Mission 27, page 15
It did happen two more times during the final month, though. On September 16 Cervelli became the third Yankees player to deal the Blue Jays a walk-off loss, while rookie Juan Miranda—who had nine at-bats in the big leagues that year—delivered the 15th walk-off hit of the season for the Yankees, beating the Kansas City Royals on September 29.
By the end of the regular season, a total of nine players had delivered walk-off hits. Players weren’t the only ones that had become prepared for Burnett. Jones, the YES Network reporter who was usually conducting an interview with that day’s hero, found herself constantly on the lookout. “There was no longer a sense of surprise, which almost got to be more fun,” Jones said. “In some cases, like Posada, they definitely wanted to dodge it. Players like Cervelli, I think the first thing he said to me on-air was, ‘Where’s Burnett?’ So the anticipation became part of the postgame.”
People would ask Burnett if he was prepared to smash a cream pie in the faces of the team’s biggest names—especially Jeter. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ longtime broadcaster, said that he wishes Jeter had produced a walk-off hit just to see if Burnett would have followed through. “They would’ve had to do it to him because they did it to everybody else,” Kay said. “Because everything with Derek works out the way it should, he was never put in that situation. I think Derek would’ve accepted it; I don’t think he would’ve loved it.”
Burnett’s stock response was that he didn’t care who got the hit; if you delivered a walk-off, you were up next. He even promised Girardi that if the Yankees won the World Series, there would be a pie with the manager’s name on it. “I told Jeter every day of the year, ‘I can’t wait to get you, man,’” Burnett said. “He was on deck for so many of them, too. There were so many times that we he had a chance to get him. He was the only one I didn’t get.”
11. Rivalries Renewed
The Yankees trudged away from the Fenway Park diamond in the late evening hours of June 11 through an ancient corridor with peeling white paint—where the likes of Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra might have once stopped to tie their cleats—and toward the cramped confines of the visiting clubhouse. They honestly believed they were better than the Boston Red Sox, but as Hall of Fame NFL coach Bill Parcells, who had coached teams in both regions, was fond of saying, “You are what your record says you are.” At that point, they’d played eight games against Boston and had absorbed eight losses. This team needed to catch a break or two, and Joe Girardi felt that the time was right to call a meeting. “I said, ‘Look, guys, we’re a good team,’” Girardi said. “‘Things just haven’t went our way in this series. It’s going to turn around, and when it does, it’s going to turn around big.’ I was really confident in that team. I just felt like this team is really good. It’s talented and it’s going to take off. And we did.”
Boston swept the Yankees in a three-game set at Fenway from April 24–26 and won its first two games at the new Stadium on May 4–5, so the Yankees arrived in Beantown seeking payback. Instead, the midweek visit was a complete wash for the Bombers, who dropped the contests by scores of 7–0, 6–5, and 4–3, falling two games behind in the American League East.
In the series opener, Josh Beckett limited the Yankees to an infield hit through six innings, offering an olive branch of sorts by noting that since Alex Rodriguez was recovering from hip surgery and had missed the first five losses, “We’ll start counting after that.” The gesture was of no consolation to A.J. Burnett, who’d allowed three runs and five hits, walked five, and recorded just eight outs before taking his frustrations out on a dugout water cooler. “Considering that’s all you hear and that’s all you see every Sunday, those series mean more for some reason. They just do,” Burnett said. “It’s been a thing since baseball started and it’s a different series than any other series. It’s different than the Subway Series; it’s different when you play Boston home or away. They dirt-rolled us early. I couldn’t get the ball anywhere in Jorge [Posada’s] mitt when I pitched in Fenway. Nothing ever got to him.”
The next night, Chien-Ming Wang’s miserable season continued with a third-inning exit, having served up a Mike Lowell homer. Kevin Youkilis also went deep against Phil Hughes as Mark Teixeira’s four hits went to waste, including the slugger’s American League-leading 19th homer. “It was like, ‘We can’t beat these guys. What’s going on? Why can’t we beat these guys?’” Teixeira said.
