7
I HAVE A NEW pitching home in 1996, and I spend the next 1,096 appearances of my career there. It’s called the bullpen. I guess if you put me against a wall and force me to answer, I’d say I slightly prefer starting, but whatever the club needs, I will do my best.
It’s a season of major transition for the Yankees. We have a new manager, Joe Torre. A new ace in twenty-four-year-old Andy Pettitte. A new shortstop in twenty-one-year-old Derek Jeter, as well as a new first baseman, former Mariner Tino Martinez, and a new catcher—a smart, solid guy named Joe Girardi. You never know how it’s all going to piece together, and I guess George Steinbrenner isn’t so sure himself, which is why the Yankees are in talks with the Mariners about trading me for their shortstop, Felix Fermin. Steinbrenner apparently has questions about whether Derek is ready to take over and wants Fermin as an insurance policy. I have no clue the talks are going on, and don’t want to know. Some players obsess about this stuff, and want to be on top of every last trade rumor and bit of speculation. But I am the exact opposite. To me, such rumors can only be a distraction, and in my worldview as a pitcher, distractions are the enemy.
If it’s not going to help me get people out, why even bother paying attention?
My main focus in the spring is making a strong first impression on the new manager. I have never heard of Joe Torre, know nothing of his playing career, his MVP award, his Brooklyn boyhood, or his previous managerial stops. Buck Showalter, my previous skipper, has seen me for years in the Yankee system, and I knew he was a big supporter of mine. When the Yankees decide to let Buck go and bring in Mr. T—it’s what I call him even now—I get fired up for keen competition to win a bullpen spot. There is a boatload of relievers in camp. I am just one of the deckhands. Just because I did well in the playoffs the year before, I take nothing for granted, in spring training or that year.
In my first outing of the regular season, I throw two scoreless innings with two strikeouts against the Rangers and feel as good as I ever have on the mound. It’s almost embarrassing, but I still basically have a repertoire of one pitch, my years in the laboratory—trying to develop a trustworthy slider and serviceable changeup—having yielded no breakthrough. So my arsenal consists of a four-seam fastball.
When I want to mix it up, I throw a… four-seam fastball.
I bet I don’t throw even ten sliders the whole season. It doesn’t seem to matter. I have easy heat with late movement, and usually can put it exactly where I want.
Six weeks into 1996, I have an ERA of 0.83. I throw fifteen straight no-hit innings at one point. During a midseason hot streak in which we win eight of nine, I strike out three Red Sox—Troy O’Leary, Lee Tinsley, and Jeff Frye—on twelve pitches, and I get the hold for Wetteland. Soon there is a lot of clamoring that I should be named to Mike Hargrove’s All-Star staff. Hargrove passes on me, and if Yankee fans get all worked up about it, I do not. It simply doesn’t bother me. It’s another gift the Lord has seen fit to grant me. I’m just not wired that way.
All I want to do is get back to Panama for the All-Star break to see Clara, who is pregnant with our second son, Jafet.
I finish the year pretty much the way I start it, with a 2.09 ERA and 130 strikeouts in 107 innings; I even finish third in the Cy Young voting for the league’s best pitcher. We win the American League East and draw the Rangers in the division series. The Rangers win Game 1 at the Stadium, 6–2, so it makes the second game even more important, if we want to avoid going to Texas having to sweep.
Andy goes into the seventh and then I get the ball from Mr. T. We are down, 4–2. I strike out Ivan (Pudge) Rodriguez on three fastballs and then get Rusty Greer to ground out. I face eight Rangers in all, and get all eight of them, including Juan Gonzalez, the league’s Most Valuable Player that year and a guy who already has two homers and four RBIs in the game, and three homers for the series. Gonzalez is in one of those zones hitters get into—when the ball looks as big as a cantaloupe, and they don’t think, they know, that they can hit anything. Pitchers get in zones, too, though. And I am in one, a place where you are completely committed to every pitch you throw, and you know you can put it exactly where you want. Gonzalez hit a homer off me the year before, so I know just how dangerous he can be. Unlike most sluggers against me, he also almost always makes contact; I would strike him out only one time in twenty-four career at-bats. He is a very good low fastball hitter, so I try to keep the ball up and away from the middle of the plate. I get him to ground out to short to lead off the eighth.
We wind up tying the game in the eighth on Cecil Fielder’s soft single, and winning it in the twelfth after Derek smacks a leadoff hit and scores on an errant throw.
