The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “I laid some things out,” Mussina said. “It was about players I thought weren't going about it the right way. The ‘05 team had some issues the first half of the season.”

  What the Yankees lacked in talent, particularly when it came to starting pitching, was exacerbated by odd personalities and individual agendas in the clubhouse. The mix of players wasn't working, taking the Yankees further and further from the roots of their championships.

  “It's all a continuation of the end of the other group, the group that left after ‘01,” Mussina said. “After ‘01 we lost some guys and after ‘02 we lost some guys, and after ‘03 we lost the pitching staff. Whatever semblance of that other team there was, it certainly was gone after ‘03. It started phasing out after ‘01, but after ‘03 it was just Derek and Posada and Mariano and Bernie who were left. Everybody else was new. The mix wasn't the same.”

  Only days after Mussina voiced his concern to Torre, and on the same trip, and still only one month after the Brown meltdown, another blowup occurred. This time it involved Gary Sheffield and Torre. As the struggling Yankees lost another game, this one in St. Louis, Sheffield appeared to loaf after a ball in right field. Torre, unhappy with the general effort he was getting from his team, held a clubhouse meeting after the game in which he singled out Sheffield and rookie second baseman Robinson Cano for what he thought was a lack of hustle.

  In the days after the meeting, Torre noticed that Sheffield was moping around him. He called him into his office.

  “Do we have an issue?” Torre asked.

  “Yeah,” said Sheffield, who explained he took exception to Torre accusing him in front of the team of not hustling.

  “I was trying to deke the runner,” Sheffield said.

  “Well, if you weren't loafing, I apologize,” Torre said, “because that's what it looked like to me. What else we got?”

  “Well, it was in the paper,” Sheffield said of Torre calling him out.

  “Do you think I told them?” Torre asked.

  “I don't know,” Sheffield said.

  “I don't do that,” Torre said. “I wouldn't do that. Obviously, it came from somewhere else. There were a lot of people in the room. I can't control that. There's no reason for me to go to the media with that.”

  Said Torre, “He seemed to believe me, but he was always a suspicious person.”

  Two years later, speaking to HBO, Sheffield used that clubhouse meeting as evidence to support his opinion that Torre treated black players differently than white players.

  “The only thing I ever wanted to do as a manager was to make sure everybody felt they were being treated fairly,” Torre said. “That's why when Sheffield said something it really blew me away. Because I really went ass over teakettle to try to accommodate him. If I had something he needed to hear, like if he brought his son into the clubhouse, which wasn't allowed, I'd ask Jeter to tell him because he had a relationship with him. If it came from a player it didn't seem somebody was trying to tell him what to do again.

  “At the time I knew none of what he said was true. I just didn't want to fan the flames at that point in time. I had been around the game a very long time, so if there had been an issue I'm sure it would have come out that I slighted people or didn't treat them right. That came out of left field.”

  What the 2005 Yankees needed most of all to establish stability and a presence was an ace. They needed a Schilling, the guy Boston general manager Theo Epstein successfully hunted to bring a “kick your ass” attitude to the Red Sox pitching staff. The Yankees were so sure they had that guy in Randy Johnson that their entire front office elected unanimously to pursue Johnson, who was 41 years old, rather than Beltran, a fleet, athletic everyday player in his prime. They were dead wrong.

  (Beltran had given the Yankees a last-minute, discounted offer before signing with the Mets. Said Torre, “Cash said no, you can't have everything. Beltran wanted to come to us, so he could hide among the other trees. Nobody wants to be that guy to lead. That's what makes Jeter so unique in what he does. Alex, to his credit, wants to be that guy, but as long as Jeter is there he's very aware of that.”)

