by Joe Torre
“Just like today, too. He said to me, ‘No ground balls. I'm just going to hit in the cage.’ “
The Yankees that day offered only optional hitting in the indoor batting cage. There was no usual pregame hitting on the field, during which Bowa always made sure to hit Cano groundballs.
“And I tell him, ‘No, you're not,’” Bowa said. “‘You're not just going to the cage. You're going to get your ass out here and work. You're 23 years old, not some old veteran who needs a break.’
“See, the thing is you have to remind yourself that he's 23. You have to get on him, but then you ask yourself, who at the age of 23 has it all figured out? But you look at him and you see that he can be as good as he wants to be. As great as he wants to be. He's that talented. He glides into the ball, but unlike most guys who do that, he keeps his hands back. And then when he brings the bat through it stays through the strike zone for a very long time. He's like George Brett that way. He can be as great as he wants to be.”
Cano, of course, took his groundballs that day. With Bowa riding him, Cano would hit .306 in 2007 with 97 runs batted in. Like Cano, Rodriguez knew Bowa was always there to push him. In spring training, for instance, Bowa berated Rodriguez for making soft, lazy throws to second base on the front end of double plays. “You're going to get your second baseman killed!” Bowa told him, and ordered Rodriguez to work on the throws early in the morning on a back field before most of his teammates had even showed up. The gruff Bowa was an important voice to someone like Rodriguez, who otherwise surrounded himself with a cadre of publicity agents and buddies who amounted to a back-slapping club.
“You know the big thing with these guys, they might not tell you they like it, but the real good players, they don't want to hear just that you agree with them,” Bowa said. “I mean, if it happened once it happened ten times in two years with Alex: Alex would come up to me after making a mistake and say, ‘Do you think I should have had that ball?’ And nine times out of ten he makes that play. And I said, ‘Yeah, you've got to catch that ball.’
“After it happened four or five times I told him, ‘Al, every time you come to me, you know you should have made the play or you wouldn't have come to me. I've seen you make mistakes on a line drive, backhand. You don't come to me because you know it's a tough play, but every play you think you should make you come to me. So I'm just going to reaffirm that I know you know you should have made that play.’ And I think the players like when you're being honest. They might not like it at the time, but they like you to be up-front with them.”
Rodriguez, however, already carried one of the highest capacities for work in baseball. The most important push he received from Bowa was not to work, but to keep himself out of trouble. Rodriguez made an obvious effort to do just that in 2007. The goal, as Bowa would say, was to prevent himself from “saying stupid shit.” The Yankees had won nothing more than a Division Series matchup against Minnesota since they acquired Rodriguez, who had become, because of his talent, because of his industry-rattling $252 million contract that remained unsurpassed six years running, and because of his knack for calling attention to himself (not always for the better), the embodiment of Yankee failures. Much of it was unfair, of course, not unlike the prettiest girl in high school becoming an easy target for criticism. Torre knew that, and wanted Rodriguez to know he shouldn't fight it. One day in March, just before the Yankees were to play a spring training game, Torre pulled Rodriguez aside near the dugout.
“Look, a lot of what goes on with you is unfair,” Torre told Rodriguez. “You're the story no matter what happens, if you get four hits or no hits, if we win or if we lose. I understand that. But you can't worry about that. What you've got to do is just play and not worry about what's going to happen. Just let it happen instead of worrying about the consequences.”
Opening Day could not have begun much worse for A-Rod. He dropped the first ball hit to him, a foul pop-up. Batting cleanup— his first game since Torre batted him eighth in the Division Series– clinching defeat to Detroit—Rodriguez struck out with two runners on. It was only the first inning of the first game of the season and he was getting booed. But Rodriguez turned his day and the game around. With the game tied at 5, Rodriguez began the seventh inning with a single off Tampa Bay pitcher Brian Stokes. Running on his own, he stole second base and scored the tie-breaking run on a single by Jason Giambi. The stolen base reflected how Rodriguez had changed his body over the winter, dropping 15 pounds without losing strength and reducing his body fat from 18 percent to 10 percent, an astounding four-month transformation for someone turning 32 years old that summer.
