Yankees' winning formula: Hard work, team work
By
Gene Wojciechowski
ESPN.com
Archive
BOSTON -- Not far from Fenway Park, at the corner of Boylston and Massachusetts, a local organization provided free stress tests to anyone who stopped by its sidewalk tables. I only saw one person take advantage of the pregame freebie consultation: a New York Yankees fan wearing his road gray Bernie Williams jersey.
This was late Saturday morning, before the Yankees won Game Two of their weekend cage match against the Red Sox and clinched the AL East title outright when New York's new best friends, the Chicago White Sox, beat the Cleveland Indians. Now the Yankees can relax (at least, until George Steinbrenner's latest rabies shot wears off), and Red Sox manager Terry Francona can take a seat at the makeshift Boylston stress clinic.
Once again, the Yankees soaked another clubhouse floor and walls with sprayed bubbly. They've won so many of these things (eight consecutive division titles and counting) they could conduct a seminar on proper cork-popping technique. But this one, said Yankees manager Joe Torre "is the best of all of them. ... This has to be the most special."
It was special enough that Torre wore sunglasses in the Yankees dugout -- not because he needed them, but because he didn't want anyone to see the tears in his eyes as starter Randy Johnson protected New York's five-run lead by striking out the side in the sixth inning.
Torre gets chick-flick misty at the drop of a baseball cap, but this was different. It was different because in his 10-year Bronx tenure, the Yankees have never had to work harder for a division title. Injuries. ... The Red Sox. ... The constant, sometimes-suffocating pressure that comes with wearing pinstripes all made for a celebration to remember in the cramped -- and wet -- visitors' clubhouse at Fenway.
"This club has made me very emotional this year," said Torre, who didn't seem in a hurry to switch from his champagne-doused t-shirt to something in the non-alcohol variety.
You couldn't swing a bottle of Korbel brut without hitting a Yankee who wasn't having an Oprah moment. There was closer Mariano Rivera, who was cheered by Boston fans when the Red Sox were presented their 2004 World Series rings before the April 11 home opener. It was Rivera who had blown a ninth-inning Yankees lead in what could have been, should have been the AL Championship Series Game 4 clincher. Instead, the Red Sox won that one, and three more to record one of the greatest playoff series comebacks in the history of sports.
So guess who abandoned his usual game-day routine and spent the first couple of innings in the Yankees' dugout cheering on his teammates? It was Rivera, who usually stays for the national anthem before returning to the clubhouse and later the bullpen. But this time, Rivera couldn't help himself.
"I was almost telling him to shut up," said Torre, who wanted Rivera to conserve his energy for something important, like pitching.
Rivera, who arguably is the Yankees' most valuable player this season, was where he belonged in the ninth inning: on the mound, duct-taping the Red Sox's AL East hopes shut.
"A lot of people counted us out," Rivera said. "We showed we are capable of coming back, and we did. It's special. Before, it wasn't like that. Before, we had big leads. Now, we have to fight for it."
The Yankees were 11-19 and nine games out of first on May 6. By mid-July they led the division, but fell behind and trailed by four games as recently as Sept. 10. Now this: another title and, for the moment, retribution and satisfaction.
"We had a lot of guys who stepped up," said shortstop Derek Jeter, the guy Torre describes as the Yankees' "Gibraltar."
One of those guys is Johnson, whose arrival via free agency made the New York rotation the deepest Torre has had as Yankees manager. But that was before Yankees starters began dropping like they had heat stroke. Through it all, the 42-year-old Johnson was the only one who never spent time on the disabled list. He finished the regular season with a 17-8 record. Five of those victories came against the Red Sox.
"When I came here, I was told there's two seasons: a regular season and a postseason," Johnson said. "There's not too many teams I've played for who expect to get to the postseason. This team has been there enough that they expect to get to the postseason every year."
Body language says everything. Even when Johnson gave up a first-inning bomb to Manny Ramirez, or squirmed out of a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the second, he walked slowly off the mound and toward the Yankees' dugout as if he were walking down the driveway to pick up the morning paper.
"But there's a heartbeat in there," Torre said.
And it was thumping hard in those first few innings, and again during the champagne shower. After all, this is why he wanted to be a Yankee.
Baseball and its agonizingly long regular season doesn't allow for many flukes, and this AL East Ironman race was no exception. The division's best team, which also happens to be baseball's most expensive team, earned its latest East title by a margin as thin as a blade of Fenway infield grass. The perk? Even if Torre shows up at home plate Sunday in a pair of boxers and forfeits the game because his team popped one too many bottles of Korbel the night before, the Yankees still will own the division because of a better season record against The Nation.
Meanwhile, the Red Sox are stuck in stress mode. A win Sunday means they're the wild-card winner. But it won't be easy, even with Jaret Wright replacing scheduled starter Mike Mussina.
"Oh, we're going to try to win," Torre said.
They always do.
Gene Wojciechowski is the senior national columnist for ESPN.com. You can contact him at gene.wojciechowski@espn3.com.
