The Yankee Years Part 18

"He was at the top of my list," Torre said about the free agent market that winter. "I was just a little uneasy with some of the questions he asked. I reported back to Cash, and still that other image, the World Series image, kept coming back at me. I wasn't as put off by Pavano as much as I was about Kenny Rogers, when I sat with him back in '95." Pavano and his agent, Scott Shapiro, embarked on a tour of the country to solicit offers. The Mariners, Red Sox, Tigers and Reds were among the many teams with strong interest in the righthander. Pavano was getting a bevy of four-year offers-the Mariners were close to $48 million with escalator clauses that would bring him even more money-when Shapiro told him the Yankees were looking for an answer soon. The Yankees already had agreed to terms on a three-year, $21 million deal with Jaret Wright, who was coming off a 15-win season for the Braves but whose long history of arm problems made him a significant medical risk. They also were deciding on whether to bring back Jon Lieber. Pavano had grown up in Connecticut rooting for the Yankees. Shapiro gave Pavano the standard disclaimer about pitching for the Yankees: the expectations and attention are greater in pinstripes than anywhere else.

"I want to be a New York Yankee," Pavano told Shapiro.

There was trouble from the start. The Yankees signed Pavano for $39.95 million over four years. Pavano had been under the impression that he was getting $40 million from the Yankees, and he would soon fire Shapiro over the misunderstanding. Shapiro even offered to give Pavano the $50,000 himself by taking it out of his agent's commission, but that did not placate Pavano, who moved on to his fourth agent.

There were other troubling signs regarding Pavano. The Boston baseball writers invited Pavano, a Connecticut native, to attend their annual off-season dinner. Pavano agreed to it. On the day of the dinner, Pavano's girlfriend called up Shapiro and said, "Carl's not going to be able to make it. He wants me to tell you that he's sick, but he's not. But that's what he told me to say."

Shapiro wanted to arrange a casual dinner for Pavano with the New York press corps to ease his transition to the Yankees. It would be an informal question-and-answer, get-acquainted session with the writers covering the team. When Shapiro presented the idea to Pavano, the pitcher responded, "I don't want to meet with those f.u.c.king a.s.sholes."

On the day of Pavano's first game at Yankee Stadium, he met his mother in the executive lobby of Yankee Stadium and was mortified to see her wearing a Yankees "NY" on her cheek in face paint. "Take that c.r.a.p off your face. You're embarra.s.sing me," he sternly told her. The words were meant to be sarcastic, but Yankee officials standing there were uncomfortable with the manner in which Pavano rebuked his own mother in front of them.

"Whoa, did he just say that to his mom?" said a person who was there.

Pavano made 17 starts for the Yankees in 2005-he was. .h.i.t hard, going 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA, a significant jump from his 3.00 the previous year in the softer National League-before shutting it down for the season in June with a sore right shoulder. The Yankees learned very quickly that Pavano was not cut out to pitch in New York.

"Partway through that first year," Mussina said, when asked when he came to that conclusion. "He said some stuff to me in the dugout about playing someplace else. He was referring to some other teams he had talked to when he was a free agent. He just didn't like being under the microscope. He couldn't play being under the microscope every day."

So Pavano's choice was not to play at all?

"That's what it turned out to be," Mussina said.

In August, while the Yankees were playing the White Sox, bullpen catcher Mike Borzello brought up Pavano to Tim Raines, the former Yankees outfielder who was a coach with Chicago.

"Tim Raines told me, 'Pavano? He's never going to pitch for you. Forget it,' " Borzello said. "I said, 'What?' He said, 'The guy didn't want to pitch in Montreal. There was always something wrong with him. In Florida, same thing. He didn't want to pitch except for the one year he was pitching for a contract. I'm telling you, he's not going to pitch for you.' "

Raines turned out to be right. Over the life of the four-year contract Pavano made only 26 starts and won just nine games, or a cost of $4.44 million per win for the Yankees' investment. He missed extended stretches of time because of the sore shoulder, a bruised b.u.t.tocks, two broken ribs suffered in a car accident about which he failed to notify the team, a strained elbow and eventually major elbow surgery. His Yankees teammates wrote him off as a guy who milked any physical ailment as an excuse not to have to pitch.

"The players all hated him," Torre said. "It was no secret."