  Johnson had thrown a perfect game, logged 245⅔ innings, won 16 games and struck out a National League-best 290 batters in 2003 with Arizona. He fit the profile of the stopper the Yankees so desperately needed—the statistical profile, anyway. He was, in fact, a sensitive, hyperaware person who, in the growing tradition of Weaver, Contreras, Vazquez and Pavano, was uncomfortable with the constant criticism and noise that came with playing in New York. Such awkwardness was apparent from his very first day, when he swatted away a news cameraman on the streets of New York while in town for his physical.

  “I was in Hawaii when it happened,” Torre said, “and I talked to him on the phone. I said, ‘Do what you have to do. If you want to apologize, apologize. Just let it go.’

  “But that really wasn't his fault. They never should have put him in that situation. They should've put him in a car or a van and taken him to the hospital. That was our security decision. That was a bad decision. He really had trouble recovering from that, because all of a sudden now all this pressure was on him, because people don't like him to start with. And he would read every single word that was written.”

  Johnson was struck by two baseball neuroses that were amplified in New York: he fretted about what was said and written about him and he worried constantly that other teams were decoding “tells” in his delivery to know what pitch was coming. They most certainly were not the typical qualities of a “kick your ass” staff leader.

  Johnson did not pitch all that badly in New York. He took the ball with regularity. From 2004 through 2007, only four times did a pitcher give the Yankees 200 innings. Johnson did so twice, as many as all other Yankees pitchers combined in those four years. He also won some games, posting a 34-19 record. But he was also hit too hard and was lost too deeply in his own cloud of worry to give the Yankees anything close to the vibe of being a true ace. In those two seasons, for instance, he gave up 95 and 114 earned runs, the two worst such seasons of his long career. His combined ERA in those two seasons with the Yankees was 4.37, which ranked an unimpressive 55th among all ERA qualifiers in that span.

  “The biggest surprise to me was how Randy Johnson could get rattled,” Torre said. “I wish I knew this about him in the 2001 World Series when we played against him. You could rattle him. Every start with Randy it would be, ‘This guy has my pitches, that guy has my pitches …’ There wasn't one team that didn't have a person that told him they were getting his pitches that he would take to heart. I mentioned it to Randy and I said, ‘It's not about the pitches. It's about location. Throw that pitch where you want it and you'll get them out.’

  “He was always so concerned about that. Are they getting my pitches? Do you think they're getting my pitches? The guy hit this pitch.’ I'd go, ‘You just threw it down the middle. When they start laying off pitches they should be swinging at, then yeah.’ But he was the biggest surprise for me. He was probably the most self-conscious superstar I've ever been around. By far.”

  Torre spent hours with Johnson trying to make life easier for him in New York. He would tell Johnson that he shouldn't worry about criticism because, based on his prolific career, he could never satisfy fans and the media, anyway. “You're not going to satisfy people unless you strike out 10 or 12 every game,” Torre would tell him. “Even if you win ballgames, they're going to want to know why you didn't strike out more. So don't even worry about it.”

  One day Johnson came to Torre with a newspaper in his hand. “Look at this!” Johnson said. “This is my apartment! They have pictures of my apartment!”

  “Randy,” Torre said, “why do you even look at the fucking newspaper?”

  Other times Torre would see so much passivity out of Johnson on the mound that he would tell him, “I need to see your teeth out there. You have to growl.” Then Johnson would pitch a good game and say to Torre, “Is that what you m
ean?”

  “Yeah,” Torre said. “Just do what you do like that and find out how good it is, that's all.”

  And then it would be gone, the fire snuffed by something the newspapers or radio put out there about him or that nagging worry that hitters knew what was coming.

  “I brought him into the office, I'd talk to him in the trainer's room, we'd sit in the dugout … a number of places,” Torre said. “It was sad more than frustrating because when we got him I thought we finally had someone you could hook your wagon to, and that wasn't the case.”

