Torre, Cashman reflect on four bad days

NEW YORK - The way general manager Brian Cashman and manager Joe Torre see it, the New York Yankees quick elimination from the playoffs was just a case of four bad days in October, the wrong time for that to happen. <br> <br> ``This is a good team, a very good team,&#39;&#39; Cashman said Monday. ``It just didn&#39;t play well for four days. You can&#39;t afford that. The biggest issue is not how to remake it. It&#39;s how you deal with the openings that might be there. <br> <br> ``I&#39;m proud of this team. The best record in baseball is not easy to do. You can&#39;t judge a 103-win team on four games. It was a championship caliber team. Poor play at the wrong moment cut us down.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> The play was poor. The pitching was worse. Anaheim set a postseason record with a .376 batting average against the Yankees staff. That may be where the openings develop. <br> <br> Roger Clemens, 40 years old and seven wins away from 300, is eligible for free agency. Relievers Mike Stanton and Ramiro Mendoza also are free agents. Andy Pettitte has an $11.5 million club option for next year. Arbitration-eligible Orlando Hernandez has no contract. Each of them except for Stanton had long stretches on the disabled list in the last two years. <br> <br> Hernandez was asked about next season. <br> <br> ``I don&#39;t think of the future,&#39;&#39; he said. ``I think of now and packing to go home. If you looked far ahead (before the playoffs), we thought we&#39;d be champions. That means you should take things day to day.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> Torre knows the fault was with his pitchers, who were lit up by the Angels hitters. He also knows he would have used the same ones - Clemens, Pettitte, Mike Mussina and David Wells - if he had it to do over again. <br> <br> ``If we played all over again, I&#39;d do the same things,&#39;&#39; he said. ``I didn&#39;t second-guess myself. I made the decisions that didn&#39;t work out. I get paid a lot of money to sit here and make decisions and win the World Series. You&#39;re supposed to do that. <br> <br> ``We got into the World Series four years in a row. It seems like it&#39;s an automatic. It&#39;s not cut and dried. There&#39;s a lot of work involved.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> The Yankees weren&#39;t the only surprise casualties of the best-of-five first-round playoff series. <br> <br> ``You look up out of the foxhole and see the Diamondbacks out,&#39;&#39; he said. ``You see Oakland (another 103-win team) losing to a team that was not supposed to be here or even be in baseball this year. And you see Atlanta with a lead on a wild-card team, having to go to a fifth game. <br> <br> ``Things happen. It&#39;s strange. It should have told me something when we had a tied All-Star game that this would be a strange year.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> The Yankees had come to view the American League pennant as their manifest destiny after winning four in a row and capturing three World Series. They learned it was not that simple, especially when their pitchers had a 8.21 earned run average, the worst in the team&#39;s storied postseason history. <br> <br> Torre preferred to view it as an aberration. <br> <br> ``We sent four starters to the mound and they didn&#39;t pitch as well as they&#39;re capable,&#39;&#39; he said. ``They&#39;d be the first to tell you that. You like to believe it will be there for you when you need it and it has been.&#39;&#39; <br> <br> The failure left Torre with an intriguing dilemma in the pennant playoff between Anaheim and Minnesota. <br> <br> ``Do you want the team that beat you to go to the World Series?&#39;&#39; he said. ``Or do you want the team you beat all six times (you played) to go to the World Series? You look good either way.&#39;&#39;