PHILADELPHIA — It took only a handful of questions yesterday for Joe Torre to be reminded that this isn’t 1998 anymore and these Dodgers aren’t those Yankees.
Those Yankees were so tight and so focused, Torre recalled, that he sometimes had to call team meetings behind the dugout during games to calm them down.
These Dodgers, on the other hand, are so La-La-Land laid back that Manny Ramirez admitted yesterday he was in the shower Monday night and didn’t see the Jimmy Rollins comeback that put L.A. in a 3-1 elimination hole going into tonight’s Game 5 at Citizens Bank Park.
“You know how it is,” Ramirez said to wide-eyed glances from the assembled media. “I got out of the game [for defensive purposes in the ninth inning], so I wanted to take a shower.”
Unbelievable.
Torre laughingly chalked it up to Manny just being Manny, of course, and it appears true that Ramirez’s noxious, no-longer-charming attitude hasn’t infected his much younger teammates.
It’s also true that Torre has been in these do-or-die situations numerous times over the course of his 14 consecutive playoff appearances as a manager, and his calm and collected approach worked out in the Yankees’ favor more often than not.
But for the sake of Torre’s legacy — remember, he hasn’t won a World Series since 2000 and is retiring after next season — it would behoove the Dodgers to lose the surfer-cool persona and turn up the intensity tonight.
Changing the personality of a team virtually overnight is no small feat, of course, especially coming off consecutive losses of 11-0 and Monday’s crushing walk-off.
And I’m not expecting anything to change based simply on the Dodgers’ clubhouse yesterday, where a large group of players sat around watching “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” while Ramirez recounted his shower exploits.
Team Focus, it was not — and is not. In fact, it looked more like a club preparing its offseason tee times than one expecting to play Game 6 back in Chavez Ravine on Friday.
But Torre and the Dodgers really have no choice, because the Phillies are just as loose and even more resilient than their L.A. counterparts, with the added advantage of clearly being in the Dodgers’ heads with last year’s five-game NLCS romp and what has the makings of a similar dismantling this season.
Doug Mientkiewicz, the ex-Red Sox first baseman now with the Dodgers, talked at length yesterday about the potential parallels of Boston’s comeback from a 3-0 deficit to the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS.
Nice try, Doug, but these Dodgers haven’t shown much — if any — of the same resiliency as the Idiots of 2004. What they have shown is an embarrassing lack of determination that nearly caused them to blow a six-game NL West lead in the final 10 days of the regular season.
Torre showed no interest in cracking the whip yesterday, and that obviously wouldn’t be his style. But his team has spent most of this series in a fog, with even its lone win in Game 2 last week at Dodger Stadium the result more of a Phillies meltdown than an L.A. rally.
Maybe Torre will have taken this Dodgers team as far as it could go the past two years if Vicente Padilla doesn’t come through in Game 5 tonight. Admittedly, it isn’t a lineup full of young stars like the Phillies, who appear poised for a long run as the NL’s best team.
But as witnessed by their consecutive NLDS wipeouts of the powerful Cubs and even more powerful Cardinals, the Dodgers are better than they have shown against the Phillies the past two postseasons.
The fault for not showing it has to be shouldered at least in part by Torre, who has shown as little urgency as his players.
Torre recalled yesterday that Paul O’Neill, perhaps the most uptight member of that uptight 1998 Yankees team, responded to a loosen-up lecture from Torre that year by saying, “It’s not fun unless you win, Skip.”
The Yankees ended up having a lot of fun, all right, turning their intensity into a World Series crown.
This year’s Dodgers could learn a thing or two from that.