The Yankee Years Part 24

Cashman took Torre's plea under advis.e.m.e.nt. That night, the Yankees blew a 4-0 lead to Boston and fell behind, 5-4, entering the eighth inning. But they rallied for a run in the eighth and won the game in the ninth on a home run by Rodriguez off Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. Kerrigan was safe. And the Yankees had won only their third road series of the year.

_The Yankees continued to play with the focus and energy they had summoned from the Toronto meeting. They went to Chicago and took three out of four. Back home, they swept the Pirates-with Clemens, rusty as an old oil derrick, back in pinstripes pitching again-swept the Diamondbacks and took two out of three from the Mets. The 13-3 run put them two games above .500. Damon and Abreu were at last rounding into shape, body and mind.

Said Mussina at the time, "The difference now is we have more than three guys giving good at-bats. It's eight or nine, and the team is feeding off of that. The pitchers know this team can come back and the hitters know it doesn't fall on one guy to get it done. We're in a real good place right now."

Cano, the young second baseman p.r.o.ne to lapses in concentration, provided a good example of the players' rededication. Cano had been Bowa's pet project, an arrangement the coach made clear in spring training when he sat down with the second baseman.

"Robby, if you want to be the best player that you can be, you need to come out here and work every day," Bowa told him. "I know you're a natural hitter. I know you can hit .300. But you've got to do everything. And I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. You know, you get lazy out there on double plays. You let the ball get real deep. And I'm going to let you know that's not how you make the double play.

"For the most part, you're real good at what you do. Then all of a sudden you get into these little spells where you'll go, 'Oh, I've got it,' and then-boom!-you get into bad habits. So here's what we're going to do. Every time we have an off day the next day we're coming out to the field early to do extra work."

Cano stayed true to Bowa's plan. Then, in June, Bowa decided that Cano had been so good about his work and staying focused that he decided to cut him some slack. Bowa called off the mandatory extra workouts for him. A week later, Cano sought out Bowa.

"Hey, I want to go back to working early after every off day," Cano said.

Bowa smiled.

"Great," the coach said.

The Yankees had a new vibe. They reached the All-Star break 43-43. They had a pulse. Torre held a quick meeting before the first game after the break. It was nothing more than a reminder to keep playing hard, to continue to be mentally sharp every day. When he was done, Torre asked, "Anybody have any questions?"

n.o.body had a question, but Derek Jeter wanted to say something. Over the years, and especially after Jeter was named captain, Torre would sometimes use Jeter as a messenger. He might give him a heads-up about a team meeting so he could be ready with a contribution. "I might want you to say something," Torre might tell him. Torre knew the peer-to-peer delivery system among ballplayers is a powerful one, especially when it is Jeter.

"I'd push him and he'd do it," Torre said, "but when he spoke it was always, 'We,' never 'You' or 'I.' 'We're doing this.' After he became captain he did more of that. It wouldn't be a rah-rah thing. He would be critical, without calling people out. He'd say something like, 'We can't not not run a ball out.' He may have been aiming the message at an individual, but he would be critical in his remarks without picking on any one person. He was good that way. run a ball out.' He may have been aiming the message at an individual, but he would be critical in his remarks without picking on any one person. He was good that way.

"With Alex, I'd ask Alex to say something and he never wanted to say anything. Never wanted to say anything."

In that post-All-Star break meeting, Torre had not prompted Jeter to say anything, so even the manager was curious to hear what the captain would say.

"Starting today," Jeter said, "every game is a playoff game. That's how we have to treat every game: like it's a playoff game."

Jeter's words got everybody's attention. Jeter, like Torre, was faithful to the belief that everything was going to work out fine in time. He had no time or energy to waste on negative thoughts. But here the Yankees were in the middle of July and Jeter, Captain Cool, was pressing the accelerator.

"Even in him you could see that he was concerned," Bowa said. "When Jeet talks, because he really doesn't talk all that much, he gets their attention."

