The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Edwin Jackson, a righthanded pitcher for Tampa Bay who entered the game with a 1-9 record, befuddled the Yankees hitters, allowing no runs over six innings. The lefthanded trio of Damon, Abreu and Matsui went 1-for-14. Another lefty, Giambi, wasn't even in the lineup.

  The defeat dropped the Yankees to 49-46, their worst record after 95 games in 16 years. Twenty-six other Yankees team were 49-46 or worse after 95 games. None of them made the playoffs.

  All things considered, it was a good night to be in New Britain, Connecticut, instead of the Bronx. That is exactly where you could find all of the most important decision makers in the Yankees baseball operations department. Indeed, it was a beautiful evening at New Britain Stadium, home of the Rock Cats, the MinnesotaTwins’ Double-A affiliate: temperature in the low 70s, low humidity, a nice breeze. It was a good night to dream. Into the 6,000-seat ballpark walked the who's who of Yankees brass: general manager Brian Cashman, stats guru and assistant general manager Billy Eppler, head of player development Mark Newman, pitching guru Nardi Contreras (the Yankees, naturally, did not hire mere experts; they unearthed the gurus of their profession) and special adviser Reggie Jackson. They did not come for the comfort of the evening, nor for the $6.50 burritos or the $5.50 Sam Adams Cherry Wheat drafts.

  They came to see the future.

  The Rock Cats were playing the Trenton Thunder, the Yankees’ Double-A affiliate, who were starting a beefy 21-year-old right-handed pitcher named Joba Chamberlain. Cashman, Eppler, Newman, Contreras and Jackson wanted to see if Chamberlain was ready to help the Yankees in their uphill climb. The single biggest reason that the Yankees dynasty had devolved into just another franchise scrambling to even get into the playoffs as a wild card was because Cashman and his gurus had made mistake after mistake after mistake when it came to evaluating pitchers, both on the major league and amateur sides.

  Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Jaret Wright, Jeff Weaver, Steve Karsay, Esteban Loaiza, Kyle Farnsworth, Jose Contreras, Javier Vazquez, Kei Igawa, Carl Pavano, Roger Clemens (the 44-year-old version) … None of those 12 pitchers, all brought in from outside the organization, pitched three consecutive seasons with the Yankees. None. It was a losing pattern that defied enormous odds. The Yankees would typically overvalue a pitcher, bringing him in when he was either at the end of his career or not a fit for New York, then dump the pitcher to move on to the next mistake. The balance sheet on those 12 investments was ugly:

  Record: 125-105 (including 3-7 in the postseason)

  Cost*: $255 million

  Cost per win: $2.04 million

  * Does not include prospects surrendered in trades

  Cashman was in New Britain because he had a pretty good inkling that flushing $255 million on pitching mistakes did not exactly make for good business practice. The Yankees put themselves in the position of dumping all that money on the wrong pitchers because they couldn't develop any decent pitchers of their own. They had to scramble to find available veteran pitchers because their system was producing nothing. And, because the revenue-sharing system and new revenue streams put more money in the pockets of smaller revenue teams, the pool of available veteran pitchers for the Yankees to wave their money at was drying up. In another era, the Yankees might have cherry-picked elite pitchers in their prime from organizations that could no longer afford them, in the same way they had plucked David Cone from the Blue Jays in 1995 and Mussina from the Orioles after playing out his contract in 2000. Instead, the Blue Jays locked up Roy Halladay, the Indians locked up CC Sabathia, the Brewers locked up Ben Sheets, the Astros locked up Roy Oswalt and the Twins locked up Johan Santana—all small-revenue teams who suddenly had the cash to keep their ace pitchers off the trade and free agent markets. The kicker for the Yankees was that under the revenue-sharing system they were financing some of the newfound solvency of those teams.

  For the next decade after bringing Andy Pettitte to the big leagues in 1995, the Yankees did not use even one homegrown pitcher of any consequence with the exception of Ramiro Mendoza, and though he had value as a middle reliever, Mendoza was neither a starter nor a closer, the premium slots for a pitcher. So each year the Yankees had to fill spots in their staff by trading for or buying somebody else's problems.

