CHICAGO – Joe Torre knew where he could find his old wingman yesterday. The Rays and the White Sox wouldn’t start their American League Division Series until today, so there was little reason for Don Zimmer, now a senior adviser for Tampa Bay, to be anywhere near Tropicana Field.
“He was relaxing,” Torre said with a smile yesterday afternoon. “And if you know anything at all about Zim, you know what I mean by ‘relaxing.’ ”
What he meant was that Zimmer spent his afternoon taking in the matinee thoroughbred simulcast at Derby Lane, the dog track in St. Pete, where he was planted in front of the bank of TV screens, monitoring the proceedings at Belmont Park and The Meadowlands, and at Suffolk Downs, and at Laurel, studying them like a stock ticker.
“It’s good to talk to Zim when he’s relaxing,” Torre said, chuckling, no doubt recalling all the times in all the years he spent relaxing right alongside.
Torre was snapping the buttons shut on his windbreaker in the cramped visitors clubhouse at Wrigley Field, blue with white “Dodgers” in script on the front, when Ned Colletti, the Dodgers’ GM, hatched an idea.
“Let’s call Zim,” said Colletti, who goes back to the Cubs of the late 1980s with Zimmer. “Let’s see what he’s up to.”
Zimmer was up to the same thing Torre was, discovering (in his own way) that there is October life after pinstripes. Soon enough, the Dodgers, a team built on stingy pitching, talented kids and one freakish hitter named Manny, would bring a haunting silence to Wrigley, thrashing the Cubs 7-2 in Game 1 of the NLDS.
And Torre was back in a familiar place, hands stuffed in his pockets, surrounded by a new round of consigliores, Larry Bowa and Rick Honeycutt, filling the old seats that once belong to Zimmer and Mel Stottlemyre, watching Manny Ramirez, James Loney and Derek Lowe act out their parts the way Derek Jeter, Paul O’Neill and Andy Pettitte used to.
“Even when we were down 2-0 early on,” Torre said later, “I was pretty satisfied with our approach.”
Not that you could tell if Torre were happy or sad, delighted or distraught, frantic or furious or frenetic or frightened. Not that you’ve ever been able to tell. After 12 years with the Yankees, there were those who had begun to interpret this as a sign of weakness. It seemed silly at the time, and absurd right about now.
“He has been through all of this,” said Loney, whose grand slam instantly altered the game in the fifth innning. “Nothing we go through is new to him.”
It has become fashionable for Yankees fans – led by Hank Steinbrenner, loudest Yankees fan of them all – to diminish what Torre’s Dodgers have done this year, dismiss them as a product of a weak division.
If that helps everyone sleep better at night, fine. Still, on Aug. 29, the Dodgers sat five games in the loss column behind the Diamondbacks with 27 games to go, while the Yankees lurked six games behind the Red Sox.
The predicaments were almost identical through that moment. Yet Torre’s Dodgers managed to make up seven games on Arizona while the Yanks stalled in neutral, gaining exactly zero games on Boston. Would it have mattered if Torre had his old job rather than his new one? We’ll never know.
And Torre, to be blunt, doesn’t care. “Every time you get a chance to play in a postseason you have to look at it as a hell of an opportunity to do something special,” he said. “That’s how I think about it.”
He laughed.
“All of those years with the Yankees, all those series at Fenway Park, and now I get a chance to manage a playoff series at Wrigley Field,” he said. “And you have to say, that’s pretty cool.”
Torre knows that Zimmer will be following the Dodgers every bit as closely as Torre will keep his eyes on the Rays. All these years later, a couple of old foxhole guys share one more adventure a thousand miles apart: discovering October skies beyond The Bronx.
