Jeff Mangold - Power and Pinstripes: My Years Training the New York Yankees

For my wife, Gale, and our children, Sean, Jaime, and Jessethe greatest team ever assembled.

Contents

Foreword by Mariano Rivera

One of the many people I always like to credit for the success I had in my career and the success we had with the New York Yankees was Jeff Mangold. He was hired as our strength and conditioning coach in 1998, and we won three straight World Series championships in his first three seasons with the team. But it was so much more than that. I always felt like we had a special, personal relationship that helped me both as a player and as a person. The thing that I liked about Jeff right away was that he was always available to me.

He was always one of those people trying to put us as a team in a position to shine. I always liked to take advantage of his presence on the team. Stretching and doing those type of exercises to keep your body in shape are the obvious things that every strength and conditioning coach does. With Jeff it always went beyond thatwhether it was the things he did to keep things loose and fun for the players or the little pushes he would always provide to keep us healthy and hungry. I enjoyed a great personal relationship with him and his family. It was very special to me.

Maintaining my body always was important to me throughout my career. Whether I was in Single A or the major leagues, I always wanted to make sure that I was available to be on the field. I wanted to be stretched so that I was strong and able to do my job to the best of my ability. As you know by now, I always liked to shag fly balls during batting practice to help with my conditioning, and that was something that Jeff did with me quite often. But for me to do that, I had to make sure I was stretched out. I had to make sure that I worked on my shoulder, elbow, upper-body, and lower-body programs that Jeff provided. It allowed me to stay in shape all the way into the playoffs and the World Series. Any time I needed Jeff, he was there, and thats what I always appreciated about our coaches, trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches.

We connected from the start of his time with the team. When I first met Jeff, he told me a story of when he lived in Iowa, he used to work out at Briar Cliff College (now a university) in Sioux City, and there were several basketball players there who were from Panama, my home country. It was like an instant connection for me when he talked about guys like Mario Butler, Rolando Frazer, Tito Malcolm, and Eddie Warren. It was important for me. Any time you meet someone who is working with you and they have some type of bond with people from your home country, it is an opening there for your relationship. It made it easier to connect with Jeff, knowing that he understood athletes from where I came from.

From the beginning I always took my work with Jeff seriously, but I never felt the need to try to influence the other players to take it seriously, too. Jeff always reminded us how important it was, but we were a group of players who always motivated ourselves and each other. We just wanted the team to be the best it could be. And we knew those were all the little things that we needed to do to get better. So there definitely was enough motivation already, and I feel like all the guys led by that example. But then also we had Jeff, our strength and conditioning coordinator, there to push us.

Working with him was fun, too. We made it fun, and Jeff made it fun. That was a big part of why it worked so well. Guys never complained about having to do that work. We used these big rubber bands to stretch, and guys threw them at each other and shot them like missiles, flicking them up in the air. The reliever groupmyself, Ramiro Mendoza, and Jeff Nelsonhad a great time with Jeff, teasing each other, but when it came time to do our conditioning work at the end of batting practice, we would get it done.

We did different conditioning sets, and Jeff tried to do something different with us every other day, so we would not get stale. Jeff used to do one drill with us, where he threw us touchdown passes. We got in our running by going out for a pass like a receiver in football, and Jeff was the quarterback. We would each have a baseball in our gloves and hand it to Jeff, and he would throw us the ball as we sprinted down the field 30 or 40 yards. We did this out in the outfield, and that was always a great time. In addition to shagging the fly balls in the outfield during BP, this was another fun thing that we would do to get in some running. You could tell Jeff played sports growing up. You could tell he was a good athlete, too. We would put on a show. People in the stands would be like, Wow. Jeff was very accurate throwing the ball. Mike Mussina was very athletic too and really liked to do that drill. Everybody would be making these great catches on the run down the field. Those were the kinds of things that made training enjoyable for us. It was conditioning because we were running, but it was fun, too. We had some competitive guys who wanted to outdo each other. Thats what Jeff was good about.

We wanted to do things that were a little different to keep it fresh while also doing the job. That was important because its such a long season. You want to make sure that everybody was interested and motivated to do their work, and doing things like that football drill kept it interesting for the guys to do whatever we needed to do. It was so important.

Because it was a long season, there were stretches of time occasionally when I would go a little while without lifting. But I liked that Jeff knew when to give us space and when to push us. He knew the right time to say, Listen, Mariano, lets get in the gym and do some leg squats or other exercises to help me maintain my leg strength, my lower body, my abs, my core. We trusted him so much that we always listened when Jeff told us what we needed to do to stay in the best possible shape for the team. Sometimes you need the coaches or the strength trainers to tell you something they are noticingeven if its just a little thing. You appreciate people like that who really take care of you.

Another thing that helped Jeffs relationships was he had a very good, dry sense of humor, and we would tease each other all the time. He took his job seriously, but he wasnt afraid to make jokes with all the playerseven the stars of the teamand that was another important aspect about the relationship. You have to be able to laugh over the course of the season. I would try to get other teammates involved, and we would embarrass Jeff sometimes with a joke because I knew he could take it and would have a good sense of humor about it. I would say, What are you doing to us, Mangold? Are you crazy? And the guys would laugh, and that was always important. It almost would look like we were arguing sometimes, but it was always as a joke.

With baseball being such a long season, you had to make the best out of grinding out each day. On that team we did exactly that. If youre not having fun on a team like that with as much success as we had, whats the point, right? We knew how to have a good time, but when it was time to be serious, we knew how to do that, too.

Jeff also is a strong man of faith just like my family and I are, and that was another strong connection with us. We needed to have that. As a Christian I believed it was a big part of what we did together and we had a lot of guys on that team in those years who were Christians. Having that bond made our relationship more powerful. And that faith gave me great confidence.