Pinstripe Empire (84 page)

Late in 2004, Steinbrenner was a guest on YES Network’s
Centerstage
program, with Michael Kay interviewing him. It didn’t go well. The old bombast was gone, and the questions were generally repeated as answers. He never did another such interview again. For a man who had learned to use the press to advance his agenda, to criticize a player or a manager, to chide another owner—it was a big void in the New York papers.

After 2007, Hank, forty-nine and the eldest son, stepped into the lead role, but a year later, acknowledging that Hal “has the head for this,” the family moved Hal into a leadership position. Both Hank and Hal had gone to Culver Military Academy, as their father and sisters Jennifer and Jessica had. Hank, forty-nine, then went to Central Methodist College, and worked in the Yankees’ front office in the eighties, but was generally occupied with management of the family’s Ocala-based horse farm. Hal, thirty-eight, graduated from Williams College (like his dad) and got an MBA from the University of Florida. He served as chairman and CEO of Steinbrenner Hotel Properties.

Publicly, both children continued to defer to their father.

THE OFF-SEASON OF 2003–04 WAS both controversial and momentous.

Andy Pettitte, coming off his 21-victory season and his game-six loss to Beckett, signed a three-year free-agent contract with Houston on December 16. An opportunity to pitch near his hometown of Deer Park, Texas, proved too enticing to refuse.

As soon as he signed, speculation began that Clemens would “unretire” and join him, which he did. The two had a close friendship, a shared workout routine, and a chance to get Houston to its first World Series: The Astros began play in 1962 and had never won a pennant. They finally won in 2005 with Clemens and Pettitte winning 30 games between them.

The Yanks replaced them with Javier Vazquez, whose 4.91 ERA would be a disappointment; Jon Lieber, only slightly better; and the heralded Kevin Brown, who was 10–6 in 22 starts, limited by a bad back. Tom Gordon came aboard as the eighth-inning setup man, a position in which he excelled over two seasons.

Brown had won 197 games over seventeen seasons with five teams. The Yanks got him in a trade with the Dodgers on December 13 and assumed his contract of nearly $16 million a year. He was not, however, a pitcher who was able to adjust to diminishing skills, and his Yankee stay was not a happy one.

The Yanks thought they would have David Wells back, having reached a verbal agreement. The next thing they knew, he signed with San Diego, spurning the Yankees as he had spurned the Diamondbacks two years before in similar circumstances.

“I’m not complaining,” said Cashman. “This can happen when you’re negotiating with David.”

The Yanks also added Gary Sheffield, signing him as a free agent six days after the Brown trade. This was a deal primarily done out of the Tampa office, where Doc Gooden, Sheffield’s uncle, had Steinbrenner’s ear. In New York, Cashman had been pursuing Vladimir Guerrero.

The Braves, for whom Sheffield had produced two strong seasons, wanted him back. He decided to meet with them at Malio’s, a favorite Tampa restaurant of Steinbrenner’s; he wanted the Boss to see him dining with the Braves. His plan worked. Steinbrenner saw him with the Braves, and met with him right afterward. After a couple of tough negotiating sessions (which Sheffield did without an agent), he made a deal.

“The truth was that I wanted to play in New York and nowhere else,” wrote Sheffield later. “I had to get New York out of my system.”

In 2004, he finished second in MVP voting—to Guerrero—with a .290/36/121 season.

IN FEBRUARY 2004, Aaron Boone, the toast of New York, was playing a pickup game of basketball and tore a ligament in his knee. It was a violation of his contract. He’d be out all year.

A lot of other players would invent ways to explain how they had gotten hurt. Not Boone. He called Cashman and told him the truth, knowing he would likely be released.

“He was man enough to admit what happened,” said Cashman. “But I had to do my job.”

Boone left with the distinction of being the first Yankee since Joe DiMaggio to be married to a
Playboy
Playmate of the Month. But now the Yankees needed someone to play third.

On February 16, they swung one of the most dramatic trades in the history of the franchise. They traded Soriano, their talented second baseman, to the Texas Rangers for Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod was already one of the great players in baseball history. He led the league in home runs in each of his three seasons in Texas. With Jeter and Boston’s Nomar Garciaparra, he was considered one of a trio of superstar shortstops that the American League had been blessed with in one era. With the Yankees he would have to move to third base, a move he willingly embraced, ceding short to Jeter.

