The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Times were different now. For Steinbrenner, it was time to rest, not time to fight. This was his office, but it was not his meeting. It was not his decision alone, anymore.

  The meeting was Torre's idea. Hank, Hal, Felix, Levine, Trost and Cashman had kicked around the idea of what to do about Torre for the better part of a week. Do they offer him another contract and, if so, for how long and for how much money? Do they even want him back at all? While they deliberated, Torre told Cashman he wanted to meet with the group face-to-face. It wasn't much different from how he managed: you look somebody in the eye and rely on direct honesty, rather than leaks and secondhand information. The six Yankee lieutenants thought it was a good idea. By then they had decided that they would offer Torre nothing more than one guaranteed year.

  The day before the meeting, as the two sides finalized arrangements for the meeting, Cashman broke the news to Torre that he probably would not do any better than a one-year offer.

  “They only want to give you one year,” Cashman told him over the phone.

  “What about a second year?” Torre asked.

  “I don't think they're going to offer you that.”

  “Cash, I have an idea. What about a two-year contract? It doesn't even really matter what the money is. Two years, and if I get fired in the first year, the second year is guaranteed. But if I get fired after the first year, I don't get the full amount of the second year, just a buyout. The money doesn't matter. I mean, as long as it's not just something ridiculous. It's not about the money. It's the second year.”

  Torre had just gone through the toughest year of his career, what with the leaks, the sniping, the constant talk about getting fired, and the feeling that people within his own organization were rooting against him. He was worn-out by all of that. There was no way he was going to go through another season like that. And there was one scenario that would have set the table for exactly that kind of season all over again: working under a one-year contract. That scenario would stamp him a lame duck all over again, with the leaks and sniping and managerial death watch starting up again upon the first three-game losing streak in April.

  All Torre wanted was to manage one more season in relative calm, and the second year on a contract would help provide that kind of stability. The second year was nothing but an insurance policy. He planned to retire after that one season, anyway.

  “I couldn't do it on a one-year deal,” Torre said. “I couldn't go through what was the worst year of my professional life all over again. I couldn't put my family through it again. I couldn't put my coaches through that again. All I wanted was one year where nobody is questioning me about how you're going to lose your job.”

  On October 18, Torre, Cashman and Trost boarded a private jet in Westchester, New York, for the flight to Tampa. He had told his coaches that he wasn't sure what was going to happen.

  “I knew at the time I thought it was going to be 60/40 that he wouldn't come back,” third-base coach Larry Bowa said.”You know, Joe kept everything pretty quiet. He said,’I'll get in touch with you guys.’ Selfishly, I wanted him to come back because I loved coaching there, but he had to do what he had to do. Coming back on a one-year deal would not be fair to him or the players, because he would have been gone quickly. No question.

  “For a guy with what he's done for the city and that team, that's the one thing I thought was very unfair. I don't think he was treated the right way. I mean, I think Joe earned the right to go out on his own, and he should have earned the right to open that new stadium. At least they should have said,’Okay, this year we'll give you, and for the new stadium you have an option if you want to stay or not, or go upstairs and be an adviser.’ I really thought that was going to happen because of what Joe meant to the city, the players that played there and to the organization. And it didn't happen like that. It turned out to be an ugly ending.”

  On the plane ride to Tampa, Cashman repeated his warning to Torre about the length of the contract, again choosing a pronoun carefully as if to distance himself from what was about to go down.

  “I don't think they're going to go to more than one year,” Cash-man said. “What are you going to do then?”

  “I don't know,” Torre said. “I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go in there.”

  Torre was putting his faith in the power of personal communication, anticipating that a face-to-face meeting with the lieutenants would bring about an honest negotiation. He held out hope that there was a way to manage the Yankees in 2008 without his head in a noose from the first day of spring training. The first thing he needed to know was if they really wanted him in the first place.

  “Do you want me to manage?”

  Levine and Hal told him that yes, they wanted him back, and it was a unanimous decision by everyone in the room. Hal said they had decided on an offer: a one-year contract at $5 million, a 33 percent pay cut from his 2007 salary. Hal told him, “I want you to manage because you're good with young players.” Torre wondered why, if that were the case, they were offering only one year.

  If the Yankees reached the postseason, Torre would get another $1 million. He would get another $1 million if the Yankees reached the League Championship Series and another $1 million if they reached the World Series. Levine classified the bonus money as “incentives,” implying at the meeting and later to reporters that Torre needed to be motivated.”It's important to motivate people,” Levine would later tell reporters, “as most people in everyday life have to be, based on performance.”

  Motivate? The 2007 Yankees had come back from the sixth-worst 50-game start in franchise history to make the playoffs. They had used 14 different starting pitchers—no Yankees team except the wartime 1946 team ever needed more—and yet they still won 94 games. They roared back from a losing record as late as July 7 to play .675 baseball down the stretch (52-25). Three-fifths of their original rotation was a disaster—Kei Igawa and Carl Pavano combined for three wins, and Mike Mussina endured the worst season of his career—and yet they won the third-most games in all of baseball.

