The Yankee Years Part 25

_That night, true to the promise Torre gave Steinbrenner, the Yankees beat Tampa Bay, 12-4, to clinch a postseason berth. Steinbrenner watched the game from a luxury box at Tropicana Field. The final out had the familiar patina of the good old days: Steinbrenner watching, Rivera pitching, Posada catching, Jeter, who had homered in the game, at shortstop and Torre in the dugout. The Yankees, beset by injuries and a malaise that put them in that 21-29 hole, unloosed a wild celebration in the Tropicana Field visiting clubhouse. This was the 29th time that Torre's Yankees earned the privilege of spraying champagne over themselves amid the triumph of clinching a playoff spot or winning a postseason series. But this one was different from all the others. This road to October, Jeter told reporters, "has definitely been the hardest one." Torre obviously felt the same way. He called the team together for a toast in the middle of the clubhouse, and as he began he could not help but think about all the team had been through that season and all that he had been through. When he began to speak he could hardly get the words out.

"I'm proud of each and every one of you guys," Torre said.

He was tearing up. He continued as best he could.

"This one," he said, his voice cracking, "means a lot to me . . ."

He was choking up. He wanted to continue, to tell his players how important this postseason berth meant to him, but he could not speak. All he could do was bow his head and try to gather himself. No words would come. There was a brief, awkward silence in the room as the ballplayers waited to see if Torre could pull himself together. And then an old friend stepped in to save him from the emotions and the awkwardness. Jeter, who had taken part in all 29 of these parties, reached over and pulled the hat off Torre's head and dumped a bottle of champagne on his manager. The room erupted in a big cheer, and the celebration started anew in full force.

Twenty-nine times Torre helped bring the Yankees to this kind of celebration. Twenty-nine times, including at least once every year for 12 consecutive seasons. Twenty-nine times, and yet this one, at the end of a long, painful season, was unlike all the others.

There would never be another.

Attack of the Midges

Major league managers hate the best-of-five-games format of the Division Series. The inferior team has a better chance to beat the superior team in a shorter series than what the best-of-seven League Champions.h.i.+p Series and World Series offer; the smaller the sample, the more havoc that chance can create. Moreover, managers must decide between using three starting pitchers or four, especially if a loss in Game 1 creates the palpable urgency of having to win three out of the next four games. Torre's 2007 Yankees, the 94-win American League wild card entrant, drew the Cleveland Indians, the 96-win AL Central champions, in this best-of-five-game anxiety attack.

The Indians owned the home-field advantage, which meant they would host the first two games, a comforting arrangement for a young team that had not played a playoff game since 2001, had lost all six games it had played against the Yankees that season and had scored 157 fewer runs than New York, or almost a full run fewer per game.

"We have to focus on not playing the Yankees, but playing our best, the best baseball we can play," is how Indians general manager Mark Shapiro remembered his thinking going into that series. "Talent-wise, I think we stack up. But there's a reality to playing in Yankee Stadium. There's a reality to how it affected our team prior to that, and those names. Imposing names."

Most every postseason, Torre would give a motivational speech to his players on the eve of the opening game. This time, as he did with modifying his usual spring training speech at the start of the season, Torre would choose a different tack. His team had grinded so hard just to get to the playoffs-coming back from a losing record 95 games into the season-that Torre felt a different touch was needed than the usual football locker room machismo. Actually, it was a conversation with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick that convinced Torre to keep the mood light. Belichick's Patriots were Torre's Yankees of the NFL, routinely playing to higher expectations than every other franchise. The Patriots were being heavily criticized at the time for what was being called Spygate, the team's illegal use of recording devices to tape the coaching signals of opponents. Belichick told Torre that in those difficult, tense times his instinct was that his team needed to laugh and stay loose, so he brought a comedian into the New England locker room. Torre liked the idea. He called his good friend and Yankees fan, Billy Crystal.

"Can you put a bit together for us that I can show the guys?" Torre asked him.

Crystal agreed, and he quizzed Torre for some information about the players that he could use in his monologue, which he taped, burned to a DVD and sent to Torre in Cleveland. On the workout day before Game 1, Torre gathered his team in the visiting clubhouse at Jacobs Field and popped in the DVD. Suddenly a p.o.r.nographic scene began playing on the monitor. There was nervous laughter. What sort of mistake was this? Had somebody mixed up the DVDs? No. A close-up of Crystal suddenly replaced the p.o.r.nography.

"Now that I've got your attention . . ." Crystal said.

