The Yankee Years Part 22

"You're talking about a guy pitching for the New York Yankees, the New York Yankees," Borzello said. "The New York Yankees always went after the premier guys. And after investing $200 million in payroll, why are you putting the ball in the hands of this kind of pitcher? It made no sense. But the Yankees kept making the same mistake. Pavano, [Jaret]Wright, Igawa . . . other organizations sc.r.a.pe up that kind of pitching. But the Yankees Yankees?"

_These were the 2007 Yankees, the team on which Torre, in the last year of his contract, would be placing his managerial future. Forty percent of the rotation was a.s.signed to Pavano, who couldn't stay healthy, and Igawa, who couldn't throw a strike. Pavano, because of injuries to the other starters, was the Yankees' Opening Day pitcher. The center fielder, Damon, wanted to quit. The right fielder, Abreu, was hurt and out of shape. The first baseman, Giambi, was too out of shape to play first-base anymore, so he had to be the designated hitter while the first-base position was an open casting call among Doug Mientkiewicz, Josh Phelps and Andy Phillips, none of whom could hit as a first baseman should. The biggest acquisition to come, Clemens, was turning 45 and had successfully lobbied for special treatment. Did this look like a team that should be expected to win the World Series? And did Torre have any loyalists left in the front office after being embarra.s.sed in the public stocks after the 2006 Division Series?

In the clubhouse and on the field, these were no longer the Yankees as the baseball world knew them. They wore the same pinstripes, played in the same ballpark, claimed ownership to the same 26World Series t.i.tles, but these Yankees were no longer the same Yankees who could regard the World Series as a virtual birthright. Most obvious of all, these were no longer George Steinbrenner's Yankees. The Boss had imposed his will and spirit upon the entire organization and the Yankees were the better and the worse for it all these years. Now there was a vacuum where there had been so much energy. For Torre, Steinbrenner's decline was another blow to the underpinnings of his management. Steinbrenner could be demanding and unreasonable, but Torre could always speak to him, and usually find the right words to keep The Boss from completely blowing a fuse. In 2007, the pipeline was cut. Torre knew it, especially when he would be leaving Legends Field in the early evening after a full day of work and see Steinbrenner only then coming to work himself. On the last day of spring training it was obvious that Steinbrenner was too frail to be The Boss.

Torre rode the elevator at Legends Field to the fourth floor to say goodbye to Steinbrenner. The Yankees were preparing to fly from Tampa to New York to begin the season in two days. The team would hold its annual Welcome Home dinner on the eve of the opener. Steinbrenner sat in the suite adjacent to his office. Hank Steinbrenner was there. Felix Lopez was there. Steinbrenner's wife, Joan, was there.

"Boss, I'm just here to say goodbye," Torre said.

"Okay," Steinbrenner said. "I'll see you tomorrow night."

Joan looked at Torre, and as they moved away from Steinbrenner and toward the door, she told him with a concerned look on her face, "I don't know how we're going to get him there."

They did get Steinbrenner to New York for the dinner, in what stood as a rare trip for him then. Torre saw Steinbrenner at the dinner and walked across the room to greet him. Steinbrenner was sitting with his family. He looked frail. He was wearing dark gla.s.ses in the ballroom. And even beneath those dark gla.s.ses, as Torre could see, Steinbrenner was crying. He was choked up, hit by another emotional jag, at what was supposed to be the birthplace of optimism and sunshine, Opening Day eve. As Steinbrenner dabbed at a melancholy tear, Torre knew life with the Yankees would never be the same for both of them.

_The second game of the 2007 season was rained out, which was not a bad development for the Yankees. It kept them undefeated for one more day and postponed the h.e.l.lish spring about to come their way. Alex Rodriguez peeled off his uniform and rea.s.sumed his proper East Side look: a green cable-knit sweater pulled over a black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers. His goal for the season was to be completely inoffensive, or, as third-base coach Larry Bowa constantly would remind him, "Vanilla." Rodriguez was off to a good start, the green sweater and a March interview with New York AM radio station WFAN notwithstanding. Rodriguez said on air that whether he stayed with the Yankees or used an opt-out clause in his contract to leave for another team after the season would be decided by whether New York fans accepted him or not. "It's a do-or-die situation," he said.

