Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126)

by Jackson, Reggie; Baker, Kevin

  It was a situation where somebody needed to come in and say something. I felt just then like I couldn’t say anything; I was too angry and resentful. Thurman was the captain, but he couldn’t say anything. I think we were both in shock. And by then the writers were all over it, trying to make more of it.

  I do remember that a couple days after the article came out, I was in the sauna with Fran and Thurman. And I remember that I told Thurman, “I didn’t say this. I didn’t say that.” But there were so many things that I said I didn’t say, Thurman just looked at me and said, “Reggie, how could you be misquoted that badly?”

  It was just hard for him to look past it, with so many players on the team wondering what he was going to do about it. He was in as awkward a position as I was. If there was any hope for him and me fixing it, there were too many other negative things, too many other “people in the room” who were receiving it negatively—which was easy to understand. So it was hard for Thurman to take the lead and say, “Hey, I understand, let’s forget about it.” Something just between him and me would have been different. But I really think with everybody being involved, the media and everybody else, it was just hard to get past it.

  It was a place where we needed someone in leadership to step up and say something. Get us together and have a talk with us both and try to fix things for the clubhouse atmosphere. Billy, our manager, wasn’t about to do that. For Martin, this was like proving he was right.

  Instead, Billy just let the bad blood fester between us. He wasn’t going to help you out. I didn’t even look there for help. I didn’t talk to my brother about that. I didn’t talk to my dad about that. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt worse. I was embarrassed.

  Looking back on it now, I think that this problem that I created was an opportunity for Billy Martin to prove that I was not a good fit. This gave him an opportunity to try to impress upon the team that he was in charge, rather than fix the situation. That he would embarrass me to get even. Billy was determined, regardless of the effect on the team, to prove I was a bad apple. He was so hell-bent to prove that I “wasn’t a Yankee.”

  So I just went out there that night and played against the Red Sox. Bill Lee was pitching, and he was running his mouth, like he always was. Always going on about how we were fascists, or Nazis, or some nonsense.

  I went out and had a line-drive double off Lee, and I hit another ball hard that got turned into a double play, and then I hit a long home run off a sinker that didn’t sink. That tied the game in the seventh, though we lost in the end. After I hit the home run, I came back to the dugout, where the team was waiting to shake my hand.

  I wouldn’t shake hands. I was just fed up with all the nonsense of the last couple weeks. I kept my hands to myself, walked to the end of the bench, and sat down.

  I just wanted to be alone. My thought was, “You guys are going to be that way? Okay. I’ll deal with it. Let’s just move on and be open about it.”

  You don’t like me, I don’t like you. Why hide it?

  Of course the media made out like it was all my fault. Like I was just not going to shake their hands all of a sudden for no reason. Thinking about it later, I realized I shouldn’t have given them that opportunity. I should have been the one trying to rise above it and get us back to being a team, playing for each other. Which is what I did, eventually.

  But I took this opportunity to make a stand and sulk. It wasn’t the thing to do. Not in the dugout.

  Knowing myself at this point, I felt that it was time. Nobody was going to talk about it, and there was all this undercurrent going on … there needed to be a discussion. This had happened before at times, and it was why during my time in baseball I got the tag of being controversial. I wasn’t willing to let things ride. There needed to be a discussion. And if you’re not going to do it, then I’m going to do something and make you talk about it. We’re going to get it out on the table now.

  We’re having a bumping of heads philosophically? You don’t want to talk? I’m going to make you talk. I’m not going to grab you. We’re not going to physically have a confrontation. But we are going to have a confrontation—and we’re going to sit down and talk about it.

  It’s not that I want a pat on the back for being brutally honest. But you get to a point sometimes where there has to be a confrontation, an airing of issues and clutter. A clearing of the air. And whatever it brings, it brings.

  You get to a point in time where it’s gotta come out. You want to control yourself physically—and let the chips fall where they may. I was in those situations with George Steinbrenner on more than one occasion. I was in that situation with Billy Martin.

  With George, it was a situation where our relationship needed work. I was not going to disrespect him, because of the changes he had made in my life and for my family and my future. But I wanted to be heard as a man.

  With George, it really wasn’t until I retired as a player and started to work with him. We had an issue in 1996 on the bus going to the plane to go to Texas for the playoffs. I went to talk to Joe Torre about where we were going to have dinner. I was very close to Joe, and I went up to him, and George pulled on my sleeve jacket and said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  It was just that he was in a mood, and he wanted to ruffle my feathers and get on me in front of people. He sure wanted a piece of me. It was just a building up of issues and discomfort that he had with me, and I had with him. George could agitate you over a long period of time. You had to stand up to him, or he would steamroll you. He would Jim Brown you. He would Earl Campbell you. He would Joe Greene you.

  We cleared the air with words, but it was very tense on the bus. We were going to Teterboro, and it was a long way. It was very tense on the plane, all the way to Texas. We didn’t talk until the next morning, and it was suggested by him that I go home. When I went home, I didn’t want to go back.

  I wanted to talk about it, and he didn’t. He said we would talk about it when I got back to New York, and I wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t want to come, but I came. We sat down and talked and started getting past it. We had another situation a few years later, but it really started a great bond between us.

