by Phil Pepe
No less an authority than Dr. Frank Jobe, the legendary orthopedist who pioneered ligament replacement (or Tommy John) surgery, made the diagnosis and ruled out the procedure which would have sidelined Rivera for at least a year.
“The ligament was frayed and Dr. Jobe cleaned it up,” said Michael.
As a result, Rivera’s rehabilitation did not cause him to miss the 1993 season. However, the injury did present the Yankees with a dilemma. Rivera’s rehab coincided with the MLB expansion draft required to fill the rosters of two new teams, the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins. While they still didn’t consider him a top prospect—“He had a straight fastball, no cutter, and no movement,” remembered Gene Michael. “He was mediocre at best.”—the Yankees thought enough of Rivera to protect him on their 40-man roster. However, they failed to include him on their protected list for the expansion draft.
In hindsight, the Yankees’ Mark Newman, who has been with the team since 1989 and is currently the senior vice president of baseball operations, remembered there were few back then who were on the Rivera bandwagon.
“When we signed Mariano in 1990,” said Newman, “I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘This guy is going to be a major leaguer.’ He was a very good athlete and he could throw it over the plate, but nobody wrote out the Mariano development plan that said he would someday throw 98 miles per hour, have the finest control on the face of the planet, would learn a cutter, and, oh by the way, that’s all he’s going to throw.”
Either the Rockies or the Marlins could have taken him, a thought that sends shivers up the spine of Yankees front-office personnel and fans. But to their everlasting regret, both the Rockies and Marlins passed on Rivera and he resumed his career with a step back to the Gulf Coast Yankees and Greensboro.
At Tampa and Greensboro, Rivera appeared in 12 games, all starts, winning just one game and losing one, but posting earned run averages of 2.25 and 2.06 and holding batters to a .208 average. His star was beginning to rise in the Yankees galaxy.
2. Handy Andy
Before they tabbed Andy Pettitte in the 22nd round—the 594th player chosen in the 1990 MLB amateur draft—the Yankees selected Kirt Ojala from the University of Michigan in the fourth round, Tim Rumer from Duke University in the eighth round, and Keith Seiler from the University of Virginia in the 21st round. Each of them, like Pettitte, a left-handed pitcher.
Ever hear of them?
Among them, Ojala, Rumer, and Seiler would win 153 professional games—all but three in the minor leagues—almost 100 fewer than Pettitte’s major league wins.
What this speaks to is the inexact science of free agent scouting in baseball. How else can one account for the fact that the same year the scouting department that was so clairvoyant in taking Pettitte in the 22nd round, Ricky Ledee in the 16th round, Kevin Jordan in the 20th round, Jorge Posada in the 24th round, and Shane Spencer in the 28th round could have been so much off the mark with Ojala, Rumer, and Seiler?
Clearly the Yankees and scout Joe Robison, who had been following Pettitte since Andy was in high school, were enamored with Pettitte’s size, youth, and athleticism.
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Pettitte was nine when his family moved to Deer Park, Texas, a suburb of Houston, where his father, Tommy, worked at an oil refinery and devoted his free time to coaching his son in youth baseball leagues.
Not yet 18 years old as the 1990 MLB free agent draft was approaching, Pettitte stood 6'5" and weighed a somewhat pudgy, but athletic, 220 pounds. Not only did he pitch Deer Park High School to within one game of the state championship, he played center field when he wasn’t pitching and was the starting noseguard on the Deer Park football team.
The Yankees liked Pettitte’s upside. But they had a problem. Pettitte’s parents wanted Andy to go to college and there were several colleges putting the rush on him, including LSU and the University of Texas. There also was Wayne Graham, the baseball coach at Texas’ San Jacinto Junior College, which was only a pickoff throw away from the Pettitte’s Deer Park home.
An outfielder/third baseman, Graham played 11 seasons in the minor leagues and reached the majors for 10 games with the Philadelphia Phillies under Gene Mauch in 1963 and 20 games with the New York Mets under Casey Stengel in 1964. He became baseball coach at San Jacinto in 1981, and in 11 years built the Gators into the most dominant junior college baseball team in the nation, winning five NJCAA World Series championships in a six-year span from 1985 to 1990.
