Part 16 (2/2)
Brown wheeled away from Stottlemyre, walking into the main portion of the clubhouse. He stopped at a concrete pillar and hauled off on it, throwing a hard punch. Brown quickly bent over in pain, holding his hand.
”Tell me that wasn't your right hand,” Stottlemyre said.
Brown didn't answer. Stottlemyre thought he saw that Brown was holding his left hand.
”Are you all right?” the pitching coach asked.
Still no answer. Brown kept ignoring his coach.
”Kevin,” Stottlemyre said. ”I need to know if you can go back and pitch or not. You gotta tell me something.”
Brown looked down at his hand. Finally, he spoke.
”No,” he said. ”I'm not all right.”
Stottlemyre knew the first order of business was to alert Torre because the Yankees would need to get a pitcher ready to replace Brown. He walked down the runway, back to the dugout.
”Joe,” he said, ”you're not going to be too happy with your pitcher.”
”What'd he do?” Torre asked.
”He punched a wall,” Stottlemyre said. ”Might have broken his left hand.”
Now Torre left the dugout and headed up the runway and into the clubhouse. He found Brown and immediately began to scream at him.
”That's the most f.u.c.king selfish thing I've ever seen anybody do!” Torre said. ”I have no patience for that s.h.i.+t!”
”I'm sorry,” Brown said.
Torre's anger and tongue-las.h.i.+ng quickly subsided. He saw that the man in front of him was a beaten man.
Said Torre, ”At that point he was so demoralized. He was never a fighter. He never wanted to fight you. Neither was Randy Johnson, for that matter. I like Kevin Brown. The difference between Kevin Brown and David Wells is that both make your life miserable, but David Wells meant to. I don't think Kevin Brown meant to. I don't think Randy meant to. And that's what I go on.”
Brown came back from the broken hand to make two starts before the end of the regular season, the first of which was a nightmare against Boston in which he couldn't get out of the first inning. The Red Sox pounded him for six hits and four runs in that abbreviated time. Brown simply generated no good feelings from his team, and ALCS Game 3, while ending up in a blowout victory, continued with Brown as the carrier of bad karma, hardly the role the Yankees had in mind when they traded for him and his $15 million per year salary to take the sting out of losing Pett.i.tte and to provide a return volley to the Red Sox for getting Schilling.
Buried within the Game 3 win was another troubling sign. Torre brought in setup reliever Tom Gordon to pitch the ninth inning with the score 19-8. It was the third straight game in which Gordon was used. Why would Torre use his key eighth-inning reliever in a blowout? Gordon badly was in need of a confidence boost. He appeared jittery in both Game 1 and Game 2, giving up two runs and failing to pitch cleanly in both outings. Torre thought giving him the ninth inning, with n.o.body on base and an 11-run lead, would relax Gordon and give him confidence that would carry over into the next time Torre needed him in a tight spot. Nonetheless, Gordon still appeared on edge. With one out he gave up a double to Trot Nixon. Then he uncorked a wild pitch. He did strike out Millar and retired Bill Mueller on a fly ball to end the inning without a run scoring. It represented progress for Gordon, but only by a small step.
Vazquez, Brown and Gordon all had struggled, but how much could that really matter at this point? The Yankees led the series three games to none. The Red Sox were as good as dead. In the history of Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL, teams trailing 3-0 in a best-of-seven series were 2-231. The Red Sox had a 0.85 percent chance of winning the series. The only teams to recover from the bottom of that well were the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs and the 1975 New York Islanders. The Yankees were starting Orlando Hernandez in Game 4, the veteran righthander with a 9-3 career postseason record. The Red Sox were starting Derek Lowe, who had pitched himself out of the postseason rotation and was only getting the ball because the scheduled Game 4 starter, Tim Wakefield, pitched in relief in Game 3 to save Francona from blowing out his bullpen in the rout.
A few hours before Game 4, Epstein watched Schilling muster his way through a bullpen session at Fenway Park, using a special bootlike spike to try to give support to his wobbly right ankle. No one was sure if he could pitch again in the series. Actually, no one was sure there were going to be any more games in the series.
On his way from the bullpen to the dugout, Epstein was stopped by reporters on the warning track, down the right-field line. They had obituaries and epitaphs to write about this Red Sox team and they wanted the team's general manager to cooperate. Epstein wasn't playing along.
