by Jorge Posada
That city-buzz was especially intense when we played the Mets. Usually, you played in an environment that was mostly positive. Yankees fans loved their team passionately. Mets fans loved their team passionately. Each type of fan hated the other team in the city. Mix those various passions up, and you’ve got a volatile environment. It was great, and the playoff-type atmosphere for those games was real. I don’t think we hated the Mets, or vice versa, the way the fans did, but you could appreciate the intensity of those emotions and wanted to reward the people who supported you and helped pay your salary. It was just fun too. The season was long, and you sometimes needed something to help keep your level of enthusiasm up. A big series like that was just what we needed.
All of this was relatively new to me in ’97, so I was really looking forward to playing the Mets. The interesting thing about ’97 was that for the people involved in the Yankees Suck/Mets Suck debate, we entered into that first game at the Stadium with identical 37-30 records. No matter what, except in the unlikely case of a suspended game or a rainout, one of the two sides of that debate was going to get proof of the inferiority of the other.
Things weren’t looking too good for us when we lost the opener of the series 6–0. Getting shut out is always tough. But getting shut out 6–0 while getting the same number of hits as the opposition is especially frustrating. We won the next two, including a walk-off victory in the last game of the series. Because I was stuck in a stretch where it seemed like I was getting one start a week, I didn’t play in any of these games. To be having a big series, with big media attention and in our own backyard like that, and not even get the chance to contribute was frustrating.
It wasn’t like the media was paying any attention to me anyway. I admit that early in my career I did follow what was being written about and said of the Yankees. I’m a big sports fan anyway, so it seemed natural to me that in a town where you had three major newspapers covering the city and I don’t know how many radio stations and television stations competing for stories, I was going to be a big consumer of news.
Days before the series against the Mets, the sports headlines and sports radio shows were going on and on about David Wells being kicked out of a game in the first inning against the Marlins down in South Florida. David felt that the umpire, Greg Bonin, was squeezing the strike zone. Because we were in a National League city, David had to bat. He came up to the plate and got into it with Bonin and got himself tossed. That wasn’t good. First of all, getting thrown out for arguing calls at the plate, while at the plate, was unusual for a Yankees pitcher. Second, arguing with an umpire and saying something bad enough to get yourself tossed wasn’t the way to deal with an umpire. Also, getting tossed that early in the game put a strain on our bullpen. But David was an emotional guy. I liked that about him. He didn’t want to take crap from anybody, but he wasn’t exactly diplomatic about it.
Joe wasn’t too happy with David. Instead of calling him into his office to sort things out, he did what my dad would never have done: he played the waiting game, figuring that David should have known that he’d messed up and would come to him to let him know he wouldn’t do something like that again. David didn’t talk to him until three days later, and he also stated in the papers that he took offense to Joe telling the media that what he did was “unprofessional.” It was, and I didn’t think Joe crossed any lines there in saying that. He could have used a lot of other words to describe David’s actions, but he didn’t. Even though David took exception to it, eventually he came around, and after a couple of uncomfortable days of feeling the effects of what some in the media were calling “the silent treatment,” things got settled.
What was interesting to me, since I wasn’t a part of the whole situation, was that David Cone was frequently quoted in the papers. I admired him for the way he handled questions and managed to be really good with the media. Down the line, Mike Mussina was another one who would be excellent this way. Mussina, a bright guy who was legendary for his crossword puzzle–solving ability, was good with words, and that helped.
I was at a stage in my career when I wasn’t getting interviewed with any real frequency, and I was still a bit uncertain about how to deal with the media. I know that Derek took a little bit different approach to the media in one regard. One day that year he saw me reading the papers and said, “You sure you want to do that?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “eventually there is going to be something in there about you, something you might not like. It’s better to just ignore it all—the good stuff and the bad stuff. Neither of them will really help you out.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Think about it. You go two for three, drive in a couple of runs. What are you going to find out in the papers the next day?”
“That I went two for three and drove in a couple of runs.”
“Exactly. It’s not like they’re going to write that the game before you were getting out on your front foot too early and bringing your hands forward and you corrected that. They’re not your coaches.”
“That’s true.”
“You’re getting enough advice from other people, good people. Don’t let too much other foolishness clutter your mind. The game is hard, so try to keep the simple things simple. Besides, I hate to see your lips moving when you read. Makes it hard for me to think.”
“And you don’t need me to add to your troubles with thinking.”
I was already in touch with my dad frequently, and he was giving me helpful advice. I had my uncle Leo. I had the Yankee staff. It wasn’t like I was looking for all those people to comment on my performance. I had gotten into the habit of checking in with my dad all the time, and he had some good insights and I valued his opinion. I just needed to regulate the flow of that information better—to get what I needed when I asked for it and wanted it. Still, as much as there was a lot of truth in what Derek said, keeping up with what the media was saying was an interesting part of life as a Yankee. That kind of media scrutiny would only get more intense as my career progressed, and it was easy in those early days to dismiss my newspaper reading as a guilty pleasure. It wasn’t about me, since I wasn’t an everyday player, so it didn’t have any real effect on me. Later on, when the media would come to me more often, I’d pick up on a few things and Derek’s advice became important to follow.