The Yankees began not just beating teams but demolishing them with an offensive might of historic proportions. They won 12 of their first 16 games coming out of the All-Star break while scoring a whopping 151 runs. Only two other teams in franchise history ever scored 150 runs in any 16-game span, and those teams did so way back in 1930 and 1939. Finally, after months in which Torre had pushed and poked and yelled at them, the Yankees were totally invested in the entire process of winning baseball games: the preparation, the intensity, the focus, the ferocious will will to win. They cared. to win. They cared.

_The Yankees were rolling. But there was a problem. Torre could not enjoy it. He knew from his mock firing after the previous season, from the sniping in April and May and from the Yankees having no contractual obligation to him beyond 2007 that his job status was a major issue in the organization. Torre knew working for Steinbrenner meant your job was always in jeopardy, no matter the length of the contract, but this was different. He felt some of the "voices" talking to Steinbrenner didn't fully support him. What bothered him just as much, however, was knowing that his players and coaches knew he was hanging by a string. Torre always worked to keep the clubhouse "uncluttered," the way he called it, so that the players and staff could occupy themselves only with the diligence that winning baseball required. If the newspapers were full of leaks and whispers about his job, that noise was bound to create conversation and speculation that could only detract from that diligence.

"I was trying, really trying to always be that same guy for them," Torre said, "even though what I was going through was uncomfortable. It was certainly difficult going to the park in 2007, knowing s.h.i.t had been in the paper and on the radio. And you walk in the clubhouse and you go in the coach's room, and there's this dead silence in there, because they don't know what to say to me. And you go in the training room with the players, and unless I start kidding about it, n.o.body really knows what to say. It was a very uncomfortable time."

Some players noticed a change in Torre. He seemed tired. Worn.

"What Joe always tried to do a good job of was no matter what was going on, keep the matter from affecting the clubhouse," Giambi said. "Really, every year for his last three years Joe's head was on the block. Basically every year he had to like fight for his job. 'Well, Joe's gone!' Then something incredible happened, and then they couldn't fire him, because we would come from 15 games down to win and get in the postseason.

"In '07, for us, it was mostly a situation where we felt bad for him. For a human being to go through that it would have to be tough. I mean, he acted like it wasn't, but it had to be wearing on him. I mean, I noticed a difference probably between my first three years and my last three years here. Just because, I think when you have to go through that all the time it's tough. He handles himself with cla.s.s and dignity, but . . .

"It had to be wearing him down. It had to be something on his mind all the time. I felt he was a little more tired. Does that make sense? He felt more tired. I mean, you could kind of see it. I'd even ask Jeet sometimes. 'Jeet, is he doing okay?' And Jeet would go, 'Yeah, he probably has a lot on his mind.' And I just think that's what I noticed."

Other players, though, did not notice a change in Torre.

"It didn't seem like it was ever there," Mussina said of Torre's job status being a clubhouse issue. "He never portrayed it as being there. I think we all read the papers and understood what was going on, and we knew it, and people were talking to us about it. But it never leaked into the everyday stuff.

"Joe has a great ability, and he had a great ability in New York. in New York. He has a great ability to diffuse things so they don't leak into his clubhouse, so they don't get to the players, so they don't become distractions. That's one of his best qualities." He has a great ability to diffuse things so they don't leak into his clubhouse, so they don't get to the players, so they don't become distractions. That's one of his best qualities."

Maybe as the Yankees began to win over the summer the victories bought Torre a little more time, but it didn't change the reality that he was living in the crosshairs of people who wanted him gone, and probably anything short of a World Series championship would not have been enough. What was debilitating for him was knowing they no longer trusted him, and yet he was the same man who had helped bring home those six pennants and four world championships.

"Cashman has a problem telling people things," said Borzello, the bullpen catcher. "He would say comments about Joe, like he did this or he did that in a game, and he'd be telling people who he must have known know and like Joe. What, he didn't think Joe would hear it from them? But Cash operated that way all the time. It was a big problem. And then we would all talk about it and say, 'Doesn't he realize we're all a family down here?'

