The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  The crushing defeat to the Red Sox brought out the worst in the Yankees: a quick-fix approach to team building, with little regard to the role character played in fitting into New York and in the Yankees clubhouse, and a sort of top-down anger and frustration over not winning the World Series for all of four years. Torre and Steinbren-ner virtually stopped speaking to one another that year. The mood around the Yankees had turned so sour that by just the third game of the season—and the first defeat—fans at Yankee Stadium were booing the great and graceful Mariano Rivera. The closer entered that game against the Red Sox with a 3-2 lead and left the mound trailing 6-3. Only one of the five runs scored off him was earned.

  “It was one of the only times I took him out of a game in the middle of an inning and the fans booed,” Torre said. “That's the one time I was totally upset and shocked by the fan reaction.”

  Five days later, in Boston's opener, the Yankees stood there watching the Red Sox reap the spoils of war: the presentation of the 2004 world championship rings. There was much speculation about what the Yankees would do during the ceremony. Would they stay ensconced in their clubhouse? Torre held a brief meeting with his players after batting practice.

  “The only thing I'm going to tell you, guys, is I'm not going to make you go out there,” Torre said. “But they've had to put up with a lot of shit when we won. And I think we can just show what we're made of by understanding that they earned it. They won. You can't ignore it. So I'm not telling you to go out there. But I'm going out there when they're getting their rings.”

  Said Torre, “And everybody came out. It was tough. Another one of those trips to the dentist's office. But it's one of those things that the more you think about it, the more uncomfortable it is, but you also have a better understanding. And I always try to nail perspective as a part of things.”

  The Yankee team that stood in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park that afternoon represented another rung down from the championship teams. General manager Brian Cashman would later describe this period of decline in the organization as heading toward “an abyss.” And if there was a symbol of that impending abyss, it was Pavano. Torre had some inkling, but not a strong one, that Pavano might be a problem when he happened to run into him at a restaurant in West Palm Beach, Florida, over the previous winter. Torre was attending the wedding rehearsal dinner of a nephew. Pavano seemed slightly timid, even socially ill at ease. Torre, having watched players such as Kenny Rogers, Jose Contreras and Javier Vazquez underperform as Yankees because they were uncomfortable in New York, came away with a concern about Pavano, but the hesitation wasn't nearly as strong as the memory of watching Pavano throw nine strong innings against the Yankees in the 2003 World Series.

  “He was at the top of my list,” Torre said about the free agent market that winter. “I was just a little uneasy with some of the questions he asked. I reported back to Cash, and still that other image, the World Series image, kept coming back at me. I wasn't as put off by Pavano as much as I was about Kenny Rogers, when I sat with him back in ‘95.”

  Pavano and his agent, Scott Shapiro, embarked on a tour of the country to solicit offers. The Mariners, Red Sox, Tigers and Reds were among the many teams with strong interest in the right hander. Pavano was getting a bevy of four-year offers—the Mariners were close to $48 million with escalator clauses that would bring him even more money—when Shapiro told him the Yankees were looking for an answer soon. The Yankees already had agreed to terms on a three-year, $21 million deal with Jaret Wright, who was coming off a 15-win season for the Braves but whose long history of arm problems made him a significant medical risk. They also were deciding on whether to bring back Jon Lieber. Pavano had grown up in Connecticut rooting for the Yankees. Shapiro gave Pavano the standard disclaimer about pitching for the Yankees: the expectations and attention are greater in pinstripes than anywhere else.

  “I want to be a New York Yankee,” Pavano told Shapiro.

  There was trouble from the start. The Yankees signed Pavano for $39.95 million over four years. Pavano had been under the impression that he was getting $40 million from the Yankees, and he would soon fire Shapiro over the misunderstanding. Shapiro even offered to give Pavano the $50,000 himself by taking it out of his agent's commission, but that did not placate Pavano, who moved on to his fourth agent.

  There were other troubling signs regarding Pavano. The Boston baseball writers invited Pavano, a Connecticut native, to attend their annual off-season dinner. Pavano agreed to it. On the day of the dinner, Pavano's girlfriend called up Shapiro and said, “Carl's not going to be able to make it. He wants me to tell you that he's sick, but he's not. But that's what he told me to say.”

