Pinstripe Empire (85 page)

Tony Womack was to have been the Yankees’ second baseman in 2005, but it wasn’t working out, and in May Torre handed the job to rookie Robinson Cano.

Cano, born in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic, and named for Jackie Robinson (he eventually wore number 24 as a tribute to Robinson’s retired number 42), would become one of the few players whose major league performance far exceeded his minor league one. So rapidly did his skills rise above expectations, that by his sixth season it was possible for observers to believe that on most days, the Yankees were fielding the best third baseman (A-Rod), best shortstop (Jeter), and best second baseman (Cano) in team history. Of course, careers take twists and turns, and injuries can happen, but his offense was already exceeding the two Yankee second basemen in the Hall of Fame—Lazzeri and Gordon—and he had a smooth flat-footed defensive style and strong throwing arm.

The son of Jose Cano, who pitched six games for the ’89 Astros, he got a modest $150,000 bonus and hit .261 in three minor league seasons. He always made a postgame phone call to his father to analyze his performance, even after he became a star.
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He was often in trade talks as a “throw-in” but he stayed in the system, and he was there when Womack failed. He began with a 2-for-23 showing but Torre built his confidence and told him the hits would fall. He wound up with a .297 average, and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting.

One of the trades he survived was the one that brought Hall of Fame–bound Randy Johnson to New York in 2005. Johnson, forty-one, a nine-time strikeout champion and five-time Cy Young winner, became, at six foot ten, the tallest Yankee in history.
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He had 246 career victories, a perfect game, and a World Series ring from the 2001 Arizona triumph over the Yankees. He earned $32 million in his two years.

While Johnson won 34 games over his two Yankee seasons, there was a
sense that his skills were beginning to diminish. He wasn’t “lights out,” as he had been so often in his career, and his 5.00 ERA in 2006 confirmed what people were sensing. He got on poorly with the media, entering into a confrontation on a Manhattan street with a TV crew even before he pitched his first game. It was less than a good fit, and he was traded back to Arizona after two years, winning his 300th game with the Giants in 2009 before retiring at age forty-five.

He was joined on the Yankee staff in 2005 by Chien-Ming Wang, the fourth Taiwanese player in major league history and the Yanks’ first. Wang (pronounced
Wong
, but playfully called “Wanger” by Jeter and others) had been the organization’s Minor League Pitcher of the Year in 2004. He signed in 2000 and worked his way up through the system, beginning with the Staten Island Yankees, the Yankees NY-Penn League team that began play the year before at a new ballpark near the Staten Island Ferry dock. (The team moved from Oneonta, nineteen miles from Cooperstown, where for thirty-two seasons the Yanks had maintained a working relationship with the community-owned franchise.)

The Yankees brought Wang up from Columbus in late April and put him in the starting rotation. He responded with an 8–5 record in 18 games. Communication was difficult, but he managed press conferences in English without a translator.

Wang turned out to be a real find. He won 19 games in both 2006 and 2007 and became the most reliable pitcher in the rotation. When the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, he was among the players prominently displayed on exterior billboards heralding the star-packed roster. But in a 2008 interleague game at Houston, he partially tore a tendon in his right foot while scoring the only run of his Yankee career. He wound up on crutches and missed the rest of the season.

The baserunning snafu wasn’t really the problem. Wang had some shoulder issues and ultimately, they did him in. He pitched the first exhibition game in the new stadium the following year, and then 12 regular season games afterward, but his 9.64 ERA said it all. His mechanics were off, and he was not the pitcher he had been. Sadly, he was cut loose after the 2009 season, with fans left to wonder what might have been, and reminded of how fragile a career can be.

Another “find” in 2005 was Aaron Small, thirty-three. The Yankees were his tenth organization. He had mostly pitched in the minors for seventeen long seasons. The Yanks called him up in July, and he became an inspiration
to all players who just “hung in” over repeated shuffles through the minors and various organizations. Small went 10–0 with a 3.20 ERA before losing a game in the ALDS. He was a one-year wonder; the magic was gone in 2006, but to be ten games over .500 for a playoff-bound team was no small contribution.

