Uniform Gives Torre a Special Feeling

No offense to the Cardinals, Braves and Mets, but when New York Yankee Manager Joe Torre donned the uniforms of those teams, it wasn’t the same as when he suited up in Yankee pinstripes for the first time in 1996.

“It was a completely different feeling,” Torre recalled Monday before Game 5 of the American League championship series against Seattle. “It’s a uniform that gets your attention, OK? I know even when the Yankees were not winning and I was a player and we’d play the Yankees in spring training, it was a special day, even though the game didn’t mean anything.”

Torre replaced Buck Showalter in 1996 and has guided the Yankees to four of the last five World Series championships, but he’ll never forget the first day he walked into the Yankee Stadium dugout and onto the field wearing pinstripes.

“It was an amazing feeling,” he said. “I’ve been in baseball my whole life and have been with some pretty good organizations. But I remember what Yogi [Berra] told me. He said when you get introduced for your first World Series game and run out to the first-base line, you are never going to forget that feeling. And he was right.”

Much is made of the Yankee mystique, of how players elevate their game when they don pinstripes, and there must be something to it. How else do you explain Angel washouts Allen Watson and Jason Grimsley playing prominent roles on New York’s 1999 championship team?

But Seattle Manager Lou Piniella doesn’t put much stock in that.

“I think you can put purple and green on that bunch over there and they’re going to play well,” Piniella said. “It’s not the uniform. You’ve still got to play baseball. Yeah, you’ve got the monuments [of Yankee greats beyond the outfield wall] and the tradition to lean on, but you’ve still got to play baseball.

“They said that about Notre Dame football and the Boston Celtics. Well, you’ve got to put a bunch together that goes out there and plays together as a team and plays well, and that’s what they’ve been able to do.”

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Piniella shuffled his defensive alignment before Monday night’s game, moving left fielder Jay Buhner to right field and right fielder Ichiro Suzuki to left, a peculiar decision considering Suzuki is a speedy Gold Glove award candidate and the Yankees had five consecutive left-handed hitters in the middle of the lineup.

But there is much more ground to cover in Yankee Stadium’s left field and left-center field gap, and Buhner is still not fully recovered from a foot injury that sidelined him for most of the regular season, so Piniella preferred Suzuki’s range in left. It was Suzuki’s first major league appearance in left field.

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One key to the series was the Yankees’ ability to contain Mariner cleanup batter Edgar Martinez, who had three hits in 20 at-bats (.150) and no runs batted in. Martinez’s sore right groin, an injury he has nursed all postseason, may have had as much to do with that as Yankee pitching.