  Shapiro wanted to arrange a casual dinner for Pavano with the New York press corps to ease his transition to the Yankees. It would be an informal question-and-answer, get-acquainted session with the writers covering the team. When Shapiro presented the idea to Pavano, the pitcher responded, “I don't want to meet with those fucking assholes.”

  On the day of Pavano's first game at Yankee Stadium, he met his mother in the executive lobby of Yankee Stadium and was mortified to see her wearing a Yankees “NY” on her cheek in face paint. “Take that crap off your face. You're embarrassing me,” he sternly told her. The words were meant to be sarcastic, but Yankee officials standing there were uncomfortable with the manner in which Pavano rebuked his own mother in front of them.

  “Whoa, did he just say that to his mom?” said a person who was there.

  Pavano made 17 starts for the Yankees in 2005—he was hit hard, going 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA, a significant jump from his 3.00 the previous year in the softer National League—before shutting it down for the season in June with a sore right shoulder. The Yankees learned very quickly that Pavano was not cut out to pitch in New York.

  “Partway through that first year,” Mussina said, when asked when he came to that conclusion. “He said some stuff to me in the dugout about playing someplace else. He was referring to some other teams he had talked to when he was a free agent. He just didn't like being under the microscope. He couldn't play being under the microscope every day.”

  So Pavano's choice was not to play at all?

  “That's what it turned out to be,” Mussina said.

  In August, while the Yankees were playing the White Sox, bullpen catcher Mike Borzello brought up Pavano to Tim Raines, the former Yankees outfielder who was a coach with Chicago.

  “Tim Raines told me, ‘Pavano? He's never going to pitch for you. Forget it,’ “ Borzello said. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘The guy didn't want to pitch in Montreal. There was always something wrong with him. In Florida, same thing. He didn't want to pitch except for the one year he was pitching for a contract. I'm telling you, he's not going to pitch for you.’ “

  Raines turned out to be right. Over the life of the four-year contract Pavano made only 26 starts and won just nine games, or a cost of $4.44 million per win for the Yankees’ investment. He missed extended stretches of time because of the sore shoulder, a bruised buttocks, two broken ribs suffered in a car accident about which he failed to notify the team, a strained elbow and eventually major elbow surgery. His Yankees teammates wrote him off as a guy who milked any physical ailment as an excuse not to have to pitch.

  “The players all hated him,” Torre said. “It was no secret.”

  Said Borzello, “Guys on that team despised him. One day Jeet walked by him and said, ‘Hey Pav. You ever going to play? Ever?’ Wow. That was a damaging comment, coming from Jeter. He didn't say a whole lot, but when he said something like that, it was pretty piercing.”

  There was one time Torre called bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan and Pavano into his office, because Kerrigan reported that a defiant Pavano had told him, “I'm not blowing out my arm for this organization.”

  “Pav,” Torre said, “this organization gave you $40 million and has been patient with you. What I want to know is, for what organization would you be willing to
risk blowing out your arm?” Pavano said he couldn't remember saying such a thing to Kerrigan.

  What bothered Torre most about Pavano was that the pitcher had no sense of his responsibility to his teammates. Pavano made that clear in 2006 when he hurt himself in the car wreck, when he drove his 2006 Porsche into a tractor trailer. The accident occurred just when the Yankees were about ready to activate him from a rehabilitation assignment. Torre telephoned Pavano and told him, “It's nice to go out. I know you like to go out, but you've got a commitment here. You've got a bunch of players that need for you to be a pitcher.”

  Pavano never did get it. “He was always a little skittish when you talked to him,” Torre said.

  At the end of that season, Cashman was ready to send Pavano home. The pitcher was on perpetual rehab in Tampa, and he wasn't going to be able to help the Yankees down the stretch.

  “No,” Torre told Cashman. “Have him come to St. Pete on the last road trip.”

  Torre knew Pavano's teammates loathed him, and he wanted them to be able to vent their frustration to the pitcher rather than carrying it over into a new season. He wanted Pavano in the Yankees clubhouse when the team played the Devil Rays in St. Petersburg.

