The Yankee Years Part 6

"He asked me to pick up some stuff for him and k.n.o.blauch," McNamee said. "That's how that started. That was three times, and I stopped it, because I didn't feel good about it."

Members of the 2000 Yankees became good business for Radomski. At some points over the 2000 and 2001 seasons, according to the Mitch.e.l.l Report, Radomski provided drugs for Grimsley, k.n.o.blauch, pitcher Denny Neagle, outfielders Glenallen Hill and David Justice, and later for pitcher Mike Stanton. In addition, the 2000 Yankees included three other players who later admitted their drug use (though not necessarily specific to that particular year): Jose Canseco, Jim Leyritz and Andy Pett.i.tte. Most infamously, the 2000 Yankees had a tenth player who would be tied to reports of performance-enhancing drug use: Clemens.

According to McNamee, Clemens came to him in the second half of the 2000 season looking for a boost. McNamee turned to his friend Radomski for steroids and human growth hormone. McNamee said he injected Clemens four to six times with the steroids and four to six times with the HGH. Clemens, who turned 38 years old in August that season, pitched far better in the second half than he had in the first, lowering his ERA from 4.33 at the All-Star break to 3.15 after it, while improving his record of 6-6 before the break to 7-2 after it. The Yankees finally saw the pitcher they traded for from Toronto. Did the players a.s.sume Clemens was on "the program"?

"I think the fact that I picked up some stuff for k.n.o.blauch and Grimsley, there was an a.s.sumption they talked about it, too," McNamee said. "I would think you would have to a.s.sume that Roger was taking something. I never talked about it. And I didn't want steroids and growth hormone to be the be-all, and that's why Roger was performing well. I made that clear to Andy once I knew he knew. He understood that. I think you would have to be an idiot not to think Roger was taking something."

Of course, such thinking did not stop McNamee from writing a guest column in the New York Times New York Times later that same year that was t.i.tled "Don't Be So Quick to Prejudge All That Power." In it McNamee wrote, "The suggestion that steroids are the answer to the increased strength, recovery from injury and the improved performances of today's players is just wrong." He concluded his opus thusly: "Yes, the players today are stronger, faster and smarter than their predecessors. But their superiority is not because of steroid use, but because of the advancement in sports-specific science and commitment of the organizations to strength, conditioning and nutrition. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible and disrespectful." later that same year that was t.i.tled "Don't Be So Quick to Prejudge All That Power." In it McNamee wrote, "The suggestion that steroids are the answer to the increased strength, recovery from injury and the improved performances of today's players is just wrong." He concluded his opus thusly: "Yes, the players today are stronger, faster and smarter than their predecessors. But their superiority is not because of steroid use, but because of the advancement in sports-specific science and commitment of the organizations to strength, conditioning and nutrition. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible and disrespectful."

It was, naturally, a complete lie. Baseball had become one fraud piled upon another.

"I did lie to the media," McNamee said. "Because I got tired of going to clinics and kids asking me about steroids. I went out of my way to say no, never, never, never . . . I lied. But to me, what was I going to do? 'Oh yeah, this is the way you should work out, but by the way, my guys take steroids.' So I had to answer the question. Me, as a trainer, can't say, 'I don't want to talk about it.' Because that's an admission of guilt.

"The fact that I enabled it was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. But it was a gray area for me. Because the way I got involved with Radomski had nothing to do with steroids. And it's a personality flaw, where you look at my job. My job is to protect these guys at all times. Before, during and after. So when these guys are already doing something that's wrong, I tried to help that. Because they're going to do it anyway. Was it wrong for me? I don't know if I would do the same thing again. I should have said no, but I can't. I have an inability to do that."

The 2000 Yankees won the American League East Division with 87 victories, stumbling badly to the finish by losing 15 of their final 18 games. They held off Oakland in the Division Series in five games, dispatched Seattle in the American League Champions.h.i.+p Series-in which Clemens won Game 4, 5-0, with the most dominating game of his postseason career, a one-hitter in which he struck out 15 batters and threw 138 pitches-and then took out the Mets in five games to win the world champions.h.i.+p. (Radomski said he provided drugs to at least two Mets players on that team, Matt Franco and Todd Pratt.) The Yankees were the best team in baseball. And when it came to steroids, they were no different from anybody else.