He then launched into a 12-minute comedy segment in which, with the help of fellow comedian Robin Williams, he poked fun at Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Melky Cabrera and others. The players loved it. Crystal turned serious at the end of his bit. He implored the Yankees to make sure they played with an effort that would leave them no regrets. He talked about how lucky they were to have this opportunity and their health. "And there is someone we should all pray for," Crystal said, "because he has not been blessed with the same great health. So before you go out there, when you hit your knees, say a prayer . . . for Carl Pavano!"

The room erupted in laughter.

"Cashman didn't think it was very funny," Torre said. "Cash would have liked a motivational video. I've been in the postseason so often that I can't see the point in bringing up the expectations. You don't need to remind guys. I think I got to the point, whether it was because of my own situation and being criticized, or whether I felt there was a lot of tension in the playoffs anyway based on the expectations, we should keep it light and airy."

_Torre's most serious decision heading into the Division Series was how to deploy his starting pitchers. Chien-Ming w.a.n.g was the unquestioned leader of the staff, having won 19 games for a second straight season, and an obvious choice to start Game 1. He was not your typical ace, though. w.a.n.g was a groundball specialist who did not strike out many batters and, like a parent with a two-year-old at Sunday service, was at the mercy of the unpredictable behavior of his power sinker. Andy Pett.i.tte, Torre's traditional Game 2 security blanket, also was a lock, though he did pitch poorly in September. Roger Clemens would get a start, if only because of his reputation and because of all the money the Yankees were paying him. But Clemens wasn't the warrior the Yankees had known from his first round with the team. He was a rusted battles.h.i.+p. Clemens was 45 years old and had not pitched since September 16 because of a hamstring injury.

Torre's toughest decision was what to do about Game 4. He thought about giving the start to Mike Mussina, who had salvaged something from his awful season by posting a 3.49 ERA in September, and who had beaten the Indians in August in a strong start in which he pitched into the eighth inning. If Torre started Mussina, then he could use Pett.i.tte again on normal rest in Game 5. Under that scenario, Torre would have given the ball in four out of five games to veteran pitchers 35 and older.

"I was thinking about Mussina in Game 4," Torre said. "I thought maybe somebody with breaking stuff, somebody who could change speeds, would be efficient against the Indians. But he really hadn't pitched much and you had to wonder about how sharp he was going to be."

Torre decided to ask Cashman for his preference, "though I already had an idea of where he was going," Torre said. "He said he liked w.a.n.g on short rest in Game 4 instead of Mussina. He said if you go with Mussina, then you've got Pett.i.tte for Game 5 and w.a.n.g doesn't go a second time."

w.a.n.g was the Yankees' best starting pitcher. He also was 10-4 with a 2.75 ERA at Yankee Stadium, where Game 4 would be played. Cashman had no problem making sure w.a.n.g pitched two of the first four games, even if the second one would carry the risk of pitching him on only three days of rest instead of the normal four. Torre agreed with him. w.a.n.g had pitched on three days of rest only once in his 80 major league starts, and that had gone badly, losing 7-2 to Boston without getting out of the fifth inning back in 2005.

As it turned out, w.a.n.g was awful even fully rested for Game 1. In what was one of the worst pitching performances in postseason history, w.a.n.g, who couldn't get his power sinker to stay down on its best behavior, was sh.e.l.lacked for a postseason record-tying eight earned runs in less than five innings of what was a 12-3 Cleveland rout. Only six pitchers previously had allowed eight earned runs in a postseason start, and none of them had allowed as many as the 14 base runners that w.a.n.g did. It was a cla.s.sic example of the dark side of living with w.a.n.g as your ace. If his sinker wasn't acting properly, he had nowhere else to go to get people out with any consistency. He had nothing to make hitters swing and miss.

With just one defeat, the Yankees had come to fully understand the danger of a five-game series. One defeat essentially threw them in a must-win situation in the other team's ballpark. Were they to lose Game 2, they would have to win three consecutive games to win the series. What they needed was for Pett.i.tte to deliver a lead to their lockdown late-game specialists, Chamberlain and Rivera. Pett.i.tte did exactly that, though barely so in a taut pitching duel with Fausto Carmona, Cleveland's 23-year-old 19-game winner. Pett.i.tte handed a 1-0 lead in the seventh inning to Chamberlain, who stranded the two runners Pett.i.tte had left for him. The Yankees felt good about bringing the series back to New York tied, and why not? They had never lost a game that season when they entrusted a lead to Chamblerlain. He went back out for the eighth, with Rivera behind him to pick up the final three outs. Everything was coming together straight off the Yankees' blueprint for winning. Torre was six routine outs away from the first of the seven wins he would need to win the pennant and return the Yankees to the World Series, which most observers considered the minimum requirement for him to ensure he would be back as manager in 2008.