  The 2005 Yankees employed a pitching staff with an average age of 34.2 years old, making it the oldest staff in franchise history. They finished ninth in the American League with a 4.87 ERA. Their relative ERA, essentially a measurement of how they compared to the league average, was the Yankees’ second-worst in the previous 70 years, exceeded only by the 1989 club that lost 87 games and finished fifth. Bill James’ Pythagorean formula pegged the Yankees, with that kind of pitching, as worth 90 wins, which would have kept them home for the playoffs with the fifth-best record in the American League.

  Instead, somehow they won the AL East again with 95 wins. (The Yankees actually finished in a tie with the Red Sox, but were awarded first place by virtue of winning the season series against Boston, 10-9. The teams had split their previous 90 games, 45-45.) A clear pattern had developed. The Yankees’ pitching was getting worse and worse and the clubhouse becoming more populated with ill-suited players, but Torre still not only was getting these teams into the playoffs, he was also consistently getting these teams to overperform. The 2005 team was Torre's eighth straight team that won more games than it should have been expected to win. Those teams outperformed Pythagorean expectations by an average of 5.25 wins.

  In a way, by somehow dragging themselves into the playoffs in the later part of those years, those teams were covering up what otherwise would have been even more obvious flaws. The Yankees had nothing close to championship pitching anymore. But they wore the same uniforms as the 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 Yankees, still had Jeter and Williams and Posada and Rivera and Torre, still had the highest payroll in baseball, so therefore they were expected to simply show up and win the World Series as if nothing in baseball had changed in the past five years. They were bound to fail in October.

  The Yankees drew the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the Division Series, a series in which the Angels, who also won 95 games, held home-field advantage by virtue of beating the Yankees head-to-head during the season, 6-4. After the Yankees managed to split the first two games in Anaheim, their season fittingly was fun-neled straight into the hands of Johnson, who would get the ball in Game 3, the swing game, at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees’ answer to Schilling was abysmal.

  Johnson could not get so much as one out in the fourth inning. He faced 17 batters and gave up nine hits. He left with two runners on base in the fourth inning with the Yankees behind, 5-0. All season he never gave off the real glow of an ace, and the reality was all too obvious in Game 3.

  “That's the game where you've got a decided advantage,” Torre said, “and you've just got to go ahead and grab it by the throat. He just never seemed to be comfortable doing it. He never took the ball and said, All right, guys. Follow me.’ You never had the feeling that that was what you were going to get. There's no question that New York is a different place to play. Everything you do is magnified and criticized. He was uncomfortable pitching in New York.

  “He's the one that's supposed to be intimidating. He pitched a horrible game and it's like it didn't surprise him. It surprised Roger Clemens every time he pitched a horrible game.”

  The Yankees, who could still bang the ball with anybody in baseball, hit their way out of the 5-0 hole and actually took a 6-5 lead into the sixth inning. But the Angels battered the Yankees bullpen for six unanswered runs and won, 11-7.

  The Yankees did send the series back to Anaheim by rallying to win Game 4, 3-2, with two runs in the seventh inning. But their pitching, old and creaky, caught up with them again in the deciding game. Mussina, 36, bothered by a strained groin muscle, staggered off the mound in the third inning, having put the Yankees in a 5-2 hole. They lost, 5-3.

  Shortly thereafter, Stottlemyre quit as pitching coach, worn down by the fractious relationship between Yankees officials in New York and Tampa, the latter often choosing to intervene in major league pitching matters. Stottlemyre also quit, however, because he knew Torre's relationship with Steinbrenner had worsened, and he knew one of Steinbrenner's favorite tactics to tweak his manager was to fire one of his favored coaches. Stottlemyre wanted out before Steinbrenner had the chance to use him as a pawn in his war with Torre.

  Torre, too, wasn't sure he wanted to come back to what the job had become. He knew, coming off the bitter 2004 ALCS defeat, that he had little favor left with Steinbrenner. The two of them had engaged in almost no communication throughout the 2005 season. The incidence of criticisms, second-guessing and statements handed or leaked to the media had picked up. Torre was bothered, too, that Yankee officials were feeding questions to YES network reporter Kim Jones designed to corner Torre or to put him in an unfavorable light. The questions themselves didn't bother Torre so much. It was more that Torre, who built his entire relationships with people on trust, understood that the very people who were paying him to help the Yankees win were intentionally trying to undermine him on the team's own network.

