The Yankee Years Part 17

"You're looking in," Millar said of his approach, "and the thing is sometimes when you're aggressive at the plate in an area like that, your hitter's instincts will be to lay off. Whereas sometimes when you think you have to cover too much of the plate you start chasing more. I was just actually looking for one pitch. I was looking dead red and in. When you're facing Mariano you just hope he's not hitting his spots and you might have a chance. He's definitely tougher against lefties. He's not blowing up bats against righties that he does to lefties."

Francona sent in Roberts to run for Millar. Roberts was on his own, meaning he was free to attempt to steal second base whenever he thought he could get the bag. Roberts, however, was chilled, stiff and a bit jittery from sitting out the game for nine innings. Fenway Park, built in 1912, has no adequate area for someone to fully prepare himself for pinch-running on a cool night. Roberts had done the best he could, running in the narrow, short, wet concrete hallway that leads from the Red Sox dugout to a stairwell that winds to the clubhouse. When Roberts reached first base he had no intention of stealing second base on the first pitch; on September 17 he had waited until the third pitch.

Rivera made a pickoff throw to first base. Roberts got back easily. Then Rivera threw over again, and this time the play was a little closer. And then Rivera threw over for a third time, and this time it was closer still. Something unintended and important had happened with that sequence of three consecutive throws to first base: Roberts was now warm and his legs were loose. Rivera had done him a favor. Roberts now was fully immersed in the flow of the game. His plan had changed. He made up his mind to steal on the first pitch.

There was no fourth pickoff attempt. Rivera threw home with a pitch to the batter, Mueller. Roberts ran. The pitch was a ball. Jorge Posada, with a quick release, loosed a strong, accurate throw to second base. Jeter caught it, very close to the bag, and put a tag on Roberts. But it was too late. Roberts reached the base barely before Jeter applied the tag. The Red Sox had the tying run in scoring position with no outs.

Mueller was a .375 career regular-season hitter off Rivera, with three hits, including a walkoff homer July 24, 2004, in eight at-bats. Mueller took the next pitch for a strike, evening the count at 1-and-1.

"I give t.i.to a lot of credit for not bunting," Epstein said. "Back then Mariano really didn't use his sinker away to lefties. So if Bill Mueller makes an out, it's likely to be a groundball to the right side that gets him over anyway."

On the next offering from Rivera, Mueller grounded a hard single over the mound, over the second-base area and into center field.

Roberts came bounding home with the tying run. The Red Sox were alive.

What were the odds? Through 2004 in his regular season career, Rivera had faced 231 lefthanded hitters with a one-run lead in the ninth inning. In only 10 such cases did Rivera blow the lead. Mueller was the only batter responsible for two of those failures: a single on May 28, 2003, and his walkoff home run three months earlier.

It was all so improbable. There was only a 3.6 percent chance Rivera would walk the lead-off batter in the ninth with a one-run lead. There was only a 4.3 percent chance he would lose such a lead while facing a lefthanded batter. And yet both of those occurrences, like the two longest shots in a daily double, had come through and paid off for the Red Sox. There was still a long way to go to get there, but was it somehow possible that even that longest of long shots, the 0.85 percent chance that a pro sports team could come back from being down three games to none, was suddenly in play?

"You start feeling it's possible after the walk," Millar said, "but the biggest at-bat of the whole thing was by Billy Mueller. You hear about the walk. You hear about the stolen base, but who drove him in? Billy Mueller got a single to drive in the son of a b.i.t.c.h. Then you hear about Ortiz's walkoff off Quantrill and Ortiz's at-bat against Loaiza, but Billy Mueller had the greatest at-bat of the postseason."

The Yankees would still have chances to win the game, getting four at-bats with the go-ahead run in scoring position in the 11th and 12th innings. Every one of those at-bats ended in failure, by Rodriguez (line-out), Williams (fly-out), Clark (fly-out) and Cairo (strikeout).

Gordon, pressed into duty, gave Torre two shutout innings. Paul Quantrill, the Yankees' fifth pitcher, started the 12th. Ramirez greeted him with a single. Ortiz ended the long night with a walkoff home run.

"Everything flipped with that game," Millar said. "One hundred percent. I said that before the game."

The Yankees had not heeded Millar's warning. They had let the idiots win Game 4.