We have been a resilient team all season, never quitting, always fighting back, and we demonstrate it again in Game 3, in Texas, when we’re down a run in the ninth and score twice on a long sac fly from Bernie Williams, who is almost as hot as Gonzalez, and Mariano Duncan’s single. Wetteland closes it out, and one game later, I throw two more scoreless innings as we take a 5–4 lead into the ninth. Bernie hits his second homer of the game, and in the bottom of the ninth, Wetteland whiffs Dean Palmer to close the series out.
We move into the ALCS against the Baltimore Orioles, and right away we have to come back again. In Game 1, we fall behind by two runs and don’t get even until Derek hits an opposite-field home run off Armando Benitez in the bottom of the eighth, a Yankee Stadium special and a Jeffrey Maier special, too. No, it wasn’t a legitimate home run, and yes, the eleven-year-old kid interferes with it, and the Orioles have every right to argue, but what can you do? You keep fighting, that’s all. I get Mike Devereaux to ground out to get out of a jam in the tenth, and then strike out the tough Roberto Alomar to end the eleventh, and then three minutes later, Bernie wraps a 1–1 pitch from Randy Myers around the left-field foul pole to seal a 5–4 victory.
The Orioles square the series at one by taking Game 2, and then we head to Camden Yards, where Jimmy Key pitches a masterpiece in Game 3. Then, in Game 4, our bullpen—David Weathers, Graeme Lloyd, me, and Wetteland—throws six shutout innings after Kenny Rogers is cuffed around early. We go up, 3–1. I don’t do it the easy way, though; I load the bases on three singles, and then strike out Brady Anderson and Chris Hoiles, going up the ladder and getting them to chase high fastballs, then getting Todd Zeile to pop up. Andy finishes off the Orioles in Game 5 by pitching three-hit ball over eight innings, and Jim Leyritz, Fielder, and Darryl Strawberry all homer in a six-run third off of Scott Erickson to put us into the World Series against the Atlanta Braves.
You’d think that being in my first World Series would bring a whole new level of pressure, but that is not the case at all. The way the year went, we expected to be in the Series. If we had fallen short, that would’ve been crushing, so it was almost as if the pressure felt greater in the two rounds of American League playoffs.
You never would know that by the way the Series begins, though, with the Braves playing the role of tractor and the Yankees playing the role of dirt clump. We lose two games at home by a combined score of 16–1, mostly because Andruw Jones, a nineteen-year-old kid from Curaçao (practically a Central American neighbor), crushes two homers in Game 1, and the Braves’ starting rotation—one of the best ever—is as good as everybody says. John Smoltz shuts us down in the first game, Greg Maddux in the second. I am in awe watching these guys, especially Maddux. He is a master craftsman, whittling here and whittling there, carving us up before we even know it. He throws eighty-two pitches in eight innings. He goes to a three-ball count on only two batters the whole game. In the fourth inning, he sets down the heart of our order on six pitches. He does what great artists in every line of work do.
He makes it look easy.
The Series switches to Atlanta, and we win Game 3 behind David Cone (I give up my first postseason run), but we are in big trouble with only five outs to go in Game 4, down 6–3—five outs from being down three games to one, and having to face Smoltz and Tom Glavine in the next two games. I am getting loose in the bullpen as the eighth inning begins, with Charlie Hayes leading off against Mark Wohlers, one of the most dominant, and one of the hardest-throwing, closers in the game.
Hayes hits a swinging bunt that teeters along the third-base line and somehow stays fair. Then Darryl Strawberry rips a line drive to left and we have two runners on. I keep throwing to Mike Borzello, the bullpen catcher, as Mariano Duncan hits what looks to be an automatic double-play ball to Rafael Belliard, the Braves’ shortstop.
Belliard bobbles it and only gets one. It brings up Leyritz, a tremendous fastball hitter who likes to be in the batter’s box in clutch situations. He’d hit that huge homer against the Mariners the previous October, and homered in the clinching game against the Orioles. Leyritz has never faced Wohlers before.
What’s Wohlers got? Leyritz asks Chris Chambliss, the hitting coach.
He’s got a one-hundred-mile-per-hour fastball, Chambliss says.
Leyritz steps in, using one of Strawberry’s bats. On Wohlers’s first pitch, Leyritz is right on the fastball, then takes a slider for a ball. On the 1–1 pitch, Wohlers throws another slider, up and over the plate, and Leyritz extends and drives it deep to left. Andruw Jones climbs the left-field wall, but the ball is beyond his reach. The game is tied, and as Leyritz fist-pumps his way around the bases, I know it’s on me to make sure it stays tied.