Said Borzello, "Guys on that team despised him. One day Jeet walked by him and said, 'Hey, Pav. You ever going to play? Ever?' Wow. That was a damaging comment, coming from Jeter. He didn't say a whole lot, but when he said something like that, it was pretty piercing."

There was one time Torre called bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan and Pavano into his office, because Kerrigan reported that a defiant Pavano had told him, "I'm not blowing out my arm for this organization."

"Pav," Torre said, "this organization gave you $40 million and has been patient with you. What I want to know is, for what organization would you be willing to risk blowing out your arm?" Pavano said he couldn't remember saying such a thing to Kerrigan.

What bothered Torre most about Pavano was that the pitcher had no sense of his responsibility to his teammates. Pavano made that clear in 2006 when he hurt himself in the car wreck, when he drove his 2006 Porsche into a tractor trailer. The accident occurred just when the Yankees were about ready to activate him from a rehabilitation a.s.signment. Torre telephoned Pavano and told him, "It's nice to go out. I know you like to go out, but you've got a commitment here. You've got a bunch of players that need for you to be a pitcher."

Pavano never did get it. "He was always a little skittish when you talked to him," Torre said.

At the end of that season, Cashman was ready to send Pavano home. The pitcher was on perpetual rehab in Tampa, and he wasn't going to be able to help the Yankees down the stretch.

"No," Torre told Cashman. "Have him come to St. Pete on the last road trip."

Torre knew Pavano's teammates loathed him, and he wanted them to be able to vent their frustration to the pitcher rather than carrying it over into a new season. He wanted Pavano in the Yankees clubhouse when the team played the Devil Rays in St. Petersburg.

"Let them get this s.h.i.t out of the way," Torre told Cashman. "They can see him, get on him, whatever they're going to do to him."

Cashman agreed and told Pavano to come to the games in St. Petersburg. When Pavano arrived Torre explained to him why he wanted him there.

"You're going to have to get this s.h.i.t out of the way," he told Pavano.

When Pavano showed up in the Yankees clubhouse, something far worse than cruel jokes and frat-boy razzing took place: nothing. The Yankees said nothing to him. They wanted nothing to do with him. He had turned himself into a nonperson.

"Unfortunately, n.o.body got on him," Torre said. "That's a bad sign. They ignored him."

The next spring, Mussina made it clear that the Yankee players had no confidence in Pavano. He told reporters about Pavano's injuries and extended absences, "It didn't look good from a player's and teammate's standpoint. Was everything just coincidence? Over and over again? I don't know."

It was a stunning and rare public rebuke among teammates, a violation of the unwritten code among teammates. But Pavano was so far removed from the natural bonds of a team that Mussina felt free to fire away. Torre called both Mussina and Pavano into his office. He knew Mussina, in the strictest sense of the code, was out of line, but he also knew that Mussina's feelings about Pavano represented the feelings of the entire clubhouse, and it was good for Pavano to know he faced major repair work when it came to his relationship with his teammates.

"Moose didn't do the right thing, the way he went about it," Torre said. "But they did talk and they got past that, and all of a sudden he started to get some support back.

"Andy Pett.i.tte had elbow issues in 1996, and you just have to realize, 'I'm either going to pitch or I can't play this game anymore.' Pav, unfortunately, never faced that reality. In saying that, am I saying he wasn't hurt? No. Not at all. But would it have made a difference if he had pitched, based on where he wound up, anyway? You're still capable of getting people out.

"He's a guy with all these issues in his life and he's not sure what's important and what isn't. Was he afraid of failing in New York? It must be that way, because I talked to Larry Bowa, and he saw the bulldog on the mound when he pitched against the Phillies, and I saw it in the World Series. We just didn't see that with the Yankees."

Pavano was not some idle mistake. It was part of a trend. The collection of expensive pitchers imported to the Yankees who were ill-suited for New York, either because they were too emotionally fragile or broken down, was growing at a staggering rate. Weaver, Contreras, Vazquez, Wright, Brown, Pavano . . .

"I'm certainly not a player evaluator," Mussina said, "but I generally believe that players are who they are over a period of a certain number of years. They may have a good year here or they may have a bad year here, but in general they play at a certain level, the players who are around long enough. The time a player is coming up to be a free agent, like in his sixth year, let's say all of a sudden he has a year that shoots up. Everybody looks at it like, 'Oh, now he's got an idea.' It's not his rookie year. There are four or five other years in there. Let's look at all of them.

