Jaret Wright - Bad Blood

[Maxman]

Two wrongs

don't make Wright

Jaret, Yanks putting the past behind them

BY ANTHONY McCARRON

DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Despite having plunked several Yanks, including Luis Sojo (below), Jaret Wright (above) has been accepted by Bombers.

TAMPA - Memories get fuzzy when a hated foe joins your team. Hard feelings soften, old grudges die. For the sake of winning, Jaret Wright is welcome in the Yankee clubhouse. Why not? It worked only a few years ago with another pitcher famous for attitude, purpose pitches and being despised by the Yankees - Roger Clemens.

The Yankees once seethed at the sight of Wright. As a 21-year-old Cleveland righty, he beat them twice in the 1997 playoffs. His pitches always seemed to sail too close to Yankee helmets and the Bombers didn't like the cocky way Wright stood on the mound, daring them and glaring at them.

Wright shattered a bone in Luis Sojo's left hand with a fastball in a spring training game in '98, and that season drilled Paul O'Neill, prompting O'Neill to scream at him on the way to first base. He was a flashpoint in the '98 playoffs, too, with everyone in baseball wondering if someone was going to get hit in the ALCS opener.

"It was one of those things where you don't like the guy at all," Sojo says. "If we were playing the Indians and he was pitching, you said, 'OK, this is it. We've got to kill this guy.' Every time we faced him, it was like we wanted to score 20 runs. And you expected him to throw a pitch inside so you could go at it, too."

Sojo was hit after former Yankee Hideki Irabu plunked two Indians in a spring game, which are normally sun-drenched, sleepy affairs. But Wright threw the ball at Sojo's head, Sojo said, and Sojo was injured when he thrust his left hand upward to protect himself.

"I knew someone was going to get hit and I was the first batter up the next inning," says Sojo, now the Yanks' third-base coach. "I talked a lot of crap that day, I was telling Pat (Borders, the Indians' catcher) that I was going to (mess) Jaret up. I was mad. I was in real pain."

At the time, the bad feelings were mutual. Wright, then baseball's beanball bad boy, said he got especially charged up to pitch against the Yankees and he admitted he particularly didn't like Jorge Posada, another fiery player.

But the past drama didn't enter Wright's mind when he was a free agent over the winter and the Yankees came courting. Sojo and other Yankees admitted they didn't know Wright very well yet, but immediately talked glowingly about him.

Wright, 29, enjoyed a career renaissance last year, going 15-8 with a 3.28 ERA for the Braves after five frustrating, injury-laden seasons, and he earned a three-year, $21 million contract from the Yanks. He never thought the past would be an issue, regardless of how deep the feelings once ran. He's been right.

In fact, the past has only been fodder for jokes. Ealry in camp, Derek Jeter told Sojo, "There's your boy, he broke your hand," and pointed to Wright. When a reporter was interviewing Posada about Wright, Jeter butted in and said to Posada, "Jaret Wright didn't like you."

"I know," Posada said. "He didn't like me at all. I don't know why. He didn't like Derek, either."

"Yes, he did," Jeter replied. "I got him in a place. Hey, Jaret, come here. You didn't like Jorge, right?"

"No, I didn't. I didn't like any of you guys," Wright said.

Everyone got a laugh and Jeter reminded Wright that he had once gotten him into a Manhattan nightspot when Wright had been waiting outside behind a velvet rope.

Humor is exactly how the Yankees treated Clemens' arrival in 1999. Clemens had hit Jeter several times when they were opponents, but Jeter and Chuck Knoblauch cut the tension by wearing full catcher's gear to the plate in their first batting practice against Clemens. The Rocket laughed and threw one behind the first hitter.

"When you're competing against someone, it's hard to like them because your job is to beat them," Jeter says. "I went in thinking Roger was a different person than he is and he was one of the best teammates I ever had. The only way you find that out is playing with him."

The Yankees are hoping for the same with Wright. Jeter suggested that Wright has matured since he was a brash 21-year-old, and Wright agrees.

"When I was 21, 22, I went at it like a football game," Wright says. "I didn't always know where the ball was going as much as I should have and some guys got hit in the head and they shouldn't have. I was young and I was trying to establish myself in the big leagues and my dad (former major leaguer Clyde Wright) had always taught me that I had to control both sides of the plate, that the inner half was mine.

"I still have that same fire and tenacity, but I tended then to wear it on my sleeve because I wanted people to know that when I was pitching, I was coming after them, that it was going to be a dogfight. Now I keep it more on the inside."

Seven trips to the disabled list and two shoulder surgeries since 1999 have mellowed Wright.

"Being hurt changed my perspective on what a privilege it is to play and be in the locker room," he says. "Nobody likes to lose, but I used to live and die, literally, every fifth day. You get mad now, but it does teach you a life lesson, that you're lucky to play a game for a living."

[Blackout]

this sob better preform well or else he'll be joining the Weaver/Vasquez club

[Maxman]

this sob better preform well or else he'll be joining the Weaver/Vasquez club

President = Eddie Lee Whitson

V.P. = Irabu