His salary was another issue. Tom Hicks, the Rangers’ owner, had given him a ten-year deal beginning in 2001 for a colossal $252 million—way more than anyone else was offering. As such, the deal was baffling to observers and seemed well out of line with what was necessary to sign him. Of course, A-Rod had jumped at it.

He later revealed that he used steroids in Texas, attributing it to the pressure the contract brought. He seemed well on the way to breaking Bonds’s career home run record, an event baseball would celebrate to cleanse Bonds out of the record book. The future steroid revelation would complicate that, but to break the record as a Yankee, restoring the career record to Babe Ruth’s team, seemed like a terrific idea.

He had always worn Babe’s number 3, but as that was retired on the Yankees, he would wear 13.

The move was not as great a salary upheaval to the Yankees’ payroll as it might have been. Not only were the Yankees shedding Soriano’s contract, over $5 million in 2004, but the Rangers agreed to pay $67 million of the $179 million remaining on A-Rod’s pact, which left the Yankees giving him about $16 million a year. Miguel Cairo would play second base and earn just $900,000. So they were only “adding” a net $12 million in payroll. This they could do.

BORN IN WASHINGTON HEIGHTS but raised in Miami, Rodriguez soon became the greatest third baseman in Yankee history. His right-handed power dwarfed even that of DiMaggio, who always seemed thwarted by the left-field dimensions of old Yankee Stadium. A 2005 home run by Alex, deep into the old visitors’ bullpen, where the ambulance now parked, was thought to have traveled 487 feet. In the remodeled stadium, this was topped by only five players: Kirk Gibson (500 feet to the top of the right-field bleachers in 1985), Barry Bonds (500 feet into upper deck in right in 2002) Jay Buhner (492 in 1991), Juan Encarnacion (490 in 2001), and Fred McGriff (490 in 1987).

Rodriguez would bring eccentric moments to the field—yelling “Ha!” or “I got it!” to try to get an infielder to drop a pop-up, trying to slap a ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove while racing him to first base in a Yankee-Boston playoff game, and annoying Oakland pitcher Dallas Braden, over whose mound he ran after making an out.

He dated starlets, including Madonna, Kate Hudson, and Cameron Diaz,
and was a gossip-column regular. He did endorsement deals for private jets, but lacked the easy rapport that Jeter always enjoyed with the public.

No one doubted he was a unique talent, but even his friendship with Jeter had soured a bit while he was at Texas, after he told a magazine that Derek wasn’t the guy in the Yankee lineup that people feared. It wasn’t what friends did. Sometimes the on-field camaraderie between them seemed false.

The 2004 season was going to be a test of Torre’s leadership. Good chemistry couldn’t be counted on. It helped that old hero Don Mattingly returned as a coach after eight years away from the game, but the team was still a bit more like the old Yankees for Yankee haters.

Yankee haters, of course, were most in abundance in New England, and the rivalry between the Yanks and the Red Sox would call for both teams to step back and ban vulgar T-shirts and banners that fans brought into both parks. Scuffles in the stands were not uncommon; security was always tightened. Rhythmic, obscene chants were impossible to stop and became a part of the soundtrack for games between the two clubs. The team owners, who certainly enjoyed the sellouts created by the rivalry, didn’t always stand back. In December 2002, Boston CEO Larry Lucchino referred to the Yankees as “the Evil Empire” after they signed José Contreras, a term that had been used by President Reagan in 1983 in reference to the Soviet Union.

Steinbrenner responded to Lucchino’s charge by saying, “That’s how a sick person thinks. I’ve learned this about Lucchino: He’s baseball’s foremost chameleon of all time. He changes colors depending on where he’s standing. He’s been at Baltimore and he deserted them there, and then went out to San Diego, and look at what trouble they’re in out there. When he was in San Diego, he was a big man for the small markets. Now he’s in Boston and he’s for the big markets. He’s not the kind of guy you want to have in your foxhole. He’s running the team behind John Henry’s back. I warned John it would happen, told him, ‘Just be careful.’ He talks out of both sides of his mouth. He has trouble talking out of the front of it.”

THE YANKEES RESPONDED to “Red Sox Nation” by creating “Yankees Universe” in 2006, selling merchandise that benefited pediatric cancer research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. (The Yankees Foundation, a charitable arm formed by Steinbrenner in 1973, benefits projects in the
Yankee Stadium neighborhood. A Yankee fantasy camp in Tampa is among the revenue streams that feeds the foundation.)

