The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  The meeting ended in, at best, a cold truce. Both men were still angry. Cone saw Torre after the meeting finally ended.

  “I told him to go talk to you, Joe,” Cone said. “Better that way than what was going on.”

  “I know, I know,” Torre said.

  “Did you get it straightened out?”

  Torre didn't give an answer. He just stared at Cone, the anger still evident.

  “I'm working on him, Joe. I'm working on him,” Cone said.

  Wells’ ERA stood at an unsightly 5.77 after that game in Texas. But after the meeting in Minnesota, he was a changed pitcher. The next time he took the ball he beat the Royals, 3-2, a game in which Torre gave him so much rope that Wells threw 136 pitches over eight innings. His start after that was simply perfect. Wells threw 120 pitches in a perfect game at Yankee Stadium against the Minnesota Twins, one of only 17 perfect games in history. He did not walk a batter and struck out 11 in the 4-0 win. Wells went from essentially quitting on the mound to throwing a perfect game with only one start in between. It was a 12-day snapshot that fairly captured the entire career of Wells, who could be as exasperating as he could be great.

  “Wells would exert more energy to find a way not to be on the field for pregame practice than it would have taken to be out there,” Torre said. “You have rules and the only way rules are effective is if everybody has to live by them. We had rules that you had to be on the field for however long it was, an hour of batting practice. I said, ‘If you have to leave the field, you have to get permission from a coach or me.’

  “I try to analyze it, try to be in somebody else's skin, but nobody needs that much work in the trainer's room that it can't wait 20 minutes. I think it could be a throwback to needing the attention. Whether it was positive or negative, he needed the attention. I think that was more a part of it.

  “He can be an engaging personality, and then there are times as a manager where you could hate his guts. He'd go out there and I'd watch his body language, and I'd watch Jeff Weaver and I'd watch Sidney Ponson, those are two guys who gravitated toward him, and I saw the same things. ‘Woe is me.’ It drove you nuts.

  “The players addressed that with him, too. Jeter or O'Neill said something. It was never any big deal. I told him everybody was trying to help him win and said, ‘It's not fair to them.’ He admitted it. But I think about his growing up without a male influence. Even though it doesn't stop you from being pissed at him, you try to understand it.

  “But he could pitch. My favorite story was calling him in and telling him how much he weighed and saying, ‘There's no way you can pitch effectively at that weight.’ Of course, now he's going to go out there and pitch a gem because now he's going to prove it to me. He had an arm like Warren Spahn, blessed with a rubber arm. He could pitch any time for as long as you want him. There were other issues—back, gout, whatever—but there were never any arm problems.”

  After the blowout meeting with Torre in Minnesota, and including the postseason, Wells went 19-3 with a 2.91 ERA. The Yankees went 23-4 when he took the ball in that turnaround. Wells led the league in winning percentage, shutouts, strikeout-to-walk ratio, and fewest baserunners per inning.

  “He needed somebody to push him, he really did,” Cone said. “Once he got it going after that perfect game, he really changed. He was lights out for the rest of the year. It was a Cy Young type year. He did need to be pushed. I don't know if you can trace it back to his childhood and not having a father around or what, but after that meeting he was really good. Since he was pitching so well Joe and Mel eased up on him. I stayed on him. I told Joe and Mel, ‘Hey I'm on him. We're with him. We're building him up. We're going to stay on him.’

  “That was the beauty of Torre. He knew he had guys in that clubhouse who could police themselves and he allowed it to happen. He allowed us to do that. So when he did call a meeting, which was rarely, it was effective. He always knew we were on top of it. That particular clubhouse, we were on top of everything.”

  By any measurement, the 1998 Yankees were the pinnacle of the dynasty. They led the league in runs (though no one hit more than 28 home runs), pitching and defensive efficiency (a measurement of how well a team turns batted balls into outs). The starting rotation—Cone, Wells, Pettitte, Orlando Hernandez and Hideki Irabu—combined for a 79-35 record. Mariano Rivera, with Mike Stanton, Graeme Lloyd and Jeff Nelson providing the setup relief, was 3-0 with a 1.91 ERA and 36 saves.

