The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  Torre filled out the rest of his lineup when he arrived at the ballpark for Game 5. He chose to play Hayes instead of Boggs at third base—emphasizing the likelihood of groundballs there with the lefthanded Pettitte pitching—the hot-hitting Fielder instead of Martinez at first base, despite facing a righthander; and Raines in the outfield instead of O'Neill, who was limited by a sore hamstring. Torre called Boggs, Martinez and O'Neill into his office one-by-one to break the news to them they would not be starting.

  “Boggs was disappointed,” Torre said, “Tino was the only one where you could see the anger, and Paulie just looked resigned. He was down. He walked out with his head down and his shoulders slouched.”

  As O'Neill left the office, Zimmer saw resignation on O'Neill's face. The danger with sitting O'Neill against Smoltz was that O'Neill would not be there mentally whenever Torre did have to go back to him. Zimmer thought about O'Neill's reaction.

  “This guy has been playing on one leg all year,” Zimmer said. “I think we really owe it to him.”

  Torre agreed. It gave him an idea: why not play Strawberry in left and O'Neill in right? He told Zimmer to bring O'Neill back into his office.

  “Manager's prerogative,” he told O'Neill. “I changed my mind. You're playing.”

  Meanwhile, Fielder, rising to the occasion, was walking around the clubhouse, telling anybody within earshot, “Just get on base! Somebody get on base, and Big Daddy's got you today! I'll get you in. Just give me somebody on base.”

  Sure enough, Fielder drove in the only run of the game with a double, one of his three hits. Torre's agonizing lineup decisions worked out well. Leyritz called a smart game. Pettitte threw shut out baseball one out into the ninth inning with the help of 14 groundball outs, three of them by way of Hayes. Torre even allowed Pettitte to bat in the top of the ninth inning with two outs and two on rather than use a pinch hitter and turn the game over to Wette-land.

  “People were yelling from the stands, ‘Are you guys crazy?’ “ Torre said. “Zimmer turned around and yelled back at them, ‘Sit your ass down!’ “

  A few sections out of earshot, Pettitte's wife, Laura, was sitting next to Torre's wife, Ali.

  “What's he doing?” Laura asked. “He's never done this before. Andy doesn't pitch the last inning!”

  As Torre explained, “You had Chipper Jones leading off the ninth, who at the time wasn't as good a righthanded hitter. Freddie McGriff, who scared the shit out of me, was the second hitter. I know letting Andy hit in a 1-0 game probably wasn't the sanest thing to do. But I just wanted him to be the pitcher in the ninth inning.

  “Of course, the first pitch Jones hits for a double down the left-field line. Then McGriff hits a groundball to second base and the tying run is on third. I bring Wetteland in and Javy Lopez hits a one-hopper to third. I lucked out.

  “Then I made another decision. I intentionally walked Ryan Klesko and pitched to Luis Polonia, even though Klesko was the winning run.”

  Now Torre's last major lineup decision—putting O'Neill back into the lineup—would come into play. Polonia kept fouling off pitches—five in a row—and coach Jose Cardenal kept trying to get O'Neill to move toward center field because the lefthanded Polonia was not getting around on Wetteland's fastball.

  O'Neill, as was his habit, was too busy working on his batting stroke, taking imaginary swings in right field. Cardenal tried waving a towel, and then two towels, and then three towels to get O'Neill's attention. Finally, just before Wetteland's seventh pitch to Polonia, O'Neill caught sight of the frantic Cardenal and moved a few steps to his right. Polonia hit the next pitch hard and to the right-center field gap. O'Neill hobbled after it and thrust his glove up as he neared the warning track.

  If O'Neill caught the ball, the Yankees would be one win away from the world championship. If he did not catch it, both runners would score, the Yankees would lose the game, the Braves would be one win away from the title, and Torre would be roasted for letting Pettitte hit and start the ninth and for intentionally putting the winning run on base.

  O'Neill caught the ball, and without one wobbly step to spare. He smacked his left hand against the outfield wall for emphasis, while limping to a stop. “To see the expression on his face when he caught that ball,” Torre said, “that was special.” The Yankees were going home with a chance to win the World Series.