THERE HAD BEEN many classic Yankee–Red Sox games over the years, including a 2–0 Yankee loss in a Martinez-Clemens complete-game matchup in 2000 decided by a ninth-inning homer by Trot Nixon.

But perhaps the ultimate matchup came on July 1, 2004, in Yankee Stadium, a tense, back-and-forth contest that went into extra innings. In the twelfth, Nixon lifted one down the left-field line. Jeter, never quitting, dove toward the ball and made the catch as his momentum carried him into the stands. He emerged with a bloodied face and suffered a bruised right cheek and right shoulder. He was taken to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (on the site of old Hilltop Park) for X-rays and received seven stitches.

“I went to the hospital with him,” said Dr. Stuart Hershon. “What you saw on TV—the stoic, matter-of-fact approach, the calm, this-is-how-you-play-the-game attitude—that’s the way he was in the privacy of the trip. There was never a mention of, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have put myself at risk like that.’ He only knew one way to play baseball.”

The Yankees won the game, and Jeter was back in the lineup the next night.

The Yankees opened the 2004 season with two games against Tampa Bay in Tokyo, seen on television in New York at 5:00 A.M. Matsui was the impetus for the games, and he rewarded his faithful Japanese fans (who regularly woke up early in the morning to watch the Yankees on live TV) with a tworun homer in the second game, giving Brown a victory in his Yankee debut.

The Yankees moved into first place to stay on June 1 as Rivera recorded 12 saves in an eighteen-game period. (He had 53 for the season, his career high.) They won 101 for the second straight year, making three straight 100-win seasons for the first time in their history, along with seven straight division titles. They set a new Yankee Stadium attendance record of 3,775,292.

Again it was Minnesota in the ALDS, and again, after losing the opener of the series, the Yankees came back to win three straight, the clincher coming in eleven innings when A-Rod, hitting .421, doubled and scored to provide the winning run.

Now it was again the Red Sox in the ALCS, the two highest-payroll teams in baseball going at each other. (The Yankees, the only team to pay a luxury tax on payroll in the system’s first year, 2003, owed $25 million in 2004,
with the Red Sox owing $3 million and the Angels $927,000. No other teams owed anything.)

Red Sox Nation looked on in anguish as the Yanks won the first three games 10–7, 3–1, and an embarrassing 19–8.

In game four, the potential clincher at Fenway, the Yanks led 4–3 going to the last of the ninth with Rivera on the mound. Kevin Millar led off with a walk, and Dave Roberts, pinch-running, stole second. Bill Mueller singled him home with the tying run, and the teams played on.

In the twelfth, “Big Papi” David Ortiz homered off Paul Quantrill and the Sox would see another day. (Quantrill pitched a Yankee-record 86 games in the regular season.) In game five, Ortiz, who would have 11 RBI in the series, homered in the eighth, and a sacrifice fly off Rivera tied the game at 4–4. Boston won it in the fourteenth when Ortiz singled home Johnny Damon off reliever Esteban Loaiza, working his fourth inning. Three games to two.

In game six, Boston held on to a 4–2 win as Curt Schilling went seven innings despite a torn tendon sheath, resulting in his bleeding through his white sanitary sock.

In game seven, the Red Sox were seeking to become the first team in postseason history to overcome a 3–0 deficit. And they did it, knocking Kevin Brown out of the box in the second inning, pounding him for five earned runs in 1
⅔
innings, and winning 10–3 before a stunned, silent, and early-departing Yankee Stadium crowd. The big blow was a grand slam by Damon. It was certainly one of the most painful losses—both the game and the series—the Yanks had ever endured.

The Red Sox would go on to win the World Series in four straight and to end the Curse of the Bambino after having gone without a world championship since 1918.

WHILE WATCHING GAME ONE of the World Series on TV, opera great Robert Merrill, eighty-seven, a regular national anthem performer for the Yankees since 1969, died.

On the day after Christmas, Stadium organist Eddie Layton died at seventy-nine. He had been a beloved fixture at Yankee Stadium since returning in 1978 (his original run was 1967–70). His successors would be Paul Cartier and Ed Alstrom.

Willie Randolph, a Yankee coach since 1994 and bench coach after Zimmer left, got his long-awaited shot at managing when the Mets hired him
on November 3. His successor was Joe Girardi, who had been a YES Network broadcaster in ’04 following his retirement as an active player. (A year later, Girardi became Manager of the Year with the Florida Marlins.)