"So you're giving guys-and just using Pavano as an example-you give a guy that's two or three games under .500 for his career a four-year contract for $40 million. Well, I don't understand that. I don't understand that."

Brown, of course, because of the 2004 ALCS Game 7 debacle, also was symbolic of poor pitching evaluations steering the Yankees into the abyss, as Cashman called it. His 2005 season began just as 2004 ended: with a bad back and awful results. He started 2005 on the disabled list, the fifth time in six years he had to be put on the shelf.

When Brown did try to pitch again, he was wretchedly bad. He was, for all intents and purposes, finished as an effective big league pitcher. Moreover, the fans at Yankee Stadium, who would always a.s.sociate him with the Game 7 abomination, had no use for him, and his teammates barely more than that. On May 3, 2005, Brown took the mound in St. Petersburg against the Devil Rays with an 0-3 record and a 6.63 ERA. His tenure with the Yankees was about to get even uglier. The Devil Rays gave Brown a brutal beating in the first inning, scoring six runs on eight hits before Brown could so much as get a second out. The symphony of hits and base runners played out to a staccaco beat: single, wild pitch, single, ground rule double, run-scoring groundout, single, double, single, single, single. The score was 6-0 after one-third of an inning. After Brown finally managed to get the two outs to end the percussive treatment, he stomped off the field, kept going past Torre and marched up the runway to the clubhouse, shouting as he pa.s.sed the manager, "I'm done!"

Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre looked at one another as if to say, "What now?" Brown was infamous for his temper, but was quitting in the middle of a game really an option? Torre turned and left the dugout, taking the runway and then the stairs that led into the visiting clubhouse at Tropicana Field. Torre saw Brown's jersey, hat and glove strewn about the floor, but he didn't see Brown. He did see Mussina, sitting in one of the clubhouse chairs.

"Where is he?" Torre asked.

"I don't know," Mussina said, "somewhere back there." He motioned toward a back room off the clubhouse. Mussina had seen Brown storm into the clubhouse, fling away his jersey, glove and hat, grab his cell phone from his locker, and disappear, snapping, "I'm done! I'm going home!"

Torre followed in the direction where Mussina pointed. He turned a corner, and suddenly was stunned at what he saw: Kevin Brown, 40 years old, a six-time All-Star, a two-time ERA champion, a man who had won 207 major league games and earned more than $130 million playing baseball, was curled up on the floor in a tiny crevice in the corner of a storage area in the back of the clubhouse.

"What are you doing?" Torre said.

"I'm not going to go out there and pitch anymore," Brown said.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to go home."

"You might as well go home."

There was no response from Brown. Torre continued.

"Because just remember: if you're going to quit on those guys, you can't ever come back. You can never never come back. Just understand that. What you just told me? That's what it means. If you're not going to go back out there, you can't even stay here." come back. Just understand that. What you just told me? That's what it means. If you're not going to go back out there, you can't even stay here."

Brown wore that thoroughly beaten look, the same look he had nine months earlier after he broke his left hand punching a concrete pillar.

Meanwhile, the top of the second inning was in progress, and there was one out already. The Yankees would need somebody somebody to pitch the bottom of the inning real quickly. n.o.body was throwing in the bullpen. n.o.body else knew what was going on with Brown. to pitch the bottom of the inning real quickly. n.o.body was throwing in the bullpen. n.o.body else knew what was going on with Brown.

"Listen," Torre said to Brown, "why don't you just get your glove, go back out there and pitch, and let's talk about it later."

Brown stood up, walked past Torre and into the main clubhouse. He fired his cell phone clear across the room in the direction of his locker. He picked up his shirt, his hat and his glove and he walked backed toward the dugout. Kevin Brown threw four more innings, surrendering two more runs.

"He never did bother coming in to talk," Torre said. "He was banged up. But I think he had some emotional issues. There were a lot of demons in this guy. It was sad."

The Yankees lost the game, 11-4, and they lost again, and again and again after that as part of a 1-9 stretch that dropped their record to 11-19, marking only the fifth time in franchise history they posted so many losses in the first 30 games. The other four teams to start so poorly turned out, in fact, to be horrendous teams. Those teams, from 1912, 1913, 1925 and 1966, all lost at least 85 games and finished out of first place by 55, 38, 28 and 26 games, respectively. Such was the inglorious company of the 2005 Yankees.

