I am sorry that I have gotten carried away with my own sense of importance. I am sorrier still that I have ventured off on my own, to a degree, instead of seeking the Lord’s will. The Lord has indeed put me here. Without Him I am nothing. The only reason I am here, and able to do what I do, is because He gives me strength.
It is time to pitch now.
Oh boy, I am thinking. I really don’t know how this is going to go.
I am going to do my best, but in this instant I probably have as much doubt about my ability to focus on the task at hand as I ever have in my professional career. Maybe this is part of the lesson that the Lord wants to teach me—I don’t know.
I get Bret Boone on a fly ball to right, and for a moment I think that maybe I can steady myself after all.
The thought does not last for long.
I bounce a pitch badly to Chipper Jones, then walk him on another ball way out of the strike zone. On my first pitch to Brian Jordan, he rips a hit-and-run single to right field. After I fall behind Ryan Klesko, Mel comes out to visit to get me to relax and throw the strikes that I almost always throw. I nod. I act as if everything is okay.
It is not okay.
Klesko laces a single. That blows the save. Two batters later, Andruw Jones takes me over the wall in left center. That blows the game.
It is about as bad an outing as I’ve ever had as a closer.
I don’t say a word about what happened to any of my teammates, but I know I have learned an important lesson. I am a human being, and human beings get complacent. We lose our way sometimes. The Lord decides that this hot summer night is the time to help me find my way again.
Is it a coincidence the way the rest of the season goes? That I give up one run for the rest of the year? That I finish the season with streaks of thirty and two-thirds scoreless innings and twenty-two consecutive saves? I have no idea. All I can tell you is that I spend the next three months in a zone of profound humility and as much concentration and confidence as I’ve ever had in my life.
We win sixteen fewer games than we did the year before, but our record of 98–64 is still the best in the league, putting us in the division series against the Rangers for the third time in four years. The Rangers are a very good club, but, let’s face it, there is a part of them that seems to wilt like a flower in the Texas heat at the very sight of us. We sweep three straight games again, and for the second straight year, their loaded lineup manages a single run against us in the three games. I strike out Rafael Palmeiro and Tom Goodwin and pop up Todd Zeile to save Game 2, and throw two more scoreless innings to finish the series and put us into the ALCS against the Red Sox—the matchup everybody seems to want.
Ever since he arrives on his boat from Cuba, El Duque keeps proving what a big-game pitcher he is, and here he is again, going eight strong innings in Game 1, which is tied at three when I come on to start the ninth. I get six outs and allow one hit in two innings, taking it into the bottom of the tenth, when Bernie Williams socks a Rod Beck pitch over the fence a few minutes after midnight.
It’s a rousing way to start, and we don’t let up. Chuck Knoblauch has an RBI double and Paul O’Neill an RBI single late in Game 2, then Ramiro strands the bases loaded with two immense outs in the eighth, before I get the save in a wobbly ninth, striking out Damon Buford with Nomar Garciaparra, the tying run, on third.
We head to Boston with a 2–0 lead, and though the Red Sox emphatically get one back with a 13–1 victory in which Pedro Martinez is brilliant and Roger Clemens, longtime Sox ace turned Public Enemy No. 1, has the worst postseason start of his life, the slippage stops there. Andy is dominant in Game 3, and Ricky Ledee hits a grand slam off Beck in the ninth inning, and we win, 9–2—and before you can bake a batch of beans, we are dancing on the Fenway infield after Duque rides again to lift us to a 6–1 victory in Game 5.
It puts us up against the Braves in another World Series, and wouldn’t you know it, the Game 1 matchup is El Duque and Greg Maddux, the same guys who were on the mound when the Holy Spirit visited me in the Bronx three months earlier. I do not hear voices this time. I just marvel at the contrast between these pitchers, and how they go about their craft. Here you have Duque, with his spring-loaded leg kick and gyrations, and arm angles he seems to invent as he goes, throwing all kinds of nasty stuff. There you have Maddux, as steady as a metronome, commanding the ball with flawless, brutally efficient mechanics. Unlike in the regular-season game, they are both in peak form, and eventually it is a 1–1 game in the eighth. It stays tight until Paul O’Neill comes up that inning.
