By Larry Henry
Herald Writer
NEW YORK – Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t been asked the question.
And Lou Piniella was clearly tired of answering it.
If he’d been asked once, he’d been asked 50 times: What is it about the Yankee mystique?
You could almost see it in Piniella’s eyes when the question was put to him. Aw, come on, people, not again.
He got it again before Game 5 of the American League Championship Series Monday night at Yankee Stadium.
Considering the circumstances – his team on the verge of an early winter vacation – Piniella showed great restraint in not pulling off a Bobby Knight act with his chair. He was quite civil, though, except for a trace of exasperation in his voice.
“There really isn’t any (mystique),” Piniella said, the line well rehearsed by now. “That’s what people don’t understand. And I mean that sincerely.”
It could be that there really isn’t any special aura surrounding Yankee teams, but some people don’t buy it. And Piniella might have figured out who those people are.
“The media creates mystique because they talk about it all the time,” he said. “If you let it, it gets in your opponent’s head.”
When Alfonso Soriano hit a Kazuhiro Sasaki fastball into the seats for a two-run, game-winning homer Sunday night, the mystique issue once again popped into about 600 media heads covering the game.
The real issue, Piniella said, was that the Mariners didn’t hit, collecting only a John Olerud single and a Bret Boone solo homer that put the M’s on top, if briefly, 1-0 in the eighth. In the bottom of the inning, the Yankees tied it with a Bernie Williams homer, then won it with Soriano’s wind-blown blast in the ninth.
So it isn’t the uniform? someone else persisted.
“It’s not the uniform,” he said. “I think you can put purple and green on this bunch over here and they are going to play well. Yeah, you’ve got the monuments (in left field) and you’ve got this (tradition) and there’re lots of things to lean on, but you’ve still got to play baseball when the umpire says ‘Play ball.’”
Piniella might discount the “magic in the uniform” theory, but Joe Torre remembers that when he first put on the Yankee pinstripes as manager, it was a “completely different” feeling.
“It’s a uniform that gets your attention, OK,” he said. “I know even when the Yankees were not winning and I was a player and we would play the Yankees in spring training, it was a special day to play the Yankees, even though the game didn’t mean anything.
“But to beat the Yankees, even though they were a struggling team at the time, it was still a feather in your cap. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to understand what the Yankee pinstripes represent.”
Before his first World Series game as Yankee skipper in 1996, Torre was told by Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra that “‘when you get introduced and you run out to that first-base line, you are never going to forget that feeling,’ and he was right.”
For a man whose team was on the brink of elimination, Piniella seemed in a good mood.
Asked if he still guaranteed a Game 6 in Seattle, he quipped: “Well, last night we were over Detroit on our way to Minneapolis and right now we are back at La Guardia.”
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