Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Gibson, too, was a gamer. In the World Series, he was 7–2, with 92 strikeouts in 81 innings, and a cumulative Series ERA of 1.67 (Koufax in 57 World Series innings pitched, had an ERA of 0.97). A few years ago when I wrote a book on Michael Jordan, I sent a copy to Gibson, with an inscription: “The person he reminds me of is you.”

  So who knows who is the best? Only the hitters could really know, and who batted against Feller and Koufax, and Gibson and Martinez when all were in their prime? What we do know is that Pedro Martinez is the best in the game today, a nonpareil, that he almost always dominates, and perhaps most important, he is a true gamer. The bigger the game, the better he pitches.

  Let us recount two great Pedro moments: One against the Yankees in September of 1999, the other against Cleveland in a 1999 playoff game.

  Let us take the first one, against the Yankees, in what was a very tough pennant race, where he clearly has to carry the Red Sox—especially in big games, where his psychological presence can influence his teammates and affect more than the game he is pitching. I went back the other day to watch a replay of it. He was matched against Andy Pettitte, leading in the seventh, 2–1, on a two-run Mike Stanley home run. Bobby Murcer, calling the game for the Yankees, kept repeating, “One run for Pedro Martinez is like five runs for anyone else,” while Tim McCarver kept saying, “What a great ball-game this is.”

  Late in the game, Boston had loaded the bases with no outs, but Jeff Nelson had come in and gotten the Yankees out of the jam, first with a force play at home, then a double play. That was a huge incentive for the Yankees to turn the momentum the other way. They had Jeter, O’Neill and Williams coming up. So, of course, here we have Pedro at his best. The count went to 3-2, and he got Jeter on a called third strike. The next hitter was O’Neill. Again a 3-2 count. Got him swinging, his 11th strikeout of the game. And then Bernie. The count was 0-2, and he decided not to waste any time. Got him on a breaking ball. He struck out 17 Yankees that night, a personal best. Excepting Don Larsen’s perfect game in the World Series in 1956, this might have been the greatest game ever pitched in Yankee Stadium, and given a choice to be on hand at either, I would have taken the Martinez-Pettitte game.

  The other great night for him as a gamer was the fifth game of the Divisional Series against Cleveland. By that point, it was clear that the pitching on both teams was gone, that the pitching staffs were exhausted. Martinez himself had been hurt, and had had to come out of an earlier game with a shoulder that was giving him pain. By the time he entered the fifth game, the score had begun to resemble a football score, 8–8 at the end of three innings. Ailing shoulder or not, he pitched six magical innings of no-hit baseball.

  Here is what we know about him—and I am indebted here to my generous colleague Dan Shaughnessy, the immensely talented Boston Globe columnist. He has every pitch: fastball, slider, curve and change. The change, notes Shaughnessy, is remarkable—it starts with the same fierce motion, same delivery, same angle as the fastball, but with much less speed. In spring training, he will even tell batters that the change is coming, and they still can’t hit it.

  No small amount of Pedro’s success, Shaughnessy believes, comes from his unusually long fingers. That allows him to do more things with the ball. “It’s like Michael’s big hands—the ball is smaller for Michael than it is for the other players, and he can do more things with it. That’s true of Pedro, as well,” Shaughnessy says.

  The Red Sox paid handsomely for him when they got him from those poor folks up in Montreal, but it has turned out to be a bargain of the first order. It was Montreal which got him on the cheap. He was 22 years old at the time, clearly just coming of age; in 1993, his first full season with the Dodgers, he won 10 and lost 5, had an ERA of 2.61, and struck out 119. He appeared to be a pitcher just about to bloom. Then the Dodgers traded him, even up, for Delino DeShields. Pedro seems to get along with most people in baseball, but Lasorda is another story. The anger here is a blood thing, because the Dodgers never gave him a real chance and judged him on his size, not his talent and his heart.