And then suddenly all h.e.l.l broke loose, or at least the two-winged version of it. It took at that exact moment a convergence of bizarre forces that had nothing to do with baseball-rather, they were ecological, meteorological and entomological-to put the Torre Era on the brink of its extinction.

_The perfect swarm.

Midges, thousands upon thousands of the b.u.g.g.e.rs, suddenly swarmed around the pitching mound, many of them flying into Chamberlain's eyes, nose, ears, face and neck, with many of those sticking to the wet skin of the heavily perspiring pitcher. He couldn't concentrate. He had trouble even seeing home plate through the cloud of bugs. A trainer came running out with an aerosol can of bug spray and showered him with the insecticide, but that didn't help at all. The midge infestation actually seemed worse. What the h.e.l.l was going on?

The answer went all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s. Lake Erie was so polluted in those days that midges, or mayflies as some people called them, disappeared. These midges are harmless creatures except for the annoyance they engender. They don't bite or carry disease. They begin in a larval state on the bottom of lakes, streams and standing water. With enough clean, oxygen-rich sediment, they emerge from the water as adults that fly off to swarm and, while doing so, to mate. Lake Erie, however, used to be too polluted for the midges to prosper. But after a major cleanup effort, the midges began returning to the Cleveland area in the mid-1990s. People near the western basin of Lake Erie came to regard them as a regular warm-weather nuisance. The midges typically would swarm three times a year, only for a day or two each time, and usually toward artificial light sources in the 45 minutes after dusk during days in May or June when warm weather set off their activity. Theirs was a 24- to 72-hour lifespan. In that short time adult midges would leave the water, swarm, breed and die.

In 2007, the first week of October happened to be unusually warm in Cleveland. It felt like spring-apparently to the midges, as well. The unusual heat (it was 81 degrees when Game 2 began at five o'clock) tricked the midges into a fourth active cycle. They left the water-likely Lake Erie or the Cuyahoga River, another waterway that had been cleaned up-saw the bright lights of Jacobs Field and headed straight to the ballpark. Only because of the odd starting time, made to accommodate the telecast of the AngelsRed Sox Division Series game in prime time to follow, did the Indians and Yankees happen to be playing the eighth inning smack in the middle of peak swarming time for midges: the 45-minute window after dusk.

So after an uninterrupted 12-year run, the Torre Era was about to come undone for good by an incredible series of events: a major cleanup of Rust Belt waterways, a freakish autumnal heat wave and an odd starting time to a playoff game.

Oh, and one more thing: the mistake of using bug spray to try to ward off the bugs.

A Cleveland insect specialist, an Indians fan, happened to be watching the game on television when he saw Yankees trainer Gene Monahan spraying down Chamberlain. The bug expert quickly reached for the phone and called the Indians' front office.

"For G.o.d's sake," he said, "tell your guys down on the field, whatever they do, don't don't use bug spray. It's useless against these bugs. It actually makes it worse because they will be attracted to the moisture on the skin." use bug spray. It's useless against these bugs. It actually makes it worse because they will be attracted to the moisture on the skin."

Chamberlain, glistening from the spray and his heavy sweat, was a midge magnet. The television pictures resembled a teen horror flick. Watching in Boston, Red Sox officials were shocked that play continued. "I can't believe they're playing in that," one of them remarked.

This wasn't just some meaningless August game. This was a playoff game, a game the Yankees and their manager all but had to win. A 1-0 game in the eighth inning. And their pitcher was trying to pitch while slathered in a sticky stew of sweat, insecticide and bugs while a swarm of more midges probed every uncovered orifice of his body. It was quickly evident how badly Chamberlain was compromised. He walked the leadoff batter, Grady Sizemore, on four pitches. Chamberlain had faced 91 batters during the season and only twice even went so far as a 3-and-0 count.

It grew worse. His next pitch sailed past Posada for a wild pitch, sending Sizemore to second. The Indians now had the tying run in scoring position and they had yet to even take a swing. The Yankees, however, were swinging wildly. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, New York's $43 million left side of the infield, were constantly waving their gloves and throwing hands at the little midges. Fighting for their playoff lives, the most expensive team in baseball had devolved into a vaudeville act.

Chamberlain looked into the Yankees dugout at Torre and said, "I can't see!"

Torre started toward the mound but stopped. He was worried about being charged with a trip to the mound, though he could have appealed to the umpires to consider it an unofficial visit, as is the case when possible injuries are involved, because of the extraordinary circ.u.mstances.

"Geno!" Torre said.

He called for Monahan, the trainer, to check on Chamberlain.

Said Torre, "For some reason I stopped because I was thinking about a trip, and I didn't want to make a trip, even though this was something extraordinary. I just didn't realize how extraordinary it was. I sent the trainer out."

Monahan raced out to the mound-armed with more bug spray.

