YOU fight a pennant race with the starting rotation you have, not the one envisioned in March when everyone, even including the manager, chose to overlook the wear and tear on his veterans’ arms (and other body parts) in proposing that the 2005 Yankees would have the best rotation of the Joe Torre Era.
After last night’s 12-9 Bronx clubbing of the Orioles, there are 12 games to go in a race that’s transformed this September into one of the most dramatic final months in franchise history. For all the winning throughout time, you don’t need more than five fingers to count the stirring pennant races. That’s kind of the byproduct of finishing first by at least eight games 22 times since the move into the Stadium in 1923.
The Yankees don’t run in races. Rather, they parade into coronations.
So much of this season was spent searching for Yankee comparables. Was this 1965, when the roof caved in on the Mantle Dynasty? Or, maybe 1959, the hiccup year that served as a bridge between the older Hank Bauer clubs and the younger ones featuring Roger Maris?
Turns out this actually might be a reprise of 1964, when a widely dismissed Yankee team charged from third place and four games out on Sept. 3 to win the pennant by one game in a largely forgotten three-team race with Chicago and Baltimore.
The Yanks won that year largely because Mel Stottlemyre came out of Richmond to go 9-3 following his summer promotion when the veteran arms on Ralph Terry, Stan Williams and Roland Sheldon went limp.
Manager Yogi Berra did not replace Stottlemyre when his veterans were ready to return. For in a pennant race, you dance with the ones who brung ‘ya, not the ones with whom you might have hoped to go all the way, way back when.
Mike Mussina’s right arm is good to go, and as such, Torre is giving him tomorrow’s start against the Orioles. Mussina hasn’t pitched since elbow trouble forced him from the mound in Seattle on Sept. 1. Limited to a pitch count of about 80 and without a rehab start, who knows?
“I want to be involved and I want to contribute, but we’ve done some nice things [without me] and I don’t want to mess it up,” Mussina said. “I have no idea whether I’m going to be rusty or whether I’m going to be good.
“I don’t want to do anything to hurt our chances. We’re here to go to the playoffs. I’m not foolish enough to say I should be the one [on the mound] if I can’t do the job.”
Torre loves big-game experience. Mussina’s upside is high enough that he warrants tomorrow’s nod regardless, but experience – see Cleveland, late ’90’s – is largely why the manager is committed to Jaret Wright on Saturday, pushed back by one day in the aftermath of the right elbow contusion he sustained last Sunday when struck by a flying bat shard, to complete a temporary six-man rotation.
Health issues aside, there’s no question that Torre wants both Mussina and Wright in the rotation with Randy Johnson and Aaron Small. But committing to Wright, who has been erratic both pre- and post-DL, thus means that either Chien-Ming Wang or Shawn Chacon will become the odd man out the final week, deserving or not, more reliable than Wright, or not.
“Jaret is one of our original five; you don’t dismiss that,” said Torre, alluding to the projected Johnson-Mussina-Wright-Carl Pavano-Kevin Brown rotation. “He was brought here for a reason, and part of that is that he had done it before.”
Doing it before is one thing. Getting it done now, is another. Torre should know that you run a pennant race with the ones who brung ‘ya to the party, not the ones with whom you once thought you’d be going all the way.