There exists a mythology that the championship Yankees teams under Torre operated on autopilot, blissfully riding their talent and their will to preordained t.i.tles. No team requires no care. Even the most beautiful garden in the world, as amazed and occupied as we might be by its natural beauty, is the work of hours of pruning and weeding and feeding and fastidious attention to detail. The championship teams required their own maintenance, from, among others, the insecurities of Chuck k.n.o.blauch, to the immaturity of David Wells, to the self-critical nature of Tino Martinez, to the overflow intensity of Paul O'Neill, to the neediness of Roger Clemens, and to the overbearing intrusion and influence of George Steinbrenner. Greatness is the ability to mask the difficulty of a task-to make the difficult appear easy. Those Yankee teams epitomized greatness.

But the Yankees in the middle oughts made nothing look easy. They were rocked by organizational and clubhouse dysfunction that made the maintenance of the team a noisy, constant and exhausting job, like keeping a belching, balky furnace going in the bas.e.m.e.nt of an apartment building. The problems became apparent in 2004 because of the mix of players introduced and worsened in that 2005 season. Not four weeks after the Brown meltdown, Mussina asked to speak to Torre about what he perceived to be a lack of focus and preparation by some of the players. They went to lunch while the team was in Milwaukee.

"I laid some things out," Mussina said. "It was about players I thought weren't going about it the right way. The '05 team had some issues the first half of the season."

What the Yankees lacked in talent, particularly when it came to starting pitching, was exacerbated by odd personalities and individual agendas in the clubhouse. The mix of players wasn't working, taking the Yankees further and further from the roots of their championships.

"It's all a continuation of the end of the other group, the group that left after '01," Mussina said. "After '01 we lost some guys and after '02 we lost some guys, and after '03 we lost the pitching staff. Whatever semblance of that other team there was, it certainly was gone after '03. It started phasing out after '01, but after '03 it was just Derek and Posada and Mariano and Bernie who were left. Everybody else was new. The mix wasn't the same."

Only days after Mussina voiced his concern to Torre, and on the same trip, and still only one month after the Brown meltdown, another blowup occurred. This time it involved Gary Sheffield and Torre. As the struggling Yankees lost another game, this one in St. Louis, Sheffield appeared to loaf after a ball in right field. Torre, unhappy with the general effort he was getting from his team, held a clubhouse meeting after the game in which he singled out Sheffield and rookie second baseman Robinson Cano for what he thought was a lack of hustle.

In the days after the meeting, Torre noticed that Sheffield was moping around him. He called him into his office.

"Do we have an issue?" Torre asked.

"Yeah," said Sheffield, who explained he took exception to Torre accusing him in front of the team of not hustling.

"I was trying to deke the runner," Sheffield said.

"Well, if you weren't loafing, I apologize," Torre said, "because that's what it looked like to me. What else we got?"

"Well, it was in the paper," Sheffield said of Torre calling him out.

"Do you think I told them?" Torre asked.

"I don't know," Sheffield said.

"I don't do that," Torre said. "I wouldn't do that. Obviously, it came from somewhere else. There were a lot of people in the room. I can't control that. There's no reason for me to go to the media with that."

Said Torre, "He seemed to believe me, but he was always a suspicious person."

Two years later, speaking to HBO, Sheffield used that clubhouse meeting as evidence to support his opinion that Torre treated black players differently than white players.

"The only thing I ever wanted to do as a manager was to make sure everybody felt they were being treated fairly," Torre said. "That's why when Sheffield said something it really blew me away. Because I really went a.s.s over teakettle to try to accommodate him. If I had something he needed to hear, like if he brought his son into the clubhouse, which wasn't allowed, I'd ask Jeter to tell him because he had a relationship with him. If it came from a player it didn't seem somebody was trying to tell him what to do again.

"At the time I knew none of what he said was true. I just didn't want to fan the flames at that point in time. I had been around the game a very long time, so if there had been an issue I'm sure it would have come out that I slighted people or didn't treat them right. That came out of left field."

What the 2005 Yankees needed most of all to establish stability and a presence was an ace. They needed a Schilling, the guy Boston general manager Theo Epstein successfully hunted to bring a "kick your a.s.s" att.i.tude to the Red Sox pitching staff. The Yankees were so sure they had that guy in Randy Johnson that their entire front office elected unanimously to pursue Johnson, who was 41 years old, rather than Beltran, a fleet, athletic everyday player in his prime. They were dead wrong.