Torre didn't know how bad the situation was because the midges inexplicably kept their swarming activities to the middle of the diamond. There was almost no problem in the Yankees dugout, where Torre sat, or down the right-field line, where umpire Bruce Froemming, the crew chief working the final postseason of his career, enjoyed a comfortable, bug-free view. So Torre made no appeal to the umpires to stop the game the way they would when rain is heavy enough to compromise playing conditions. It was a moment he would later identify as his one regret in 12 years as the Yankees manager.

"I see Jeter out there at shortstop, just waving," Torre said, "but it was never one of these things like Joba was going through. So my feeling is if I had gone out there, and could've called the umpire out and said, 'You can't pitch in this' . . . well, I'm not sure if it would've gotten me anywhere, but I may have been convincing enough to at least call a timeout for a time, like a rain delay of some kind."

Torre was under the impression that another round of bug spray helped Chamberlain, though it did not.

"It looked like it was okay," Torre said. "It looked like something you could deal with. I'm not saying it disappeared, but it looked like something that was less than what it actually was. But I think Joba just got rattled, which is understandable."

Chamberlain managed to get his next pitch over the plate. Cleveland second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera bunted it, sending Sizemore to third on the sacrifice. Travis Hafner, the Indians' designated hitter, ripped Chamberlain's next pitch on a line, but first baseman Doug Mietkiewicz caught it. Somehow Chamberlain was one out away from escaping this sticky mess. He needed only to retire catcher Victor Martinez to turn over the lead and the final three outs to Rivera. Chamberlain, however, let loose yet another wild pitch, and Sizemore came barreling home to tie the game. Chamberlain had thrown 343 pitches in the major leagues and only one of them had been a wild pitch. Now, completely bugged, he had thrown two in a span of 10 pitches.

The Yankees had lost a lead with Chamberlain on the mound for the first time, and done so in a manner bizarre enough to make Stephen King envious: one walk, one bunt, two wild pitches and one million midges. During the entire rally neither the baseball nor the midges ever left the infield. Chamberlain hit Martinez with a pitch and walked Ryan Garko before he finally ended the nightmare by striking out Jhonny Peralta.

__The Yankees still had hope. After all, Carmona, the Cleveland pitcher who had allowed only two hits over eight innings, would have to deal with the midges himself in the top of the ninth inning while facing the top of the prodigious Yankees lineup.

"I was standing there coaching third base," Bowa said, "and the next thing I knew it was the return of these bugs. I said, 'What the f.u.c.k are these?' And the third baseman said, 'Oh, they come out every now and then.' I mean, I could hardly see. And they're all over your skin. They weren't biting or anything. It was just a nuisance. Hindsight being 20/20, we should have said, 'Everyone get off the field.' It would have been like a downpour, where you say, 'We can't play in these conditions.' "

Something very strange happened, though. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower and threw the baseball as if the midges around him and on his face and neck did not exist. He gave the appearance of a man in a crisp suit walking down the street in a rainstorm, oblivious to the extreme conditions. Behind him, the Cleveland infielders gave none of the burlesque histrionics seen from Jeter and Rodriguez. The swarm had not minimized, but the Indians gave the appearance otherwise.

"I thought there were clearly differences to how the two teams were reacting to it," general manager Mark Shapiro said. "But our year had been one to give our team multiple valid excuses. Snow-outs, home games on the road, home games in Milwaukee, no off days in forever . . . our guys just never gave in to it, which was an affirmation to what tough players they are. You talk about tough players and a team approach, that's what we hope to build here as a culture. It's less about feel good things, less about objective things, and it is the manager that can help implement that culture in a clubhouse."

Carmona would have to face the best Yankees. .h.i.tters in the ninth inning of a tie game in the playoffs with insects surrounding him and sticking to him. What happened next was a triumph of the Cleveland Indians organizational intellect. As much as any other, this one inning would confirm exactly how a middle-market team erased the compet.i.tive advantage the Yankees enjoyed in their champions.h.i.+p seasons over the rest of baseball, and the Indians had done so with a payroll that amounted to less than one-third of what the Yankees were spending on players.

_The postmodern general manager prototype, Shapiro, in his wrinkle-free crisp khakis and sports s.h.i.+rt, sits at his sleek desk in front of his computer, navigating through his team's propriety and copyrighted software program, DiamondView, the program so valuable that the Arizona Diamondbacks once only half jokingly were asked to consider trading it for Carlos Quentin, their top power-hitting prospect. Not even a server to be named later could have convinced Cleveland's general manager to give up the computational brains of the organization. Shapiro looks as if he might well be running a private hedge fund or operating a technology startup from his office above Progressive Field in Cleveland.