  So deep was the lineup that Williams led the team in batting, O'Neill led in total bases, Martinez led in home runs, Jeter led in hits and Knoblauch led in walks. Scott Brosius, who hit .203 the previous season for Oakland, batted .300 and drove in 98 runs—while making all but three of his starts out of the eighth or ninth spots in the batting order. Posada and Joe Girardi helped give the Yankees 88 RBI out of the catching position. Five players combined to give them 74 RBI out of the left-field position: Chad Curtis, Strawberry, Raines, Ricky Ledee and Shane Spencer. Homer Bush was a pinch-running specialist who also happened to hit .380. The roster was so deep and productive that the players Torre brought off the bench produced a better on-base percentage (.370) than those who started (.364) that season.

  “I give a lot of credit to Raines and Strawberry,” Cone said. “They provided veteran leadership. They were real leaders, especially when we threw our secondary lineup out there with Straw, Raines and Homer Bush. We were almost better on those days. I think that set the tone. The depth of that roster really stands out for me. I was never on a team that was that deep. From one through 25, I don't think there was ever a better team.”

  Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, watched in awe as the Yankees beat his club eight times in 11 games, outscoring Oakland 81-48.

  “I've been in the game 30 years,” Beane said. “That 1998 team was one of the greatest teams in the history of the game. The greatest teams I ever saw were the 1998 Yankees and the ‘75-’76 Reds. They had everything you'd a want a baseball team to have. To win one game against them was a big deal. I remember we had one game against them that was rained out, so we had to play a four-game series in three days. We didn't have a particularly great pitching staff. Well, the first game of the doubleheader, poor Mike Oquist was pitching. We knew we had three more games to play, so we had to leave him out there, otherwise we would have wound up throwing an infielder in the second game. We literally ran out of pitching in a four-game series.

  “They wore you out. They pounded you. The impact they would have on your pitching staff when you were done playing them would carry over for another week. And one thing about getting beat by the Yankees: they did it with class. It was as if they beat you in rented tuxedos.”

  The roster was a near-perfect construct, of youth in the everyday positions, experience and wisdom off the bench, power and speed, lefthanded and righthanded pitching … the Yankees lacked nothing. They added to that talent with an insatiable desire to win. During the 1998 season Cone put his finger precisely on what made the Yankees great when he observed, “There is a desperation to win.”

  Martinez, for instance, was habitually hard on himself. The slightest slump, even a hitless game, would prompt the first baseman to grow angry with himself. Torre would have to call him into his office.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Torre told Martinez one time. “I know you don't want to hear this, but you're sitting here in this clubhouse and you're thinking you're letting everybody down. If Derek Jeter went 0-for-8, would you feel like he was letting you down?”

  “No,” Martinez said.

  “Well, that's the way we feel about you.”

  The Yankees took it personally on those rare occasions when they did lose. Nobody took failure harder than O'Neill, the guy people in the front office had warned Torre back in 1996 was a bit “selfish.” That reputation came about because of the regularity with which O'Neill would trash watercoolers, slam his bat to the ground or fail to run hard when he was mad at himself for hitting a routine
pop-up or grounder.

  “Paul O'Neill was just that guy who threw himself in there all the time,” Torre said, “who never thought, What do I do if this doesn't work out? And he was a great soldier. Not selfish and not self-conscious. He didn't care what it looked like. He didn't care how ugly the swings were. His job was to get on base.

  “His selfishness, if you want to call it that, came from the fact that he wanted to get a hit every time up. He didn't have a selfish bone in his body. He wanted to win above everything else. There was never an excuse in this guy. “

  One time when O'Neill hit a routine grounder and, out of frustration, he failed to run hard, the fielder bobbled the ball. O'Neill still was thrown out at first. His lack of hustle prevented him from reaching base safely, and he knew it. After the game, O'Neill walked into Torre's office and threw a one-hundred-dollar bill on the manager's desk.