"I am very uncomfortable at that point," Torre said. "I mean, everybody else feels better than I do. We still have a three games to one lead. But the fact is we had our closer on the mound and we let them breathe."

The Yankees were in position to win Game 5, too. Trailing 2-1 in the sixth against Martinez, Jeter swatted a three-run double, yet another game-changing play in his long history of clutch postseason moments. But somehow, with multiple chances, the Yankees never scored again over what would be eight more agonizing innings. A series of bad breaks and bad at-bats began that same sixth inning, when the Yankees reloaded the bases after Jeter's double. With two outs, Hideki Matsui drilled a line drive into right field. Nixon, fighting the encroaching twilight, somehow found the ball and caught it for the third out.

"If that ball isn't caught, it opens up the game," Torre said. "It's over. Of course, when anything happens like that, I think it's a bad sign, because you never have enough runs."

The Yankees looked as if they would add to that 4-2 lead in the eighth inning, too. Cairo led off with a double against reliever Mike Timlin. Torre ordered Jeter to bunt him to third base to give Rodriguez a shot at bringing home a big insurance run. Again, the Red Sox had no fear pitching to Rodriguez with a base open, and Timlin rewarded their confidence. Timlin fanned Rodriguez on five pitches.

"Timlin just blew him away, basically," Torre said. "That to me stood out more than anything. It was not being able to get that third run."

Sheffield walked after Rodriguez's whiff, then Matsui lined out again, this time to left field, to end the threat.

Still, the Yankees had a two-run lead with six outs to go to end the series. What were the odds they could blow that? Among the 766 postseason games in best-of-seven series to that point, road teams with a two-run lead with six outs to go were 67-10, representing an 87 percent success rate. The Yankees still held a firm grip on the series. The game was in the hands of Gordon, who had pitched to one batter in the seventh, getting a double play. Gordon had been excitable all series, so unable to calm his anxieties that he had been throwing up in the Yankees bullpen before coming into the game.

"Flash always got very excited in the bullpen," said Borzello, the bullpen catcher. "There was nothing different about that game versus any other. Flash is high-strung and cares a lot. I don't think it's fear. I think it's more just the anxiety of not being out there yet. This moment is coming, and he knows it's there, and he gets anxious. I think he just reacts to that. I don't think he's scared. He's not afraid of anything, and he wants the ball, and he wants to win. People want to paint that as he was scared. I don't see that at all."

Gordon coughed up more than his lunch. His second pitch of the eighth inning was hammered by Ortiz for a home run. Now it was 4-3. Gordon then managed to get two swinging strikes on Millar, but then threw four consecutive b.a.l.l.s to put the tying run on first base with no outs. To complete the symmetry of another key walk by Millar, Roberts replaced him as a pinch runner. Gordon fell behind Nixon, 3-and-1, and then Nixon slashed a single up the middle. Roberts scooted to third base. Gordon had faced three batters in the eighth inning with a two-run lead and retired none of them, going home run, walk, single. Torre brought in Rivera in what technically would be recorded as a blown save, but Rivera did well to get out of the jam-first and third, no outs-with only one run scoring a sacrifice fly by Varitek.

"It's a blown save, but it certainly wasn't his fault," Torre said. "Tom Gordon, for whatever reason, was a mess out there."

The Yankees would never lead again in the series. They did nearly win it in the ninth when Clark smashed a two-out hit into the right-field corner that appeared would score Ruben Sierra from first base. But the ball hopped into the stands for a ground rule double, and Sierra was ordered stopped at third base, whence he stayed when Cairo lofted a foul pop-up for the third out. It was another bad sign for the Yankees.

They kept wasting chances in extra innings, too. In the 11th inning, with a runner at second base, Jeter lined out and Rodriguez flied out. In the 13th, Sierra struck out with runners at second and third. The longer the game went on, the tighter the Yankees looked. In extra innings they went 2-for-18 against four Boston relievers while striking out in half of those at-bats.

In the 14th inning, Torre had Loaiza, his seventh pitcher, on the mound for his third inning of work. Loaiza walked Damon with one out. He walked Ramirez with two outs. Then, on the tenth pitch of the at-bat and the 471st pitch of the game-which came five hours and 49 minutes after the first one-Ortiz smacked a base hit up the middle to send home Damon with the winning run.