(Beltran had given the Yankees a last-minute, discounted offer before signing with the Mets. Said Torre, "Cash said no, you can't have everything. Beltran wanted to come to us, so he could hide among the other trees. n.o.body wants to be that guy to lead. That's what makes Jeter so unique in what he does. Alex, to his credit, wants to be that guy, but as long as Jeter is there he's very aware of that.") Johnson had thrown a perfect game, logged 245[image]innings, won 16 games and struck out a National Leaguebest 290 batters in 2003 with Arizona. He fit the profile of the stopper the Yankees so desperately needed-the statistical profile, anyway. He was, in fact, a sensitive, hyperaware person who, in the growing tradition of Weaver, Contreras, Vazquez and Pavano, was uncomfortable with the constant criticism and noise that came with playing in New York. Such awkwardness was apparent from his very first day, when he swatted away a news cameraman on the streets of New York while in town for his physical.

"I was in Hawaii when it happened," Torre said, "and I talked to him on the phone. I said, 'Do what you have to do. If you want to apologize, apologize. Just let it go.'

"But that really wasn't his fault. They never should have put him in that situation. They should've put him in a car or a van and taken him to the hospital. That was our security decision. That was a bad decision. He really had trouble recovering from that, because all of a sudden now all this pressure was on him, because people don't like him to start with. And he would read every single word that was written."

Johnson was struck by two baseball neuroses that were amplified in New York: he fretted about what was said and written about him and he worried constantly that other teams were decoding "tells" in his delivery to know what pitch was coming. They most certainly were not the typical qualities of a "kick your a.s.s" staff leader.

Johnson did not pitch all that badly in New York. He took the ball with regularity. From 2004 through 2007, only four times did a pitcher give the Yankees 200 innings. Johnson did so twice, as many as all other Yankees pitchers combined in those four years. He also won some games, posting a 34-19 record. But he was also hit too hard and was lost too deeply in his own cloud of worry to give the Yankees anything close to the vibe of being a true ace. In those two seasons, for instance, he gave up 95 and 114 earned runs, the two worst such seasons of his long career. His combined ERA in those two seasons with the Yankees was 4.37, which ranked an unimpressive 55th among all ERA qualifiers in that span.

"The biggest surprise to me was how Randy Johnson could get rattled," Torre said. "I wish I knew this about him in the 2001 World Series when we played against him. You could rattle him. Every start with Randy it would be, 'This guy has my pitches, that guy has my pitches . . .' There wasn't one team that didn't have a person that told him they were getting his pitches that he would take to heart. I mentioned it to Randy and I said, 'It's not about the pitches. It's about location. Throw that pitch where you want it and you'll get them out.'

"He was always so concerned about that. 'Are they getting my pitches? Do you think they're getting my pitches? The guy hit this pitch.' I'd go, 'You just threw it down the middle. When they start laying off pitches they should be swinging at, then yeah.' But he was the biggest surprise for me. He was probably the most self-conscious superstar I've ever been around. By far."

Torre spent hours with Johnson trying to make life easier for him in New York. He would tell Johnson that he shouldn't worry about criticism because, based on his prolific career, he could never satisfy fans and the media, anyway. "You're not going to satisfy people unless you strike out 10 or 12 every game," Torre would tell him. "Even if you win ballgames, they're going to want to know why you didn't strike out more. So don't even worry about it."

One day Johnson came to Torre with a newspaper in his hand. "Look at this!" Johnson said. "This is my apartment! They have pictures of my apartment!"

"Randy," Torre said, "why do you even look at the f.u.c.king newspaper?"

Other times Torre would see so much pa.s.sivity out of Johnson on the mound that he would tell him, "I need to see your teeth out there. You have to growl." Then Johnson would pitch a good game and say to Torre, "Is that what you mean?"

"Yeah," Torre said. "Just do what you do like that and find out how good it is, that's all."

And then it would be gone, the fire snuffed by something the newspapers or radio put out there about him or that nagging worry that hitters knew what was coming.

"I brought him into the office, I'd talk to him in the trainer's room, we'd sit in the dugout . . . a number of places," Torre said. "It was sad more than frustrating because when we got him I thought we finally had someone you could hook your wagon to, and that wasn't the case."