And apparently I did need an example to follow. At one point in ’97, I got interviewed after a game I started in which I felt like we hadn’t gotten a few calls. More than that, though, I honestly felt like, if we had gotten those calls, the outcome of the game would have been different. And I said that. The next day Rick Cerrone, one of the Yankee PR guys (not the catcher), came to me and asked me to read a story that was in the Daily News. I read it and saw my quotes. Rick asked me what I thought.
“I said some pretty strong things.”
“You did. Next time, you can still make your point about not getting the calls, but also say something about it not costing you guys the game, that you had other opportunities, or better yet, just say something neutral. They were borderline pitches. Didn’t go our way. Anything else but the kind of thing that might upset an umpire. They read the stuff or will have someone bring it up to them.”
I appreciated being told that. Eventually I would get to the point where I could respect that the writers had their jobs to do and needed answers, but could still protect myself and the ball club by not being too direct. It was a fine line to walk. That first year, and even later, I’d do what I was asked. I’d wait for 15 minutes after the clubhouse was open to the media, a half hour after the game ended, and then I’d get out of there. I didn’t want the media’s attention like some guys did. Nick Swisher, for instance, seemed to want to be buddies with the media, though once I got to know him better I realized he was just being himself. He was the kind of guy who says, “Hey, how’s it going? How’s the family?” and stuff like that to everybody, strangers included. He was just bein
g himself, though it was kind of irritating to me because I wasn’t like that, and it seemed sometimes like he was trying to get attention. But at least he was true to who he was.
I’d like to say that being a non-native speaker of English contributed to my not being considered a great interview, but I was more or less the same with the Spanish-language people in the media—more comfortable, but still pretty reserved. That was my nature. I don’t let a lot of people in and get close to me, but the ones I do allow in see a different me than the rest of the world does. Because I’ve always been that way, that’s what came naturally to me when dealing with the press. I didn’t put up fences, but I also wasn’t widening doors and moving furniture out to make room for more people to crowd around.
I look at it this way. We all have parts of our jobs that we like better than others and are more suited to doing. I accepted having to deal with the media, and for the most part I felt like I had a good and professional relationship with them, one that improved the longer I was in the league. But I wanted to be a good professional ballplayer and concentrated the most on the biggest part of my job—the competition on the field. Media relations stuff was a smaller part of my job, so I spent what I saw as the right amount of time working at it. I wanted to get better overall in all parts of my work, and I think I did. I wasn’t upset that people didn’t really know the real me that I revealed to my friends and family.
When you play every day you get into a rhythm, and it’s easy to develop a routine that maximizes your time and effort. You have a job and you develop a planned set of activities around that job: what time you get up in the morning, when you eat, when you leave home, the route you take, when you take breaks or eat at work, when you leave to go home, when you eat, how you spend your evening, and then when you go to bed. For most people, those routines don’t change much from day to day. As a ballplayer, though, you’re subject to a lot of variables: the length of the game, whether you’re playing at night or during the day, travel between cities, sleeping in a different environment. Little of what we do is as routine as it would be if we lived and worked at home all the time.
When I mentioned earlier watching how the veterans prepared themselves for the playoffs, I was referring to many of these elements that make up a player’s day. I only saw what those guys did when they arrived at the clubhouse, but after playing professionally for a while, I came to understand the importance of a routine that I could stick to. The variable of not playing every day was something I had to deal with, but here’s where I benefited from Joe Torre being the manager. He did his best to communicate with Joe Girardi and me about the schedule. I was seldom, if ever, surprised to find out when I arrived at the ballpark that I’d be playing that day or night.
Even early on, I tried to get to the park at the same time regardless of whether I was starting or was on the bench, because I wanted to build a routine that I could stick with for years. When you have a strict routine, you don’t have to think about it. You just do it. As a player, you have enough other variables—who the opposing pitcher is being the most important—that you don’t want to be distracted. Then you might have other things going on, like family and friends on your guest list who’ve requested tickets from you, whether in New York or another city. You can’t let that distract you, and a lot of the married guys turned that job over to their wives, especially when the playoffs rolled around and the demand for tickets and their time got more intense. But as a single guy, I had to handle it on my own. And as a catcher, I also had to attend not only the hitters’ meeting, where we went over the pitcher we would face, but also the pitchers’ meeting, where we went over the opposition’s lineup.
