The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  Leave it to Joe Torre to figure out that I was super stressed and needed a break. From September 2 to September 9, 2001, I’d gone 2-for-21. We had a day off on the tenth before we were to fly to Chicago. Joe let me know that I wouldn’t be starting the first game. “Take it easy. Get some rest. Stop pressing,” he told me.

  I’d told Joe about the latest developments in Jorge’s case. The second operation was over, but complications had developed. The bone graft that had been placed in his forehead had become infected. It had to come out, meaning that the whole procedure had been a failure. Worse, his head was swollen and red from the infection and when Laura had been out with him a stranger made a cruel remark, telling her that she shouldn’t beat her own child. She was understandably upset, both by Jorge’s condition and the man’s disgusting accusation. Having to put Jorge through another surgery made us feel like we’d made no progress at all. The procedure to remove the infected bone was completed, but that was no real consolation. Laura was stressed. I was stressed. Sleep seemed like the only escape we might have.

  Knowing that Laura needed the rest even more than I did, I went straight to the hospital after the game to spend the night. Jorge had developed an infection after his procedure, something we always feared. On top of everything else my son had to deal with, an infection felt like someone was adding insult to injury. I struggled to get a decent rest as anxiety and frustration kicked at me all night.

  So, on the morning of September 11, I was up early, awakened by a nurse coming in to check Jorge’s vitals and his IV. I dozed off again, and I was still a little bleary-eyed when I woke up shortly before nine. Seeing Jorge in bed smiling helped. I asked if he wanted to watch one of the Blue’s Clues videos we’d brought to the hospital. He nodded and his eyes lit up. As I turned toward the TV to put it on, an image of blue skies and a tall building flashed on the screen just as I was hitting Play on the VCR.

  A few minutes later, I heard a commotion in the hallway, but didn’t think much of it. Hospitals aren’t always the quietest places. The tape was nearly over, so it only played for a few minutes, and when it ended the TV came on again. This time I saw video of an airliner going into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I stood there staring, and then heard people outside the room screaming.

  I opened the door and saw nurses and other hospital employees in surgical scrubs scrambling around, shouting instructions, wheeling beds and wheelchairs. It was like a giant vacuum was pulling all these people and all this equipment out of the hospital. My mind was racing. I went back in the room and looked at Jorge, who was hooked up to an IV and various monitors. I thought that if all those other people were rushing out of the hospital, I needed to get out as well. And I wanted Jorge out of there. If this place was as chaotic as it was, if some guys had flown a plane into a building just south of where I was on 31st Street, where my son was, we had to move.

  I returned to the hallway and found a nurse. “Can you please show me how to unhook my son from all the things? I have to get him out of here.”

  She looked around her, wide-eyed and fearful. Finally she shook her head and said, “You’re safe here. Everything is fine. He is in a safe place. Just stay here.”

  While she was talking, I noticed another TV over her shoulder and saw videos of the attack. When I went back in the room, I looked out the window and could see outside in the streets hospital personnel and beds and gurneys lined up. All of them empty.

  I called Laura and alerted her to what was going on. She didn’t know anything about it, and I shivered at the sound of her gasp.

  “Another plane just hit. The south tower this time.”

  “What is going on?” I asked.

  “This can’t be real. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, those poor people.” Her words cut through my fog.

  Laura said that she needed to get to the hospital as fast as she could. As soon as we hung up I called Derek. I knew that he’d still be sleeping, but I wanted to make sure that he was aware of what was going on and could get out of the city if he needed to.

  “Turn on the TV, we’ll talk later.”

  He called me right back.

  “Is this real?”

  “Yes. And it’s not just here. Now they’re saying a plane hit the Pentagon.”

  “What is going on?” he asked, his voice the most rattled I’d ever heard it. “What are we supposed to do?”

  I think that Derek was asking the question that was on all our minds in New York. You didn’t just want to sit there and watch this. You wanted to do something. I had to do something to protect my family.

