Before last night’s game, Joe Torre spoke to his team about the Jim Gray situation and admitted to the media he wasn’t pleased with Chad Curtis’ comments following Game 3.
“I just wish Chad would have said that was his choice [to not talk] instead of that it was the team that agreed to do this,” Torre explained. “Because I know the whole team didn’t have this type of meeting or anything like that.”
Gray, the NBC reporter who drew the wrath of fans and players for a volatile interview with Pete Rose on Sunday in Atlanta, interviewed Joe Torre and Chuck Knoblauch before the game and that “everything is fine.”
“Why don’t you watch the pre-game show and see?” he said.
Gray seemed surprised to be asked about the Curtis incident.
“I talked with Torre and it was very pleasant and cordial,” Gray insisted. “It is the standard pre-game routine to talk with the manager.”
After a short pause, Gray said he and Torre did not discuss Curtis’ refusal to talk with NBC after his game-winning home run Tuesday night.
Said Torre: “We have a certain obligation to NBC that we’re going to fulfill and that’s just what we have to do. I don’t like to orchestrate anything. Each individual should make up his own mind on what he wants to do. That’s the way it should have been left.”
NBC decided to put Gray in the Yankees’ post-game as well. He handled the trophy presentation. A role that Hannah Storm had previosuly held.On Monday, a day after the interview, Torre expressed displeasure at Gray’s tactics with Rose and said he would “support the players in whatever they do.”
While most of the Yankees thought the interview was in poor taste, only a few held on to the anger for more than a day. David Cone talked with Gray on Tuesday while Paul O’Neill, a friend of Rose, said he “didn’t know” what he would do if Gray approached him.
When Gray asked Curtis about the home-run pitch he clobbered to give the Yanks a 6-5 win in Game 3, Curtis said: “I can’t do it. As a team, we decided because of what happened to Pete we’re not going to talk out here on the field.”
Curtis, Clay Bellinger and Jim Leyritz appear to be the three Yankees most ticked off by Gray’s interview. Bellinger overheard the interview in the hallway at Turner Field and reported back to his teammates. Leyritz, who grew up in Cincinnati and knew Rose as a child, was the most outspoken after the incident, saying, “We have to protect our own.”
Before the ALDS, Curtis, a devout Christian, convinced his teammates to use non-alcoholic champagne in post-series celebrations. He spoke to all the Yankees in a group and told them that the liberal spraying of alcohol put a damper on the fun for Darryl Strawberry, a recovering alcoholic, and himself. The teammates agreed, mostly because Strawberry is a popular figure in the clubhouse.
(Different version on p. 86 in the metro and sports extra editions.)