The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  It was classic Torre: smooth, familiar and, above all, disarming and reassuring to the man he called by his nickname or his first name, not by the deferential “Mr. Steinbrenner.”

  This was not classic Steinbrenner, however. He didn't say much at all. He sat there, slightly slouched, and kept his dark glasses on in the indoor room. At one point he got up to make himself a sandwich. He contributed almost nothing to the meeting. It was obvious to Torre that Steinbrenner's reign as everyone knew it was over, which meant he would no longer be able to deal directly with Steinbrenner when it came time to talk about his future with the team.

  “It was sad,” Torre said. “As much as you might have been confrontational with him at times or hated what he did, you hate to see that. It was sad. Because now you knew it: the other guys were running the team. A few years before he would say, ‘I'm going to back out of this and let other people take over. Let the young elephants into the tent.’ But that was never going to be the case.

  “It's not quite the same when Don Corleone was shot and was recovering and was sitting in the garden. At least he was talking to his son in a very lucid way, explaining what was going to happen. I don't think George had those capabilities. And when you talked to anybody in the organization, Steve Swindal being one, when he was in good graces, you'd ask,’What's wrong with him?’ And they'd say, ‘Nothing. We don't know.’ I believed him when he told me that.”

  As Steinbrenner occupied himself with his sandwich, the rest of them talked about how happy everyone was with the young pitching. In addition to Chamberlain, Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy were throwing well for the Yankees.

  “Kennedy …,” mused Lopez. “That's a great name for marketing. Better than Rodriguez.“

  The Yankees, they believed, looked like a dangerous postseason team again. The lineup was formidable—the Yankees wound up scoring more runs than any Yankee team in 70 years—the bullpen was dominating with Chamberlain and Rivera at the back end, and the rotation appeared decent enough with Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte, a hobbled but game Roger Clemens (he was nursing yet another injury to his legs) and Mussina, who seemed be back on track after a mostly miserable summer.

  “Nobody wants to play the Yankees in the playoffs,” Hal crowed.

  “I like to think we intimidate people,” Torre said, “but it depends on which team you're talking about.”

  It was a cheery enough lunch meeting. The Yankees were headed to the playoffs for the 12th consecutive season under Torre. The food was good. And nobody brought up the question of whether Torre, even after bringing the team back from 21-29 to easily win a postseason spot, would continue to manage the club.

  “My situation never came up,” Torre said. “I didn't ask or anything. Basically I felt like Cash was on my side and I'd leave it to him to ultimately present it.”

  That night, true to the promise Torre gave Steinbrenner, the Yankees beat Tampa Bay, 12-4, to clinch a postseason berth. Steinbrenner watched the game from a luxury box at Tropicana Field. The final out had the familiar patina of the good old days: Steinbrenner watching, Rivera pitching, Posada catching, Jeter, who had homered in the game, at shortstop and Torre in the dugout. The Yankees, beset by injuries and a malaise that put them in that 21-29 hole, unloosed a wild celebration in the Tropicana Field visiting clubhouse. This was the 29th time that Torre's Yankees earned the privilege of spraying champagne over themselves amid the triumph of clinching a playoff spot or winning a postseason series. But this one was different from all the others. This road to October, Jeter told reporters, “has definitely been the hardest one.” Torre obviously felt the same way. He called the team together for a toast in the middle of the clubhouse, and as he began he could not help but think about all the team had been through that season and all that he had been through. When he began to speak he could hardly get the words out.

  “I'm proud of each and every one of you guys,” Torre said.

  He was tearing up. He continued as best he could.

  “This one,” he said, his voice cracking, “means a lot to me …”

  He was choking up. He wanted to continue, to tell his players how important this postseason berth meant to him, but he could not speak. All he could do was bow his head and try to gather himself. No words would come. There was a brief, awkward silence in the room as the ballplayers waited to see if Torre could pull himself together. And then an old friend stepped in to save him from the emotions and the awkwardness. Jeter, who had taken part in all 29 of these parties, reached over and pulled the hat off Torre's head and dumped a bottle of champagne on his manager. The room erupted in a big cheer, and the celebration started anew in full force.