In 1992, Graham took over the baseball program at Rice University, which had recorded only seven winning seasons in 78 years up to that time. At Rice, Graham duplicated his San Jacinto transformation, turning the Owls into a national powerhouse that produced such big league standouts as Jose Cruz Jr. and Lance Berkman, as well as a College World Series title in 2003. Through 2012, Graham has won more than 1,400 games as a collegiate manager and has never had a losing season in 38 years as a high school and college coach.
Pettitte was 15 years old when Graham first set eyes on him.
“He came to my baseball camp and I taught him a pickoff move,” remembered Graham, who had no idea that pickoff move would eventually confound and devastate American League base runners for years.
“When I was in pro ball [with the Chattanooga Lookouts in 1960 and ’61] I was lucky to be with a career minor league left-handed pitcher named Bob Milo, who had the best move to first base in the minor leagues,” said Graham. “I was amazed by him. I couldn’t figure out how he was able to pick so many runners off first base, so I discussed it with him and he showed me how he did it and I taught that move to Andy and to every left-handed pitcher that came through my camps. Most of them didn’t pick it up. Andy did. That’s the difference in Andy. He listens. Of course he improved on it later on.”
In his camp, Graham forged a connection with young Pettitte.
“I used to prepare individual written reports for every camper and I presented the report to them at the end of the camp,” said Graham. “On Andy’s report, among other things, I wrote that he was a good hitter.”
Graham was able to follow Pettitte’s progress at Deer Park High School and was eager to have him come to San Jacinto, but he was not very confident in being able to land him.
“We knew that this was a guy that could come in and win for us because he could throw strikes and he was left-handed and he could get the curveball over the plate,” said Graham. “We hoped to get him, but we didn’t think we could because Texas was after him. I don’t know what we did right, but he decided to go to San Jac rather than go to Texas.”
Whether the initial contact with Pettitte was a factor in getting him to attend San Jacinto is not known. What is known is that Graham played his trump card by telling Andy he reminded the coach of a left-handed version of another San Jacinto alumnus, Roger Clemens, who happened to be Pettitte’s boyhood idol. That did it.
“Ten years earlier, at San Jacinto, I had Clemens, who had this great work ethic. But Clemens came to me pudgy, which I mentioned to Andy, who also needed to trim down. I told him that Clemens had been able to correct that and I told Andy that for him to reach his potential, he was going to have to watch his weight. He was going to have to have a conditioning program. I told him I thought that was more critical to him reaching his potential than anything else because I thought his delivery was clean. I thought he was going to have enough fastball and he had great control.
“I’ve had better arms than Clemens and better arms than Pettitte but these two guys came in at age 18 with better control and better command than all of the pitchers I’ve ever had. And they worked hard. Another thing about Andy, when he was with me, he had this fire. I noticed early in the spring, he was coming in slamming his glove down and punching the dugout wall when he didn’t do well. I thought he would break his hand if he didn’t change. I told him, ‘You’re going to have to control that emotion if you’re going to reach you
r potential. You can’t let emotion control you—you’ve got to control it.’ And I think Andy does that extremely well now.”
The irony of Graham’s discovery and his role in Pettitte’s emotional transformation is that in 1999, after Pettitte had won 67 games for the Yankees and lost only 35 in four seasons, George Steinbrenner thought Pettitte lacked fire and almost traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies. Cooler heads prevailed and talked Steinbrenner out of what would have been an egregious error. (Coincidentally, 23 years earlier, Steinbrenner had to be talked out of trading another left-handed pitcher, thereby preventing Ron Guidry from leaving the Yankees.)
Had Pettitte matriculated at a four-year college instead of going to San Jacinto, the Yankees would have lost their rights to him upon his enrollment. However, by attending a junior college Pettitte remained the property of the Yankees until the following year’s draft, giving them 51 weeks to sign him or lose him. Consequently, the Yankees and Robison continued to monitor Pettitte’s progress at San Jacinto, where he won eight out of 10 decisions and went on a diet of tuna and orange juice and a workout regimen that enabled him to lose 16 pounds, turn fat into muscle, and increase his velocity from the 85–87 mph range it was in high school to a steady diet of 91–93 mph fastballs.
