Back to the future in the Bronx

Sporting News, The, August 18, 2003 by Dave Sheinin

The Yankees let setup reliever Jeff Nelson go after the 2000 season over (by Yankee standards) a trifling amount of money, believing they could get someone else to do what he did. They went through Steve Karsay and Ramiro Mendoza and Mark Wohlers and lay Witasick and Antonio Osuna and Jose Contreras and Armando Banitez before finally turning to the only guy who could really replace Nelson.

Jeff Nelson.

Now, if the Yankees could only reassemble the rest of the core of player-magicians who brought them four titles in five years--bring back Tino Martinez mad Mike Stanton, coax Paul O'Neill and Scott Brosius out of retirement, locate Bernie Williams (Oops, is that him in center field? My bad). Then people might once again feel good about the Bombers' chances of returning the World Series trophy to the Bronx.

The reacquisition of Nelson was not so much a nostalgic touch as it was an admission of sorts by the Yankees that what they have been trying to do the past couple of years was not working. ("Not working," in this case, means not producing championships.)

The Yankees always will get to the playoffs. A $180 million payroll will get you that, if nothing else.

But do you remember when there was this almost mystic aura about the Yankees, this understanding that, no matter what, they'd win? When, say, they trailed the A's 2-0 in the 2001 American League Division Series, you knew that it simply meant they'd have to work a little harder--win three straight, make a couple of more cross-country flights--in order to move on?

Why was that? It wasn't because they had the biggest payroll. It was because they had this ungodly collection of gamers, clutch hitters and big-game pitchers--players who were talented, yes, but who played above their talent when it mattered most, from Jim Leyritz and Luis Solo to Martinez, Derek Jeter and David Cone.

That feeling is gone, erased by a flared single off Luis Gonzalez's bat on November 4, 2001, and 20 subsequent months of frantic (and unnecessary) tweaking and overhauling, which has had the effect of moving the Yankees further from that feeling of invincibility rather than closer to it.

This is what Jeter means when he says, more and more frequently it seems, "This team is not that team."

By all accounts, owner George Steinbrenner began taking a much more active role in the team's baseball operations after the Yankees' loss to the Diamondbacks in the 2001 Series. He should have left well enough alone. The Yankees had come within a fluky bunt play and that flared single of winning their fourth consecutive championship.

But to Steinbrenner the loss meant change was needed, and change No. 1 was thrusting himself deeper into the decision-making process.

It isn't difficult to pick out the Steinbrenner moves. They're the ones made out of emotion and ego---Raul Mondesi, Contreras, etc.--instead of the good Yankees moves that are made because the player acquired is built to win championships.

Naturally, general manager Brian Cashman defends the team's moves--even the ones that everyone knows came from above his head and that he probably would not have made himself if he had autonomy. He also thinks it is possible to make too much of the gamer-character guy theory.

"We've won championships without a universal crop of preachers and quality citizens," he says. "We had high-end character guys and guys that would be perceived as low-end character guys. (David) Wells. (Darryl) Strawberry. Chad Curtis. Controversial guys. All of them were championship Yankees, but supposedly they rubbed people the wrong way."

But the point is, even the Yankees' fringe players, likable or not, were money in big games. Is Aaron Boone? Karim Garcia? Hideki Matsui? Jeff Weaver?

Manager Joe Torre knows whom he can trust, and mostly they are the old-guard championship Yankees, of which there are fewer and fewer nowadays.

Which is why, in one stretch this month, Torre turned to closer Mariano Rivera--perhaps the epitome of the proven, indomitable, unfailing, iron-stomached Yankee--for four straight days, the first time in Rivera's career he has done that.

Perhaps it was last month's acquisition of Benitez--a player about as far away from the late-'90s Yankees ideal as you can get--that woke up everyone in the Bronx. After they turned around and traded Benitez to the Mariners for Nelson, the Yankees' brass spoke in Yankees code:

Benitez was "not totally comfortable" with the Yankees. (Why? Because the games mattered?)

With Nelson, "a lot of questions are already answered." (What questions are those? You mean the fact he can get hitters out in the eighth inning?)

Nelson is "a better fit for what we're trying to do" (What's that? You mean win games?)

What it means is that the Yankees may be realizing once again there are players who have what it takes to come through in October, and there are players who don't--and that they have not enough of the former, too many of the latter.

And it scares them.

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