"You had two guys from New York doing all the talking in the Mitch.e.l.l Report," Torre said. "That's why you have more information on New York players. If people want to devalue the 2000 team, is that how we lost 15 out of 18 down the stretch? We dried ourselves out and then got a heavy dose for the postseason? One thing I've learned is that people are going to feel the way they're going to feel, regardless of what happened. You can talk until you're blue in the face and there's no answer that's going to satisfy everybody."

Said one former All-Star and steroid user who competed against those Yankees teams, "Everybody around baseball did what they could possibly do. It was the survival of the fittest."

n.o.body said, "This has to stop"?

"Who would have?" the player said, laughing. "It's why the government regulates monopolies. If people could do it, they would f.u.c.king do it. Just like cheating on your taxes. If there's a gray area, you're going to find it, until the government said it's not a gray area anymore."

The player said that everybody in the game just understood that att.i.tude was acceptable. "Now whether it was right or wrong, now you're talking about a moral issue, but there were no rules. You did what you did. It was the wild, wild west."

Torre came from a generation in which weight training and adding bulk were taboo. Steroids? He knew nothing about them. He never saw them. The players certainly weren't going to tell him what was going on, and he wasn't going to probe without invitation into their private lives.

"I've always tried to respect guys' privacy," Torre said. "I remember in Atlanta in 1982 we were going to the postseason and rumor had it they were going to check bats to see if any were corked. It was the time when loading bats was one of the things that was starting up. I remember having a meeting and saying, 'Guys, I never ask you what you do, but I know we've accomplished something very special here, by winning the division, and if they decide they want to check bats it could nullify everything we've ever done here. So if you were doing it, you better be careful. And if you weren't, don't even worry about it.'

"That's basically been my att.i.tude-unless I see erratic behavior sometimes. Unless somebody acts funny. I just don't go into people's lockers. Plus, I didn't see anything. I walk all over the clubhouse. I walk in the trainers' room. I walk in the lounge. I walk in the weight room, and all that stuff. I never saw it.

"I never heard players talk about it. Jeter used to kid about it. He'd joke around, 'Yeah, watch me on steroids. .h.i.t it to the warning track!' The thing that comes to my mind with steroids is it can cut your life short. The other thing is I don't think it's fair. The a.n.a.logy I use is that it's like some guys are using metal bats and some guys are using wood bats. It's not right. It's dangerous.

"The one thing you have to remember is that baseball is business that has never interfered with putting a.s.ses in the seats. You can't tell me that with everything going on-Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs in 1927, Roger Maris. .h.i.ts 61 in eight more games in 1961, and then in 1998 two guys. .h.i.t more than that-that n.o.body thinks it's suspicious? In 1998 when one guy hit 66 and one guy hit 70, baseball said it's great. And now baseball is pointing the fingers at everybody? That's the fraud to me."

Not all 10 members of the 2000 Yankees in the Mitch.e.l.l Report were described as using drugs during that particular season, but the cooperation of McNamee and Radomski gave that team a higher profile than others in the report. For instance, outfielder and admitted steroid user Shane Monahan has said steroid and amphetamine use was rampant on the 199899 Mariners teams he played on. (Monahan also described hangers-on with clubhouse access brokering greenies-for-memorabilia transactions.) Nine players from those Seattle teams, both of which lost more games than they won, have been linked in various reports to performance-enhancing drugs. McNamee said the 2000 Yankees were no different from the 29 other teams when it came to drug use.

"I think the talent level was better," McNamee said. "You put ergogenic aids on top of that, you're going to get a better team."

McNamee said he told federal agents and Mitch.e.l.l's investigators that both Toronto general manager Gord Ash and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did not want to know if players were doping and that player agents were directly involved in procuring illegal drugs for their clients, but that Mitch.e.l.l did not include those comments in the report. Gord Ash and Brian Cashman denied McNamee's a.s.sertion.