The 2005 Yankees employed a pitching staff with an average age of 34.2 years old, making it the oldest staff in franchise history. They finished ninth in the American League with a 4.87 ERA. Their relative ERA, essentially a measurement of how they compared to the league average, was the Yankees' second-worst in the previous 70 years, exceeded only by the 1989 club that lost 87 games and finished fifth. Bill James' Pythagorean formula pegged the Yankees, with that kind of pitching, as worth 90 wins, which would have kept them home for the playoffs with the fifth-best record in the American League.

Instead, somehow they won the AL East again with 95 wins. (The Yankees actually finished in a tie with the Red Sox, but were awarded first place by virtue of winning the season series against Boston, 10-9. The teams had split their previous 90 games, 45-45.) A clear pattern had developed. The Yankees' pitching was getting worse and worse and the clubhouse becoming more populated with ill-suited players, but Torre still not only was getting these teams into the playoffs, he was also consistently getting these teams to overperform. The 2005 team was Torre's eighth straight team that won more games than it should have been expected to win. Those teams outperformed Pythagorean expectations by an average of 5.25 wins.

In a way, by somehow dragging themselves into the playoffs in the later part of those years, those teams were covering up what otherwise would have been even more obvious flaws. The Yankees had nothing close to championship pitching anymore. But they wore the same uniforms as the 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 Yankees, still had Jeter and Williams and Posada and Rivera and Torre, still had the highest payroll in baseball, so therefore they were expected to simply show up and win the World Series as if nothing in baseball had changed in the past five years. They were bound to fail in October.

The Yankees drew the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the Division Series, a series in which the Angels, who also won 95 games, held home-field advantage by virtue of beating the Yankees head-to-head during the season, 6-4. After the Yankees managed to split the first two games in Anaheim, their season fittingly was funneled straight into the hands of Johnson, who would get the ball in Game 3, the swing game, at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees' answer to Schilling was abysmal.

Johnson could not get so much as one out in the fourth inning. He faced 17 batters and gave up nine hits. He left with two runners on base in the fourth inning with the Yankees behind, 5-0. All season he never gave off the real glow of an ace, and the reality was all too obvious in Game 3.

"That's the game where you've got a decided advantage," Torre said, "and you've just got to go ahead and grab it by the throat. He just never seemed to be comfortable doing it. He never took the ball and said, 'All right, guys. Follow me.' You never had the feeling that that was what you were going to get. There's no question that New York is a different place to play. Everything you do is magnified and criticized. He was uncomfortable pitching in New York.

"He's the one that's supposed to be intimidating. He pitched a horrible game and it's like it didn't surprise him. It surprised Roger Clemens every time he pitched a horrible game."

The Yankees, who could still bang the ball with anybody in baseball, hit their way out of the 5-0 hole and actually took a 6-5 lead into the sixth inning. But the Angels battered the Yankees bullpen for six unanswered runs and won, 11-7.

The Yankees did send the series back to Anaheim by rallying to win Game 4, 3-2, with two runs in the seventh inning. But their pitching, old and creaky, caught up with them again in the deciding game. Mussina, 36, bothered by a strained groin muscle, staggered off the mound in the third inning, having put the Yankees in a 5-2 hole. They lost, 5-3.

Shortly thereafter, Stottlemyre quit as pitching coach, worn down by the fractious relationship between Yankees officials in New York and Tampa, the latter often choosing to intervene in major league pitching matters. Stottlemyre also quit, however, because he knew Torre's relationship with Steinbrenner had worsened, and he knew one of Steinbrenner's favorite tactics to tweak his manager was to fire one of his favored coaches. Stottlemyre wanted out before Steinbrenner had the chance to use him as a p.a.w.n in his war with Torre.

Torre, too, wasn't sure he wanted to come back to what the job had become. He knew, coming off the bitter 2004 ALCS defeat, that he had little favor left with Steinbrenner. The two of them had engaged in almost no communication throughout the 2005 season. The incidence of criticisms, second-guessing and statements handed or leaked to the media had picked up. Torre was bothered, too, that Yankee officials were feeding questions to YES network reporter Kim Jones designed to corner Torre or to put him in an unfavorable light. The questions themselves didn't bother Torre so much. It was more that Torre, who built his entire relationships with people on trust, understood that the very people who were paying him to help the Yankees win were intentionally trying to undermine him on the team's own network.