The Closer (23 page)

This is what I need to do if I want to make it all the way back.

If there’s one unforeseen positive in the whole ordeal, it is that I discover the joys of summer with my family. I haven’t been off for an extended time during a summer since I was twenty years old.

We have a family barbecue on the Fourth of July while the Yankees are winning in Tampa.

I could get used to this,
I think.

I can go to my boys’ ball games, and have more relaxed time with Clara. I am much more in sync with the daily rhythms of our family. Of course I’m not ready for retirement; I have a comeback season, 2013, ahead of me, Lord willing. But these feelings let me know that when the time comes to retire, I am going to be fine with it.

Just as I am getting set for surgery and beginning the rehab work, the Yankees take off in the East, winning twenty of twenty-seven games in June, a charge led mostly by Robinson Cano. Every time I tune in to a game it seems Robby is crushing another baseball. He has 11 homers for the month, hits .340, and maintains a 23-game hitting streak, all while playing world-class defense.

Without a doubt, Robby is one of the greatest players I’ve ever
played with. He is also one of the most confounding players I’ve ever played with. Go back a few years to a game in Anaheim. The Angels have won two straight lopsided games, and we are in dire need of a victory if we want to stay in the pennant race.

Joe calls for me with one out and men on first and second, the score tied in the ninth. I either get two outs or we lose. The hitter is the leadoff man, Chone Figgins. On my first pitch, I get him to hit a six- or eight-hopper to second. Robby is shading a step or two toward second, but the ball is hit slowly enough that I know he has time to get there. Robby takes a couple of steps toward the ball. And then he stops.

No dive, no attempt to block it.

Nothing. He just stops.

The ball trickles into the outfield. The runner, Howie Kendrick, comes around from second to complete the sweep. Nobody can understand why Robby doesn’t dive or smother the ball somehow to save the game.

I definitely don’t understand. Even if you think the first baseman is going to catch the ball, how do you not get ready in case he doesn’t? How do you stand there like a department-store mannequin and watch the ball roll into the outfield?

How can you not give all you have in that moment to prevent our team from losing?

I do not talk to Robby after the game. Reporters are all around. Emotions are running high. That’s the worst time to have this conversation.

We fly to Minnesota that night, and the next day, I seek out Robby in the clubhouse in the Metrodome. Robby and I have had these discussions before. We are standing near his locker.

What happened on that ball Figgins hit yesterday? I say.

I don’t know. I thought Wilson [the first baseman] was taking it. I just didn’t read it right, Robby says.

When he didn’t make the play, why didn’t you go after it? I ask.

I didn’t think I could get there, he says.

Robby’s head is down, and it’s obvious he feels bad about what happened. He knows he doesn’t have a bigger fan than me on the club. I am not trying to drop a safe on him. I am trying to help him, the way an older brother helps a younger brother.

Robby, you are way better than what you showed yesterday, I say. In that situation you have to do whatever it takes to keep the ball in the infield.

Robby nods.

I know it wasn’t good. Next time it won’t happen.

Robinson Cano and I were teammates for nine years by the time I retired. This guy has so much talent I don’t know where to start. Sometimes I question if he knows how much talent he has—knows that he can be much better even than what he is, better than what anybody is. He is that gifted. I used to tell him, I don’t want to see you give up at-bats. Ever. I want to see you fight at every at-bat.

It would drive me crazy when I’d see Robby swing at balls at his eyes and basically get himself out. And how many times did I see him swing at the first pitch with the bases loaded? That’s what a guy without confidence does. Not what one of the best hitters in the game does.

Over and over, I tell him just that: Robby, you are too good to do that. On the first pitch, the pitcher often is going to throw something bad to see if he can get you to go fishing and hit a weak grounder or pop-up somewhere. Don’t help him. When you do that, it’s not just your at-bat that gets wasted. It’s a letdown for the whole team when the best hitter we’ve got gets himself out.

Why would you want to help the pitcher?