"He's night and day from where he was last year," Bowa said as the regular season began. "You could see it in him when spring training started. Everything he's doing is just natural. He's just letting his ability take over. I'm not going to use the word relaxed, relaxed, because he's still intense. But there's a different look about him. He's not worried about everything that's going on around him. Vanilla. We use that word a lot when we talk. Simple. Keep it plain. because he's still intense. But there's a different look about him. He's not worried about everything that's going on around him. Vanilla. We use that word a lot when we talk. Simple. Keep it plain.

"I only had to get on him once. It was a couple of days after he went on WFAN. And I gave it to him pretty good. I told him, 'Why do you have to keep saying this stupid s.h.i.t?' "

Bowa was an important part of Torre's management of the team. Players respected him because he had the substantial big league resume few coaches have in the modern game. Bowa played 16 years in the major leagues, collected 2,191 hits, won two Gold Gloves at shortstop, finished as high as third in Most Valuable Player Award voting, was selected to five All-Star Games and won a world championship with the 1980 Phillies. His fiery temperment, colorful vocabulary and reactionary nature made him a volatile manager with the Padres and Phillies, but as a coach he established himself as one of the best in the business: a hardworking student of the game who, most importantly, kept players from getting too comfortable. His in-your-face manner was a nice complement to the relaxed style of Torre, and it seemed to be exactly what not only A-Rod needed, but also a young player like second baseman Robinson Cano, who knew he could be a good major leaguer strictly on his talent, but didn't know the work it would require to be a great major leaguer.

One day in April, talking about Cano, Bowa said, "He backhanded a ball the other day, an easy two-hopper he should have gotten in front of. He had a bad at-bat right before that. I'm convinced he took his at-bat out into the field with him. You have to stay on Robbie. Like out in Oakland. There was a relay and he just a.s.sumed Eric Chavez was going to stop at second base. He didn't. That's Robbie's fault. You have to a.s.sume the runner is going to continue, and then if you turn and see he's stopped, then you can relax. But he did the exact opposite. He just a.s.sumed Chavez wasn't going. That's a lazy mistake. I got on him pretty good about that.

"Just like today, too. He said to me, 'No ground b.a.l.l.s. I'm just going to hit in the cage.' "

The Yankees that day offered only optional hitting in the indoor batting cage. There was no usual pregame hitting on the field, during which Bowa always made sure to hit Cano groundb.a.l.l.s.

"And I tell him, 'No, you're not,' " Bowa said. "'You're not just going to the cage. You're going to get your a.s.s out here and work. You're 23 years old, not some old veteran who needs a break.'

"See, the thing is you have to remind yourself that he's 23. You have to get on him, but then you ask yourself, who at the age of 23 has it all figured out? But you look at him and you see that he can be as good as he wants to be. As great as he wants to be. He's that talented. He glides into the ball, but unlike most guys who do that, he keeps his hands back. And then when he brings the bat through it stays through the strike zone for a very long time. He's like George Brett that way. He can be as great as he wants to be."

Cano, of course, took his groundb.a.l.l.s that day. With Bowa riding him, Cano would hit .306 in 2007 with 97 runs batted in. Like Cano, Rodriguez knew Bowa was always there to push him. In spring training, for instance, Bowa berated Rodriguez for making soft, lazy throws to second base on the front end of double plays. "You're going to get your second baseman killed!" Bowa told him, and ordered Rodriguez to work on the throws early in the morning on a back field before most of his teammates had even showed up. The gruff Bowa was an important voice to someone like Rodriguez, who otherwise surrounded himself with a cadre of publicity agents and buddies who amounted to a back-slapping club.

"You know the big thing with these guys, they might not tell you they like it, but the real good players, they don't want to hear just that you agree with them," Bowa said. "I mean, if it happened once it happened ten times in two years with Alex: Alex would come up to me after making a mistake and say, 'Do you think I should have had that ball?' And nine times out of ten he makes that play. And I said, 'Yeah, you've got to catch that ball.'

"After it happened four or five times I told him, 'Al, every time you come to me, you know you should have made the play or you wouldn't have come to me. I've seen you make mistakes on a line drive, backhand. You don't come to me because you know it's a tough play, but every play you think you should make you come to me. So I'm just going to reaffirm that I know you know you should have made that play.' And I think the players like when you're being honest. They might not like it at the time, but they like you to be up-front with them."