  Did Torre help accomplish all of that and then suddenly lose his motivation during, of all times, the playoffs? Or did the Yankees’ exit have something to do with their ace throwing two of the worst games in postseason history and a freakish attack of Lake Erie midges?

  Torre would later tell reporters he considered the incentives “an insult.” In doing so, he was not referring to the idea of incentives or the money itself, but rather to the thinking of the Yankees executives that he needed such a carrot to be “motivated.”

  “I don't need motivation to do what I do,” he told the Yankees executives at the meeting. “You have to understand that.”

  Said Torre, “I've always had a $1 million bonus for winning the World Series. In fact, in my last contract, when we put it together, Steve Swindal and myself, we had different stages, if you win-win-win. That's the way it was when I took over initially, even in my first year, that you got so much for getting to different levels. I said then, ‘Let's admit it: the only thing that's worthwhile is the World Series. The only bonus I want you to put in there is the World Series.’ “

  As much as Torre was bothered by the idea that he needed incentives to be motivated, what really stopped him was the term of the contract. Sure, maybe the seven executives in the room did want him back, but they wanted him back only in the exact compromised position in which he had managed the 2007 season: with a noose around his neck and a trapdoor below his feet. They wanted him to manage the Yankees only from an exposed position.

  There was no way Torre was coming back under those conditions again, not when he knew it meant being put in the crosshairs of being fired and undermined from Day One. The seven executives, meanwhile, would consider no other arrangement but that one.

  “Going back to the first question I asked—’Do you want me to manage?’—the answer they gave me really wasn't honest,” Torre said. “They said they wanted me to manage. If they wanted
me to manage, we would have found a way to get it done. And that was never the case. Because there was never any movement. Negotiation is something that takes place between two sides. That didn't happen. It was,’Either take it or leave it.’ And my feeling was that only because I was here so long that they felt they were obligated to make an offer.”

  Torre calmly tried to make a case for himself. For instance, he pointed out that over the course of his tenure attendance at Yankee Stadium had skyrocketed 90 percent. The Yankees ranked in the middle of the pack in attendance in Torre's first year, in 1996— seventh of 14 teams, with 2.2 million fans. In 2007 the Yankees ranked first with 4.2 million fans. He talked about ad revenues he brought to the Yankees himself, from companies that wanted to be associated with one of the most successful managers in modern history. Under Torre, of course, the Yankees were a postseason guarantee: a perfect 12-for-12 in postseason appearances with pennants in half of those years and world championships in a third of them. The promise of October baseball helped drive season ticket sales and offered another month of revenues when most ballparks were dark. And even when Torre's teams did not win the World Series in the seven-year “drought,” the Yankees were far and away the best team in baseball. In that 2001–2007 “drought,” the Yankees were at least 37 wins better than every other team in baseball.

  None of it meant anything to the seven other people in the room, not, anyway, in terms of even considering a second year.

  “The reason I went there to Tampa,” Torre said, “is I wanted to see somebody face-to-face, and I wanted to see if any of these points I brought up made any sense. I mean, where the attendance was when I first got there and where it was now, the revenues they've made since then … maybe all this stuff would somehow negate some of the fact that they felt I was overpaid and overstayed. Overpaid and overstayed. And then nobody had the guts to just say, ‘Get out.’ That was the worst part.”

  There would be no negotiations. When Cashman was asked later by reporters why the Yankees refused to negotiate, he said,”It's just complicated, given the dollars.”

  But dollars had nothing to do with it. Torre would even tell reporters later that the $5 million salary was “generous.” He wasn't asking to negotiate dollars. He was asking to negotiate one year of some security and peace. The Yankees would have none of it, and when the seven executives made it clear to him that theirs was a take-it-or-leave-it offer, Torre understood the greatest pillar of his management style had been destroyed: the trust was gone. He knew his employers did not trust him. For a man who made trust the single most important ingredient of championship teams—trust among teammates, trust from those players in the honesty and integrity of the manager and staff—he could not continue without it. It became an easy decision: he told the seven executives he could not accept their offer.

  “Yeah, I was leaving a lot of money on the table,”Torre said,”but I didn't give a shit because I knew what I went through the year before, sitting behind that desk every day and dreading coming to the ballpark. It would have been the same thing.

  “I mean, if I could go right from my house to the dugout, it would have been wonderful. But that other shit I had to put up with, I didn't want any more of that, and there was no price tag I could put on that. I couldn't do it for all the money in the world for one year like that. And really, I only wanted to manage one more year, but I wanted to manage that one year in peace.”

  So that was it. The 12-year Torre Era had come to a non-negotiable end. Torre's run as manager of the New York Yankees ended with a meeting that took little more than 10 minutes. As Torre got up from his seat in Steinbrenner's office, Hal Steinbren-ner said to him, “The door's always open. You can always work for the YES network!”

  Torre was too stunned to speak, caught between bemusement and anger. Did The Boss's son really just dangle the consolation of working for the Yankees-run regional television network after the Yankees refused to negotiate with the second-winningest manager in franchise history? Wow, Torre thought. They really don't get it.

