Insider’s View of What Went Wrong in the Bronx

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 25, 2009 - New York Times

The hallmark of the Yankees who won World Series championships in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000 was gritty team play: they weren’t famous for a roster of flashy superstars or power hitters; rather, they were a resolute band of brothers, who put collective play above individual stats — an ensemble distinguished by its chemistry on the field and in the clubhouse, a team renowned for its resourcefulness, its determination and its ability to grind out win after win after win.

The steady hand behind this team, of course, was Joe Torre, a manager whose calm, self-possessed style not only made him a foil to the Yankees’ volatile principal owner, George Steinbrenner, but also enabled him to steer the team gracefully through the pressure cooker of playing in the Big Apple and the postseason.

In “The Yankee Years,” Torre and the Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci — who collaborated on Torre’s 1997 memoir, “Chasing the Dream” — provide a lively chronicle of that historic era and the team’s depressing slide after 2001. There are two curious things about the book. One is that the volume is not a memoir but a third-person account, lacking anything resembling a personal voice and fleshed out with interviews with players like David Cone and Mike Mussina. The second is that it devotes less attention to the team’s remarkable run at the end of the millennium than to its subsequent fall from grace — a fall that began with the seventh game of the 2001 World Series, which the team lost when Mariano Rivera gave up a bloop single to Luis Gonzalez of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and which marked what the former New York Times reporter Buster Olney would later call “the last night of the Yankee dynasty.”

“The Yankee Years” does a nimble, if at times cursory, job of reanimating the long highlight reel of the Torre era: from the team’s ecstatic triumph in the 1996 World Series to Cone’s nerve-racking perfect game in 1999; from the Yankees’ two mind-blowing comebacks against Arizona with two outs in the ninth in Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series to Aaron Boone’s amazing 11th-inning, seventh-game, pennant-winning homer against Boston in the 2003 American League Championship Series.

The book does not hide Torre’s bitterness over his departure in 2007 (he was offered a one-year contract that involved a pay cut in his base salary) and takes a few swipes at the general manager, Brian Cashman, and some players — most notably, Alex Rodriguez. But the volume is most interesting in its thoughtful analysis of why the Yankees’ fortunes began to spiral downward after 2001, analysis that has been made before by baseball reporters and fans, but never with such insight and detail by a former Yankees insider.

Torre and Verducci note that as the core of the old guard from the championship years dwindled — Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius, Chuck Knoblauch and Paul O’Neill were all history by 2002 — the front office tended to turn to imported All-Stars, who failed to congeal into an effective ensemble. The farm system, which had produced the likes of Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams and Rivera, was increasingly neglected, and Steinbrenner began to indulge his taste for what Torre calls “big boppers” like Jason Giambi, who the manager felt “wasn’t part of what we prided ourselves on: playing well defensively.”

This decision, Torre and Verducci write, “made for a whole different dynamic in the Yankees’ clubhouse.” A-Rod’s arrival in 2004 would cement this metamorphosis, and the authors say he became fairly or unfairly “the unmistakable shorthand symbol for why the Yankees no longer were champions and suffered at the rise of the Red Sox”: “Whether hitting 450-foot home runs or sunbathing shirtless in Central Park or squiring strippers, Rodriguez was like nothing ever seen before on the championship teams of the Torre Era: an ambitious superstar impressed and motivated by stature and status, particularly when those qualities pertained to himself.”

With each year’s failure to win a world title, Yankees management grew increasingly desperate, going for the quick fix instead of a long-term plan, bringing to the stadium a succession of aging hitters and what the authors of this book call a “collection of expensive pitchers” — including Kevin Brown, Jeff Weaver, José Contreras, Javier Vázquez, Jaret Wright and Carl Pavano — who “were ill suited for New York, either because they were too emotionally fragile or broken down.” Meanwhile, the team made only lukewarm efforts in 2003 to keep the clutch left-handed pitcher Andy Pettitte, who left for his hometown Houston Astros.

While the Yankees were going through an identity crisis, the dynamics of baseball had begun to change, with other teams embracing new cost-effective business practices based on statistical analysis. No one excelled more at this new number crunching and player development than the Yankees’ archenemies, the Boston Red Sox, who in 2004 would deal the once-mighty Evil Empire a crushing blow, coming back to win the American League championship after the Bombers were ahead by three games to none and a mere three outs away from the World Series. It was a devastating loss that only accelerated the Yankees’ dysfunction, the authors observe, resulting in more organizational backbiting and a team made up of “a slapdash collection of parts that didn’t fit or work.”

This book often fails to detail Torre’s role in the decisions made over these years. His reactions to the signing of Giambi and management’s refusal to grant Williams a guaranteed contract in 2007 are duly noted, but in other instances, it’s unclear to what degree he protested specific choices made by the front office or its lack of a long-term rebuilding strategy.

The account served up in these pages about steroids and George J. Mitchell’s investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball is sketchy. The book relies heavily on statements made by Brian McNamee, a personal trainer who told Mitchell’s staff that he injected Roger Clemens with steroids and Pettitte with human growth hormone. “In 2000 and 2001, the Yankees would joke among themselves about guys who worked closely with McNamee, especially the ones who showed obvious strength and body type changes,” the authors write, adding: “No one wanted to know the details. These were the days of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t care.’ ”

What this book does do and does very persuasively is chart the rise and fall of one of baseball’s great dynasties, while showing the care and feeding it took to bring the city of New York four championships in five years. “There exists a mythology that the championship Yankees teams under Torre operated on autopilot, blissfully riding their talent and their will to preordained titles,” the authors write. “No team requires no care.”

They continue: “The championship teams required their own maintenance, from, among others, the insecurities of Chuck Knoblauch, to the immaturity of David Wells, to the self-critical nature of Tino Martinez, to the overflow intensity of Paul O’Neill, to the neediness of Roger Clemens, and to the overbearing intrusion and influence of George Steinbrenner. Greatness is the ability to mask the difficulty of a task — to make the difficult appear easy. Those Yankees teams epitomized greatness.”