by Joe Torre
“It was more of a joke, more just messing around,” Millar said. “It's not like we got drunk. That's what I got heat for, people thinking we got hammered. We did a toast. The next thing you know, we won.”
Schilling, on one good ankle and one gruesome one, was spectacular. This game was the very reason why Epstein had recruited him over Thanksgiving dinner. Schilling fired seven strong innings in which he allowed only one run, and that was a home run by Williams in his last inning, and permitted just four hits and no walks. The Yankees never did bunt on the man with the bloody sock. Boston won, 4-2, scoring all of its runs in the fourth inning, three of them on a two-strike, two-out, opposite field home run by Mark Bellhorn against Lieber.
“We had a little role reversal with Boston,” Giambi said. “Until they got Schilling to go with Pedro, we could beat them. Then once they had that extra guy, that's what turned the table for them. That's where they turned the tide on us.”
The series was tied. The Yankees had the look of one of those cadavers that made possible the procedure on Schilling's ankle. Torre had a huge problem as soon as Game 6 ended: he still did not know who was going to pitch for the Yankees in Game 7. The Yankees’ lack of reliable starting pitching had come to a head. Over the previous winter the Angels had signed Bartolo Colon, the Astros had signed Pettitte, the Red Sox had stolen Schilling out from under the Yankees, and the Yankees had lost Clemens, Pettitte and Wells and replaced them with … Brown, Vazquez, Lieber, Hernandez and Loaiza. Mussina and Lieber were not available because they had pitched Games 5 and 6. Torre had no good options.
Hernandez wasn't an option at all. El Duque had told Stottle-myre he was not available on two days of rest after throwing 95 pitches in Game 4. (Lowe, his opposing starter who threw 88 pitches in that same game, was Boston's pick to start Game 7.)
Loaiza wasn't an option, either. He had only one day of rest after throwing 59 pitches out of the bullpen in Game 5.
Vazquez had three days of rest after throwing 96 pitches in less than five innings in his shaky relief outing in Game 3. Torre could not trust him. The Yankees thought Vazquez, who turned 28 that summer, would be exactly the kind of young gun their staff needed. He did look the part for half of a season, going 10-5 with a 3.56 ERA and earning Torre's selection for the All-Star Game. But mysteriously and with no apparent injury Vazquez became completely unreliable. He went 4-5 with a 6.92 ERA in the second half of the season.
“The biggest shock for me was Vazquez,” Torre said. “He pitches Opening Day, I picked him for the All-Star Game, and it was ridiculous where he went after that. He was a huge pitcher for us, because all of a sudden we were getting younger. I remember Cash said to me, ‘I can get Randy Johnson from Arizona, but they want Vazquez.’ I said, ‘I wouldn't make that deal.’ That's what I thought of him early on. Later on, after the season, you could go ahead and give him up.”
So Vazquez really wasn't an option to inspire any confidence. That left Kevin Brown, the 39-year-old pitcher with the bad back, the carrier of bad karma, and the guy who looked hurt and ineffective in Game 3 in only his fourth game since breaking his left hand in a childish fit of anger. Were the Yankees really going to trust Game 7 to Brown? Not even Torre was sure of that. The Yankees were never sure of his brittle physical condition. As soon as Game 6 ended, Torre went looking for Brown in the clubhouse. He found him in the players’ lounge off the main clubhouse. Brown was sitting at a table, just past the bar area, with his back to the door of the clubhouse. Torre sat down in a chair across from him, with his back to the wall. Stottlemyre pulled up a chair, too. Other players were milling about.
“I was just trying to make a decision,” Torre said. “We're trying to keep from choking to death at that point. Because Lieber pitched pretty well but he gave up the three-run homer to Bellhorn and that was the difference in the game. Everybody was as tight as a drum, which was understandable, because we had lost three games in a row.”
Torre looked Brown in the eye and said, “You tell me: Can you pitch tomorrow? I don't need a hero. I need somebody who can do the job.”