You’re right. I won’t do it.

His baserunning is another one of our topics. When he gets going, he’s a very good base runner. He gets a good secondary lead,
reads the ball well. His instincts are solid. He just doesn’t always run hard out of the box, and then there are those times—way too many—when he doesn’t put pressure on the defense by running all-out on routine grounders. You never assume everything is going to be an out, because it isn’t always going to be.

You can ask Luis Castillo, the former Met, about that.

A month later in New York, Robby trots after a ball Cliff Floyd hits in a game at the Stadium against Tampa Bay. It allows Floyd to get to second base. At the end of the inning, Joe pulls Robby from the game.

You don’t want to hustle? Take a seat, Joe says.

I stay on top of Robby more than any other teammate, precisely because of the gifts the Lord has given him. If somebody else gets himself out or doesn’t hustle, it bothers me, but not in the same way. I hold him to a higher standard—and want him to have the same expectation of himself.

To his credit, Robby never makes excuses or tells me to back off when I approach him. Not one time. I think he trusts that I come to him in the spirit of helping. He is always very respectful—and he always says thank you.

Trust me, there are plenty of guys who can’t take that kind of honesty.

Robby has gotten better and better as he’s gotten older. He plays harder now, and I hope he keeps it going in his new home in Seattle. There’s no doubt he is a Hall of Fame–caliber talent. It’s just a question of whether he finds the drive that you need to get there. I don’t think Robby burns to be the best. I think he’s content to enjoy the game and help his team and go home. You don’t see the red-hot passion in him that you see in most elite players. He is a laid-back guy. Maybe because he came up surrounded by so many star players who were older, he just slipped into that role, but now that he is the leading man for the Mariners, it is his time.

How often do you see a player with this beautiful a swing, who
can play this kind of defense, and hit for this kind of power? It’s amazing. He steps in the box and has those quiet hands and then uncoils and the hands come forward, so strong, so quick. You see him rip a ball into the gap, and you think:
With a swing like this, you should hit .350 in your down years.
That’s the kind of ability he has. It is all there for Robby Cano. I hope he goes and gets it.

After two months of painstaking rehab on my knee, I am feeling so good that I am convinced that I can come back and pitch this season. I meet with Dr. Altchek to give him the glowing report.

Doc, my knee feels great, I say. I really think that I can—

He cuts me off. He knows athletes, knows where this is going—that I am about to make a case for why I should get back to the mound this season. He tells me it would be foolish and risky to try to rush back. I am a runner barreling toward home, and he is a Molina-sized catcher blocking the plate.

I am not going to get close to scoring.

Your arm may feel fine, but isn’t being a major league pitcher more than that? he says. Can you field bunts? Can you sprint off the mound, plant, turn, and throw a guy out? Can you defend your position, and beat a runner to first on a 3–1 play?

I wish I had a counterargument, but I don’t. He is right.

I know how much you want to get back to the club for the playoffs, but you’re not ready to be on a big league mound yet, Dr. Altchek says. You want to give your knee all the time it needs. You should be in great shape for spring training.

Spring is next up for us, since we have another disappointing October, beating the Orioles in the division series before getting swept in the ALCS by the Tigers. A bunch of cold bats do us in. After a regular season in which he hit .312 with 33 homers and 94 RBIs, Robinson Cano goes 3 for 40 in the postseason. It turns out to be his final October in a New York Yankee uniform.

I
AM ON A
back field at our spring training complex in Tampa, having just spent an hour working on bunt defense and pickoff moves. Mike Harkey, our bullpen coach, is nearby. The year is 2008. Or 2010. Or 2012.

It could’ve been the odd years, too.

This is it, Hark, I’m done. I’m not going through another year of this.

You are full of it, Hark says.

No, this time I mean it, I say.

You’re like the little boy who cried wolf, Hark says. You will be back here next year and probably the year after and we’ll be having the same conversation. You will never retire.

