The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  While the Seattle series wasn’t as dramatic, simply getting to a fourth consecutive World Series was a huge deal because of what had gone on in September. Seattle was a club that had won more games than anyone in AL history, but we carried the hopes of a recovering city with us. None of us took that lightly. Winning that year especially would have meant so much to me and the other guys, even if we hadn’t been going for four in a row. The city deserved it, and we wanted to give it to them and earn it for ourselves. Beating Seattle in the first two games of the series was huge, but after they jumped all over in Game 3, winning 14–3, momentum could have swung their way. Whatever hopes they had got Rocket-ed. Coming back from that tweaked hamstring, Rocket struggled with his control, walking four, but he struck out seven and only gave up one hit. He willed himself through five innings before Ramiro Mendoza and Mo didn’t allow a hit the rest of the game. We won with a walk-off home run from Alfonso Soriano. That took the fight out of the Mariners, and we cruised to a 14–3 win to end the series.

  Despite Arizona having a devastating one-two punch at the top of their rotation, I thought we could win both of those first two games. Our staff was great, and we had the best closer in the business. Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling were particularly difficult for me because I had to switch sides of the plate against them, but they were tough on anybody.

  What made Schilling so tough was that he could spot the ball anywhere around the plate. He rarely threw the curve or the slider, so you could go up there looking for a fastball or a splitter. He made a living working down and away, but as I said, he could move his pitches, particularly the fastball, all around the zone. If you went looking outside, he could bust you in on the hands. I don’t know what to say about Randy other than that it was really tough to pick up the ball coming out of his hand. He was so tall, his motion was so disjointed, he threw so hard, and he had a 91-mile-an-hour slider that broke so late and so hard, that even if his arm angle had been more conventional, closer to over the top, he still would have been tough to hit. We scored one run in 18 innings in losing to each of them at their park, but we’d been down before, and Joe was his usual positive and calm self.

  In Game 3, I gave us a lead for the first time in the Series when I led off the bottom of the second with a home run off a 3-2 changeup from Brian Anderson. Roger was great that game, giving up only one run and three hits in seven innings. Scott Brosius drove in the lead run, and when Mariano came in, he just dominated for two innings, striking out four of the six hitters he faced.

  The next night and into the next morning, Derek introduced us all to the magic of November baseball for the first time. Game 4 had plenty of drama, even before it stretched to extra innings. El Duque didn’t need me to get him fired up. He didn’t quite understand how the starting rotations for playoffs worked, and he was fuming when he didn’t get a start in the first three games. He showed why he had the best winning percentage of any pitcher in postseason history to that point. He didn’t get the win, but he left his guts out on that field. He was coming off a season shortened by toe surgery, and I think he wanted to ram that foot up home plate umpire Ed Rapuano’s butt in the third. He gave up a huge home run to Mark Grace the next inning. I had a feeling he was going to take that personally, and he did. El Duque being El Duque, when Joe took him out in the seventh, he took a detour before going to the dugout. He said a few things to Mr. Rapuano, smiling before he went to the dugout and with Yankees fans cheering him. I think he also took a little bit of everybody’s life expectancy into the dugout with him after working around four walks and four hits.

  We were still down by two with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but we had a chance after Paul O’Neill had one of those great at-bats, working the count to 3-2, spoiling a pitch, and then singling. That was important, because Arizona’s closer, Byung-hyun Kim, had just entered the game and we got to see all his pitches. Bernie struck out, but after seeing how Kim had gone after Paulie and Bernie, Tino had a pretty good idea, he told me after the game, of what to expect. Also, Paulie had told him that Kim came after him with a fastball to start and to look for it. With two outs, Tino jumped all over the first pitch to tie it with a home run. I was in the on-deck circle and was there to greet him at the plate, jumping up and down with excitement. Tino was as excited as anybody, and his cartoon-character eyes were bugging out of their sockets. The crowd was so into it that even though Tino and I were screaming at one another, we couldn’t hear what was being said.

  With the game tied, I knew that my job was to get on base somehow. I had to take a couple of deep breaths just to calm myself. I stayed disciplined and worked a walk, got to second on a single, but was stranded there. The game went to extra innings. Next inning, enter Derek, exit the baseball, and the Series was tied at two games apiece.

  Derek came up with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. He battled and battled Kim in a nine-pitch at-bat before hitting a home run to right field for his first walk-off home run in a Yankees uniform. As usual, he picked a pretty good spot. I had a pretty good spot myself to view it from—I was standing in the dugout, and when he hit it, I wasn’t sure that it had enough to get out. I ran onto the field, almost to the first-base coach’s box, and when it went over, I jumped up and down, screaming my head off and running toward home plate. Everybody was out of the dugout—and I mean everybody—and we mobbed him at home plate. Derek had this look on his face like everyone pounding on him was really hurting. He’d jumped and come down funny on his ankle and twisted it. He didn’t say anything, but the next day he came in early for treatment and taping.