Fueled by bottled water and energy bars, Shapiro spends every day searching for any ground, everywhere from the sandlots of the Dominican Republic to the kudzu-like blogosphere, for any incremental edge that will make the Indians better and more efficient than they were and, in turn, bring them closer to cutting into the huge advantage the Yankees enjoyed because of their revenues.

Shapiro, Princeton-educated, the son of a powerful sports agent, a history major who played collegiate football but not a day of professional baseball, was exactly the kind of hands-on, business-savvy chief executive that has become necessary for teams to cut into the Yankees' advantage. The general manager genus that existed when the Yankees were winning champions.h.i.+ps was marked by men who would make baseball decisions by the seat of their pants-or perhaps a barstool-and knew little about the business side of the organization. These were baseball men, and proud of it, whose responsibility rested almost entirely with player acquisition. They sought or kept almost no business intellect.

"At some point owners.h.i.+p decided with all the dollars at stake they wanted to talk with someone-not all owners.h.i.+p-that they had a comfort level with from a business standpoint," said Shapiro. "That doesn't diminish the human side of the game. It doesn't diminish the necessity for baseball ac.u.men or scouting to play a role in decision making. But at the top a lot of owners.h.i.+ps decided they wanted someone that had a combination of skill sets, instead of just being one of evaluation, of just picking 25 players. That's the delineation here. The job s.h.i.+fted, from picking 25 guys to building and running an organization. A CEO of a baseball organization."

In 2002, Shapiro's second year as general manager, the Indians spent $24 million on player development and scouting, more than all but two teams in baseball and a 50 percent increase in their R&D from three years earlier. They obtained 22 prospects from outside the organization that year alone, including Sizemore, Phillips, Lee, Travis Hafner, Coco Crisp and Ben Broussard, all of them soon to be bona fide big leaguers. The Indians knew that the currency of information was gaining in value around baseball. If ball-clubs could not match the Yankees' resources, which allowed New York a wide margin of error, those teams could use intellect-specifically, the gathering and a.n.a.lysis of information-to operate more efficiently.

Shapiro made some mistakes early in his tenure, but learned from those while building an organization that was at the cutting edge of the information age that was just dawning in baseball. For Shapiro, it wasn't just about getting information; it was also about using it wisely and efficiently.

"Somewhere along the line we realized you have so much information that we were spending approximately 50 percent of our time a.s.sembling it and 50 percent of our time a.n.a.lyzing it," Shapiro said. "That's when we created DiamondView, and DiamondView really evolved where now we spend 10 percent of the time a.s.sembling the information and 90 percent of the time evaluating it."

The Indians created DiamondView in the spring of 2000, though it began as a rather simple venture. Shapiro wanted an easy way to track and rank the major league and minor league players in every organization as a way to identify players the Indians might pursue in trades. DiamondView originally relied only on the reports from Cleveland scouts to grade the players. Over the years, however, DiamondView has grown into a complex, vast program to compile, store and a.n.a.lyze all kinds of information. For example, every morning at 6:45 DiamondView electronically collects game information, injury reports and transactions on the nearly 6,000 players in professional baseball and updates the profiles on those players.

"For any player . . . ," Shapiro explained. "So you pull up, say, Jared Weaver of the Angels. It's got your basic biographical facts, the history of all the reports on him, going all the way back to his time as an amateur in college. You can actually pull up one of those reports and look at it . . . here's our scouting director's report on him. He was obviously a little bit light. Our area scout was more accurate. So that's the actual report on him. Again, it's a question of what's available to us here . . . There are journal entries, which could be anything from Baseball America Baseball America articles to a spring training look to blog reports, to the 16PF test-a psychological test in college-and we actually have our own psychological test in there also . . . Now these are newspaper articles that might contain something interesting toward building a biographical background on the guy . . . physical attributes . . . when he hit different top prospect lists. . . . Now this happens to be a guy who we haven't had any trade discussions on, but I'll show you a guy that we have." articles to a spring training look to blog reports, to the 16PF test-a psychological test in college-and we actually have our own psychological test in there also . . . Now these are newspaper articles that might contain something interesting toward building a biographical background on the guy . . . physical attributes . . . when he hit different top prospect lists. . . . Now this happens to be a guy who we haven't had any trade discussions on, but I'll show you a guy that we have."

Every conversation with player agents about players is also logged into DiamondView. "When we talk about a guy, we have a history of every agent's conversation," Shapiro said, "like when a guy's a free agent. Every conversation. So you have a history and start to learn who's lying and who's not lying. You can say, 'Okay, we know this agency. They lie. They told us this was out there.' We have it. We recorded the conversation afterward, just in notes. And there's a clear pattern here. It's good information.