The Yankees were stunned. They led the series three games to two but to everyone involved now it felt as if they were chasing Boston. They had played two games at Fenway that lasted a total of 10 hours, 51 minutes, two games in which they held leads in the eighth and ninth innings that statistically gave them win probabilities of 87.5 and 87 percent-and somehow they had managed to lose both of them. "It was draining," Torre said. The Yankees were going home to Yankee Stadium for Game 6, and their mission had changed, becoming psychologically more heavy and complicated. They were no longer trying to win the series. They were trying not to blow it.

The Yankees had Lieber to face Schilling in Game 6. Unbeknownst to the Yankees, Schilling had undergone an unprecedented medical procedure to keep the torn tendon sheath in his ankle from flapping open, a temporary suturing of the sheath that had been tried as an experiment on a cadaver. No one was sure if the suturing would hold up. Indeed, even as Schilling started to warm in the bullpen, blood started oozing from the area of the incision and through his white sanitary sock. There was some speculation that the Yankees would test Schilling's mobility early in the game by bunting on him. But Torre, unaware of the true extent of the injury, spoke to his team before the game about taking the same approach they always did against Schilling.

"I basically said, 'I don't believe this whole injury aspect of it,' Torre said. " 'You go out there and play your game.' We had pretty good success against him. So I didn't want to do anything different. 'Let's make him make the adjustment.'

"We just had to go play the game. And I just tried to add perspective, that we're home and that we have a 3-2 lead. But it's very difficult when you lose a couple of games. You sort of lose your footing."

The Red Sox, meanwhile, only grew bolder and looser with each win. Millar decided before the game that the team would not take batting practice on the field before Game 6.

"It was raining," Millar said. "It was like 47 degrees. They always play Yankeeography Yankeeography in New York on the videoboard. As a visiting player, you see that they get music to hit to and when we come up we get Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle all the time." in New York on the videoboard. As a visiting player, you see that they get music to hit to and when we come up we get Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle all the time."

Millar walked into the office of Francona.

"We're not hitting on the field today, Skip," Millar said. "We're not falling for the Yankeeography Yankeeography c.r.a.p." c.r.a.p."

Francona barely looked up from his desk.

"Whatever you guys want," the manager replied.

The idiots were running the asylum.

As Millar walked out of the office, something caught his eye. "A big bottle of Jack Daniel's," he said. Millar got an idea. The Red Sox would all drink a pregame toast for good luck. He started pouring shots for guys into paper cups. Two days earlier the Red Sox were stuck at the bottom of a dark well from which no baseball team ever had recovered: trailing a best-of-seven series three games to none. And now here they were in Yankee Stadium, essentially flipping the finger at Yankee history as presented in Yankeeography Yankeeography hagiology, and lifting paper-cup shots of whiskey to toast themselves and their audacity. hagiology, and lifting paper-cup shots of whiskey to toast themselves and their audacity.

"It was more of a joke, more just messing around," Millar said. "It's not like we got drunk. That's what I got heat for, people thinking we got hammered. We did a toast. The next thing you know, we won."

Schilling, on one good ankle and one gruesome one, was spectacular. This game was the very reason why Epstein had recruited him over Thanksgiving dinner. Schilling fired seven strong innings in which he allowed only one run, and that was a home run by Williams in his last inning, and permitted just four hits and no walks. The Yankees never did bunt on the man with the b.l.o.o.d.y sock. Boston won, 4-2, scoring all of its runs in the fourth inning, three of them on a two-strike, two-out, opposite field home run by Mark Bellhorn against Lieber.

"We had a little role reversal with Boston," Giambi said. "Until they got Schilling to go with Pedro, we could beat them. Then once they had that extra guy, that's what turned the table for them. That's where they turned the tide on us."

The series was tied. The Yankees had the look of one of those cadavers that made possible the procedure on Schilling's ankle. Torre had a huge problem as soon as Game 6 ended: he still did not know who was going to pitch for the Yankees in Game 7. The Yankees' lack of reliable starting pitching had come to a head. Over the previous winter the Angels had signed Bartolo Colon, the Astros had signed Pett.i.tte, the Red Sox had stolen Schilling out from under the Yankees, and the Yankees had lost Clemens, Pett.i.tte and Wells and replaced them with . . . Brown, Vazquez, Lieber, Hernandez and Loaiza. Mussina and Lieber were not available because they had pitched Games 5 and 6. Torre had no good options.

