The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Meanwhile, behind the press releases, the real Steinbrenner, not the propped-up one issuing statements through a PR firm, wasn't showing the old fire and brimstone to Torre, either. Before the middle game of the series against the Mets, Cashman was in Torre's office when the general manager's cell phone rang. It was Stein-brenner. The call was a mistake. Steinbrenner had just spoken with Cashman a while earlier, but he had redialed by mistake. Torre saw it as an opportunity and asked to speak to The Boss. Torre liked calling Steinbrenner every couple of weeks or so, just to keep the communication going, tell him how much he appreciated his support, but the conversations were becoming increasingly shorter and generic. Torre and Steinbrenner would be on the phone only for about 30 seconds. This was another one of them.

  “You're my guy,” Steinbrenner told Torre. “Keep your chin up.”

  “Thanks, George,”Torre said.”We're doing our best to make you proud.”

  That was about it. Meanwhile, during these rough days, Cash-man was throwing himself in front of Torre as a human shield, trying to hold off the fire of Steinbrenner and, more accurately, Steinbrenner's lieutenants who had strongly considered firing Torre after the previous season and again in April and in May.

  “Joe's not the problem,” Cashman would tell Steinbrenner. “If you need to fire anybody, fire me, not Joe.”

  The Yankees took two out of three from Boston. They had something to build on. But nothing good was sustainable in those first 50 games, and the inconsistency was reflected mostly in Damon. Every time Damon's game began to percolate just so, he suddenly would appear brittle and disengaged again. May 25 was one of those frequent bad days for Damon. Before the game, while closing in on 2,000 hits, Damon sounded oddly subdued about the possibility of playing long enough to have a shot at 3,000 hits.

  “It's not out of the question,” he said, “but right now I don't know if this is what I want to be doing when I'm 37, 38, 39— playing baseball. I don't know about that.”

  In the game that night, against the Los Angeles Angels, Damon virtually embarrassed himself with his play. He went hitless in three at-bats, dropped a sinking line drive, could not run down two fly balls that should have been outs, and finally asked Torre to take him out of the game. Several of his teammates took notice when Damon asked out and were not happy about it. Here the Yankees had dug themselves a two-month hole to start the season, leaving them with little margin for error, and Damon was pulling himself from the game.

  “Just a bad day at the office,” Damon told reporters after the game. “I don't know what happened. The last few days I felt like the Fountain of Youth was injected in me. And then this happens.”

  Damon was asked if he was better off going on the disabled list than continuing to play like that.

  “I don't know,” he said. “I'll let them decide what's best for the team.”

  On paper, the Yankees looked formidable. With 45-year-old Roger Clemens signing on to make another comeback, their roster included one of the greatest starting pitchers of all time (Clemens), the greatest relief pitcher of all time (Rivera), one of the greatest infielders of all time (Rodriguez) and one of the greatest offensive shortstops of all time (Jeter). They had five of the nine highest paid players in baseball (Giambi, Rodriguez, Jeter, Clemens and Abreu) and the highest paid manager in the game.

  In reality, the Yankees were a wreck. Damon was hurt and at times disinterested to the point of angering his teammates. Giambi was hurt. Abreu had no confidence. Igawa was taking remedial pitching lessons. Pavano was hurt. Somebody named Tyler Clippard and somebody named Matt DeSalvo made up 40 percent of the rotation. So-called voices in Tampa were putting Torre's job on the line on almost a series-by-series basis. Steinbrenner wasn't showing up for work until late in the afternoon while an unpredictable scramble ensued to see how the enormous power vacuum would be filled.

  The Yankees were 21-29, off to the fifth-worst start in the history of the franchise, to put them 14½ games behind the first-place Red Sox and 8½ games out of the wild card spot—with seven teams in front of them. Only three teams had ever been that far out of the wild card that deep into the season and still made it to the postseason. It was as if Torre ran an automobile repair shop and the lot was overrun with beaters and clunkers that needed his daily attention, oil leaking and transmissions dropping everywhere.