It was virtually the same speech Torre gave to a worn-down Clemens in the training room before Game 5 of the 2001 Division Series. Clemens assured Torre he could do it that night, and gave him five good innings.
“That's basically what I was hoping for from Brown, something to sort of settle the game,” Torre said. “But he was so unlike anything I thought he was supposed to be. I watched him pitch in Texas and his shit was so good … But he was never satisfied with his stuff. He had issues. It was sad.”
Torre continued with Brown.
“I need a pitcher tomorrow,” he said. “You're one of my choices. I'm not going to give you the ball unless you understand what we need to do here. You need to look at me and tell me.”
“I'll take the ball,” Brown said.
Said Torre, “He gave me a positive response. I would have given it to Vazquez if I sensed it was something like, ‘Well, if you want me to …’ I didn't get, ‘If you want me to.’ To me, he was willing to take on the responsibility.”
The Yankees’ season, and the possibility of warding off the greatest collapse of all time, had come down to this: they were giving the ball to Kevin Brown, a guy with a bad back, and a guy his teammates did not particularly trust, understand or like.
“I thought, It's over,” Borzello said. “It's over because Kevin Brown had no chance at all and neither does Javier Vazquez or anybody else. It's over. I remember standing in the outfield with Mussina and a couple of other guys during batting practice and we were just talking about it. ‘We have no chance. There's just no chance of winning this game. We lost the series.’ I remember that. I remember just standing in the outfield in Game 7 like we had already lost.
“People didn't trust Brown. He was never part of the team, and now our hopes were on him. We let it get to that point. And there's no way we're going to be able to survive. We had our shots. We had three games to do it and now it's come to this. We deserve to lose. I mean, of all people … Kevin Brown. Some guys hated him. Guys just didn't understand him. He always had something wrong, his back, this or that.”
Said Mussina, recalling the team's feeling before Game 7, “We're finished. That was the feeling after Game 6. As soon as Game 6 ended.”
There were no more Andy Pettittes or David Wellses or David Cones to turn to at a time like this. The 2004 Yankees had an entirely different DNA from the championship Yankee teams. Starting with the trade for A-Rod and his need to be needed, continuing with Lofton in spring training fretting over the All-Star ballot, Con-treras and Vazquez being unable to pitch in New York, Sheffield moping for two months because he wasn't sure his manager wanted him, Giambi becoming a nonfactor because of his tumor and BALCO connection, and Brown, the broken-down lone wolf on whose cranky back rested all of the Yankees’ hopes … The core of trust that had served the Yankees so well was now diminished by an influx of outside stars who brought their individual needs and anxieties into the equation.
“It goes back to David Cone,” Borzello said. “David Cone never, ever would tell you anything was wrong with him. I remember charting a game, and the first three pitches of the game were 78 miles an hour. I thought they were splitters. And after the game— he went five innings, and he won the game—I walked over to him. I said, ‘Coney you were throwing 78 to 82, tops, with your fastball. Do you want me to hand this chart in?’
“Now this was before they started putting up velocities on the stadium scoreboards, so I'm the only one who knew how hard he was throwing. It wasn't on TV. It wasn't in the stadium. And he goes, ‘Really? Yeah, I really didn't have much, did I?’ I go, ‘You didn't have much?’ He goes, ‘You might want to bump it up so you don't scare anybody’
“He never thought he couldn't win the game. And Kevin Brown was not that. It was, ‘If I wasn't throwing 98 I can't win.’ And guys didn't like that. It's a lack of competitiveness.”
Torre knew his team was tight
before Game 7, so he called a quick meeting in the clubhouse. He tried to relax his players by staying upbeat and asking other people to speak, including Yogi Berra and Hideki Matsui, who was always good for a laugh when he would end meetings in his thick Japanese accent with one of the few En glish phrases he had mastered: “Let's kick their fuckin’ ass!”
Said Torre, “There is a little uneasiness at that point, and you'd like to bring a little levity into it. I was just trying to lighten the mood at that point. I just had a sense that Kevin Brown really wasn't a good sale in the clubhouse.”
