguez, which meant the blame would go to Jeter if a pop-up fell between them or if the fans would not stop booing A-Rod. Torre, on the other hand, trusted Jeter like a son, and never did get the same sense of reliability from Rodriguez.

  “My relationship with Derek has been great,”Torre said.”What-ever I've asked him, he's been about as reliable as you can get. With Alex … When I'm having my annual charitable dinner, for the Safe at Home foundation, I only invite a few players, guys who live around New York, because it's in the off-season and I don't want guys to feel like they have to fly in, except when we honored the 1996 or 1998 team. So Alex said to me, ‘Skip, why don't you invite me to your dinner?’

  “I said, ‘Alex, your wife is pregnant. I don't want to invite you if it means taking you away from her and from home. You're certainly welcome to come. We'd love to have you.’ He said,’I'll be there.’ He canceled the day before based on his wife being due so soon. It didn't surprise me.”

  9

  Marching to Different Drumbeats

  Joe Torre called Bernie Williams and Kenny Lofton into his office one day in the Yankees’ 2004 spring training camp and closed the door. The two veterans, both competing for the center-field job, sat in upholstered chairs across from Torre, with the manager's desk between them and Torre

  “Guys,” Torre said, “we've got a dilemma here.”

  The Yankees had signed Lofton that winter to a two-year, $6.2 million deal, essentially because they didn't trust Williams any more to be their everyday center fielder. Williams had batted .263 in a season in which he had missed 42 games after knee surgery. The Yankees’ front office suspected that an aging Williams should be transitioned to life as a designated hitter, an idea Torre wasn't ready to endorse completely.

  The Yankees had just watched Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo help the Marlins beat them in the 2003 World Series by giving Florida speed at the top of the lineup, and Lofton was the Yankees’ attempt at a copycat move. It was a poor attempt. The signing was fraught with misguided thinking. For one, Lofton, then 36, was older than Williams, 35, and there was no evidence that he was an upgrade on Williams. Even in an injury-shortened season, Williams hit more hom
e runs, drove in more runs and posted a better on-base percentage in 2003 than Lofton. Moreover, Lofton had turned into a baseball transient, unable to stay rooted with any team in the decline of his career and unwilling to concede he was no longer an everyday player. In 27 months he was the property of six teams, moving from the Indians to the White Sox to the Giants to the Pirates to the Cubs to the Yankees.

  Lofton tried to be somewhat diplomatic and obligatory on a conference call with reporters to announce his signing. “If they want me to park cars,” he said, “I'll do that.” But Lofton wasn't about to start doing any grunt work in his baseball career. He thought of himself as a proud, All-Star-caliber center fielder and nothing else short of that. When Lofton was asked on the conference call about the possibility of replacing Williams, a Yankee icon, in center field, he replied, “They said they want me to play center field. I am a center fielder and they know that.”

  That was true enough, but was Lofton a better center fielder than Williams? Maybe, but maybe not. What was true was that the Yankees had signed an older player with a checkered reputation who was not clearly better than Williams.

  Before the signing was announced, Torre called up Williams and told him, “We're getting Kenny Lofton. That doesn't mean anything is set for center field. We're going to start the season with the best center fielder, whoever that is.”

  It was a rotten scenario sure to displease both of them. Lofton, who never had accepted being a role player in his career, thought he was being signed to play center field, when actually Torre considered him to be coming to camp to compete for the job. Williams, the proud link to six pennant-winning teams, was stripped of his hold of the center-field job he had held for 10 seasons and forced to compete not with an up-and-coming prospect with young legs, but with an older player. But there was another problem, a corrosive one, to the bifurcated center-field scenario, a problem that revealed itself in the spring training meeting in Torre's office.

  Every team is asked in spring training to submit to Major League Baseball the names that will be placed on the All-Star Game ballot. Each team is permitted to list three outfielders. The Yankees had Gary Sheffield, whom they had signed that winter as a free agent, established in right field and Hideki Matsui established in left field. No problem there. Center field, though, was an open competition between Williams and Lofton, and baseball officials needed an answer before that competition was to be decided.

  General manager Brian Cashman asked Torre, “Who should we use in center field on the ballot?”

  Said Torre, “We'll call them both in and work it out.”

  So Torre brought Williams and Lofton into his office to settle what he thought was a minor, procedural issue. If either one played very well in the first half of the season they would be selected to the All-Star Game anyway, whether they were listed on the official fan ballot or not.

  “We've got to put an All-Star ballot together,” Torre told Williams and Lofton. “You've both been around long enough. You know if you have a good year you get voted or picked. But right now it's just about being on the ballot and we have to make a decision.”

  Lofton had yet to play a game for the Yankees. Williams was a franchise star and a Torre favorite. Yet the manager would not favor one over the other.

  “Here's what I'm going to do,” Torre told them. “You're both All-Stars. You've both done it before. I'm going to put your names into a hat. Whoever comes out of the hat is the guy we put on the ballot.”

  Williams shrugged nonchalantly, as if to say, “Whatever. Fine.” Lofton rolled his eyes and pouted.

  Torre put two folded pieces of paper into his hat and started shaking the hat to mix them up. Suddenly one of the folded pieces of paper jumped out of the hat and fell to the floor.

  “Let's use that one!” Lofton said.

  “All right,” Torre said. “Fine.”

  Torre picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it. He showed it to the two center fielders: “Bernie Williams.”

  Lofton dropped his head and shook it in anger. Torre was taken aback by Lofton's reaction.

  “I thought, What does that mean?” Torre said. “He's probably not going to play enough to make the All-Star team, so what the hell's the difference anyway?”

