The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

Torre and Francona believed that the whole Yankees-Red Sox dynamic had grown so big and so emotional that the managers dreaded it.

  “It would wear you out,” Torre said. “We had a common bond, because we both would feel the same way. We're both going through the same pressures. There really is no favorite. There's no one team that's clearly better than the other. It's like Michigan-Ohio State. It's doesn't matter how good your teams are. You're supposed to win. Each side.

  “It's the media coverage that can wear you out. It's one game on the schedule and I know it's Boston. I know it's a team in your division. But I think the rivalry got out of hand as far as magnifying every single thing that went on in the game. It's absolutely exhausting. And you know what's interesting? The game is tense, but the game is even tenser only because you know you're going to have to explain the outcome in every small detail. The game itself, though, is great. It's everything else that wears you out.”

  From the time John Henry bought the Red Sox in 2002, when Boston began to make the commitment to look the Yankees in the eye and be a worthy rival, to the start of the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox could best measure that progress, the Yankees and Red Sox had played 64 times, including the titanic 2003 ALCS. Each team had won exactly 32 of those 64 games.

  Both teams had made significant in-season alterations to their clubs to get to the ALCS. For the Yankees, it meant dumping the object of the intense and expensive international bidding war they had engaged in with the Red Sox less than two years earlier: righthanded pitcher Jose Contreras. The big man who was supposed to be an ace for the Yankees struggled with his command and the subtleties of pitching, such as pitching out of the stretch and holding runners. He also had a particularly harmful and unforgive-able flaw with the Yankees: he could not pitch against the Red Sox. Contreras was 0-4 with a 16.44 ERA against Boston.

  “He showed sparks of great pitching here and there,” Torre said, “but he had a phobia against Boston and Boston just whipped his ass. He was tipping his pitches against them. They were in his head. They waxed him. They just waxed him.

  “His stuff was good, but he had a lot of issues that I felt had to do with pitching in New York. I had gotten to the point where I said, ‘He just can't help it.’ He just didn't seem comfortable in New York.”

  On July 31, 2004, the day of the trading deadline, the Yankees were on their way toward beating the Orioles, 6-4, at Yankee Stadium when Brian Cashman called Torre.

  “We can get Esteban Loaiza for Contreras,” Cashman said.

  Torre quickly checked with pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre before getting back on the phone with his general manager.

  “Do it,” Torre replied.

  Loaiza was something of an enigma himself, and as a player with free agent rights after the season, only a rental return on the investment in Contreras. Loaiza was 9-5 for the White Sox but with a pudgy 4.86 ERA. The Yankees were his fifth team in seven years. He was 32 years old. Loaiza had won 21 games the previous season, but it was the only year in his life he won more than 11 games. In short, Loaiza was nothing more than a spot starter. The Red Sox once had bought up all the rooms in a hotel to try to keep Contreras away from the Yankees, but now here was the celebrated El Titan de Bronze ingloriously being dumped for a rotation filler. And the Yankees didn't think twice about it. Neither did Contreras. Though he held a no-trade clause, he waived it without asking anything in return.

  “At that time we were just looking for someone who could go out there and pitch,” Torre said. “We could score runs. Our plan with our pitching was, ‘Let's just try to stay in the game,’ but even that didn't work sometimes.

  “I didn't realize it when I first got to New York, but after having been there a little bit I understood that playing in New York was unlike playing in any other place. People either really embraced it, or they just really had a problem with it. I think Kenny Rogers had a problem with it. David Justice did well with it. Roger Clem ens, after a bit, did all right with it. Randy Johnson, no way. I have to put Contreras in the group that had trouble with it.”

  The Red Sox made an even bigger, more stunning move on that same trading deadline day. Epstein organized an elaborate trade web of four teams involving seven players in order to dump an erstwhile star of his own, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. The Red Sox obtained shortstop Orlando Cabrera from the Expos and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz from the Twins as part of the exchanges. That trade brought more dividends for Boston than the Contreras deal did for New York.