Asked the next night, after the rainout, if he would have attempted a steal in the same situation the previous season, Rodriguez said,”Last year? No way. Because I would have been out by two feet. That wasn't part of my game.
“I knew I wanted to go early in the count. I waited one pitch. I wanted to see if he would slide step and just to get a look at him. But I wanted to be aggressive. The big thing is making sure you take the double play out of order. It's the situation, more so than the pitcher there.”
Rodriguez is a unique talent, a guy who could break a game open with his power or win it with his legs or preserve it with his defense. But, because he lacked the pedigree that comes with a championship, and because he still seemed an awkward outsider trying to earn his pinstripes, he was regarded in his own clubhouse as not wholly reliable.
“The two guys on this team we can't afford to lose are Derek [Jeter] and Jorge [Posada],” one Yankee player said after that second-day rainout. “Pitching is still the name of the game, but if you're talking about guys who are out there every day, we need those two guys. There's nobody to replace them and what they mean to the team is so important. Alex isn't in that same category. He's important, too, but I think we could survive it if he got hurt.”
Of course, Rodriguez was the primary source of righthanded power in a lefthand-dominant lineup and played terrific defense, so the Yankees could not come close to replacing his kind of value if he were hurt. Nonetheless, coming off his 1-for-14 performance in the postseason, and his sometimes awkward clubhouse manner, his perceived value on his own team was less than his actual value. It was a very strange circumstance for a superstar talent.
Fact is, these Yankees, whether they still belonged to Jeter, because of his captaincy or Swiss bank account of goodwill with Yankees fans, or to Rodriguez, because of his talent and knack for creating attention, were still looking to craft an identity in their postchampionship years. If the Yankees expected to win, it was only out of a perceived obligation to the past, not because they truly lived and breathed it. It took a repatriated Yankee such as Andy Pettitte to recognize that kind of important shift in the Yankee culture.
Pettitte won world championships in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 with the Yankees. He left reluctantly after the lukewarm effort by the Yankees to keep him following the 2003 World Series loss to Florida to sign with his hometown Houston Astros. After three seasons in Houston, one of which included another World Series appearance for Pettitte, he jumped at the chance to come back to the Yankees, having missed the energy and demands that come with playing in New York. It had nothing to do with the city itself. Pet-titte almost never ventured into Manhattan. It had everything to do with the playing environment. The Yankees gave him back his old number, 46, his old locker (a spot along the right wall about halfway into the rectangular room), and his old default spot in the rotation, Pettitte being the classic number two starter. He was, in fact, scheduled to pitch that second game of the 2007 season before it was rained out. Sitting at his familiar locker after the game was called, Pettitte knew already that most everything else about the Yankees had changed in his three years away. These Yankees weren't sure who they were, didn't know if they were champions or not and didn't truly believe, the way the championship Yankee teams believed, that they should win.
“I have to be careful with how I say this,” Pettitte said. “
But in the years we were winning here, we expected to win. Everybody. And when we didn't win, it was devastating. I remember 2003, wanting to win so badly. It was personal for me because I hadn't pitched well in the 2001 World Series. And Josh Beckett just took it to us in the World Series and shut us down. We had a great year, but I remember thinking how the year was such a failure. It was such a bitter feeling. Bitter.”
Just the memory of it pained Pettitte. He dropped his head and actually grimaced thinking about a four-year-old memory, especially that last night when Beckett beat Pettitte and the Yankees, 2-0, in what would be the last World Series game ever played at Yankee Stadium. Only seven men ever shut out the Yankees in a postseason game at Yankee Stadium, none since the Hall of Famer Warren Spahn did so back in 1958, and none struck out more batters than the nine Yankees Beckett fanned that night. Pettitte pitched courageously that night, allowing just one earned run over seven innings, but he was the losing pitcher nonetheless. He hated even thinking about it. He picked up his head and continued.