"The team pretty much knew if we didn't get to the World Series he wasn't coming back, and there was no denying it. It wasn't so much that's what we were told. The silence said enough. There would be rumors out there or stuff in the papers about Joe's job being on the line, and n.o.body in the front office would deny it or say anything about it. The silence said it all. Joe never brought it up in the clubhouse. But we started to believe that Joe was gone."

Said Torre, "I asked Donnie [Mattingly] about it, about not enjoying it. And he said the same thing: he didn't enjoy it. Even after winning games, we wouldn't enjoy it. I was drained.

"The questions came hot and heavy. A lot of it was because we started so badly. I find that when people talk about what they want to talk about-and it was about me getting fired-they don't want to consider the reasons why we may have started so badly. It's all about the bottom line and it's all about what's going to be the fallout from it-not about how many guys we had hurt. We had Abreu on the disabled list most of the spring. We had Johnny Damon who stumbled out of the gate. You had pitchers on the DL.

"But that wasn't the back page. People want to get the meat and potatoes: I'm on the last year of a contract. And the media knew whoever was leaking the information. I just felt like it was coming at me from a lot of different directions, and I was uncomfortable with it.

"You'd like to think if you work for somebody for a certain period of time that there'd be a time where they'd trust you somewhat. And I never got that. Even when we were winning I never got that. That bothered me."

The Yankees won like n.o.body else after that kick-a.s.s meeting in Toronto and that 21-29 start. They played .652 baseball over the final four months, the best record in baseball. It took much more than the usual little poke or nudge he would give his championship teams, but Torre had found a way to get this team to respond, even after the fifth-worst start to a season in franchise history. As the Yankees clobbered opponents and pa.s.sed one team after another in the wild card race, Yankee Stadium buzzed that summer with the familiar electricity about the possibilities of another October. Life was good again in the Bronx.

Except in the manager's office at Yankee Stadium.

One day during the summer, even while the Yankees were winning with uncanny regularity, the only kind of regularity that could overcome a 21-29 beginning, Torre looked around his office and saw the acc.u.mulations of a successful 12-year-run. The trophies, the pictures, the baseb.a.l.l.s . . . the small remnants of achievement, the little reminders of the awesome power of trust. Even with the wins coming apace, Torre knew what was coming for him. He turned to his personal a.s.sistant, Chris Romanello.

"Chris," Torre said, "why don't you start packing some things up."

_The game on Friday night, July 20, 2007, was a particularly ugly one for the Yankees, providing a harsh reminder that as far back as they had come from that 21-29 start, they still had a long, rough road to October. By the fifth inning in front of 53,953 peeved fans at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees trailed the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, 9-0, thanks to abysmal pitching from Mike Mussina, who looked more and more as if his career was headed to its finish, and Edwar Ramirez, an independent league find by the Yankees whose career looked as if it might never get started.

Mussina allowed six earned runs in 4[image]innings, falling to 4-7 on the season. Torre brought in Ramirez to stem the damage, but the carnage grew so bad as to be almost painful to watch. Ramirez threw 19 pitches. Seventeen of them were b.a.l.l.s. One of the two pitches that wasn't a ball was. .h.i.t for a grand slam. This is what the first five batters did against Ramirez: walk, walk, grand slam, walk, walk. Yankees pitchers walked 10 batters in a game for the first time in six years.

Edwin Jackson, a righthanded pitcher for Tampa Bay who entered the game with a 1-9 record, befuddled the Yankees. .h.i.tters, allowing no runs over six innings. The lefthanded trio of Damon, Abreu and Matsui went 1-for-14. Another lefty, Giambi, wasn't even in the lineup.

The defeat dropped the Yankees to 49-46, their worst record after 95 games in 16 years. Twenty-six other Yankees team were 49-46 or worse after 95 games. None of them made the playoffs.