  Watching Lofton's reaction made Torre think he could leave nothing open to interpretation about this little game of chance. He reached into his hat and pulled out the folded piece of paper that said “Kenny Lofton” and showed it to him.

  “I had to open it up to show him that he was on the other one, to make sure he didn't think there was two Bernies,” Torre said. “That was a big deal to him, being on the All-Star ballot. It's too bad. And I had a taste of that kind of thinking on All-Star teams. It was always interesting when you watched all those guys from Cleveland when they came to All-Star Games. They were so undisciplined. Colon, Manny, Lofton, Belle … they were just marching to their own drummer.”

  That was the real problem. The Yankees no longer had one drumbeat. It was obvious before the Yankees played a game in the 2004 season that the workmanlike, egoless culture of the championship Yankee teams was irretrievably gone. Sure, the Yankees began to change when they said goodbye to Paul O'Neill, Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez and Chuck Knoblauch after the 2001 World Series. But in 2003 they had successfully transitioned into a pitching-dominant team, clearly the best team in baseball until the Marlins, a 91-win wild card team, happened to throw some hot pitchers at them in October. The front office panic after that 2003 World Series did more to send the Yankees into a downward spiral, especially when it came to building a roster with team-centric grinders, than anything that happened after the 2001 World Series.

  Not long after the 2003 World Series, Torre gave Brian Cashman a word of advice on Weaver.

  “I remember telling Cash, ‘You've got to get rid of this guy because emotionally he can't handle it, trying to come back from that,’ “ Torre said. “It's not like Eckersley giving up the home run to Kirk Gibson or Mariano giving up the home run to Sandy Alomar. This guy wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with that, especially in New York. I had become more comfortable with his pitching, like what he did earlier in that game, than I was earlier. But I couldn't sell it. There was just too much stuff that had happened.”

  Weaver would never throw another pitch for the Yankees. With a trade that winter, the Yankees turned Weaver into Kevin Brown, one pitcher who struggled with New York for another—only older.

  In that one off-season the Yankees brought in Lofton, the surly, antisocial Kevin Brown, the infamously moody Sheffield and the needy, status-seeking Alex Rodriguez. In addition, the team shipped off its two best young hitters, Nick Johnson and Juan Rivera, to obtain pitcher Javier Vazquez, who came from Montreal wholly unprepared for pitching under the weight of expectations in New York. Of course, they still had Jason Giambi, the guy with his own personal trainer at his beck and call and who had removed himself from the starting lineup in the previous World Series and then been summoned to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the BALCO scandal. The Yankees were less of a team than ever before in the Torre years and more a collection of individual stars.

  “You're mixing together people from all different teams,” pitcher Mike Mussina said. “You're not going to get that precise, perfect blend with every group of players you put in uniform. And when you do find that perfect mix, you've got to hang on to it. It hasn't been the same mix, and it's nobody's fault. I don't blame any one player or any group of players for anything. It's just different.”

  When asked how long the Yankees were able to maintain the right blend of players who kept to the same mindset, Mussina said, “Until ‘03, until probably even during ‘03. Then Andy left after ‘03 and Roger left and Boomer left … So when ‘04 rolled around it was really different. We had very different personalities as compared to the other group, to the group that was here when I first came in 2001.”

  To the Old Guard of the Yankees, especially Derek Jeter, who
had known nothing in his career except 25 guys buying into one mindset, the star system was a jarring change for the worse.

  “I don't know if it bothered him or not,” said Mussina, who witnessed the breakdown of playoff-caliber Orioles teams before signing with the Yankees, “but I know as a player who has watched good players be on a team, a good group of players, because I had a good group of players in Baltimore for a couple of years in a row, then, to watch a good group of guys just depart and then another group comes in and you see the whole dynamic of the clubhouse be different—be younger, not used to winning or not be about winning, it's about performing—I know it's got to be hard.

  “I'm sure for him it was a big change and especially having Alex, because Alex was the best, highest-paid player in the league, arguably. He was the highest paid, but he was arguably the best player in the league. You've got a new second baseman, you've got a brand-new third baseman … that's a lot to deal with.”

  Said Jeter, “The thing is we were winning and for the most part we had the same group together year and after, you know what I mean? Because we won, we were able to stay together. So as a group, we had pretty much gone through everything together. Whereas in recent years, when we lost, people changed. Different guys were in and out.”

  It wasn't just that the personnel changed; the culture changed. The tipping point to the end of the championship Yankees’ culture, both in the clubhouse and its on-field foundation—strong pitching—was the almost casual loss of Pettitte to free agency. Pet-titte was a rare commodity in baseball: he was lefthanded, durable, only 31 years old, coming off a 21-win season and hardened by the postseason experience and daily expectations of having played nine years in New York. Had he made his career somewhere else all those years, the Yankees, given their lustful ways in free agency, would have deeply coveted Andy Pettitte. But George Steinbrenner never did have a warm spot for Pettitte, always withholding his highest praise of calling someone a “warrior” and famously wanting him gone in an ill-conceived trade attempt in 1999. Steinbrenner's lieutenants, too, constantly worried about Pettitte's throwing elbow, in part because Pettitte seemed to chronically worry about it himself. It was just Pettitte's honest nature to share his feelings about usual aches and pains. Other than the 2002 season, Pettitte's elbow was good enough to allow him to be one of the most reliable pitchers in baseball for almost a decade. From 1995, when he broke into the big leagues, through 2003, Pettitte threw more innings than all but nine pitchers in baseball and tied Randy Johnson for the second-most wins, behind only Greg Maddux.