  Cashman recognized the downward spiral such desperation created, so in 2006 he began to prioritize the signing and development of young pitchers. His strategy began with flexing the Yankees’ financial muscle in the amateur market, even if it meant spitting in the face of the commissioner's unofficial “slotting” system, in which teams could conspire to hold down signing bonuses by keeping to established ceilings based on the draft position of the player. The Yankees didn't play by those rules because, well, because money wasn't a problem for them. This meant the Yankees would even buy up the amateur medical risks, throwing big money at pitchers with high ceilings that scared off most clubs because of the possibility they were breakdowns waiting to happen. Most clubs could not afford to take the financial risk of handing out a huge signing bonus for a first-round talent with arm trouble. The Yankees could do so because if the player never made it to the big leagues they were out only some pocket change. It would change nothing about how they did business.

  If the pitcher defied the medical reports, they had themselves a potential homegrown ace. That's exactly how the Yankees wound up with Alan Horne, who had reconstructive elbow surgery in college after Cleveland picked him in the first round out of high school; Andrew Brackman, who went straight from the draft to the operating room to have Tommy John surgery; and the burly kid who brought the Yankees’ brass to New Britain on July 20, 2007, Joba Chamberlain, whose shaky medical reports regarding his arm, knee and weight (he weighed as much as 290 pounds at the University of Nebraska) scared off most teams before the Yankees took him with the 41st overall pick of the 2006 draft.

  Cashman and the Yankees finally got religion when it came to young pitching, and their faith mostly was tied up in three righthanders: Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Chamberlain. It was Cashman's hope that these were the bedrocks of the next Yankee dynasty or, in the very least, three reasons to keep him from blowing another $255 million.

  “The message that I've got for everybody,” Cashman told the Hartford Courant while in New Britain, “is that if you pitch to the point where it forces us to look at guys that are not Roger Clemens, I want that.”

  The Yankees rotation at that moment consisted of three guys past their prime—Pettitte, 35, Mussina, 38, and Clemens, 44—and two international free agents—Wang, 27, and Igawa, 27. Chamberlain pitched poorly with the Yankees’ brass looking at him in New Britain. He gave up seven runs on nine hits in less than five innings. Still, the Yankees liked what they saw: a fastball that was clocked in the upper-90-mph range and a violent slider. His changeup and curveball were major-league quality as well. Cashman called Torre from New Britain and said, “You'll love him. He's better than Hughes.”

  “That,” Torre said, “got my attention.”

  The Yankees immediately put Chamberlain on the fast track to the Bronx. Four days after the Yankees executives saw him in New Britain, Chamblerlain was in Triple-A, and just seven days after that, Chamblerlain was in the big leagues. The only catch was that Chamberlain was not permitted to start. Indeed, Cashman and Contreras sent Chamberlain to Torre with instructions on how he could be used, a mandate that came to be known as the “Joba Rules.”

  The Yankees would no longer allow Chamberlain to start because they were concerned about piling up too many innings after throwing 88⅓innings in the minors, or only one less than he had thrown in 2006 at Nebraska. The rules were that Chamberlain would have to pitch out of the bullpen, he was not to be used to close games, he was not to be used on consecutive days and he would get one day of rest for every inning he pitched in an outing. The media perceived the Joba Rules as a slap at Torre. The conventional wisdom was that the Yankees didn't trust Torre to handle Chamberlain with care, so they had to give him instructions about how to use him.
Torre, however, had no problem with the rules.

  “No, I really didn't,” he said. “Unless I'm very naïve. I mean, I know it was written about and I was asked about it, but unless I was just naïve to it, I never took it as anything more than protecting the kid. And Nardi's the one I called. I never talked to Cashman about it. I called Nardi on a regular basis.

  “And the other fact is I didn't think there was anything wrong with the rules or talking about the rules. It's like a guy with an injury. Why look to hide something?”

