by Joe Torre
On the day of the last game in Toronto, Torre decided to check in with Steinbrenner. He liked calling him after losses. It was a way to help calm Steinbrenner's anxieties.
“I'm excited about the young pitching,”Torre told him.”With all the money this organization has spent over the years, it's good to see the young pitching. This is huge. You've got young pitching with substance to it. It's great. It's going to save you a lot of money, George.”
“Yeah, buddy. Good luck,” Steinbrenner said. He wasn't much of a conversationalist anymore. The Yankees were traveling to Boston to play the Red Sox the next day, which Torre mentioned to Stein-brenner.
“We've got the Red Sox next and we'll get ‘em,” Torre said.
“Yeah, you've got to beat those guys,” Steinbrenner said. “You get ‘em.”
And just like that the conversation was over.
“He would sort of echo, or mimic what you were saying,”Torre said. “And that would be the extent of the conversation. I talked to him and he would get me off the phone in 30 seconds. That was it. He really wouldn't be in touch with what was happening.”
Torre, in fact, would make sure he would jog Steinbrenner's memory. For instance, a little more than a week later, after Torre won his 2,000th career game as manager, he called Steinbrenner to thank him for the gift the Yankees gave him in recognition of the milestone, a sterling plate. Torre made sure to name the specific gift because he wasn't sure if Steinbrenner would recall it or not.
“Oh, okay. You deserve it,” Steinbrenner said.
If Steinbrenner wasn't the conversationalist he was once, the divide-and-conquer leadership philosophy he engrained in the Yankee organization still ran strong. As the Yankees arrived in Boston, word reached Torre that somebody on the staff was going to be fired, probably bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan, if the Yankees lost the series there. The “voices” in Tampa needed some blood spilled to send a message that the losing would not be tolerated, or even to send a message to Torre that his job security was growing thinner by the day.
Kerrigan was a Cashman hire and ally, and a rather odd, iconoclastic personality. He kept copious charts and statistics, ran half the pregame pitchers’ meetings with pitching coach Ron Guidry, broke down miles of videotapes to try to decode the habits of opposing hitters, and believed that immutable truths about the game could be found in his numbers. Cashman, of course, liked that analytical side of him. Kerrigan's people skills, however, were not his strong suit. He had confrontations with players in just about every stop of his baseball life, including Philadelphia, Boston and the Yankees, where he had angry, ugly exchanges with Carl Pavano and Jason Giambi. Pavano wanted to fight Kerrigan when they had a shouting match at the hotel bar in Boston. The confrontation with Giambi happened in a restaurant bar.
“I called him in, in Texas,”Torre said of Kerrigan, “and told him, ‘First of all, you shouldn't be sitting with players out at night. And secondly, if you can't control your emotions, then you can't go out yourself.’ Then he just stopped coming to dinners. I would invite him to join me and others on the staff to dinners, and he just stopped coming.”
Torre liked Kerrigan's work ethic and saw him as a good complement to Guidry, who was the old-school-style pitching coach. But Torre wasn't sure he could trust Kerrigan. He knew Kerrigan was connected to the front office by way of Cashman, and word reached Torre that Kerrigan was having private conversations with Cashman about the team and Torre. One staff member even said Cashman had telephoned Kerrigan during a game. Torre wanted to find out if the rumors were true, if Cashman had a pipeline behind his back to Torre's own staff, so he confronted Cashman about it.
“I remember asking Cash point-blank if he has conversations with Kerrigan,” Torre said, “and he said, ‘No.’ “
A short time later, one of Torre's staff members told him that he and a couple of other staff members were riding in a car with Kerrigan when Kerrigan's cell phone rang.”Hi, Cash,” Kerrigan said into the phone, and the two of them proceeded to chat at length. Torre felt wounded, not so much because he thought Kerrigan might be keeping a secret pipeline to the general manager, but more because Cashman had denied such an arrangement to Torre.
In bad times, Kerrigan turned out to be expendable. He didn't have the Yankee pedigree that Guidry and Mattingly did, and his confrontations with Pavano and Giambi had caused concern about his abrasiveness anyway. The Yankees split the first two games in Boston. Kerrigan was going to be fired if they lost the series finale. At that moment, an unlikely ally stepped in and fought for Kerrigan to keep his job: Torre. The manager called Cashman.
“You can't fire him,”Torre said. “We're going horseshit. I would fire him at the end of the year, but this is not the time to do it. Because then it's going to look like he's the cause of our problems, and that's not right.”
Cashman took Torre's plea under advisement. That night, the Yankees blew a 4-0 lead to Boston and fell behind, 5-4, entering the eighth inning. But they rallied for a run in the eighth and won the game in the ninth on a home run by Rodriguez off Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. Kerrigan was safe. And the Yankees had won only their third road series of the year.
The Yankees continued to play with the focus and energy they had summoned from the Toronto meeting. They went to Chicago and took three out of four. Back home, they swept the Pirates—with Clemens, rusty as an old oil derrick, back in pinstripes pitching again—swept the Diamondbacks and took two out of three from the Mets. The 13-3 run put them two games above .500. Damon and Abreu were at last rounding into shape, body and mind.