  To win Game 6, the Yankees would have to solve the magic tricks of Maddux. They did just that in the third inning. O'Neill— there for Torre when he needed him—doubled, Girardi tripled, Jeter singled and stole a base, and Williams singled. It added up to a 3-0 lead for Jimmy Key, who left in the sixth inning having given up only one run.

  By the seventh, it was time for what Torre called The Formula: Rivera for two innings and Wetteland for one. Rivera took care of the first part of the plan. Wetteland turned his end of the plan into a bit of an adventure. Three singles cut the lead to 3-2 and left runners at first and second with two outs in the ninth. Braves second baseman Mark Lemke then worked the count full. On the seventh pitch of the at-bat, Lemke lofted a foul pop-up off third base. Hayes squeezed it, and the Yankees were at last world champions once more.

  “Ninety-six was a lot of fun,” Torre said, “because we were underdogs the whole time.”

  The next two hours were a blur of tears, laughs, hugs and champagne for Torre. It wasn't until 2 a.m. that a friend drove him home. When Torre arrived home he found his house packed with people, people who wanted the night to go on forever. It was quite a sight: Torre arriving at his own house party still was wearing his champagne-soaked Yankees uniform.

  Days later, Torre found himself sharing a late breakfast with Stein-brenner at the Regency Hotel in New York. They were perfect for one another, what with Steinbrenner giving Torre a fourth chance and with his best team yet, and Torre giving Steinbrenner his world championship that had eluded him through 17 years and 16 managerial changes. Torre reminded Steinbrenner that he was due to make $550,000 in 1997. LaRussa, he pointed out, made about three times as much money, and now Torre had won as many world championships as LaRussa, who had won with Oakland in 1989. Steinbrenner agreed Torre deserved better. He tore up the second year of the contract and the two of them negotiated a new deal: $3.75 million over the next three seasons.

  Privately, Ali Torre wished her husband, having fulfilled his dream of a World Series title, could walk away from managing.

  They had a baby girl, Andrea, at home. She also knew, however, that Torre had developed a special bond with this group of players. He couldn't leave them. He also wanted to make good on his spring training vision of winning multiple titles.

  Torre and the Yankees would not win in 1997. Four outs from winning the Division Series against Cleveland, Rivera gave up a tying home run to Sandy Alomar. Rivera lost, 3-2, in the ninth on an infield single by Omar Vizquel. The Yankees lost another one-run game in the clincher, 4-3.

  Torre came back after that season, too. And he came back after winning the World Series again in 1998 and he came back after winning it again in 1999 and he came back after winning it again in 2000 … 11 more seasons in all after that first year as Yankees manager fulfilled his dream. He went on because the 1996 world championship confirmed his belief in the power of trust. The championship was a validation. It changed him as a manager, even as a person, and he liked what he had become.

  “I finally started getting self-esteem as far as the work I did,” Torre said when explaining why he stayed with the job. “I finally discovered what I did worked. You always think you're doing the right thing, but there was always a reason why it didn't pan out. It came back to you got fired for one reason: you didn't get the job done.

  “When we did it in ‘96, it was such a high for me, realizing that we won, and I felt very much in control of the situations where these players who had been there before I was there respected what I was doing. You never get enough of that. And that's why. That's why.

  And then the Yankee thing. You kno
w eventually you're going to wear out your welcome. But the core of players that was still there, I wasn't ready to walk away from them. And the money was good. And the challenge. Every single year was different, even though the team was the same, the name of the team, there's always another ingredient introduced to what you're doing. I feel like I can look at a team and try to put the puzzle together.”