Hark and I have this exchange six times, or is it ten? We have it often, because spring training is my least favorite time of the year. You hear people wax poetic about spring training being a metaphor for life, a symbolic rebirth that comes packed with hope. I never really get the rapture. I am a homebody at heart. Leaving Clara and the boys has never been easy for me. Home is where we pray and laugh. It’s where we nurture one another. I see my sons having fun in the family room right before it is time to leave one year, and I begin to cry.

The feelings are like a tsunami from nowhere.

I feel like I’ve failed these boys, because I leave them so often, I tell Clara.

Leaving home wasn’t easy when I was twenty-three and it is harder still when I am forty-three. I am a creature who finds comfort in routine, and it’s unsettling when the routine gets upended.

It’s not that I don’t want to prepare and do the work. I understand that there is rust to scrape off, fundamentals to lay down, but how many times can you cover first or work on cutoffs? To me, spring training is more boring than waiting for fish to bite. Give me a handful of innings, a couple of weeks, and I’m ready to go. There are so many monotonous drills and so little rush of competition.

In my twenty-fourth and final spring training, though, my attitude is completely different. It’s not because I know this will be the last one. It’s because I am able-bodied. Nine months removed from the pain and tears of Kansas City, my knee feels strong. My whole body feels strong. To be running in the outfield and taking ground balls and practicing with the guys—I am so grateful to the Lord for the opportunity to play again.

When I throw twenty pitches in live batting practice, my old catcher and friend Jorge Posada teases me.

Twenty pitches is a lot for you, he says.

Let him tease. Let anybody say whatever he wants. I am back in uniform, throwing baseballs. It is a blessing that I am not taking for granted.

I throw a couple of bullpen sessions in the following days, and it’s all good, and then I make my spring debut on the afternoon of March 9, a few hours after I officially announce my retirement at a press conference. Our opponent is the Atlanta Braves. I get Dan Uggla to pop up to second for the first out, then strike out Juan Francisco and Chris Johnson looking, to wrap up a quick inning. As first outings go, it couldn’t have been better. I am overflowing with optimism.

I wish I had the same feeling about Derek Jeter.

Derek also makes his spring debut against the Braves. It’s the first time he has played for the Yankees since the twelfth inning of Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, when he snapped his ankle as he moved to his left fielding a ground ball. In a strange way it reminded me of what happened to me in Kansas City, because it’s a play I’ve seen him make ten thousand times. It’s so completely normal, and then in a flash it isn’t. Derek has surgery a week later and says over and over that his goal is to be back by opening day.

Playing as a DH for his first game, Derek rips the first live pitch he’s seen in five months into left field for a single. It is vintage Derek Jeter. The fans go berserk. He plays shortstop for the first time a day or two later and insists that all systems are go for starting opening day.

The only trouble is that I don’t believe it. I have been around Derek so long that I know his movements, the anatomy of his game, as well as I know my own. And he does not look right to me. He’s not moving freely. Doesn’t have the same burst, or quickness. I know it’s extremely early in the spring, but I’m concerned about what I’m seeing and his insistence that everything is on course.

I watch him closely as camp continues. Derek had a devastating injury to his left ankle. No matter how well the surgery went, sometimes you just need more time to heal. I think he wants to be in the lineup so bad that it might be clouding his judgment.

I know how much you want to start the season, but you need to be careful and not rush back, I tell him one day in the trainer’s room. It’s not worth it. You should wait until you are one hundred percent healed, because if you push it too much too soon, it could backfire.

I’m fine, Mo. I feel good. I understand your point, but I am not going to do anything reckless, don’t worry, he says.

He says the doctors are telling him it’s getting better every day. A little stiffness and swelling are to be expected. He insists it’s all good.

Of course medical professionals know what is going on inside that ankle much better than I do. I just know what I see. In late March, Derek has some extra stiffness and inflammation and has to get some cortisone shots. He insists it’s a minor setback. Then word comes out that he is going to start the season on the disabled list, and basically the bad news never stops coming. He doesn’t play his first game until July 11. Soon he gets hurt again, his body breaking down all over the place.