  So forget whether he’s the best ever. Just accept the fact that he’s an artist, and there are always too few of them and too many others who think they’re artists, and flaunt their behavior as if they’re artists, but aren’t, legends only in their own minds. Settle for the idea that he’s the best around these days, a Cy Young winner three times, and in both leagues, and that it is a pure pleasure to watch him, a craftsman at work, all those tools, and all that intelligence and that self-evident love of the game.

  So I’ve missed him this summer. Last Saturday there was a series against Chicago, and it was a beautiful day, just that kind of day when you’re supposed to be outside, but I figured, if he had been pitching, I somehow would have cheated on the weather—maybe told my wife that I was working on a book—and stayed inside and watched the game.

  But Pedro wasn’t there, so I was forced to be something of a grown-up. I went fishing with my pal Allan LaFrance, who is a builder on this island and a friend for 20 years, and his friend Pat Taaffee, a carpenter. We went off the Great Point Rip on a gorgeous day and the water was alive with fish, bait fish everywhere, and the big fish trying to nail them. When we caught a blue, the baitfish and the miniature sand eels they had already hit, still undigested, would come out immediately. I’ve fished here for more than 30 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many fish in the water. We had a strike or a follow on almost every cast. We caught and released more than a dozen blues and even took two good-size stripers. If you can’t watch Pedro pitch on a perfect day in July, this was not half bad as a substitute.

  TORRE MAKES A GOOD BOSS

  From ESPN.com, December 5, 2001

  This is in praise of Joe Torre. What a pleasure it has been to watch the Yankees during the years he has managed in New York. May I also suggest that this year he had what was probably his best of year of managing, this being a Yankee team that was aging and somewhat vulnerable, and seemed, especially in the beginning of the season, better on paper than it was on the field.

  It is in praise of him not merely as a baseball man, but in the more complete sense as a man, for the two are not always the same. To understand the difference, all you have to do is think back to the appalling turmoil that surrounded the cartoon-like Billy Martin era in the Bronx years before Torre arrived.

  Torre is as complete a person as high-level professional sports can produce, especially in this hyped-up era with its higher visibility, where the rewards are greater than ever, and where therefore the shelf life of a coach or manager tends to be briefer—you go up higher and faster than in the past, and you can descend even more quickly. The role of the media, after all, is greater than ever, which imposes an immense temptation to take care of yourself at the expense of your players, to indulge in me-first leadership.

  Torre has been successful in New York for any number of reasons: He has had very good players, by dint of George Steinbrenner’s passion to win, and his players are by and large, mature, unusually self-reliant men (especially when calibrated on the Richter Scale of contemporary athletic maturity, where sheer ability and the willingness to accept responsibility for your actions are not necessarily on the same team).

  But I think it is important not to underestimate how well Torre’s own exceptional human qualities have served him, his honesty and sense of humor, and his instinct, despite all the media pressures on him, to be exceptionally straight in his dealings. This has helped shape the clubhouse and made these Yankees a team that sportswriters coming from venues that are nominally violently anti-Yankee have come to respect, if not actually like.

  So, in one of the three or four most heavily scrutinized institutions in the country (perhaps less scrutinized than the Pentagon, but more scrutinized than the Department of the Interior) and with an exceptionally demanding and highly volatile owner, he has managed to be true to himself, and his players know it. If they are straight with him, he will play it straight a
nd protect them—if need be, even from the owner.

  Somehow, when I think of Torre, I conjure up the opposite vision of Steve Spurrier, the immensely successful coach of Florida who (a) always seems to be running up the score, but more importantly (b) seems to give out the impression by body language and facial expression that when things go wrong, it is not that he coached poorly, but because his players did not execute his game plan as well as they should.

  I do not know Torre very well personally, but even my limited dealings with him gave me added respect for him. We met about eight years ago, when I was working on a book about the 1964 World Series between the Yankees and Cardinals. Torre had not played in that Series—he joined the Cardinals a few years later—but he was a great friend and admirer of Bob Gibson, who was the star of the Series and a central figure in my book. He was obviously intrigued that someone who is not nominally a sportswriter was going to write about one of the great athletes and fiercest competitors he knew.

