The Yankee Years Part 14

Rodriguez explained that he just had been running full tilt on the treadmill in the weight room when the belt broke and he went flying off the back end of the machine, skinning his hands and knees as he was thrown into a wall. Who the h.e.l.l ran at sprinting speed on a treadmill right before a game was about to start? The most talented player in baseball did. That was A-Rod, too.

"n.o.body has ever worked harder in my memory than this guy," Torre said. "Jeter, I'm sure he does his weight work in the wintertime. In the summertime he gets dressed and gets the h.e.l.l out of there. He doesn't hang out. n.o.body's in better shape than Alex. n.o.body works harder than Alex. For a star player, who gets there as early as he gets there, and still he might hear Coach Larry Bowa say, 'You need to take groundb.a.l.l.s.' And he'll do whatever it takes. He'll do it all the time. He's just a workaholic."

Said Bowa, "If he missed a slow roller, the next day he's out there early and we're working on slow rollers. If he missed a backhand, the next day we're working on backhands. This guy would be the first one to admit, 'I need to work on that,' or, 'I didn't approach that ball the right way, so let's go work on it.' And that's why he's such a great player."

The hardest worker on the team, however, also established himself as the one requiring the most maintenance. One of the first things Rodriguez did as a Yankee was to ask for his personal clubhouse a.s.sistant. The Yankees typically employ four or five young adults in their clubhouse and another three or four in the visiting clubhouse to run all sorts of errands, such as picking up and was.h.i.+ng dirty laundry, cleaning and s.h.i.+ning spikes, ordering and stocking clubhouse food, etc. They are drones known as "clubbies" to the players. Rodriguez wanted his own clubbie. The Yankees had never heard of such a request. Rodriguez was familiar with one particular visiting clubhouse clubbie from his visits to Yankee Stadium when with Seattle and Texas and asked that the clubbie be rea.s.signed to attend only to his needs.

"But Alex," said Lou Cucuzza, the visiting clubhouse manager, "he works for me. I need him."

Rodriguez and Cucuzza struck a deal. The clubbie would still work primarily in the visiting clubhouse but also would be considered "on call" for Rodriguez to use him on an as-needed basis. The as-needed part virtually became a full-time job. Rodriguez would have his personal clubbie lay out his practice and game clothes each night, in the manner of a dresser for a king. When Rodriguez needed something-such as a bottle of water during batting practice or stretching-he would call his clubbie and the clubbie would come running.

One time, in Detroit, where his personal attendant was not available, Rodriguez was jogging off the field after batting practice, saw a Comerica Park visiting clubhouse attendant, a young kid in his first months on the job, and simply barked, "Peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly."

"He always wanted his guy a.s.signed to him," Cucuzza said. "I knew a little bit about what he had in Texas, where there was a strained relations.h.i.+p between his guy and the equipment guy. It can be tough trying to run a clubhouse. But we know Alex wants that. It's a comfort thing for him. When Alex does need something, we try to get it done. The bottom line is to keep the players happy."

The champions.h.i.+p Yankees, though, never had such a needy player. The maintenance that Rodriguez required was not a huge distraction, but it did raise some eyebrows in the clubhouse.

"He definitely needs more attention than anybody else," Cucuzza said. "Does it cause a problem? Early on we had heard the rumors about when he was in Texas, when he was the one-man show. But you come into the Yankees and it's a whole lot different than the Texas Rangers. You still need to fit in. You didn't see that [neediness] with the Yankees. Jeter was a product of the old regime. He's definitely low maintenance. Rocket was low maintenance. He could tell you in May who he was leaving tickets for in August. It was all written down."

Rodriguez's neediness included being liked by his new teammates, but the maintenance of Alex Rodriguez required so much work-the look-at-me mannerisms on the field, the personal clubhouse valet, the phoniness of trying too hard to say things to the media that sounded bright or insightful-that it turned off teammates. He was hyperaware of how he looked to others and how he was perceived. It was a self-awareness that crept into his at-bats in clutch situations, causing performance anxiety, and his teammates knew it.