  Something else very unusual happened in that 1996 season, something unusual, that is, besides a recovering drug addict, Doc Gooden, throwing a no-hitter, a guy coming back from an aneurysm winning the division-clinching game and the pivotal game of the World Series, Dean Palmer throwing a bunt away, a 12-year-old kid turning an out into a home run, Mark Wohlers throwing a slider, the greatest World Series comeback in Yankees history, an 8-0 record on the road in the postseason and a recycled manager welcomed as “Clueless Joe” winning the World Series in his first year as Yankees manager, succeeding immediately where the 11 men before him had failed over the previous 17 years, some of them given multiple chances. What also was unusual was that a team so well stocked with savvy veterans such as Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, Wade Boggs, Tino Martinez, Joe Girardi, Jimmy Key and David Cone turned for on-field leadership and the reassurance of a clutch play to a 21-year-old kid who the previous season made 29 errors and hit just two home runs in Columbus, Ohio, for the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate. Derek Jeter was magic from the start.

  “It was toward the middle of the season when the older players, the veterans, were looking to him to do something,” Torre said. “That was something that was very unusual for me. I had never seen anything like that in the game. They were counting on him.”

  Sometimes the randomness of the match between a player and an organization, which is complicated by draft order and the arcs of franchise's rises and falls, comes out just about perfect, baseball's version of an online dating service spitting out from its complicated algorithms one true love. Boggs, for instance, grew up with a sweet inside-out lefthanded hitting stroke. In the 1976 draft he was passed over 165 times before the Boston Red Sox selected him. Boggs’ stroke was a natural fit for Fenway Park, where for years he could slap balls off the Green Monster in left field as if he were playing handball. Boggs hit .369 at Fenway in his career, .306 everywhere else.

  Jeter and the Yankees made for one of those perfect matches. A humble, hardworking kid from Kalamazoo, Michigan, raised by educators, he was the right guy at the right time for the right team. He was a superstar in training without the attention-hungry ego that typically comes standard with such a package. When he looked around the Yankees in 1995, with a spring training invitation and a late-season call-up, he saw the captain, Don Mattingly playing with the kind of motivation that matched his own. What he saw in 1996, even with Mattingly gone, was an entire team of players that carried the same kind of ethic Jeter had learned from his parents. He saw a team built on hard work and the prioritizing of team success over individual goals. The kid fit right in.

  “I picked it up from a lot of guys,” Jeter said. “I don't know if there was just one. Guys like Coney—you saw the way Coney dealt with the media, in terms of being responsible and available to the media. I think how he handled that was great. There were different aspects from different guys. Tim Raines, how he enjoyed every day. He had a smile every single day. He just always made it fun. Gerald Williams, he was always so positive. He was just someone who always looked at the positives. Tino, he played hard and was intense. I took pieces from everyone.

  “I think it was the perfect situation for me, especially playing in New York. All those things I talked about, you have to be understanding of those traits to be successful in New York. One, the media. Two, confidence. Three, having fun. And four, working hard and being intense. Those were the things I had always done. So it was almost like a reassurance when I got to the Yankees.”

  The 1995 Yankees used Tony Fernandez at shortstop, but when Torre was hired as manager the front office told him Jeter was going to be the shortstop and Fernandez would play second.

  “I'd never seen him, never met him,” Torre said. “Before spring training I happened to see Jeter on TV saying, ‘I'm going to get an opportunity to win the job.’ I said, ‘You know what? He's put it in a better way than I did.’ He took nothing for granted, not like he was inheriting the job.

  “Basically, when you know this is what the organization wants—for Jeter to be the shortstop—and you have nothing to compare it to, you just let it fly. And he really didn't do much in spring training. He didn't swing the bat very well. Not that he had bad at-bats, but he didn't do anything extraordinary.”

  Near the end of spring training, Clyde King, one of Steinbren-ner's many special advisers out of Tampa, recommended that the Yankees end the plan to start Jeter at shortstop and return him to Columbus for more seasoning. “He's not ready to play,” King said.

  “Not ready to play?” Torre said. “It's too late. We're already committed to him.”

  Said Torre, “I liked him by that time. We were going to bat him ninth and let him grow. And then Fernandez got hurt and Mariano Duncan, who we brought on board as a backup player, ends up being our second baseman.”