Naturally, the idiots on the other side of the field were, if possible, even looser than the game before. Lowe, the starting pitcher, was so loose that only then did he realize he had left his spikes back in Boston. Lou Cucuzza, the visiting clubhouse manager at Yankee Stadium, had to call a local sporting goods store to find spikes for Boston's Game 7 starting pitcher.
“We left our hotel rooms and all I said before we left was, ‘Today we have a chance to shock the world,’ “ Millar said. “It's never been done. We were down 0-3. We were down in Game 4. We were down in Game 5. ‘Today we have a chance to shock the world!’ When we left our hotel rooms and checked out we knew we were going back to Boston that night after a chance to shock the world and that was the truth. How many times can you say that in your lifetime? The world is watching this game. The world knows the ramifications. That group, that team, changed the Red Sox franchise.
“Teams win championships. Not players. Our team was just too tight—sticking together, grinding things out. And that's what I try to stress to this day: teams win championships. Not salaries. Not looks. Not players. Teams.”
The Red Sox had become more like the championship Yankees than the Yankees—except, of course, for the long hair, beards, irreverence and shots of whiskey. For Game 7 they stuck to Millar's Game 6 pregame preparation: no batting practice on the field, no Yankeeography, but shots of Jack Daniel's all around.
Game 7 was a blowout. It was over by the second inning. Brown was as bad as the Yankees feared. He faced nine batters and retired only three of them. Ortiz hit a two-run home run in the first inning. The Red Sox loaded the bases in the second inning with a single and two walks, prompting Torre to replace Brown with Vazquez. Damon slammed Vazquez's first pitch for a grand slam. It was 6-0 before the Yankees even had a base runner or a chance to get their fourth batter to the plate.
“Looking back, he wasn't very good,” Torre said of Brown, who had a 21.60 ERA in the ALCS. “It's the old thing about pitching hurt or pitching stupid. Pitching hurt, or playing hurt, is when you can go out there and still get the job done. Playing stupid is when you can't get the job done. Now you're letting everybody down.”
The final score was 10-3. The rise of the Red Sox was complete. They had wiped out all of the ground the Yankees established over Boston as the superior team from 1996 through 2003. The Red Sox, better than any other franchise, had exploited the explosion of information and revenues that had changed the baseball landscape since the Yankees were winning titles. Most of the key players in the key moments of the 2004 ALCS were obtained as the Red Sox rode the cutting edge of player evaluation: Ortiz, Millar, Mueller, Roberts … all of them were obtained cheaply and without much competition because Boston understood the importance of measuring a player by his ability to get on base rather than the traditional but flawed yardstick of batting average. That advantage would go away as statistical analytical methods became mainstream, a factor in helping to usher in a parity in the industry that also conspired against the Yankees.
The last bit of ground Boston conquered to gain control of baseball's Peloponnesian War was represented by Schilling, the ace they squired out from under the Yankees while the turkey and stuffing were cooking. Torre always maintained that the foundation to the Yankees’ championship years was pitching, particularly starting pitcher. While the Yankees lost their way on making evaluations and acquisitions on starting pitchers, the Red Sox knew Schilling was the last piece to the kind of championship rotation that the Yankees once flaunted.
“In past seasons, the Red Sox always started out really well,” Torre said, “because they had guys who, whether it was a retread or whatever it was, would pitch well early. And then eventually the cream rises to the top and the guys who aren't as good would be exposed. And it really wasn't until they addressed their pitching that they became this force. They always had Pedro, but there was always a way we could get around Pedro. We could just hold them at bay until we could run up his pitch count to get him out of the game. Then we'd win.”
The Yankees’ superiority stopped dead cold in that 2004 ALCS. The Yankees were saddled not only with the worst collapse in baseball history, but also the insult of having the hated Red Sox spill champagne in their stadium. Torre brought his team together for a brief meeting after the game. He thanked his players for their effort. And when he looked around the room he realized that the Yankees, who once came to know the World Series as an expected extension of their season, were full of players who never had been there before.
“The sad part about this for me,” Torre told them, “is the guys in this room that have never been in the World Series. Guys like Tony Clark, one of the classiest guys I've ever been around.”