Two seasons into Rodriguez's term with the Yankees, word reached Torre that Rodriguez had complained to a team official that he didn't feel accepted on the team. So one day in spring training Torre found Rodriguez alone in the clubhouse food lounge and sat next to him to talk about it.

"I'm somewhat naive," Torre said, "because I'm not in that clubhouse all the time. I'm mostly in my office and when I am out there everybody seems to be on their best behavior when I walk through. But I said to him, 'Alex, do me a favor: at least go get a cup of coffee by yourself, instead of sending somebody to get you a cup of coffee.'

"A little while later he goes out of his way to find me. He's carrying a cup of coffee. 'Look, Skip' he said, 'I got my own cup of coffee!' That wasn't even the point. It was just an example. The point was, just be one of the guys. He didn't get it.

"But see, Alex needs that. He needs to be that level above. That's been the intimidating part of being with the Yankees because he's up there in the rarified air, but so are a lot of those other guys. How much money he makes? That doesn't mean anything to them."

By the end of May in the 2006 season, a small group of players were complaining to Torre about how Rodriguez did not fit the team concept of the Yankees. Torre already had engaged in several discussions with Rodriguez to try to help him become "one of the guys." Nothing seemed to work.

"His goal was to be the best player in baseball," Torre said. "He was very much aware of what was going on elsewhere in baseball. He seemed cluttered up with these things."

No one doubted that Rodriguez was a hard worker and a great player who wanted to win. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards in his four years playing under Torre and rarely missed a game. But coupled with his will to win was a neediness to be noticed, to acquire as much status as possible, and to be liked-and the best way to measure his quest for such attention was through his individual statistics. In a Yankee clubhouse still vainly trying to hang on to what was left of the core values of the champions.h.i.+p teams, the A-Rod way seemed awkwardly out of place.

"I can relate to some of the things Alex feels," Torre said. "Obviously, I was never as talented as Alex, but my self-esteem was based on what I did on the field. It feels like that's what's going on with him.

"He could never walk away from this game and all of a sudden have people talk about somebody else. Jeter could just disappear and go sit on a quiet beach somewhere and not be bothered.

"And it's sad because I know when I played, even in my good years, if I went 0-for-4 and didn't get a hit in a key situation, I wouldn't even want to go out to dinner. I felt damaged, I guess. I let people down. It took me a long time to get over that. With Alex, it's a lot different because he will conjure up in his mind that it wasn't that way. He'll disappear into his dream world and reason with himself.

"But Alex is all about the game. He needs the game. He needs all of those statistics. He needs every record imaginable. And he needs people to make a fuss over him. And he's always going to put up numbers because he's too good. It means a lot to him, and good for him."

When Rodriguez won his first MVP as a Yankee, in November of 2005, Torre called him to congratulate him. This was right after the Yankees lost the Division Series to the Angels, during which Rodriguez batted .133 with no runs batted in and flogged himself by saying he had "played like a dog."

"Alex, this thing is always going to haunt you because people are always going to find reasons not to give you credit, even winning the MVP," Torre told him. "I'm proud of what you did and you should be proud of what you did. You're never going to satisfy people. Just understand that. It sort of makes the criticism easier to deal with."

Rodriguez then held a conference call with reporters upon the announcement of the award, and this is what he said: "We can win three World Series (and) with me it's never going to be over. My benchmark is so high that no matter what I do, it's never going to be enough."

Torre saw the comments and shook his head.

"I told him he could never satisfy people to give him perspective. No good could come from him making that idea public. I just wanted him to understand that I and his teammates appreciated what he did."