  You had to figure that the advantage was in our favor for Game 5. The old line about momentum being your next day’s starting pitcher would have told you that. Coming into that season, the Diamondbacks’ Miguel Bautista had a career record of 15-31. Mike Mussina had won 15 games in a season seven times to that point in his career. It wasn’t like Bautista was an inexperienced rookie. He was tough on us, holding us scoreless until he left with two outs in the eighth. Greg Swindell came on to get the last out.

  I don’t know if I could ever be a manager. I’m a little too hot-tempered, and I don’t know if I could have brought in the same closer who’d blown the save the night before to try to close another one out. I mean, if it was Mariano, I’d have no doubts, even if he had thrown 61 pitches like Kim had. Regardless, we were pretty happy to see Kim coming in to start the ninth.

  The thing about submariners like Kim is that they can get movement on the ball, especially down in the zone. A lot of sinkerballers will tell you that when they’re too rested, feeling too strong, they don’t get as much sink on their pitches as they want. Another thing about those sidewinders is that the first time through the lineup, their delivery can be deceptive. But we were all seeing the ball pretty good off of him. It was easier to face him as a lefty, since the ball didn’t seem to come in from behind you, as it did for righties. Also, with runners on base, he wasn’t able to use the hesitation in his delivery that could throw us off-balance. Those 61 pitches had come against 13 batters, so all of us, even the guys on the bench, had gotten a chance to watch closely and get adjusted to that arm angle and release point. I sat in my usual spot next to Joe and asked, “Are we taking a pitch?”

  “No. If it’s there, jump on it.”

  After a first-pitch ball, I got one that was flat and fat and drilled it to left. Standing on second, I was pounding my hands and urging the guys on. I was still standing there cheerleading when, two outs later, Scott Brosius came to the plate. To that point, as a team, we were only 1-for-24 with runners in scoring position. But I had a good feeling. In Game 4, Kim had retired Brosius twice, once on a strikeout and then with a fly-out on an 0-1 pitch. That first strike had been a well-struck, deep foul ball. Scott was on that pitch, but he was really on the first strike that Kim gave him. His home run was a few rows into the seats to the left of the bullpen.

  We receive video compilations of the World Series, and that’s one that
I can watch over and over. Still, there’s nothing like being on the field when that happens. You’re down to your last out, and then you get this shot of adrenaline that just electrifies your body. I crossed home plate with my arms and legs tingling. Even when I went to put my gear on after all the commotion had quieted just a bit, I felt light, hollow, almost as if gravity didn’t have any pull on my body.

  Mariano gave up a couple of hits in the 11th, they bunted the runners over, and we intentionally walked Steve Finley to load the bases. Reggie Sanders was coming up, and the scouting reports had told us that he was a low-ball hitter and had trouble with pitches up in the zone. We played for the double play up the middle, and Joe made the right move. Sanders lined one toward the second-base bag, and Alfonso Soriano made a great diving catch. If we hadn’t pulled the infielders in, he might not have gotten to that ball. One out later, I was in the dugout feeling that feeling again. And I was overwhelmed by that same sensation in the bottom of the 12th when Soriano drove in the winning run and Frank Sinatra started singing and we’d come back again after trailing in the ninth, the first time that had happened twice in a World Series. New York. New York.

  We couldn’t finish them. I don’t know what to say about the 15–2 game except that the second, third, and fourth innings were like those horror movies I always try to avoid seeing. It was clear that they had figured out something, either our signs or something we couldn’t see that Andy was doing to tip his pitches. We couldn’t get anything past them, and that just didn’t happen with Andy.

  Whatever the feeling was that we’d had in New York was gone that day. At least we had a Game 7 to look forward to, but then the thing that none of us expected to happen did happen. Mariano had been so good in the Series, in his whole career, but when he blew the save we got a taste of what we’d been forcing down the throats of a lot of other teams all season. I didn’t like the taste of it at all. Adding in the disappointment I felt in having let down the fans and the city, it was even harder to come to terms with not winning the last game of the year.

  What I remember most is how quiet that locker room was and seeing Mo at his locker staring straight ahead. I walked up to him and held out my hand. He shook it and I said, “You don’t have to do this.”

  He nodded his head. “I know. But I need to. The sooner the better,” he said of having to face the media. “I made a couple of mistakes. They hit them. There’s nothing I can do now. The sooner I talk to everybody and answer their questions, the sooner I can put this behind me. I’ll be better next time. I just wish we could have done it for the fans.”

  A lot of players say words like that, but I knew that Mariano really meant them and would do what he said. He had that closer’s mentality. He wanted to be in there with the game on the line and was willing to accept the consequences when things didn’t go his way. We’d all contributed to the loss, but Mariano was there to take the blame, hold himself accountable, and then do whatever it took to make sure that it didn’t happen again.

  We hugged and I walked away, knowing that he wanted to be alone to get his thoughts together before the media came in.

  A crowd gathered to greet us when we arrived in New York, and later people kept thanking us for our effort and for what we’d done for the city in its time of need. I didn’t know how to explain to them that the city had been there for me and for us, my family and my Yankees family, in ways that they didn’t know.

