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Roger & Out A dangerous hair-trigger reaction by Roger Clemens and a blunder on the bases set the tone as the Yankees got a 2-0 Subway Series jump on the MetsBy Tom Verducci Issue date: October 30, 2000
This was an all-New York World Series, all right. While the first two games were played in the St. Patrick's Cathedral of baseball, Yankee Stadium, they had the gritty texture of Times Square before Disneyfication. They were raw, emotional, edgy, a bit dangerous, bizarre and ultimately tighter than a streetwalker's spandex. You knew this was not going to be your properly dignified Fall Classic when Mets relief pitcher John Franco showed up for Game 1 riding shotgun in a police cruiser. This was the World According to Garp Series. Through the madness the Yankees remained Fortitude's favorite sons. Their two wins, each by a margin as uncomfortably thin as your typical vehicular following distance in Manhattan, made the Yankees of manager Joe Torre the only team in baseball history to win 14 straight World Series games. Over five years Torre's Yankees have never lost a one-run postseason game in the Bronx. Going into Tuesday's Game 3 at Shea Stadium, they also had outscored their opponents from the seventh inning on, 98-44, during a 44-14 run through Octobers that has made them more synonymous with the month than Elvira is. The Mets became the latest team to learn that the Yankees are that trick candle on a birthday cake. You simply can't put them out. "This team is as mentally tough as any team I've ever had," gushed Yankees owner George Steinbrenner after Sunday's 6-5 victory, which followed a 4-3 extra-inning thriller on Saturday. "It has as much heart as any team I've ever had." Steinbrenner was a power station of static electricity, a regular Con Edison in loafers as he paced the clubhouse carpet during the two games. No one, though, set off more charged ions into the loaded atmosphere than Yankees righthander Roger Clemens, the Game 2 winner. He was a spark-throwing bundle of intensity when he arrived at Yankee Stadium for his outing. He hadn't pitched in seven days, since his one-hit domination of the Seattle Mariners in the American League Championship Series. The last four of those days had been filled with New York media buzz about his facing Mets catcher Mike Piazza for the first time since beaning him on July 8, during one of the teams' interleague series. "I was anxious all day," Clemens said after Sunday's game. "I felt I couldn't go up and in, which I normally do on Mike, because what if one got away? All the talk really wore me down. I kept telling myself, You've got to get ahold of your emotions." There was more to think about. Pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre stopped by to chat with Clemens in the clubhouse before Game 2. Stottlemyre hasn't been with the Yankees this postseason because of stem-cell treatments he's receiving to fight blood-plasma cancer. Clemens also knew that his mother, Bess, would be at the game, seated in the wheelchair section behind home plate. She had come last year to watch her son pitch in the World Series, but she bolted after five innings because she couldn't stand the tension, and she missed seeing him close out the Fall Classic with a 4-1 win over the Atlanta Braves. The seven days of rest had seemed like forever to Clemens. All the waiting, all the anxiety -- he couldn't wait to unleash it. He spoke to almost no one in the clubhouse before the game. Minutes before he took the mound, he stretched out over a padded table in the training room. A trainer rubbed hot liniment all over his body, even between his legs. Clemens said nothing. He just let out loud, rhythmic blasts of air through his nostrils, in the manner of a wild bull in the last moments before the wooden door of the holding pen swings open to the possibilities of danger. "I don't remember ever being more ready for a start," Clemens said. "But I also knew I had to control it somehow." On the eve of the Series, Yankees righthander David Cone, a wizened elder of New York baseball (he pitched for the Mets from 1987 to '92), noted, "More than ever guys know they'll be remembered forever by what happens in this Series. One incident, one play, one gaffe, and it will be remembered forever." In that morning's newspapers, Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen was still -- 59 years later -- dropping that third strike to allow the Yankees to win Game 4 of the '41 World Series. The Series is a spin of the roulette wheel. What Cone could not know was that the wheel would stop on the number 6 of Mets rightfielder Timo Perez in Game 1 and the number 22 of Clemens in Game 2. Fifteen Mets players and about a dozen front-office workers dined together on the evening before the Series opener at a Manhattan steakhouse, consuming slabs of beef the size of bread boxes. Owners Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon each toasted the players, wishing them luck and expressing pride at having the Mets in their first Series in 14 years. There is, after all, a reason that Patience, the other library lion, wears a Mets cap. New York percolated. The Subway Series was the toughest ticket in New York this side of one for jaywalking. A fellow Clifton (N.J.) High '63 alum telephoned Mets media relations director Jay Horwitz looking for tickets. It gave the man no pause that he and Horwitz hadn't seen or spoken to each other for 37 years. The Mets made the 9.1-mile trip from Shea Stadium to Yankee Stadium in two chartered buses under police escort, with Franco in the lead car. A crowd 15 people deep, kept at bay by police barricades, jeered the team as it entered the ballpark; one Yankees fan held a sign that read WE NEVER TRADED NOLAN RYAN. Mets first baseman Todd Zeile and outfielder Darryl Hamilton pressed camcorders to their faces to record the carnival. As Perez discovered, sometimes posterity is bigger than 8 mm. He and the other