In an e-mail earlier this week, a reader wrote, “Like many of your readers, I eagerly await your comments on the Posada story.”
I am happy to offer my comments on the entire matter, in which the veteran Jorge Posada pulled himself out of the lineup for last Saturday’s game against Boston. Chances are they will be different from most of the comments that have been published or posted. They certainly come from a unique perspective.
Generally, I place myself among the Yankee Stadium fans who gave Posada a standing ovation when he went to bat as a pinch-hitter in Sunday’s game. The fans were more accurate, more understanding and more reasonable in their reaction to Posada than Yankees’ executives, named and unnamed, were in their public comments.
As if criticizing Posada wasn’t blockheaded enough, those Yankees’ executives exacerbated their blindness by taking Derek Jeter, Posada’s long-time teammate and friend, to the verbal woodshed and spanking him for publicly supporting Posada.
As outstanding a citizen as Jeter has been for his entire career, I think his bold support of Posada was his finest act as the team captain. Someone needed to support Posada; the Neanderthals in the front office didn’t.
Their view – unspoken – was that they are paying Posada $13.1 million in the final year of a four-year, $52.4 million contract, and he darn well better do what they want and not be insubordinate.
Insubordinate. That word appeared in an article about Posada in Sunday’s New York Times and triggered a flashback, a very personal flashback. Three years ago this past March 31, the sports editor of the Times, Tom Jolly, accused me of being insubordinate.
He ignorantly leaped to that charge because the baseball editor, Jay Schreiber, told him I had “declined a request for reporting help.”
Some background will put my experience in perspective and explain why I understand Posada’s position last weekend.
At the time, the financially stricken Times was desperately trying to shed some of its most veteran, highest-paid reporters and columnists. The situation struck me as being similar to the Florida Marlins shedding their best, highest-paid players after they won the World Series in 1997.
In an effort to induce me to leave, Jolly told me I would have to give up the baseball column I was writing and return to reporting, which had been my assignment from July 1969 until January 2004. He knew from previous conversations that I would not do that but figured I would instead leave the newspaper with the attractive buyout that was being offered.
Along the way, Jolly told me a series of blatant lies, but his most egregious act was his accusation that I was insubordinate.
On that day, March 31, Schreiber called me, as he had hundreds of times, presumably to ask me for help on a story but never said why he was calling. I told him I was not prepared to work because I had not decided what I was doing.
Instead of telling me what he needed, he ran to the sports editor and told him I refused to work. The accusation of insubordination followed in an e-mail later that day, as in “declining assignments represents insubordination.”
I was familiar with plenty of stories of reporters refusing assignments, most of them related by Schreiber, but none of them had ever been accused of insubordination.
In the same fashion many baseball players have asked out of lineups, and most often the managers or general managers had covered for them. Reporters often knew they were lying, but in most cases it wasn’t a matter of national security.
But Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, would have none of it. Apparently having lost his humanity, Cashman made a huge issue of Posada’s act by telling Fox television on air during the game that the absence of the .165-hitting designated hitter was not linked to an injury.
To any lucid baseball person, it would have been obvious that Posada had reached the nadir of his emotions. Whether deserved or not, his demotion to d.h. this season after a notable career as the team’s catcher was not easy to accept. To a player with Posada’s pride, a $13 million salary doesn’t make it any easier.
Hitting .165 makes it worse. Many players before Posada have found that switching from a position in the field to d.h. takes a toll on a player’s ability to hit. And then the ultimate embarrassment, being dropped to ninth in the lineup. Posada initially said he was o.k. with that, but he thought about it and wasn’t o.k. with it and asked out.
I don’t see anything wrong with a 14-year veteran, who has been behind the plate for 1,573 games, asking out for a day. He earned the right to say “I can’t play today,” without being vilified by his bosses and the news media, just as a reporter earned the right, after 39 years and innumerable exclusive stories, to say “I can’t work today” without being accused of insubordination.
Times reporters apparently understood none of this, writing that Posada “simply quit on the team” and that when he apologized Sunday for what he had done Saturday he “sounded contrite and remorseful, as if good sense and a good night’s sleep had sharpened his perspective.”
Posada apologized because circumstances required it when in this day and age, apology is required for any act that anyone thinks is wrong. In my view Posada did not have to apologize for being human.
Perhaps it is surprising that after his conference call with the Yankees’ tarnished brass Jeter did not have to issue an apology. I see nothing wrong with a teammate, the team captain, speaking up for a guy who’s struggling at bat and emotionally. But the Yankees, like The New York Times, cannot tolerate that.
Who wielded the paddle in the Yankees’ wood shed? Managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, whose biggest problem in life has been growing up as George’s son; president Randy Levine, who has spent most of his adult life serving the Steinbrenners and Rudy Giuliani, and general manager Cashman, who began his baseball career with the Yankees through a family connection.
I don’t know how Tom Jolly got his job with the Times, but he is no longer sports editor. His superiors removed him, belatedly, I was told, because they were unhappy with the Times’ embarrassingly erroneous coverage several years ago of the Duke lacrosse incident.
I do not regret my decision to reject Jolly’s ploy to have me return to reporting. I have enjoyed continuing to write columns on this Web site (this is No. 333), but in thinking about that charge of insubordination, I retrieved from my files an e-mail I wrote in response to one threatening “to address this in a formal setting with representatives of labor relations and the guild…”
“I would have enjoyed the meeting or grievance hearing,” I responded, “that would have resulted: my record of 33 consecutive years (1970-2003) of working without missing a day because of illness or injury against your day of insubordination.”
Posada’s credentials would work for him, too.