"I told the [federal] agents and George Mitch.e.l.l's people that the [general managers] came up to me and said, 'We don't care what they're taking. I just don't want to know about it.' " McNamee said. "That wasn't in their report." Cashman denied NcNamee's allegations, saying, "we thought we had a clean clubhouse. I never had a dialogue with him about what players may or may not be taking. Never, ever once." Ash also denied McNamee's allegation: "I don't recall that," Ash said.

McNamee described his relations.h.i.+p with Cashman as a friendly one. Indeed, McNamee said in 2007, six years after the Yankees did not retain McNamee as the a.s.sistant strength coach, Cashman called him regularly to consult on strength training issues regarding the team.

"If he didn't understand what was going on [with steroids], then he's a jacka.s.s," McNamee said. "[But] what was he going to do? If he wanted [a clean clubhouse] he would have had to have said, 'Hey, we're getting our a.s.ses kicked. Everybody take 'em.' That's the reality. I know that would have happened. You've got to be on a level playing field."

McNamee's run with the Yankees ended after the 2001 season. The team chose not to invite him back, princ.i.p.ally because of an incident on October 6, 2001, at the team's hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, while in town there to play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Police questioned McNamee in connection with a possible s.e.xual battery incident after he was found in the hotel pool at 4 a.m. with a 40-year-old woman. Both were naked. The woman had ingested GHB, an odorless substance commonly referred to as a "date-rape" drug. McNamee was never charged. Though the Yankees cut ties with McNamee following that season, Clemens and Pett.i.tte continued to train with him and would do so for a year.

In May of the following year, 2002, Pett.i.tte gave McNamee a call. The trainer was on the road with the Yankees and Clemens, this time not as an official member of the team, but only as Clemens' personal trainer with no special access. Pett.i.tte was in Tampa, where, while on the disabled list after making only three starts that season, he was working out at the Yankees' training complex to rehabilitate a strained left elbow.

"I need some help, Mac," Pett.i.tte said.

It wasn't just McNamee's training help that Pett.i.tte wanted. It was human growth hormone.

"You don't need to do that," McNamee told the pitcher.

"Yes, I do," Pett.i.tte told him. "I'm going to do it. Are you going to help me or not?"

McNamee decided he wasn't about to change Pett.i.tte's mind. There was only one thing to do.

"I'll help you," McNamee said.

"Good," Pett.i.tte said. "Can you get it for me?"

"Yeah, I can get it."

Said McNamee, "I don't even know how I got it down there. I didn't travel with it."

Pett.i.tte would go to the Yankees' training complex in the morning for 30 minutes of treatment. McNamee then would train Pett.i.tte through conditioning and rehabilitation exercises. They would run through another training session at night. It was hard work, designed to get Pett.i.tte back into the rotation as soon as possible while the Yankees, stuck in second place, tried not to fall too far behind the red-hot Boston Red Sox in the AL East. But the training regimen wasn't enough for Pett.i.tte. Twice each day, once in the morning and once at night, McNamee injected Pett.i.tte with human growth hormone. Pett.i.tte was a churchgoing, G.o.d-fearing Texan, known in the Yankees clubhouse for his integrity and earnestness. If Pett.i.tte was going to cheat, who wouldn't? Of course, even Pett.i.tte did not consider injections of an illegally obtained performance-enhancing drug as cheating.

"I think he rationalized it with the information I supplied and why guys took it," McNamee said. "I think he just really wanted to heal. It wasn't a performance-enhancing issue. As far as I know, he never took steroids. Everybody thought he did, because when I started training him he went from 8889 [miles per hour] to 96. If you have a photo of him taking steroids, I don't know. I don't know what to believe."

Torre never knew about Pett.i.tte's HGH use. He learned about it at the same time as the rest of the world: when the Mitch.e.l.l Report was released in December of 2007. Pett.i.tte was in the middle of preparing a statement in which he would admit to using HGH when Torre called him.

"Andy, I'm just calling to see how you're doing," Torre said. "I'm not calling to ask any questions."

"Skip," Pett.i.tte said, "I'm just getting ready to make a statement."

"I don't want to know your statement," Torre said. "I just want to see how you're doing."