  Where do you begin to save the season and save your job? Torre began inToronto. He began with one more meeting. He began with the kick-ass meeting to end all kick-ass meetings.

  14

  The Last Race

  Another city. Another day. Another crisis. Another meeting. This is how the first one-third of the schedule went by for the 2007 Yankees.

  They were in Toronto to finish May, their second straight horrible month. For weeks Torre had tried to prompt his team into playing with urgency, with an understanding and a trust for one another, but the results did not come. Worse, in the preceding days his coaches began to alert him that some players were actually becoming less focused, not more so, amid the heap of losses that piled up. Guys were showing up late for stretching, maybe skipping some extra pregame work … cutting some corners at a time when the Yankees needed to take nothing for granted.

  “I think they took a lot of things for granted because the Yankees won before and they thought things would happen automatically, just kick in,” Bowa said. “Just some little things that were happening … I don't know, they weren't New York Yankee–style things.

  “They're little things, like being late for stretching, but then they keep adding up. And the guys who were late were not just utility players. I mean, they were guys that were star players.

  “You know, when you start losing games, you see a lot of shit happening and guys say, ‘Why bother?’ That's how the game has changed. Because when I used to play, when you were losing, that's when you did everything by the book. When you're losing and not playing up to your capabilities you want to be as quiet as possible and toe the line, whatever the manager wants. It's when you're winning that you might try to pull some shit. Now, it's in fact the other way around.”

  There was something about this team that concerned Torre. Maybe it was unfair to compare it to his championship teams, but that was the frame of reference with which he worked. In a room filled with grinders such as Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius the lapses in concentration and effort over the long season never lingered. Those teams responded quickly to the inevitable lags in energy or focus.

  “Those teams, all they needed was a little poke, a little reminder, and they responded,” Torre said.

  This was a very different team. Most of the players in the room had never won anything. Many didn't know how to win. There was a noticeable lack of effort, to do what it took to win.

  “Yeah. You could just sense that,” Mussina said. “You could just feel that everyone was getting used to losing. People were getting used to just playing, and win or lose it didn't matter.”

  This team didn't need just a poke or a nudge. This one needed a kick in the ass. Several kicks.

  The Yankees took extra hitting at 2:30 p.m. in Toronto, which is their custom upon their first trip of the season into a ballpark. A short time after it ended, Torre called a team meeting to be held in the visiting clubhouse of the Rogers Centre.

  “My angry meeting,” Torre said. “That was the first time in my years with the Yankees where I felt there weren't enough guys who really gave a shit. I had that meeting and I was just angry.

  “We were just terrible at the time. We played badly and it didn't look like it bothered them.”

  Torre lit into his players for how they were playing, but he did so in a calm, measured voice.

  “Let's stop this shit right now,” he said.

  From now on, he said, the Yankees would start taking infield practice, the kind of old-school pregame work that had long disappeared as a staple of the game. Guys would be fined if they were even a minute late for stretching. Everyone wou
ld have to be all in, heart and soul. He talked about responsibility and focus.

  “And,” he warned them, “it's too late to keep saying it's early.”

  The change would have to come immediately.

  And then Bowa spoke.

  “Guys, you're playing for the best manager you could possibly play for,” Bowa told the players. “He never rips you. He sticks up for you whether you're right or wrong. He gives you the benefit of the doubt on anything. He tells you the night before whether you're playing or resting the next day. I think you're fucking taking advantage of this guy.

  “You go somewhere else? You're not going to see a manager like this. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your career. Don't fucking abuse it. Don't fucking take it for granted because this is a manager that comes along every 25, 30 years. You guys, you have no idea how fucking good you have it playing for this guy.”

  The players were taken aback by the in-your-face intensity of both Torre and Bowa in the meeting. Maybe that kind of anger is what they had come to expect from the spring-loaded Bowa. But Torre? Many of them had never seen him so angry. It made an impression.