Even if I wasn’t starting, I still sat in on the pregame meeting when our pitching coach went over the other team’s lineup. If you had to go in there in case of injury or substitutions, you had to be prepared. I saw that some pitchers kept notebooks that tracked how they performed and what pitches they used to get guys out, but I never kept one formally like that. In looking back, though, I realize that in my first few years with the Yankees, when I prepared for games, I concentrated way more on my defense than I did on offense. That was all about making up for lost time and not having as much experience at the position. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think about offense at all, but it definitely took a backseat.
Some of the routine I established came from just following team rules—making sure that I was shaved, that my hair was the right length, that I arrived at the ballpark by a certain time, that when I went out for batting practice I had something on my upper body with the NY logo on it. But other parts of my routine were personal choices. This was particularly true with my equipment.
As players, our behavior with our equipment could border on obsessive-compulsive. But like a mechanic or carpenter with his tools, we used our equipment to make a living, so we were careful with our “tools” and had a lot of personal preferences about them. Baseball bats have changed over the last 20 years or so. Some people say that the quality of the wood has changed because ash trees aren’t as plentiful as they once were, that the younger trees being harvested don’t have as tight a grain pattern as the old-growth trees. I think that’s true to an extent, and that it contributes to the number of broken bats you see. But I never stopped using ash bats, as some guys did in selecting maple models. I still believed that ash was best.
I don’t know of too many players who thought that one bat was the same as any other of the same model. When I got a shipment of them from Louisville Slugger, I had to inspect them all and decide which were “gamers”—the ones suitable for at-bats that counted. When you first start out in the minor leagues, you select from the available models that the manufacturer produces. I liked an Edgar Martínez spec bat—a bat with a big barrel and a skinnier handle. (With more weight at the end, this model also breaks more easily.) After about ’97, I had a contract with Louisville Slugger, and they produced one to my exact specifications, a P320M. The “M” stood for “modified”—it was a slightly altered version of another bat they produced—and the “P” was for “Posada.” It was pretty cool to get that first shipment of bats that were as close to what I wanted as possible. Notice I didn’t say they were perfect. The bats we use in pro baseball are still handcrafted, and the wood has variations in it. I used a bat that was 34½ inches long and weighed 33 ounces. Even though the manufacturer could get the length right, the weight could be off a bit because of differences in the wood’s density and moisture. All the bats would come labeled “33 ounces,” but I could tell they weren’t all exactly that weight. I could tell by feel, but I’d also use a scale on them. Toward the end of a season, as I got more fatigued, I’d get bats that were half an ounce lighter.
Since I didn’t wear gloves, used a thin-handled bat, and held it somewhat lightly in my fingers, I needed a sticky handle. When I was 16, on one of my trips to Miami to work with my uncle Leo, he had worked on my hand placement. I’d been using my palms as the main point of contact with the bat, and he had me slide the bat forward in my hands. By doing that, I was better able to turn on balls on the inside of the plate, and even if the ball did get in on me and I hit one toward the handle, I didn’t get that bee-sting sensation. Having a very thin barrel made it easier to grip the bat more with my fingers, but as I said, I needed a sticky handle. So I would spend some time loading my bats with pine tar before games. Once some of the rules to speed up the game came in, that was even more important. I couldn’t spend a minute or two in the on-deck circle prepping my bat anymore.
You have a lot more gear to worry about as a catcher, and the equipment guys are a big help to you. For a long time, the Cucuzza and Priore families were a big part of the Yankees, with fathers and sons handling some of those duties. They took care of all the gear, and they were the ones I turned to especially to help with my gloves. At first, I would use just one—the smaller Wilson I talked about earlier—throughout a season, from spring training through the playoffs, whether I wa
s warming the starting pitcher in the bullpen or in a game. Later I couldn’t make it through the whole season with just one glove, so I’d work in a second one. For a long time, I kept all my old gloves stored in the basement, but the Florida humidity got to many of them. I tried to salvage them, including a few that I really had fond memories of—the ’98 glove that had a perfect game in it—but they had to be tossed. I didn’t conduct any kind of special ceremony for them, I just dumped them in the trash. Sometimes reality bumps aside sentimentality, but having to get rid of that ’98 perfect game glove really hurt.
Some of my routine was based in practicality. As a switch-hitter, I had to stay in a groove from both sides of the plate. I had a pregame routine that didn’t vary from the time I was a minor leaguer until deep in my big league career. Like most guys, I divided my routine into two phases—off the field in the cages and on the field. I’d take more swings from the side I’d be on for my first at-bat. I’d hit off the tee and do soft-toss from both sides. I’d do the same thing live or off the pitching machine in the cage, making sure that I always hit at least one round of my “off” side and always took my last swings from my “on” side so that I’d have the feel going into that first at-bat. Because I took more swings than the typical hitter who just stuck to one side, I felt like I had to work even harder to avoid fatigue. Toward the end of my career, the last three years or so, I cut down on this pregame routine and just hit from the side of the plate I was going to start out the game using.