Hernandez wasn't an option at all. El Duque had told Stottlemyre he was not available on two days of rest after throwing 95 pitches in Game 4. (Lowe, his opposing starter who threw 88 pitches in that same game, was Boston's pick to start Game 7.) Loaiza wasn't an option, either. He had only one day of rest after throwing 59 pitches out of the bullpen in Game 5.

Vazquez had three days of rest after throwing 96 pitches in less than five innings in his shaky relief outing in Game 3. Torre could not trust him. The Yankees thought Vazquez, who turned 28 that summer, would be exactly the kind of young gun their staff needed. He did look the part for half of a season, going 10-5 with a 3.56 ERA and earning Torre's selection for the All-Star Game. But mysteriously, and with no apparent injury, Vazquez became completely unreliable. He went 4-5 with a 6.92 ERA in the second half of the season.

"The biggest shock for me was Vazquez," Torre said. "He pitches Opening Day, I picked him for the All-Star Game, and it was ridiculous where he went after that. He was a huge pitcher for us, because all of a sudden we were getting younger. I remember Cash said to me, 'I can get Randy Johnson from Arizona, but they want Vazquez.' I said, 'I wouldn't make that deal.' That's what I thought of him early on. Later on, after the season, you could go ahead and give him up."

So Vazquez really wasn't an option to inspire any confidence. That left Kevin Brown, the 39-year-old pitcher with the bad back, the carrier of bad karma, and the guy who looked hurt and ineffective in Game 3 in only his fourth game since breaking his left hand in a childish fit of anger. Were the Yankees really going to trust Game 7 to Brown? Not even Torre was sure of that. The Yankees were never sure of his brittle physical condition. As soon as Game 6 ended, Torre went looking for Brown in the clubhouse. He found him in the players' lounge off the main clubhouse. Brown was sitting at a table, just past the bar area, with his back to the door of the clubhouse. Torre sat down in a chair across from him, with his back to the wall. Stottlemyre pulled up a chair, too. Other players were milling about.

"I was just trying to make a decision," Torre said. "We're trying to keep from choking to death at that point. Because Lieber pitched pretty well but he gave up the three-run homer to Bellhorn and that was the difference in the game. Everybody was as tight as a drum, which was understandable, because we had lost three games in a row."

Torre looked Brown in the eye and said, "You tell me: Can you pitch tomorrow? I don't need a hero. I need somebody who can do the job."

It was virtually the same speech Torre gave to a worn-down Clemens in the training room before Game 5 of the 2001 Division Series. Clemens a.s.sured Torre he could do it that night, and gave him five good innings.

"That's basically what I was hoping for from Brown, something to sort of settle the game," Torre said. "But he was so unlike anything I thought he was supposed to be. I watched him pitch in Texas and his s.h.i.+t was so good . . . But he was never satisfied with his stuff. He had issues. It was sad."

Torre continued with Brown.

"I need a pitcher tomorrow," he said. "You're one of my choices. I'm not going to give you the ball unless you understand what we need to do here. You need to look at me and tell me."

"I'll take the ball," Brown said.

Said Torre, "He gave me a positive response. I would have given it to Vazquez if I sensed it was something like, 'Well, if you want me to . . .' I didn't get, 'If you want me to.' To me, he was willing to take on the responsibility."

The Yankees' season, and the possibility of warding off the greatest collapse of all time, had come down to this: they were giving the ball to Kevin Brown, a guy with a bad back, and a guy his teammates did not particularly trust, understand or like.

"I thought, It's over," Borzello said. "It's over because Kevin Brown had no chance at all and neither does Javier Vazquez or anybody else. It's over. I remember standing in the outfield with Mussina and a couple of other guys during batting practice and we were just talking about it. 'We have no chance. There's just no chance of winning this game. We lost the series.' I remember that. I remember just standing in the outfield in Game 7 like we had already lost.

"People didn't trust Brown. He was never part of the team, and now our hopes were on him. We let it get to that point. And there's no way we're going to be able to survive. We had our shots. We had three games to do it and now it's come to this. We deserve to lose. I mean, of all people . . . Kevin Brown. Some guys hated him. Guys just didn't understand him. He always had something wrong, his back, this or that."

Said Mussina, recalling the team's feeling before Game 7, "We're finished. That was the feeling after Game 6. As soon as Game 6 ended."

