Pinstripe Empire (83 page)

Giambi would experience some mysterious downtimes in his Yankee career. In 2004, he fell to .208 with 12 home runs and looked hopeless at the plate following the July discovery that he had a benign tumor. Prior to the start of the 2005 season, he delivered an apology to his teammates and fans at a Yankee Stadium press conference, apparently for using steroids, although he never explicitly said so. Then he came back to win Comeback Player of the Year in 2005, belting 32 homers.

In May of 2007, he apologized again, this time admitting to steroid use. He acknowledged his admission in grand-jury testimony in an investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), which had been accused of providing steroids and human growth hormones for athletes.

Fans disapproved of steroid use, but when it came to their hometown players, they were usually supportive—as long as they played well. Giambi never suffered from fan ire. By the time his seven-year contract expired, he had no world championship rings to show for his New York stay (nor did Mussina), but he did have 209 home runs, ninth all-time in Yankee history, and that bought him a lot of goodwill.

The Mitchell Report, issued in December 2007, named the players that former senator George Mitchell’s committee had concluded were steroid or HGH users in baseball, and helped spur greater cooperation between MLB and the Players Association toward advanced drug testing.

Players with Yankee connections named in the report included Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Randy Velarde, Kevin Brown, Clemens, Jason Grimsley, Jerry Hairston Jr., Glenallen Hill, Justice, Knoblauch, Hal Morris, Denny Neagle, Pettitte, Stanton, Ron Villone, Rondell White, Canseco, and Darren Holmes. Also implicated for the use of steroids or human growth hormones but not mentioned in the Mitchell Report were Ivan Rodriguez, Matt Lawton, Sergio Mitre, Leyritz, and Todd Greene. Lawton, Grimsley, and Mitre were the only ones suspended by MLB; Mitre’s punishment came in his first fifty days with the Yankees in 2009 for an infraction while with the Marlins. Lawton was suspended for ten games at the start of the 2006 season, by which time he had moved on as a free agent from the Yankees to Seattle.

Alex Rodriguez’s name would emerge later.

Clemens issued an unconditional denial and later found himself locked in a legal battle over whether he lied to a congressional investigating committee about it. Pettitte admitted to using a growth hormone in 2002 to help recover from injury and received widespread forgiveness due to the manner in which he handled it. Knoblauch, Justice, Morris (a Yankee before the steroid era), Stanton, and Hairston denied the charges. Others refused to be interviewed.

It was a difficult time for baseball, particularly for the onslaught of suspect home run records. Every era of baseball had been different, due to segregation, air travel, night games, dead ball, lively ball, war, the DH, spit-balls, or the lowered mound. But the steroid era would prove to be harder to get past, coming as it did with such ostentatious home run numbers. Yet as power stats declined and the problem seemed in retreat, the issue faded and fans seemed ready to move on. Hall of Fame elections remain a future obstacle, but otherwise the game did not seem to suffer in attendance, television ratings, or advertiser support. Baseball took a black eye, for sure, one
of the worst in its history. But the basic game on the field continued to hold the fans.

THE SUCCESS OF Ichiro Suzuki with the Seattle Mariners, who entered the major leagues in 2001, had shown major league clubs that position players from Japan were ready to compete in the majors and achieve All-Star-level success. Ichiro had been MVP and Rookie of the Year in 2001, banging out 242 hits. Following the 2002 season, the Yankees signed Hideki Matsui, the premier power hitter in Japanese baseball.

Matsui, nicknamed “Godzilla,” played ten seasons for the Yomiuri Giants, “the Yankees of Japan,” and in 2002 was the Central League’s MVP, hitting .334 with 50 home runs. At six foot two, he towered over his Japanese teammates. He was a black belt in judo, and in a country where honor ranks high as a standard of measurement, he was a national hero. While his English did not rise to high proficiency in the U.S., his dignity was measured in how he carried himself, right from the day he signed a three-year, $21 million contact in January 2003. (He would re-sign as a free agent in 2006 for another four years at $65 million.) The fans took to him at once, particularly after his grand-slam homer on opening day in Yankee Stadium won the game for the Yanks.

Matsui probably should have been Rookie of the Year in 2003, playing in every game and driving in 106 runs, but publicity about not truly being a rookie after ten pro seasons in Japan turned some voters away from him and he finished second. The matter had not come up during Ichiro’s rookie season, nor during pitcher Hideo Nomo’s ROY season with the Dodgers.