"I'm okay," Pett.i.tte said.

Torre noticed that Pett.i.tte sounded anxious, or "jumpy" as he put it. After Pett.i.tte released his statement, the pitcher called his former manager back.

"I'm sorry," Pett.i.tte said. "I apologize to you, especially if I did anything to put you in a tough situation. I don't know how I did this. As religious as I am, I even question how G.o.d can help me make those kind of decisions."

"Well, Andy," Torre said, "we don't always make the right decisions. It's what life is all about. Just knowing you the way I know you, and not a lot of people know you like I do, you were torn because you thought, being on the disabled list, the most important thing was to get yourself back to earning your money and helping the team. You were willing to try something, and then you realized you didn't want to do this anymore. So what did you do? You stopped.

"It's what you did. Is it the right thing? The wrong thing? It's what you did. You certainly didn't have anything really devious in your mind at the time. You were just trying to get back to earn your money. You weren't trying to get back there to win a game for yourself."

"I feel badly about it," Pett.i.tte said.

"And what about the other donkey?" Torre said.

Pett.i.tte knew Torre was referring to Clemens.

"Roger is Roger," Pett.i.tte said. "When I talked to him, he was Roger."

Torre immediately understood what Pett.i.tte meant about his good friend: that a full-blown steroids scandal wasn't about to change Clemens from being the most c.o.c.ksure cowboy on the planet. Clemens lived in his own world, surrounded by people who unequivocally verified it for him, and George Mitch.e.l.l wasn't about to cause him any self-examination or doubt. Torre also understood how Pett.i.tte fell victim to the culture of the times.

"It's like Bob Gibson said: 'To win a game you'd take anything,' " Torre said. "We'd all sell our souls. Winning is something that was first and foremost and that's what we wanted to do. Unfortunately, now what stimulates the need to do this is individual performance and not winning. It used to be all about winning. It was, 'Let's win this game.' 'Let's go to the World Series.' That was the motivation at the time. Now it's more a case of the motivation being, 'My numbers.' But yeah, as a compet.i.tor, you'd sell your soul."

Pett.i.tte might not consider his HGH use to have been cheating or performance-enhancing. The Red Sox, of course, might view it a little differently. Pett.i.tte was off the disabled list and back in the rotation on June 14. The Yankees trailed Boston by 1 games. Pett.i.tte made 19 starts thereafter and was one of the best pitchers in the league at that time, going 12-4 with a 3.29 ERA. With Pett.i.tte's help, the Yankees overtook the Red Sox and won the division with 103 victories. The Red Sox won 93 games. They did not qualify for the playoffs.

At about the very same time Pett.i.tte, with McNamee's help, was in a hotel suite in Tampa sticking needles loaded with HGH into the folds of the skin in his abdomen, and four years after h.e.l.ling's first of several pleas to the players a.s.sociation fell on deaf ears, Ken Caminiti sat across from a writer in a lawn chair in his garage in Houston, surrounded by his show-quality muscle cars, and made an announcement that was a long time coming: the emperor had no clothes. Baseball, Caminiti said, was rife with steroid users. It was a moment that would change how baseball would be played and administered. It was the beginning of the end of The Steroid Era, at least its Wild West days with no laws in place in the game.

Not only did Caminiti, a former Most Valuable Player Award winner then in his first year of retirement, admit to using steroids himself, making him the first among the hundreds and hundreds of players who had used steroids to actually admit it, but he also expressed absolutely no remorse about having done so. Steroids were so prevalent, they had become the default choice if you wanted to make it as a big leaguer. How could you feel guilty about it if about half the players, as Caminiti estimated, were doing the same thing?

What he said was not shocking at all. Baseball had given itself over to steroid users for more then a decade, though, as Cone observed, the rate of those crossing over to the dark side had greatly accelerated over the previous four years. By 2001 it had reached its tipping point: clean players such as h.e.l.ling began to see themselves as the minority, put at a compet.i.tive disadvantage by the growing acceptance that steroids simply were, like occasional brushback pitches, now part of the cost of playing baseball. Steroids were no longer part of a rogue element. They were de rigeur.