Derek is one of the most driven people I have ever known. It’s what makes him great. But I also think in this case his drive just blinded him, and maybe everybody else, too. To me it was obvious he wasn’t ready, and yet somehow he kept pushing and pushing and nobody stopped him—or protected him from himself—the way that Dr. Altchek protected me from myself. I believe it was an organizational mistake—a big one—not proceeding more deliberately.

Nobody had anything but his best interests at heart, no doubt, but sometimes you have to forget what the diagnostic tests say and trust your eyes. Derek plays in a total of seventeen games in 2013. If he doesn’t rush it and plays even fifty or seventy-five games, the whole season plays out differently. We have our captain, our Hall of Fame–bound shortstop. With a healthy Derek Jeter, I can’t see our season ending in September.

Six weeks into the season, with thirteen saves in thirteen chances, I am standing on the mound of Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. I am not a patient this time around. I am a closer. I like this much better.

It is a day of deep emotion for me, in all kinds of ways. Five
hours before the game, I meet with eighteen people from the Kansas City community. All season long, at every stop, I make it a point to do this, meeting people whom I might not ordinarily get to connect with. They might be fans, or ushers at the stadium, or cafeteria workers, or ticket takers, folks who work behind the scenes to make ball games happen, folks who in many ways are the lifeblood of the game. In Cleveland, I even get an audience with the legendary drummer John Adams, who has been banging on his drums at the top of the bleachers, trying to start Indians rallies, almost since the time I was born. Jason Zillo, the Yankees PR director, does a phenomenal job taking care of the logistics, and these intimate meetings are truly as memorable as anything in my last year. I’m not trying to be noble or heroic; I’m simply taking an opportunity to thank people for their contributions and their steadfastness, to join them in their world, not mine. Or, in the case of visiting with people who are facing adversity or tragedy, it’s just a way to offer whatever I can that might make a difficult time just a little better.

I connect with wonderful people all over the country, and the memories of all of them will stay with me forever, though none are more poignant than my visits with the Bresette family and with a young pitcher named Jonas Borchert before our May 11 game in Kansas City. The Bresettes, of Overland Park, Kansas, had just suffered an unimaginable loss while traveling home from Florida. Their ten-year-old son, Luke, was killed when a huge display board in the Birmingham, Alabama, airport landed on him. Heather Bresette, his mother, was seriously injured as well, and so were sons Sam and Tyler. When I hug Ryan Bresette, the boys’ father, I don’t know what to say or do, other than to express my sorrow and tell him I will be praying for his family.

You are giving us a special gift in a time of a lot of tears, Ryan says.

You are giving me a gift, too, by sharing your family and your time with me, I say through tears of my own.

We all have a laugh when another young Bresette, thirteen-year-old Joe, lets it be known that Luke loved baseball but hated the Yankees.

The power, and the inspiration, go on and on as I meet so many special people that day. I am uplifted by the Bresettes’ strength in the face of such a devastating loss, just as I am uplifted by fifteen-year-old Jonas Borchert, a dominant closer from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, who has a form of cancer but is fighting it with all he has, and by Ricky Hernandez, a young man in a wheelchair who built a place in his backyard for children with disabilities to play.

Everybody wants to make a big deal out of how nice it is for me to take an hour or so out of my day, but I try to tell them that they are the ones who should be thanked, for what they’ve given me. Even in a room that is overstuffed with pain and adversity, the Lord’s blessings, and people’s goodness, are everywhere, and I am so much richer for having been there.

Returning to the scene of the accident isn’t traumatic at all. It is a joy. I shag before the game (though I admit I am not going at it as hard as I did before the knee surgery), and I laugh when I see the big “No ‘Mo’ Zone” sign my teammates have hung on the outfield wall, right at the spot where I collapsed. I can’t wait to get out there and pitch. In the bullpen, the phone rings in the eighth inning. Hark picks up.