  “You're not going to solve this thing by clearing your conscience,” Torre told him. “You keep that hundred.”

  Said Torre, “What you had to understand was that he needed to win.”

  Said Donahue, “When we lost a game, I don't care if it was in April or May, he'd come in the clubhouse and from halfway across the room he'd be firing bats into his locker. We'd be back in the trainer's room, hear the noise and know right away, ‘Oh, shit. We lost.’ He'd be so pissed. No pitcher was ever any good, either. When that guy they made the movie about, the science teacher for Tampa Bay, Jim Morris, got him out, O'Neill went crazy. ‘Who are they going to bring in next to get me out? A gym teacher? A plumber?’

  “He'd always say, ‘That's it. I'm done. I can't hit.’ And Zim would sit there and go, ‘Hey I got a buddy in Cincinnati who can get you a bricklayer's job …’

  “He'd rarely come into the trainer's room. One time he broke a rib in Tampa right before the playoffs. He went into a wall and broke a rib. Didn't bother him. He used to say, ‘The trainer's room is for pitchers.’ In 1996 and 1998 he had a bad hamstring. He wouldn't even come in to get it wrapped. He was a bad patient.”

  “The thing about Paulie,” Cone said, “was he was into his own routine, but it was not at all seen as selfish. I think people didn't realize how goofy Paulie was off the field. They saw he was intense, but after the game you could get all over him. Tino or I would say something to him and he was just so goofy. He was just very different from his on-field demeanor. The way he handled himself, he didn't take himself too seriously, even though it looked that way on the field. He was very self-deprecating, talking about how he stunk.”

  In the 1997 Division Series, O'Neill batted in the ninth inning of Game 5 with the Yankees down to their last out and down by one run against the Indians. He roped a hard line drive that smacked off the wall in right field. O'Neill dashed into second base, arriving with such an ugly, awkward slide that Torre ran to the field to check on him.

  “I thought it was out!” O'Neill said.

  Torre signaled for a pinch runner.

  “I'm all right, Skip! I'm all right!” O'Neill protested.

  “Paulie,” Torre said, “I'm bringing in a pinch runner for you because the other guy is faster than you, not because you're hurt.”

  “I remember one time,” Borzello said, “when we played in Detroit and I think he left nine men on base himself. And I remember him coming in and we lost the game by one or two runs. We came into the clubhouse, and I remember him saying, ‘You left nine men on base! Nine fucking men on base!’ When he had a bad game he had this glassy stare and he'd talk to himself. And then he picked up a chair and fired it. I just remember him feeling solely responsible.

  “He wanted to get his hits, but his hits were important to him because of the success of the team. There are a lot of guys who want a hit every at-bat, but this guy, it was more about not letting the other 24 guys down. If he didn't do enough to help the team win the game, he felt like he let everyone down. And I think people fed off that, that his passion for success and how that translated to the team's success was what was important to him.”

  A desperation to win. That's what drove the 1998 Yankees to 114 victories—22 more than anybody else in the league. There was only one downside to being so much better than everyone else: the pressure to win the World Series was enormous. They were supposed to win it all, and it showed when they played Texas in the Division Series.

  “We were very tight,” Torre said, “as tight as I can remember. It was weird, though: even then, we just kept winning.”

  The Yankees didn't hit much; they scored nine runs in three games. They also were knocked back emotionally one day during the series when they learned that Strawberry had been diagnosed with colon cancer. But they swept the Rangers because they allowed Texas one run on 13 hits in the entire series. The Yankees used only six pitchers.

  “They were a very professional group of guys,” said former Rangers pitcher Rick Helling, who lost Game 2 when the Yankees forced him to throw 119 pitches in six innings. “I remember very well the way they worked the count and how unselfish they were as a team. They were not afraid to let the next guy do it. A lot of times a guy in position to get the big hit gets overanxious and wants to do it himself. That team was not that way. It was a battle facing them. It was a great lineup, very unselfish for a bunch of star players.”