Matsui’s respect for the game, and indeed for the Yankee organization, could be seen in an interview he did with a Japanese newspaper some years later. While extolling the honor of playing for the Yankees, he expressed shock that some of his teammates could be seen spitting their gum on the Yankee Stadium field. It was, to him, a dishonor to the historic ballpark.

The foreign media crush surrounding Matsui’s arrival never abated. His every move was reported in the Japanese press. When he surprised his teammates by getting married during spring training of 2008, he good-naturedly sketched a stick-figure drawing of his bride, preserving her anonymity with great humor. In Japan, his father administered a museum bearing his name. And whereas Hideki Irabu had been rude and ill-tempered to the press, Matsui treated those same reporters with friendliness and respect.
He also reached out to the New York media, taking them to dinner each spring training with his interpreter in tow, picking up the check for the large party and providing them with gifts.

“He was a joy,” recalled media-relations director Rick Cerrone. “He was the anti-Irabu as far as the Japanese media was concerned. We had some sixty Japanese media to accommodate in spring training, and a large contingent following his every move. It was sometimes a larger group than New York media. And he was always great with them all.”

Generally the team’s left fielder, he filled in capably in center when needed, and ran his consecutive-game streak, covering Japan and the U.S., to 1,768 before fracturing his left wrist diving for a fly ball in 2006. The 518 consecutive games he played in the U.S. to start his career was a major league record, and it was the longest playing streak by a Yankee since Lou Gehrig’s.

The Yankees also signed a four-year deal with Cuban exile José Contreras in 2003, one that didn’t work out as well. Although he was 7–2, 3.30 as a starter, he made four visits to the disabled list and didn’t provide the excitement that El Duque brought. After two seasons, Contreras moved on and achieved greater success with the White Sox.

In their centennial season of 2003, the starting staff, while old, was strong. Clemens and Wells, both forty, were 17–9 and 15–7 respectively. Mussina, thirty-four, was 17–8, and Pettitte, thirty-one, was 21–8. The Yanks won 101 games to capture their sixth straight division title. On June 13, Clemens won his 300th game before a rain-soaked crowd at Yankee Stadium, beating the Cardinals in an interleague game. The game featured the oddity of his also recording his 4,000th strikeout in the process. The Cardinals’ Tino Martinez was about to bat for the first time as a Yankee Stadium visitor, but the applause for Clemens’s accomplishment overshadowed the Martinez at-bat. Not to be deterred, the fans made sure that Tino got his standing ovation in his next at-bat—a “makeup” ovation.

The Yankee players gave Clemens a Hummer as a gift for his 300th win.

Another oddity during the season was a no-hitter thrown by six Houston pitchers on June 11 against the Yankees, as Roy Oswalt, Peter Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner hurled the first no-hitter against the Yankees since Wilhelm in 1958. The no-hitter “by committee” was necessitated by a strained groin muscle suffered by Oswalt in the second inning.

On June 3, with the team in Cincinnati, the Yankees named Jeter captain,
a position vacant since Mattingly’s retirement. It felt like a natural transition from untitled team leader. This followed a mild controversy from the previous December in which Steinbrenner had questioned Jeter’s lifestyle, wondering whether the gossip columnists had it right about his being seen “on the town” so frequently. “When I read in the paper that he’s out until 3 A.M. in New York City going to a birthday party, I won’t lie. That doesn’t sit well with me,” said the Boss to Wayne Coffey of the
Daily News.

Not only did they patch up the misunderstanding, but they got a clever television commercial out of it for Visa credit cards, which concluded with both of them being in a conga line at a nightclub.

(The Boss’s oldest son, Hank, reprised this theme in 2011 when he said, “I think maybe they celebrated too much last year. Some of the players, too busy building mansions and doing other things, and not concentrating on winning.” The reference was clearly to Jeter, who had just concluded the construction of a thirty-thousand-square-foot mansion on Davis Island in Tampa, known locally as “St. Jetersburg.”)

AT THE JULY 31 trading deadline for the 2003 season, the Yankees decided to trade two players and cash to Cincinnati for third baseman Aaron Boone, a third-generation major leaguer whose father Bob and grandfather Ray had preceded him. (His brother Bret was also in the majors.) Ventura was traded to the Dodgers on the same day, and Boone would handle the position for the remainder of the season.

After winning a sixth straight division title, the Yanks lost the first game of the Division Series to Minnesota, but came back behind Pettitte, Clemens, and Wells to win the next three, Matsui’s two-run homer in the Clemens game providing the margin of victory.