In the finale CC Sabathia held the Red Sox to one run through seven innings and was permitted to begin the eighth after Francisco Cervelli and Rodriguez slugged doubles in the top of the eighth, providing a 3–1 lead. The advantage evaporated as J.D. Drew sparked a rally with an RBI single that chased Sabathia, scoring the go-ahead run on Lowell’s sacrifice fly off Alfredo Aceves. Despite the final scores that were posted on the hand-operated Green Monster, Sabathia said, “I never really thought they were good at that point back then. I knew we were better than them.”
Sabathia was but one of 25 men in the room, and, as Girardi ditched his lineup card, he was concerned that some other corners of the roster were taking on a downtrodden mind-set. “I wasn’t down on them because I loved the effort,” Girardi said. “I just thought some screwy things happened that kept us from winning some games. The park can play funny, and the dimensions are weird. I just said, ‘This is going to change, guys. We are too good for this not to change.’”
The last time the Red Sox had dominated their blood rivals so thoroughly was 1912, when they’d helped christen brand-new Fenway by pasting a team known as the Highlanders through their first 14 meetings. The Yankees would not see the Red Sox again until August 6, when they’d follow through on Girardi’s urging to produce a better outcome. “You remember every meeting in that [Fenway visiting] clubhouse,” Burnett said. “It’s so little. I do remember that one. It was the same type of thing. ‘Hey, let’s not get too caught up in what the hell’s going on here.’ Of course, Joe would never say that. ‘Let’s think about the mission, let’s get back on track. They’re going to come to us, and we’re going to kick their butts, so let’s just stay even-keeled and Mission 27.’ It was planted in us.”
Andy Pettitte said that while Girardi’s speech may have helped improve the Yanks’ performance, it just as easily could have been a matter of good timing. “Look, I’m not a big believer in a whole lot of meetings,” Pettitte said. “You’ve got a team filled with veteran players, and we know what to expect. Sometimes you’ve got to ride some stuff out, and things go bad. I definitely remember that we had struggled early against them in the year and then I felt like we had turned it around. Maybe we were playing a little uptight or a little stressed. A lot of times, you’ve got to relax a little bit and stop thinking so much about things.”
Years later, some of the Yankees had all but forgotten that they struggled so mightily against the Red Sox, against whom they finished the year 9–9. “We were? Wow, that’s pretty amazing,” Damon said. “Yeah, obviously that puts pressure on us. A good way to think of it is if you lose to a team all year long, you’re bound to beat them sometime. Going 0-for-8, I know our fans couldn’t have been too happy about that, especially with the matchups. That’s not good. We played great against everybody else but the Red Sox. They had our number and nobody else’s? That’s a crazy stat.”
Reliever Brian Bruney had also forgotten that the Yankees opened so poorly against Boston, but the reminder triggered a lesson that he’d learned from Derek Jeter early in his Yankees tenure. “Throughout a season, you don’t look at any of that stuff,” Bruney said. “I remember early in my career looking at numbers. Jeet was like, ‘Hey, why do you look at that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I need to know where I’m at.’ I remember him saying, ‘Are you going to try harder if they’re not any good?’ I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Well, then don’t look at them. They’ll be there at the end of the year. Look at them then.’”
Anyway, there was precious little time for the Yankees to lick their Sox-inflicted wounds, having to return home to meet the New York Mets for the first Subway Series game played at the new Stadium. After birthday boy Hideki Matsui hit one of five home runs in the game, David Wright snapped a 7–7 tie with an eighth-inning RBI double off Mariano Rivera, and the Mets called upon closer Francisco Rodriguez—known as “K-Rod”—for the final three outs.
Brett Gardner fouled out, but Jeter singled and stole second base as Damon struck out. Teixeira was granted an intentional walk to bring up Alex Rodriguez, who slammed his bat on home plate in frustration after lifting a 3–1 pitch into shallow right field. K-Rod pointed toward the sky, pumping his fist in celebration. A Mets win had been secured, or so it appeared.