_Rodriguez, however, already carried one of the highest capacities for work in baseball. The most important push he received from Bowa was not to work, but to keep himself out of trouble. Rodriguez made an obvious effort to do just that in 2007. The goal, as Bowa would say, was to prevent himself from "saying stupid s.h.i.t." The Yankees had won nothing more than a Division Series matchup against Minnesota since they acquired Rodriguez, who had become, because of his talent, because of his industry-rattling $252 million contract that remained unsurpa.s.sed six years running, and because of his knack for calling attention to himself (not always for the better), the embodiment of Yankee failures. Much of it was unfair, of course, not unlike the prettiest girl in high school becoming an easy target for criticism. Torre knew that, and wanted Rodriguez to know he shouldn't fight it. One day in March, just before the Yankees were to play a spring training game, Torre pulled Rodriguez aside near the dugout.

"Look, a lot of what goes on with you is unfair," Torre told Rodriguez. "You're the story no matter what happens, if you get four hits or no hits, if we win or if we lose. I understand that. But you can't worry about that. What you've got to do is just play and not worry about what's going to happen. Just let it happen instead of worrying about the consequences."

Opening Day could not have begun much worse for A-Rod. He dropped the first ball hit to him, a foul pop-up. Batting cleanup-his first game since Torre batted him eighth in the Division Seriesclinching defeat to Detroit-Rodriguez struck out with two runners on. It was only the first inning of the first game of the season and he was getting booed. But Rodriguez turned his day and the game around. With the game tied at 5, Rodriguez began the seventh inning with a single off Tampa Bay pitcher Brian Stokes. Running on his own, he stole second base and scored the tie-breaking run on a single by Jason Giambi. The stolen base reflected how Rodriguez had changed his body over the winter, dropping 15 pounds without losing strength and reducing his body fat from 18 percent to 10 percent, an astounding four-month transformation for someone turning 32 years old that summer.

Asked the next night, after the rainout, if he would have attempted a steal in the same situation the previous season, Rodriguez said, "Last year? No way. Because I would have been out by two feet. That wasn't part of my game.

"I knew I wanted to go early in the count. I waited one pitch. I wanted to see if he would slide step and just to get a look at him. But I wanted to be aggressive. The big thing is making sure you take the double play out of order. It's the situation, more so than the pitcher there."

Rodriguez is a unique talent, a guy who could break a game open with his power or win it with his legs or preserve it with his defense. But, because he lacked the pedigree that comes with a championship, and because he still seemed an awkward outsider trying to earn his pinstripes, he was regarded in his own clubhouse as not wholly reliable.

"The two guys on this team we can't afford to lose are Derek [Jeter] and Jorge [Posada]," one Yankee player said after that second-day rainout. "Pitching is still the name of the game, but if you're talking about guys who are out there every day, we need those two guys. There's n.o.body to replace them and what they mean to the team is so important. Alex isn't in that same category. He's important, too, but I think we could survive it if he got hurt."

Of course, Rodriguez was the primary source of righthanded power in a lefthand-dominant lineup and played terrific defense, so the Yankees could not come close to replacing his kind of value if he were hurt. Nonetheless, coming off his 1-for-14 performance in the postseason, and his sometimes awkward clubhouse manner, his perceived value on his own team was less than his actual value. It was a very strange circ.u.mstance for a superstar talent.

Fact is, these Yankees, whether they still belonged to Jeter, because of his captaincy or Swiss bank account of goodwill with Yankees fans, or to Rodriguez, because of his talent and knack for creating attention, were still looking to craft an ident.i.ty in their postchampionship years. If the Yankees expected to win, it was only out of a perceived obligation to the past, not because they truly lived and breathed it. It took a repatriated Yankee such as Andy Pett.i.tte to recognize that kind of important shift in the Yankee culture.

_Pett.i.tte won world championships in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 with the Yankees. He left reluctantly after the lukewarm effort by the Yankees to keep him following the 2003 World Series loss to Florida to sign with his hometown Houston Astros. After three seasons in Houston, one of which included another World Series appearance for Pett.i.tte, he jumped at the chance to come back to the Yankees, having missed the energy and demands that come with playing in New York. It had nothing to do with the city itself. Pett.i.tte almost never ventured into Manhattan. It had everything to do with the playing environment. The Yankees gave him back his old number, 46, his old locker (a spot along the right wall about halfway into the rectangular room), and his old default spot in the rotation, Pett.i.tte being the cla.s.sic number two starter. He was, in fact, scheduled to pitch that second game of the 2007 season before it was rained out. Sitting at his familiar locker after the game was called, Pett.i.tte knew already that most everything else about the Yankees had changed in his three years away. These Yankees weren't sure who they were, didn't know if they were champions or not and didn't truly believe, the way the championship Yankee teams believed, that they should should win. win.