”Guys,” he pleaded. ”We have one game to win tonight. That's our focus.”
The line of questioning didn't end. A columnist, with the sound of the Yankees' bats still ringing in his ears after the 19-8 sh.e.l.lacking, asked Epstein, ”Is what happened yesterday an indictment of the lack of professionalism in your clubhouse, especially contrasted to the Yankees? Is that a sign that you can't win with the kind of lawlessness in your clubhouse?”
”Guys,” Epstein said, barely concealing his anger, ”we might not win, but it has absolutely nothing to do with our makeup.”
Epstein marched off into the clubhouse. He was hot. It wasn't the reporters that bothered him most. It was how everything invested in this season, going back to the motivation to redeem the Aaron Boone game, to the stealth securing of Schilling, to the hiring of Francona, to the bold trade of Garciaparra . . . all of it could be washed down the drain without winning so much as one game against the Yankees.
”It was just a thought in the back of my head that wouldn't go away,” Epstein said. ”I was so p.i.s.sed off about the possibility of getting swept. I'm thinking, I cannot f.u.c.king believe a team this good that played so well down the stretch and could so easily win the World Series is going to be swept by the Yankees. We cannot let it happen.”
When Epstein looked around the room he saw reason to be encouraged.
”They were still really loose,” he said of his players. ”They had incredible makeup.”
Millar, the first baseman who was always quick with a quote, a laugh or a joke, was walking around the room saying the same thing over and over again: ”Don't let us win one! Don't let us win one!” It became the idiots' rallying cry.
As Millar recounted, ”I was thinking, You better beat us in Game 4, because if we win it . . . look out. I didn't like our matchup in Game 4. I didn't know how we were going to do it, but don't let us win. Because now we've got Pedro in Game 5 and now we've got Schilling in Game 6, and in Game 7 anything can happen. So I knew once we could win that game, the entire pressure went to them. We didn't have any pressure. We were supposed to lose. We're down. Now we're just having fun. Now we're going to watch them choke. That's basically what it boils down to. We're going to have fun and keep battling. And those were great games.”
The Yankees scored first, on a two-run home run by Alex Rodriguez in the third inning. It would be the last time Rodriguez drove in a base runner in the postseason in this series and the next three postseasons combined, and the next three postseasons combined, a span of 59 at-bats overall in which he batted .136, including 0-for-27 with 38 total runners on base. The Yankees lost the lead when Boston nicked Hernandez for three runs in the fifth, then seized it right back with two runs in the sixth. The tie-breaking run scored on an infield hit by Tony Clark. Torre put the 4-3 lead into the hands of Tanyon Sturtze, not Gordon, and Sturtze came through with two scoreless innings. a span of 59 at-bats overall in which he batted .136, including 0-for-27 with 38 total runners on base. The Yankees lost the lead when Boston nicked Hernandez for three runs in the fifth, then seized it right back with two runs in the sixth. The tie-breaking run scored on an infield hit by Tony Clark. Torre put the 4-3 lead into the hands of Tanyon Sturtze, not Gordon, and Sturtze came through with two scoreless innings.
Now the Yankees were six outs away from sweeping the Red Sox, with the heart of the Boston order due up in the eighth inning. Torre was absolutely sure who was going to get those outs: Rivera. Gordon's shakiness didn't even come into play now. Torre's closer was fully rested after three days off. Torre always worried about giving a near-dead opponent any reason for optimism. Rivera, even for six outs, was the surest option in baseball, the king of postseason closers. It was time to step on the throat of the Red Sox.
Rivera yielded a single to his first batter, Manny Ramirez, but it was cla.s.sic Rivera for the rest of the eighth inning: three consecutive outs on 13 pitches (15 total for the inning) without the ball leaving the infield (a strikeout of David Ortiz and groundb.a.l.l.s from Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon).