Said Mussina at the time, “The difference now is we have more than three guys giving good at-bats. It's eight or nine, and the team is feeding off of that. The pitchers know this team can come back and the hitters know it doesn't fall on one guy to get it done. We're in a real good place right now.”
Cano, the young second baseman prone to lapses in concentration, provided a good example of the players’ rededication. Cano had been Bowa's pet project, an arrangement the coach made clear in spring training when he sat down with the second baseman.
“Robby, if you want to be the best player that you can be, you need to come out here and work every day,” Bowa told him. “I know you're a natural hitter. I know you can hit .300. But you've got to do everything. And I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. You know, you get lazy out there on double plays. You let the ball get real deep. And I'm going to let you know that's not how you make the double play.
“For the most part, you're real good at what you do. Then all of a sudden you get into these little spells where you'll go,’Oh, I've got it,’ and then—boom!—you get into bad habits. So here's what we're going to do. Every time we have an off day the next day we're coming out to the field early to do extra work.”
Cano stayed true to Bowa's plan. Then, in June, Bowa decided that Cano had been so good about his work and staying focused that he decided to cut him some slack. Bowa called off the mandatory extra workouts for him. A week later, Cano sought out Bowa.
“Hey, I want to go back to working early after every off day,” Cano said.
Bowa smiled.
“Great,” the coach said.
The Yankees had a new vibe. They reached the All-Star break 43-43. They had a pulse. Torre held a quick meeting before the first game after the break. It was nothing more than a reminder to keep playing hard, to continue to be mentally sharp every day. When he was done, Torre asked, “Anybody have any questions?”
Nobody had a question, but Derek Jeter wanted to say something. Over the years, and especially after Jeter was named captain, Torre would sometimes use Jeter as a messenger. He might give him a heads-up about a team meeting so he could be ready with a contribution.”I might want you to say something,” Torre might tell him. Torre knew the peer-to-peer delivery system among ballplayers is a powerful one, especially when it is Jeter.
“I'd push him and he'd do it,” Torre said, �
��but when he spoke it was always, ‘We,’ never ‘You’ or ‘I.’ ‘We're doing this.’ After he became captain he did more of that. It wouldn't be a rah-rah thing. He would be critical, without calling people out. He'd say something like, ‘We can't not run a ball out.’ He may have been aiming the message at an individual, but he would be critical in his remarks without picking on any one person. He was good that way.
“With Alex, I'd ask Alex to say something and he never wanted to say anything. Never wanted to say anything.”
In that post-All-Star break meeting, Torre had not prompted Jeter to say anything, so even the manager was curious to hear what the captain would say.
“Starting today,” Jeter said,”every game is a playoff game. That's how we have to treat every game: like it's a playoff game.”
Jeter's words got everybody's attention. Jeter, like Torre, was faithful to the belief that everything was going to work out fine in time. He had no time or energy to waste on negative thoughts. But here the Yankees were in the middle of July and Jeter, Captain Cool, was pressing the accelerator.
“Even in him you could see that he was concerned,” Bowa said. “When Jeet talks, because he really doesn't talk all that much, he gets their attention.”
The Yankees began not just beating teams but demolishing them with an offensive might of historic proportions. They won 12 of their first 16 games coming out of the All-Star break while scoring a whopping 151 runs. Only two other teams in franchise history ever scored 150 runs in any 16-game span, and those teams did so way back in 1930 and 1939. Finally, after months in which Torre had pushed and poked and yelled at them, the Yankees were totally invested in the entire process of winning baseball games: the preparation, the intensity, the focus, the ferocious will to win. They cared.
The Yankees were rolling. But there was a problem. Torre could not enjoy it. He knew from his mock firing after the previous season, from the sniping in April and May and from the Yankees having no contractual obligation to him beyond 2007 that his job status was a major issue in the organization. Torre knew working for Stein-brenner meant your job was always in jeopardy, no matter the length of the contract, but this was different. He felt some of the “voices” talking to Steinbrenner didn't fully support him. What bothered him just as much, however, was knowing that his players and coaches knew he was hanging by a string. Torre always worked to keep the clubhouse “uncluttered,” the way he called it, so that the players and staff could occupy themselves only with the diligence that winning baseball required. If the newspapers were full of leaks and whispers about his job, that noise was bound to create conversation and speculation that could only detract from that diligence.
“I was trying, really trying to always be that same guy for them,” Torre said, “even though what I was going through was uncomfortable. It was certainly difficult going to the park in 2007, knowing shit had been in the paper and on the radio. And you walk in the clubhouse and you go in the coach's room, and there's this dead silence in there, because they don't know what to say to me. And you go in the training room with the players, and unless I start kidding about it, nobody really knows what to say. It was a very uncomfortable time.”
Some players noticed a change in Torre. He seemed tired. Worn.
“What Joe always tried to do a good job of was no matter what was going on, keep the matter from affecting the clubhouse,” Giambi said. “Really, every year for his last three years Joe's head was on the block. Basically every year he had to like fight for his job. ‘Well, Joe's gone!’ Then something incredible happened, and then they couldn't fire him, because we would come from 15 games down to win and get in the postseason.