Rodriguez may have had his quirks and foibles, but those were trivial matters compared to the biggest issue his presence brought to the Yankees clubhouse: the uneasy dynamic between him and Jeter. It was a problem for both of them. For Rodriguez, the problem was that he knew he was a better player than Jeter but he could not enjoy anything close to Jeter's preferred status in and out of the organization. Jeter had the Yankee pedigree, the four champions.h.i.+p rings, the captaincy, the national endors.e.m.e.nts and that off-the-charts likability factor that flummoxed Rodriguez. Jeter didn't hit or field like Rodriguez, so for a guy who measured himself by his statistics, Rodriguez wondered how Jeter could be held with so much more reverence than himself. In his own way, Rodriguez was fascinated with Jeter, as if trying to figure out what it was about Jeter that could have bought him so much goodwill. The inside joke in the clubhouse was that Rodriguez's preoccupation with Jeter recalled the 1992 film Single White Female, Single White Female, in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her. in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her.

During the World Baseball Cla.s.sic in 2006, a clothes designer who was friends with Gary Sheffield gave some USA players designer jeans in a hip-hop style. Jeter and Rodriguez received their jeans in Tampa. One day, while Team USA was working out in Arizona, Rodriguez noticed the designer jeans hanging in Jeter's locker. "Oh, you're wearing those?" he asked Jeter. Rodriguez promptly had his jeans overnighted from Tampa to the team's training base in Arizona.

"I think Alex fit into the clubhouse that first year," Borzello said. "I just don't think he fit in anywhere else. I don't think he fit in, especially with the media. It just didn't work. He didn't understand it. I think he had to realize that what you had done up to that day didn't mean anything to the fans. I mean, you didn't do it here so no one cared. I think that was something he had to adjust to.

"Plus, he didn't do all that well by his standards. I just think it was a constant struggle for him to do like Roger tried to do, show everyone how good I am. 'You guys know, but watch.' And trying to do it, we weren't able to succeed that year for the most part."

The problem for Jeter with Rodriguez in his clubhouse was not so much the Esquire Esquire article. Those quotes were three years old by the time the two of them became teammates, though as Borzello said, "Derek is a very stubborn person, and he doesn't have a lot of people he allows close to him. And when he does, if you burn him, I think he's very resentful of that. He opens the door for so few people that when he does open the door for you and you screw him over, in his mind, he becomes much more guarded." article. Those quotes were three years old by the time the two of them became teammates, though as Borzello said, "Derek is a very stubborn person, and he doesn't have a lot of people he allows close to him. And when he does, if you burn him, I think he's very resentful of that. He opens the door for so few people that when he does open the door for you and you screw him over, in his mind, he becomes much more guarded."

The bigger problem for Jeter was discovering what Rodriguez was like as a teammate. Jeter already was chagrined to see the camaraderie of the champions.h.i.+p teams disintegrating around him ever since O'Neill, Brosius, Martinez and k.n.o.blauch left after the 2001 World Series. He could look around the clubhouse in 2004 and 2005 and see random veterans who just seemed to be pa.s.sing through, people such as Kevin Brown, Kenny Lofton, Randy Johnson and Tony Womack. Rodriguez, with his hyper self-awareness, was the most visible and controversial symbol of the Yankees moving further away from what Jeter knew as the definition of champions.h.i.+p teams. Jeter and Rodriguez were wired way too differently-saw very different versions of what it took to win-for the Yankees to recapture that togetherness of the champions.h.i.+p years.

"Their motivations are completely different," Mussina said. "It will always be that way. I mean, there's nothing wrong with either one of their motivations. It's just that it's not the same motivation. And I think that group that Derek learned to play with-O'Neill and Tino and those guys-the motivation was all the same. They knew they weren't the greatest players in the league, but they knew if they did their job as a group, they could win.

"Derek's not the greatest player in the league. Even in his best years. But he knows how to win. He knows how to get the hit in the big spot. He knows what it takes. He knows how to run the bases. And he's got pedigree now. And it doesn't matter to him what the consequences of failure might be. There's no fear of that.