I pitch a scoreless eighth, and get one out in the ninth. Graeme Lloyd picks me up, getting Fred McGriff to hit into a double play, and we go on to win in ten.
In Game 5, Andy outduels Smoltz in a game neither deserves to lose, and the 1–0 victory takes us back to Yankee Stadium with a 3–2 lead. We finally get to Maddux with three runs in the third, and we still have a 3–1 lead when I come in. It’s the seventh inning, and I am not changing anything now. I am throwing heat and throwing it in the best locations I can, and I plow through two innings, retiring six straight after walking Terry Pendleton to open the seventh, and then leave it to Wetteland. He gives up three singles and a run and the Braves have the tying run on second when Wetteland gets Mark Lemke to pop a foul ball behind third, where Charlie Hayes catches it.
The Series is ours.
From the top step of the dugout, I sprint to the mound and get there almost before Charlie comes down from his jump. It’s the Yankees’ first World Series title in eighteen years, and my first World Series title ever, and for three guys from Columbus—Derek, Andy, and me—to play such important roles makes it that much sweeter. To be in that pile and celebrate after we had to come back again to beat a team as good as the Braves is an indescribable feeling.
After the season ends, the Yankees decide I am ready to close games and let Wetteland, a free agent, sign with the Rangers. I minimize the difference in the roles publicly, insisting I feel no added pressure, but the truth is that I do feel pressure. I want to prove that the Yankees did the right thing; I want to show everybody that I can do it. I want not only to be as good as John Wetteland. I want to be better than him.
The ’97 season does not start well. We win only five of our first fifteen games. I blow three of the first six save opportunities I have. Through the first nine innings of the season, I give up fourteen hits and four runs.
The most recent slipup comes against the Angels at the Stadium, and the guy who gets me is Jim Leyritz, of all people. Traded about six weeks after his homer against Wohlers, Leyritz whacks a two-run double down the left-field line. After the game, Mr. T calls me into his office. Mel Stottlemyre, the pitching coach, is with him. I have a pretty good idea that they don’t want to talk about the stock market. I know I haven’t been doing the job. I know that if it keeps up this way, they are going to have to make a change.
I’m sorry I’ve blown so many games. I am not sure what’s wrong. I feel good but I am not getting the results, I tell them.
Mr. T says, Mo, do you know what you need to do? You need to be Mariano Rivera. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less. It looks to us like you’re trying to be perfect.
You’ve gotten away from what has made you so successful, Mel says. By trying to do too much, you are taking away some of your aggressiveness and hurting your command.
You are our closer. You are our guy, and we want you to be our guy, and that is not going to change, okay? Mr. T says.
I feel an immediate sense of relief. I look both of them in the eye, first Mr. T and then Mel.
Thank you, I say. Knowing you still have faith in me means so much.
One of the great ironies about sports is that trying too hard to succeed is about the surest way to bring on failure. Joe and Mel are exactly right. I still have the same arm, the same stuff, but pushing myself to be better or faster than I was before is only hurting me. You have to get out of your own way sometimes and just let your body do what it does naturally.
As I walk out of Mr. T’s office, I feel about 10,000 tons lighter. I make a vow to myself to remember what he and Mel told me. And I devise my own little trick to help: I am not going to even think about what inning it is. Whether it’s the seventh or eighth inning, the way it was a year ago, or the ninth inning, the way it is this year, I still have a ball, the hitter still has a bat, and my only job is still to get him out, one pitch at a time.
I’ve had a great deal of success since the end of 1995 in getting big league hitters out. So why change anything? Why focus differently? That’s what I need to keep in mind.
The payoff from the meeting is immediate. I stop trying to be Wetteland and stop demanding perfection, and run off twelve straight saves. I am getting completely comfortable with the new role now, and by the time we head into Tiger Stadium for a three-game series in late June, the insecurities are behind me.
Who had any idea what would be ahead of me?
I am playing catch with Ramiro Mendoza, my fellow pitcher and fellow Panamanian, a couple of hours before the game. We are in front of our dugout. Our catch is no different from hundreds of other games of catch I’ve had. As I get loose, I start to throw a bit harder. I am feeling good. I catch Ramiro’s throw and, heating up now, I fire it back to him.
My throw seems to surprise him. He has to move his glove at the last moment to catch it.
Hey, stop playing around, Ramiro says.
What are you talking about? I’m not playing around.
I’m talking about the ball you just threw. It almost hit me.
I just threw a normal ball, I say.
Well, it didn’t look normal to me.