"So it's not a question of having the information. Every organization has it. It's a question of having it accessible quickly. I think there are at least 15 teams that have a lot of objective a.n.a.lysis, their own proprietary smart guys, mathematicians, smart guys turning out stats . . . How much they factor in decisions and how much they weigh it, how they use it, I'm not sure. But how accessible is it? How many teams have everything together: stats, scouting reports, video, contractual information, the history, college stuff . . . I don't think very many have that all together in one place."

The Indians, of course, also have their own proprietary information, such as the psychological tests, which they give to every player in their system. They also try to give it to amateur players that they scout, though resistance to the test from agents and colleges often forces the club to approach the players about it in summer leagues, such as the Cape Cod League.

"Now you start to get into what kind of things we do that are creative," Shapiro said. "Stats, objective a.n.a.lysis . . . There's a lot of unique, proprietary information. Very unique. It's all mixed in here."

The Oakland Athletics found an inefficiency to exploit almost a decade ago with an emphasis on on-base percentage while the rest of baseball remained focused on batting average. The Indians exploited an inefficiency by using DiamondView to quickly collect and a.n.a.lyze the flood of information pouring into the game. Like marine recovery teams searching for buried treasure in the vastness of the oceans, smart ballclubs constantly are looking for the next inefficiency to exploit.

_With Carmona on the mound in Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS was every incremental improvement by Cleveland-advanced medical and prehabilitation systems, proprietary software, statistical a.n.a.lysis, biomechanics, sports psychology, a holistic approach to player development, a redefining of the general manager as a CEO, and more money to invest in those developments because of revenue sharing and central fund distributions from revenue streams that didn't exist when the Yankees were winning champions.h.i.+ps.

All of that happened while the Yankees, in a relative sense, slept. The Yankees' response to the growth of revenue and intellect around the game had been to keep patching the roster with expensive veterans, regardless of what they may bring to the clubhouse culture. A barren farm system had given them little room to consider much else.

The Indians signed Fausto Carmona as a free agent out of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 28, 2000, three weeks after he celebrated his seventeenth birthday. He was a tall, skinny kid-six-foot-three and only 160 pounds-with an 83-mph fastball. The Indians gave him a signing bonus of $10,000.

"It wasn't brilliant scouting," Shapiro admitted.

Carmona was nothing special. Every year the Indians, like most teams, would sign about 15 of these raw, mostly underweight kids from Latin America, the same way somebody might buy 15 lottery tickets. The investment was a pittance to major league teams-$150,000 for 15 players-but the potential payoff was enormous if even one of those fliers made it to the big leagues.

If anyone wondered why professional baseball was acquiring a more Latin American presence, the decisions by the Indians on amateur players in 2000 provided one clue. Teams like the Indians knew Latin America offered a much bigger bang for the player development buck than the stateside high school and college kids who went through the First-Year Player Draft. The Indians spent a combined $2.25 million just on their first two picks of the draft, Corey Smith, a high school shortstop from New Jersey taken 26th overall, and Derek Thompson, a lefthanded high school pitcher from Florida selected 37th overall. Neither of them ever played a day in the big leagues for Cleveland. For a fraction of the money they burned on those two top picks-less than 7 percent-the Indians could sign 15 players 15 players out of Latin America, including a future 19-game winner who would finish fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting. out of Latin America, including a future 19-game winner who would finish fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting.

"You don't sign anyone for $10,000 anymore," Shapiro said. "Now it's 50. The new $10,000 is $50,000."

The Indians kept Carmona in his home country for his first professional season, a.s.signing him to the Dominican Summer League. The next year he reported to Cleveland's minor league camp in Winter Haven, Florida, where the education of a pitcher truly began. The Indians provided English cla.s.ses for Carmona and other young Latin players. (They have since added the equivalent of secondary school education programs for such players. The players attend these schools in the Dominican in the off-season to earn the equivalent of a General Education Degree.) They provided nutritional and dental a.s.sistance. (Carmona had significant dental issues that compromised his eating habits, not an uncommon trait from a part of the world where good, affordable dental care is not readily available.) A nutritionist provided educational seminars for the Latin American players and even escorted them on field trips to local grocery stores to teach them how to shop and what to buy.

The Indians a.s.signed Carmona to Burlington, where he pitched well and showed exceptional control for a teenager. The next year they sent him to Lake County in Cla.s.s A ball. "That's when he jumped up," Shapiro said. Carmona went 17-4 with a 2.06 ERA. This was 2003, when Moneyball Moneyball began to change the vocabulary of scouting and player development, so at first blush Carmona's numbers might have been met with some skepticism because he was not a big strikeout pitcher, a preferred trait among the statistical a.n.a.lysts. But Shapiro saw the value in his entire statistical profile rather than one column. began to change the vocabulary of scouting and player development, so at first blush Carmona's numbers might have been met with some skepticism because he was not a big strikeout pitcher, a preferred trait among the statistical a.n.a.lysts. But Shapiro saw the value in his entire statistical profile rather than one column.