"Alex may end up calling attention to himself, but he's not loud about it. Alex has this motivation to be the best player in the game. When all is said and done, he wants to be the best player ever. That's his motivation in this. That's fine. That's good. Everybody needs a motivation, whatever it is."

The dynamic between Jeter and Rodriguez never was an open war that sent collateral damage flying about the rest of the clubhouse. Indeed, they operated more along the lines of a cold truce. But everybody in the clubhouse could feel the frost emanating from the Jeter-Rodriguez dynamic.

"I don't think it's helped the team," Borzello said. "That team is a machine, though. It's resilient. You deal with so much there that most things don't faze you. You come in, do your thing. There are enough guys who do get along well that I don't think anyone is fazed by it. I don't think other players care that those two got along. It was never arguing or shouting. It was just sort of a cold shoulder.

"It doesn't help. You would rather that the stars are in the same place, pulling together, but I don't think it affected the other players. It just affected the feel in the clubhouse, and it separates the team off the field because Alex is going to go one way with a group of guys, Derek is going to go another way with a group of guys, and it's never going to be a group of 10 or 12 or 15 guys together."

Said Bowa about the relations.h.i.+p between Jeter and Rodriguez, "I think it's workable, but it is what it is. I saw the article they're all talking about, and obviously Derek took it real personal, and if Alex could do it over again, he'd probably redo it. He wouldn't say that. I think Jeet has gradually forgiven him a little bit, but I don't think they're ever going to be, as they say, buddies."

The bottom line was that Jeter and Rodriguez were vastly different people. Jeter did not care too much about his statistics and place in history; Rodriguez was consumed not only about his status in that regard but all things baseball.

"He's a fan of baseball first, and he happens to be a great player," Borzello said. "But he's a baseball fan. Whether he ever made it in baseball, he would be watching baseball all day long if he could.

"I'm telling you, we'd go from Yankee Stadium after the last out, get in the car, talk about the game, go to his house and watch the West Coast games on the baseball package.

"I remember him going to Derek Jeter's house once, me and him. He was going to get a haircut. Jeter had someone who cut hair at his house. So we went over there and we sit down and Alex turns on the TV, waiting for the guy. And Jeter's walking around. And Alex goes, 'Where's the baseball package? Jeet, what channel is the baseball package on?' And Jeter goes, 'I don't have that stuff.' And Alex goes, 'How come you don't have the baseball package?' He couldn't believe it, like, 'What else do you do?'

"So it was just so funny because Derek will never watch a baseball game other than the one he's playing in. They're just complete opposites. I remember Alex's reaction to it was like, 'How is that possible?' "

The third year of Jeter and Rodriguez living under the same clubhouse roof was the worst-"I could feel the tension," Bowa said-and never more so than on the afternoon of August 17, 2006, for a game at Yankee Stadium against Baltimore. The Orioles hammered the Yankees that day, 12-2, dropping the Yankees' first-place lead over the Red Sox to 1 games on the eve of an enormously important five-game series in Boston. In a signature moment, easily the worst moment of the blowout defeat to Baltimore, neither Rodriguez nor Jeter attempted to catch a pop-up between the two of them on the left side of the infield. When the ball plopped to the infield dirt, neither bothered to immediately retrieve it. Instead, in silence, they sort of turned their backs to one another, each one of them as if in protest for not just letting the ball drop without an attempt to catch it, but for adhering to a completely different doctrine on what it took to win. They seemed at that moment, with a baseball landing between them, to have absolutely nothing in common.

Torre kept the clubhouse door closed after that game to air out his team, while specifically calling out Jeter and Rodriguez.

"I don't know who wants to catch that thing," Torre said, "but somebody somebody has to catch the son of a b.i.t.c.h. It looks horses.h.i.+t. It looks like you don't care. I don't know whose fault it was and I don't care. The only thing I know is that it can't drop. So you guys better figure it out. has to catch the son of a b.i.t.c.h. It looks horses.h.i.+t. It looks like you don't care. I don't know whose fault it was and I don't care. The only thing I know is that it can't drop. So you guys better figure it out.

