Pinstripe Empire (86 page)

A long-sought train station for Westchester and Connecticut commuters would be built, and beginning that very day, construction cranes arrived to begin a task scheduled for completion by opening day 2009.

THE STRUCTURE WOULD rise on top of city-owned land at Macombs Dam and John Mullaly parks, which dated back to 1899, with the current stadium to be torn down and replaced by three smaller diamonds, known together as Heritage Field. (Mullaly, who died in 1914, was known as the “father of Bronx parks.”) In 2010, a new Macombs Dam Park opened atop the new Ruppert Plaza Garage, on the south side of 161st Street, across from the old gate 4.

“We’re just happy that we’re able to do this for the Yankees and happy to do it for you people,” said Steinbrenner at the groundbreaking. “Enjoy the new stadium. I hope it’s wonderful.”

It was a ninety-minute ceremony on a very hot day. Yogi Berra and actor Billy Crystal sat behind him. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor George Pataki, Bronx officials, Commissioner Selig, Steve Swindal, COO Lonn Trost, and team president Randy Levine all spoke. A photo op of hard-hatted dignitaries overturning the first dirt was followed by real excavation as soon as the invited crowd departed. HOK, who had designed the luxury suites in the 1976 stadium, was the architect, and Turner Construction did the building. For the next two seasons, a trip to Yankee Stadium would mean a sighting of the work in progress next door.

THE 2007 SEASON introduced a pair of homegrown pitchers who really stirred attention. Phil Hughes, just twenty, made his Yankee debut on April 26, and although he missed 85 games with a strained hamstring, the
Yankees won all five of his September starts as he positioned himself for a spot in the rotation. He was a first-round pick in the 2004 June draft right out of Foothill High School in Santa Ana, California.

Beefy Joba Chamberlain, a Native American raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, by a single father, was the feel-good story of the year. A product of the University of Nebraska, he was drafted as a starting pitcher in the compensation round of the 2006 draft. But after he went 9–2 in 15 starts for Tampa, Trenton, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, the Yankees called him up on August 7 and put him in the bullpen.

He didn’t allow a run in his first 15
⅔
innings, the longest Yankee streak for a newcomer since Slow Joe Doyle of the Highlanders in 1906. He finished with a 0.38 ERA in 19 appearances (just one earned run), with 34 strikeouts in 24 innings. With each big out he dramatically pumped his fist, his motion carrying him toward the first-base line. His wheelchair-bound father, who had been raised on the Winnebago Indian Reservation near Lincoln, became a fixture at home games, pumping his first in unison. By his fifth appearance, his entry onto the field had the fans howling. It was one of the great debuts in Yankee history, almost a gift from the baseball gods, especially since relief pitching was all new to him. By year’s end, having Joba pitch the eighth and Rivera the ninth had shortened Yankee games to seven innings; if the opponent didn’t have the lead by then, it was over.

For a mentor, Chamberlain and Hughes found themselves an unlikely teammate in forty-four-year-old Roger Clemens, who had pitched three years with Houston and seemingly retired again. But rumors began to swell that he was considering yet another comeback with the Yankees, and on May 6, during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium, he stood up in a luxury suite with a microphone and said, “Thank y’all. Well, they came and got me out of Texas, and, I can tell you it’s a privilege to be back. I’ll be talking to y’all soon.”

The odd moment was accompanied by his signing a deal worth $28 million for the season, but prorated to $18.7 million to cover his time with the team. He debuted on June 9 and went 6–6 in 17 starts. He was a great presence in the clubhouse, and was reunited again with Andy Pettitte (15–9), who also returned to the Yankees after three years in Houston.

The Yankees were not as lucky with another new arrival, Kei Igawa. A star pitcher in Japan, he was thought worthy of a five-year, $20 million contract after the Yankees paid the Hanshin Tigers $26 million for his rights. This was considered a runner-up prize, so to speak, as the Red Sox signed
Daisuke Matsuzaka to a six-year, $51 million contract after paying the Seibu Lions more than $51 million for his rights. Matsuzaka was the better signing, but neither pitcher adapted well to the American game. Igawa was a disaster. Even in 2008, when the Yanks were bringing up everyone with a pulse to fill openings in middle relief, Igawa was relegated to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, which had replaced Columbus as the Yanks’ triple-A farm team in ’07.