  Twenty-nine times Torre helped bring the Yankees to this kind of celebration. Twenty-nine times, including at least once every year for 12 consecutive seasons. Twenty-nine times, and yet this one, at the end of a long, painful season, was unlike all the others.

  There would never be another.

  15

  Attack of the Midges

  Major league managers hate the best-of-five-games format of the Division Series. The inferior team has a better chance to beat the superior team in a shorter series than what the best-of-seven League Championship Series and World Series offer; the smaller the sample, the more havoc that chance can create. Moreover, managers must decide between using three starting pitchers or four, especially if a loss in Game 1 creates the palpable urgency of having to win three out of the next four games. Torre's 2007 Yankees, the 94-win American League wild card entrant, drew the Cleveland Indians, the 96-win AL Central champions, in this best-of-five-game anxiety attack.

  The Indians owned the home-field advantage, which meant they would host the first two games, a comforting arrangement for a young team that had not played a playoff game since 2001, had lost all six games it had played against the Yankees that season and had scored 157 fewer runs than New York, or almost a full run fewer per game.

  “We have to focus on not playing the Yankees, but playing our best, the best baseball we can play,” is how Indians general manager Mark Shapiro remembered his thinking going into that series. “Talent-wise, I think we stack up. But there's a reality to playing in Yankee Stadium. There's a reality to how it affected our team prior to that, and those names. Imposing names.”

  Most every postseason, Torre would give a motivational speech to his players on the eve of the opening game. This time, as he did with modifying his usual spring training speech at the start of the season, Torre would choose a different tack. His team had grinded so hard just to get to the playoffs—coming back from a losing record 95 games into the season—that Torre felt a different touch was needed than the usual football locker room machismo. Actually, it was a conversation with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick that convinced Torre to keep the mood light. Belichick's Patriots were Torre's Yankees of the NFL, routinely playing to higher expectations than every other franchise. The Patriots were being heavily criticized at the time for what was being called Spygate, the team's illegal use of recording devices to tape the coaching signals of opponents. Belichick told Torre that in those difficult, tense times his instinct was that his team needed to laugh and stay loose, so he brought a comedian into the New England locker room. Torre liked the idea. He called his good friend and Yankees fan, Billy Crystal.

  “Can you put a bit together for us that I can show the guys?” Torre asked him.

  Crystal agreed, and he quizzed Torre for some information about the players that he could use in his monologue, which he taped, burned to a DVD and sent to Torre in Cleveland. On the workout day before Game 1, Torre gathered his team in the visiting clubhouse at Jacobs Field and popped in the DVD. Suddenly a pornographic scene began playing on the monitor. There was nervous laughter. What sort of mistake was this? Had somebody mixed up the DVDs? No. A close-up of Crystal suddenly replaced the pornography.

  “Now that I've got your attention …” Crystal said.

  He then launched into a 12-minute
comedy segment in which, with the help of fellow comedian Robin Williams, he poked fun at Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Melky Cabrera and others. The players loved it. Crystal turned serious at the end of his bit. He implored the Yankees to make sure they played with an effort that would leave them no regrets. He talked about how lucky they were to have this opportunity and their health. “And there is someone we should all pray for,” Crystal said, “because he has not been blessed with the same great health. So before you go out there, when you hit your knees, say a prayer … for Carl Pavano!”

  The room erupted in laughter.

  “Cashman didn't think it was very funny,” Torre said. “Cash would have liked a motivational video. I've been in the postseason so often that I can't see the point in bringing up the expectations. You don't need to remind guys. I think I got to the point, whether it was because of my own situation and being criticized, or whether I felt there was a lot of tension in the playoffs anyway based on the expectations, we should keep it light and airy.”