“In ‘07, for us, it was mostly a situation where we felt bad for him. For a human being to go through that it would have to be tough. I mean, he acted like it wasn't, but it had to be wearing on him. I mean, I noticed a difference probably between my first three years and my last three years here. Just because, I think when you have to go through that all the time it's tough. He handles himself with class and dignity, but …
“It had to be wearing him down. It had to be something on his mind all the time. I felt he was a little more tired. Does that make sense? He felt more tired. I mean, you could kind of see it. I'd even ask Jeet sometimes. ‘Jeet, is he doing okay?’ And Jeet would go, ‘Yeah, he probably has a lot on his mind.’ And I just think that's what I noticed.”
Other players, though, did not notice a change in Torre.
“It didn't seem like it was ever there,” Mussina said of Torre's job status being a clubhouse issue. “He never portrayed it as being there. I think we all read the papers and understood what was going on, and we knew it, and people were talking to us about it. But it never leaked into the everyday stuff.
“Joe has a great ability, and he had a great ability in New York. He has a great ability to diffuse things so they don't leak into his clubhouse, so they don't get to the players, so they don't become distractions. That's one of his best qualities.”
Maybe as the Yankees began to win over the summer the victories bought Torre a little more time, but it didn't change the reality that he was living in the crosshairs of people who wanted him gone, and probably anything short of a World Series championship would not have been enough. What was debilitating for him was knowing they no longer trusted him, and yet he was the same man who had helped bring home those six pennants and four world championships.
“Cashman has a problem telling people things,” said Borzello, the bullpen catcher.”He would say comments about Joe, like he did this or he did that in a game, and he'd be telling people who he must have known know and like Joe. What, he didn't think Joe would hear it from them? But Cash operated that way all the time. It was a big problem. And then we would all talk about it and say, ‘Doesn't he realize we're all a family down here?’
“The team pretty much knew if we didn't get to the World Series he wasn't coming back, and there was no denying it. It wasn't so much that's what we were told. The silence said enough. There would be rumors out there or stuff in the papers about Joe's job being on the line, and nobody in the front office would deny it or say anything about it. The silence said it all. Joe never brought it up in the clubhouse. But we started to believe that Joe was gone.”
Said Torre, “I asked Donnie [Mattingly] about it, about not enjoying it. And he said the same thing: he didn't enjoy it. Even after winning games, we wouldn't enjoy it. I was drained.
“The questions came hot and heavy. A lot of it was because we started so badly. I find that when people talk about what they want to talk about—and it was about me getting fired—they don't want to consider the reasons why we may have started so badly. It's all about the bottom line and it's all about what's going to be the fallout from it—not about how many guys we had hurt. We had Abreu on the disabled list most of the spring. We had Johnny Damon who stumbled out of the gate. You had pitchers on the DL.
“But that wasn't the back page. People want to get the meat and potatoes: I'm on the last year of a contract. And the media knew whoever was leaking the information. I just felt like it was coming at me from a lot of different directions, and I was uncomfortable with it.
“You'd like to think if you work for somebody for a certain period of time that there'd be a time where they'd trust you somewhat. And I never got that. Even when we were winning I never got that. That bothered me.”
The Yankees won like nobody else after that kick-ass meeting in Toronto and that 21-29 start. They played .652 baseball over the final four months, the best record in baseball. It took much more than the usual little poke or nudge he would give his championship teams, but Torre had found a way to get this team to respond, even after the fifth-worst start to a season in franchise history. As the Yankees clobbered opponents and passed one team after another in the wild card race, Yankee Stadium buzzed that summer with the familiar electricity about the possibilities of another October. Life was good again in the Bronx.
&nbs
p; Except in the manager's office at Yankee Stadium.
One day during the summer, even while the Yankees were winning with uncanny regularity, the only kind of regularity that could overcome a 21-29 beginning, Torre looked around his office and saw the accumulations of a successful 12-year-run. The trophies, the pictures, the baseballs … the small remnants of achievement, the little reminders of the awesome power of trust. Even with the wins coming apace, Torre knew what was coming for him. He turned to his personal assistant, Chris Romanello.
“Chris,” Torre said, “why don't you start packing some things up.”
The game on Friday night, July 20, 2007, was a particularly ugly one for the Yankees, providing a harsh reminder that as far back as they had come from that 21-29 start, they still had a long, rough road to October. By the fifth inning in front of 53,953 peeved fans at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees trailed the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 9-0, thanks to abysmal pitching from Mike Mussina, who looked more and more as if his career was headed to its finish, and Edwar Ramirez, an independent league find by the Yankees whose career looked as if it might never get started.
Mussina allowed six earned runs in 4⅔ innings, falling to 4-7 on the season. Torre brought in Ramirez to stem the damage, but the carnage grew so bad as to be almost painful to watch. Ramirez threw 19 pitches. Seventeen of them were balls. One of the two pitches that wasn't a ball was hit for a grand slam. This is what the first five batters did against Ramirez: walk, walk, grand slam, walk, walk. Yankees pitchers walked 10 batters in a game for the first time in six years.