"I have to be careful with how I say this," Pett.i.tte said. "But in the years we were winning here, we expected to win. Everybody. Everybody. And when we didn't win, it was devastating. I remember 2003, wanting to win so badly. It was personal for me because I hadn't pitched well in the 2001World Series. And Josh Beckett just took it to us in the World Series and shut us down. We had a great year, but I remember thinking how the year was such a failure. It was such a bitter feeling. Bitter." And when we didn't win, it was devastating. I remember 2003, wanting to win so badly. It was personal for me because I hadn't pitched well in the 2001World Series. And Josh Beckett just took it to us in the World Series and shut us down. We had a great year, but I remember thinking how the year was such a failure. It was such a bitter feeling. Bitter."

Just the memory of it pained Pett.i.tte. He dropped his head and actually grimaced thinking about a four-year-old memory, especially that last night when Beckett beat Pett.i.tte and the Yankees, 2-0, in what would be the last World Series game ever played at Yankee Stadium. Only seven men ever shut out the Yankees in a postseason game at Yankee Stadium, none since the Hall of Famer Warren Spahn did so back in 1958, and none struck out more batters than the nine Yankees Beckett fanned that night. Pett.i.tte pitched courageously that night, allowing just one earned run over seven innings, but he was the losing pitcher nonetheless. He hated even thinking about it. He picked up his head and continued.

"And here's where I have to be careful," he said. "I think now we know how difficult it is to win. You have to be careful saying it because you don't want people to think you've lowered the expectations. The goal is still the same. But there's a different feeling now. It's a feeling that we know how difficult it is to win."

By losing, the Yankees came to know how difficult the winning really was. And maybe now they know that reality a little too well.

"Exactly," Pett.i.tte said. "That doesn't mean we want to win any less, but the expectation that we will will win? That's different now than it was before." win? That's different now than it was before."

Jeter, meanwhile, remained wedded to the Yankees' old-school ways. He took losing hard and didn't tolerate those who did not. He still believed, despite the speech Torre gave in spring training about being proud of 97 wins, that the 2006 season was a failure.

"Maybe if it's a young team that never made the playoffs before they can say it wasn't a failure," Jeter said. "Not us. Not me. To me it's a failure if you don't accomplish what you set out to accomplish. Because you didn't reach the goal you set it's not a success."

But wasn't there a point, Jeter was asked, when even you realized that 2006 was a pretty good year, that the Yankees won as many games as anybody in baseball, even with many injuries and a slow start?

"No," he said. "Not at all."

That was the extent of his answer. It was as if the answer was so obvious that any explanation or expansion of it was superfluous. Twelve inches make a foot. There are 24 hours in a day. Any Yankees season that ends short of a World Series t.i.tle is a failure. It was an immutable truth. Trouble is, as the Yankees' roster churned in the six years since they actually had a self-defined successful season, more and more of the Yankees didn't think like Jeter. Losing now was a property of baseball nature that applied as much to the Yankees as it did the 29 other franchises, especially in the first two months of the 2007 season.

_The Yankees lost games with a frequency that ranked among the worst Yankees teams of all time. They lost 29 of their first 50 games, a disaster that would have been far worse if not for the spectacular hitting of the newly buffed Rodriguez.

Only five other Yankees teams ever stumbled to a worse start, including only one in the past 93 years: the teams of 1905, 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1990. All of those teams finished with losing records in sixth place or worse. The 2007 Yankees had disaster written all over them.

After those 50 games, the Yankees' lefthanded hitting, which figured to be the backbone of the offense, was atrocious. Abreu was. .h.i.tting .228, Damon was. .h.i.tting .260 and Giambi was. .h.i.tting .262. None of them were yet in proper game shape.