  “We had a fatal flaw,” Epstein said. “Our defense was terrible.” Under Epstein and Henry, the Red Sox not only embraced statistical analysis but also developed propriety formulas to measure performance. When they ran the numbers on Garciaparra's defense that season, they were astonished at what came out. He was, by a long shot, the worst defensive shortstop in the history of their database. The Red Sox did not rely solely on the numbers. The numbers were backed up by the observations of Red Sox scouts who occasionally checked in on their own team.

  “Whether because of age or injury, he just wasn't getting to balls he normally did,” Epstein said. “The pitching was really taking a hit, especially a groundball guy like Derek Lowe, in ways that you can't always see. We knew that teams that win the World Series typically have pretty rangy shortstops. Really it was our whole infield defense that needed to be addressed.”

  The other element pushing Boston toward dealing Garciaparra was that he no longer seemed to be a perfect fit in a clubhouse that had become a band of crazy extroverts, who would become famously self-described as “idiots.” Garciaparra was more the quiet, brooding sort, especially ever since spring training of 2003, when the Red Sox offered him what he considered to be a below-market contract extension.

  “He was understandably upset,” Epstein said. “He became isolated.”

  When Epstein put Garciaparra on the trade market, only one team, the Cubs, showed any interest at first. They offered to send Boston 24-year-old outfielder David Kelton, but they also wanted to swap pitcher Matt Clement for Lowe. Epstein said no thanks, and furiously went back to work. He eventually pulled enough strings to wind up with Cabrera and Mientkiewicz, two players renowned for their defense.

  “Two minutes before the deadline I thought it was dead,” Epstein said. “I must have made four dozen calls in the last half hour. It ended up happening right at the deadline. We thought it was the right deal. We knew Cabrera was good offensively but was under-performing. What we knew about his personality convinced us he would have no problem being put on the big stage with everyone watching. It was just what we needed. And we thought our first-base defense had been equally shaky.

  “We got two guys hitting about .230 at the time, but we thought it was what we needed. We had power, we had a really good pitching staff, but defense was killing us. These guys were exceptional defenders. It helped. Our starting pitching got on a huge roll. Starting in mid-August, they went 30-13.”

  If the Red Sox had outmaneuvered the Yankees the previous November, they had done so again in August. After the deadline deals, the Red Sox were the best team in baseball over the remainder of the regular season (42-18), 5½ games better than the Yankees (36-23).

  “Over that year, for sure, I thought they were a better ballclub than us,” Torre said. “But the games in the postseason have nothing to do with the season. At that point in time, you throw everything out the window. We certainly were conditioned enough to know that there was nobody on the field that could beat us. I mean, they got our attention and I'm sure we got their attention.”

  Boston's sweep of the Angels in the Division Series allowed the Red Sox to align their rotation to have Schilling and Martinez open the first two games of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium. It sounded great for Boston. Schilling, however, was a diminished pitcher. He had hurt himself while pitching in the Division Series, tearing a tendon sheath in his right ankle. A wholly ineffective Schilling was gone after three innings in Game 1, having bur
ied his team in a 6-0 hole.

  One out into the seventh inning, the Yankees led 8-0 and Mike Mussina was throwing a perfect game. The Red Sox suddenly showed their might, and before the Yankees could get five more outs it was 8-7 and Boston had the tying run at third base and Kevin Millar batting. Torre brought in Mariano Rivera and that was the end of Boston scoring. He retired Millar on a pop-up and the Yankees wound up winning, 10-7.

  The Yankees also won Game 2, though they did so in far different form, with Lieber besting Martinez in a classic pitcher's duel, 3-1. Once again, Torre gave the ball to Rivera with a runner on third and one out in the eighth inning, and the great closer locked down another victory.

  There would be no need for Rivera in Game 3. The Yankees won, 19-8, with a prodigious show of hitting in a game that had been tied after three innings, 6-6. The Yankees were rolling, up three games to none, a lead no team in the history of baseball ever had lost.