  Therefore, he went out of his way to be helpful. There was nothing in it for him, which for most readers probably does not mean much. But for anyone writing about sports it means a great deal—by and large, when you deal with an athlete or an ex-athlete, one of the things that hangs quite heavily in the air is one of the oldest questions of all time—what’s in it for me?

  It struck me that Torre went out of his way to be generous, not because he cared that much who I was, or wanted to ingratiate himself with me, for there was no way I could help his career or get him back into baseball at that time, but because he thought I was serious, and—most of all—because he loved Bob Gibson and he wanted to be sure I got him right. Torre’s generosity was about something very old-fashioned, loyalty to a magnificent teammate, years after they had played their last game together.

  I remember leaving the interview that day, impressed not merely by the wonderful quality of Torre’s stories about Gibson, but about the nature of the man I had just finished interviewing. He had an old-fashioned sense of honor and loyalty to a teammate. It told me a good deal about two men, Gibson, the man who inspired that loyalty, and Torre, the man who, in such an egocentric line of work, still possessed it.

  I was impressed at the time, and had made it a point in the years after to pay attention to Torre, and he has not disappointed me. He always seems to be in character, very much the man I dealt with then, albeit in ever more explosive and pressurized circumstances.

  I am always a little wary of journalistic psychological assumptions, but I have come to believe that Torre behaves this way because it is who he is, and the way he was raised, his home, his religion, the nurturing of an admired older brother, and that he was taught to deal with people in a certain way, the way he would like to be treated by them. He seems to be a man secure in his knowledge of who he is, and secure in his faith. Equally important, though he would obviously prefer to win rather than to lose, how he behaves as a man and how he sees himself is not based on his career winning percentage.

  It is a rare quality these days, and it extends far beyond sports. My wife, who is not a devoted baseball fan, has watched him over the years, in all kinds of difficult situations, especially in this year when the Yankees made their great postseason run, with the shadow of the New York tragedy hanging over them, and she was stunned by Torre’s constant grace under pressure, the test Hemingway set up for men years ago—he is, she says, the most elegant of men; he always seems to get the situation he is in right and to say the right thing.

  She is right. The key to Torre is that he is a good baseball man, but he also knows there is much more to life than baseball, and that, finally, it is how you behave, most obviously when things are not going on well, that defines you.

  If Torre is a man who has come to peace with himself, George Steinbrenner has seemed, at many times in his career (less so now than in the past), a man far from comfortable with himself, often given to bullying those around him and denigrating his players during losing streaks. Some of his pettier qualities have been reined in recently, and I suspect part of the change is simply a factor of age. He was 71 this year, and most of us become less volatile as we get older.

  But one of Torre’s great successes has been to serve as an insulator to protect his players from the owner and, whenever possible, to take the heat himself. Another has been to be able to change the ambiance at the Stadium from the time, just a decade ago, when the Yankees could not get the free agents they wanted, and were being used by shrewd agents to bid the price up for other teams. Does anyone think Mike Mussina would have come to the Yankees in the Billy Martin era?

  The Steinbrenner-Torre relationship is a fascinating, constantly shifting one of balances and counterbalances. Torre serves, as all managers do, at the owner’s whim, and Steinbrenner has more whims than most people, and they come to him more quickly. If he knows he needs this manager, there is also no doubt that he has no small amount of envy for Torre’s larger public and media popularity and, as such, we get the occasional reminders of his irritation, the long delay in re-signing Torre, and the occasional throwaway lines that Torre never won until he came to the Yankees, and thus managed the players Steinbrenner signed. There is a good deal of truth to that, but it is also true that the clubhouse ambiance has changed dramatically in the Torre years, making the Yankees more attractive to the free agents Steinbrenner wants to sign.

  One of the things that has always fascinated me when looking at men who are engaged in fierce pursuits, in the military or sports, for example, is the difference between being strong and being tough. Steinbrenner, for whatever insecurities, has always struck me as someone who wants to be tough (there was an unusually stupid Howard Cosell piece about him years ago which called him the George Patton of the Yankees—though, of course, Steinbrenner had never heard a shot fired in anger), but does not know the difference between being tough and strong. From his own background, and from his own self-doubt, I suspect, come a certain amount of swaggering, bullying and tough guy talk, as if that is the way real tough guys talk.

