By George, It’s Not Enough

Joe Torre stood, transfixed, leaning against the rail of the visitor’s dugout.

He stared at Angel Manager Mike Scioscia.

He watched a pile of ecstatic Angels envelop pitcher Troy Percival.

He saw a team of young, confident, talented, wide-eyed, hard-working, smart, mostly anonymous men who had just accomplished something great and surprising. They had beaten the Yankees, 9-5, and won the series, 3-1. The Angels are moving on to the American League championship series.

And Torre thought back six years ago, to the 1996 Yankees, to young, confident, talented, wide-eyed, hard-working, smart, mostly anonymous men who won a World Series and started a glorious run of four championships in six years.

The run is over. Probably for good for many of this group.

Having blown leads in the last three games of this American League division series, having had its pitching staff whacked around, having its defense become fumble-fingered, its high-priced, midseason acquisitions become meaningless, having watched his team, the mighty, mighty Yankees, become querulous whiners with the umpires, Torre looked ahead squeamishly.

“Obviously,” he said, “all of us aren’t going to be back in the spring. But hopefully the experience here will help whoever is back.”

Yankee owner George Steinbrenner wasn’t here. But he wasn’t happy. Everybody knows that. Steinbrenner would not find invigorating the refrain that came from the New York clubhouse.

The Yankees won 103 games this year.

That’s what they kept saying.

“We won 103 games,” General Manager Brian Cashman said.

“We won 103 games and you want to tear us apart?” pitcher David Wells said.

“We won 103 games and I’d say that’s good enough to win a championship,” pitcher Andy Pettitte said.

Steinbrenner isn’t going to care about the 103 wins. He’s only going to care about these three consecutive losses. To a team that had never won a playoff series. Steinbrenner considers it a failure if the Yankees don’t win the World Series.

But so many of them wanted to tell us everything is OK because winning 103 games means things aren’t so bad.

Derek Jeter, who had said defiantly a year ago when the Yankees lost in Game 7 of the World Series that “it feels like failure,” sat in front of his locker in the visitor’s clubhouse at Edison Field and said he didn’t see the need for major reconstruction.

“I mean, we won 103 games,” Jeter said.

But for the first time since 1997, the mighty Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs in the division series.

They were eliminated in emphatic fashion, getting pushed around Saturday afternoon, standing flummoxed while the Angels posted an eight-run fifth inning, watching a pitching staff Torre called his best ever, get hammered over and over, starters and relievers, young and old.

Roger Clemens, 40; Pettitte, 30; Mike Mussina, who turns 34 in December, and Wells, 39, were made to look like the old guys in the softball league down the street. In 17 1/3 innings pitched, they threw 308 pitches, gave up 32 hits and 20 runs. Twenty runs.

“To be honest,” Pettitte said, “with the way we relied on home runs, I was a little worried about our offense going into the playoffs. But our offense was great. If we score four, five runs, in the past, we won those games.”

In the past, a lot of things happened. The Yankees won four world championships over the last six years and, as usual, Steinbrenner spent prodigiously to buy whatever he thought he needed this year.

Extra pitching? Welcome, Jeff Weaver, Detroit’s ace. Extra hitting and fielding? Come on down, Raul Mondesi.

Steinbrenner personally signed Wells last winter after the Arizona Diamondbacks thought they had the portly pitcher committed to them. Wells had an 8-1 postseason record. Steinbrenner wanted that. Even before his disastrous fifth inning, Wells made an ugly error in the fourth when Tim Salmon dribbled a nothing ball to Wells. He picked it up and whizzed it down the right-field line. Salmon ended up on second. He didn’t score, but Wells’ composure seemed fragile after that.

Second baseman Alfonso Soriano, who will finish high in the AL most-valuable-player voting, seemed awed by the circumstances of the playoffs this year. He hit .118 and committed a damaging error in the third inning, booting a certain double-play ball that allowed the first Angel run to score and seemed to spark the Anaheim ignition.

“It just bounced high,” Soriano said. “I just did not have my good series here.”

Neither did catcher Jorge Posada (.235). Mondesi hit .250 and made more bad plays than good in right field. While the bottom of the Angel order provided hits, runs and power, the bottom of the Yankee order provided many rally-killing outs.

“I don’t think it was a failure,” Cashman said. “We have a lot of strength and a couple of weaknesses. What it came down to was, we didn’t play our best baseball this week. And if you don’t play your best, you’re going to get beat. Pitching makes or breaks a team. Usually it makes us. This time it didn’t.”

Wells, who gave up eight runs and 10 hits in his 4 2/3 innings, talked for 40 minutes after the game. Over and over he mentioned the 103 wins. All credit to the Angels, he said. And don’t tell him about numbers, Wells said. He didn’t want to hear about ERAs or innings pitched or when the last time the Yankees had done this or that bad thing.

“I don’t know numbers,” Wells said. “I just know that everything ends. It was gonna happen sometime. We were going to lose early. So it’s happened. So what? Are we bad now? We won 103 games.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.