We keep playing catch. I throw the ball to him again and the same thing happens. It breaks about a foot right when it is on top of him, and again he almost misses it completely.
That’s what I’m talking about, he says. Stop doing that.
I promise in the name of the Lord I am not doing anything, I reply.
I make several more throws to Ramiro and every one of them has the same wicked movement at the end.
You better go find somebody else to catch you, he says, finally. I don’t want to get hurt.
He’s serious. Our game of catch is over.
I have no idea what just happened, and no idea why the ball is moving this way. I am not aware of doing a single thing different. I head to the bullpen, which is on the field at old Tiger Stadium, and throw to Mike Borzello. My ball—what I think is my regular four-seam fastball—is doing the same thing that it did with Ramiro.
Whoa! Where did that come from? Borzi says. He’s sure something is wrong with the baseball—that it has a scuff that’s making it move this way. He throws it aside and gets a new ball.
The same thing happens. Borzi holds up his hands.
What’s going on? What are you doing? he asks.
I don’t know. I am just throwing my regular four-seam fastball, I say, showing him my grip.
We talk again after the game, and agree to go back in the bullpen early the next day and try to figure this out. The pitch keeps cutting, hard and late. Now I’m getting concerned.
Borzi, this isn’t good. We’ve got to straighten this pitch because I have almost no command of it at all.
Mel Stottlemyre joins the conversation and closely observes me throwing. We look at my grip, my arm angle, everything. We cannot get me to throw this pitch straight.
For two weeks, maybe three, we work to do just that. We fiddle with my grip and release point. It’s as if the ball has a mind of its own, because it keeps moving late, on a horizontal plane, boring in on left-handed hitters and away from righties. As we tinker, I continue to pitch in games, and the more I throw this new pitch, the more I begin to get command of it. I am starting to throw it for strikes.
I am starting to come to the realization that it’s absurd to try to throw the ball straight.
Whoever heard of a pitcher trying to get less movement on the ball? The whole thing is crazy.
And this is how my cut fastball, or cutter, is born. It is as if it is dropped straight from the heavens, as if I were out on my father’s boat and a million pounds of fish just swam into our nets, the radar gone a deep, deep red.
How can I explain it any other way than as one more incredible gift from the Lord?
I do not spend years searching for this pitch. I do not ask for it, or pray for it. All of a sudden it is there, a devastating baseball weapon. It is not a pitch I had yesterday. But it is a pitch I have today and that I would have until the end. I am throwing the ball across the seams with what feels like the littlest bit more pressure on the ball from my middle finger, and my fastball now has this wicked tail on it. How does this happen? Why does this happen? Why not somebody else? I don’t know the answers, except to say that the Lord must’ve had a plan, because He always has a plan. And it is some plan.
All it does is change my whole career.
By midseason, I have 27 saves and a 1.96 ERA and Mr. T names me to the All-Star team. The game is played at Jacobs Field in Cleveland. I come into the ninth with a 3–1 lead, thanks to a two-run homer by the Indians’ Sandy Alomar, the hometown hero, and a solo blast from Edgar Martinez. I am very happy to have Edgar on my team. He hits me better than any man on earth. Just owns me, so much so that I feel like throwing a party for him when he retires (with an average of .312 against all pitchers and a .579 average against me).
I start the ninth by striking out Charles Johnson, then get Mark Grace to ground out and Moises Alou to line out, getting in and getting out, my favorite kind of save.
We fly home the next day on a plane the Yankees charter for us—Mr. T, his coaching staff, Paul O’Neill, Bernie, my father, Clara, and I—a whole bunch of people. It’s a propeller plane, and looks as if it might go back to Mr. T’s playing days. Oh, boy. Jet engines are bad enough. Now I have to look at blades that I imagine are powered by rubber bands?
Not good.
I keep hoping and praying that my fear of flying will pass, but it never does. Not on this flight or the hundreds that follow it. On all those countless Yankee charters to all corners of the United States, I sit in Row 29, in the middle seat, with my red leather Bible in my hand and Christian music in my earphones. My teammates? They are unmerciful. Mike Harkey, our bullpen coach in my last years, is a prime offender, walking down the aisle and motioning for me to take off my headphones, as if he has important news to share.
Hey, Mo, I just spoke with the pilot, and he said it might be a rough flight, so you may want to buckle up a little tighter.