  Laura’s mom was the first to show up. She’d been dressed and ready to come to the hospital when I called. She was upset, but not panicked, and she let me know that if I was going to the apartment to pick up what I needed for our upcoming road trip, or to just get out of town, I’d better leave right then. Transportation around the city was coming to a halt. Laura probably wasn’t going to be able to get a cab, and even if she did, avenues were closing. I headed uptown, running through the crowded streets. The further north I got, the more normal the day seemed. It was so clear and bright and warm that it was hard to believe such chaos was going on down below 14th Street. I got into the building, sweating and breathing hard, but no one looked at me like anything was wrong. Everything was wrong, and there was no such thing as normal that day.

  I threw things in a bag and headed out the door. By the time I got back to the hospital, it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to go anywhere—or even that we needed to. Bridges and tunnels were closed to vehicle traffic, streams of people walked the streets, people were lined up to give blood, and everywhere you looked people had the dazed look of survivors unsure of what it meant to be one. Like everybody else in the country, we sat and watched the news coverage. Only for us in New York, we had the added element that the images were coming from just a few miles away and not from somewhere in the Middle East or elsewhere.

  At some point before noon—time had become irrelevant really, those moments all seemed to stretch into one long scene out of a horror movie—I got word from the club to stick by the phone. Eventually we learned that that night’s game was canceled.

  As we all know, that night stretched into many more nights when stadiums were empty. I thought that was a good thing, both out of respect for the victims and their families and for the safety of my family and everyone else’s. In the days following the attacks, I still didn’t feel safe and wanted to be sure to protect everyone I knew and everyone else. Those horrible images just kept replaying in my mind. Jorge remained in the hospital, and although Mayor Rudy Giuliani encouraged New Yorkers to get back to their normal lives, I told Laura to avoid any place where large groups of people might be gathered. I didn’t want her to go to the mall, and I didn’t want us to go to restaurants together. That uneasy feeling faded over time, but it took a while.

  Going to the Stadium to work out helped bring back some sense of normalcy, but being in a mostly empty stadium in early September, when the pennant races should have been in full swing and the crowds should have been going nuts, made it all feel very surreal. Mayor Giuliani was a huge Yankees fan. I know that he wanted us all to resume normal activity, and I understood all the reasons why, but being away from my family was going to be hard. We arrived in Chicago to resume play on the 18th, and not having played since September 9, there was nothing any of us could have done to prepare ourselves in advance. One nice moment was to see the banners Chicago fans displayed saying that Chicago loved New York.

  Here’s where that word “distraction” comes up again. I felt like people wanted us to play, and so when it came time for the players’ representatives on each team to vote about whether or not to cancel the season, Mike Mussina came around to get our input. Despite whatever personal concerns I had, I told him yes, let’s play. We needed to do this for the city. For the rest of the teams, with the exception of the Mets, the issues they had to face were different. This was our ho
me. This was deeply, deeply personal. We’d all been terrorized. We couldn’t let them make us give up what mattered to us and to our wounded and grieving city.

  And just as had happened with Jorge and his surgeries, it was good for all of us, players and fans, to have something else to focus on. In the big picture, there were so many things that mattered more than a baseball game, but we were also an important part of the lives of a lot of other people. That was on our minds when we voted to continue the season. We didn’t want to keep doing our jobs just because that was how we made our livings, but because we could do something to help the city, maybe help people in some small way to move on and resume their normal lives, as our mayor had asked us to do in the earliest days after the attacks.

  Nothing, though, could prepare me for what it was like the first night back in the Stadium, on September 25. Members of the police and fire departments and the emergency services teams lined the tunnel from the clubhouse to the dugout, and later joined us on the field. Walking toward the dugout, we shook a few hands and thanked those men and women for what they’d done for the city. They thanked us back, and one policeman said to me, “Thank you for what you guys do. We need it. You guys are great. You’re being really brave.” I looked at him. Knowing what he did and what I did, I didn’t see it that way at all. Those people are the bravest and the finest, a title that they’ve earned over and over again. And as I said to that officer, “We’re just lucky and grateful.” I’ll always feel that way.