  George was the Boss, and he was going to let you know he was the Boss. He would start on you for some reason … I don’t know if it was for practice or for an appetizer. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. But he could chew you up and turn you into a salad, anytime he wanted.

  I had been through that. Like George, my father was an agitator. Quick-witted, could heap a load of sarcasm on you. I felt that I had to stand up for myself. I had to establish myself.

  I was about sixteen or seventeen the first time I stood up to my father. I had pretty good size; I was maybe 190 pounds. It was in the kitchen. We had those old aluminum chairs with the vinyl on them and the claw legs. I stood up and picked up my chair and bent it in half. I screamed, “Leave me alone!” and walked out of the room.

  He was startled. Stunned. We didn’t talk for a day, and then it was over. He was disciplining me, riding me for something. He could ride you until you bled. And always in front of an audience. If he had a crowd, you had a chance to be in trouble.

  My father didn’t drink or smoke, either. This was his recreation, gettin’ on your ass.

  My dad was tough. Raised as an orphan. He barely knew what date he was born. He used to tell us, “How do I know when I was born? They just wrote the date on a wall. So it’s either 1903, 1907, or 1910.”

  He was just making us tough. He knew that the world was tough. He knew that we would be raised as colored children, that’s what we were. You were going to be tough, or you could leave home, he didn’t give a dang. My older sister left home; my oldest brother went into the service, to get some peace of mind. I went to college—my dad went to prison. Went to jail for six months for driving without a license—a third offense or something.

  When he was younger, my dad ran numbers for some of the Italian and Jewish book
makers in Philadelphia. It was an extra “hustle.” He was a tailor and a dry cleaner, but he would do that on the side. I remembered big bags of change being around—five-, ten-pound potato bags, filled with nickels and dimes for betting the numbers.

  My dad’s favorite number was 010. He hit the numbers once in a while, made $100 here and there. Not bad for a nickel bet.

  So by the time I came to know the Boss, I was used to a guy who could beat up on you, use you as a punching bag. During my confrontations with George, though, the comments would never broach something that you couldn’t take back. You could say you’re a pain in the ass; you could say you don’t know what you’re talking about. But we would stay away from something that would scar and could leave a mark. I swore in arguing with George, but I never swore at George.

  With Billy, the ridicule and the embarrassment got to the point where I couldn’t take it. Whether I wasn’t humble enough, whether I didn’t understand my role, or whatever it was—it was bumpy, it got ugly, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. So I just had to let it go.

  Now, that’s been my past. I certainly changed that. When I got out of the game, I was able to be a lot more diplomatic about it. The reason why was, when I got out of the game at forty-something years old, a lot of the tension was gone. The demand for excellence, the demand for success, the demand for production, is no longer there on a daily basis. So you’re able to relax, even in business. There’s no longer the everyday demand to produce the way there is being a cleanup hitter in baseball—especially in New York, where it’s just different than anyplace else.

  But when you’re back in the office every day, I would be in a situation where I felt it was necessary to talk. I’m going to clam up, walk by you enough times that you’re going to reach out and say, “Hey, man, what the hell’s wrong with you? You’re too important a figure to walk around like nothing’s happening.” So eventually we would have some kind of conversation.

  I’m not here to say my way was the right way. But this is what I did to try to get it out.

  That’s how I saw it at the time. Me against them: “We don’t need to go to dinner; we don’t need to be buddies. I’m good with it. I don’t even need to come into the locker room. I’ll dress down in the street. I can go dress around the corner.”

  So I told the writers afterward I had a bad hand, that’s why I didn’t shake hands after that home run off Lee. I knew they wouldn’t buy it. I didn’t expect them to. I was just saying stupid stuff because I thought what was going on was stupid.

  Of course they went and asked the other players if they believed me. They asked Thurman for a quote. He said, “He’s a f—in’ liar. How’s that for a quote?”

  I didn’t care. Except for Fran Healy, and maybe a couple of other guys, most everybody on that team was against me anyway. I wasn’t going to let them get away with everything they did in the clubhouse, stare at me, curse me from across the room, kick my equipment bag. Refuse to locker next to me, not even ask for my side of the story. I wasn’t going to let them do that and then have them act like it was all okay out on the field. That they were above it all. I wasn’t going to pretend that that wasn’t going on.

  We get back in the clubhouse. Billy Martin tells the writers about me, “Ask him about the ball that got away from him at the start of the eighth. He probably forgets about those things.”

  Here’s a manager, his team’s in crisis, and all he can think to do is taunt one of his best players about a fielding play. He was right that I forgot about things like that. That’s what you have to do as a major-league ballplayer: forget about the mistakes you make and move on.

  But Billy wasn’t going to let anything go. Have you ever heard of anything like that? You ever hear any manager saying anything like that today?

  Things just kept deteriorating from there. A day or so later, someone put a note in my uniform pants that I found when I put them on. It said, “Get your f—in’ ass out of here.”