Then came another Yankee–Red Sox showdown in the ALCS, one that would prove among the most memorable. The series, which would ultimately go to seven games, was marked by a bitter fight in the third game in which Pedro Martinez shoved Yankee coach Don Zimmer to the ground. While it was hard to emerge with any sympathy for Martinez with a seventy-two-year-old man lying on the ground, Zimmer admitted later that “it all happened so fast, I didn’t have time to realize what a fool I’d made of myself.”

Martinez had given up a two-run double to Matsui and then hit the Yanks’ Karim Garcia with a pitch that many people thought was intentional.
Then he began pointing at his head and yelling at Posada, as though to suggest that Jorge was next to go down.

When Clemens threw high and tight to Manny Ramirez in the last of the fourth, both benches emptied. This is when Zimmer charged onto the field in search of Martinez. All Pedro could do was to shove him aside in self-defense.

It was thought best to get Zimmer to a hospital for precautionary X-rays, so there was Zimmer, being hauled out of Fenway Park on a stretcher, the latest drama in the Yankee–Red Sox wars.

Martinez tried to apologize the next day, but Zimmer said, “What does he have to apologize for? I was the guy who charged him and threw the punch!”

In game seven, the Yanks scored three times in the eighth to create a 5–5 tie, allowing a massive sigh of relief from the full house in Yankee Stadium. Many felt that Red Sox manager Grady Little had gone too deep into the game with Martinez, and the game-tying hit was a two-run double by Posada that finally drove Pedro out. (Little was fired by the Red Sox after the season.)

During that inning, Boone, who had been benched, ran for Ruben Sierra, then took over at third for Enrique Wilson.

Rivera set down the Sox in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, a rare three-inning stint. Now the Yankees came up to face Tim Wakefield in the last of the eleventh, with Boone to lead off with his first at-bat of the night. It was 12:16 A.M. Bret Boone was a Fox broadcaster, watching his brother come to the plate. Aaron had gone 2-for-16 in the series and had six homers in 54 games during the season.

Boone swung at Wakefield’s first pitch—and it was into the left-field seats for a pennant-winning home run, reversing a game in which Boston had been just five outs from going to the World Series.

“It was the greatest moment I’ve been here for,” said Brian Cashman more than seven years later.

Boone’s unlikely heroism sealed his place in Yankee history, reviving memories of Chris Chambliss and Bucky Dent. It brought the Yankees their thirty-ninth American League pennant, and sent them into the World Series against the surprising Florida Marlins.

As with most things Yankee-Boston, anything that followed felt anticlimactic. Beating the Red Sox felt like winning the World Series. But that wasn’t how the rules worked. And Florida, like Arizona two years before, would leave the Yanks with a pennant, but not a world championship. Up
three games to two and playing at a hushed Yankee Stadium, hosting its one hundredth World Series game, Josh Beckett topped Pettitte 2–0 with a complete-game triumph, bringing the Marlins a second world championship in just eleven years in the league. The Marlins hit only .232 in the six games and were outscored by the Yankees, but there would be no seventh game for the Yankees to recover.

That would be Joe Torre’s last trip to the World Series as a Yankee. Zimmer, his relationship with Steinbrenner deteriorating since his interim managing stint in 1999, resigned. A lot of people thought his pairing with Torre in the Yankee dugout was an important ingredient to the Yankee success in the nineties and beyond. He didn’t miss a thing.

It was also thought to be Clemens’s farewell to the game, and he did nothing to discourage talk of his retirement. He accepted standing ovations in his last starts throughout the majors, and even got one from the Marlin players after departing game four, trailing 3–1, in what was believed to be his last time on the mound. Even the fans in Boston, known to despise him, had begrudgingly stood and cheered him in his “final” Fenway Park start during the LCS.

IN DECEMBER 2003, George Steinbrenner collapsed while attending the funeral of his friend Otto Graham, the great Cleveland Brown quarterback. While he recovered quickly, to many it was a milestone, signifying the start of a gradual health decline. His outbursts about performances would be less frequent. His availability to the media became more limited. An outside spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, was often the one who issued responses when requests were made. Newspapers took to assigning reporters just to follow Steinbrenner out of the stadium after games, hoping to catch a newsworthy remark. But he could no longer be counted on to be at home games or, in fact, at owners’ meetings. His son-in-law, Steve Swindal, assumed a higher profile and was designated by Steinbrenner as his ultimate successor. (Unfortunately, a split from Jennifer Steinbrenner derailed those plans.)