"Now we all have two ways to go from here, going up to Boston. If you take this up there, the way you just played, you're in trouble. Basically, you better leave this s.h.i.+t here. This was s.h.i.+tty. There's no excuse for it. We stunk. Now let's see what we're made of."

The Yankees would sweep all five games from Boston in Fenway Park, essentially salting away another division t.i.tle.

After the game with the pop-up debacle, Cashman consulted with Torre on not only that play but also the Jeter-Rodriguez dynamic.

"Cash totally blamed Jeter on the basis of the shortstop having priority on a pop-up," Torre said. "There were times I had to defend Jeter. Cash went over backwards sometimes thinking the captain should be more proactive than what Jeter wanted to be in the relations.h.i.+p with Alex. I know I'm a little partial to Derek, so you have to take it into consideration, plus he's hurt and he still plays. He never looks for anything more than going out and playing. I'm not saying he does things one hundred percent of the time that he should do. But as far as competing, he's always there for you."

Cashman was already miffed with Torre and Jeter for not throwing enough public support toward Rodriguez during a three-month slump that summer in which fans at Yankee Stadium booed the third baseman with gusto. Rodriguez hit .257 over the slump and played awful defense, kicking groundb.a.l.l.s and bouncing throws. The New York newspapers reflected his poor play with headlines such as: "Do You Hate This Man?"

"Personal h.e.l.l for Alex Is Getting Worse by the Day"

"E-Rod"

"K-Rod"

"Alex gets a hit . . ."

Cashman looked to Torre and Jeter to help get Yankees fans off Rodriguez's back. He told Torre, "You've got to tell Derek he has to come out and support Alex and tell the fans to leave him alone."

"I can't do that," Torre said. "Because if you ask Jeter to do that and he starts doing it, then people will say, 'Why didn't he do that last year?' I can't do that. He's a teammate. He and Alex know each other. It's not like he needs to get to know this guy or he's misreading him. They've been together long before we met them."

Torre wasn't going to ask Jeter to tell the fans to ease up on Rodriguez. He wasn't going to ask Jeter to do something he didn't want to do anyway.

"My job as a player is not to tell the fans what to do," Jeter said then. "My job is not to tell the media what to write about. They're going to do what they want. They should just let it go. How many times can you ask the same questions?"

Jeter was asked if he had seen anyone criticized as much as Rodriguez.

"k.n.o.bby," he said, referring to error-p.r.o.ne former second baseman Chuck k.n.o.blauch. "Clemens for a whole year. Tino."

Has A-Rod's treatment been worse?

"I don't know," he said. "I don't think about that. I'm just concerned with doing what we can to win. That's it. I don't worry about that other stuff."

Shortly before the pop-up episode, Rodriguez agreed to meet with Reggie Jackson over dinner. Jackson was concerned that Rodriguez was tone deaf to what was happening in his own clubhouse. Jackson knew that players were trying to help Rodriguez to get on track, whether it was at the plate or fitting into the team structure, but that Rodriguez wasn't getting the message because he was convinced that everything was perfectly fine.

Jackson began by telling Rodriguez he knew what it was like to struggle as a Yankee, and knew it to be much worse than what Rodriguez had known. Jackson said teammates would leave notes in the clothes in his locker telling him they didn't want him on the team. He told Rodriguez that manager Billy Martin so beat it into his head that he was a bad defensive player that on the night he famously hit three home runs in the 1977 World Series Jackson played a routine double to right field into a triple out of sheer pa.s.sivity caused by fear he'd screw it up. Jackson also relayed a story that he once was mired in such an embarra.s.sing, horrific streak of strikeouts that when he stepped into the batter's box he said to Tigers catcher Lance Parrish, "Tell me what's coming and I promise I'll take a turn right back into the dugout no matter where I hit it. I just want to look like a pro a little bit." (Parrish replied, "f.u.c.k you"; Jackson, to his immense satisfaction, managed to ground out.) Reggie wanted A-Rod to know he really didn't have it that bad.