"You look at the strikeouts to innings pitched," Shapiro said, referring to Carmon's pedestrian 5.04 strikeouts per nine innings in 2003. "But he had few walks and was an extreme groundball pitcher. Pure objective a.n.a.lysis? Some people would devalue him to some extent because his strikeouts were not that great. But the walks were still low and the groundball to flyball rate was so high."

Carmona continued to improve and grow. He impressed his coaches with his work ethic. Even after clocking in his usual six innings or so of work, Carmona, rather than retreating to the training room for the usual ice therapy for a pitcher's arm, would run or bike for another 15 minutes. The Indians' attention to prehabilitation also helped his development. Indians trainers found that Carmona had a slight sway in his back, which would likely compromise his back and shoulder health over time, so they a.s.signed him specific exercises to improve his core strength and posture. By 2006 Cleveland decided that Carmona, now 22 and about 220 pounds, and throwing his fastball 95 miles per hour, was ready for the big leagues.

Carmona initially had disastrous results. Pitching mostly out of the bullpen, Carmona went 1-10, becoming only the eighth pitcher since 1901 to post a winning percentage worse than .100 in his first big league season.

The worst of it for Carmona was when the Indians, desperate for late-inning help, decided to try him as a closer in the middle of the season. Carmona blew ninth-inning leads in three straight appearances, losing each one of them on a walkoff extra-base hit, twice in Boston to the Red Sox and once in Detroit to the Tigers. It was the sort of nightmare that can ruin a career, especially for a rookie. What was happening to him? The Indians again put their holistic approach to work to find an answer. They looked for an objective reason why Carmona was getting hit so hard and they found it: a study of the digital video files of his outings revealed that his sinker had straightened out. And why had it straightened out? The same reason why the Indians wanted to try him as a closer in the first place: they knew he was wired to be a fierce compet.i.tor. In this case, given the high leverage created by a ninth-inning lead, Carmona was victimized by trying too hard to succeed. The harder he tried, the more his release point dropped, and the more his release point dropped, the less sink he generated on his pitches.

"His strength worked against him," said Shapiro. "So we didn't try to sc.r.a.p everything. We just said, 'Hey, you need to recognize when your mental condition works against you, when you're delivery breaks down, and what happens in your delivery.'"

After Carmona's bullpen meltdowns, the Indians sent the rookie righthander to Triple-A Buffalo to start games, not finish them. They called him back to Cleveland as a starter, then sent him to the Dominican Winter League to start some more, the better to develop the greater stamina needed by a starting pitcher after spending most of 2006 in the bullpen. In 2007, in the seventh year of Carmona's holistic development-mental, physical, h.e.l.l, even dental-the Indians' little $10,000 investment had become a workhorse major league starter. Carmona threw 215 innings. He finished second in the league in wins (19) and second in ERA (3.06). Trying to hit his power sinker was like trying to hit a bowling ball. n.o.body threw more double-play grounders (32). He had, by far, the best groundball-to-flyball ratio in the league (3.28). The Indians had themselves a young pitching star.

The Indians had won the lottery.

_When the kid from Santo Domingo took the ball for the ninth inning of Game 2 against New York-the game tied, the midges swirling madly, the Yankees sending Johnny Damon, Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu to the plate, with Alex Rodriguez waiting in case any of them reached base-Carmona's task would test every bit of that holistic development. No Cleveland pitcher this young ever had thrown nine innings in a postseason game. No starting pitcher had lasted nine innings against this formidable Yankees lineup all year. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower, ignored the midges and went to work with the calm purposefulness of a diamond cutter.

Damon grounded out. Jeter struck out. Abreu reached first base on an infield single, to shortstop, then promptly swiped second base on the next pitch. The must-have game for the Yankees had come down to this: Rodriguez, the most expensive player in baseball, against Carmona, the erstwhile $10,000 kid, with the potential winning run at second base. Rodriguez, for all of his 156 runs batted in during the regular season, was in need of some serious holistic postseason help himself. He was 0-for-5 in the series (without getting the ball out of the infield) and had four hits in his previous 49 postseason at-bats with the Yankees, including 27 consecutive at-bats without a hit on the road. Rodriguez did see nine pitches, but it ended badly for him. Carmona, with his 113th of the night, buzzed a ferocious sinker under the hands of a swinging Rodriguez for strike three.

When Carmona marched into the Cleveland dugout, Indians trainers were amazed at what they saw: his face and neck were covered with hundreds of midges. Not once had he taken a peeved swat at any of them. It was as if they were never there.