This World Series isn’t especially dramatic—another four-game sweep—and is without epic games and highlight-film moments. People remember how I break three of Ryan Klesko’s bats in one trip to the plate in the final moments of the Series, and how Chipper Jones is laughing about it in the dugout. For me, though, this is a World Series that is all about Paul O’Neill.
Paulie got to the Yankees in 1993, and the team immediately started winning. In fact, the Yankees haven’t had a losing season since his arrival. It would be silly to say that the turnaround was all about him, but it would be even sillier to say that it was a complete coincidence.
The first time I meet Paulie is in spring training. Right away you notice not just his strength and size (a broad-shouldered and muscular six foot four) but his intensity and serious sense of purpose. He never says much, and he never hot dogs about anything. He does his work and wants to win. He’s a guy who once hit .359, and yet he just wants to be one of the guys in the lineup.
I admire that about him from the beginning. You learn early on in the big leagues that some guys play to the cameras, and some guys wish the cameras weren’t there at all. Paulie is in the latter group. He loathes talking about himself, even after he goes 4 for 4 or saves the game with a nice catch. He also doesn’t like getting attention after he heaves a helmet over a called strike, or batters one more watercooler into extinction. Paulie is unbelievably hard on himself, a perfectionist to the core. Early in 1999, we have a game at home against the Angels, and Paulie goes 1 for 5 and strikes out three times. The last time, he’s caught looking by Troy Percival with a guy on in the bottom of the ninth, the tying run at the plate. When umpire Greg Kosc punches him out, Paulie heads back to the dugout, and the next thing you know there’s an airborne watercooler on its way to the field. His temper can definitely cloud his judgment; once, he swings at a pitch and is so disgusted with the contact that he flings the bat away in a rage. The ball goes over the right-field wall. We give him a good going-over for that one.
You can always count on this guy, though. Paulie has a long-running feud with Lou Piniella, the Mariners’ manager, dating to their years together in Cincinnati. Lou loves to get into Paulie’s head and publicly calls him a baby for whining every time somebody pitches him inside. Maybe this is all gamesmanship; I don’t know, because I never get into that stuff. There isn’t one time in all my years of pitching when I either work an umpire or beef about a call so I might get the next one, or try to intimidate a hitter by telling him he better get ready to move his feet.
It’s not just that I think it’s unsportsmanlike; it’s just not the way I want to do business. I have a ball in my hand, and I believe I have all I need to get the hitter out without any of the extracurricular stuff.
In any case, all it does is make Paulie even more determined. He hit three homers in five games in the 1995 division series against the Mariners, and hits .417 with a couple more homers in the ALCS in 2001, the year Piniella’s Mariners won a record 116 games.
That’s what I love about this guy; he is always there when the team needs him most. In June of 1999, we have a nasty little beanball game against the Indians. Wil Cordero homers off Clemens and later gets hit by our reliever Jason Grimsley. Not long after, Derek gets drilled by the Indians’ reliever Steve Reed. Derek isn’t even done glaring at Reed before Paulie rips a Reed pitch over the wall in right to lock the game away.
Nice
job of taking justice into your own hands, I say to Paulie afterward.
He smiles.
It’s the best way to get even with a pitcher, he says.
Paulie is there with the glove, too, never more than in Game 5 of the 1996 World Series, as Wetteland tries to protect Andy’s 1–0 lead in the bottom of the ninth. The Braves have runners at first and third and pinch hitter Luis Polonia at the plate, and after six foul balls, Polonia drives a ball to deep right center.
I am sure that this ball is in the gap and that the game is over, the Braves taking a 3–2 lead. But Paulie runs and runs and chases it down near the warning track—never mind that he has a bad hamstring. His catch saves the game, and very possibly the World Series. Again, in 1998, with two on in the first inning of Game 2 against the Padres, he makes a leaping grab at the wall to rob Wally Joyner and sets us on our way.
Three years later, back in the Series again, it is not an easy time for the Yankees. A season that begins with Mr. T taking a leave of absence to get cancer treatment continues with the death of Scott Brosius’s father and then Luis Sojo’s father. Luis misses the first two games of the Series after his father passes.
