As was evidenced rather clearly in "The Yankee Years," Joe Torre isn't afraid to tell tales out of school from his time in the Bronx. From stories of "A-Fraud" to Kevin Brown's emotional unbalance to his battles with Brian Cashman, Torre held back little in the book.
It's something he's continuing to do, as evidenced by a recent appearance in New York.
Torre, 70, spoke at the Hard Rock Cafe this week, and he shared a story from the 2000 World Series against the Mets. The world knows that Roger Clemens threw a broken bat barrel at Mets star Mike Piazza, and it's also known that Clemens later claimed that he thought the bat was the ball.
While that explanation never really made too much sense, Torre shined a little light on Clemens' state of mind after the incident.
According to WFAN's Neil Keefe, "Clemens went into Torre's office where [Mel] Stottlemyre and [George] Steinbrenner were in the middle of the first inning and just began crying like a baby and saying that he didn't mean to throw the bat at Piazza."
Watching the replay on YouTube, it doesn't appear to be much of an accidental act, so with the throwing of the bat and the denying and the crying, you have to imagine that certain influences were affecting Mr. Clemens' mood at the time.
