Joe Torre’s Yankees Were Blessed Team With a Lot of Heart

Who’d have ever thought it, a New York Yankees team we could like?

But upon leaving Yankee Stadium, where the Yankees won the World Series for the first time in 18 years, all was well.

Passers-by waved from automobiles and shouted their happiness. We decided to take the subway downtown. Amazing thing, we were on the No. 4 train leaving the 161st Street station. And the train was filled with kind and gentle folks, each and every one mellow and smiling.

All of which prompts a question.

This is New York?

Even Reggie Jackson had a warm-and-fuzzy look. The Hall of Famer from the Yankees’ glory days of the late 1970s is now a muckety-muck in owner George Steinbrenner’s stable of revolving muckety-mucks. Jackson went to the Atlanta clubhouse. He wore a Yankees cap and carried a cigar and beer. He shook hands with Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who says, “Tell Andy Pettitte he did great. That last game, it’ll boost his career.”

Jackson says, “I know you know what you’re saying,” and then, with a fraternal nod of respect, he moves on.

Who’d have thought it, Reggie Jackson a beneficent sage?

Once upon a time, we scribes scribbled our Yankees stories with pens fashioned from razor wire. Now we tickle the keyboards with feathers.

How could we do otherwise?

You gotta love Yankees manager Joe Torre. In him is the essence of baseball, a kid’s game that can be a man’s life. He was an immigrant’s son tagging along with his big brothers, Rocco and Frank, on Brooklyn’s sandlots in the 1950s. Quickly a major league player, it yet took Torre 33 years to get to a World Series, 18 as a player, 15 as a manager. He held the record. Most major league games played and/or managed without being in a World Series. More than 4,200 games.

Fired by the New York Mets, Braves and St. Louis Cardinals, Torre started this season in the last manager’s job most any rational man wants, the Yankees’. But if he knew anything about the job, this is what he knew first: It was home. He also knew the part-time fool Steinbrenner is a full-time zealot in pursuit of victory. And he respected Bob Watson, the new general manager, who once played for him.

Together, the three men created a Yankees team unlike any in two decades of Steinbrenner control. They’re world champions. Nothing new there. The new part is, they’re people you could invite into your home without asking the cops to drive by occasionally.

Strongman Cecil Fielder at first base; rookie Derek Jeter at shortstop, second-year pitcher Andy Pettitte and his mentor Jimmy Key; 28-year-old center fielder Bernie Williams, and the sweaty-capped closer John Wetteland--they’re stars who bring dignity to a team once called “the Bronx Zoo,” a collection of perversities, contrarians and egomaniacs that transformed Yankee Stadium from cathedral to asylum.

Reckoned to be a middling team this season, the Yankees became champions when Pettitte became a dominant pitcher, the American League’s certain Cy Young Award winner. The rehabilitations of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, while incomplete, were remarkable enough to win a dozen games and more. Perhaps as important, the fallen stars set a tone of sacrifice and commitment that pervaded the Yankees clubhouse.

“We just kept coming back,” Williams says. “This club, despite everything, wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

By “everything,” he meant the usual. Steinbrennerian rages. Threats of resignation. A $20 million pitcher relegated to the bullpen. A pitcher with an aneurysm that might have killed him on the mound. Gooden’s no-hitter followed by his movie deal followed by his dead arm followed by Steinbrennerian rage.

These things, Joe Torre pretty much ignored. Once a kid in a man’s game, he’s now a man in a kid’s game. He wanted to work in New York. But if the owner didn’t want him, he’d go somewhere else. Big deal.

He worried more about his big brother who took him to the sandlots so long ago. Frank is 64. He played in the major leagues ahead of Joe, seven seasons in all, was in the World Series with the Milwaukee Braves of 1957 and ’58. By this summer he’d had three heart attacks. Heart disease had killed the Torres’ brother, Rocco. Doctors said Frank needed a new heart.

So, for 72 days this summer, he waited in a New York hospital.

He waited for someone to die whose heart he could have.

He waited and watched his little brother, Joe, manage the Yankees past mighty Cleveland, past the Baltimore Orioles (with an assist by Jeffrey Maier) and into the World Series. He watched and made telephone calls about strategy and lineups. He made calls and talked ball when Joe came to the hospital.

And when the Yankees came back to New York with a 3-2 lead in this World Series--by winning three games on the road, winning one after falling behind, 6-0, through five innings--then came the best news of Joe Torre’s season.

Doctors had found a heart for his brother.

On an day off, they found a heart.

“‘How do you think it goes from here?” Frank Torre asks a nurse wheeling him back to his room after a preparatory X-ray at 4 a.m.

“We have the best doctors in the world here,” the nurse says. “The operation will go just fine.”

“I mean the Series. You think we can beat Maddux and Glavine if we have to?”

“Why don’t we worry about that tomorrow?” the nurse says.

On the morrow, Frank Torre had a new heart. That night, Joe Torre managed the Yankees to a world championship.

Who’d have ever thought it, the blessed Yankees?