Mo, you got the ninth, he says.

I come on to try to save a victory for Andy, who has a fine duel with James Shields of the Royals. I get two outs on grounders to short. Salvador Perez, the Royals’ catcher, hits a double to right and now the hitter is Mike Moustakas, a left-handed-hitting third baseman. He battles hard, fouls off four pitches. With the count full, I throw a cutter up and away and he hits it to left center, fairly deep. The ball is going right toward the spot where I got hurt. I turn and
watch left fielder Vernon Wells run into the gap and haul it in. It’s our fourth straight victory, and we make it five a day later when I save a victory for Kuroda, getting Moustakas again, this time on a short fly to right.

I save twenty-nine games in my first thirty chances and am feeling as good as I ever have. We’re up and down as a team, and the barrage of injuries—suffered not just by Derek but by Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson, Francisco Cervelli, and Alex Rodriguez (still recovering from hip surgery)—is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

We keep trying to find our way and head out west, and at our stop in Oakland I get to visit an old friend and language teacher, Tim Cooper. It’s been twenty years since we were teammates, but Coop is somebody I won’t ever forget. He was there when I needed him, teaching me English and helping me escape my loneliness. I leave him tickets and have him and his family in the dugout before the game. It is great to see him.

You look good, I tell him.

I’d cut your hair, but you don’t have any, he tells me.

We’re six games back as I head for my final All-Star Game, another game I’m thankful I can drive to, since it’s just across the bridge in Queens. Jim Leyland, the American League manager, calls for me in the bottom of the eighth. When I walk through the bullpen door and begin to run across the Citi Field outfield, “Enter Sandman” starts to play and the fans are standing and cheering. Everything feels the same, normal, and it’s not until I am almost at the mound that I realize something.

I am all alone on the field.

Completely alone.

My American League teammates stay back in the dugout to salute me. They are all at the railing, clapping. The National League players are doing the same thing on the first-base side of the field. I am so humbled, so blown away, by the outpouring that I
am barely conscious of what I am doing. I bow my head and blow a kiss. I wave my hat and touch my heart, and all I can think is:

How blessed can one man be?

I wish I could go all around Citi Field and thank every single person there.

Before the game, I had stood in the middle of a room full of All-Stars and told them how proud they should be of their accomplishments, and what an honor and privilege it was to be among them. Torii Hunter got up and implored the AL stars to win it for me, getting a rousing cheer as he did a rap-star impersonation.

And now here I am, three hours later, trying to help win it for them, for us. I throw my warm-up pitches to Salvador Perez and have a three-run lead to protect. I retire Jean Segura, Allen Craig, and Carlos Gomez in order. After Gomez grounds to short, I walk slowly toward the third-base dugout. The fans are standing again. This whole season is full of lasts… a last visit to this park, and that park, to all these places. It is winding down now. This is my last All-Star team. It’s the best imaginable way to go out.

After the break, we are in Chicago for a three-game series with the reeling White Sox—and not in a good place. We are stuck in fourth in the American League East, 6–9 in our first fifteen games after the All-Star Game, and now we have The Greatest Sideshow on Earth changing into his uniform just across the clubhouse. The story of the night isn’t our sluggish and inconsistent play or the White Sox’s ten-game losing streak. It is the return of our third baseman, Alex Rodriguez, who is finally making his season debut following hip surgery. The hip is the least of Alex’s problems, though. He has just been suspended for 211 games for his alleged role in the Biogenesis scandal, getting performance drugs and then trying to block baseball’s investigation of the case, according to Major League Baseball. It’s the heaviest drug suspension ever
handed out. A bunch of other players accepted 50-game bans for their involvement with Biogenesis, which used to bill itself as an anti-aging clinic but turns out to have been more of an anti-playing clinic, for the way its customers got hammered.