Torre’s Strategy Was to Sacrifice

Joe Torre was insistent, even emphatic about it.

The esteemed manager of the New York Yankees sat behind a microphone in the World Series interview room at Bank One Ballpark Saturday and said he would hold nothing back in Game 6, that he didn’t want his team thinking it needed to win only one of the next two just because it came West leading the four of seven Series, 3-2.

“This is our Game 7,” Torre said a couple hours before the start of Game 6. “We’re going to try to win this game tonight. There’s no question. We don’t want to think of a Game 7. I mean, Roger Clemens and (Mike) Mussina are probably the only (pitchers) not available to us tonight. We will do whatever it takes to try to win this game tonight because you never know what’s going to happen. We certainly want to not have to save anybody. I’m not thinking that way.”

Really?

In a series that has seen virtually every move by Arizona Manager Bob Brenly dissed and dissected, it was the Yankee manager who helped turn Game 6 into an embarrassment on the national stage.

If this was his Game 7, as he said, it should be interesting to see how he manages the real thing--because in Game 6 he hardly managed at all.

Matched against the dominating Randy Johnson and knowing he couldn’t let the Diamondbacks build a lead, Torre showed curious patience with starter Andy Pettitte and then simply gave up in only the third inning, turning reliever Jay Witasick into a human sacrifice on the altar of a 15-2 Arizona victory.

Pettitte gave up seven hits and four runs before his removal with two runners on and no outs in the third. Then, the manager who was not going to save anything, the manager of a team that has proven its ability to come back from almost any deficit at any time, allowed Witasick (with Randy Choate having warmed up and ready in the bullpen) to give up four straight hits, turning 4-0 into 7-0--and that was just the start of it.

Witasick faced 10 batters in the third inning and gave up eight hits. Arizona scored eight runs in the inning, by which time Torre needed a mercy rule rather than another reliever.

Make no mistake:

With a Game 7 to be played and the sense that you have a better shot with Clemens pitching against Curt Schilling (making a second start on three days rest) than you do coming back against Johnson, maybe you don’t rush a Sterling Hitchcock or Mike Stanton or Ramiro Mendoza to the mound once Witasick allows the score to get out of hand so quickly.

Then again, do you concede in the third inning?

“I think it was a take one for the team situation,” Torre said of the abuse Witasick absorbed. “The one difference when I said before the game that this is our seventh game ... well, we wanted it like it was our seventh game but we didn’t have to play it like it was the seventh game.

“We still have tomorrow to deal with, and in my mind, you fall behind five, six, seven (runs), I would rather keep all of (my key relievers) for that game. I mean, you don’t like to do it, but we had to ask Jay to suck one up for the team.”

Boy, did he.

Witasick, 8-2 overall this year and 3-0 after his June acquisition from San Diego, set a World Series record for yielding the most hits in an inning.

“Obviously, when you give up hit after hit after hit, you keep thinking it’s got to end sometime, you keep thinking you’ve got to get a fly ball, a broken bat, a rim shot, anything,” Witasick said. “But it doesn’t happen, so you keep waiting and waiting and waiting for somebody to come get you.”

Witasick ultimately allowed 10 hits and nine runs in 11/3 innings and said he simply couldn’t throw his breaking ball for a strike and “you can’t keep resorting to a fastball in this league. The disappointing thing was that I couldn’t give us innings and we had to bring other pitchers out of the bullpen. I was horrendous, but the only way to survive as a reliever is to have a short memory. I’ll go back to the hotel, have a good dinner and come back tomorrow.”

It has been a strange series in which those two nightclub dancers--as Schilling labeled the Yankees’ aura and mystique--can’t seem to decide which team’s colors they wear.

The Yankees have been outscored, 28-3, in three winless games at Bank One Ballpark, but here they are tied at three games apiece, and it may have been a little premature for the Diamondbacks to taunt visiting New York mayor Rudolph Guliani and his favorite team by blasting “New York, New York” on the PA system after Saturday’s game and a little premature for Schilling to guarantee on TV before Game 6 that he would beat the Yankees if it went to a Game 7.

“I don’t care,” Derek Jeter said in response to that. “People guarantee stuff against us all the time. I don’t pay attention. It doesn’t mean anything.”

It’s hard to say what does. Seldom has a team suffered two tougher defeats than the Diamondbacks did in Games 4 and 5, but as the baseball adage goes: momentum is only as good as your next day’s starter. Pettitte had problems with his breaking ball and location, and the Diamondbacks quickly forgot Games 4 and 5 while eventually totaling a record 22 hits.

Amid the onslaught, Torre asked Witasick to take one for the team, and rejected the offers of Paul O’Neill and Luis Sojo to pitch, saving the bullpen.

Now Torre gets the Game 7 that he had hoped Game 6 would be.

Presumably, this time, he won’t save anybody.