  “I was getting paid to do a pre-and postgame show for the YES network,” Torre said. “And they took the fact that they paid me as an opening to tell somebody what to ask me and try to ask tough questions—which I don't know what a tough question is when someone is talking about the game. I mean, they ask you a question about the game, you answer the question. You knew she was uncomfortable asking certain questions, about why'd you bring him in or why'd you do this. It just didn't match up.

  “And then they admitted it. ‘Well, you're getting paid.’ They felt they had the right to do that, which is crazy in my mind. So after the season was over I said, ‘Forget it. We're not going to do it anymore. I don't want your money. I'll answer any question you want, but let's not put a dialogue together designed to put me in a bad light.’

  “It was so obvious that it was all about trying to make me look bad. And I don't know what question was so tough, anyway. If I brought in a pitcher and he got his ass kicked, what's so secretive about that? Everybody saw what happened. I made a decision and it didn't work. It's not like I said, ‘I have to make a decision. Let me flip a coin. Okay, I'll bring this guy in.’ “

  Torre went home and tried to decompress from a draining season. For a few days he spoke to no one in the organization and no one in the media. He didn't know whether he wanted to manage the Yankees anymore, in great part because he didn't know if they wanted him. After Torre had done enough brooding around the house, his wife, Ali, said to him, “Why don't you go down and talk to George?”

  “You're right,” Torre said.

  He had not called Steinbrenner virtually all year, nor had he discussed his relationship with Steinbrenner with the media, and it was time to break the cold war and see if George really did want him back.

  “I disconnected,” Torre said. “I hadn't talked to him. It was all secondhand smoke I was getting, which was the worst.”

  To keep the trip as quiet as possible, Torre chartered a private plane to Tampa. Steve Swindal, the team's managing partner, asked Torre if he minded if Randy Levine flew down with him. “No, not at all,” Torre said.

  Levine met Torre at the airport. The flight was delayed.

  “Maintenance problem,” Torre told Levine. “The ejection seat for you needed to get fixed.”

  They chuckled at the gallows humor. Levine told Torre on the plane ride to Tampa, “We want you back,” so Torre's mood was brightened a bit by the time he walked into the meeting. Torre and Levine joined Steinbrenner and Swindal. They met in Steinbren-ner's office at Legends Field, with Steinbrenner sea
ted at his desk like the captain at the helm. Torre took a seat to Steinbrenner's left.

  “The only reason I'm down here,” Torre said, “is I want to see if you want me to be the manager.”

  Torre wasn't sure what reaction he would get from Steinbrenner to that opening. He had decided well before the meeting that “if there was any hemming or hawing, or if they didn't want me, I would have said, ‘Let's figure a way out of this.’ “

  Steinbrenner did not hesitate.

  “Yes, I want you to manage,” he said.

  Torre was relieved.

  “I can't work for someone if the only reason they're keeping me on is they're paying me,” Torre said. “I want to be comfortable knowing when I do things, they're on my side, that they're pulling for me to do something right.”

  The rest of the meeting was quick and easy. Torre did say that the disconnect between Yankees officials in New York and Tampa needed to be resolved; Steinbrenner agreed. Torre also promised to call Steinbrenner every ten days or so. “I'll make sure we stay connected,” he told him.

  There was one loose end that required immediate attention, and, though Torre did not know it at the time, it would contribute to a rift in his professional relationship with Brian Cashman and, by extension, to the beginning of his end as Yankees manager. The Yankees needed a replacement for Stottlemyre as the pitching coach. Torre mentioned that his choice would be Ron Guidry the former Yankees pitcher who had served as a spring training instructor.