  We’d all been through some tough times, individually and collectively, and I was better able to put that loss and the game in perspective than I’d have been able to do without the events of September 11, 2001. In looking back, I realized what it meant to play with the Yankees, for New York. Those are little words, “for” and “with,” and they may seem kind of interchangeable, but if the fans rooted both for us and with us, it felt more like the latter after that year. I wanted the feeling of disappointment and frustration at having fallen short of our goal to end, but I wanted that feeling of “with”—the fans rooting with us—to stick with me and my teammates, my family, and my friends. I wasn’t just working hard for them, I was doing it with them.

  Ultimately, I learned that what happened in that Stadium mattered to people in a way that I don’t think I had fully appreciated or understood before. I knew how much winning mattered to me and to my teammates, and though I understood now that other things mattered more, that didn’t mean I had to care about winning any less.

  I can point to the events from September 11, 2001, to the end of that season as marking a turning point, a time when my affection for and commitment to the Yankees franchise, its fans, and the city only deepened. I can’t find a similar marker, though, to indicate when or where the long stretch of failing to bring home a championship really began. When a drought begins, no one really notices those first days or even weeks of dryness. It takes time for those days to pile up before you notice how the landscape has been transformed. In many ways, though, that analogy doesn’t quite work. It wasn’t as if the team fell into a shambles and we struggled to make it to .500 or even to the playoffs.

  I pointed out previously how consistent we were with our record and our winning percentages over the bulk of my career. I don’t think I can say the same thing about the losses, though, because it didn’t seem like there were consistent reasons for them or consistent connections between them. Everybody, including me, wants a nice neat explanation for why a bad thing happens, but we don’t always get the comforting answers we want to hear.

  In a lot of ways, those Diamondback losses point to that. As difficult as it is to lose to a team 15–2, at least you can say you flat out just got beaten. But all the close ball games could have gone either way, and those are much harder to put behind you. I do think that it’s possible to do your job, to execute well, to want to win as much as the opposition, and still lose. Luck does play a part in games. We usually refer to it as “breaks,” though I’m not sure why. I do know that in 2002, after that hugely disappointing first-round loss against the Angels, I came out and said that they wanted it more than we did. I intentionally made that statement in the heat of the moment because I wanted to piss people off. Not because they didn’t actually want to win, but because I knew that what got me going was to be angry. I wanted to carry some of that anger forward into the next season, to motivate us to do the off-season work we needed to do.

  Sometimes when a team doesn’t win you can point to a diminishment of skills or productivity, but that wasn’t the case in 2002 at all. We had a great club. Jason Giambi added a big bat to our lineup. As a team, we finished first in the American League in runs, walks, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage, and second in home runs. We ranked near the bottom in triples and strikeouts. That last one was always a concern to me, but the nature of the game had changed. Putting the ball in play, doing the things that people refer to as “small ball”—that just wasn’t a part of the culture of the game at that time. Fans came to see guys mashing, and salaries rewarded that approach. There’s no way, though, that I’m saying that emphasis on the big blast was responsible for our losing to the Angels. We struck out 25 times in that four-game series, to the Angel’s 18. Not huge numbers or a huge difference, but maybe the outcome had something to do with when those strikeouts occurred? I know that we preached and preached having a good and patient approach at the plate. I don’t think we abandoned that approach in that series, but were we getting away from it?

  In the two years prior, we ranked eighth and sixth in that category, with 36 and then 64 fewer strikeouts. But we also finished with far fewer runs scored. So what does that tell you? You can look at the numbers and twist things around to make just about any point you want, but that still doesn’t explain the loss to the Angels. I was pissed because we had some guys, me included, who’d had really productive years that wound up meaning not a whole lot. I hit .268 with 20 home runs and 99 RBI. As much as Wade Boggs loved sevens, I hated nines. Batting .299? Terrible. Hitting 19, 29, 39 homers? Bad. And
79, 89, 99 RBI? Bad.

  I remember coming to the plate with the bases loaded in a game early in September of that year and striking out. I came back into the dugout and looked at Derek and said, “Watch. I’m going to end up with 99 at the end of the year. All I had to do was put the ball in play, and I couldn’t.” Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so smart. Another All-Star appearance and my third Silver Slugger Award in a row were nice honors, but who remembers that? I was grateful for the recognition and don’t mean to diminish what I accomplished, but that season that’s how I felt about myself and about the rest of the guys.

  I take a lot of pride in handling a pitching staff, and we were in the top five in every major statistical category except losses—which is a good thing—and hits allowed, where we finished sixth. We were well below the league ERA average of 4.46 at 3.87. We got great contributions out of the bullpen, with Ramiro Mendoza winning eight and Mike Stanton winning seven. That part of the game hadn’t changed in my time in the big leagues. Everybody was mixing and matching and monitoring pitch counts. We didn’t have a 20-game winner—David Wells was back with us and won 19 that year—but only three guys in the entire league reached that mark. As a team, we had an ERA of 8.21 against the Angels, and we averaged a little more than six runs a game. I take responsibility for that. I always looked at it that way. If the staff wasn’t being successful, it was on me. I didn’t have a great series at the plate or behind it. I know that taking the blame can come across as arrogant, like I think that, as Jorge goes, so go the Yankees, but my mind-set was always that if I didn’t do my job, if I didn’t help the team win and the staff do well, then the blame was on me.