The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “His strength worked against him,” said Shapiro. “So we didn't try to scrap everything. We just said, ‘Hey, you need to recognize when your mental condition works against you, when you're delivery breaks down, and what happens in your delivery.’ “

  After Carmona's bullpen meltdowns, the Indians sent the rookie righthander to Triple-A Buffalo to start games, not finish them. They called him back to Cleveland as a starter, then sent him to the Dominican Winter League to start some more, the better to develop the greater stamina needed by a starting pitcher after spending most of 2006 in the bullpen. In 2007, in the seventh year of Carmona's holistic development—mental, physical, hell, even dental—the Indians’ little $10,000 investment had become a workhorse major league starter. Carmona threw 215 innings. He finished second in the league in wins (19) and second in ERA (3.06). Trying to hit his power sinker was like trying to hit a bowling ball. Nobody threw more double-play grounders (32). He had, by far, the best groundball-to-flyball ratio in the league (3.28). The Indians had themselves a young pitching star.

  The Indians had won the lottery.

  When the kid from Santo Domingo took the ball for the ninth inning of Game 2 against New York—the game tied, the midges swirling madly, the Yankees sending Johnny Damon, Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu to the plate, with Alex Rodriguez waiting in case any of them reached base—Carmona's task would test every bit of that holistic development. No Cleveland pitcher this young ever had thrown nine innings in a postseason game. No starting pitcher had lasted nine innings against this formidable Yankees lineup all year. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower, ignored the midges and went to work with the calm purposefulness of a diamond cutter.

  Damon grounded out. Jeter struck out. Abreu reached first base on an infield single, to shortstop, then promptly swiped second base on the next pitch. The must-have game for the Yankees had come down to this: Rodriguez, the most expensive player in baseball, against Carmona, the erstwhile $10,000 kid, with the potential winning run at second base. Rodriguez, for all of his 156 runs batted in during the regular season, was in need of some serious holistic postseason help himself. He was 0-for-5 in the series (without getting the ball out of the infield) and had four hits in his previous 49 postseason at-bats with the Yankees, including 27 consecutive at-bats without a hit on the road. Rodriguez did see nine pitches, but it ended badly for him. Carmona, with his 113th of the night, buzzed a ferocious sinker under the hands of a swinging Rodriguez for strike three.

  When Carmona marched into the Cleveland dugout, Indians trainers were amazed at what they saw: his face and neck were covered with hundreds of midges. Not once had he taken a peeved swat at any of them. It was as if they were never there.

  The midges left a short time later, their 45-minute window to wreak havoc on the Yankees and help close the curtain on the Torre Era having expired. Rivera did provide two shutout innings, but as soon as Torre had to go to anybody else in the bullpen, and in this case it was Luis Vizcaino, the game was over. Vizcaino walked the leadoff hitter of the 11th inning, the preamble to an eventual game-winning single by Travis Hafner.

  The Yankees were one game away from elimination. The same could be said for Torre. Steinbrenner made sure the world knew it, too. On the morning of Game 3, Steinbrenner, out of nowhere, was quoted in the Bergen Record explaining that Torre was gone with one more loss.

  “His job is on the line,” Steinbrenner said.”I think we're paying him a lot of money. He's the highest-paid manager in baseball, so I don't think we'd take him back if we didn't win this series.”

  The bluster would have been normal procedure from Stein-brenner 10, even five, years earlier. But in 2007? It was shocking. Steinbrenner's handlers had kept him away from the press all year. He communicated with the media only through carefully worded statements from his public relations representative. When writer Franz Lidz, assigned by Portfolio magazine to write a piece on the Yankees’ owner, breached the protective wall around Steinbrenner by visiting him that summer unannounced at his Tampa home, the description that emerged of The Boss was a pathetic one. Stein-brenner was portrayed as barely lucid, mumbling and repeating himself. Steinbrenner was well enough to make only three games in New York all year before this series. And now, with his team on the brink of elimination, he had suddenly found the old gusto?

  Ian O'Connor, a columnist for the Bergen Record, had called Steinbrenner at his place in the Regency Hotel. It was a play taken from an old Yankees beat writer playbook: call Steinbrenner when the team is playing poorly and you just might get yourself a headline if The Boss decides to pop off. In the 1980s the beat writers used to call Steinbrenner “Mr. Tunes,” because getting outrageous quotes from him was as easy as dropping a quarter into a jukebox and making your selection. Many of the quotes were as familiar as hit records, straight from the Steinbrenner catalog. But this was 2007, and Steinbrenner's declining health had rendered him little more than a figurehead who was barely seen or heard from. Indeed, not more than a week later the Yankees would announce that Steinbrenner officially was no longer actively running the team, but would serve as a kind of patriarch to the operations.

  There was no answer on Steinbrenner's phone. O'Connor kept calling. No answer. Another call. Then suddenly, Steinbrenner picked up the phone. He answered questions. O'Connor decided that Steinbrenner sounded lucid enough for the quotes to have merit. He had his headline. It was big news. Torre found out about Steinbrenner's win-or-be-gone edict on his drive into Yankee Stadium for Game 3. He always did hate having his job security become a public issue around his players, but now it had become the issue. At his scheduled pregame news conference, Torre took 13 questions. Nine of them were about his job status and Steinbren-ner's comments.