Offensively, the season belonged to A-Rod, whose 143 runs scored were the most in baseball in twenty-two years, and who led the league with 54 homers and 156 RBI as he won his second MVP as a Yankee. He hit his 500th career home run on August 4.

ON AUGUST 13, 2007, Phil Rizzuto died in a New Jersey nursing home at the age of eighty-nine. In his final months, Yogi Berra would visit weekly to play bingo with him. Bill White sat with him and held his hand. He loved his canolis until the end. Because his career with the Yankees as a player and a broadcaster lasted from 1941 to 1996, fans born in the 1980s could feel connected to the Yankees of the forties through Rizzuto and would be able to maintain that connection until their old age in the 2070s and beyond. He had a powerful bond with fans, and the fact that he broadcast the ’96 season, and spoke of Jeter, Williams, Posada, Pettitte, and Rivera in his final times on the air, also connected those players to his original teammates.

His 1994 induction speech at the Hall of Fame, at long last, was one of the most charming and memorable ever delivered.

THE 2007 SEASON was the first since 1997 without the American League East title, but the Yankees did manage to take the wild-card spot and make the playoffs for the twelfth time in Joe Torre’s twelve years at the helm. It didn’t come easily. They were 21–29 by the end of May and needed a big finish in September to pull it off. There was talk of Torre’s job being in jeopardy early in the year, but he prevailed and the Yanks took on Cleveland in the Division Series.

All eyes were on A-Rod as the series unfolded. He had gone 3-for-19 in the previous two ALDS, and despite his big numbers the Yanks had not won a World Series since he arrived. Pressure was heavy on him, but he went 4-for-15 and heard boos with each out at Yankee Stadium.

The Indians’ CC Sabathia beat Chien-Ming Wang 12–3 in the opener, and then the Yanks lost game two 2–1 in eleven innings, a game remembered as “the bug game.” In a fluke of nature, swarms of midges attacked humid Jacobs Field in the seventh inning, a situation that would have sent any picnicker running for cover. But the players stayed on the field, interrupted only by Gene Monahan and Steve Donahue doing their best to help with bug spray. It probably made things worse. Everyone was flailing away wildly at the attack.

(In 1939, the Yanks similarly lost a doubleheader to the Red Sox in a futile attempt at fighting off Japanese beetles.)

Chamberlain, on the mound when the bugs arrived, soldiered on, trying to pretend that he wasn’t covered with pests. But his sweat seemed to attract more. In the last of the eighth he gave up the tying run, setting up a chance for the Indians to win, and they did.

“It was my biggest mistake in twelve years as manager,” said Torre. “I should have taken my team off the field.”

The series moved to Yankee Stadium. On the morning of game three,
Bergen Record
columnist Ian O’Connor took a chance and called the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue and asked for George Steinbrenner. This was the Boss’s New York home, as he never had a permanent residence in the city.

After a brief screening process, Steinbrenner was on the phone. He hadn’t done an interview in ages. This would be his last one.

“Hi, Ian.” O’Connor was startled, but he gathered himself and started asking his first of about ten questions, before he heard, “Okay, Ian, you got enough?” and that was the end.

He had enough. Steinbrenner said that he’d likely fire Torre if the Yankees lost the series. “His job is on the line,” he said, giving O’Connor his headline and a story that was picked up everywhere. “I think we’re paying him a lot of money … so I don’t think we’d take him back if we don’t win this series.”

Steinbrenner did not blame Torre for not pulling the team off the field in Cleveland; he blamed Bruce Froemming, who was retiring as an umpire after thirty-seven years of service. “He won’t umpire our games anymore. It was terrible,” he said. “It messed up the whole team. Jeter, all of them.”

Asked whether he had ceded control to his sons Hank and Hal and son-in-law Felix Lopez, who had married his daughter Jessica, he said, “I have full control. I’m doing all right. I’m fine.”

While all of this was going on, Alex Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, was
sending signals that his client, the richest man in the game, would likely opt out of his contract and become a free agent, presumably forcing the Yankees into the bidding at an increased rate. The publicity did not help in getting fans to back off booing A-Rod.

“I think we’ll re-sign him,” Steinbrenner told O’Connor. “I think he realizes New York is the place to be, the place to play.”