  All was not perfect, though. Yankees starter Kevin Brown, who was supposed to be the ace of the staff, and who had battled back problems most of the year, had pitched horribly and did not look right. In only two innings, Brown gave up four runs on five hits and two walks before Torre sent Vazquez to replace him to start the third inning. (Vazquez, too, was hammered, yielding four runs on seven hits and two walks in 4⅓innings.) It was only the latest episode to explain why Brown engendered no confidence from his teammates. Brown had a famously rotten temper and a surly disposition, attributes that did not serve him well at a time in his career when he could no longer throw as hard as he once did and didn't have the wherewithal to concede to his age and battered body in order to make adjustments.

  Brown had missed seven weeks over the summer because of a strained lower back and also because of an intestinal parasite. On September 3, pitching against Baltimore, Brown was staked to a 1-0 lead when he gave up a run in the second inning, yielded another in the third, tweaked his knee while covering first base in the fifth, and was struck on the right forearm by a run-scoring hit in the sixth that stretched the Orioles’ lead to 3-1. It was all too much for him and his short fuse to bear. After getting out of the inning, Brown stormed off the field and straight up the runway leading to the clubhouse. Stottlemyre, knowing Brown's low boiling point, and concerned about the shot the pitcher took off his arm, decided he should walk back to the clubhouse to check on the righthander. He found Brown standing in the narrow hallway outside of Torre's office, seething.

  “Are you okay, physically?” Stottlemyre asked him.

  “What's it look like?” Brown snapped back.

  Brown wheeled away from Stottlemyre, walking into the main portion of the clubhouse. He stopped at a concrete pillar and hauled off on it, throwing a hard punch. Brown quickly bent over in pain, holding his hand.

  “Tell me that wasn't your right hand,” Stottlemyre said.

  Brown didn't answer. Stottlemyre thought he saw that Brown was holding his left hand.

  “Are you all right?” the pitching coach asked.

  Still no answer. Brown kept ignoring his coach.

  “Kevin,” Stottlemyre said. “I need to know if you can go back and pitch or not. You gotta tell me something.”

  Brown looked down at his hand. Finally he spoke.

  “No,” he said. “I'm not all right.”

  Stottlemyre knew the first order of business was to alert Torre because the Yankees would need to get a pitcher ready to replace Brown. He walked down the runway back to the dugout.

  “Joe,” he said, “you're not going to be too happy with your pitcher.”

  “What'd he do?” Torre asked.

  “He punched a wall,” Stottlemyre said. “Might have broken his left hand.”

  Now Torre left the dugout and headed up the runway and into the clubhouse. He found Brown and immediately began to scream at him.

  “That's the most fucking selfish thing I've ever seen anybody do!” Torre said. “I have no patience for that shit!”

  “I'm sorry,” Brown said.

  Torre's anger and tongue-lashing quickly subsided. He saw that the man in front of him was a beaten man.

  Said Torre, “At that point he was so demoralized. He was never a fighter. He never wanted to fight you. Neither was Randy Johnson, for that matter. I like Kevin Brown. The difference between Kevin Brown and David Wells is that both make your life miserable, but David Wells meant to. I don't think Kevin Brown meant to. I don't think Randy meant to. And that's what I go on.”

  Brown came back from the broken hand to make two starts before the end of the regular season, the first of which was a nightmare against Boston in which he couldn't get out of the first inning. The Red Sox pounded him for six hits and four runs in that abbreviated time. Brown simply generated no good feelings from his team, and ALCS Game 3, while ending up in a blowout victory, continued with Brown as the carrier of bad karma, hardly the role the Yankees had in mind when they traded for him and his $15 million per year salary to take the sting out of losing Pettitte and to provide a return volley to the Red Sox for getting Schilling.

  Buried within the Game 3 win was another troubling sign. Torre brought in setup reliever Tom Gordon to pitch the ninth inning with the score 19-8. It was the third straight game in which Gordon was used. Why would Torre use his key eighth-inning reliever in a blowout? Gordon badly was in need of a confidence boost. He appeared jittery in both Game 1 and Game 2, giving up two runs and failing to pitch cleanly in both outings. Torre thought giving him the ninth inning, with nobody on base and an 11-run lead, would relax Gordon and give him confidence that would carry over into the next time Torre needed him in a tight spot. Nonetheless, Gordon still appeared on edge. With one out he gave up a double to Trot Nixon. Then he uncorked a wild pitch. He did strike out Millar and retired Bill Mueller on a fly ball to end the inning without a run scoring. It represented progress for Gordon, but only by a small step.