  Torre shook the hands of everybody in the room, starting with George. The old man took his dark glasses off and said, “Good luck, Joe.”

  “Thanks again, Boss,” Torre said.

  Felix was the only one who walked out of the room with Torre toward the elevators in the reception area of the third-floor offices. But then Cashman appeared.

  “Joe, Lonn and I won't be flying back with you,” Cashman said. “We'll be staying here.”

  Seeing Cashman suddenly reminded Torre of something: that two-year proposal he made to Cashman over the phone in advance of the meeting, the one with the buyout in it. The offer never had been discussed in Steinbrenner's office. Torre figured Cashman already had presented it to the other executives, and he was curious as to what happened to the proposal.

  “Cash,” Torre said, “they had no interest in that buyout proposal, the one I gave you over the phone?”

  Cashman looked at Torre oddly, as if this was something new.

  “Uh, I really didn't understand it,” Cashman said. “Remind me, what was it again?”

  “Two-year contract, whatever the number. If they fire me during the first year, they pay me both years. If they fire me after the first year, they pay me some reduced amount we can talk about.”

  “I'll see.”

  Cashman walked back into Steinbrenner's office.

  Torre was incredulous.

  “I'm thinking, Well, shit! He never told them!” Torre said.

  They had spent 12 years together, Cashman first as the assistant to general manager Bob Watson and then as the general manager of three consecutive world championship teams with Torre as the manager. Torre had presented Cashman with the lineup card from the clinching game of the 1998 World Series, the one in which those Yankees established themselves as one of the greatest teams of all time with a record 125 wins, postseason included. Torre and Cashman had shared dinners and champagne and laughs and arguments. Twelve years. It was an eternity in baseball for an executive and a manager to work together for that long.

  But at the moment when Torre was searching for some way to save his job, and when he turned to Cashman in his moment of need, Cashman did not so much as pass on to his bosses a proposal from Torre—a simple one, too, one that was not at all difficult to understand. Twelve years together, and it ends like this.

  Come to think of it, Torre thought, Cashman had said nothing during the entire meeting. Cashman was the general manager who had convinced Steinbrenner after the 2005 season to put in writing that he would have control over all baseball operations. The manager is a fairly important part of baseball operations. And when the future employment of the manager was being discussed, how was it that the empowered general manager had nothing at all to say?

  “Cash was sitting right over my right shoulder,” Torre said, “and never uttered a sound the whole meeting.” Cashman, for his part, said simply, “It was Joe's meeting.”

  Only much later did Torre start to put the picture together of what had happened to his working relationship with Cashman. The personal fallout they had in 2006 spring training, Cashman's conversion to the religion of statistics, his disregard for bringing back Bernie Williams, his submission of odd lineup suggestions based on stats, his lack of regard for Ron Guidry as a pitching coach, his detachment from the responsibility “they” were making on an offer to Torre, his failure to offer any comment or support in the meeting to decide Torre's future, his failure to personally relay to the Stein-brenners Torre's proposal to find a way to reach an agreement …

  Where could Torre find support in the end? Steve Swindal, thanks to one DUI charge, had been run out of the organization and the Steinbrenner family. George Steinbrenner was not fit enough to deal directly with Torre himself. And now Cashman had retreated to silence with Torre's job on the line. The allies of Joe Torre had dwindled to zero.

  “I thought Cash was an ally, I really did,” Torre said. “You know, we had some diffe
rences on coaches, and the usefulness of the coaches. I know he didn't think much of Guidry. And Zimmer. You know, Zimmer could not trust Cash, and I disagreed with Zimmer vehemently for the longest time. Then, you know, you start thinking about things … I have a—I don't want to say it's a weakness, but I like to believe that I want to trust people. And I do trust people until I'm proven wrong. And it's not going to keep me from trusting somebody else tomorrow because it's the only way I can do my job—is to be that guy.”

  Torre still held out faint hope that the two-year proposal could be the pathway to an agreement. He waited by the elevators.

  “It was a last-ditch effort by me to remind them, ‘Does this make any sense for us to get together?’” Torre said. “There weren't any cross words. I didn't say things to them in anger or anything. It was more like, ‘If that's the way you want it, that's the way it is.’ It was just trying to move a little bit and give them an offer that maybe they could live with. I just wanted to make sure before I did walk away from this thing that I gave them every opportunity to keep me.”

  Not more than 30 seconds after Cashman left Torre at the reception area, Cashman came walking back to him. It took less than a minute for the Steinbrenners, Levine and Trost to wholly reject the idea.

  “No, they have no interest in doing that,” Cashman told Torre.

  No interest. Rejected in less than a minute. That was it. It was done. The Torre Era officially was finished. He stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. A strong feeling washed over him.

  “Relief,” Torre said. “A feeling of relief.” The relief came from knowing it was a very easy decision. He flew back home alone.

  Acknowledgments

  Joe Torre

  My heartfelt gratitude to George Steinbrenner for giving me the opportunity to accomplish something very special with his Yankees.