The back end of the rotation was hardly a surprise: it was as dreadfully unreliable as it had looked on paper. Igawa was so bad that after only six starts the Yankees demoted him and his 7.63 ERA all the way to the Cla.s.s A Florida State League, essentially to have Steinbrenner's "gurus" of pitching, Nardi Contreras and Billy Connors, give him a beginner's tutorial on pitching. It was mind-boggling to think the Yankees could believe he was worth a $46 million investment and then decide after only six games he needed to learn how to pitch. And Pavano? He was the pitching version of why New York State enacted a lemon law to protect used car buyers. He lasted through spring training and exactly two regular season starts before he was done for the season with an elbow injury.

While the demises of Igawa and Pavano may have been predictable, Mussina, Chien-Ming w.a.n.g and rookie Phil Hughes also wound up on the disabled list (Hughes pulled a hamstring in the midst of throwing a no-hitter). The Yankees immediately were caught with a shortage of major leaguecaliber replacements. In just those first 50 games of the season, Torre was forced to use 11 different starting pitchers, seven of them being rookies and almost none of them with any significant future in the big leagues. One of them, Chase Wright, became the second pitcher in major league history to serve up four consecutive home runs, which he managed to do in his second big league game, in a span of just 10 pitches, in Boston against the Red Sox.

"Our problem right now is we have too many pitchers on the 15-day Pavano," Mussina said one day in April. "That's what it's officially called now. Did you know that? The Pavano. His body just shut down from actually pitching for six weeks. It's like when you get an organ transplant and your body rejects it. His body rejected pitching. It's not used to it."

Wins and decent pitching were so hard to come by that Torre quickly reneged on a plan he announced on the first day of spring training that Mariano Rivera would become a one-inning closer. Rivera was 37 years old, and Torre figured he could ease the physical burden on Rivera if he never asked him to get more than three outs, which is the way most managers were pampering their closers.

Rivera, though, sensed immediately that Torre's plan would be subject to change. Rivera was one of the most valuable weapons in baseball, a guy not only with dominating stuff, but also with a freakish efficiency-he rarely went deep into counts, let alone walked hitters-that enabled him to secure more outs than your typical closer. He was a manager's best friend, the go-to solution to a problem. In case of emergency, don't break gla.s.s; pitch Mariano.

"We'll see," a skeptical Rivera said in March of Torre's plan. "I've heard those kinds of things before, and then it doesn't happen. It doesn't matter to me. I pitch when they tell me to pitch and I'll be ready. But let's see."

Torre's plan lasted until April 21, when one of those typically wild games at Fenway Park against the Red Sox created one of those "in case of emergency" situations. The Yankees took a 6-2 lead into the eighth inning against the Red Sox when Torre had Mike Myers, his lefthanded specialist, pitch to David Ortiz, a lefthanded hitter. Ortiz ripped a double.

Then Torre tried his righthanded setup man, Luis Vizcaino, against the righthanded hitting Manny Ramirez. Vizcaino walked Ramirez. Vizcaino did get J. D. Drew to ground out, but then Mike Lowell rapped a single to drive in Ortiz. Now it was 6-3 with the tying run at the plate and one out. It was time for Torre to junk his plan and go to his best pitcher.

"I lied, what can I tell you?" Torre would say after the game. "I didn't plan on lying, but I did. As it turned out, he didn't pitch two innings."

Rivera blew the lead. Jason Varitek singled to drive in one run, Coco Crisp tripled to send home two more, and Alex Cora dumped a bloop single over the head of Jeter to account for the last run of what was a 7-6 Boston win.

__For the Yankees, it was the start of seven consecutive losses, four of them to the Red Sox, including an 11-4 mugging at Yankee Stadium for loss number seven. It was April 27 and Torre was officially put on notice that his firing was imminent-well, if you consider newspaper leaks as the official form of Yankees front-office communication. "Joe in Jeopardy as Yanks Bomb," the New York Post New York Post declared the next morning. Wrote George King, "Yesterday, the word out of Tampa was that Steinbrenner 'was very displeased' about the way his high-price stable of talent is underachieving and was thinking about a change." declared the next morning. Wrote George King, "Yesterday, the word out of Tampa was that Steinbrenner 'was very displeased' about the way his high-price stable of talent is underachieving and was thinking about a change."

The story questioned whether Torre was to blame for the woeful pitching and inept hitting, going on to say, "If Steinbrenner and the voices he is listening to believe the answers are 'yes,' and if the Yankees get swept this weekend by the Red Sox, it's not out of the realm of possibility that The Boss could make a change."