  Chamberlain was an immediate sensation. He was a character straight out of a cornball 1950s Hollywood casting job: a country kid in the big city with a fastball that could reach 100 miles an hour and a tendency to celebrate strikeouts with a howl and a fist pump. Yankees fans loved his act. So did Torre. With Chamberlain in front of Rivera, the Yankees had their best late-inning lockdown combination since the tag team of Rivera and Wetteland in 1996. Chamberlain would pitch in 19 games for the Yankees and they would win 17 of them. He allowed only one earned run. With runners in scoring position, he was perfect: nobody got a hit off him. He struck out 34 of the 91 hitters he faced. He was as close to unhit-table as anybody had seen in a long time—a 21-year-old kid who was in college the previous year, mind you, a kid who had never seen big league hitters before.

  Chamberlain's arrival had the effect of making Kyle Farnsworth rather useless in any meaningful situation, which bothered Yankees fans not at all. Cashman was ecstatic to have signed Farnsworth as a free agent after the 2005 season to a three-year, $17 million deal. Farnsworth essentially replaced Tom Gordon, who signed as a free agent with Philadelphia. Farnsworth threw hard and owned a nasty, if misbehaving slider, but the knock on Farnsworth was that he wilted in the big spots. Indeed, only two months before the Yankees gave him $17 million, the Braves were six outs away from sending their Division Series against Houston to a fifth and deciding game when Atlanta manager Bobby Cox gave the ball to Farns-worth. Atlanta was leading, 6-1. Farnsworth gave up a grand slam in the eighth and a solo home run in the ninth to cough up the lead. Houston won in the 18th inning, sending the Braves home.

  In the Yankees’ 2006 spring training camp, Eppler could not contain his enthusiasm over the Farnsworth addition.

  “Farnsworth is really going to help us,” Eppler told Borzello, the bullpen catcher. “He's got one of the best sliders in the game.”

  “Yeah, sure. Great,” an unimpressed Borzello said. “His slider is great, except maybe only one out of every seven is great.”

  Farnsworth did flash nasty stuff. Opposing hitters batted .242 against him in his two years pitching for Torre—as long as there were no runners in scoring position. With runners in scoring position, Farnsworth wasn't as tough to hit. They batted .272 against him in those spots.

  The other curious glitch in the Yankees’ $17 million reliever was that Farnsworth was built like an NFL tight end and somehow he was one of their more brittle pitchers, mostly due to a balky back that might go out on him while warming in the bullpen. It was Torre's understanding that the Yankees did not want him to use Farnsworth two days in a row. In two years under Torre, Farnsworth made only 20 of his 136 appearances without rest, and he was generally poor in those situations, posting a 5.60 ERA in those rare times when Torre did use him on back-to-back days.

  “I was told we shouldn't use him two days in a row,” Torre said, “Billy Eppler and Cash, I mean … that was their baby when they brought him on.”

  The arrangement created a problem for Torre. By trying to avoid using him on back-to-back days, Torre could not give Farns-worth tuneup work in games that appeared to be already decided. If Torre did throw him into such games, he would not have Farnsworth available the next day in a game where he might be needed to set up Rivera. It was a catch-22. The problem, however, was that Farnsworth didn't know he came with his own set of instructions. He was also a highly emotional sort. (On May 19 at Shea Stadium, for instance, Torre found Farnsworth on the floor in the corner of the tiny, run-down trainers’ room in the visiting clubhouse, crying. Farnsworth was hurt because his teammates disapproved of comments he made to the media that Clemens was getting special treatment from the Yankees.)

  On July 29 in Baltimore, Torre brought Farnsworth in to pitch the eighth inning with a 10-4 lead. He promptly gave up two runs, inflating his ERA to 4.57. Farnsworth had pitched only once in the previous seven days, and he was angry about his lack of work. He popped off to the press after the game, saying, “I didn't come here to sit the bench.”

  “Farnsworth,”Torre said,”was a good kid. Just a little emotional, that's all. I don't think he was trying to show me up. He was just upset, that's all.”

  Torre arranged for a meeting with Farnsworth and invited Cashman, too. Farnsworth said he wanted to be traded.

  “Listen,” Torre said. “It's tough for me to bring you in in a game we're way ahead or way behind just to get you an inning, knowing I can't use you the next day. Because I don't know if I'll need you the next day in a close game.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Farnsworth said. He had no idea about the ban on him pitching back-to-back days. “I want to pitch.”