Paul’s father, Charles O’Neill, is home in Ohio fighting a serious heart condition. I know it weighs on Paulie all year, and even more so in the postseason, when his father’s condition worsens. I get so much comfort when I see him out there in right field—a man who you know is going to give all he has to help you get an out—that I wish somehow that I could comfort him.
Paulie’s father dies in the early hours of the morning before Game 4 against the Braves in 1999. When Mr. T posts the lineup and I see O’Neill in the usual No. 3 hole, between Derek and Bernie, I am not surprised at all. I look at Paulie as he sits at his locker in the back of the clubhouse before the game, wondering what this loss must feel like for him. I want to pray with him and console him, but now is not the time. That comes five hours later, after I break Klesko’s bats and get Keith Lockhart to fly out to left to finish off the sweep.
As the guys all converge on me in the center of the Stadium diamond, Paulie is the last one to arrive, the joy and grief and everything seeming to hit him all at once as he hugs Mr. T and begins to cry. He leaves the field in tears and walks into the dugout. As Mr. T said, Paulie is going through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, all on the same day. Nothing prepares you for that. In the clubhouse chaos, with the Champagne spraying everywhere, I walk over to Paulie at his locker.
I am so sorry about your father, I say. I don’t know why the Lord wanted him to come home today, but I am sure he’s very proud of you.
Thank you, Mo, he says. He was watching, guarantee you that, and he’s happier than anybody that we did it.
I face forty-three batters in three postseason series that year, and none of them scores. The last run I gave up was almost three months and forty innings ago, on a double by Tampa Bay catcher John Flaherty. I finish the season with more saves (45) than hits allowed (43). I am named World Series MVP, and back in Puerto Caimito and all over Panama, family and friends are telling me I’m the talk of the Canal Zone, and everywhere else. Fame is fine, but it is not what I seek. What I seek is the light and love of the Lord, for as He reminded me on that hot July night on the pitcher’s mound in the Bronx, He is the one who has put me here.
There is nothing like a ticker-tape parade in New York City. You ride through that canyon of skyscrapers, with millions of pieces of confetti swirling and almost as many fans cheering, and the outpouring is a humbling spectacle. All this love, all this adulation—it’s remarkable to bask in it, and to share in people’s happiness. Maybe my most enduring memory of that 1999 celebration comes at the City Hall ceremony. Mr. T has the microphone and summons Jorge Posada to join him.
Tell them what we say at the end of our meetings, Jorgie, Mr. T says.
Grind it out! Jorgie hollers as he turns his fist, smiling as he does.
There isn’t a better grinder-outer on those championship teams than Jorgie Posada, let me tell you that. Nobody works harder, either. A second baseman when he was drafted, Jorgie spends countless hours, over the years, refining his footwork, his pitch-blocking, his throwing mechanics—and it all pays off in 2000, when Joe Girardi is gone and Jorgie gets more of the workload than ever. He puts up an All-Star season, hitting 28 homers with 86 runs batted in and a .287 average; with his 107 walks, he posts the highest on-base percentage (.417) on the club. He strikes out more than anybody, too (151 times), but I cut him slack on that because he is such a total gamer.
Jorgie is emotional and unyielding at times, with a will as thick as his catcher’s physique. You want him on your side, for sure. We’re in St. Petersburg at the start of July 2000 to play the Rays, and we are in a tailspin, having lost 4 of 5 and 7 of 9, our record just two games over .500 (38–36). Duque is pitching well, but he and the Rays are barking at each other after Randy Winn steps out just as Duque is about to throw a pitch. Jorge calms Duque down—an ironic scene, because often Jorge would motivate Duque by riling him up (something like putting quarters into a jukebox)—and later Tino clears the bases with a three-run double. In the bottom of the seventh, the Rays’ Bobby Smith goes down on strikes against Jeff Nelson, and as Jorgie pops out to fire the ball to Brosius, Smith bumps him slightly with the barrel of his bat.
Jorge jabs the ball into Smith’s side and then they’re at it, bodies tumbling, Smith’s helmet flying, revealing the best blond Afro this side of Randy Levine. Jorge and Smith are both ejected (and later suspended), and even though I never ask Jorgie if he had an ulterior motive by getting into it with Smith, he knows how to rouse the troops. The game means so much that Mr. T has me come in to close even though we have a five-run lead. We win seven of our next eight and climb back into first place, staying there the rest of the year.
