Pinstripe Empire (79 page)

To some, Torre would come to be considered the best manager in the franchise’s history, surpassing the work of Huggins, McCarthy, and Stengel. Unlike them, he had to beat thirteen, not seven opponents to win the pennant, and he had to get through three rounds of playoffs to win the world championship.

He had to reckon with multinational, multiracial players with huge guaranteed contracts. He had to deal with the second-guessing that went with the emergence of sports talk radio, to be followed by bloggers and the twenty-four-hour news cycle provided by cable television and the Internet. His postgame comments were shown live on TV. And he had that very demanding boss. Neither Huggins, McCarthy, nor Stengel ever experienced any of that.

The Yankee organization established itself as polished and efficient during this era. Marketing and promotional innovations were admired, even the ground crew’s dance performance of “YMCA” as they raked the field before the sixth inning (as suggested by Joe Molloy in 1996, after doing it with Tampa’s ground crew in spring training).

The field was better maintained and achieved a beautiful look under head groundskeeper Danny Cunningham, who succeeded Frankie Albohn in 1994. The removal of the on-deck and fungo hitting circles, the creative alternate mowing patterns, and the painting of the classic NY logo behind home plate, maintained by Dick Kunath and his family, made the field look spectacular. Part of the reason, as well, was the decreasing use of chewing tobacco by players, which used to badly soil the field.

The Yankees were proactive in banning smoking in the stands and tobacco advertising on billboards starting in 1995, years before such things were mandated by law. Then, in an effort to deal with unruly fans, beer sales were cut off after seven innings, and stopped entirely in the bleachers (but restored in the new stadium in 2009).

Bob Sheppard’s PA announcements still had their lordly dignity, but now the scoreboard helped make the game fun for younger fans: an animated subway race, various quizzes and games, and the playing of “Cotton Eye Joe” as a sing-along. Eddie Layton had a great sense of ballpark music, augmented by favorites direct from the pop charts.

Attendance went back over two million in 1996, and by 1999 cracked the three million mark. Just six years later, it hit an unthinkable four million. Ticket prices rose along with payroll, but not horribly, and well below Broadway prices. Box seats rose from $7.50 in 1980 to $12 in 1990 to $35 in 2000. The fans were being rewarded with great teams, and Yankee merchandise was worn all over. It was a very uplifting era in Yankee history, and it all began in 1996 when Torre, Zimmer, and Stottlemyre entered the dugout, when Jeter took over at short, when Rivera moved to the bullpen, when Tampa became the spring training home, and when “YMCA” began playing at the end of the fifth inning.

Universally, the game was undergoing changes. ESPN’s
Baseball Tonight
was a staple for the ardent fan, while the proliferation of online stats and Web sites put information on overload. When blogs and Tweets came along, some players kept “in touch” with their fans with what felt like personal communications. Baseball cards became more high-tech, annual record books faded into online versions, and people could follow games on handheld devices while on the go.

Women continued to attend in growing numbers. “While the success of the team played a big part in this ascent, a combination of other factors was also at play,” said women’s sports historian Ernestine Miller.

Women liked the game for their own enjoyment, but it was also relevant to them in their job, social, and family lives. A big change in traditional attitudes towards what women should and should not like was taking place.

The Yankee brand was expanding and part of the marketing effort was directed at women with the manufacturing of apparel in women’s sizes. Wearing T-shirts, caps, sweatshirts, and jackets with the Yankee logo not only showed support for the team, it was the ultimate fashion statement.

And of course in a society that was becoming increasingly obsessed with athletes, players like Jeter and later Alex Rodriguez attracted legions of adoring women who wanted to know details about their lives that had nothing to do with baseball.

Having won the World Series in ’96, and operating with a big payroll and a win-at-all-costs owner, the Yankees began to find themselves favored to win almost every year. And with the ability to acquire players in midseason to
fill holes, especially free-agents-to-be with demands too high for their teams, their options became fertile with win-now players. The temptation to fix a problem area with an available veteran always made them part of the pennant picks.

The most interesting new face on the ’97 Yankees was their first Japanese player, pitcher Hideki Irabu (his father was American), a right-hander who had put up big strikeout totals in the Japanese Pacific League. As far back as the seventies, the Yankees had tried to create ties with Japan, forming a working relationship with the Nippon Ham Fighters, who installed one of their employees in the Yankee offices to learn the U.S. business style for baseball. Unfortunately, the bond never led to any player signings.