This important s.h.i.+ft among the rank and file of players became clear in the second half of that 2001 season. Perhaps the breaking of the home run record yet again, this time by a garishly pumped-up version of Bonds, who hit 73 at the age of 36 after never having hit more than 49, helped fuel the intramural carping. Several clean players steered conversations toward this growing acceptance of steroids. They were concerned and angry, of course, though the thin blue line mentality among these union brothers and foxhole comrades prevented them from speaking on the record. One of them joked, though with black humor, about the "steroid starter kits" that made the users so obvious and ubiquitous: in addition to the needles, the steroid user needed acne creams for the pimples that otherwise would fester on his back, and a good razor or wax job to keep the body hairless, the better to show off the new, well-muscled, if bloated, physique. These players became increasingly body-image conscious, even if they fairly glistened from the watery, hairless musculature. Some players had slight trouble speaking clearly because the HGH swelled the size of their tongues and jaws. Some players could not push their batting helmet completely down on their heads because their heads had swelled.

Of course, steroids hardly were a secret in baseball then. Many media outlets had covered the topic, often with anonymous sources, and the Mitch.e.l.l Report referenced many of those reports. But the topic never gained much traction, primarily because top Major League Baseball officials, union leaders and active players typically would not admit the scope of the problem or attach their name to a call for action.

By April of 2002, the increasing resentment among some players to steroid use was a sign that perhaps the "don't ask, don't tell, don't care" culture was about to crack. The worst-kept secret in baseball was the growing use and acceptance of steroids. Caminiti, who was a fierce compet.i.tor and bluntly honest character over his 15 seasons with Houston, San Diego, Texas and Atlanta, was the man who broke the coded silence in the pages of Sports Ill.u.s.trated. Sports Ill.u.s.trated.

"I've got nothing to hide," he said.

Still, there was an obvious sadness about him. His virility was gone. Caminiti moved and spoke slowly. His famously intense eyes had gone cold and dull. He complained several times that his body could no longer produce enough testosterone on its own, having grown dependent on the synthetic forms he injected into his body.

"You know what that's like?" he said. "You get lethargic. You get depressed. It's terrible."

The story was enormous. What h.e.l.ling had been trying to tell the players a.s.sociation for four years was now broadcast across every network and media outlet in the country. The secret was out, as much as some still didn't want to acknowledge the obvious truth. They wanted to perpetuate the myth.

"Everybody hates a snitch," said Cubs manager Dusty Baker, remaining faithful to the ballplayers' omerta. omerta.

Said Angels slugger Mo Vaughn, "Let me tell you why Barry Bonds. .h.i.t 73 homers. Because he's a great hitter. Because the Giants moved out of Candlestick Park into a place where the wind doesn't blow as much."

Of course, this was the same Mo Vaughn who was one of Kirk Radomski's best customers. Mitch.e.l.l's investigators found that Vaughn, who was referred to Radomski by Glenallen Hill, wrote at least three checks to Radomski in 2001 totaling $8,600 for kits of human growth hormone. Radomski told Mitch.e.l.l he personally delivered the drugs to Vaughn.

Then there was the post-Caminiti reaction of Jason Giambi of the Yankees. "I know this stuff is newsworthy," Giambi said, "but hopefully people don't buy into it. There's no miracle thing for this game. Either you have talent or you don't. One common thread of all the greats of the game, they've had longevity."

Of course, this was the same Jason Giambi, apparently short on requisite talent, who was pumping his body full of steroids and human growth hormone.

Try as they might, the ballplayers could not wish away the steroid issue. Three months after Caminiti spoke out, the players a.s.sociation suddenly dropped its long-standing and fierce opposition to random drug testing, and agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement that would require all players in 2003 to submit to anonymous "survey" testing. Before the union would even agree to do something about the steroid problem in baseball, however, the players bargained for an escape clause: a program just to find out if a problem even existed. Real steroid testing would take place starting in 2004 only if more than 5 percent of the anonymous 2003 tests came back positive-tests the players knew they would be taking in spring training. The players couldn't even keep from using the drugs long enough to beat the tests they knew were coming. Enough ballplayers still flunked to trigger the real testing program.