As the 1991 draft—and the Yankees deadline—approached, Robison met with Andy and his father and offered the pitcher a signing bonus of $40,000, which was quickly turned down. Robison excused himself from the meeting and left to make a telephone call. When he returned, Robison upped the ante to what he claimed was a final offer, $55,000. Exasperated by the ongoing negotiations, young Pettitte blurted out, “If you give me $80,000 right now, I’ll sign.”
Without hesitating—or excusing himself to make another phone call—Robison said it was a deal. Pettitte signed with the Yankees just hours before the deadline that would have caused the Yankees to lose their rights to him.
“I should have asked for more money,” Pettitte would lament years later.
Indeed, if he had refused to sign with the Yankees, Pettitte would have been eligible for the 1991 draft, where the Yankees might have redrafted him or he might have been taken by another team and signed for what scouts estimated would be a bonus in excess of $200,000.
Pettitte began his professional career with the Tampa Yankees in the Gulf Coast Rookie League where he made an impressive debut with a 4–1 record and an earned run average of 0.98 in six starts. In 362⁄³ innings, he allowed only 16 hits, struck out 51 batters, and issued eight walks. That earned him a promotion to the Yankees’ affiliate in the Class A short-season New York–Penn League in Oneonta, a quiet, laconic town in upstate New York, practically in the shadow of Cooperstown, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. In Oneonta, Pettitte made six more starts and had a 2–2 record but a glittering 2.18 ERA. Also in Oneonta, he became a teammate for the first time with a future member of the Core Four, Jorge Posada, who, at the time, was morphing from a second baseman into a catcher.
Pettitte’s breakout season came the next year when he was 10–4 in 27 starts, pitching for the Greensboro Hornets of the Class A South Atlantic League. His earned run average of 2.20 was second in the league and the best in the Yankee organization.
In Greensboro, Pettitte once again teamed with Jorge Posada, now a full-fledged catcher. Late in the season, up from the Tampa Yankees in the Gulf Coast Rookie League came an 18-year-old shortstop named Derek Jeter to join Pettitte and Posada, mainstays of the Greensboro Hornets and hardened professional baseball veterans of 20 years old, each two years older than Jeter. They put the skinny, 18-year-old boy-wonder future shortstop of the Yankees under their microscope, saw him commit nine errors in 11 games, and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Looking back many years later, Pettitte remembered his first impression of Jeter.
“I was like, ‘Look at this guy. A first-round draft pick? Are you kidding me?’”
While their time together as teammates for the first time with Greensboro in 1992 was ever so brief, Pettitte, Posada, and Jeter still had not yet caught up with the fourth member of the eventual Core Four of the Yankees, Mariano Rivera.
After his success at Greensboro, Pettitte was moved up in 1993 to Prince William in the Class A Carolina League, where he won 11 games which earned him a promotion for one start to Albany-Colonie of the Class AA Eastern League. He pitched five innings, allowed two earned runs, and was the winning pitcher.
At that time, there was a raging internal debate behind closed doors in the Yankees personnel department over who was the better prospect with the higher upside, Pettitte or Sterling Hitchcock, a left-hander from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Hitchcock had been drafted a year before Pettitte and he had preceded Pettitte up the ladder with the Gulf Coast Yankees, Greensboro, Prince William, and Albany-Colonie, winning 34 games in four seasons and—much to Pettitte’s dismay and envy—given brief trials with the Yankees in 1992 and 1993.
Gene Michael lined up in Pettitte’s corner, saying, “I liked his determination and concentration just a little bit more.” Michael was convinced that it was the competition with Hitchcock that brought out the best in Pettitte and motivated him to not only succeed and move ahead of Hitchcock but also to be a source of great pride for San Jacinto Junior College.
“Andy’s a terrific person,” said his old college coach, Wayne Graham, a sentiment shared by the current baseball coach at San Jacinto, Tom Arrington.