  Torre is, very quietly, something quite different. He is quietly strong—a strength that comes from a healthy sense of accurately appraised self-value, and a willingness, if need be, to walk away from any situation which might be unacceptably difficult or abusive. As such, there has been an invisible line drawn in the sand at the Stadium without him ever having to draw it. Because of that, he has not only done an exceptional job managing the Yankees, but has also helped do something that a number of us thought once could not have been done—he has helped turn George Steinbrenner, though still a work in progress, into a good owner.

  THE PERFECTIONIST AT THE PLATE

  From the New York Times, July 9, 2002

  In late August of 1946, When I was 12, I watched Ted Williams hit the most vicious drive I have ever seen. The ball, in my memory at least, was still soaring majestically when it hit the seats in the third tier in Yankee Stadium. Forty-two years later, when I was 54 and he was nearly 70, I spoke with Williams about the drive, both of us magically still boys on this date because of the subject matter. As I did, and as the details of that game all came back, I watched a smile spread over his face. “Tiny Bonham,” he said at the end, naming the Yankee pitcher. I am sure he remembered the exact quality of the light and what Bonham threw as well.

  He remembered because he was highly intelligent and he employed the full force of that ferocious, aggressive intelligence in the pursuit of only one objective: being the greatest hitter who ever lived, which he might well have been. Pitchers, in his words, were dumb by breed, and he studied them constantly looking for, and usually finding, their weaknesses.

  He transcended baseball. He was a link not just to one of baseball’s golden eras, the last man to bat over .400. He also had served during two wars that have long since passed into history and was someone our parents and grandparents had seen play, and about whom they surely had strong opinions. He leaves men of my generation still debating the same questions we argue
d about when we were boys: What he might have done had he played in Yankee Stadium, with its more accessible right-field seats; and what his statistics might have been had he not had to give up nearly five full seasons to military service.

  Difficult and cantankerous when he was young, and easily wounded, he had been the victim of some of the sleaziest journalism of modern times, particularly on the part of the Boston sportswriters whose tabloid papers were struggling to survive in a too crowded field. But he always held true to his own beliefs; reporters were, in his phrase, “knights of the keyboard.” How amused he might have been with the coverage of his death. He led the evening news on ABC and the two surviving Boston papers treated his passing as a virtual state event.

  Relatively late in life, considerably mellowed, he let the world in to see him. What we saw was a surprisingly warm and generous man, someone rich within himself, who had always lived by his own codes and to his own specifications when it was immensely costly to him. The things he did, both good and bad, he did because he could never do otherwise.

  The defining Ted Williams moment came on the last day of the 1941 season. He was hitting .39955 that morning, which in baseball statistical terms rounds off to .400. Joe Cronin, the Boston manager, offered to let him sit—the .400 would be his. No way that Ted Williams was going to sit that out: he played both games of a doubleheader, went 6 for 8, and finished with a .406 average, well outside the reach of purists. We can only imagine the pressure that, in today’s society, agents and advertisers would use in begging a lineal successor not to go out and risk so much for so little.

  He was a completely authentic man and he never bent to fashion; he remained to his final days the unvarnished man. His failure to wear a tie in an era when ballplayers were supposed to wear ties, particularly at events in their honor, was more than a fashion statement, it was a statement of personal freedom: if he showed, he showed as Ted Williams. It also reflected the fact that he was completely comfortable in the universe of baseball but quite uncomfortable in the larger universe around it. He had great status in the former and was completely uncomfortable with status as granted in the latter. When he retired from baseball, he moved to Islamorada, Fla., where in lieu of his former teammates, his pals became the local fishing guides—grizzled, rough men with much the same earthy view of life. Nor did he doubt that as one of the most passionate fishermen of our time, he could fly-cast better than they could.