All things considered, it was a good night to be in New Britain, Connecticut, instead of the Bronx. That is exactly where you could find all of the most important decision makers in the Yankees baseball operations department. Indeed, it was a beautiful evening at New Britain Stadium, home of the Rock Cats, the Minnesota Twins' Double-A affiliate: temperature in the low 70s, low humidity, a nice breeze. It was a good night to dream. Into the 6,000-seat ballpark walked the who's who of Yankees bra.s.s: general manager Brian Cashman, stats guru and a.s.sistant general manager Billy Eppler, head of player development Mark Newman, pitching guru Nardi Contreras (the Yankees, naturally, did not hire mere experts; they unearthed the gurus of their profession) and special adviser Reggie Jackson. They did not come for the comfort of the evening, nor for the $6.50 burritos or the $5.50 Sam Adams Cherry Wheat drafts.

They came to see the future.

The Rock Cats were playing the Trenton Thunder, the Yankees' Double-A affiliate, who were starting a beefy 21-year-old right-handed pitcher named Joba Chamberlain. Cashman, Eppler, Newman, Contreras and Jackson wanted to see if Chamberlain was ready to help the Yankees in their uphill climb. The single biggest reason that the Yankees dynasty had devolved into just another franchise scrambling to even get into the playoffs as a wild card was because Cashman and his gurus had made mistake after mistake after mistake when it came to evaluating pitchers, both on the major league and amateur sides.

Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Jaret Wright, Jeff Weaver, Steve Karsay, Esteban Loaiza, Kyle Farnsworth, Jose Contreras, Javier Vazquez, Kei Igawa, Carl Pavano, Roger Clemens (the 44-year-old version) . . . None of those 12 pitchers, all brought in from outside the organization, pitched three consecutive seasons with the Yankees. None. It was a losing pattern that defied enormous odds. The Yankees would typically overvalue a pitcher, bringing him in when he was either at the end of his career or not a fit for New York, then dump the pitcher to move on to the next mistake. The balance sheet on those 12 investments was ugly: Record:125-105 (including 3-7 in the postseason)Cost*:$255 million Cost per win:$2.04 million Cost per win:$2.04 million *Does not include prospects surrendered in trades Cashman was in New Britain because he had a pretty good inkling that flushing $255 million on pitching mistakes did not exactly make for good business practice. The Yankees put themselves in the position of dumping all that money on the wrong pitchers because they couldn't develop any decent pitchers of their own. They had had to scramble to find available veteran pitchers because their system was producing nothing. And, because the revenue-sharing system and new revenue streams put more money in the pockets of smaller revenue teams, the pool of available veteran pitchers for the Yankees to wave their money at was drying up. In another era, the Yankees might have cherry-picked elite pitchers in their prime from organizations that could no longer afford them, in the same way they had plucked David Cone from the Blue Jays in 1995 and Mussina from the Orioles after playing out his contract in 2000. Instead, the Blue Jays locked up Roy Halladay, the Indians locked up CC Sabathia, the Brewers locked up Ben Sheets, the Astros locked up Roy Oswalt and the Twins locked up Johan Santana-all small-revenue teams who suddenly had the cash to keep their ace pitchers off the trade and free agent markets. The kicker for the Yankees was that under the revenue-sharing system they were financing some of the newfound solvency of those teams. to scramble to find available veteran pitchers because their system was producing nothing. And, because the revenue-sharing system and new revenue streams put more money in the pockets of smaller revenue teams, the pool of available veteran pitchers for the Yankees to wave their money at was drying up. In another era, the Yankees might have cherry-picked elite pitchers in their prime from organizations that could no longer afford them, in the same way they had plucked David Cone from the Blue Jays in 1995 and Mussina from the Orioles after playing out his contract in 2000. Instead, the Blue Jays locked up Roy Halladay, the Indians locked up CC Sabathia, the Brewers locked up Ben Sheets, the Astros locked up Roy Oswalt and the Twins locked up Johan Santana-all small-revenue teams who suddenly had the cash to keep their ace pitchers off the trade and free agent markets. The kicker for the Yankees was that under the revenue-sharing system they were financing some of the newfound solvency of those teams.