  Torre's most serious decision heading into the Division Series was how to deploy his starting pitchers. Chien-Ming Wang was the unquestioned leader of the staff, having won 19 games for a second straight season, and an obvious choice to start Game 1. He was not your typical ace, though. Wang was a groundball specialist who did not strike out many batters and, like a parent with a two-year-old at Sunday service, was at the mercy of the unpredictable behavior of his power sinker. Andy Pettitte, Torre's traditional Game 2 security blanket, also was a lock, though he did pitch poorly in September. Roger Clemens would get a start, if only because of his reputation and because of all the money the Yankees were paying him. But Clemens wasn't the warrior the Yankees had known from his first round with the team. He was a rusted battleship. Clemens was 45 years old and had not pitched since September 16 because of a hamstring injury.

  Torre's toughest decision was what to do about Game 4. He thought about giving the start to Mike Mussina, who had salvaged something from his awful season by posting a 3.49 ERA in September, and who had beaten the Indians in August in a strong start in which he pitched into the eighth inning. If Torre started Mussina, then he could use Pettitte again on normal rest in Game 5. Under that scenario, Torre would have given the ball in four out of five games to veteran pitchers 35 and older.

  “I was thinking about Mussina in Game 4,” Torre said. “I thought maybe somebody with breaking stuff, somebody who could change speeds, would be efficient against the Indians. But he really hadn't pitched much and you had to wonder about how sharp he was going to be.”

  Torre decided to ask Cashman for his preference, “though I already had an idea of where he was going,” Torre said. “He said he liked Wang on short rest in Game 4 instead of Mussina. He said if you go with Mussina, then you've got Pettitte for Game 5 and Wang doesn't go a second time.”

  Wang was the Yankees’ best starting pitcher. He also was 10-4 with a 2.75 ERA at Yankee Stadium, where Game 4 would be played. Cashman had no problem making sure Wang pitched two of the first four games, even if the second one would carry the risk of pitching him on only three days of rest instead of the normal four. Torre agreed with him. Wang had pitched on three days of rest only once in his 80 major league starts, and that had gone badly, losing 7-2 to Boston without getting out of the fifth inning back in 2005.

  As it turned out, Wang was awful even fully rested for Game 1. In what was one of the worst pitching performances in postseason history, Wang, who couldn't get his power sinker to stay down on its best behavior, was shellacked for a postseason record-tying eight earned runs in less than five innings of what was a 12-3 Cleveland rout. Only six pitchers previously had allowed eight earned runs in a postseason start, and none of them had allowed as many as the 14 base runners that Wang did. It was a classic example of the dark side of living with Wang as your ace. If his sinker wasn't acting properly, he had nowhere else to go to get people out with any consistency. He had nothing to make hitters swing and miss.

  With just one defeat, the Yankees had come to fully understand the danger of a five-game series. One defeat essentially threw them in a must-win situation in the other team's ballpark. Were they to lose Game 2, they would have to win three consecutive games to win the series. What they needed was for Pettitte to deliver a lead to their lockdown late-game specialists, Chamberlain and Rivera. Pettitte did exactly that, though barely so in a taut pitching duel with Fausto Carmona, Cleveland's 23-year-old 19-game winner. Pettitte handed a 1-0 lead in the seventh inning to Chamberlain, who stranded the two runners Pettitte had left for him. The Yankees felt good about bringing the series back to New York tied, and why not? They had never lost a game that season when they entrusted a lead to Chamblerlain. He went back out for the eighth, with Rivera behind him to pick up the final three outs. Everything was coming together straight off the Yankees’ blueprint for winning. Torre was six routine outs away from the first of the seven wins he would need to win the pennant and return the Yankees to the World Series, which most observers considered the minimum requirement for him to ensure he would be back as manager in 2008.

  And then suddenly all hell broke loose, or at least the two-winged version of it. It took at that exact moment a convergence of bizarre forces that had nothing to do with baseball—rather, they were ecological, meteorological and entomological—to put the Torre Era on the brink of its extinction.

  The perfect swarm.