Yet another free agent signing for 2005 was Carl Pavano; one this did not play out well. Pavano pitched against the Yankees in the 2003 World Series, and then went 18–8 for the Marlins in 2004. He signed a four-year contract for just under $40 million, and started the ’05 season well. But then injuries followed injuries, rehab didn’t go well, and when Pavano broke his ribs in a car accident and waited too long to tell the team, the relationship really soured. He refused a minor league assignment to give the Yankees a needed roster spot. Newspapers cleverly called him “American Idle.”

His teammates began to speak about him in less than supportive terms. Mussina said, “Was everything just coincidence? Over and over again? I don’t know.” Torre used the word “sizable” to describe the work Pavano needed to do to get back in the good graces of his teammates. It was most unusual to find players not closing ranks around one of their own.

In the end, the Yankees let his four-year contract expire and just called it a bad signing. He managed to get another contract from Cleveland and got back his winning form there and in Minnesota. When he was a free agent after 2010, and the Yankees needed a starting pitcher—he was not considered.

His lifetime record with the Yankees in just 26 starts was 9–8, 5.00. He pitched just 145 innings over the length of the contract, at a cost of over $250,000 per inning. Throw in medical expenses and meal money, and Pavano was one of the least rewarding investments the team ever made.

A FAMILIAR FACE returned to New York in 2005 for one last season. With Giambi now seen as primarily a DH, the Yanks brought back Tino Martinez. Tino showed his old power early, hitting eight homers over eight games in May, but in the end hit only nine more and then retired. Al Leiter also came “home” to the organization at which he had begun his career, returning on July 17, sixteen years after being traded to Toronto for Jesse Barfield.

The 2005 Yanks got an instant MVP season from A-Rod, .321/48/130, in which he became the first Yankee in twenty-five years (since Reggie Jackson) to lead the league in home runs. He was the first right-handed-hitting
Yankee to win a home run title since DiMaggio in 1948, and it gave him 429 career home runs in the year he turned thirty.

The Yanks went 95–67, the same record as the Red Sox, but because they won the season series from Boston 10–9, they clinched the division on the next-to-last day of the season with an 8–4 win over the Sox. For eight years in a row now, they had finished first and Boston second.

On Sunday, September 25, the final home game of the regular season, a crowd of 55,136 poured through the gates to put the Yankees over four million for the first time in their history. It was an incredible accomplishment—almost a season of sellouts. When I had been the PR director, we would put out an annual press release hailing “the [blank] consecutive year in which the Yankees had drawn a million.” Two million became standard when the remodeled stadium opened in 1976. Three million became the threshold in 1999. And now this. In each of the final four years of the remodeled Yankee Stadium, four million was surpassed.

The Yanks faced the newly renamed Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the Division Series. The Angels were always a tough opponent for the Yanks, and in this series they divided the first four games, with the Yanks’ Shawn Chacon staving off elimination with a game-four victory. But in game five, Mussina allowed five runs in 2
⅔
innings, and Torre brought in Randy Johnson in relief. On two days’ rest, Johnson pitched 4
⅔
shutout innings, but the Angels held on to win the game 5–3 and send the Yankees home. They hadn’t missed two World Series in a row since the 1981–95 drought.

AFTER LOSING THE 2001 World Series, Steinbrenner had told Brian Cashman, “Okay, we’ve been doing it your way, now it’s my turn,” and he had created dual—some said dueling—front offices. The concept failed to produce another world championship.

“I kept telling George that he needed a general manager he would listen to,” said Cashman. “If roster moves weren’t working out, it was my problem, I was taking the blame, and in many cases, I hadn’t signed those guys in the first place. Too many people were involved. In the military, you have a clear chain of command, and you consolidate authority. We needed that as an organization. And I told him I would leave—I had other offers. It wasn’t a power play, it was just becoming more and more difficult.

“George was surprised by my position, especially when Randy Levine and [general partner] Steve Swindal told him I meant it.”

Steinbrenner acquiesced. He didn’t want to lose Cashman, and he agreed to tender him full authority for player decisions. He gave him autonomy and a three-year, $3 million contract.

“I stayed out of respect for him. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to disappoint him, but I couldn’t exist in the current structure,” he said.