Game three saw Clemens, in what really would be his final appearance, give up three runs quickly and Hughes enter in the third. Hughes, Chamberlain, and Rivera allowed one run over the last six innings, while the Yanks came back to win 8–4 to stay alive. But in game four, the Indians scored early on Wang, forcing Mussina into second-inning relief. It was to no avail; the Indians won 6–4. The Yankee Stadium crowd sat quietly as their team was eliminated for the seventh year in a row. Boston would win the World Series again.

In the coming days, attention turned to the rehiring of Joe Torre and the great dilemma of what to do about A-Rod. Hank Steinbrenner said the Yankees wouldn’t negotiate any further with him. (The Yankees would be losing the $21.3 million that Texas was paying him under his original agreement.)

There weren’t a lot of teams left who could pay the kind of money he was looking for, and A-Rod knew it. He would later say that opting out was “a mistake that was handled extremely poorly.

“I made mistakes. I’ve got to look in the mirror. If I had to do it again, I would’ve called Hank from day one and negotiated myself,” he added. He did, indeed, drop Boras as his representative and handled the renewal with the two sons on his own, with assistance from a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

He didn’t do badly at all. On December 13, Rodriguez signed a new ten-year contact for $275 million, which included bonus clauses if he passed Mays, Ruth, Aaron, and Bonds on the career home run list. The new contract to run through 2017, fluctuated year by year, peaking at $32 million in 2009 and 2010.

THE JOE TORRE saga played out quite differently.

Having not won a World Series since 2000, Joe was losing leverage each year. There were supporters in the front office losing patience with him. Although he had the twelve straight playoff seasons under his belt, he also
perennially had the league’s highest payroll, so success was expected. There was some resentment over his increasingly high profile—all the commercials, the magazine covers, the television interviews. The organization prided itself on success being a team effort, meaning the full front office.

In fact, although his popularity remained high, Torre was beginning to disconnect from Cashman, who, having gained full control of player decisions since his 2005 contract, was more and more impressed by the use of computer stats and the insight that they could provide. Cashman was seeing how lineups with the best chance of winning could be produced by computer output. Torre was still going by the gut instincts of a baseball man of nearly a half century.

“People used to think it was okay to smoke, or okay to drink during pregnancy,” said Cashman. “We learn as we go forward.”

Cashman felt the Red Sox were regularly playing better than they had a right to, and he saw in that the use of SABR stat guru Bill James, a Red Sox advisor. He brought in Mike Fishman as his director of quantitative analysis. His assistant general manager, Jean Afterman, was also a strong advocate of the far-reaching information computer stats could reveal. Sometimes Cashman would go to Torre to show him the value of the computer. “Look at this, Joe” he’d say. “We have a better chance against this pitcher with [Wilson] Betemit in the lineup instead of [Andy] Phillips.” But he wouldn’t get very far. Cashman was losing faith. He felt his manager needed to be on the same page he was.

Torre saw a growing divide. “We had a falling-out in spring training,” he told Tom Verducci in his memoir. “I basically challenged him. Then I apologized a few days later, because I really like Cash … I would have really liked to have him trust me.”

Still, it was Cashman who remained his biggest supporter when a group met at Steinbrenner’s home in Tampa to discuss Torre’s future. Cashman saw the public-relations fallout of dropping the enormously popular local hero. Steinbrenner, his sons, his son-in-law, and Randy Levine were ready to move on. But they decided to offer him a $5 million contract—a pay cut—that would still keep him the highest-paid manager, and would include incentives to get him to $8 million if he won the World Series.

Torre was hurt by the offer and asked Cashman if he could talk to the Steinbrenners in person. On October 18 he flew to Florida with Cash, and walked into Steinbrenner’s fourth-floor office at Legends Field. He said he didn’t think he deserved a pay cut.

Hal Steinbrenner said, “I’m sorry you feel this way, but we’d all still like you to stay with the Yankees and work with the network.”

That was the end. By not taking the new offer, and then by holding his own press conference the next day to call the offer an insult, he was making his exit. He felt there was no negotiation intended. The Joe Torre era was over.

Not since Casey Stengel’s 1960 firing had the public felt such a shock. Joe would soon take a job managing the Dodgers, moving to Los Angeles and returning the Dodgers to the postseason. His book with Verducci in 2009 burned a lot of bridges, took serious shots at the Yankees, and called A-Rod “A-Fraud,” which was a tough thing to do to Rodriguez. Torre’s excuse that “he’s called that in the clubhouse all the time” didn’t go over well.