Translation: Torre's job was in the hands of starting pitchers Jeff Karstens and Chien-Ming w.a.n.g over the next 48 hours.

"It does bother me, the leaks," Torre said. "It's an insult. If you have a problem, come to me. Being with the Yankees this long, devoting myself to the organization . . . Somebody doesn't like what you do, then just tell me. Like in 2006, when I wasn't consulted at the end of the season. They left me hanging out there, and now I'm going to have a press conference and I don't know if I'm working or not. Then I have George calling me five or 10 minutes before my press conference and telling me I'm coming back, and then I'm even playing the role. 'Thanks a lot.'

"It's an insult because you think you deserve more than that. My wife tells me I'm overly sensitive and I said, 'You're probably right.' But there is a certain dignity to what you do.

"Again, as Ali pointed out, well, you know who you're working for. It's just the way they operate. And I didn't mind it when you win. And George still goes to the whip all the time. That's fine. You sort of grin at that and respect why he's successful and what he's made of. But there is a certain time you'd like people to trust what you do rather than question what you do."

Karstens, with his third major league win, and what would be his only victory of the season, saved Torre's job, pitching the Yankees to an improbable 3-1 win. The Yankees, though, reverted to form in the series finale, losing, 7-4. They had won one game in the previous 10 days.

Now it was time for Steinbrenner to weigh in, or at least the carefully managed version of Steinbrenner, rather than just the surrept.i.tious whispers of "the voices he is listening to." Steinbrenner's publicity people had stopped allowing him to speak extemporaneously to the press, whether in person or on the telephone. He rarely made public appearances. It was a public relations risk to have Steinbrenner be heard or seen, if only because it would spark more debate about his health and the succession of power. The Boss would communicate with the media only through well-vetted statements released through the publicity firm, while officials from that firm or the Yankees front office continued to paint a picture of a robust Steinbrenner who, if you listened to them, was practically swimming the English Channel each morning and towing tractor trailers with his teeth in the afternoons. Truth was, when Torre would place calls to Steinbrenner, he no longer could get him at his office at Legends Field until four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Steinbrenner wasn't coming to his office until then.

"The season is still very young," the Steinbrenner statement said, "but up to now the results are clearly not acceptable to me or to Yankee fans. However, Brian Cashman, our general manager, Joe Torre, our manager, and our players all believe that they will turn this around quickly.

"I believe in them. I am here to support them in any way to help them accomplish this turnaround. It is time to put excuses and talk away. It is time to see if people are ready to step up and accept their responsibilities. It is time for all of them to show me and the fans what they are made of.

"Let's get going. Let's go out and win and bring a world championship back to New York. That's what I want."

It sounded like somebody doing his version of Steinbrenner, like one of those Hemingway writing contests for amateur authors, because, well, in times like this Steinbrenner would be expected to say something, something, wouldn't he? It included the typical veiled threats (Cashman and Torre having been the only ones named, were thus considered to have been placed on notice that any blame would fall to them) and the football halftime speech plat.i.tudes Steinbrenner believed could make baseball players play better. But it lacked the authentic from-the-gut fire and brimstone that made Steinbrenner such a fierce leader. Still, the statement was enough to fan more speculation that Torre's job was on the line. wouldn't he? It included the typical veiled threats (Cashman and Torre having been the only ones named, were thus considered to have been placed on notice that any blame would fall to them) and the football halftime speech plat.i.tudes Steinbrenner believed could make baseball players play better. But it lacked the authentic from-the-gut fire and brimstone that made Steinbrenner such a fierce leader. Still, the statement was enough to fan more speculation that Torre's job was on the line.

"Every game we lost was a reference to getting fired," Torre said. "It was like it was imminent. That's the way people were talking. As much as you try not to read the paper, you have all your friends and relatives reading the paper. And you can't shut yourself off.

"It was just wearing me out having to answer all those questions. And I'd go in the clubhouse and I'd have players say to me, 'You all right? You all right?' Because of what was going on. And I hated that.

"You want everything nice. Win or lose, you want a clubhouse that's ready to compete, rather than having to sort of put stuff away first. And I was there 12 years. So there's a certain amount of respect that the players-even if they don't want you there as manager-that they feel they've got to show. It was just an uncomfortable time for me. The best part for me was the game. I didn't have to answer anything. I could just do what I knew how to do."