  “All of us,” Cone said, “thought, If he could just hold his own defensively that would be enough. And really, from the Opening Day in Cleveland, it was sort of like, ‘Wow!’ “

  On Opening Day, Jeter made a spectacular catch of a pop-up with his back to the infield, made a sweet backhand play in the hole in which he showed off a strong arm and smacked a fifth-inning home run off veteran pitcher Dennis Martinez to give the Yankees some breathing room in what was a 1-0 pitchers’ duel at the time.

  “And he didn't get excited like guys who hit their first big league home run,” Torre said. “From there it was just a matter of progressing.”

  Said Cone, “He never looked back, really. We were all impressed. And he was real humble. That's the beauty of Derek. He handled himself the right way. It was hard to get on him. We'd always look for things—Straw, Raines and I would look at him and it was hard to find things to get on him about. He just carried himself so well.

  “We had a veteran team that would have given him a rookie hazing if we thought he needed it. We couldn't find an opening anywhere. We were looking … the first six weeks, the first couple of months … looking for any opening to say ‘Hey kid, you can't do that.’ Anything. Anything on the field, anything on the bus, anything at the hotels, his wardrobe … Nothing.

  “When you talk about great makeup, a great background, he had it. The whole time the way he carried himself, his demeanor, was so impressive. He was kind of quiet, kept to himself, and didn't say anything wrong or dumb like most rookies do to allow you to hammer him. Never happened.”

  Jeter wasn't above making rookie mistakes on the field, but even then he displayed such an easy way about himself that such mistakes never threw him off that placid equilibrium. On August 12, 1996, for instance, Jeter made the foolish mistake of trying to steal third base with two outs in the eighth inning of a tie game against the White Sox with Cecil Fielder batting. Jeter was already in scoring position with the potential go-ahead run. Third base was virtually inconsequential. He was thrown out. The Yankees would lose the game, 3-2, in 10 innings.

  “I was pissed off,” Torre said. “I was mad at myself, basically, for probably giving him too much credit, knowing what he should do there. And I was mad—more mad at myself. I said to Zim, ‘I'm not going to talk to him until tomorrow. We've got the rest of the game to play’

  “What does Derek do? He comes in off the field and sits right between me and Zim. Just came right over to us. He knew what he did. I hit him on the back of the head and said, ‘Get out of here.’ And it was that way pretty much all year.”

  Jeter did not play well in his first postseason game. He left five runners on base in his first three times at bat, all hitless. He did manage a bases-empty single his last time up. The Yankees lost, 6-2. Reporters asked Torre if he int
ended to talk to the rookie in an attempt to calm his nerves.

  “I don't know,” Torre said. “I'll get a feel for it and see.”

  After Jeter showered and dressed, he was walking past Torre's office on his way home when he poked his head inside the manager's doorway.

  “Mr. T,” the rookie shortstop called out to Torre, “tomorrow's the biggest game of your life. Make sure you get your rest.”

  Torre laughed and thought, Well, I guess I don't have to talk to him.

  The next day Jeter had three hits, including a leadoff single in the 12th inning that led to him scoring the winning run. So was born his reputation as a clutch postseason player. From 1996 until the 2001 World Series, the Yankees played .746 baseball in the postseason, an outrageously great record over 71 games, playing against the best teams under the most pressure. They were 53-18 while winning 14 of 15 series. It ranks as one of the most astounding stretches ever of October greatness. Jeter batted .319 in that run and, like some comic book superhero, always seemed to show up at exactly the right time to save the day.

  In the 2000 World Series, for instance, the Mets were at home in Game 4 after having acquired momentum in the series with an eighth-inning rally to win Game 3. They stood to tie the series at two games each if they sustained that momentum. In one pitch, however, it was gone. Torre batted Jeter leadoff that game, the third leadoff batter Torre used in four games. With one pitch, Jeter restored the Yankees to the commanding position in the series. With the usual World Series first-pitch flashbulbs firing all about him, Jeter ripped the first offering from Bobby Jones for a home run. The Yankees held the lead from the first pitch to the last, winning 3-2.