  The Yankees advanced to play the Indians, the team that knocked them out the previous year, in the American League Championship Series. After the Yankees rolled to a 7-2 victory in Game 1, they found themselves in a 1-1 tie in the 12th inning of Game 2 when Knoblauch committed an all-time infamous blunder. The second baseman stood arguing with the first-base umpire for an interference call—the baseball sitting in the infield dirt not more than a few steps away from him—while Enrique Wilson of the Indians was running all the way from first to home with the tie-breaking run. Nelson, Martinez and teammates in the dugout were yelling to Knoblauch to fetch the baseball, but the second baseman was too engrossed in his ill-timed argument. By the time he did get the ball and throw home, it was too late. The Indians went on to win, 4-1.

  Knoblauch was a very strange case study in New York. He arrived with the Yankees in time for the 1998 season after a trade with the Twins, where he had established himself as a rugged lead-off hitter and fearless baserunner. But he often seemed jumpy and lacking in confidence with the Yankees. He wasn't the same threat on the bases. In 1997 with Minnesota, for instance, Knoblauch attempted 72 steals. The next season with the Yankees he ran only 43 times, and never exceeded 47 attempts in his four years in pinstripes.

  “I never realized how fragile he was,” Torre said. “When we got him I thought it was a perfect fit. We could utilize his speed. But he never really exhibited it with us. He was afraid to run. He was afraid of getting thrown out. That fear of failure stuff. And you can't talk somebody into failing if they're afraid to fail.

  “With Minnesota he was a tough, hard-nosed player. Certainly the son of a gun was a good hitter. But his mood swings certainly were a big contributor in his lack of consistency. I think New York got the best of him. He found more things to do, more trouble.”

  By 2000, Knoblauch's inner demons had coalesced into a mental block about fielding and throwing the ball to first base from second base. It was painful to watch. Then, on June 16, 2000, upon throwing away a baseball in that game for the third time in six innings, Knoblauch walked off the field, tapped Torre on the knee in the dugout, said, “I'm done,” and kept right on walking up the runway and into the clubhouse. Torre followed him and reached him near his locker. Knoblauch was getting undressed. He told Torre he was quitting.

  “You're going through a tough time,” Torre told him. “I can't let you just walk out on the spur of the moment and then you'll be sorry about it. Just go home for now and you think about it.”

  Said Torre, “I told Cash what had happened, and when Randy Levine got wind of what happened, he wanted to take his money away.”

  Knoblauch was back in the lineup the next day at second base, but he nev
er fully regained his confidence there. The Yankees moved him to left field the following season.

  “What happened in the championship series against Cleveland was sad,” Torre said. “I just tried to get the team together after that. The players were mad at him. I was pissed with him at the time it was going on, but if you knew how fragile he was you couldn't stay angry I talked to some players. Mariano, Bernie, O'Neill, Girardi, who was one of my soldiers. I said, ‘It's done. It's behind us. The only way to get through this is to be there for him. We can't do anything about it but go on.’ “

  Said Cone, “Some of us talked to him, and he was almost in denial, blaming it on the umpire.”

  On the plane ride after the game to Cleveland, where the Yankees would have an off day before Game 3, it was Cone, of course, who provided the most important counseling to Knoblauch. He told him of a similar gaffe he had made in Atlanta as a pitcher with the Mets, arguing with an umpire while two Braves runners sped around the bases.

  “You've got to take it,” Cone told him. “You've got to stand up for this one. Stand up and take it. Whether the umpire blew the call or not, you've got to get the ball. Whether the runner was out of the baseline or not is irrelevant. Now all you've got to do is take the blame and it will go away.”

  Said Cone, “He finally said, ‘Okay’ and he did. He had his press conference and he said, ‘I screwed up.’ Finally. After being in denial for a while.”

  On that same flight to Cleveland Torre sensed that his team was uptight, and that it needed a complete day off, especially away from the media that he knew were going to milk another day's worth of stories out of the Knoblauch gaffe. He told his players not to come to the ballpark the next day.