  Midges, thousands upon thousands of the buggers, suddenly swarmed around the pitching mound, many of them flying into Chamberlain's eyes, nose, ears, face and neck, with many of those sticking to the wet skin of the heavily perspiring pitcher. He couldn't concentrate. He had trouble even seeing home plate through the cloud of bugs. A trainer came running out with an aerosol can of bug spray and showered him with the insecticide, but that didn't help at all. The midge infestation actually seemed worse. What the hell was going on?

  The answer went all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s. Lake Erie was so polluted in those days that midges, or mayflies as some people called them, disappeared. These midges are harmless creatures except for the annoyance they engender. They don't bite or carry disease. They begin in a larval state on the bottom of lakes, streams and standing water. With enough clean, oxygen-rich sediment, they emerge from the water as adults that fly off to swarm and, while doing so, to mate. Lake Erie, however, used to be too polluted for the midges to prosper. But after a major cleanup effort, the midges began returning to the Cleveland area in the mid-1990s. People near the western basin of Lake Erie came to regard them as a regular warm-weather nuisance. The midges typically would swarm three times a year, only for a day or two each time, and usually toward artificial light sources in the 45 minutes after dusk during days in May or June when warm weather set off their activity. Theirs was a 24-to 72-hour lifespan. In that short time adult midges would leave the water, swarm, breed and die.

  In 2007, the first week of October happened to be unusually warm in Cleveland. It felt like spring—apparently to the midges, as well. The unusual heat (it was 81 degrees when Game 2 began at five o'clock) tricked the midges into a fourth active cycle. They left the water—likely Lake Erie or the Cuyahoga River, another waterway that had been cleaned up—saw the bright lights of Jacobs Field and headed straight to the ballpark. Only because of the odd starting time, made to accommodate the telecast of the Angels–Red Sox Division Series game in prime time to follow, did the Indians and Yankees happen to be playing the eighth inning smack in the middle of peak swarming time for midges: the 45-minute window after dusk.

  So after an uninterrupted 12-year run, the Torre Era was about to come undone for good by an incredible series of events: a major cleanup of Rust Belt waterways, a freakish autumnal heat wave and an odd starting time to a playoff game.

  Oh, and one more thing: the mistake of using bug spray to try to ward off the bugs.

  A Cleveland insect specialist, an Indians fan, happened to be watching the game on tel
evision when he saw Yankees trainer Gene Monahan spraying down Chamberlain. The bug expert quickly reached for the phone and called the Indians’ front office.

  “For God's sake,” he said, “tell your guys down on the field, whatever they do, don't use bug spray. It's useless against these bugs. It actually makes it worse because they will be attracted to the moisture on the skin.”

  Chamberlain, glistening from the spray and his heavy sweat, was a midge magnet. The television pictures resembled a teen horror flick. Watching in Boston, Red Sox officials were shocked that play continued.”I can't believe they're playing in that,” one of them remarked.

  This wasn't just some meaningless August game. This was a playoff game, a game the Yankees and their manager all but had to win. A 1-0 game in the eighth inning. And their pitcher was trying to pitch while slathered in a sticky stew of sweat, insecticide and bugs while a swarm of more midges probed every uncovered orifice of his body. It was quickly evident how badly Chamberlain was compromised. He walked the leadoff batter, Grady Sizemore, on four pitches. Chamberlain had faced 91 batters during the season and only twice even went so far as a 3-and-0 count.

  It grew worse. His next pitch sailed past Posada for a wild pitch, sending Sizemore to second. The Indians now had the tying run in scoring position and they had yet to even take a swing. The Yankees, however, were swinging wildly. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, New York's $43 million left side of the infield, were constantly waving their gloves and throwing hands at the little midges. Fighting for their playoff lives, the most expensive team in baseball had devolved into a vaudeville act.

  Chamberlain looked into the Yankees dugout at Torre and said, “I can't see!”

  Torre started toward the mound but stopped. He was worried about being charged with a trip to the mound, though he could have appealed to the umpires to consider it an unofficial visit, as is the case when possible injuries are involved, because of the extraordinary circumstances.