_The games were not all that soothing for Torre. The Yankees had played only 23 games to the point when Steinbrenner issued his missive. They were 9-14 and had used nine different pitchers to start those 23 games. Five of those pitchers were rookies, and four of those had never before pitched in the big leagues, making the Yankees the first team since 1900 to use that many first-time pitchers that early in a season.

Cashman was trying to help, but the a.s.sistance he provided only served to underscore a subtle philosophical gap that was opening between him and Torre. Cashman would hand Torre lineup suggestions, almost always basing them on statistics such as on-base percentage. "Do what you want with it," Cashman said. In one lineup he suggested having Bobby Abreu bat leadoff and Jason Giambi bat second. Both were elite run producers, but Cashman's idea was to stack high on-base percentage hitters at the top of the lineup, whether or not they were traditional middle-of-the-order sluggers.

Torre generally disregarded the specific lineup ideas. Torre liked some numbers as a tool, not as a philosophy. He liked to know, for instance, how hitters and pitchers did over the long haul against righties and lefties. So Torre would politely thank Cashman for the suggestions and add a reminder for the general manager.

"Brian," Torre would say, "the numbers are good. But don't you ever forget the heartbeat."

Cashman did make one suggestion that Torre felt obligated to address immediately.

"Why don't you pitch Mike Myers against righthanded hitters?" Cashman said. "He's been getting groundb.a.l.l.s from righthanders. If you have a big spot where you need a double play against a right-handed hitter, why don't you bring in Myers?"

Myers was a lefthanded pitcher whose sole purpose in his baseball life was to get out lefthanded hitters. He threw with a funky, slingshot sidearm delivery designed specifically to create difficulty for lefthanded hitters by increasing the angle from the release point of his throwing motion to home plate. The ball seemed to come sideways at lefthanded hitters. The delivery, though, granted right-handers a long look at the ball.

Over his career righthanders pounded Myers for a .300 batting average, but lefties. .h.i.t only .219 against him. The 2007 season was an anomaly for Myers, one in which lefties actually hit better against him (.295) than did righthanders (.259). Cashman was putting his faith in the small sample of numbers early in the 2007 season, numbers compiled largely in low-leverage situations, not the late innings of close ballgames.

"Brian, the only time we're letting him pitch to righthanded hitters is when we have wiggle room," Torre said. "You have to look at the situations. He's not pitching to righthanded hitters with the game on the line."

The Yankees were a mess. Steinbrenner really did have reason to be worried. His team was in full-blown turmoil, and it was not just because of the injuries.

_Damon, the leadoff hitter who once injected the Yankees with a goofy kind of energy, had become a drag on the team with his leg injuries and lackl.u.s.ter att.i.tude. Once Damon made the decision to return to the Yankees after spring training, he still needed to get his legs in shape, but he was too far behind schedule for that to happen in time for the start of the season. Sure enough, on Opening Day no less, Damon was drifting back on a fly ball by Elijah Dukes of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a fly ball that would be a home run, when he felt a grabbing sensation in his calf.

"I actually felt ready to go," Damon said, "and then Opening Day, in 30-degree weather-why we play in New York then and not in Tampa I don't know-on Elijah Dukes' home run I felt my calf go. I was like, You've got to be s.h.i.ttin' me. You've got to be s.h.i.ttin' me. I kept playing through it. I couldn't get to b.a.l.l.s. The team was losing because I couldn't get to b.a.l.l.s. It was brutal. I kept trying to do something, but my legs wouldn't let me." I kept playing through it. I couldn't get to b.a.l.l.s. The team was losing because I couldn't get to b.a.l.l.s. It was brutal. I kept trying to do something, but my legs wouldn't let me."

For two months Damon would brood over the condition of his legs, never getting the spark back in his desire to play baseball. There were days when he said he could not play and days he played when he did not seem enthused to be doing so. Back and forth it would go: Is he in the lineup or not? Does he want to play or not? Teammates grew frustrated. It didn't help, either, that Damon moped most of the time around the clubhouse. There was no more of that pregame joking in the clubhouse and the dugout.