  Rocket was on the mound that night, and he told me as we walked in together from the bullpen that he had chills. I knew that he always wanted to win, but I could hear in his voice that he really wanted to win. He was wearing a warm-up jacket that guys from a firehouse had given him, and his usual game face seemed a bit different that night. Hearing “Taps” and Ronan Tynan sing “God Bless America,” seeing those representatives of the police and fire departments and other agencies lined up along the foul lines, getting to shake a few of their hands and then gathering on the mound to salute the fans—all this had my mind very far away from the Tampa lineup and what we needed to do to get them out. When Mayor Giuliani got called out onto the field and the fans chanted his name, I could see how much that meant to him. It felt good to smile. It felt good to be an American and a New Yorker.

  Before that game, I thought I understood how much the Yankees meant to our fans, but those days in September demonstrated more clearly than I’d ever seen before the place that we had in the city’s heart. I hated what had happened, but I loved how we responded as a city and as a team.

  With all that going on, it was hard to remember exactly where we left off. When the season got interrupted, we had just swept the Red Sox in a three-game series to go up by 13 games over them. That first night back at the Stadium we didn’t have a lot to cheer about, and somehow that felt both strange and appropriate. How were we supposed to celebrate? Though we were being shut out and Roger was on the losing end of a game for the first time since May 20 and would see his record “fall” to an almost unbelievable 20-2, the fans showed us the way. They’d been scoreboard watching, and when the Orioles’ win over the Red Sox was posted, they erupted in cheers because that meant we’d clinched the division. It was okay to be happy, but we didn’t know if we should celebrate. We all gathered together as a team before the media came in. Joe addressed us all, congratulating us but saying this wasn’t a time to celebrate, not when so many people were grieving. We all agreed.

  We wanted to be together, so we ate our postgame meal in the clubhouse. We had champagne in the locker room but didn’t open it. Mr. Steinbrenner walked through the clubhouse congratulating us. It wasn’t like we’d completely backed into the playoffs, but given the circumstances, we all had really wanted to give the city a win that night.

  Sometimes that was what it meant to be a Yankee. On a night when you win the division, you can lose a game and walk away disappointed. For a team that consistently showed heart all the time, to not win on a night when broken hearts were starting to heal, felt like a moment had been missed.

  I was 29 years old and on my way to completing my second full season as a catcher, putting together a second season in which I was voted an All-Star, and winning a second Silver Slugger Award as the top offensive player at my position by hitting .277 with 22 home runs and 95 RBI. I’d hit a home run on opening day and gone 3-for-4, then hit my first grand slam six days later. That was the second homer of three that I hit in three straight games. I was thinking that my usual slow start wasn’t going to show up, but then I went 87 at-bats in May before breaking that homerless drought.

  I’d had minor injuries before, but I really had to battle through the sprained ligament in my thumb that kept me from catching for seven games in a row. Mentally, I think it helped to have come forward in the off-season to let people know about Jorge and his condition. We’d received a lot of generous donations, and the foundation was thriving. When Laura and I were honored at the Thurman Munson Awards Dinner in February 2001, that meant as much to me as the recognition I received that year for what I did on the field.

  Throughout the 2001 season, I got to watch as my good friends Bernie and Tino had outstanding years, both of them hitting over .300 with more than 25 home runs each and 207 RBI between them. Derek continued his string of seasons of MVP consideration and All-Star appearances, as did Mariano, who hit the 50-saves mark. Andy joined us all on that All-Star team, as did Roger, who went on to later win the Cy Young Award. Alfonso Soriano emerged as the Rookie of the Year and seemed destined to be a big part of our future. Given all that as well as our track record of success in the postseason, and given the wide margin by which we won our division and how well we’d played all year, we were well positioned for four in a row.

