JOE Torre was talking about the Red Sox, whom the Yankees will play five times in four days at Fenway beginning Friday, but he just as well could have been talking about his own team.
“Good teams find a way to get things done,” Torre said last night, when asked if he still considered Boston to be as serious a threat as ever, injuries to players like Jason Varitek, Trot Nixon and Tim Wakefield notwithstanding.
“That’s the intangible [that’s tangible].” It’s the intangible that somehow kept the Yankees afloat last season when their pitching staff fell to pieces and the season appeared about to shatter as well in the aftermath of miserable performances that June in Kansas City, Milwaukee and St. Louis.
It’s the intangible that provided the stitches of the fabric this year that allowed the Yankees to prosper when corner outfielders Hideki Matsui and Gary Sheffield went down in May.
Players come and players go. Heroes and goats exchange roles. But even now, with the Orioles in The Bronx last night for the first of three before the latest version of The Rivalry commences, there were the Yankees in first place (by two games) and the Red Sox in second for the ninth consecutive year running.
Not, however, that intangibles can ever substitute for reliable starting pitching or fundamentally-sound baseball. Not that intangibles can ever surmount a failure to pay attention to detail.
The Yankees had lost three out of five after having won four straight and had seen their three-game lead sliced to one before Monday’s finale of a four-game series against the Angels. It wasn’t only the fact that Randy Johnson was superb in his seven innings – wasn’t even the fact that the Yankees won the game 7-2 by scoring a run in the seventh and adding four more in the eighth – it was the way they went about it that most cheered Torre.
It was the way Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu got down perfect bunts in succession in the seventh to help build the winning run. It was the way the team played crisply in the field to nail down the victory.
“I think we cleaned up our game at the end,” he said after the game. “I think we played with more confidence.” Last night, expanding on the thought, Torre pointed to a careless blunder in Monday’s first inning – when Robinson Cano unaccountably botched a flip from Jeter at second base and thus failed to turn a double play – as an example of what he hadn’t seen as the game evolved into the late innings.
“Robbie dropped that ball in the first inning because he thought it was going to be easy,” Torre said. “But it’s never easy.
“I’m not saying this was specifically the case with us, but sometimes when you’re winning a lot you take too much for granted; you don’t have to think about [what you’re doing] all the time.
“Players are always geared to work on that specific day, in that specific game.
When you win a lot, you think you’re supposed to. And that’s when it gets you. You need to work on it on an everyday basis.
“It’s about attention to detail, no question.” Last night, tonight and tomorrow afternoon it will be about paying attention to beating up on the sad-sack Orioles before the showdown. Every game the Yankees win against every other opponent on the schedule makes it less imperative to devour the Red Sox.
“We’re not going to sacrifice anything in this series because of who’s coming up,” said Torre, who hasn’t officially named Sidney Ponson to start the back end of Friday’s day-night doubleheader because, “if we need to use him in relief to win a game against Baltimore, we will.
“We need to concentrate on the game in front of us.” And then the intangibles will take care of themselves.