Clara is even more afraid of flying than I am. And here she is next to me on this vintage prop plane, the two of us almost as white as Casper. Twenty minutes out of Cleveland, the sky turns black and the plane starts rolling around like an amusement-park ride at thirty thousand feet, swooping up, plunging down, bouncing sideways. I am a mess. Clara and I are saying our prayers, clutching each other, asking the Lord to get us all safely on the ground.
We are flying into Westchester County Airport, just north of the city, and the only merciful thing about this trip is that it is short. As we make our descent, things finally calm down and I begin to feel better. We are almost down now. I close my eyes, just waiting and waiting to feel the ground beneath the wheels, so I can exhale once and for all. An instant later we hit with a hard thud, a tire blowing out, the plane careening, bouncing down the runway before coming to a stop.
Are you okay? I say to Clara.
She looks very pale, but she nods.
Thank you, Lord, for getting us here safely, Clara says.
I can barely unlock my fingers from the armrest. I feel as if we’ve circumnavigated the globe, not flown in from Cleveland. When we get inside the terminal, I find out that almost all the commercial airliners are grounded because of the weather. We are the only ones who flew.
The second half of the season is a whole lot better than that flight. We are one of the best teams in baseball after the break, going 48–29, and win eight of our last nine. We win 96 games, finish two games behind the Orioles, and earn a division series matchup against… Cleveland. It opens at Yankee Stadium, and the traffic is still clogged on the Major Deegan by the time the Indians score five times in the first against David Cone, who can’t find the strike zone. A walk, a hit-by-pitch, a wild pitch, three singles, and Sandy Alomar Jr.’s three-run homer make for a big mess. But, just as in our championship run the year before, we never stop coming at you.
Ramiro Mendoza pitches three and a third superb innings in relief of Cone, and we start our charge. Tino Martinez homers, and we scratch out another run and then, after chasing Orel Hershiser in the fifth, Tim Raines, Derek, and O’Neill pound out consecutive home runs to put us up, 8–6, in the sixth. Jeff Nelson holds them into the eighth, then I get four outs, striking Matt Williams out looking to end it.
Tino, who had a monster regular season (44 home runs, 141 RBIs, .296), keeps it going in Game 2, drilling a two-run double in a three-run first. With Andy going, I figure it is going to hold up, but the Indians score five times with two outs in the fourth, and by the time Williams takes Andy deep for a two-run shot an inning later, the Indians are on their way to a 7–5 victory.
In these tight best-of-five series, the third game is always pivotal, and it couldn’t go any better as the series shifts to Cleveland, thanks to a grand slam from Paul O’Neill and a Maddux-like performance from David Wells. We cruise, 6–1, and, now just a victory away from the ALCS, we get a solid start from Dwight Gooden and take a 2–1 lead into the eighth. Mike Stanton strikes out David Justice looking, and then Mr. T gives the ball to me to get the last five outs. I get Matt Williams on a flyout. The next hitter is Alomar Jr.
I fall behind, 2–0. I don’t want to put the tying run at first, so there’s no way I am going to walk him. But I’m not giving in, either, by just throwing something down the middle to get a strike. Alomar stands a long way from the plate, bent a bit at the waist, with a slightly closed stance. Joe Girardi sets up away. I am looking to hit the outside corner, low. I come set and fire a cutter. The ball is out over the plate, almost shoulder height. I miss my spot badly. The pitch is ball three.
I am surprised when Alomar swings.
I am shocked when he hits it into the first row in the right-field seats.
The game is tied and the place erupts. I put my head down for a moment and pick up the rosin bag. The Indians go on to win in the bottom of the ninth and then take Game 5 to end our reign as world champions much sooner than any of us expected.
Giving up that homer is the greatest failure of my young career. I know Joe and Mel are concerned about how I am going to handle it. Mark Wohlers is never the same pitcher after the Leyritz home run. Other relievers have responded similarly after giving up huge home runs. But almost the minute the ball sails over Paul O’Neill’s glove, I know that not only is this not going to break me, it is going to make me better.
I learn from that pitch. If you watch the replays closely, you can see I don’t finish correctly, and leave my release point too high. I’m not sure if I gave Sandy a hundred more pitches in the same spot that he would hit another one out, but the point is that I have to finish that pitch properly, have to be so focused, have to be so completely consistent with my mechanics that I do not miss my spot by so much.
The Lord has blessed me with an ability to pour all my energy into places where it can do me good. I have a strong mind, one that is not easily distracted or deterred or discouraged. I cannot bring Sandy Alomar’s ball back. I can’t change the outcome of the division series. But I do know that I hate the feeling that I have when I walk off the mound that night in Jacobs Field. And I am going to do all I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.