It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” Andy Pettitte on signing professionally with the Yankees.
Andy Pettitte had been selected in the twenty-second round of the June 1990 draft, a selection process that exemplified the excellent evaluating eye of that era’s Yankee scouting department. The Yankees also picked Ricky Ledee on the sixteenth round, Kevin Jordan on the twentieth round, Jorge Posada on the twenty-fourth round and Shane Spencer on the twenty-eighth round. At Deer Park (Texas) High School, Pettitte had been pudgy enough to be the football team’s center on offense and nose guard on defense besides throwing an eighty-five to eighty-seven mile per hour fastball. Wayne Graham, who would go on to college fame as the coach of Rice, recruited Pettitte to San Jacinto (Texas) Junior College by telling the youngster he was a lefty version of another San Jacinto alum, Roger Clemens. Pettitte was seduced. He had grown up idolizing Clemens, and decided not to sign with the Yankees out of high school.
In their one year together, Graham rode Pettitte about getting into shape. During the summer of 1990 Pettitte went on an orange juice and tuna diet, ran regularly in a sweat-inducing plastic top and lifted weights seriously for the first time. He found he loved to work out hard and lost sixteen pounds, dropping to two hundred twelve pounds. More importantly, with the additional strength, Pettitte increased the speed of his fastball and pitched at between ninety-one and ninety-three miles per hour. Joe Robison, the Yankee area scout who had followed Pettitte in high school, stayed on him at San Jacinto and was stunned by the increased velocity. He also knew the clock was ticking. If Pettitte had enrolled at a four-year college, the Yankees would have immediately lost his rights. But at a junior college Pettitte fell into the category known within the game as a draft-and-follow. That meant the Yankees had fifty-one weeks from the date of selection to sign Pettitte, until one week before the 1991 draft, midnight May 25, 1991. The Yankees were offering $40,000. But Graham told Pettitte that another high school lefty prodigy from the Houston area, Justin Thompson, was due to go in the first round in 1991 and reach six figures in a signing bonus throwing no harder than Pettitte did. Robison continued to badger Pettitte, so on May 25, 1991, Pettitte and his father, Tom, decided to escape to his grandmother Jenny Martello’s house in Baton Rouge.
“It was fortuitous,” Tom Pettitte remembers. “Because Mr. Robison happened to be at a tournament at LSU in Baton Rogue.”
Robison invited the Pettittes to his room at the Hampton Inn. A few agonizing hours passed in which Robison disappeared to call minor league head Bill Livesey each time a new proposal was even discussed. Robison finally offered $55,000, telling the Pettittes it was as far as the organization could go because some kids out of California still had to be signed. “I finally got sick of the whole process and I just picked a number out of thin air,” Pettitte recalled. “I said, ‘if you give me $80,000 right now, I’ll sign.’ Robison didn’t blink, didn’t make another phone call, he just said, ‘yes.’ I was mad; suddenly he didn’t have to make another call. I should have gotten more.”
That night, over pasta prepared by grandma Martello, Pettitte signed. If Pettitte had just waited a few more hours, he would no longer have been Yankee property. That is why he looks back with resentment at the process, because he believes that he would then have been one of the first players selected in the 1991 draft, and signed for more than $200,000. But to the Yankees’ great thrill he was in the fold. He soon became part of, what Mark Newman remembers as near weekly discussions among the Yankee minor league brass about which young starter had the highest ceiling: Sterling Hitchcock, Mariano Rivera or Pettitte. A pecking order was established by the start of the 1995 season. Rivera was in the minors, and Hitchcock won a battle for the Yankees’ fifth starter job against Pettitte, who was sent to the bullpen. A relief slot was only open because to begin that year major league rosters had been expanded from twenty-five to twenty-eight players to compensate for the shorter spring training following the strike. Pettitte had lost again and did not like it. Assistant trainer Steve Donohue remembers how the mild-mannered Pettitte “might have been more pissed than I’ve ever seen him” about the decision.