Jackson later told this parable to make a point about how Rodriguez refused to admit he was struggling or to accept the advice of teammates: A man is trapped in his house as floodwaters rise. Twice he refuses help, once from rescuers in a boat and then, when the man seeks refuge on his roof, from rescuers in a helicopter.

"No, thanks. I've got faith," the man said each time.

The next thing he knows the man is face-to-face with G.o.d in heaven.

"But I put my faith in you!" the man cried.

"Yes," G.o.d replied, "and I answered your faith and tried to help you twice!"

The Yankees soon reached the point of frustration in their effort to help Rodriguez. Jason Giambi came to Torre and said, "Skip, it's time to stop coddling him."

Recalling that conversation, Torre said, "What Jason said made me realize that I had to go at it a different way. When the rest of the team starts noticing things, you have to get this fixed. That's my job. I like to give individuals what I believe is the room they need, but when I sense that other people are affected, team-wise, I have to find a solution to it and take an approach that is a little more serious."

Torre asked Rodriguez to sit down with him in his office in the visiting clubhouse in Seattle. He wanted to snap back Rodriguez from this false world he lived in, to have Rodriguez recognize what everybody else in the room did: that he was struggling and needed help.

"This is all about honesty," Torre told Rodriguez. "And it's not about anybody else but you. You can't pretend everything is okay when it's not. You have to face the reality that you're going through a tough time, and then work from there."

That night, batting as a pinch hitter, Rodriguez struck out to end the game. He pounded the dugout railing with his bat on his way back to the dugout, walked up the runway and into the clubhouse and picked up a folding chair and threw it.

The trouble for Rodriguez as a Yankee was that everything he did, and especially everything that he didn't do, such as. .h.i.tting in the clutch, winning a champions.h.i.+p or staying out of tawdry gossip items, was compared and contrasted to Jeter, the Yankee template. Rodriguez, though recognized as the more talented player and certainly the far better slugger, could not win the comparison. With the Yankees under Torre, for instance, Jeter outhit Rodriguez with runners in scoring position, .311-.306, outhit him with runners in scoring position with two outs, .316-.274, outhit him in the postseason, .309-.245, and outhit him overall, .317-.306. Cashman, who had traded for Rodriguez and understood the value of his enormous production at bat, wanted to believe in Rodriguez, which meant the blame would go to Jeter if a pop-up fell between them or if the fans would not stop booing A-Rod. Torre, on the other hand, trusted Jeter like a son, and never did get the same sense of reliability from Rodriguez.

"My relations.h.i.+p with Derek has been great," Torre said. "Whatever I've asked him, he's been about as reliable as you can get. With Alex . . . When I'm having my annual charitable dinner, for the Safe at Home foundation, I only invite a few players, guys who live around New York, because it's in the off-season and I don't want guys to feel like they have to fly in, except when we honored the 1996 or 1998 team. So Alex said to me, 'Skip, why don't you invite me to your dinner?'

"I said, 'Alex, your wife is pregnant. I don't want to invite you if it means taking you away from her and from home. You're certainly welcome to come. We'd love to have you.' He said, 'I'll be there.' He canceled the day before based on his wife being due so soon. It didn't surprise me."

Marching to Different Drumbeats

Joe Torre called Bernie Williams and Kenny Lofton into his office one day in the Yankees' 2004 spring training camp and closed the door. The two veterans, both competing for the centerfield job, sat in upholstered chairs across from Torre, with the manager's desk between them and Torre "Guys," Torre said, "we've got a dilemma here."

The Yankees had signed Lofton that winter to a two-year, $6.2 million deal, essentially because they didn't trust Williams any more to be their everyday center fielder. Williams had batted .263 in a season in which he had missed 42 games after knee surgery. The Yankees' front office suspected that an aging Williams should be transitioned to life as a designated hitter, an idea Torre wasn't ready to endorse completely.