The Yankees went quietly in the top of the ninth against Keith Foulke. Three outs to go. The Yankees held an extreme advantage over Boston. In all best-of-seven series games, the road team leading by one run with three outs to go was 77-11, an 87.5 percent success rate. Representatives from Major League Baseball Properties carried large boxes into a back room of the Yankees clubhouse. The boxes held dozens of hats and T-s.h.i.+rts that said, ”New York Yankees. 2004 American League Champions.” There was no champagne being prepared yet. The Yankees were so experienced at those kind of celebrations-and so cautious not to jinx them-that their clubhouse staff learned to wait for the last possible out; they could set up for the party in under 10 minutes.
As Rivera prepared himself to leave the dugout to pitch the ninth, Torre thought of pa.s.sing on to him a word of warning about the leadoff hitter, Millar. He thought about having Stottlemyre, or even himself, tell Rivera to be aggressive with Millar. He let the moment pa.s.s without saying anything. It is a decision that gnaws at Torre to this day.
”If there's one thing I can second-guess myself about,” Torre said, ”it was in 2004 with Mo going out in the ninth inning. I didn't tell Mel, 'Tell him don't get too fancy.' Or I was going to go to him and tell him, 'Don't get too fancy. Go after him. Don't worry about trying to make too good of a pitch.'
”The only reason I didn't say anything is I remembered the last time he faced him, in Game 2.”
Rivera had faced Millar, representing the tying run, with Ramirez at second base, with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 2. The at-bat was relatively brief and emphatic: called strike, ball, strike swinging, foul, strike swinging for a strikeout to end the game.
”That's the only reason I didn't plant the seed,” Torre said. ”Because of how easy that at-bat was. I said, 'f.u.c.k it.' Because I didn't want to plant a seed that wasn't there. It was so easy, the last time.”
That Game 2 at-bat, however, occurred at Yankee Stadium, where Millar's pull-everything hitting philosophy was penalized by the expansiveness of left field. The Game 4 at-bat occurred at Fenway Park, where a fly ball to left field could easily be off or over the towering wall that seemed to loom right over a pitcher's shoulder.
”In that ballpark, you're trying not to make a mistake to him,” Torre said. ”It's a little different than in our ballpark.”
On the other side of the field, Francona did not bother to say anything to Millar.
”No,” Millar said. ”There's nothing to say. In that situation, we're down by one, we're down 0-3 in the series, you've got Mariano Rivera in the game . . . there's not a lot of sunlight on us. But you know what? That's why you've got to play the game.”
Millar was a .364 career hitter against Rivera in the regular season, with four hits, including one home run, in 11 at-bats, while also once getting hit by a pitch. Most hitters would begin the ninth inning while down one run trying to find any means possible to get on base, to grind out an at-bat in survival mode. But these were the idiots and this was Millar, who was one of the premier pract.i.tioners of the kind of brazen idiocy that served the Red Sox so well. There was only one thing on Millar's mind: try to jack a Rivera pitch over the Green Monster in left field.
”I've always had good at-bats against Mo,” Millar said. ”Decent numbers. But you don't want to make a living facing him. He's a power guy and I like the fastball, so I was just thinking one thing: get a pitch up and middle-in and hit it out for a home run. That was my thought process. Just try to hit a home run. There was no looking away. So I was basically in watch mode. If I could just get something up and leaking in and I was trying to pull, I thought that was our only chance. That's what I felt.”
The ”watch mode” approach served Millar well. Because he was going to swing only if the ball entered the area in which he was watching, Millar actually made himself patient. The downside of his approach is that he essentially conceded the outer half of the plate to Rivera, at least until he got two strikes. Rivera never got to two strikes. He missed with his first pitch. Millar fouled off the next. Then Rivera missed with three consecutive pitches, putting the tying run on first base with a free pa.s.s.
What were the odds that Rivera would walk the leadoff batter? Through 2004 in his regular season career, Rivera had faced 110 leadoff batters in the ninth inning while protecting a one-run lead. He had walked only four of them, and only twice did those walks presage a defeat. One of them occurred only one month earlier against the Red Sox, a game that suddenly looked eerily predictive. On September 17, Rivera began the ninth inning by walking Nixon with a 2-1 lead. Dave Roberts pinch-ran and stole second base as Varitek struck out. Rivera hit Millar with a pitch. Cabrera knocked in Roberts with the tying run. One out later, Damon knocked in the winning run with a single. Millar's walk in Game 4 gave the Red Sox that shred of belief that Torre wanted to avoid.
<script>