On May 16 Pettitte was demoted to Columbus so he could continue starting. His stay lasted just eleven days. He was promoted to replace Jimmy Key, who would ultimately need shoulder surgery. That was fitting. At Columbus, while others sat on the bench during home games in 1994, Pettitte watched Key’s starts off the satellite in the clubhouse. Like Key, Pettitte was a lefty who in the minors relied heavily on his changeup. So he studied Key. He was looking for ways to win in a major-league future. Tom Pettitte’s early memories of his son are about Andy’s intolerance for anything short of victory. Pettitte’s strongest defender in the organization was Tony Cloninger, who had worked with him as the organization’s roving pitching coordinator in 1990-91. Cloninger also sensed the left-hander’s relentless desire to succeed. Gene Michael turned down many trade requests based simply on that relationship, saying, “Tony Cloninger influenced me on Pettitte. He once told me Pettitte is a mentally tough guy that has big inspirations to be better than Hitchcock. He wanted to pass him in the organization.”
Upon being recalled to the rotation, Pettitte determined that this time he was never going to the minors again, that he was going to convince the Yankees he was a keeper and better than Hitchcock. He did. In 1995, Pettitte won the most games by a Yankee rookie in twenty-seven years and, vitally, showed his fortitude by going 5-1 with a 3.38 ERA down the stretch as the Yankees had to win nearly every day to secure the wild card. He was greatly influenced by Jack McDowell’s toughness. McDowell was pitching with a strain in his upper back, and Pettitte was awed by McDowell’s fortitude. “Talk about a competitor,” Pettitte said. “That guy was willing to pitch through anything to win.”
McDowell was gone in 1996 and so was Hitchcock, traded to Seattle because the Yankees believed Pettitte was the superior pitcher. McDowell, though, lived on with the Yankees in Pettitte. He admitted nearly a decade later that his elbow was never right after he volunteered to pitch in relief May 1 against the Orioles, twenty-four hours following a failed start. The condition grew progressively worse and by mid-June Pettitte was in so much discomfort he was worried his career was in peril despite promises from the Yankee medical staff that he had no tears and was in no danger of worsening the injury. Still, the pain lingered and Pettitte simply decided he would not give in to the discomfort and would find a way to win, just like McDowell would have. That attitude essentially saved the Yankee season during a mostly catastrophic August.
There were a few bright spots for the Yankees during the month. Darryl Strawberry hit those three homers, a reminder of the towering star he had once been. And on August 23 at Yankee Stadium, Mariano Rivera responded to John Wetteland’s presence on the disabled list with a groin injury by serving nobly as set-up man and closer against Oakland. Rivera came on with two out and one on in the seventh to face Mark McGwire, who led the majors with forty-three homers. It was the greatest confrontation of power vs. power that the 1996 season could offer; the swelling biceps of McGwire against the rising fastball of Rivera. McGwire was the go-ahead run and struck out on a 1-2 fastball. McGwire batted again in the ninth inning with the tying runs on base. There were two outs and the Yankees led 5-3, when with his fifty-ninth pitch of the game, another high fastball in a season of high fastballs, Rivera fanned McGwire once more.
However, the difference between the Yankees staying in first place or crumbling into second that August was a lefty who had a picture of Toucan Sam from Froot Loops taped over his baseball card in his locker, a self-recognition by Pettitte about the size of his nose. But it was the size of Pettitte’s heart that mattered most. From August 2 to August 30, the Yankee lead shriveled from ten games over the Orioles to four. It was a period when panic, dissension, organizational missteps and George Steinbrenner’s cruelty blanketed the franchise. It also was a twenty-eight-game period in which the sore-armed Pettitte won four times and the rest of the Yankee rotation combined for five victories. All four of Pettitte’s victories followed Yankee losses. The whole rest of the rotation managed just two victories after Yankee losses during the same stretch. Overall for the twenty-eight-game phase, Pettitte was 4-1 with a 3.59 ERA and every other starter was 5-8 with a 6.79 ERA.
Simply put, the youngest member of the majors’ most expensive rotation was the most irreplaceable. David Cone, who was supposed to be the ace, missed a total of four months following his shoulder surgery. Rogers, who was slated to be the No. 2 starter, never fully gained Torre’s trust nor displayed an ability to prevail over the New York pressure. Key twice landed on the disabled list as he tried to rediscover his precision and craft following shoulder surgery. Dwight Gooden, who spent three-and-a-half months rekindling 1985, finally succumbed to his workload and was as ineffective down the stretch as he had been at the beginning of the season. Melido Perez never pitched an inning for the 1996 Yankees or again in the major leagues. And Scott Kamieniecki’s Yankee season lasted twenty-two and two-third ineffective innings. At $150,000, Pettitte made just $41,000 more than the major league minimum wage and thirty-one times less than what Melido Perez earned not to pitch.