For the next decade after bringing Andy Pett.i.tte to the big leagues in 1995, the Yankees did not use even one homegrown pitcher of any consequence with the exception of Ramiro Mendoza, and though he had value as a middle reliever, Mendoza was neither a starter nor a closer, the premium slots for a pitcher. So each year the Yankees had to fill spots in their staff by trading for or buying somebody else's problems.

Cashman recognized the downward spiral such desperation created, so in 2006 he began to prioritize the signing and development of young pitchers. His strategy began with flexing the Yankees' financial muscle in the amateur market, even if it meant spitting in the face of the commissioner's unofficial "slotting" system, in which teams could conspire to hold down signing bonuses by keeping to established ceilings based on the draft position of the player. The Yankees didn't play by those rules because, well, because money wasn't a problem for them. This meant the Yankees would even buy up the amateur medical risks, throwing big money at pitchers with high ceilings that scared off most clubs because of the possibility they were breakdowns waiting to happen. Most clubs could not afford to take the financial risk of handing out a huge signing bonus for a first-round talent with arm trouble. The Yankees could do so because if the player never made it to the big leagues they were out only some pocket change. It would change nothing about how they did business.

If the pitcher defied the medical reports, they had themselves a potential homegrown ace. That's exactly how the Yankees wound up with Alan Horne, who had reconstructive elbow surgery in college after Cleveland picked him in the first round out of high school; Andrew Brackman, who went straight from the draft to the operating room to have Tommy John surgery; and the burly kid who brought the Yankees' bra.s.s to New Britain on July 20, 2007, Joba Chamberlain, whose shaky medical reports regarding his arm, knee and weight (he weighed as much as 290 pounds at the University of Nebraska) scared off most teams before the Yankees took him with the 41st overall pick of the 2006 draft.

Cashman and the Yankees finally got religion when it came to young pitching, and their faith mostly was tied up in three righthanders: Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Chamberlain. It was Cashman's hope that these were the bedrocks of the next Yankee dynasty or, in the very least, three reasons to keep him from blowing another $255 million.

"The message that I've got for everybody," Cashman told the Hartford Courant Hartford Courant while in New Britain, "is that if you pitch to the point where it forces us to look at guys that are not Roger Clemens, I want that." while in New Britain, "is that if you pitch to the point where it forces us to look at guys that are not Roger Clemens, I want that."

The Yankees rotation at that moment consisted of three guys past their prime-Pett.i.tte, 35, Mussina, 38, and Clemens, 44-and two international free agents-w.a.n.g, 27, and Igawa, 27. Chamberlain pitched poorly with the Yankees' bra.s.s looking at him in New Britain. He gave up seven runs on nine hits in less than five innings. Still, the Yankees liked what they saw: a fastball that was clocked in the upper-90-mph range and a violent slider. His changeup and curveball were major-league quality as well. Cashman called Torre from New Britain and said, "You'll love him. He's better than Hughes."

"That," Torre said, "got my attention."

The Yankees immediately put Chamberlain on the fast track to the Bronx. Four days after the Yankees executives saw him in New Britain, Chamblerlain was in Triple-A, and just seven days after that, Chamblerlain was in the big leagues. The only catch was that Chamberlain was not permitted to start. Indeed, Cashman and Contreras sent Chamberlain to Torre with instructions on how he could be used, a mandate that came to be known as the "Joba Rules."