“And here's where I have to be careful,” he said. “I think now we know how difficult it is to win. You have to be careful saying it because you don't want people to think you've lowered the expectations. The goal is still the same. But there's a different feeling now. It's a feeling that we know how difficult it is to win.”
By losing, the Yankees came to know how difficult the winning really was. And maybe now they know that reality a little too well.
“Exactly,” Pettitte said. “That doesn't mean we want to win any less, but the expectation that we will win? That's different now than it was before.”
Jeter, meanwhile, remained wedded to the Yankees’ old-school ways. He took losing hard and didn't tolerate those who did not. He still believed, despite the speech Torre gave in spring training about being proud of 97 wins, that the 2006 season was a failure.
“Maybe if it's a young team that never made the playoffs before they can say it wasn't a failure,” Jeter said. “Not us. Not me. To me it's a failure if you don't accomplish what you set out to accomplish. Because you didn't reach the goal you set it's not a success.”
But wasn't there a point, Jeter was asked, when even you realized that 2006 was a pretty good year, that the Yankees won as many games as anybody in baseball, even with many injuries and a slow start?
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
That was the extent of his answer. It was as if the answer was so obvious that any explanation or expansion of it was superfluous. Twelve inches make a foot. There are 24 hours in a day. Any Yankees season that ends short of a World Series title is a failure. It was an immutable truth. Trouble is, as the Yankees’ roster churned in the six years since they actually had a self-defined successful season, more and more of the Yankees didn't think like Jeter. Losing now was a property of baseball nature that applied as much to the Yankees as it did the 29 other franchises, especially in the first two months of the 2007 season.
The Yankees lost games with a frequency that ranked among the worst Yankees teams of all time. They lost 29 of their first 50 games, a disaster that would have been far worse if not for the spectacular hitting of the newly buffed Rodriguez.
Only five other Yankees teams ever stumbled to a worse start, including only one in the past 93 years: the teams of 1905, 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1990. All of those teams finished with losing records in sixth place or worse. The 2007 Yankees had disaster written all over them.
After those 50 games, the Yankees’ lefthanded hitting, which figured to be the backbone of the offense, was atrocious. Abreu was hitting .228, Damon was hitting .260 and Giambi was hitting .262. None of them were yet in proper game shape.
The back end of the rotation was hardly a surprise: it was as dreadfully unreliable as it had looked on paper. Igawa was so bad that after only six starts the Yankees demoted him and his 7.63 ERA all the way to the Class A Florida State League, essentially to have Steinbrenner's “gurus” of pitching, Nardi Contreras and Billy Connors, give him a beginner's tutorial on pitching. It was mind-boggling to think the Yankees could believe he was worth a $46 million investment and then decide after only six games he needed to learn how to pitch. And Pavano? He was the pitching version of why New York State enacted a lemon law to protect used car buyers. He lasted through spring training and exactly two regular season starts before he was done for the season with an elbow injury.
While the demises of Igawa and Pavano may have been predictable, Mussina, Chien-Ming Wang and rookie Phil Hughes also wound up on the disabled list (Hughes pulled a hamstring in the midst of throwing a no-hitter). The Yankees immediately were caught with a shortage of major league–caliber replacements. In just those first 50 games of the season, Torre was forced to use 11 different starting pitchers, seven of them being rookies and almost none of them with any significant future in the big leagues. One of them, Chase Wright, became the second pitcher in major league history to serve up four consecutive home runs, which he managed to do in his second big league game, in a span of just 10 pitches, in Boston against the Red Sox.
“Our problem right now is we have too many pitchers on the 15-day Pavano,” Mussina said one day in April. “That's what it's officially called now. Did you know that? The Pavano. His body just shut down from actually pitching for six weeks. It's like when you get an organ transplant and your body rejects it. His body rejected pitching. It's not used to it.”