  “You don't always get used to it,” Torre said in response to one question about his reaction to Steinbrenner's comments, “but you understand if you want to work here, and certainly there's a great deal of upside to working here, that you understand that there are certain things you have to deal with. You know, that's pretty much where I am.”

  Cashman sought out Torre behind the batting cage during batting practice.

  “I'm sorry,” Cashman said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I'm pissed about the timing of it,” Torre said. “We don't need this.”

  Said Torre, “At that point I knew I wasn't coming back, even if we won.” All things considered, Torre did a fairly good job concealing his hurt and disappointment. The urgency of the Yankees’ plight demanded his attention. It was up to Roger Clemens to save the franchise and the manager. Clemens was 45 years old, had not pitched in 20 days and, with his body betraying him, was staring at the possibility that this finally could be the last game he pitched in the big leagues— especially considering at that moment the two tons of dirt on him sitting on the desk of baseball's independent steroids investigator, George Mitchell. Even if the Yankees somehow managed to survive that game, the decision by Torre and Cashman to have Wang pitch two of the first four games looked far more suspect now that the Indians had hammered Wang in Game 1.

  As the Yankees took batting practice before Game 3, Mussina walked over to Wang in the Yankee Stadium outfield.

  “Can you pitch tomorrow?” Mussina asked him.

  “No, you pitch tomorrow,” Wang said.

  “I didn't ask you that,” Mussina said. “I said can you pitch tomorrow.”

  “Uh, yeah, I'm okay,” Wang said.

  Said Mussina, “He really didn't give me an answer. He was just kind of confused about the question. And then, 15 minutes later, they told him that he was going to pitch the next day. On three days of rest. I knew he was getting worn down. It was a long year. He had thrown a lot of innings. I knew he was worn down.

  “The point is I know Joe would have been scrutinized to death if he had pitched me in Game 4 and I got beat. I still think I would have given us the best chance to win that day because I was rested. Wang wasn't. Wang had been beat up. I had had success
against the Indians and it was a home game. Whether that would have made a difference or not in that game, I don't know. Just personally, I felt good about facing them.”

  To even get to a Game 4 the Yankees needed to survive a start from Clemens, who was a physical wreck, with hamstring and elbow woes, but who basically called his own shots. There was a game September 3 against Seattle, for instance, when Torre thought Clemens might consider not making the start because of his elbow trouble. Torre had Mussina standing by as an emergency starter. He left it up to Clemens.

  “Roger insisted he could pitch,” Torre said. “I must have asked him 10 times. I said, ‘You know, you don't have to pitch this game.’ And I know he's bullshitting me because he's bullshitting himself. He has this meeting with himself and he convinces himself that he can do this. He wills himself. So in getting that same point across to me, I'm still looking at this from the more rational side, so I'm still a little skeptical.

  “It's like David Cone. You go to David Cone and ask him,’Can you get this guy out?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I'll get him out.’ He may have to pull a gun to do it, but whichever way he has to do it, he'll get him out. It gets to a point with certain guys, guys you've been around and trust, you know when they make that commitment they're going to do it. It may not be pretty, but they're going to get it done. So with Roger, you want to give him the responsibility, but you're sitting there thinking, I don't know why I let him do this. Then again, if I didn't let him do it, I'd be sitting there thinking, I wonder if he could have done it? It's one of those things where you second-guess yourself but you know there was no other way to do it.”

  In that September 3 game, Clemens lasted only four innings before the elbow pain forced him out. He gave up five runs and the Yankees lost to the Mariners, 7-1. Now Torre was rolling the dice on a creaky Clemens again, only this time with their season and the manager's job riding on it.

  “There was no hesitation,” Torre said.

  Clemens never made it out of the third inning against the Indians. He needed to throw 59 pitches just to get seven outs. His hamstring fairly groaned in protestation when he tried to field a soft groundball near the mound in the second inning. His body was giving out. After that episode he told Torre, “Skip, I'll give you a signal if I can't do it.”

  Of course, a failing Clemens, still too proud, never gave the signal. He was laboring obviously when, already down 2-0, he walked the leadoff batter of the third inning. Torre told catcher Jorge Posada to talk to Clemens.

  “Let me get this guy,” Clemens said, referring to the next batter, Victor Martinez. Somehow, Clemens struck out Martinez. But Posada looked into the dugout at Torre and shook his head, signaling that Clemens was done. It was the last batter Clemens would ever face. Torre removed Clemens, replacing him with Phil Hughes, who would allow the third run to score. Clemens walked off for the final time, limping. He walked down the dugout steps gingerly, needing to hold a handrail to steady himself. His great career was over.

  “It was pretty obvious he had to come out,” Torre said. “You could tell just by watching him that he couldn't get the ball to do what he wanted it to do. He wasn't locating it. He always talks when he comes into the dugout, and he was talking that night about not being able to get the ball to behave the way it's supposed to.

  “When you look back you say, ‘Well, it was his age. What are you going to do?’ The body just doesn't heal as quickly as you would want it to or used to. But no second thoughts. When you get to the postseason a lot of it is emotions. It sort of overrides ability a lot of times.”

