More From Moose and Damon about 'The Yankee Years'

A few days ago when news first broke about the book, Mike Mussina said that the A-Fruad stuff wouldn't hurt A-Rod or the Yankees clubhouse. He said they've been through this and worse before with Alex, and this won't let it effect them.

Yesterday, he spoke with The Record's Bob Klapisch to discuss the book some more.

“Joe has started something that a lot of people are going to have to answer to,” Mike Mussina said by telephone on Thursday. “Joe’s going to have to answer to it too, but it won’t be as bad for him because he’s with the Dodgers now. But it’s going to be bad for the guys he left behind.”

Klapisch wonders how this will effect his current team:

It’s not just that Torre crushes easy targets like Johnson and Pavano, it’s that he violated the sanctity of the clubhouse to plunge the knife deeper. By doing so, Torre is telling his present-day Dodgers that no anecdote or conversation will be off the record once he leaves the organization. None of his players could be blamed for keeping their distance; how could any of them trust Torre ever again?

Mussina said, “it’s not just what goes on in the clubhouse, it’s sitting on the bus, or if you’re out having lunch. As a ballplayer you need to know who you have to watch out for and who you can trust. First and foremost, you should be able to trust your manager.

“I mean, people knew that Brown was out there, and that Randy was ornery all the time. And Pavano is whoever he is. But if you’re their manager, you can’t go out and write about them like that.”

What I would really like to know is what Mussina had to say about the comments he made in the book. Specifically, this quote about Mariano Rivera that Bill Madden had in his article today:

"As great as he is, and it's amazing what he does, if you start the evaluation again since I've been here, he has accomplished nothing in comparison to what he accomplished the four years before. He blew the World Series in '01. He lost the Boston series. He didn't lose it himself, but we had a chance to win in the ninth and sweep them and he doesn't do it there. ... That's what I remember about the '04 series."

Damon spoke with Peter Kerasotis of the Cincinnati Enquirer and had this to say:

"What happens in the clubhouse should always stay in the clubhouse, unless it's funny or goofy. You know, harmless stuff," he said.

Damon also discussed the excerpt from the book where about a conversation the he and Torre had at the beginning of the 2007 season:

"Yeah, yeah, I was very honest with him," he said, speaking of that meeting with Torre. "I told him I was thinking of retiring. Baseball is not the most important thing to me. I enjoy my life off the field. I love spending time with my family, and we'd just had a baby born about a month and a half earlier. I needed time to figure out if I still wanted to play."

At the time, Damon was only 33.

"I had some friends who were fishing in Key West, stuff like that, stuff I never have a chance to do in the summer," he said. "Baseball's such a grind. I didn't know if I wanted to do it anymore. Mainly, it was wanting to be with my family more."

After contemplating retirement, though, Damon decided "the team needed me" and that retirement during or before a season leaves a team "out to dry." So he kept playing.

"I had a couple of days off, and I found that spark again," he said.

But as far as any spark of anger against Torre for writing about the episode, it wasn't there.

"No, no, that's OK. I'm OK," Damon said. "I'm a person who loves his family. So nobody can beat me up over that."

Regarding the whole A-Fraud thing Damon said,

"I do not ever recall Alex being called that. Alex is a great guy. He would do anything for his teammates, and I hope he's my teammate for a number of years. It's just a shame that with spring training ready to start, he has to deal with this."

A lot of players are taking the same "what happens in the clubhouse should stay in the clubhouse" approach. This doesn't bode well for Torre, who now may have to convince his Dodger team that they can trust him and won't end up in the future book titled, "The Dodger Years."