Wins and decent pitching were so hard to come by that Torre quickly reneged on a plan he announced on the first day of spring training that Mariano Rivera would become a one-inning closer. Rivera was 37 years old, and Torre figured he could ease the physical burden on Rivera if he never asked him to get more than three outs, which is the way most managers were pampering their closers.
Rivera, though, sensed immediately that Torre's plan would be subject to change. Rivera was one of the most valuable weapons in baseball, a guy not only with dominating stuff, but also with a freakish efficiency—he rarely went deep into counts, let alone walked hitters—that enabled him to secure more outs than your typical closer. He was a manager's best friend, the go-to solution to a problem. In case of emergency, don't break glass; pitch Mariano.
“We'll see,” a skeptical Rivera said in March of Torre's plan.”I've heard those kinds of things before, and then it doesn't happen. It doesn't matter to me. I pitch when they tell me to pitch and I'll be ready. But let's see.”
Torre's plan lasted until April 21, when one of those typically wild games at Fenway Park against the Red Sox created one of those “in case of emergency” situations. The Yankees took a 6-2 lead into the eighth inning against the Red Sox when Torre had Mike Myers, his lefthanded specialist, pitch to David Ortiz, a lefthanded hitter. Ortiz ripped a double.
Then Torre tried his righthanded setup man, Luis Vizcaino, against the righthanded hitting Manny Ramirez. Vizcaino walked Ramirez. Vizcaino did get J. D. Drew to ground out, but then Mike Lowell rapped a single to drive in Ortiz. Now it was 6-3 with the tying run at the plate and one out. It was time for Torre to junk his plan and go to his best pitcher.
“I lied, what can I tell you?” Torre would say after the game. “I didn't plan on lying, but I did. As it turned out, he didn't pitch two innings.”
Rivera blew the lead. Jason Varitek singled to drive in one run, Coco Crisp tripled to send home two more, and Alex Cora dumped a bloop single over the head of Jeter to account for the last run of what was a 7-6 Boston win.
For the Yankees, it was the start of seven consecutive losses, four of them to the Red Sox, including an 11-4 mugging at Yankee Stadium for loss number seven. It was April 27 and Torre was officially put on notice that his firing was imminent—well, if you consider newspaper leaks as the official form of Yankees front-office communication. “Joe in Jeopardy as Yanks Bomb,” the New York Post declared the next morning. Wrote George King, “Yesterday, the word out of Tampa was that Steinbrenner ‘was very displeased’ about the way his high-price stable of talent is u
nderachieving and was thinking about a change.”
The story questioned whether Torre was to blame for the woeful pitching and inept hitting, going on to say, “If Steinbrenner and the voices he is listening to believe the answers are ‘yes,’ and if the Yankees get swept this weekend by the Red Sox, it's not out of the realm of possibility that The Boss could make a change.”
Translation: Torre's job was in the hands of starting pitchers Jeff Karstens and Chien-Ming Wang over the next 48 hours.
“It does bother me, the leaks,” Torre said. “It's an insult. If you have a problem, come to me. Being with the Yankees this long, devoting myself to the organization … Somebody doesn't like what you do, then just tell me. Like in 2006, when I wasn't consulted at the end of the season. They left me hanging out there, and now I'm going to have a press conference and I don't know if I'm working or not. Then I have George calling me five or 10 minutes before my press conference and telling me I'm coming back, and then I'm even playing the role. ‘Thanks a lot.’
“It's an insult because you think you deserve more than that. My wife tells me I'm overly sensitive and I said, ‘You're probably right.’ But there is a certain dignity to what you do.
“Again, as Ali pointed out, well, you know who you're working for. It's just the way they operate. And I didn't mind it when you win. And George still goes to the whip all the time. That's fine. You sort of grin at that and respect why he's successful and what he's made of. But there is a certain time you'd like people to trust what you do rather than question what you do.”