San Diego purchased the rights to Irabu. The signing led to the creation of a “posting system” to better govern the movement of players from Japan to the U.S. Ichiro Suzuki, who went to Seattle in 2001, was the first big star and the first position player affected by this.

Irabu, meanwhile, only wanted to pitch for the Yankees and would not sign with San Diego. Recognizing the futility of trying to persuade him, the Padres finally sent him to the Yankees with infielder Homer Bush for pitcher Rafael Medina, Ruben Rivera, and $3 million. The Yankees gave Irabu a $12.8 million contract for four years.

Dispensing with Ruben Rivera, a cousin of Mariano, was noteworthy in that the highly regarded outfielder, rated the Yankees’ top prospect by
Baseball America
from 1995 to 1997, was falling short of his promise. Rivera would bounce around without success before coming back to the Yanks in spring training of 2002, only to be caught stealing Jeter’s glove and bat from his locker to sell to a sports-memorabilia dealer. The lapse in judgment resulted in his immediate release.

Irabu was less than expected. He did not get along with the huge Japanese media contingent that was assigned to cover him. It wasn’t long before fans started suggesting the name meant “I rob you” in Japanese. Although he would twice be the American League Pitcher of the Month during his three seasons in New York, and although he had a 29–20 record with the Yanks, he was a disappointment. He was 5–4 in 1997 but had a 7.09 ERA. After four starts he went back to the minors, returning weeks later without improvement.

In spring training of 1999, he failed to cover first base before Steinbrenner’s watchful eye and was labeled a “fat pus-y toad” by the Boss. He was pretty much finished in New York after that. He refused to travel to Anaheim
to open the season, reporting instead for the season’s third game in Oakland. In 2011, long retired at forty-two, he hung himself in his Southern California home.

Also new to the starting rotation was big David Wells, a free agent from the Orioles. He won 16 and was tireless on the mound. A big Yankee fan who once wore a game-used Babe Ruth cap on the mound (he had purchased it from a dealer, but was told to remove it after an inning), “Boomer” would be a challenge for Torre, as his renegade lifestyle didn’t always conform to Joe’s designs. Four weeks after he signed, he broke his hand during an “altercation” following his mother’s funeral in San Diego. His mother, “Attitude Annie,” was a Hell’s Angel biker chick. The Yankees were his fifth team and he wound up pitching for nine altogether, but there was a lot to be said for his workhorse abilities and great control.

Martinez had the team’s big bat in ’97, belting 44 homers and driving in 141 runs. He even won the Home Run Derby at the All-Star break, beating Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. in the process. He was only the seventh different Yankee to reach 40 homers in a season.

With Wetteland off to Texas through free agency, the team turned over the closer’s job to Rivera, confident that his spectacular work as a setup man in ’96 would translate.

Still, there is something in the mind and heart of a closer that makes the assignment different, and Rivera had to prove himself. He gave up runs in three of his first seven appearances and had a 4.00 ERA. But he settled in and found his groove, becoming the Mariano Rivera that fans and opponents would come to revere over the next decade and a half: lights out. He finished that season with 43 saves and a 1.88 ERA, 68 strikeouts and 20 walks in 71
⅔
innings. The stats seldom varied, year after year. He was the best closer to ever come along and he did it without the dramatic flamboyance associated with the position.

Each game’s routine was efficient and businesslike. The stretches and the warm-ups in the bullpen. Entering home games to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. But the rest of his “show” was all in his work, breaking bats, inducing weak pop-ups, fielding his position with precision, and calmly walking off after the final out. Hitters knew what to expect, with his fastball setting up his rising cutter, leaving them, lefty or righty, flailing away or making weak contact. He turned games into eight-inning affairs for Yankee opponents. Few players would be as respected by opponents as the deeply religious Rivera, who would also be the last active player to wear number 42.
The number was retired in honor of Jackie Robinson in 1997, except for players who were still wearing it.

“Enter Sandman” was selected by a group of Yankee employees who tested a variety of options after Stadium Operations Director Kirk Randazzo was impressed by Trevor Hoffman’s entrances to “Hell’s Bells” in San Diego at the ’98 World Series. Randazzo “auditioned” six possible selections and the group agreed on “Enter Sandman” after Mike Luzzi brought it in. It was first used in 1999, but Mariano played no part in the selection.