  Down 3-0, the Yankees rallied to win the game, 8-4. Hughes pitched 3⅔ innings of shutout ball. The offense awoke. Still, the front office wasn't happy about Torre using Chamberlain for two innings. The Yankees were leading 5-3 heading into their at-bat in the sixth inning when Chamberlain began throwing with the instructions that he would pitch the seventh to protect the two-run lead. The Yankees tacked on three runs in their at-bat. Chamberlain was already warming by then, so the best course of action was to get him in the game, rather than sit him down and risk having to get him up again if Cleveland threatened. Chamberlain cruised through the seventh inning in order on 16 pitches.

  Now Torre had a choice: Did he pull Chamberlain to keep him strong for Game 4? If he did that, then he would have given the eighth inning of a must-win game to Kyle Farnsworth. And if Farns-worth wobbled even just a bit, Torre would have to send Rivera into the game in the eighth inning, which would limit his availability for Game 4. Torre was not prepared to take that kind of gamble, not with Farnsworth, especially not in an elimination game.

  “I was trying to do whatever I could to stay away from Mariano to have him for two innings the next day,”Torre said.”Chamberlain got through the seventh with the low pitch count. Now my choice is to go with someone else in the eighth, but if I don't get a clean inning, then I've got to get Mariano up, which was the one thing I was trying to avoid. I guess I never really had enough trust in everybody else down there to think that getting three outs in that spot is so simple.”

  Chamberlain stumbled in the eighth. He gave up a run while needing 22 pitches to get through it. Rivera breezed through the ninth inning in order, needing only 10 pitches. Torre's plan had worked. He won the game and got to a Game 4 with his best pitcher, Rivera, fresh and available for two innings. Chamberlain, freed from the “Joba Rules,” still could come back with one inning. If the Yankees could win the first six innings of Game 4, Torre felt Chamberlain and Rivera, barring another biblical-like plague, could get the final nine outs to bring the Yankees to a Game 5, when each would be refreshed by a day of rest from an off day after Game 4. Some members of the front office, though, saw that Chamberlain had thrown 38 pitches in an 8-4 game and shook their heads.

  Once again, after the game, Torre was forced to talk about his job status.

  “The only thing I try to do,” Torre said at his press conference, “is allow my players to roll the dice out there and play, because every time we go to postseason there's nothing that's going to satisfy anybody unless you win the World Series. And that's very difficult. Those are very difficult situations for the players to play under. I understand the requirements here, but the players are human beings, and it's not machinery here. Even though they get paid a lot of money, it's still blood that runs through their veins. And my job is to try to get them to be the players they are by, you know, allowing them to understand that the best effort you can give is all you can do.”

  His words seemed for the consumption of Cashman, Stein-brenner and Steinbrenner's cabinet as much as for the assembled media in front of him. It had been another long day in a long season: the shocking Steinbrenner win-or-be-gone mandate, which was more proof his bosses no longer trusted him, the focus on his job security, the sight of Clemens hobbling off the mound for what this time really did look like the end to his career … to the very end, even victory exacted a toll.

  It was the 1,249th win with the Yankees for Torre, including postseason play, over 12 seasons. It would be the last.

  The last game of the Torre Era began with a wish, a sort of last request, which seemed fitting because Torre delivered it in the maze of narrow hallways in the basement of Yankee Stadium, which at times like these had the feel of catacombs winding darkly toward the gallows. Torre was walking to his usual pregame news conference before Game 4 with Phyllis Merhige, senior vice president of club relations for Major League Baseball.

  “I hope we win the World Series this year,” Torre told her, “so I can tell them they can shove this job up their ass.”

  There was no hiding the hurt. Three years of growing distrust from his employers had culminated with Steinbrenner taking a shot at him out of the blue, and with his team down to its last breath, no less. Torre didn't know O'Connor was telling people he had kept dialing Steinbrenner on his own accord in search of a story. “It sounded like somebody set it up,” Torre said, referencing people close to Steinbrenner, “especially kno
wing where George was at that time with his health. People couldn't get to George all year. It looked like it had other fingerprints on it. Of course, I was probably gun-shy at that point, anyway.

  “I said what I said before Game 4 because I didn't want to come back with that whole attitude of distrust in place. It was all stuff that seemed contrived. I can't stand living like that, where people are looking for ways to trick you. If you don't want somebody around, just tell them.”

  The end held little drama. It was 87 degrees when the game began, the hottest October 3 in the recorded history of New York. Wang, pitching on short rest, was even worse than he was in Game 1. The first batter hit a home run. The third batter singled and the fifth batter singled, accounting for a 2-0 Cleveland lead. In the second inning, the leadoff batter singled and so did the next batter. Wang hit the next batter with a pitch. Torre had seen enough. Wang had faced nine batters and retired only three of them. He left the bases loaded for Mike Mussina, who allowed two of those runners to score before pitching out of the inning. Wang, already tagged for a playoff-record-tying eight earned runs in Game 1, became only the 10th starting pitcher in postseason history to lose an elimination game while failing to get more than three outs.