WITH SHEFFIELD AND MATSUI both sidelined for long stretches by injuries in 2006, the Yankees were lucky to come up with four unexpected replacements: Johnny Damon, who left the Red Sox to sign a four-year, $52 million contract; rookie Melky Cabrera, who brought young enthusiasm to the roster; Bobby Abreu, a fine offensive player obtained in July from the Phillies; and Bernie Williams, who signed a one-year, $1.5 million “last-round” contract and wound up playing 131 games.

When the season ended, Williams was disappointed not to be offered anything more than a spring training invite. So his career ended without him formally retiring, still hopeful of another shot.

Williams had five 100-RBI seasons and eight 100-run seasons. He was sixth on the Yankees’ all-time home run list, fifth in games played, and no Yankee hit more postseason home runs.

Jeter enjoyed a big 2006 and finished a close second to Minnesota’s Justin Morneau in MVP voting, his second runner-up finish. Jeter never played for awards, but this felt like a missing piece of hardware to a remarkable collection. Cano hit a robust .342.

Sheffield returned late in the season from his wrist injury, and Torre decided to try him at first base, feeling the outfield was now well manned with Damon, Matsui, and Abreu, with Giambi as DH (37 regular-season homers), and with Cabrera as a spare. But the team’s ninth straight ALDS didn’t go well for the Yanks; Sheffield was 1-for-12, A-Rod 1-for-14 (to increasing fan booing), Cano 2-for-15, and Damon 4-for-17. The Tigers knocked off the Yanks in four games with only Wang winning his start,
and the Yankees went home early for a third straight year. Ex-Yank Kenny Rogers hurled seven shutout innings for the Tigers in game three.

Steinbrenner waited until three days after the season before offering Torre another contract, albeit at $7 million a year, the most ever earned by a manager. But patience was never his strong suit: It had been six years now without a world championship.

When pitcher Cory Lidle’s private plane hit a Manhattan apartment building four days after the Yanks were eliminated, killing the pitcher and recalling the death of Thurman Munson, some reflected on how a win over Detroit would have kept the Yanks going: Lidle would not have been in the air that day.

TALK CONTINUED ON a new Yankee Stadium. In 1996 HOK, the renowned stadium architectural firm, proposed four sites for a new home: the rail yard on Manhattan’s west side, Pelham Bay Park, Van Cortlandt Park, and the existing site (or across the street). By now Rudolph Giuliani had been elected mayor, and there never was a bigger Yankee fan in City Hall.

But despite having everything seemingly in place—a supportive mayor, a strong economy, a popular team, and a 1998 plan unveiled for a new Met stadium—it never happened during the Giuliani administration. In his final week in office, not long after 9/11, he brought forth a half-taxpayer, half-ballclub plan for both the Yankees and the Mets to have new ballparks, but that too was not what ultimately happened. One missing element was a supportive press. They didn’t like the idea of public money going to the projects. And still, New Jersey beckoned. The
New Yorker
had a cover showing Yankee Stadium being lifted by helicopters and transferred to Jersey. But public opinion polls in New Jersey convinced Governor Christine Whitman to back down.

On April 5, 2006, the city council of New York approved plans calling for the Yankees to privately finance a new ballpark. The stadium was built through a combination of the state, the city, and the Yankees. The city formed a local development corporation that in effect provided the land to build it. The Yankees paid for construction through PILOT payments (payments in lieu of taxes), and the funding came via city-issued bonds, the Yankees making payments to the bond holders while contributing millions toward new parks and Bronx community-group programs. The city owned both the land and the building; the Yankees signed a forty-year lease.

On August 16, 2006, the fifty-eighth anniversary of Babe Ruth’s passing, ground was broken just across East 161st Street from the existing ballpark for a new and larger Yankee Stadium, with no naming rights sold. It would eventually cost about $1.45 billion, with an additional $300 to $400 million for infrastructure improvements to be borne by city and state taxpayers.

Just like other teams with new ballparks, the Yankees could deduct their stadium-construction payments from their local revenue (broadcast, tickets, and concessions), from which their sharing obligations with the lower-revenue teams was determined.