LOS ANGELES – Oh yeah, one of the 10 best pitchers ever makes his Yankee debut tonight.
What was expected to be the spectacle of Roger Clemens in pinstripes has been reduced to a sidebar because of the ongoing Yankee sideshow. The No. 1 starter’s OpeningNight assignment in Oakland has been obscured by issues involving the No. 5 man, Hideki Irabu, all while interim manager Don Zimmer and impetuous owner George Steinbrenner play bi-coastal hardball.
The bookends for what was expected to be a quiet Yankee preseason were a Rocket coming to the rotation and a “fat … toad” leaving it.
So much for the quiet. Remember when the storyline was how the same team that made history last season was back to try it again? That proved as valid as those NBA previews touting the Nets as real title contenders.
Nevertheless, the newest set of forecasts are in, and the Yankees are the darlings of the predicting world. They are again the flavor of a new year. They are the chalk to repeat.
Chalk can be erased, however. Sure things, after all, come in two sizes – sucker and super-sized sucker.
The 26-week season will be unpredictable, just like the six-week spring. Unless you are someone who combined ESP and ESPN, and knew before camp opened these Yankees would begin 1999 with Zimmer as their manager, Clemens as their ace and non-entities Clay Bellinger, Mike Figga, Jason Grimsley and Dan Naulty on the final roster. If you saw all that coming, please give me a call. We can make money together.
“I keep hearing how the Yankees are a cinch,” Zimmer said. “There is no such thing. We have a good team. We had one last year. Everything that could go our way, did.”
All indications are, that will not be the case this season. The aura already is not right. Camp Tranquil quickly morphed into Camp Trauma. The Yanks lost their manager, their lone lefty starter (Andy Pettitte) and way too many games to suit their owner.
“We have had a lot of shocks,” Joe Girardi said.
Indeed. The Yankees were supposed to be the boring New York team this spring. The Mets, after an offseason of high finance, were expected to offer high drama. Except the Yankees don’t know how to play the background.
So the Mets bring in a 1988 Cy Young Award winner (Orel Hershiser). The Yanks bring in a 1998 Cy Young Award winner (Clemens).
The Mets release their touted Japanese import, Hideo Nomo, with understatement. The Yankees remove their touted Japanese import, Irabu, from the rotation with the subtlety of a falling anvil.
The Mets incorporate their greatest player, Tom Seaver, back into their family. The Yankees have the greatest living player, Joe DiMaggio, die; an ailing Catfish Hunter show up with Lou Gehrig’s disease; Yogi Berra return to the team’s spring-training site for the first time in 14 years; and try to persuade World Series hero Jimmy Key out of retirement.
Really, Clemens’ arrival on Day One of camp should have been a tip this season could not be choreographed. David Wells, Graeme Lloyd and Homer Bush were gone before pitchers and catchers were officially allowed to work out. And there went the theory about the same team trying to repeat. Darren Holmes would be jettisoned before the club left Florida.
There was high finance when Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera were the only major-leaguers to win arbitrations. And then there was real high finance when the Yanks and Nets formed an unprecedented partnership. Maybe the association with the long-hexed Nets should have been an indicator of things to come.
For the first time in his Yankee days, Darryl Strawberry publicly questioned his place in the team’s thinking, all while he continued to undergo chemotherapy. And he became the secondary cancer story of the camp when it was revealed Joe Torre had prostate cancer.
“There’s been a lot of high drama,” David Cone said. “We have amazing resilience. I can’t think of a team in the big leagues that has been through more drama than this team the last few years. … [The Irabu mess] is just part of a long list of distractions this spring. I can’t think of a better group to handle these kind of distractions. We’re well-prepared for it.”
Even if that is the case, this spring has been a slap-in- the-face reminder that 1998 is done. Two-fifths of the projected rotation (Pettitte and Irabu) will not be among the initial starting five. The back end of the roster with Bellinger, Figga, Grimsley and Naulty does not promise the depth of Bush and Tim Raines, Holmes and Lloyd.
Zimmer, no gentle diplomat, will be asked to juggle touchy situations in left field, behind the plate and in the rotation, all while having to deal with a spiteful owner he already has publicly criticized.
The Yankees still come at 1999 with fantastic talent, starting with, of all things, an underpublicized Clemens. But before the first pitch has even been thrown, they also come at 1999 without that sense of magic. The season comes tonight. Can they get it back?