"It does surprise me a little bit," said relief pitcher Mike Stanton, then with the Mets after his years with the Yankees. "But the tests don't like lie."

Stanton was surprised? Of course, this was the same Mike Stanton who, according to the Mitch.e.l.l Report, met Radomski when he was a Yankee in 2001, and received from Radomski three kits of human growth hormone in 2003-the same year Stanton expressed surprise at the survey test results.

Rick h.e.l.ling was at least one person who was not surprised at what happened to baseball. Baseball in the Steroid Era was one lie piled upon another over and over, starting with the lie that baseball didn't have a steroid problem at the time, continuing with the wanton disregard of federal law that there were no rules against steroids, advancing to the lie that steroids did not help anyone play baseball, moving to the lies that go on even to this day that no one ever seemed to know anyone who used steroids or, G.o.d forbid, actually used the stuff themselves, and including the lies that pa.s.s as the career playing statistics for the hundreds of players who knowingly chose to break the law and the seemingly archaic code of sportsmans.h.i.+p. The Steroid Era was baseball's Watergate, a colossal breach of trust for which the inst.i.tution is forever tainted. It floats untethered to the rest of baseball history, like some great piece of s.p.a.ce junk, disconnected from the moorings of the game's statistics.

Like Watergate, the Steroid Era eventually and a.s.suredly led to an age of discovery, a sort of archaeology of the times in which some of the ugly truths bobbed to the surface or were unearthed by the brus.h.i.+ng away of the lies. Reputations were ruined or damaged. h.e.l.ling was right. It blew up in the players' faces. Two giants of the game, however, were hit the hardest of all, paying a steep price because their reputations were so outsized in the first place, and then because their personal trainers were ensnared in the legal unravelings of what had happened. One was Bonds. The other was the c.o.c.ksure cowboy from Texas who helped deliver Torre's Yankees to two world champions.h.i.+ps.

The Boss

George Steinbrenner would shovel debris out of six inches of gunky, green water while dressed in his loafers and slacks if it meant winning a World Series, which is exactly what he was doing in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 2000 World Series at Shea Stadium. A fire had started in a third-deck trash container at Shea. When firefighters opened one standpipe to extinguish the fire, pressure built in another standpipe located over the Yankees' clubhouse. The pipe burst, spewing torrents of dirty water and eventually causing the clubhouse ceiling to collapse. Great waves of fetid water cascaded over the clubhouse, and headed in the direction of the Yankees' princ.i.p.al owner.

Steinbrenner's custom was to watch postseason games on television in the Yankees' clubhouse. "You would show up for a game early and he would be the first one there, sitting on the couch waiting for the game to start. He watched the whole game right there," said David Cone. Steinbrenner liked that the television cameras could not focus on him there, and he liked being able to communicate with his team during games. For instance, when hitting coach Chris Chambliss walked into the clubhouse during the game to look at videotapes, Steinbrenner barked at him, "We've got to get these guys going!" It was the old football coach in him.

As firefighters arrived to shut off the standpipe and to clean up the mess, Steinbrenner jumped in to help them. After they did the best they could to move the water out and shovel away the pieces of the demolished ceiling, Steinbrenner, soaked himself, took a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off fifties and hundreds to give to the firefighters in appreciation of their effort.

Steinbrenner was the epitome of the hands-on owner. His presence was everywhere. Earlier on the same day the pipe burst, Steinbrenner ordered his clubhouse attendants to refurnish the visiting clubhouse at Shea Stadium with the team's own chairs, sofas and training tables trucked over from Yankee Stadium. The Boss was upset that the Mets provided only stools in front of each player's locker and he wanted high-backed leather chairs for his players.

"I can't have my guys sitting on these stools!" Steinbrenner said.

Nothing was too small or insignificant to be out of the purview of the owner of the Yankees. Indeed, Steinbrenner thought of himself as one of the guys, a former football player and coach who liked milling about the clubhouse and jabbering with the athletes, speaking their language and smelling the liniment. He would even sit in on scouting report meetings. Cone, more than any other player, recognized Steinbrenner's need to be a part of the jock culture and toyed with him about it.

