COMMENTARY : A Real Key Loss for Yanks

About five o’clock in the afternoon you looked up and suddenly there in the Yankee clubhouse was first place in the American League East.

Suddenly Jimmy Key was in front of his locker, next to Andy Pettite and John Wetteland, right around the corner from Buck Showalter’s office.

It is only a couple of weeks since Key had surgery to repair a tear in his rotator cuff. He cannot yet lift his left arm above his shoulder. But for a few moments on last Tuesday, Key was back in the room and you could imagine the fine season we were supposed to get from the Yankees, instead of the one we have.

“Do I believe we would be in first place if we’d had Jimmy healthy all season?” Jack McDowell said, down the row from Key’s locker. “Of course I believe we would be in first place.”

McDowell was with the White Sox last year, but he saw enough of the Yankees to know what everyone in the American League knew, that Jimmy Key was as good a pitcher as there was in the league. They gave the Cy Young Award to David Cone but could have given it to Key instead. Should have given it to Key.

He won 17 games and lost just four. The year before, Key was 18-6. He worked the corners at Yankee Stadium, went inside and outside with the hitters, and there were games when Key was the closest thing to Whitey Ford you could remember at the Stadium.

There always had been arm troubles for Key, all the way back to his seasons with the Blue Jays, whom he helped win a World Series. But his last surgery was in 1989. Now Key’s subtle skills at moving a baseball around had found a great big stage in New York. Somehow it seemed he had finally arrived.

“I know we went after Greg Maddux before we went after Jimmy,” Don Mattingly said. “And I know how good Maddux is. But what was Jimmy? Thirty-five and 10? I don’t see how we could have gotten much more from Maddux than 35 and 10.”

Maddux won 36 games with the Braves over the same period, lost 16. But now he is still going, Key is not.

By the end of last season, Key’s left shoulder was damaged. He knew it; the Yankees knew it. There was arthroscopic surgery after the season. “We knew we didn’t fix the problem last October,” Key said quietly. He meant doctors avoided major surgery on his shoulder at the time. He would come back this season and try to pitch the way he did with the Yankees on his way to 35 and 10, if he could.

Key tried in spring training and kept trying into May. He had pitched with pain in his career, had done that a lot. Only now, the pain was too much. The Yankees put him on the disabled list and sent him to Florida. Still, Key kept trying to come back and help make the season right.

“I had to prove to myself and everybody once and for all that I couldn’t pitch the way it was,” Key said.

So Dr. James Andrews of Birmingham, Ala., went into Key’s left shoulder and performed what amounted to major surgery for a pitcher.

The tear has been repaired, but there are no guarantees Key will pitch again in the big leagues. The doctors have told him there is no better than a 50-50 chance that he can ever again be what he was. It can end for a pitcher that fast.

“Very rarely do you see it happen this way,” McDowell said, watching Key as he spoke. There was a big crowd of reporters around Key’s locker, the way there always was last season after he had worked the corners and beaten another team. “You don’t see a guy come off a year like Jimmy had and then, boom, he might be done.”

McDowell shook his head and perhaps counted his blessings at the same time. He has spent seven years in the big leagues and has never had arm trouble, never had surgery.

“It’s rare in today’s medical world that you hear about anybody suffering a career-ending surgery,” McDowell said. “You start to get the idea that they’re supposed to be able to fix anything these days. Now Jimmy’s standing down there talking about how he might be done.”