  “There was real emotion,” Mussina said.”I think that got everybody's attention. There was really a feeling we got from Joe and the staff that there was real concern. Maybe not anguish, but just real … emotion. Almost like, ‘If you're going to get this turned around you better start real soon.’ Like it was getting too late. I think everybody picked up on the emotion.”

  When Torre, Bowa and the rest of the staff left the room, the players remained. They decided to reinforce the message with their own meeting. Pettitte spoke. Jeter spoke.

  “There are times when you can be too comfortable,” Jeter said. “And that's not always a good thing. I think sometimes people think if they play for this organization, if they play for this team, it's just going to automatically win. You know what I mean? I'm not saying anybody in particular. Sometimes that can be the mindset and you get caught up in that.’Ahh, if we don't win today we'll just get ‘em tomorrow. You know, we're the Yankees. We'll be in the playoffs. Winning just happens.’

  “But the meeting was a wakeup call for us. I've said a lot of things over the years. People always assume I don't. People always assume. They make that assumption. ‘Jeter's not vocal.’ Let me ask you a hypothetical situation. Say I pulled Mo over. First of all, I'm not going to do it with a camera on me. I think people that do that probably know the camera is on them. Say I pull Mo aside, and say I just yell at Mo all day long. For an hour. Is he going to tell you? He's not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you. But then I always hear, ‘Well, he's not vocal.’ Yeah. Okay. I talk to everybody. But I don't do it when there is a camera around.”

  Jeter's words caught the attention of the players.

  “You know, it's one thing to hear something from the manager and staff,” Mussina said, “and it's another thing to hear it player-to-player. Not that the manager doesn't have an impact, but it's like hearing from your parents as opposed to hearing it from your peers. It has a very different impact.

  “Basically, what was said was to make sure each guy was doing absolutely everything he could to be prepared and to play to the best of his ability. When you win it's because you pay attention to all the details and do all the work. You take nothing for granted. But it's real easy to get used to losing. You fall behind in the beginning of a game and it's like, ‘Okay, another loss. We'll go get ‘em tomorrow.’ It's easy to give in to that feeling and to get used to losing. That's what the players were concerned about. To make sure we weren't falling into that mindset by making sure we did everything we could to be a winning team. No individuals were called out, but there's a way to deliver a message to people without having to call them out.”

  Said Jason Giambi, “Joe just wanted us to play harder. No matter how good your team is, every once in a while you have to put people in check. I think he did that. We kind of sorted it out and talked. The biggest thing, too, is everybody started to come back from their injuries, and I think that's what got the ball rolling, too.”

  Meetings, even players-only meetings, tend be fairly routine, full of platitudes and posturing, not unlike a political convention. But these meetings were different. There was an edge to what people were saying. Players were openly questioning the attitudes of other players, if not by name.

  “Guys were saying stuff to other guys that maybe they didn't want to hear,” Borzello said,”and they didn't want Joe there to stop it because Joe would have, that's how heated it got. Guys were questioning who wanted to play and who didn't, injuries that some people didn't feel were real, stuff like that.”

  The two meetings lasted nearly an hour. The Yankees missed virtually their entire batting practice. They had been challenged by Torre, scolded by Bowa and put on notice by Pettitte and Jeter. This either was going to be the turning point to their season or verification that this group of Yankees just didn't give a damn.

  “I started thinking about myself,” Mussina said. “I got to the point where some of the players were speaking where I wasn't listening. I mean, I knew guys were getting fired up, and I knew basically they were telling us that we were abusing all the privileges we were given. The trust of us doing what we had to do to be ready to play—and to go out and play the game the way we were capable of playing—was being lost. That trust was being lost.

  “What each player should do is they should be looking at themselves saying, ‘Am I involved in this? Am I one of these people?’

  “But some guys sit there and they don't even listen to it. They don't think anybody is ever talking about them. But I was actually at that point where I was just sitting there thinking, Is this me? Whether I was or I wasn't … I mean, I had been hurt for half the time up to that point anyway, and then I was on the DL with a hamstring thing for half of the period before this meeting. But I still wondered if I was doing all that I could or should be doing. And the meeting made a difference, ultimately.”