Said Torre, “Of course, the guy I didn't mention who was in the back of my mind was Don Mattingly. All those years with the Yankees, and he had never been to the World Series.”
Torre picked up the telephone in his office and called over to the visiting clubhouse. He congratulated his friend, Francona. He asked to speak to Wakefield, the pitcher who one year earlier was near tears in that same clubhouse after giving up the home run to Aaron Boone. Now Wakefield was going to the World Series. After he hung up the phone, Wakefield said out loud, to no one in particular, “I'll never forget that phone call. That shows so much class.”
So it was done. The 2004 Yankees were history. They would be remembered for all the wrong reasons. How did it go so wrong? What would most stick with the players about the failure to close out the Red Sox? Mussina thinks about those questions and he thinks about the same man who closed out all those championships before Mussina joined the Yankees in 2001.
“We were up 3-0 and Mo came in again with the lead and lost it,” Mussina said. “He lost it again. As great as he is, and it's amazing what he does, if you start the evaluation again since I got here, he has accomplished nothing in comparison to what he accomplished the four years before. He blew the World Series in ‘01. He lost the Boston series. He didn't lose it himself, but we had a chance to win in the ninth and sweep them, and he doesn't do it there.
“I know you look at everything he's done and it's been awesome. I'll admit that. But it hadn't been the same in those couple of years. That's what I remember about the ‘04 series.”
It wasn't long after Game 7 that Torre received a call from George Steinbrenner.
“Boss, I feel bad,” Torre told him. “I'm sorry it happened. But you can't lose any sleep over this. I wish I could sit here and tell you I wish I had done something different. I mean, Game 7, we didn't have any options. And I mean, Game 4 you put Mariano Rivera on the mound with a lead in the ninth inning and you lose the game. Game 5, you have a two-run lead with Gordon on the mound and you lose the game. What do you change? You don't change anything.”
But deep down, Torre knew Steinbrenner wasn't going to let go so easily of such a painful defeat. Torre's Teflon status as Yankees manager was gone. The lion tamer who somehow could always stick his head into the mouth of the big cat named Steinbrenner and emerge unscathed no longer had the same magic touch. He was on dangerous ground now. From this moment on, each year for him would become more difficult than the last.
“Obviously the embarrassment got to him,” Torre said. “There was more after that with him. That's when this whole underground campaign started with me.”
11
The Abyss
If the 2003 World Series defeat to the Ma
rlins caused the Yankees to lose their way in the subsequent off-season, the crushing 2004 loss to the Red Sox sent them even deeper and more horribly off course, like a ship wandering at sea without any instrumentation. Their response to losing to Schilling and the pitching-fortified Red Sox, the newly crowned champions of baseball, was to seek starting pitching over the winter, even if it meant rejecting a 27-year-old switch-hitting free agent center fielder coming off a 38-homer season, Carlos Beltran, who was willing to take a 20 percent discount to bring his young legs to the Yankees.
The Yankees were fixated on pitching, and this is what they came up with in one 22-day shopping spree they would quickly regret: Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright and Randy Johnson. With that trio joining the creaky and cranky Kevin Brown, his ALCS Game 7 bomb added to his oversized baggage, the Yankees had one of the most physically and emotionally fragile rotations you could possibly put together, even if you tried doing so. Predictably, the Yankees’ rotation in 2005 was such a mess that Torre needed 14 starting pitchers to get through the year. Only once before had the Yankees needed to put more starters to work, and that was during wartime, in 1946, when they used 16.
The 2005 Yankees were such a wreck, such a slapdash collection of parts that didn't fit or work, so full of organizational backbiting and clubhouse dysfunction, and another 60 degrees of separation removed from the championship Yankee teams, that at the end of the year pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre quit and Torre seriously questioned whether he should follow his friend out the door.
“I didn't know if I wanted to come back,” Torre said. “That was the first year of my three-year contract. I was prepared to see if they wanted me, and if they didn't, I would find a way to get out of this thing.”