  “Let them get this shit out of the way,” Torre told Cashman. “They can see him, get on him, whatever they're going to do to him.”

  Cashman agreed and told Pavano to come to the games in St. Petersburg. When Pavano arrived Torre explained to him why he wanted him there.

  “You're going to have to get this shit out of the way,” he told Pavano.

  When Pavano showed up in the Yankees clubhouse, something far worse than cruel jokes and frat-boy razzing took place: nothing. The Yankees said nothing to him. They wanted nothing to do with him. He had turned himself into a nonperson.

  “Unfortunately, nobody got on him,” Torre said. “That's a bad sign. They ignored him.”

  The next spring, Mussina made it clear that the Yankee players had no confidence in Pavano. He told reporters about Pavano's injuries and extended absences, “It didn't look good from a player's and teammate's standpoint. Was everything just coincidence? Over and over again? I don't know.”

  It was a stunning and rare public rebuke among teammates, a violation of the unwritten code among teammates. But Pavano was so far removed from the natural bonds of a team that Mussina felt free to fire away. Torre called both Mussina and Pavano into his office. He knew Mussina, in the strictest sense of the code, was out of line, but he also knew that Mussina's feelings about Pavano represented the feelings of the entire clubhouse, and it was good for Pavano to know he faced major repair work when it came to his relationship with his teammates.

  “Moose didn't do the right thing, the way he went about it,” Torre said. “But they did talk and they got past that, and all of a sudden he started to get some support back.

  “Andy Pettitte had elbow issues in 1996, and you just have to realize, ‘I'm either going to pitch or I can't play this game anymore.’ Pav, unfortunately, never faced that reality. In saying that, am I saying he wasn't hurt? No. Not at all. But would it have made a difference if he had pitched, based on where he wound up, anyway? You're still capable of getting people out.

  “He's a guy with all these issues in his life and he's not sure what's important and what isn't. Was he afraid of failing in New York? It must be that way because I talked to Larry Bowa, and he saw the bulldog on the mound when he pitched against the Phillies, and I saw it in the World Series. We just didn't see that with the Yankees.”

  Pavano was not some idle mistake. It was part of a trend. The collection of expensive pitchers imported to the Yankees who were ill-suited for New York, either because they were too emotionally fragile or broken down, was growing at a staggering rate. Weaver, Contreras, Vazquez, Wright, Brown, Pavano …

  “I'm certainly not a player evaluator,” Mussina said, “but I generally believe that players are who they are over a period of a certain number of years. They may have a good year here or they may have a bad year here, but in general they play at a certain level, the players who are around long enough. The time a player is coming up to be a free agent, like in his sixth year, let's say all of a sudden he has a year that shoots up. Everybody looks at it like, ‘Oh, now he's got an idea.’ It's not his rookie year. There are four or five other years in there. Let's look at all of them.

  “So you're giving guys—and just using Pavano as an example— you give a guy that's two or three games under .500 for his career a four-year contract for $40 million. Well, I don't understand that. I don't understand that.”

  Brown, of course, because of the 2004 ALCS Game 7 debacle, also was symbolic of poor pitching evaluations steering the Yankees into the abyss, as Cashman called it. His 2005 season began just as 2004 ended: with a bad back and awful results. He started 2005 on the disabled list, the fifth time in six years he had to be put on the shelf.

  When Brown did try to pitch again, he was wretchedly bad. He was, for all intents and purposes, finished as an effective big league pitcher. Moreover, the fans at Yankee Stadium, who would always associate him with the Game 7 abomination, had no use for him, and his teammates barely more than that. On May 3, 2005, Brown took the mound in St. Petersburg against the Devil Rays with an 0-3 record and a 6.63 ERA. His tenure with the Yankees was about to get even uglier. The Devil Rays gave Brown a brutal beating in the first inning, scoring six runs on eight hits before Brown could so much as get a second out. The symphony of hits and base runners played out to a staccaco beat: single, wild pitch, single, ground rule double, run-scoring groundout, single, double, single, single, single. The score was 6-0 after one-third of an inning. After Brown finally managed to get the two outs to end the percussive treatment, he stomped off the field, kept going past Torre and marched up the runway to the clubhouse, shouting as he passed the manager, “I'm done!”

  Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre looked at one another as if to say, “What now?” Brown was infamous for his temper, but was quitting in the middle of a game really an option? Torre turned and left the dugout, taking the runway and then the stairs that led into the visiting clubhouse at Tropicana Field. Torre saw Brown's jersey, hat and glove strewn about the floor, but he didn't see Brown. He did see Mussina, sitting in one of the clubhouse chairs.

  “Where is he?” Torre asked.

  “I don't know,” Mussina said, “somewhere back there.” He motioned toward a back room off the clubhouse. Mussina had seen Brown storm into the clubhouse, fling away his jersey, glove and hat, grab his cell phone from his locker, and disappear, snapping, “I'm done! I'm going home!”

  Torre followed in the direction where Mussina pointed. He turned a corner, and suddenly was stunned at what he saw: Kevin Brown, 40 years old, a six-time All-Star, a two-time ERA champion, a man who had won 207 major league games and earned more than $130 million playing baseball, was curled up on the floor in a tiny crevice in the corner of a storage area in the back of the clubhouse.

  “What are you doing?” Torre said.

  “I'm not going to go out there and pitch anymore,” Brown said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I'm going to go home.”

  “You might as well go home.”

  There was no response from Brown. Torre continued.

  “Because just remember: if you're going to quit on those guys, you can't ever come back. You can never come back. Just understand that. What you just told me? That's what it means. If you're not going to go back out there, you can't even stay here.”

  Brown wore that thoroughly beaten look, the same look he had nine months earlier after he broke his left hand punching a concrete pillar.

  Meanwhile, the top of the second inning was in progress, and there was one out already. The Yankees would need somebody to pitch the bottom of the inning real quickly. Nobody was throwing in the bullpen. Nobody else knew what was going on with Brown.

  “Listen,” Torre said to Brown, “why don't you ju
st get your glove, go back out there and pitch, and let's talk about it later.”

  Brown stood up, walked past Torre and into the main clubhouse. He fired his cell phone clear across the room in the direction of his locker. He picked up his shirt, his hat and his glove and he walked backed toward the dugout. Kevin Brown threw four more innings, surrendering two more runs.

  “He never did bother coming in to talk,” Torre said. “He was banged up. But I think he had some emotional issues. There were a lot of demons in this guy. It was sad.”

  The Yankees lost the game, 11-4, and they lost again, and again and again after that as part of a 1-9 stretch that dropped their record to 11-19, marking only the fifth time in franchise history they posted so many losses in the first 30 games. The other four teams to start so poorly turned out, in fact, to be horrendous teams. Those teams, from 1912, 1913, 1925 and 1966, all lost at least 85 games and finished out of first place by 55, 38, 28½ and 26½ games, respectively. Such was the inglorious company of the 2005 Yankees.

  There exists a mythology that the championship Yankees teams under Torre operated on autopilot, blissfully riding their talent and their will to preordained titles. No team requires no care. Even the most beautiful garden in the world, as amazed and occupied as we might be by its natural beauty, is the work of hours of pruning and weeding and feeding and fastidious attention to detail. The championship teams required their own maintenance, from, among others, the insecurities of Chuck Knoblauch, to the immaturity of David Wells, to the self-critical nature of Tino Martinez, to the overflow intensity of Paul O'Neill, to the neediness of Roger Clemens, and to the overbearing intrusion and influence of George Steinbrenner. Greatness is the ability to mask the difficulty of a task—to make the difficult appear easy. Those Yankee teams epitomized greatness.

  But the Yankees in the middle oughts made nothing look easy. They were rocked by organizational and clubhouse dysfunction that made the maintenance of the team a noisy, constant and exhausting job, like keeping a belching, balky furnace going in the basement of an apartment building. The problems became apparent in 2004 because of the mix of players introduced and worsened in that 2005 season. Not four weeks after the Brown meltdown, Mussina asked to speak to Torre about what he perceived to be a lack of focus and preparation by some of the players. They went to lunch while the team was in Milwaukee.