“He hosts an alumni golf tournament here every year to help raise funds for scholarships,” said Arrington. “He’s just a very genuine person. He’ll come over to say hello and I’ll bring some of my players over to the tournament and he’ll talk with them about life and baseball and such. He’s still a big part of San Jacinto College.”
Pettitte hasn’t forgotten his roots.
“I visited him in New York a few years ago,” said Coach Graham. “He told me he still has the piece of paper that said he was a good hitter that I gave him when he was 15 years old and in my camp.”
3. Southern Exposure
That Jorge Posada caught more games as a Yankee than Hall of Famers Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra and hit more home runs than any Yankees catcher except Berra is not remarkable. It’s not even noteworthy. It’s a miracle.
Consider that Posada might never have had the chance to play professional baseball had his father, Jorge Sr., not fled his native Cuba for Puerto Rico to escape the Fidel Castro regime.
Consider that 645 players were selected before the Yankees took Posada in the 24th round of the 1990 MLB amateur draft.
Consider that Posada was drafted as an infielder and didn’t become a full-time catcher until his second year of professional ball with the Greensboro Hornets in the Class A South Atlantic League in 1992.
And consider that Leon Wurth, the scout who recommended Posada to the Yankees, might not have seen him in a game at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tennessee, had Posada not left Puerto Rico to play college baseball at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama.
How does a kid get from Santurce, Puerto Rico, to Decatur, Alabama, “the River City,” located just southwest of Huntsville and about 50 miles north of Birmingham; a city with a population of 53,929 in the 2000 census, of which only 5.64 percent, or less than 3,000, was Hispanic?
For the answer to that mystery, one must consult Fred Frickie, baseball coach from 1967 to 1995 at the largest two-year school in the state of Alabama, Calhoun Community College, named for John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice president of the United States. In his 28-year tenure, Frickie, who played three seasons as an outfielder/first baseman in the farm systems of the Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox, won 669 games and six Alabama Junior/Community College Conference tournament titles. In 2009 he was elected to the National Junior College Athletic Association’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
Asked how he got George Posada (at Calhoun he was n
ever called “Hor-hay,” he was “George”), Frickie relived the incident as if it were last year, not some two decades ago.
“My wife and I were going to Augusta, Georgia, to see one of my former players who was playing in the Pittsburgh organization,” Frickie remembered. “I was looking for a shortstop, so on the way we stopped in Atlanta at Georgia Tech where they were having a high school all-star baseball game. Ellis Dungan was there. At the time he was a Toronto Blue Jays scout, but I had known Ellis because he was a coach for 25 years at Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Florida—a real great program—and every spring we used to make a trip down the Gulf Coast and I always played him.
“When I saw Ellis Dungan at Georgia Tech I said, ‘Ellis, I’m looking for a shortstop. Do you know where one is?’
“He said ‘No.’
“I figured he was just holding back and I realized sometimes you have to give something to get something. I had a boy’s name in my book, a left-handed pitcher in the Alabama Junior College system that threw pretty good. I wrote the boy’s name and phone number on a piece of paper and I handed it to Dungan. ‘Ellis,’ I said, ‘this boy can throw about 90. You may not know about him.’ Ellis took the boy’s name and number. A little while later here comes Ellis. ‘I do know where a shortstop is,’ he said. ‘Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. You ever get one out of there?’
“I said, ‘No, but you give me his name and phone number and I’m going to start calling.’
“That was George Posada. His daddy was scouting for the Atlanta Braves, covering Puerto Rico, and that’s how Ellis knew about his son, who was looking for a place to play ball.”
Baseball was in Posada’s blood. His uncle, Leo Posada, an outfielder, batted .256, hit eight home runs, and drove in 58 runs in 155 games with the Kansas City Athletics for three seasons in the early 1960s and was their regular left fielder in 1961. Jorge’s dad, Jorge Sr., had been a promising young player before fleeing his native Cuba, but he never got his chance in the United States. However, he worked as a scout for several major league teams, including the Atlanta Braves and Colorado Rockies.