  I saved that note for a long time. I never did find out for sure who put it there. Whoever did it, the whole situation was getting out of control fast. Finally, the next day or the day after, I went into Billy’s office and had a meeting with him and the coaches. I told him I thought we should have a team meeting so I could apologize. By then, I was just trying to do the right thing.

  Billy told the press he didn’t think we should have a meeting. I don’t know why. I just thought, “Wow, why would he say it was a bad idea?”

  So instead, over the next couple days, I went around and apologized to everybody in the clubhouse myself. I said, “I just want to tell the guys I’m sorry for not shaking their hands after I hit the home run.”

  A lot of them, including Thurman, didn’t say anything. Some of them had been out in the bullpen, and a couple of them told me, “What are you apologizing to me for? I wasn’t there!”

  One of them told the writers, “Can you believe this? This is becoming a f—ing circus.” Another one said, “It’s like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” the soap opera send-up of the time. Both said it anonymously, of course.

  I didn’t see why it kept going. I mean, we got into it, and I apologized. That kind of thing happens on a team over the long season, especially when you have a lot of high-spirited guys trying to win. For me, it was over.

  A couple days later, I hit another home run, and when I came in the dugout, I shook every hand I could find. I would’ve shaken the peanut vendor’s hand if he’d come down there. Thurman made sure to go and walk to the other end of the dugout. Nice …

  A little later, Thurman tripled and scored. I tried to shake his hand. He ignored me. The next day, he scored a run, and I stuck out my hand to him on the on-deck circle. He ran right past me. I felt like a traffic cop.

  When the writers asked me about why he didn’t take my hand, I told them, “I don’t think he saw it.” When they asked him, Thurman said, “I saw it.”

  I thought that was funny, but I had no one to share a laugh with—only Fran, and he was in the bullpen.

  I told the press, “I’m just trying to be a good guy.” And I was.

  Next game, Thurman shook my hand again.

  “Peace, it’s wonderful!” It seemed like things were starting to get right again. By now Billy had started taking me out of right field in the late innings because he said he couldn’t trust my fielding. This was his way of showing me up and maintaining control, showing George and me.

  I just ignored that. I just kept coming to the park, trying to play my game.

  By mid-June, we were in first place again, and I thought we might finally be ready to turn everything around and play like I knew we could.

  Then we went to Boston.

  10

  BOSTON

  I KNOW I’VE had worse days in baseball than that series up in Boston. I just can’t remember when.

  The Red Sox that year were a great team, with a great lineup. Tremendous. Jim Rice, George Scott, Freddie Lynn. Yaz. Dwight Evans, Carlton Fisk. They had Butch Hobson batting ninth, where he hit thirty home runs and drove in 112 runs.

  That’s how good they were, their number nine guy driving in 112 runs. And we caught them just when they were getting hot.

  Second pitch of the first inning in the first game there, Rick Burleson hit a ball off Catfish Hunter into the screen over the Green Monster in left. Next batter, Freddie Lynn, homers to right-center. Before the first inning was over, they had hit four home runs. Four of their first six batters.

  We actually came back in that game and tied the score, but later Dick Tidrow gave up a couple more home runs, and we lost, 9–4.

  You thought, “Wow! These guys are just killing us!”

  You know, you never like to get beat like that. And I was very concerned about Catfish, because it was obvious that his arm wasn’t right, not being able to get out of the first inning. I’d never seen that from him before. But sometimes you just run into a team that’s hot, and there’s nothing you can do. I mean, it was just
June, and that was just one game. It was a drubbing—but after it was over, we were still just a half game out of first place.

  The next afternoon, I was still feeling pretty good. I was feeling like, they got us yesterday, let’s go get ’em today.

  But what I heard much later from Fran Healy was that Billy Martin was already thinking before the game of what he could do to embarrass me. I only found this out in 2012.

  Why, I don’t know. Before the game, I was sitting on the bench with Bucky Dent. Billy didn’t have any confidence in Bucky’s bat; he kept making him bunt all the time and pinch-hitting for him. The day before, he put on a squeeze play with Bucky at the plate and Lou Piniella on third and me on second. It was just the third inning, with one out, and the score was tied. But Billy had Dent try to lay one down, and he missed the pitch and Lou was tagged out at the plate, and there went the rally.

  Billy comes over to us before the game, and he tells Bucky not to worry about missing that bunt. Then he says to me, “I thought it was a good play. What did you think?”

  Now, all of a sudden, he wants to know what I think. He wants me to back him up in front of Bucky.

  I thought, “Whoa, here’s the enemy, at my locker. Now we’re buddies? Huh? I was born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.”

  So I told him, “If you really want my opinion, I think Bucky feels like you take the bat out of his hand, making him squeeze in the second and third inning.”

  What was I going to say? “You don’t trust your hitter enough to see if he can hit a single in the third inning of a tie game in June?” If he wanted to put on a squeeze, fine. But if he wanted to ask my opinion, I was going to tell him the truth.

  I think in the end Bucky Dent proved he could hit the ball all right in Fenway Park.

  Who knows, maybe that was another test, I don’t know. Maybe I was supposed to prove my loyalty to Billy by going along with whatever he said.