  There was just one problem with the timing of the meeting: the Yankees were starting rookie Matt DeSalvo on the mound that night. DeSalvo was a decent enough pitcher, and actually contributed a couple of good games, but he essentially was an un-proven placeholder for Roger Clemens, or, more accurately given all the injuries, a placeholder for a placeholder for a placeholder for Clemens. He was not the kind of proven pitcher you want to consolidate a kick-ass meeting about getting the season turned around immediately. DeSalvo was gone before the fifth inning ended. The Yankees lost, 7-2.

  At least the Yankees had Pettitte, a member of their old guard, and one of their few reliable pitchers they were starting those days, taking the ball in the next game. Turns out, that was a problem, too.

  “Tightest I've ever seen this team,”Torre said. “They played like they felt they had to win the game because Andy was pitching. And it showed.”

  The Yankees lost again, 3-2, dropping their record to 21-29 after 50 games. Then a funny thing happened after the game: the bus ride back to the hotel turned into a comedy club on wheels. Guys were laughing and joking, not because they didn't care that they lost, but because they were just … well, just goofy. The tension had broken, like a cloudburst in a heat wave. The Yankees knew they had played a good, clean game, coming back from two one-run deficits, with Pettitte pitching into the eighth inning, before losing on a sacrifice fly in that inning. It was as if they fully understood Torre's mantra about how you can't always control the result but you can control your effort. The Yankees had given a focused effort with urgency. They had lost the game, but they had found themselves. They were the Yankees again, and they seemed to know that on the bus ride back to the hotel. The next day they demolished the Blue Jays, 10-5. They were on their way.

  “I just felt like they got it,” Bowa said. “You hear Joe use that word urgency. ‘You need a sense of urgency.’ I really felt that after that airing out and then the guys talking, there was that sense of urgency every time they to
ok the field. I really felt it. You could see how the players responded. The way they took batting practice. The way they focused in meetings when we're going over pitchers. I just felt like they were more attentive. And they knew we had a long road to get to the playoffs because of where we were.”

  The Yankees, of course, couldn't get out of Toronto and on track without Rodriguez managing to create a controversy. Running toward third base on what was a routine pop-up to third baseman Howie Clark, Rodriguez yelled something at Clark in an attempt to distract him. It worked. Clark dropped the ball, extending the inning. The Blue Jays were enraged. Like most observers, they regarded it as a play that, while possibly within the rules, smacked of a bush league maneuver. Mussina, Rodriguez's teammate, even referred to it as “unsportsmanlike.”Torre told reporters that Rodriguez probably wished he had not done it, especially considering the ill will it stirred. Torre's response to the writers’ questions came out like this in the next day's tabloids: “Torre to A-Rod: Shut Up.”

  “Alex took a hit in that thing,” Torre said, “and my feeling was, and I mentioned it to him, that if he was the one under the pop-up and somebody did it to him, and he let it drop, he would be the one criticized. It is true.

  “I told the media he would probably think twice about doing it again. And that's when they put in the paper that I told him to shut up. I never did that. I told him, ‘You're getting this reaction, Alex. What are you going to do? You're trying to win a game.’

  “He was excited. He was swinging the bat really well. He went by the guy at third base. You know he does shit all the time during the game when he's going good. I didn't think it was a bush play. He plays hard. Maybe it was unnecessary, but you certainly didn't expect the guy to miss the ball. I thought they overreacted. And I thought it was horseshit the way they reacted. They waited until they got back to their ballpark to get even. They come into Yankee Stadium and … nothing. Nothing happens. Then they come back home, and they threw a ball behind him. And that's when Rocket got thrown out of the game. He's pitching a hell of a game, then he gets thrown out protecting Alex, and we had to scratch by our ass to win the game. Roger was floating along really well. Of course, when he was ejected he told me he thought that was his last inning, anyway. I said,’You could have waited for two outs.’ He did it to the leadoff guy. But Roger was a lot like Alex in a lot of ways. Kind of in their own world.”