“We don’t make the postseason without Pettitte, period,” Torre reflected.
Pettitte was the lone Yankee to stay in the rotation all season. He depended upon a cutter refined by organizational pitching maven Billy Connors. He picked off a major league-high eleven runners with a deceptive move that he first invented himself on the mound his father built in the family backyard. Tom Pettitte had helped teach his son to pitch by borrowing a book from the library that showed how Nolan Ryan gripped his various pitches. Mostly, though, Tom Pettitte imparted a work ethic on his son. He had been a police officer in Baton Rogue for thirteen years before relocating his family to Deer Park, Texas, to take a job working the overnight shift as a chemical operator at a motor oil plant. Like his old man, Andy Pettitte was a grinder, and like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, he walked into a veteran clubhouse unbowed. All three defined themselves by their zeal to win. They were young, and yet almost immediately part of the winning DNA of the team.
Pettitte had certain traits similar to Paul O’Neill. He was a self-demanding perfectionist, who belittled himself or erupted in anguish at failure. Wayne Graham had worked hard to get him to stop tearing up dugouts when he did not meet his own exacting standards and, instead, channel it back into work. As a result, Joe Girardi said, “Andy had an incredible ability as a young man to focus on just the next pitch, not the one before, not the one still to come. He could block out bad stuff.”
And there was a lot of bad stuff in August 1996 for Pettitte to block out. On August 2, Rivera was rocked for four tenth-inning runs in a loss to Kansas City and David Weathers was bombed in his Yankee debut start the next night. But on August 4, Pettitte ignored all of that to strike out a career-high eleven Royals in a 5-3 triumph. On August 12, Harold Baines hit a walk-off homer against John Wetteland at Comiskey Park for the second time in 1996 and the next day Weathers fell to 0-2 with an 11.17 ERA in three Yankee starts. But Pettitte assured the White Sox did not sweep the Yankees on August 14 by fanning nine in seven innings in a 3-1 victory. Coming off a 1-8 homestand, the Mariners nevertheless came to New York and expressed their continuing dominance over the Yankees by winning the first three games of a four-game series. The Yankees’ overworked bullpen was being exploited. Wetteland was on the disabled list and Torre was trying hard in the second half of the season to ease the burden on the slender Rivera. But Rivera’s dependability in the middle of the game could not be replicated. In the opener against Seattle, 50,724 fans participated in a gimmick associated with the dance craze of the moment by forming the largest Macarena line ever, and then watched as Dave Pavlas, Bob Wickman and Jeff Nelson could not do Rivera’s job, allowing three runs in a 6-5 Seattle win. Over the next two games, Rogers and Gooden lasted a combined five and two-third innings and permitted fifteen runs, forcing the bullpen to pick up twelve and one-third innings. The Yankee lead over the Orioles was five and one-half games; the noose was tightening.
On August 19 at the Stadium, against a Mariner team that had just brutalized Yankee pitching for twenty-nine runs on forty-three hits over twenty-seven innings, Pettitte was asked to prevent another sweep and save the bullpen. Deeply religious, Pettitte had been reading his bible, seeking solace against his throbbing elbow. But a few days before this start Pettitte had found comfort from an unexpected source. Torre’s pal Bob Gibson told Pettitte that he still endured elbow pain. It was an occupational hazard from throwing a baseball with force over and over again during his Hall of Fame career. It eased Pettitte’s mind to know the first significant pain in his arm was a normal part of the job. But when Jay Buhner hit a three-run homer off Pettitte in the first inning, it was a here-we-go-again moment for the Yankees. Except, as Girardi noted, Pettitte had the skill to dispatch the negatives, and hone in on the present, to focus on the next pitch. Pettitte permitted just one more hit – an Alex Rodriguez homer in the sixth – in a complete-game 10-4 Yankee victory.