  “Fine,” Torre said. “I'll make sure you don't go more than three days in a row without pitching, whatever the score, and then we'll take our chances.”

  Said Torre,”He seemed perfectly satisfied with that. And I think he was satisfied with my reasoning, as opposed to thinking I had something against him, I guess. That was the end of the whole scene. Then once Joba came on the scene, well, he basically took a backseat. That was that.”

  Farnsworth finished the season with a 4.80 ERA while allowing 89 baserunners in 60 innings. The next spring he blamed Torre for his lousy season.

  “It's tough when you do lose the confidence from your manager to maybe prepare yourself, day in and day out when you have no clue about anything,” Farnsworth told reporters. “It happened a few times last year.”

  With Chamberlain in front of Rivera rather than Farnsworth, the Yankees were almost impossible to beat when they held a late lead. The Yankees played 50 games after Chamberlain joined the team. The team that began the year 21-29 in its first 50 games went 32-18 in its final 50. The only hitch to the run was the pitching of Mussina, who was so bad, giving up 19 runs in 9⅔ innings over three starts, that on August 29 Torre decided to pull him from the rotation in favor of Ian Kennedy. Mussina was sitting in the tiny office of clubhouse manager Rob Cucuzza that day when Torre walked in.

  “I'm going to have Kennedy start in your spot,” Torre told Mussina after he heard the Yankee organization had already informed Kennedy of the change. “This doesn't mean you're out of the rotation.” “Well, it sure sounds like that's what it is to me,” Mussina replied.

  Said Mussina, “And he was gone in like 45 seconds.”

  Mussina was hurt. Being taken out of the rotation was bad enough—the only game he ever pitched in relief was that 2003 ALCS Game 7 gem—but being dropped in 45 seconds chapped him. The next day he marched into Torre's office.

  “You would never have done that to Mo, or Derek, or anybody else,” Mussina said. “And I've been here for seven years. I deserve more than that.”

  “You're right,” Torre said.

  Said Mussina,”I should have been in his office and there should have been more discussion. Ultimately, when you let all the negative stuff settle out, I agreed with him. I probably needed a break. I was fried and pitching terribly. And I got back in there like 10 days later or whatever and I pitched better. The guy's made a lot of right decisions.

  “It ended up being the right thing to do. It got me away from it for a while, and then when I came back I was better, and my head was better, which is most of the battle.

  “When you have a manager that completely trusts you to do your job, you can't ask for any more than that as a player. Even when he took me out of the rotation, and even though it wasn't done the way I think it should have been done, a couple day
s later I'm like, ‘You know what? I probably should have come out of the rotation even though I didn't like it.’ And I didn't like the way he did it, but it's okay.”

  Mussina became a reliable pitcher when he returned to the rotation in September. On September 25, the Yankees arrived inTampa with a chance to clinch the wild card. They held a 5½-game lead over Detroit with six games to play. The Yankees took a 5-0 lead into the sixth inning that night, but Edwar Ramirez and Brian Bruney coughed up six runs in that inning alone. The Yankees eventually lost, 7-6, on a 10th-inning home run by Dioner Navarro off Jeff Karstens.

  The next day Torre was summoned to a meeting in the Legends Field conference room with Steinbrenner—or more accurately, the family members who had assumed the daily operations of the franchise from The Boss. There was nothing unusual about the need for a meeting. Whenever the Yankees played Tampa Bay the manager usually was obligated to make an appearance at the team headquarters in Tampa. Torre wasn't sure if his job status would be discussed, though, true to his spring training vow, he preferred not to talk about it, anyway. Torre expected Steinbrenner, his sons, Hank and Hal, and son-in-law Felix Lopez to be at the meeting. When Torre walked into the room he saw that all of them were there except Hank. Steinbrenner didn't bother to say hello, as is his usual custom. He believes in the dramatic element of in medias res when it comes to his telephone calls and meetings.

  “What happened last night?” was how Steinbrenner “greeted” Torre.

  “Don't worry, Boss,” Torre said. “We'll get ‘em tonight.”