The Yankees would no longer allow Chamberlain to start because they were concerned about piling up too many innings after throwing 88[image]innings in the minors, or only one less than he had thrown in 2006 at Nebraska. The rules were that Chamberlain would have to pitch out of the bullpen, he was not to be used to close games, he was not to be used on consecutive days and he would get one day of rest for every inning he pitched in an outing. The media perceived the Joba Rules as a slap at Torre. The conventional wisdom was that the Yankees didn't trust Torre to handle Chamberlain with care, so they had to give him instructions about how to use him. Torre, however, had no problem with the rules.

"No, I really didn't," he said. "Unless I'm very naive. I mean, I know it was written about and I was asked about it, but unless I was just naive to it, I never took it as anything more than protecting the kid. And Nardi's the one I called. I never talked to Cashman about it. I called Nardi on a regular basis.

"And the other fact is I didn't think there was anything wrong with the rules or talking about the rules. It's like a guy with an injury. Why look to hide something?"

Chamberlain was an immediate sensation. He was a character straight out of a cornball 1950s Hollywood casting job: a country kid in the big city with a fastball that could reach 100 miles an hour and a tendency to celebrate strikeouts with a howl and a fist pump. Yankees fans loved his act. So did Torre. With Chamberlain in front of Rivera, the Yankees had their best late-inning lockdown combination since the tag team of Rivera and Wetteland in 1996. Chamberlain would pitch in 19 games for the Yankees and they would win 17 of them. He allowed only one earned run. With runners in scoring position, he was perfect: n.o.body got a hit off him. He struck out 34 of the 91 hitters he faced. He was as close to unhittable as anybody had seen in a long time-a 21-year-old kid who was in college the previous year, mind you, a kid who had never seen big league hitters before.

_Chamberlain's arrival had the effect of making Kyle Farnsworth rather useless in any meaningful situation, which bothered Yankees fans not at all. Cashman was ecstatic to have signed Farnsworth as a free agent after the 2005 season to a three-year, $17 million deal. Farnsworth essentially replaced Tom Gordon, who signed as a free agent with Philadelphia. Farnsworth threw hard and owned a nasty, if misbehaving slider, but the knock on Farnsworth was that he wilted in the big spots. Indeed, only two months before the Yankees gave him $17 million, the Braves were six outs away from sending their Division Series against Houston to a fifth and deciding game when Atlanta manager Bobby c.o.x gave the ball to Farnsworth. Atlanta was leading, 6-1. Farnsworth gave up a grand slam in the eighth and a solo home run in the ninth to cough up the lead. Houston won in the 18th inning, sending the Braves home.

In the Yankees' 2006 spring training camp, Eppler could not contain his enthusiasm over the Farnsworth addition.

"Farnsworth is really going to help us," Eppler told Borzello, the bullpen catcher. "He's got one of the best sliders in the game."

"Yeah, sure. Great," an unimpressed Borzello said. "His slider is is great, except maybe only one out of every seven is great." great, except maybe only one out of every seven is great."

Farnsworth did flash nasty stuff. Opposing hitters batted .242 against him in his two years pitching for Torre-as long as there were no runners in scoring position. With runners in scoring position, Farnsworth wasn't as tough to hit. They batted .272 against him in those spots.

The other curious glitch in the Yankees' $17 million reliever was that Farnsworth was built like an NFL tight end and somehow he was one of their more brittle pitchers, mostly due to a balky back that might go out on him while warming in the bullpen. It was Torre's understanding that the Yankees did not want him to use Farnsworth two days in a row. In two years under Torre, Farnsworth made only 20 of his 136 appearances without rest, and he was generally poor in those situations, posting a 5.60 ERA in those rare times when Torre did use him on back-to-back days.

"I was told we shouldn't use him two days in a row," Torre said, "Billy Eppler and Cash, I mean . . . that was their baby when they brought him on."

