ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Things made a lot more sense in the old days, let’s be honest. When the Bronx Zoo was open for business, when the invective was flying around the old Yankee Stadium clubhouse and the craziness was plastering the walls and the hate was out there for all to see, you could at least understand why things were so crazy, so nutty, so zany around the Yankees.
You had people who couldn’t stand to be in the same room together: Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles and Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. Jackson (we are spotting a common thread here) once asked Cliff Johnson after a loss in 1979 how he’d hit Goose Gossage back in the National League.
“He couldn’t hit what he couldn’t see,” Gossage volunteered.
“You want to back that up?” Johnson replied, and before long they were wrestling among the clubhouse urinals, and Johnson was shoving Gossage into the shower, and by the time order was restored Gossage had a torn thumb ligament in his pitching hand and the season was lost.
That was The Bronx Zoo, the one that once inspired Steinbrenner to fume: “Is it too much to ask teammates to be friends once in a while?”
This is the Bizarro Zoo.
This is the Yankees in 2011, a team in which, apparently, the captain of the team can get in Dutch with his bosses for being too kind to his best friend.
“Everyone’s on the same page,” Yankees spokesman Jason Zillo said late yesterday afternoon, summing up an odd conference call that took place earlier in the day between Randy Levine, Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman and Derek Jeter.
“We’re on the same page,” Jeter later confirmed, a dozen different times, before the Yankees went out and lost their sixth straight, 6-5 to the Rays.
This isn’t the kind of page that would ever have been written by Sparky Lyle or by Peter Golenbock, put it that way. To review: Jorge Posada, Jeter’s longtime teammate and wingman, had himself a most public meltdown Saturday night, begged out of the lineup because he may or may not have been galled at hitting ninth in the order against the Red Sox. It was a terrible moment for a terrific Yankee, and if it took him a little longer to come around to that conclusion than what would’ve been most favorable . . . well, he did get there.
Jeter didn’t stick around Saturday to offer his captain’s take on the situation, explained a day later that he didn’t realize there was a controversy brewing, said he didn’t think Posada had to apologize anyway, pronounced the issue over (as did Joe Girardi), called Posada “like a brother to me,” and all but called for a couple of verses of “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” to show how much the room still cared about Posada.
This apparently didn’t sit well with the higher-ups. And because it didn’t sit well with the higher-ups, Jeter was rousted from his slumber at around 1 in the afternoon yesterday (the Yankees didn’t get into Tampa until close to 5 a.m.), was summoned to a conference call with the Yankees brass, who thereby assured that this story (declared dead by everyone involved 24 hours earlier) would receive a tour through yet another news cycle.
The page in question seems like it was torn out of the Mets’ crisis-management handbook, truth be told. In any event, it was a very popular page yesterday, one everyone swears to be sharing. Jeter, in fact, took that page and substituted it for taking the fifth after a while.
“Why were they angry?”
“We’re on the same page.”
“Do you feel differently about Jorge now?”
“We’re on the same page.”
“Have you been keeping up with ‘American Idol?’ ”
“We’re on the same page.”
Yes, you’d like to wonder what the old inhabitants of the Bronx Zoo were thinking yesterday. That team won despite loathing each other. This team, so far, seems to be losing despite liking each other. You try to figure this one out.