Near the lip of the infield dirt, second baseman Luis Castillo attempted to camp under the ball, backpedaling and shuffling a few feet to his left. Castillo realized that he was in trouble as Alex Rodriguez’s sky-high pop-up had more top-spin than expected. “I remember dropping my head, thinking, Damn, like we missed an opportunity,” Girardi said. “And then hearing screaming and looking up. I was thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me. This just happened?”
The ball smacked into the palm of Castillo’s glove and fell safely to the outfield grass. Castillo dropped to his knees and lobbed the ball to shortstop Alex Cora, who whipped a throw to catcher Omir Santos. It was too late, as Teixeira slid home with the winning run of a wild 9–8 Yankees victory. As the Yanks celebrated, a stunned K-Rod stood on the field with his hands on his head. “It’s almost like a microcosm of the Yankees and Mets history,” Teixeira said. “The Yankees are always the team with the talent and they win. And the Mets are always the team of ‘How can this happen?’”
To Teixeira’s credit, he had been running hard immediately on contact, making the play possible. “I’m as proud of that play as any play in my career because I always thought of myself as a grinder,” Teixeira said. “Obviously, with the way my body broke down the last four years of my time in New York, I kind of proved to everybody this is not easy. I played through broken bones, I’ve played through torn wrists, I played through all these things. That grinder in me was proud that people appreciated that because New York’s a kind of grind-it-out, blue-collar city. That ball went up, and I just said, ‘I’m going to bust it. You never know. Why not hustle?’ When I heard the crowd cheer, I didn’t have to look. I knew what had happened. When Rob Thomson was sending me home, I was like, I’m scoring here. I knew I was going to score.”
A relieved Alex Rodriguez was mobbed by his teammates at first base with Robinson Cano repeatedly slapping his teammate on the helmet before enveloping him in a hug. Alex Rodriguez said that events like the dropped pop-up are the breaks that make the difference in championship seasons. “Honestly, when things like that happen, you’re just like, ‘We don’t need that type of luck. We’re good. We don’t deserve that break,’” A-Rod said. “But when things like that happen, you’re seeing more signs like, ‘Maybe this is supposed to be the year.’ When weird shit starts happening and Tex is hustling his ass all the way around, I think when you have great fundamentals and you play hard and you play the right way, great things are going to happen.”
Billy Eppler never heard the ball drop. Then the Yankees’ assistant general manager, Eppler vividly recalls listening to John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman’s radio broadcast in a rental car outside a hotel in Rome, Georgia, having just watched the Yankees’ Class A Charleston affiliate play against an Atlanta Braves farm team. “They go, ‘Pop-up to second base,’ and I turned the ignition off in the car,” Eppler said. “I go and check into the hotel, put my bags down. There’s a convenience store across the street, so I go walk over and get bottles of whatever stuff I wanted to pick up, walk back to the hotel room. I finally sit down, unpack, open up my laptop, connect to the WiFi, and I’m like, ‘What? Oh my God, he dropped the pop-up.’ Now I always listen all the way through.”
The Mets responded with a 6–2 victory in the June 13 afternoon contest, but the Yankees unloaded in the series finale. Hours after Bruney and K-Rod had to be separated by teammates during batting practice in left field, the Yankees delivered a knockout by pounding Johan Santana in a 15–0 victory that marked the biggest blowout between the Big Apple rivals.
Jeter went 4-for-4, and the Yankees got two-run homers from Matsui and Cano in a nine-run fourth inning as they built a 13-run cushion for Burnett. “We basically had a bad series in Boston,” Matsui said at the time. “So it was important to start fresh and clear.”
The batting practice tiff between the relievers had stemmed from Bruney remarking that K-Rod’s exuberant celebrations were a “tired act,” and that the blown save on the Castillo pop-up “couldn’t happen to a better guy on the mound.” Having led the majors with 62 saves the year prior, Rodriguez fired back: “If it came from somebody big like Mariano [Rivera], somebody who has been around and who is good at what he does, I would respect that. But somebody like that, it doesn’t bother me.”