There were no more Andy Pett.i.ttes or David Wellses or David Cones to turn to at a time like this. The 2004 Yankees had an entirely different DNA from the champions.h.i.+p Yankee teams. Starting with the trade for A-Rod and his need to be needed, continuing with Lofton in spring training fretting over the All-Star ballot, Contreras and Vazquez being unable to pitch in New York, Sheffield moping for two months because he wasn't sure his manager wanted him, Giambi becoming a nonfactor because of his tumor and BALCO connection, and Brown, the broken-down lone wolf on whose cranky back rested all of the Yankees' hopes . . . The core of trust that had served the Yankees so well was now diminished by an influx of outside stars who brought their individual needs and anxieties into the equation.

"It goes back to David Cone," Borzello said. "David Cone never, ever would tell you anything was wrong with him. I remember charting a game, and the first three pitches of the game were 78 miles an hour. I thought they were splitters. And after the game-he went five innings, and he won the game-I walked over to him. I said, 'Coney, you were throwing 78 to 82, tops, with your fastball. Do you want me to hand this chart in?'

"Now this was before they started putting up velocities on the stadium scoreboards, so I'm the only one who knew how hard he was throwing. It wasn't on TV. It wasn't in the stadium. And he goes, 'Really? Yeah, I really didn't have much, did I?' I go, 'You didn't have much?' He goes, 'You might want to b.u.mp it up so you don't scare anybody.'

"He never thought he couldn't win the game. And Kevin Brown was not that. It was, 'If I wasn't throwing 98 I can't win.' And guys didn't like that. It's a lack of compet.i.tiveness."

Torre knew his team was tight before Game 7, so he called a quick meeting in the clubhouse. He tried to relax his players by staying upbeat and asking other people to speak, including Yogi Berra and Hideki Matsui, who was always good for a laugh when he would end meetings in his thick j.a.panese accent with one of the few English phrases he had mastered: "Let's kick their f.u.c.kin' a.s.s!"

Said Torre, "There is a little uneasiness at that point, and you'd like to bring a little levity into it. I was just trying to lighten the mood at that point. I just had a sense that Kevin Brown really wasn't a good sale in the clubhouse."

Naturally, the idiots on the other side of the field were, if possible, even looser than the game before. Lowe, the starting pitcher, was so loose that only then did he realize he had left his spikes back in Boston. Lou Cucuzza, the visiting clubhouse manager at Yankee Stadium, had to call a local sporting goods store to find spikes for Boston's Game 7 starting pitcher.

"We left our hotel rooms and all I said before we left was, 'Today we have a chance to shock the world,' " Millar said. "It's never been done. We were down 0-3. We were down in Game 4. We were down in Game 5. 'Today we have a chance to shock the world!' When we left our hotel rooms and checked out we knew we were going back to Boston that night after a chance to shock the world and that was the truth. How many times can you say that in your lifetime? The world is watching this game. The world knows the ramifications. That group, that team, changed the Red Sox franchise.

"Teams win champions.h.i.+ps. Not players. Our team was just too tight-sticking together, grinding things out. And that's what I try to stress to this day: teams win champions.h.i.+ps. Not salaries. Not looks. Not players. Teams."

The Red Sox had become more like the champions.h.i.+p Yankees than the Yankees-except, of course, for the long hair, beards, irreverence and shots of whiskey. For Game 7 they stuck to Millar's Game 6 pregame preparation: no batting practice on the field, no Yankeeography, Yankeeography, but shots of Jack Daniel's all around. but shots of Jack Daniel's all around.

Game 7 was a blowout. It was over by the second inning. Brown was as bad as the Yankees feared. He faced nine batters and retired only three of them. Ortiz hit a two-run home run in the first inning. The Red Sox loaded the bases in the second inning with a single and two walks, prompting Torre to replace Brown with Vazquez. Damon slammed Vazquez's first pitch for a grand slam. It was 6-0 before the Yankees even had a base runner or a chance to get their fourth batter to the plate.

"Looking back, he wasn't very good," Torre said of Brown, who had a 21.60 ERA in the ALCS. "It's the old thing about pitching hurt or pitching stupid. Pitching hurt, or playing hurt, is when you can go out there and still get the job done. Playing stupid is when you can't get the job done. Now you're letting everybody down."