The Yankees had just watched Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo help the Marlins beat them in the 2003 World Series by giving Florida speed at the top of the lineup, and Lofton was the Yankees' attempt at a copycat move. It was a poor attempt. The signing was fraught with misguided thinking. For one, Lofton, then 36, was older than Williams, 35, and there was no evidence that he was an upgrade on Williams. Even in an injury-shortened season, Williams. .h.i.t more home runs, drove in more runs and posted a better on-base percentage in 2003 than Lofton. Moreover, Lofton had turned into a baseball transient, unable to stay rooted with any team in the decline of his career and unwilling to concede he was no longer an everyday player. In 27 months he was the property of six teams, moving from the Indians to the White Sox to the Giants to the Pirates to the Cubs to the Yankees.

Lofton tried to be somewhat diplomatic and obligatory on a conference call with reporters to announce his signing. "If they want me to park cars," he said, "I'll do that." But Lofton wasn't about to start doing any grunt work in his baseball career. He thought of himself as a proud, All-Star-caliber center fielder and nothing else short of that. When Lofton was asked on the conference call about the possibility of replacing Williams, a Yankee icon, in center field, he replied, "They said they want me to play center field. I am a center fielder and they know that."

That was true enough, but was Lofton a better center fielder than Williams? Maybe, but maybe not. What was true was that the Yankees had signed an older player with a checkered reputation who was not clearly better than Williams.

Before the signing was announced, Torre called up Williams and told him, "We're getting Kenny Lofton. That doesn't mean anything is set for center field. We're going to start the season with the best center fielder, whoever that is."

It was a rotten scenario sure to displease both of them. Lofton, who never had accepted being a role player in his career, thought he was being signed to play center field, when actually Torre considered him to be coming to camp to compete for the job. Williams, the proud link to six pennant-winning teams, was stripped of his hold of the center-field job he had held for 10 seasons and forced to compete not with an up-and-coming prospect with young legs, but with an older older player. But there was another problem, a corrosive one, to the bifurcated center-field scenario, a problem that revealed itself in the spring training meeting in Torre's office. player. But there was another problem, a corrosive one, to the bifurcated center-field scenario, a problem that revealed itself in the spring training meeting in Torre's office.

Every team is asked in spring training to submit to Major League Baseball the names that will be placed on the All-Star Game ballot. Each team is permitted to list three outfielders. The Yankees had Gary Sheffield, whom they had signed that winter as a free agent, established in right field and Hideki Matsui established in left field. No problem there. Center field, though, was an open compet.i.tion between Williams and Lofton, and baseball officials needed an answer before that compet.i.tion was to be decided.

General manager Brian Cashman asked Torre, "Who should we use in center field on the ballot?"

Said Torre, "We'll call them both in and work it out."

So Torre brought Williams and Lofton into his office to settle what he thought was a minor, procedural issue. If either one played very well in the first half of the season they would be selected to the All-Star Game anyway, whether they were listed on the official fan ballot or not.

"We've got to put an All-Star ballot together," Torre told Williams and Lofton. "You've both been around long enough. You know if you have a good year you get voted or picked. But right now it's just about being on the ballot and we have to make a decision."

Lofton had yet to play a game for the Yankees. Williams was a franchise star and a Torre favorite. Yet the manager would not favor one over the other.

"Here's what I'm going to do," Torre told them. "You're both All-Stars. You've both done it before. I'm going to put your names into a hat. Whoever comes out of the hat is the guy we put on the ballot."

Williams shrugged nonchalantly, as if to say, "Whatever. Fine." Lofton rolled his eyes and pouted.

Torre put two folded pieces of paper into his hat and started shaking the hat to mix them up. Suddenly one of the folded pieces of paper jumped out of the hat and fell to the floor.