  Vazquez, Brown and Gordon all had struggled, but how much could that really matter at this point? The Yankees led the series three games to none. The Red Sox were as good as dead. In the history of Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL, teams trailing 3-0 in a best-of-seven series were 2-231. The Red Sox had a 0.85 percent chance of winning the series. The only teams to recover from the bottom of that well were the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs and the 1975 New York Islanders. The Yankees were starting Orlando Hernandez in Game 4, the veteran righthander with a 9-3 career postseason record. The Red Sox were starting Derek Lowe, who had pitched himself out of the postseason rotation and was only getting the ball because the scheduled Game 4 starter, Tim Wakefield, pitched in relief in Game 3 to save Francona from blowing out his bullpen in the rout.

  A few hours before Game 4, Epstein watched Schilling muster his way through a bullpen session at Fenway Park, using a special bootlike spike to try to give support to his wobbly right ankle. No one was sure if he could pitch again in the series. Actually no one was sure there were going to be any more games in the series.

  On his way from the bullpen to the dugout, Epstein was stopped by reporters on the warning track, down the right-field line. They had obituaries and epitaphs to write about this Red Sox team and they wanted the team's general manager to cooperate. Epstein wasn't playing along.

  “Guys,” he pleaded. “We have one game to win tonight. That's our focus.”

  The line of questioning didn't end. A columnist, with the sound of the Yankees’ bats still ringing in his ears after the 19-8 shellacking, asked Epstein, “Is what happened yesterday an indictment of the lack of professionalism in your clubhouse, especially contrasted to the Yankees? Is that a sign that you can't win with the kind of lawlessness in your clubhouse?”

  “Guys,” Epstein said, barely concealing his anger, “we might not win, but it has absolutely nothing to do with our makeup.”

  Epstein marched off into the clubhouse. He was hot. It wasn't the reporters that bothered him most. It was how everything invested in this season, going back to the motivation to r
edeem the Aaron Boone game, to the stealth securing of Schilling, to the hiring of Francona, to the bold trade of Garciaparra … all of it could be washed down the drain without winning so much as one game against the Yankees.

  “It was just a thought in the back of my head that wouldn't go away,” Epstein said. “I was so pissed off about the possibility of getting swept. I'm thinking, I cannot fucking believe a team this good that played so well down the stretch and could so easily win the World Series is going to be swept by the Yankees. We cannot let it happen.”

  When Epstein looked around the room he saw reason to be encouraged.

  “They were still really loose,” he said of his players. “They had incredible makeup.”

  Millar, the first baseman who was always quick with a quote, a laugh or a joke, was walking around the room saying the same thing over and over again: “Don't let us win one! Don't let us win one!” It became the idiots’ rallying cry.

  As Millar recounted, “I was thinking, You better beat us in Game 4, because if we win it … look out. I didn't like our matchup in Game 4. I didn't know how we were going to do it, but don't let us win. Because now we've got Pedro in Game 5 and now we've got Schilling in Game 6, and in Game 7 anything can happen. So I knew once we could win that game, the entire pressure went to them. We didn't have any pressure. We were supposed to lose. We're down. Now we're just having fun. Now we're going to watch them choke. That's basically what it boils down to. We're going to have fun and keep battling. And those were great games.”

  The Yankees scored first, on a two-run home run by Alex Rodriguez in the third inning. It would be the last time Rodriguez drove in a base runner in the postseason in this series and the next three postseasons combined, a span of 59 at-bats overall in which he batted .136, including 0-for-27 with 38 total runners on base. The Yankees lost the lead when Boston nicked Hernandez for three runs in the fifth, then seized it right back with two runs in the sixth. The tie-breaking run scored on an infield hit by Tony Clark. Torre put the 4-3 lead into the hands of Tanyon Sturtze, not Gordon, and Sturtze came through with two scoreless innings.