The final score was 10-3. The rise of the Red Sox was complete. They had wiped out all of the ground the Yankees established over Boston as the superior team from 1996 through 2003. The Red Sox, better than any other franchise, had exploited the explosion of information and revenues that had changed the baseball landscape since the Yankees were winning t.i.tles. Most of the key players in the key moments of the 2004 ALCS were obtained as the Red Sox rode the cutting edge of player evaluation: Ortiz, Millar, Mueller, Roberts . . . all of them were obtained cheaply and without much compet.i.tion because Boston understood the importance of measuring a player by his ability to get on base rather than the traditional but flawed yardstick of batting average. That advantage would go away as statistical a.n.a.lytical methods became mainstream, a factor in helping to usher in a parity in the industry that also conspired against the Yankees.

The last bit of ground Boston conquered to gain control of baseball's Peloponnesian War was represented by Schilling, the ace they squired out from under the Yankees while the turkey and stuffing were cooking. Torre always maintained that the foundation to the Yankees' champions.h.i.+p years was pitching, particularly starting pitcher. While the Yankees lost their way on making evaluations and acquisitions on starting pitchers, the Red Sox knew Schilling was the last piece to the kind of champions.h.i.+p rotation that the Yankees once flaunted.

"In past seasons, the Red Sox always started out really well," Torre said, "because they had guys who, whether it was a retread or whatever it was, would pitch well early. And then eventually the cream rises to the top and the guys who aren't as good would be exposed. And it really wasn't until they addressed their pitching that they became this force. They always had Pedro, but there was always a way we could get around Pedro. We could just hold them at bay until we could run up his pitch count to get him out of the game. Then we'd win."

The Yankees' superiority stopped dead cold in that 2004 ALCS. The Yankees were saddled not only with the worst collapse in baseball history, but also the insult of having the hated Red Sox spill champagne in their stadium. Torre brought his team together for a brief meeting after the game. He thanked his players for their effort. And when he looked around the room he realized that the Yankees, who once came to know the World Series as an expected extension of their season, were full of players who never had been there before.

"The sad part about this for me," Torre told them, "is the guys in this room that have never been in the World Series. Guys like Tony Clark, one of the cla.s.siest guys I've ever been around."

Said Torre, "Of course, the guy I didn't mention who was in the back of my mind was Don Mattingly. All those years with the Yankees, and he had never been to the World Series."

Torre picked up the telephone in his office and called over to the visiting clubhouse. He congratulated his friend, Francona. He asked to speak to Wakefield, the pitcher who one year earlier was near tears in that same clubhouse after giving up the home run to Aaron Boone. Now Wakefield was going to the World Series. After he hung up the phone, Wakefield said out loud, to no one in particular, "I'll never forget that phone call. That shows so much cla.s.s."

So it was done. The 2004 Yankees were history. They would be remembered for all the wrong reasons. How did it go so wrong? What would most stick with the players about the failure to close out the Red Sox? Mussina thinks about those questions and he thinks about the same man who closed out all those champions.h.i.+ps before Mussina joined the Yankees in 2001.

"We were up 3-0 and Mo came in again with the lead and lost it," Mussina said. "He lost it again. As great as he is, and it's amazing what he does, if you start the evaluation again since I got here, he has accomplished nothing in comparison to what he accomplished the four years before. He blew the World Series in '01. He lost the Boston series. He didn't lose it himself, but we had a chance to win in the ninth and sweep them, and he doesn't do it there.

"I know you look at everything he's done and it's been awesome. I'll admit that. But it hadn't been the same in those couple of years. That's what I remember about the '04 series."

It wasn't long after Game 7 that Torre received a call from George Steinbrenner.

"Boss, I feel bad," Torre told him. "I'm sorry it happened. But you can't lose any sleep over this. I wish I could sit here and tell you I wish I had done something different. I mean, Game 7, we didn't have any options. And I mean, Game 4 you put Mariano Rivera on the mound with a lead in the ninth inning and you lose the game. Game 5, you have a two-run lead with Gordon on the mound and you lose the game. What do you change? You don't change anything."

But deep down, Torre knew Steinbrenner wasn't going to let go so easily of such a painful defeat. Torre's Teflon status as Yankees manager was gone. The lion tamer who somehow could always stick his head into the mouth of the big cat named Steinbrenner and emerge unscathed no longer had the same magic touch. He was on dangerous ground now. From this moment on, each year for him would become more difficult than the last.