The midges left a short time later, their 45-minute window to wreak havoc on the Yankees and help close the curtain on the Torre Era having expired. Rivera did provide two shutout innings, but as soon as Torre had to go to anybody else in the bullpen, and in this case it was Luis Vizcaino, the game was over. Vizcaino walked the leadoff hitter of the 11th inning, the preamble to an eventual game-winning single by Travis Hafner.

_The Yankees were one game away from elimination. The same could be said for Torre. Steinbrenner made sure the world knew it, too. On the morning of Game 3, Steinbrenner, out of nowhere, was quoted in the Bergen Record Bergen Record explaining that Torre was gone with one more loss. explaining that Torre was gone with one more loss.

"His job is on the line," Steinbrenner said. "I think we're paying him a lot of money. He's the highest-paid manager in baseball, so I don't think we'd take him back if we didn't win this series."

The bl.u.s.ter would have been normal procedure from Steinbrenner 10, even five, years earlier. But in 2007? It was shocking. Steinbrenner's handlers had kept him away from the press all year. He communicated with the media only through carefully worded statements from his public relations representative. When writer Franz Lidz, a.s.signed by Portfolio Portfolio magazine to write a piece on the Yankees' owner, breached the protective wall around Steinbrenner by visiting him that summer unannounced at his Tampa home, the description that emerged of The Boss was a pathetic one. Steinbrenner was portrayed as barely lucid, mumbling and repeating himself. Steinbrenner was well enough to make only three games in New York all year before this series. And now, with his team on the brink of elimination, he had suddenly found the old gusto? magazine to write a piece on the Yankees' owner, breached the protective wall around Steinbrenner by visiting him that summer unannounced at his Tampa home, the description that emerged of The Boss was a pathetic one. Steinbrenner was portrayed as barely lucid, mumbling and repeating himself. Steinbrenner was well enough to make only three games in New York all year before this series. And now, with his team on the brink of elimination, he had suddenly found the old gusto?

Ian O'Connor, a columnist for the Bergen Record, Bergen Record, had called Steinbrenner at his place in the Regency Hotel. It was a play taken from an old Yankees beat writer playbook: call Steinbrenner when the team is playing poorly and you just might get yourself a headline if The Boss decides to pop off. In the 1980s the beat writers used to call Steinbrenner "Mr. Tunes," because getting outrageous quotes from him was as easy as dropping a quarter into a jukebox and making your selection. Many of the quotes were as familiar as. .h.i.t records, straight from the Steinbrenner catalog. But this was 2007, and Steinbrenner's declining health had rendered him little more than a figurehead who was barely seen or heard from. Indeed, not more than a week later the Yankees would announce that Steinbrenner officially was no longer actively running the team, but would serve as a kind of patriarch to the operations. had called Steinbrenner at his place in the Regency Hotel. It was a play taken from an old Yankees beat writer playbook: call Steinbrenner when the team is playing poorly and you just might get yourself a headline if The Boss decides to pop off. In the 1980s the beat writers used to call Steinbrenner "Mr. Tunes," because getting outrageous quotes from him was as easy as dropping a quarter into a jukebox and making your selection. Many of the quotes were as familiar as. .h.i.t records, straight from the Steinbrenner catalog. But this was 2007, and Steinbrenner's declining health had rendered him little more than a figurehead who was barely seen or heard from. Indeed, not more than a week later the Yankees would announce that Steinbrenner officially was no longer actively running the team, but would serve as a kind of patriarch to the operations.

There was no answer on Steinbrenner's phone. O'Connor kept calling. No answer. Another call. Then suddenly, Steinbrenner picked up the phone. He answered questions. O'Connor decided that Steinbrenner sounded lucid enough for the quotes to have merit. He had his headline. It was big news. Torre found out about Steinbrenner's win-or-be-gone edict on his drive into Yankee Stadium for Game 3. He always did hate having his job security become a public issue around his players, but now it had become the the issue. At his scheduled pregame news conference, Torre took 13 questions. Nine of them were about his job status and Steinbrenner's comments. issue. At his scheduled pregame news conference, Torre took 13 questions. Nine of them were about his job status and Steinbrenner's comments.

"You don't always get used to it," Torre said in response to one question about his reaction to Steinbrenner's comments, "but you understand if you want to work here, and certainly there's a great deal of upside to working here, that you understand that there are certain things you have to deal with. You know, that's pretty much where I am."

Cashman sought out Torre behind the batting cage during batting practice.

"I'm sorry," Cashman said. "I had nothing to do with it."

"I'm p.i.s.sed about the timing of it," Torre said. "We don't need this."