The arrangement created a problem for Torre. By trying to avoid using him on back-to-back days, Torre could not give Farnsworth tuneup work in games that appeared to be already decided. If Torre did throw him into such games, he would not have Farnsworth available the next day in a game where he might be needed to set up Rivera. It was a catch-22. The problem, however, was that Farnsworth didn't know he came with his own set of instructions. He was also a highly emotional sort. (On May 19 at Shea Stadium, for instance, Torre found Farnsworth on the floor in the corner of the tiny, run-down trainers' room in the visiting clubhouse, crying. Farnsworth was hurt because his teammates disapproved of comments he made to the media that Clemens was getting special treatment from the Yankees.) On July 29 in Baltimore, Torre brought Farnsworth in to pitch the eighth inning with a 10-4 lead. He promptly gave up two runs, inflating his ERA to 4.57. Farnsworth had pitched only once in the previous seven days, and he was angry about his lack of work. He popped off to the press after the game, saying, "I didn't come here to sit the bench."

"Farnsworth," Torre said, "was a good kid. Just a little emotional, that's all. I don't think he was trying to show me up. He was just upset, that's all."

Torre arranged for a meeting with Farnsworth and invited Cashman, too. Farnsworth said he wanted to be traded.

"Listen," Torre said. "It's tough for me to bring you in in a game we're way ahead or way behind just to get you an inning, knowing I can't use you the next day. Because I don't know if I'll need you the next day in a close game."

"What are you guys talking about?" Farnsworth said. He had no idea about the ban on him pitching back-to-back days. "I want to pitch."

"Fine," Torre said. "I'll make sure you don't go more than three days in a row without pitching, whatever the score, and then we'll take our chances."

Said Torre, "He seemed perfectly satisfied with that. And I think he was satisfied with my reasoning, as opposed to thinking I had something against him, I guess. That was the end of the whole scene. Then once Joba came on the scene, well, he basically took a backseat. That was that."

Farnsworth finished the season with a 4.80 ERA while allowing 89 baserunners in 60 innings. The next spring he blamed Torre for his lousy season.

"It's tough when you do lose the confidence from your manager to maybe prepare yourself, day in and day out when you have no clue about anything," Farnsworth told reporters. "It happened a few times last year."

With Chamberlain in front of Rivera rather than Farnsworth, the Yankees were almost impossible to beat when they held a late lead. The Yankees played 50 games after Chamberlain joined the team. The team that began the year 21-29 in its first 50 games went 32-18 in its final 50. The only hitch to the run was the pitching of Mussina, who was so bad, giving up 19 runs in 9[image]innings over three starts, that on August 29 Torre decided to pull him from the rotation in favor of Ian Kennedy. Mussina was sitting in the tiny office of clubhouse manager Rob Cucuzza that day when Torre walked in.

"I'm going to have Kennedy start in your spot," Torre told Mussina after he heard the Yankee organization had already informed Kennedy of the change. "This doesn't mean you're out of the rotation."

"Well, it sure sounds like that's what it is to me," Mussina replied.

Said Mussina, "And he was gone in like 45 seconds."

Mussina was hurt. Being taken out of the rotation was bad enough-the only game he ever pitched in relief was that 2003 ALCS Game 7 gem-but being dropped in 45 seconds chapped him. The next day he marched into Torre's office.

"You would never have done that to Mo, or Derek, or anybody else," Mussina said. "And I've been here for seven years. I deserve more than that."

"You're right," Torre said.

Said Mussina, "I should have been in his office and there should have been more discussion. Ultimately, when you let all the negative stuff settle out, I agreed with him. I probably needed a break. I was fried and pitching terribly. And I got back in there like 10 days later or whatever and I pitched better. The guy's made a lot of right decisions.

"It ended up being the right thing to do. It got me away from it for a while, and then when I came back I was better, and my head was better, which is most of the battle.

"When you have a manager that completely trusts you to do your job, you can't ask for any more than that as a player. Even when he took me out of the rotation, and even though it wasn't done the way I think it should have been done, a couple days later I'm like, 'You know what? I probably should have come out of the rotation even though I didn't like it.' And I didn't like the way he did it, but it's okay."