Mets had appeared loose, with third baseman Robin Ventura giving new meaning to the term by taking batting practice sans undergarments. With two outs in the sixth inning and the game scoreless, Zeile smacked a fly ball deep to leftfield off Yankees lefty Andy Pettitte. Perez, the dynamic rookie who had reached first on a single, unwisely ran in low gear, thrusting an arm in the air to signal that Zeile had homered. Zeile, too, pumped a fist in celebration, while rounding first base. One problem: The ball didn't leave the park. It hit the top of the padded wall and caromed to leftfielder David Justice. "Where's Jeffrey Maier when you need him?" Zeile would crack later, referring to the 12-year-old boy whose reach turned a fly ball out by Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter into a home run in the Yankees' win over Zeile's Baltimore Orioles in Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series. The 5'9" Perez tried to outrun his blunder, but Jeter would not allow him to get away with it. He took a throw from Justice and, wheeling toward the plate and throwing off one foot (think Joe Montana to Dwight Clark), fired a strike to catcher Jorge Posada to nail Perez. "I'll gain experience from it," the humbled Perez said. "If I'd left at full throttle, I would have scored easily." The new Lonnie Smith (Smith's baserunning blunder cost the Atlanta Braves Game 7 of the 1991 Series) was chastised by several teammates, who told him never to be so careless again. The missed run loomed large in the ninth inning, when the Mets asked closer Armando Benitez to protect a 3-2 lead. Benitez did get one out and came within one strike of the second, but rightfielder Paul O'Neill, in the most important and stubborn at bat of the young Series, drew a 10-pitch walk. Not even the IRS takes as much as the Yankees; they outwalked the Mets in the first two games 15-1. Then lefthanded-hitting pinch hitter Luis Polonia laced a single off Benitez with a bat on which he had written A. BENITEZ and T. WENDELL in anticipation of facing Benitez and Turk Wendell, the Mets' top righthanded relievers. Another single, by second baseman Jose Vizcaino, set up a game-tying sacrifice fly by designated hitter Chuck Knoblauch. It wasn't until the 12th inning that the Yankees won, on a bases-loaded single by Vizcaino off Wendell. New York had waited 38 years for a Mets-Yankees Subway Series, and Game 1 seemed to take just as long. At four hours, 51 minutes, it was the longest of the 560 World Series games ever played and only five minutes shorter than the two previous Subway Series games combined, in '56 between the Yankees and the Dodgers. Not even Torre's Yankees had won a game like this. The franchise had been 0-54 when trailing after eight innings in World Series games since ... Owen dropped that third strike. Game 2 -- and a piece of Series history -- belonged to Clemens. His pregame intensity exploded in an angry spray of 98-mph fastballs. He whiffed the first two batters, all the while spitting and snarling and huffing and puffing. "My feet were flying off the ground," he said. Then, in a blip of time, all his tightly strung circuitry went haywire. On a buzz saw of a fastball, Piazza's bat shattered in three pieces. The largest part, the barrel, bounced to Clemens, who fielded it with two hands as if it were the baseball -- which, unbeknownst to both Clemens and Piazza, had fallen foul wide of first base. In this instant the synapses became overloaded. Clemens heaved the daggerlike piece of wood toward the Yankees' on-deck circle. ("I didn't even know [Piazza] was running," Clemens would say.) The bat, its sharp end tumbling end over end, cartwheeled only about a foot in front of Piazza. "What's your problem?" Piazza yelled. Clemens at first indicated that he thought he had fielded the baseball. Piazza kept yelling for an answer -- fishing for Clemens to defuse the situation by passing it off as an accident -- but Clemens would not address him. Clemens stalked toward home plate umpire Charlie Reliford, wanting only to get another baseball and get back on the mound. Both benches emptied, though without incident. On the next pitch Clemens retired Piazza on a grounder. He ducked into the clubhouse, where he ran into Stottlemyre. "You've got to settle down," Stottlemyre told Clemens. He did. The Mets went down meekly thereafter. Clemens faced 28 batters over eight innings, and only five of them put the ball out of the infield, just twice for hits. The Mets did hang five runs in the ninth on the Yankees' bullpen, but that was one short of the six the Yankees had scratched out off skittish lefty Mike Hampton and a succession of leaky relievers. The Mets absolved Clemens of intent in the bat incident, and Piazza described himself as "more shocked and confused than anything." In the interview room after the game, Clemens said, "There was no intent there." Torre, normally the stoic sage, blew up at repeated questions from reporters about the incident. Clemens was astonished at Torre's outburst. Later, after he'd showered and put on his black shirt and leather jacket, Clemens telephoned a friend while walking to his black SUV. "Boy, they really got Skip fired up!" said Clemens. As he arrived at the SUV, his wife, Debra, hopped down from the passenger seat. There was one thing he had to know. "Did Mom make it?" he asked. "Yes," Debra replied. "She made it through, all the way until you came out." Clemens smiled. It was 2 a.m., and only now did he put himself at ease. He had stared down the Mets with the help of a fastball straight out of his youth and a will straight from his mother. It was a night in which he became, in the parlance of the territory, a made Yankee. The games were raw, emotional, a bit dangerous, bizarre and tighter than a streetwalker's spandex. The bat cartwheeled only about a foot in front of Piazza. "What's your problem?" he yelled. Issue date: October 30, 2000
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