Damon presented Torre with a multifaceted problem. There was the problem of putting together a lineup with the day-to-day nature of Damon's leg problems. There was the problem of Damon's lack of production when he was in the lineup. And there was the problem of Damon's teammates, especially the old-guard Yankees, angry about Damon's lack of commitment. Torre spoke privately with Damon from time to time, and came away thinking Damon was in the same place he was when he walked away from the team in spring training: he was still waffling on whether or not he wanted to play baseball-not exactly the kind of guy a sinking team needs as its leadoff hitter and would-be catalyst.

In one of their private meetings, Torre told Damon, "The kind of player you've been your whole life is the player who goes out there and fully commits himself. You're not that kind of person now. It's easy to see that."

Damon agreed with Torre.

"I'm not sure I want to do this," Damon told him.

Damon's teammates grew so frustrated with him that several spoke to Torre out of concern that he was hurting the team. One of them visited Torre one day in the manager's office and was near tears talking about Damon.

"Let's get rid of him," the player said. "Guys can't stand him."

Torre told him, "I understand the way you feel, and I am disappointed, too, and all of that stuff, but we've got to find a way to make it work instead of just walking away from it. We just have to. And you're going to have to help me find a way to get this thing straightened out.

"The easiest thing in the world-I mean, not that you could actually do it-is just get rid of him. You can't do that. We We can't do that. So let's figure out a way to make this thing work. can't do that. So let's figure out a way to make this thing work.

"Listen, we've always had somebody here from time to time that we had to deal with, somebody we weren't crazy about. But we're doing badly right now, so that's why it may feel different. The bottom line is he's a part of this team. And as long as he is a part of the team it's up to all of us to find a way to make this work. Let's just do whatever we can to help him and move on."

Damon continued to frustrate his teammates. Damon was. .h.i.tting .229 with one home run when the Yankees, stumbling badly at 9-14, and fresh off having had Steinbrenner put them on notice, went to Texas for a three-game series against the Rangers. Torre decided a meeting was in order, a meeting in which it was just as important for the players to talk as it was for Torre to talk. The Yankees a.s.sembled in the trainers' room of the visiting clubhouse of the Ballpark in Arlington.

"To get through something like this, you need each other," Torre told them. "I don't care what you think of each other, whether you like the guy next to you or whether you don't, but you need each other. We only have one thing that we're trying to accomplish and you can't do it alone.

"When you go up there to the plate or you go out to that mound, you have to know that guys have your back. If you don't do the job, you have to understand that somebody else will do it for you.

"You can't control the result all the time. You just have to be prepared every day and play your a.s.s off. And . . . it has to be important to you."

Much of the old guard spoke. Jeter spoke. Pett.i.tte spoke. Rivera spoke. They spoke about getting everybody on the same page, fully invested with some urgency. They spoke about the importance of relying on each other. n.o.body mentioned Damon by name. Then, to Torre's surprise, Damon got up to speak. He basically repeated the same message, straight from the "This is what we need to do" speech archive. He concluded by saying, "I wish I could have helped you. I was hurt. Now I I need to help." need to help."

The words had no effect on his teammates. Damon may have meant well, but he was in no position, they thought, to be rallying the troops when he was the one most in need of being rallied. Torre was surprised to hear Damon speak.

Damon did improve his game slightly after that, but it was still subjected to fits and starts that vexed Torre. On May 15, with the Yankees in Chicago to play the White Sox, Torre knew he had to speak with Damon yet again. A storm was coming. Heavy, ominous clouds gathered over U. S. Cellular Field as the Yankees conducted an optional early hitting workout.

"We were fine in Texas and even at home after that," Torre said at the time, "but we're missing that spark. We're just missing that put-away att.i.tude. We're playing well enough but we're not getting the job done. And I've got two guys who are trying to decide whether they want to play or not."

The spark they missed most was the one Damon was supposed to provide. Giambi, too, was a problem. His foot, like Damon's legs, was a daily issue that seemed to drag down his resolve. As if on cue, the clouds over U. S. Cellular Field opened up with a deluge, sending the Yankees scurrying for cover in the clubhouse. Torre found Damon and Giambi there and told each of them he wanted to see them in the weight training room.

"There's one thing I need to know from you guys," Torre said to them. "I need to know if you guys are ready to play. Because we're at a point where we really need to win games, and you guys are very important to us. But you're only really important to us if your heart's in it. So let me know: Do you want to play baseball or not?"