Trust.(The Yankee Years)(Critical essay)

Joe Torre will be back in town on Tuesday, July 7th, reassuringly on view behind the batting cage at Citi Field as he prepares his Los Angeles Dodgers for a three-game series against the Mets. Last year, he took the Dodgers into the National League Championship Series, one step short of the World Series, but lost to the eventual 2008 Champions, the Phillies; it was the thirteenth consecutive year that a team of his had progressed into the October playoffs. The Yankees, meanwhile, finished a lacklustre third in the American League East under their new manager, Joe Girardi, and went home. For me, a longtime New York baseball fan, the shock of no Yankees in the playoffs was less than the shock of not having Joe Torre in town for the summer, and I feel the same way now, at the beginning of his second year in exile. What's lost is not the winning so much as the elegant daily and weekly, home and away managing seminar on giving your team a chance to win, or get ready to win--or perhaps lose, if that's the way things turn out. This tone or strategy may be only another way of enunciating Yogi Berra's "In baseball you don't know nothin'," but it's a lesson I did not fully grasp until I had watched Torre sitting immobile in the Yankee dugout through many hundreds of innings, with his lidded dark gaze raised to the level of the field; one hand occasionally reaching back for another swig of green tea; his head now and then tilting toward the words of his bench coach; and, late in the evening, his shoulders lifting as he prepared to get up and climb the steps and trudge to the mound to change a pitcher and exchange a word or two with his catcher about the situation at hand. Is this all that big-league managers do? Here's Torre: "There's a certain amount of keeping track and keeping a little grip on certain things, so somebody doesn't go off half-cocked or somebody doesn't lose their direction, but aside from that you trust these guys to play the game. I can honestly say that when the game's over that you just go home. If it wasn't good enough, it wasn't good enough. You knew they were out there giving it everything they had."

Torre's calm and presence aren't perfect throughout "The Yankee Years" (Doubleday; $26.95), a capacious fresh account of his great run in the Bronx, which he co-wrote with the Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci--there's a nice moment when he tells a Yankee president to shut the fuck up, on the phone--but trust or its poisonous absence are recurrent chords in this narrative of the Steinbrenner empire during the Yankees' four World Championships between 1996 and 2000, and their ensuing misses or near-misses from 2001 to 2007, when Torre was cut loose in humiliating fashion. Although "The Yankee Years" can be read as urban opera, with scenes taken from the Subway Series against the Mets in 2000 and the emotional resumption of play after 9/11, plus fabulous late (sometimes late, late) post-season duets with the Red Sox, it's also a case history of the sad physical and mental decline of Emperor George, or an M.B.A. class in radical corporate thinking and its absence in a baseball time of unimaginable financial expansion, or a further take on high-salaried egos and frail character in the steroid era of sports. The Torre-Verducci collaboration departs from the usual run of sports lit, because it's so clearly Verducci's book; he does all the writing and reporting, while Joe stands a step or two to one side and speaks up when needed. The book covers much the same ground as Buster Olney's ringing "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty," from 2004, but gives most attention to the latter seasons and the steady input from Joe. This is straight baseball by a reporter alert enough to enlist Yankee bullpen catcher Mike Borzello and trainer Steve Donahue as significant sources.

Verducci has range and ease; he's a shortstop on the page. He gets us into the visiting-team clubhouse before the sixth game of the Yankees-Red Sox American League championship in 2004 (the Red Sox have come back from three games down), where Kevin Millar, ringleader of "the Idiots," as the hilariously loose team is known, tells manager Terry Francona that the Sox will not be taking practice that night, in order to avoid "Yankeeography crap" up on the stadium's video board. "Whatever you guys want," Francona says. Millar then tours the clubhouse, doling out slugs to his teammates from a bottle of Jack Daniel's he's come upon, and the Sox go out and nail the game.

In his chapter on steroids, Verducci deposes Rick Helling, a young pitcher and player representative with the Texas Rangers in 1998, who back then urgently told the executive board of the Players Association that steroid use was rampant in the sport and would ultimately corrupt it--to absolutely no avail. Verducci also admires the generation of young G.M.s like the Red Sox' Theo Epstein and the Indians' Mark Shapiro, who have led the post-"Moneyball" revolution in scouting and player appraisal and game tactics which has overturned the pastime.

Near the end of the book, when a distracting cloud of Lake Erie midges envelops the rookie Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain on the mound in Cleveland in October, 2007, causing the two wild pitches that take away the Yanks' quavering lead, Verducci slips in some entomology, then embarks on an inspired digression about the Indians' seven-year process of finding and signing (at seventeen) and patiently developing a young Dominican right-hander named Fausto Carmona. Now twenty-three, and a nineteen-game winner, Carmona stands on the mound in the ninth in this same game after eight innings' work, ignoring midges while he faces Alex Rodriguez, with two out, a Yankee base runner on second, and the game tied, and strikes him out on a power sinker. The Yankees lose, and two games later Torre's career in the Bronx is over.

Yankee fans love to look back on the good stuff and keep it on permanent replay, but there's never enough of it, because these losing nights, the killers, keep coming back and take over in our minds. In the book, it's a rush when you reach those latter-nineties or millennial late-inning Yankee explosions and Stadium-shaking endings, like the successive-night home runs against the same pitcher, Diamondback closer Byung-Hyun Kim, in the fourth and fifth games of the World Series of 2001. Two years along, Aaron Boone eliminates the Red Sox once again in the Championship Series, with his eleventh-inning lead-off homer into the lower left-field stands. Hold it right there--only you can't. The two biggest games in the book by far are Yankee defeats: the D-backs' seventh-game World Series effort in 2001, when Arizona rallies with a pair of ninth-inning runs against the untouchable Mariano Rivera to win their first and only championship; and the Red Sox' tying rally (again against Mo) in the ninth inning of that 2004 A.L.C.S. fourth game--they've trailed in this series, remember, three games to none, and face elimination here--and then the twelfth-inning, two-run home run by David Ortiz that wins the game and begins the tectonic shift away from the Bronx and toward Boston.

The Steinbrenner obsession to win infects the Torre story like arsenic in a tenement flat. In June, 1996, a bare three months into his first season at the Yankee helm--a season in which the Yanks would win their first World Championship in eighteen years--he was summoned into Steinbrenner's office and told "it's your ass that's on the line" if the team, already in first place in its division, didn't win an upcoming series against the Indians. Less than a week into the 1998 season, the same threat was being levelled against a Yankee team that would go on to win more games than any team in baseball history. During spring training in 2007, when general manager Brian Cashman wanted to discuss a renewal of Torre's contract with the Boss, he was told that it was "not a good time for this," because the Yanks had just lost two exhibition games in a row. That fall, with the Yanks a game away from elimination in the Division Series against the Indians, the ill and now reclusive George took a call from a reporter for the Bergen County Record and said, "His job is on the line. . . . He's the highest-paid manager in baseball, so I don't think we'd take him back if we don't win this series." They did lose, and this time he didn't come back. The bullying never ended, and, in between times, Steinbrenner threatened the jobs of Torre's coaches and drove some of them, including Torre's first bench coach, Don Zimmer, and the austere long-term pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, into unwilling retirement. Verducci calls this policy "designated scapegoating," or making people responsible for the outcomes of others, and says that Steinbrenner loved it because it kept his employees uneasy.