"I would do stuff just to get him going," Cone said, "to make him feel a part of it. I liked having him around for that reason, because most people were too intimidated to say anything. I would always say, 'What was it like to coach Lenny Dawson? Tell O'Neill. C'mon. Tell him! Give him that pep talk like you gave Lenny!' I'd get him going. And O'Neill would hate it.

"George just wanted to be a part of it. He loved that. I remember one time we had a hitters' meeting before one of the playoff games at Yankee Stadium. George would hang out in the clubhouse for the entire postseason after hardly seeing it during the regular season. He would be involved with the hitters' meetings, the pitchers' meetings, the scouting reports-after not coming by all year.

"I remember we had our pitchers' meeting, and then George was back in the food room with all the hitters, and Chris Chambliss was going over all their pitchers. 'This guy's got this, and that . . .' Gene Michael had the advance report. And the c.o.ke machine was over in the corner buzzing. Bzzzzz. Bzzzzz. It drove George nuts. So he got on his hands and knees and reached around and he's trying to unplug it. It drove George nuts. So he got on his hands and knees and reached around and he's trying to unplug it. Bzzzzz. Bzzzzz. He's moving that thing, he's trying to go around it . . . He's moving that thing, he's trying to go around it . . . Bzzzzz. Bzzzzz. He's yelling at the clubbies, 'Help me move this thing!' Finally, he unplugs it. It stops making the noise. He gets back up off the ground. He's yelling at the clubbies, 'Help me move this thing!' Finally, he unplugs it. It stops making the noise. He gets back up off the ground.

"So we had just finished our meeting and I walk in there and I saw him in there and I looked at Tino's face. And Tino looks as tight as a drum after going over everything. Now George is going over everything, looking over Chambliss' shoulder. So I just screamed, 'George, don't you f.u.c.k up those guys in there!' He looked back at me like this, like, 'What the . . . ?' and everybody just looked up at me.

"I said, 'Get out of there, George! Don't you f.u.c.k them up!' Then I kind of waved, and he broke down and started laughing. Right then, Tino got up and they broke up the meeting.

"And George came up to me after that and said, 'You just better be ready!' I told him, 'I'll be ready, George. I'll be ready.' "

Cone was at it again with Steinbrenner just before the start of that fourth game of the 2000 World Series. O'Neill, famously intense and serious about his preparation, was walking by Cone in the redecorated clubhouse when the pitcher called out to Steinbrenner, "Time for a pep talk, George! O'Neill needs something. He doesn't look like he's ready to play to me."

O'Neill shot a cold stare at Cone. Said Cone, "He's looking at me and he's as tight as a drum. He's bitter. bitter. He's p.i.s.sed at me for trying to stir things up." Cone, of course, kept up the banter. He's p.i.s.sed at me for trying to stir things up." Cone, of course, kept up the banter.

"C'mon, George," he said. "Tell him! C'mon. We need O'Neill today, George. He doesn't look ready to go to me. Does he look ready to you?"

Said Cone, "George just loved it." O'Neill, however, took a very different view of Cone's gamesmans.h.i.+p.

"You," he barked at Cone, "get the f.u.c.k out of the clubhouse! Right now!"

Said Cone, "I thought he was going to kill me. That's the first time I saw Paulie look at me like that. And he wasn't kidding."

Cone had some more fun with Steinbrenner the next day, with the Yankees up three games to one and an opportunity to clinch the World Series. Once again, Steinbrenner arrived early to the clubhouse. Cone pointed out to him some strange cables that had not been in the clubhouse before. He found a microphone taped to the underside of one of the clubhouse tables.

"Look, Boss!" Cone said. "They're wiretapping us! The Mets are wiretapping us!"

Cone, however, knew the equipment belonged to Fox television in preparation for a possible clubhouse celebration.

"Cone knew how to push his b.u.t.tons," said Lou Cucuzza, the Yankees visiting clubhouse manager. "He knew Steinbrenner had a distrust of everything, and was always concerned about wiretapping."