  I can’t say that we saw it that way at the time, though, because we took seriously both teams we faced in the AL playoffs. The Oakland A’s had won 102 games and could easily have won either the Central or the East, but they finished second in their division that year. With 116 wins, tying a major league record, the Mariners ran away with the West. We were going to have to be absolutely on our game to beat the A’s, and we weren’t in Game 1.

  I noticed that Roger wasn’t as loose as he normally was. His upper body wasn’t really following through on his pitches. He didn’t want to talk about it, but when only one A’s hitter swung and missed in the first, I knew something was up. When Roger tweaked his hamstring going after a bouncer to the right side in the fourth, he was done. We didn’t capitalize on some early chances in that game, and when Tim Hudson shut us out the next night, we had to take advantage of that long flight to Oakland to think about the times in the past when we’d been down.

  We just weren’t hitting, and that continued in Game 3. We only had two hits, but one of them was a homer I hit in the fifth off of Barry Zito. We were playing a day game, and with the hitters in the shadows and the pitcher in sunlight, the glare from the glass out beyond the fences made it tough for both sides to see well. Zito had fallen behind me in my first at-bat. When he came in with a fastball, I hit it hard but on the ground for a double play. When he fell behind again in my next at-bat, I was looking fastball all the way and got it. I took off running and watched as the ball hit the top of the fence in left and went over. I was so pumped up that I kept churning around the base paths, not even stopping until I got to the dugout. That was it for the scoring, though, and we only had one hit the rest of the way.

  Thanks to Derek, that was all we needed. I’m more than okay with the fact that the story line the next day wasn’t about my home run or Mike Mussina’s great start—it was all about a defensive play that has gone down in history as one of the greatest in Derek’s career. Not to take anything away from Derek’s athleticism and baseball knowledge, but what I think is most remarkable about what came to be known as The Flip is that we had actually practiced it in spring training that year. That shows how smart Joe is, and also how smart Derek is. We ran that play in sprin
g training once, because we were going to open the season on the West Coast, including a series at Oakland. Their field has acres of foul territory, so that kind of backup-and-relay play could happen there. That it did in the seventh inning of that game under those conditions, with us clinging to a one-run lead and having scored only four runs through 25 innings, was huge.

  The play started when Shane Spencer—Joe had started him in place of Paul O’Neill—made a strong throw on a ball down the right-field line that was high and got past both Tino and Alfonso Soriano. Derek was where he was told to be—near the mound so that he could read whether the play was going to be at third or at home. When he saw the ball getting by the men in front of him, he took off. I had to stay at the plate, of course, but I was counting on Derek to get it. He did, and then his amazing flip to me just barely arrived before Jeremy Giambi thundered to the plate. Derek couldn’t get a lot on the throw, and it was out in front of home plate, but fortunately it came in low, so I could go down to my knees as it was coming in and pivot toward the runner. I was able to reach Giambi’s far leg—just barely—before his lead foot touched the ground. It was as close a play at the plate as I’ve ever been involved in. Everything had to be right to get that out, and it was.

  You know that Derek and I are friends, so it’s easy to say that I’m biased, but over the years other guys who played with him only briefly, guys like David Justice, have said to me that Derek was special. That was one of the most clutch defensive plays I’ve ever seen. We practiced it once in spring training, and then in game 164 he put himself exactly where he needed to be and made an amazing play with his body to complete what he’d done with his brain. Not only did that play save a run, but the A’s would have had a guy on at least second and most likely third base and could have easily gone ahead.

  Season saved.

  This time I wasn’t the one in tears. Joe said that he was struggling to hold them back during the last couple of innings of Game 5, he was so proud of what we’d done, accomplishing what no other baseball team had done before in coming back like that. We were the old guys, if you believed what was being written, and the A’s the young guns. I know that I didn’t feel old, especially not when I ran out to Mariano and the two of us danced and jumped around like little kids. Maybe the champagne you spray around when you win is the real fountain of youth.