When you go through such long seasons with guys, ups and downs are inevitable, and more than anybody else on the team I feel for Chuck Knoblauch. I think people forget what a huge factor he proved to be in our championship runs in 1998 and 1999. For almost a decade he’s been one of the top leadoff men in baseball. He hit .341 and .333 in back-to-back years with the Twins, and the year before we traded for him, he hit .291 with ten triples and sixty-two steals—the kind of player whose speed and energy can change a whole game. He also won a Gold Glove as the league’s top defensive second baseman, which is why it’s so hard to see him suffering the way he is with his throwing. Chuck, simply put, has the yips—the term baseball people use for players who suddenly, inexplicably, lose the ability to execute a simple skill they’ve demonstrated mastery of their entire career. It can be a pitcher who loses the strike zone and never relocates it, a catcher who can’t throw the ball back to the pitcher, a pitcher who can’t throw to first, or, in Chuck’s case, a second baseman who can’t make a twenty-five-foot throw to the first baseman right next door. Chuck is fine when he has to make a diving play, then scramble to his feet and throw. The yips come when he has time to think about it. I’ve never been on a team with a player who has had the yips until now, and it’s just horrific to watch. To see a guy who is a phenomenal athlete and competitor get invaded by these demons, and have a runaway mind grind him into mulch—it’s so sad. And probably the worst part—beyond even the embarrassment and humiliation—is the way it sucks every bit of fun out of playing the game.
Chuck had one error in his Gold Glove year, thirteen the following year, and twenty-six the year after that. His problems seem to be on the wane as the season begins, but then they flare up again in a 12–3 loss to the White Sox at Yankee Stadium. Chuck makes errors on two routine throws to Tino, missing badly, and then, on a perfect double-play ball, gets the shovel feed from Derek and throws the ball about twenty feet up the line from where Tino is stretching toward him. The fans boo him unmercifully. At the end of the inning, he runs into the dugout, talks to Mr. T, and in an instant he is not only gone from the dugout; he is gone from the Stadium.
When a team
mate is going through something like this, not just a slump or rough patch but a psychological disorder, you don’t know what to say or do. You feel helpless. You just try to stay positive and let him know you are there.
Chuck toughs it out, and it sure looks as if he is getting better toward the end of the year, but by then our issues go way beyond the yips. When Roger defeats the Blue Jays and I get my 34th save on September 13, we are 25 games over .500 (84–59). At which point we sink faster than my father’s rusty old anchor.
We lose eight of our next nine, and fifteen of our last eighteen. In one three-game stretch, we give up thirty-five runs. In our last seven games—all losses—we are outscored, 68–15. That’s hard for an expansion team to do, never mind a two-time defending World Series champion.
So we limp into the division series against the Oakland A’s, and have a question to answer: Are we the club that has won twenty-two of its last twenty-five postseason games, and captured three of the last four World Series?
Or are we the club that hasn’t pitched, fielded, or hit in the clutch for more than two weeks?
When Roger gives up four runs in six innings and we lose Game 1 in Oakland, I can’t deny the obvious: We are up against it in a way we haven’t been since 1997. We either show up and play hard for nine innings in Game 2 or we’re just not made of the same championship fiber we once were. Could it be that the Mets, who are on their way to the National League pennant, are going to be the New York team that gets a parade this fall?
Not many managers have better instincts than Mr. T, so when he makes lineup changes for the second game, I don’t think of it as panic; I think of it as a smart manager playing a strong hunch. Against the Padres in 1998, Mr. T had a feeling about Ricky Ledee, who was rarely used during the season, and Ledee wound up getting six hits in three games. He had a feeling that Ramiro Mendoza should be the long man in the postseason, and it worked spectacularly. Knoblauch, now a designated hitter (DH) because of his throwing issues, sits down; Glenallen Hill takes over. Paulie, struggling with a bad hip, moves down in the order, and Jorge moves up to the second spot, right behind Derek. Hill and Luis Sojo, our second baseman now, deliver big hits, and Jorgie is on base three times. Andy pitches brilliantly, taking a shutout through seven and two-thirds, and then Mr. T calls for me, and I get four groundouts to complete a 4–0 victory, even the series, and remind us what it feels like to win.
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