Backed by a tie-breaking Cano double, Sabathia continued the homestand by pitching into the eighth inning in a 5–3 victory against the woeful Washington Nationals shortly after A-Rod made an unannounced appearance in Monument Park to greet fans. Any hope of a soaring climb was doused as the last-place Nationals took the final two games of the series, handing New York a 3–0 loss on June 18 in front of about 10,000 people, following a five-and-a-half-hour rain delay. “The only problem that I think we had was in our lull times when things were bad, I think we literally just forgot who we were,” Nick Swisher said. “And that’s kind of half the battle.”
It was a gray send-off for the Yanks, who zipped their bags for a nine-game trip to Miami, Atlanta, and back to New York for their first visit to the Mets’ new Citi Field. They had no way of knowing that their season was about to take a dramatic turn.
12. A Visit from the Principal
Traffic crawled at the corner of East 161st Street and River Avenue just outside the home-plate entrance of the gleaming new stadium. Four stories above, general manager Brian Cashman leaned back in his executive’s chair as an all-too-familiar sensation of anxiety coursed through his 5’8” frame. Schooled in the win-or-else environment that George Steinbrenner had demanded from his employees, the longtime Yankees general manager frequently said that it was in his job description to never be satisfied with his team’s performance. At this moment in time, Cashman assuredly was not.
He had done everything in his power to construct a contender during the offseason. There had been plenty of bumps along the way, but the Yankees had overcome their early-season malaise, climbing out of a six-and-a-half-game hole to gain sole possession of first place.
Yet their 4–9 stretch against the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, Washington Nationals, and Florida Marlins had been punctuated by an offense that struggled to score runs. Boston surged past New York into first place in the American League East, making Cashman feel even worse. Consecutive series losses to the lowly Nationals and Marlins washed out the good vibes produced by Luis Castillo’s gift error.
There were whispers that some players had enjoyed the Miami nightlife a little too much, and a few bleary-eyed hangovers would have explained their lackadaisical play. As the series against the Braves at Atlanta’s Turner Field began on June 23, Cashman found himself cursing at a high-definition television screen as he observed another listless performance. A rookie named Tommy Hanson limited the Yankees to four hits over five-and-one-third scoreless innings, and the vaunted lineup fared no better against three relievers, who combined to hold them hitless over the final three-and-two-thirds frames. The No. 2–6 hitters—Nick Swisher, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez, Robinson Cano, and Jorge Posada—finished a collective 1-for-19.
A-Rod, in particular, seemed to be lost, as his hitless night extended a 1-for-23 skid. They had scored 18 runs over their past nine losses, averaging two runs per game. “We were losing to teams at the time we shouldn’t be losing to,” Cashman said. “You can go on a bad stretch, but this started to extend into a much longer stretch. Offensively, we were challenged for some reason against subpar pitching.”
At 38–32 the Yankees trailed the Red Sox by five games for the division lead. They wouldn’t get another crack at their rivals for another six weeks, but if they wanted those games to mean something, they needed to get their groove back before the AL East race became a pipe dream. “We just haven’t been playing well; that’s pretty much it,” Derek Jeter said after the series-opening loss in Atlanta. “People always try to dissect everything and break it down, but we haven’t hit. That’s why we’ve been losing. It’s nothing deeper than that.”
Cashman didn’t know exactly what was going on, but he wasn’t about to sit in his office while the season was falling apart. Though Cashman typically preferred to allow the clubhouse to be the domain of the manager, coaches, and players, believing that he shouldn’t usurp their authority, his fingers dialed the numbers for traveling secretary Ben Tuliebitz.
Screw it. He needed a plane ticket to Atlanta.
“We were an elite team, at least on paper, and I didn’t know what was going on,” Cashman said. “So I flew in to address all of it, to try to get into the blood and guts. Your manager and your coaching staff and your players are all there on a daily basis, trying to fight through this stuff. But sometimes I do believe if you have to insert yourself, you can’t be afraid to do that.”
The GM had planned to be at a ballpark on that date—just not a big league venue. His initial itinerary involved a leisurely 90-mile trek to Moosic, Pennsylvania, home of the Yankees’ Triple A affiliate, where rehabbing outfielder Xavier Nady and pitcher Sergio Mitre were slated to play in a minor league game against the Washington Nationals’ top farm team.