The ’97 Yankees were the wild-card team in the AL. They won 96, four more than in 1996, but were locked in second place all season. They finished two games behind Baltimore with a late-season run of five straight wins and thirteen out of sixteen.

The Yanks took on Cleveland in the ALDS, and led 2–1 after three games. Then in game four at Jacobs Field, the Yanks leading 2–1 in the eighth, Torre brought in Rivera for a five-out save situation. But Sandy Alomar Jr. hit a game-tying homer with the series just four outs from going the Yankees’ way. In the ninth, with the score still tied, Ramiro Mendoza allowed another run, and victory would have to wait another day.

It didn’t work out. In the deciding fifth game, Jaret Wright outdueled Andy Pettitte, the Indians won 4–3, and the Yankees went home, the Alomar homer still vivid in their minds. That would be remembered as the key moment of the series, and one of the few black marks on the career ledger of Rivera.

BRIAN CASHMAN BECAME THE YANKEE general manager on February 3, 1998, following the resignation of Bob Watson. Cashman, just thirty, would be the second-youngest GM in the game’s history, topped only by Tal Smith’s son, Randy, in San Diego. The appointment continued Steinbrenner’s desire to “let the young elephants into the tent,” and in this case also recognized that a change in the position was developing. No longer would the GMs in baseball be men recycled from team to team, operating largely on the gut instinct of veteran scouts. Now they would have to adapt to the emergence of sabermetrics (with Bill James as the guru) and the collection of computer-based data in evaluating talent.

Much of this was outlined in the book
Moneyball
by Michael Lewis, which put its focus on Billy Beane’s business style in Oakland. Cashman, for five years an assistant to Gene Michael and then to Watson, would see his methods “assigned” to the younger GMs in the game, and his relationships were growing as these men built seniority. In Beane, Cashman was able to find someone to take Kenny Rogers off his hands.

Cashman, who grew up in Rockville Centre, New York, and Lexington, Kentucky, played baseball at Catholic University and joined the Yankees in 1986 as an intern in the minor league and scouting department. His father was in the horse-breeding business and knew Steinbrenner through that world.

Three days into his new job, Cashman swung a deal with another young GM, Terry Ryan, and got All-Star Chuck Knoblauch from the Twins to play second base. “Knoblauch was the best leadoff hitter in the game,” said
Cashman, and he had to trade their 1996 number-one draft pick, pitcher Eric Milton, to get him. While Knoblauch’s average dipped to .265, he hit 17 homers, a lot for a second baseman, and he also led the team with 31 steals. The following year he would develop an inexplicable mental block throwing to first, forcing an eventual move to the outfield.

The Rogers trade brought third baseman Scott Brosius to New York, coming off a horrific .203 season after hitting .304 in 1996. No one was quite certain about Brosius, who was originally thought to be a utility player taking Randy Velarde’s role. But Brosius rebounded with a .300/19/98 season in New York and signed a new three-year contract before it was over. He would be an All-Star and win a Gold Glove, three World Series rings, and a World Series MVP Award.

His success made Mike Lowell expendable. Lowell, the team’s Minor League Player of the Year in 1997, would spend the year at Columbus, hitting .304, and then was traded to the Marlins. He went on to a stellar career with Florida and Boston.

THE 1998 SEASON marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of Yankee Stadium, with April 18 to be the actual date of the commemoration. A special logo was designed for the occasion, and many of the gift days on the schedule revolved around the theme.

But on April 13, the date of the fourth home game of the season, a five-hundred pound chunk of concrete and steel—an expansion joint—fell fifty feet onto the loge level, pulverizing seat 7, Box A in Section 22 along the left-field line. Had anyone been sitting there, the result would have been tragic. But the accident occurred at about 3:00 P.M., two hours before the gates opened, and a disaster was averted. While city building inspectors rushed to the scene, the Yankees moved two games, playing one of them against the Angels at Shea Stadium and then shifting their weekend “anniversary” series to Detroit. Not only was the anniversary game not played at home, but the focus on the glorious history of the stadium was removed from the team’s plans. Now the focus would be on Steinbrenner’s growing push to have a new ballpark built.