__Mussina became a reliable pitcher when he returned to the rotation in September. On September 25, the Yankees arrived in Tampa with a chance to clinch the wild card. They held a 5-game lead over Detroit with six games to play. The Yankees took a 5-0 lead into the sixth inning that night, but Edwar Ramirez and Brian Bruney coughed up six runs in that inning alone. The Yankees eventually lost, 7-6, on a 10th-inning home run by Dioner Navarro off Jeff Karstens.

The next day Torre was summoned to a meeting in the Legends Field conference room with Steinbrenner-or more accurately, the family members who had a.s.sumed the daily operations of the franchise from The Boss. There was nothing unusual about the need for a meeting. Whenever the Yankees played Tampa Bay the manager usually was obligated to make an appearance at the team headquarters in Tampa. Torre wasn't sure if his job status would be discussed, though, true to his spring training vow, he preferred not to talk about it, anyway. Torre expected Steinbrenner, his sons, Hank and Hal, and son-in-law Felix Lopez to be at the meeting. When Torre walked into the room he saw that all of them were there except Hank. Steinbrenner didn't bother to say h.e.l.lo, as is his usual custom. He believes in the dramatic element of in medias res in medias res when it comes to his telephone calls and meetings. when it comes to his telephone calls and meetings.

"What happened last night?" was how Steinbrenner "greeted" Torre.

"Don't worry, Boss," Torre said. "We'll get 'em tonight."

It was cla.s.sic Torre: smooth, familiar and, above all, disarming and rea.s.suring to the man he called by his nickname or his first name, not by the deferential "Mr. Steinbrenner."

This was not cla.s.sic Steinbrenner, however. He didn't say much at all. He sat there, slightly slouched, and kept his dark gla.s.ses on in the indoor room. At one point he got up to make himself a sandwich. He contributed almost nothing to the meeting. It was obvious to Torre that Steinbrenner's reign as everyone knew it was over, which meant he would no longer be able to deal directly with Steinbrenner when it came time to talk about his future with the team.

"It was sad," Torre said. "As much as you might have been confrontational with him at times or hated what he did, you hate to see that. It was sad. Because now you knew it: the other guys were running the team. A few years before he would say, 'I'm going to back out of this and let other people take over. Let the young elephants into the tent.' But that was never going to be the case.

"It's not quite the same when Don Corleone was shot and was recovering and was sitting in the garden. At least he was talking to his son in a very lucid way, explaining what was going to happen. I don't think George had those capabilities. And when you talked to anybody in the organization, Steve Swindal being one, when he was in good graces, you'd ask, 'What's wrong with him?' And they'd say, 'Nothing. We don't know.' I believed him when he told me that."

As Steinbrenner occupied himself with his sandwich, the rest of them talked about how happy everyone was with the young pitching. In addition to Chamberlain, Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy were throwing well for the Yankees.

"Kennedy . . . ," mused Lopez. "That's a great name for marketing. Better than Rodriguez. Rodriguez."

The Yankees, they believed, looked like a dangerous postseason team again. The lineup was formidable-the Yankees wound up scoring more runs than any Yankee team in 70 years-the bullpen was dominating with Chamberlain and Rivera at the back end, and the rotation appeared decent enough with Chien-Ming w.a.n.g, Andy Pett.i.tte, a hobbled but game Roger Clemens (he was nursing yet another injury to his legs) and Mussina, who seemed be back on track after a mostly miserable summer.

"n.o.body wants to play the Yankees in the playoffs," Hal crowed.

"I like to think we intimidate people," Torre said, "but it depends on which team you're talking about."

It was a cheery enough lunch meeting. The Yankees were headed to the playoffs for the 12th consecutive season under Torre. The food was good. And n.o.body brought up the question of whether Torre, even after bringing the team back from 21-29 to easily win a postseason spot, would continue to manage the club.

"My situation never came up," Torre said. "I didn't ask or anything. Basically I felt like Cash was on my side and I'd leave it to him to ultimately present it."