"Obviously the embarra.s.sment got to him," Torre said. "There was more after that with him. That's when this whole underground campaign started with me."

The Abyss

If the 2003 World Series defeat to the Marlins caused the Yankees to lose their way in the subsequent off-season, the crus.h.i.+ng 2004 loss to the Red Sox sent them even deeper and more horribly off course, like a s.h.i.+p wandering at sea without any instrumentation. Their response to losing to Schilling and the pitching-fortified Red Sox, the newly crowned champions of baseball, was to seek starting pitching over the winter, even if it meant rejecting a 27-year-old switch-hitting free agent center fielder coming off a 38-homer season, Carlos Beltran, who was willing to take a 20 percent discount to bring his young legs to the Yankees.

The Yankees were fixated on pitching, and this is what they came up with in one 22-day shopping spree they would quickly regret: Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright and Randy Johnson. With that trio joining the creaky and cranky Kevin Brown, his ALCS Game 7 bomb added to his oversized baggage, the Yankees had one of the most physically and emotionally fragile rotations you could possibly put together, even if you tried doing so. Predictably, the Yankees' rotation in 2005 was such a mess that Torre needed 14 starting pitchers to get through the year. Only once before had the Yankees needed to put more starters to work, and that was during wartime, in 1946, when they used 16.

The 2005 Yankees were such a wreck, such a slapdash collection of parts that didn't fit or work, so full of organizational backbiting and clubhouse dysfunction, and another 60 degrees of separation removed from the champions.h.i.+p Yankee teams, that at the end of the year pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre quit and Torre seriously questioned whether he should follow his friend out the door.

"I didn't know if I wanted to come back," Torre said. "That was the first year of my three-year contract. I was prepared to see if they wanted me, and if they didn't, I would find a way to get out of this thing."

The crus.h.i.+ng defeat to the Red Sox brought out the worst in the Yankees: a quick-fix approach to team building, with little regard to the role character played in fitting into New York and in the Yankees clubhouse, and a sort of top-down anger and frustration over not winning the World Series for all of four years. Torre and Steinbrenner virtually stopped speaking to one another that year. The mood around the Yankees had turned so sour that by just the third game of the season-and the first defeat-fans at Yankee Stadium were booing the great and graceful Mariano Rivera. The closer entered that game against the Red Sox with a 3-2 lead and left the mound trailing 6-3. Only one of the five runs scored off him was earned.

"It was one of the only times I took him out of a game in the middle of an inning and the fans booed," Torre said. "That's the one time I was totally upset and shocked by the fan reaction."

Five days later, in Boston's opener, the Yankees stood there watching the Red Sox reap the spoils of war: the presentation of the 2004 world champions.h.i.+p rings. There was much speculation about what the Yankees would do during the ceremony. Would they stay ensconced in their clubhouse? Torre held a brief meeting with his players after batting practice.

"The only thing I'm going to tell you, guys, is I'm not going to make you go out there," Torre said. "But they've had to put up with a lot of s.h.i.+t when we won. And I think we can just show what we're made of by understanding that they earned it. They won. You can't ignore it. So I'm not telling you to go out there. But I'm going out there when they're getting their rings."

Said Torre, "And everybody came out. It was tough. Another one of those trips to the dentist's office. But it's one of those things that the more you think about it, the more uncomfortable it is, but you also have a better understanding. And I always try to nail perspective as a part of things."

The Yankee team that stood in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park that afternoon represented another rung down from the champions.h.i.+p teams. General manager Brian Cashman would later describe this period of decline in the organization as heading toward "an abyss." And if there was a symbol of that impending abyss, it was Pavano. Torre had some inkling, but not a strong one, that Pavano might be a problem when he happened to run into him at a restaurant in West Palm Beach, Florida, over the previous winter. Torre was attending the wedding rehearsal dinner of a nephew. Pavano seemed slightly timid, even socially ill at ease. Torre, having watched players such as Kenny Rogers, Jose Contreras and Javier Vazquez underperform as Yankees because they were uncomfortable in New York, came away with a concern about Pavano, but the hesitation wasn't nearly as strong as the memory of watching Pavano throw nine strong innings against the Yankees in the 2003 World Series.