Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126)

by Jackson, Reggie; Baker, Kevin

  Unlike the year before, the reason we went on the slide again was pretty evident. Our pitching broke down. It quickly became clear that Catfish still wasn’t right. He said his arm felt better, but he was diagnosed with diabetes, and he still struggled. He just wasn’t himself and went on the disabled list.

  Andy Messersmith had that good game for us, but he’d separated his shoulder in spring training that year, and he was never the same. He went on the DL as well and never pitched for us again. Don Gullett’s arm hurt so bad he had had two cortisone shots by June. After that, he just tried to gut it out and pitch through the pain. He won his first four decisions. Then he lost two games, went on the DL, and never pitched for us again. Never pitched for anybody again. That was it, his career done at twenty-seven.

  Dick Tidrow tried to pick up the slack the way he had the year before when Billy put him in the rotation, but he jammed his thumb. We still had Kenny Holtzman, and he had a couple good starts early. But he was still in Billy’s doghouse. Billy wanted to put him on the disabled list, too, but Kenny said loud and long there was nothing wrong with him, so Billy just kept him on the bench until he could trade him. Kenny just needed to pitch.

  That was embarrassing for the whole organization, but nothing was done about it. It wasn’t just me. Roger Kahn had the guts to write about it in the paper. Graig Nettles said right out about Kenny: “It must be something that’s not happening on the field. Because he should be pitching.”

  As the season went on, the rest of us started to get dinged up, too. Willie Randolph tore up the cartilage in his right knee. He played through it pretty well, stole thirty-six bases, but he missed twenty-eight games that year. Bucky Dent had a bad hammy all season; he missed thirty-nine games and had to go down and rehab in Florida.

  And Thurman was finally wearing down. He’d caught more than a thousand big-league games by then, which is a lot for any man. His right knee was very painful all year. He couldn’t hit for as much power; his arm was bothering him. Even so, he made adjustments and played through it. He still threw out almost half the guys who tried to run on him, even though he had to throw the ball to second almost sidearm. Still only missed eight games. It wasn’t his best season, but it might have been his gutsiest, and he set an example for all of us.

  What we missed most of all, though, was Mickey Rivers. He’d been such a catalyst for us the year before, getting us everything we needed, when we needed it—a stolen base, a home run, whatever. But in the first part of 1978 he was just absent a lot—for whatever reason, we were never sure. I know his hammies were bothering him some, his legs were achy. He had a hand fracture as well. But it seemed to be more than that.

  Mick was always hard to figure out. He would kind of go on these little sit-down strikes when he thought he wasn’t being treated right or when he needed an advance on his salary. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t.

  He had a great outlook on life most of the time. He used to say something like, “I don’t worry about the things I can’t do anything about, because I can’t do anything about them. And I don’t worry about the things I can do something about, because I can do something about them.”

  That’s almost Zen—or Yogi. When you think about it, that’s sort of beautiful. That was Mickey to a T. That’s the way he lived his life.

  I thought most of the players made fun of Mickey. They made out like they were laughing with him, but really I thought they were laughing at him. He had some problems with betting on the horses, some problems with a few different wives.

  At one point, I believe he was married to two or three women at the same time. Down in Florida, he used to go by the Latino version of his name, Miguel Rivera, and he married a woman I think under that name while he had a wife in New Jersey.

  She caught up to him finally. He was sitting in the parking lot in Yankee Stadium before a game with his Florida wife, in his Cadillac Coupe de Ville. His other wife came driving up in his other car, a Mercedes 450 SL, and she ran it right into him. Then she backed it up and ran it into his Caddy again. And again, and again, and again. Put it in drive, back to reverse. In drive, back to reverse, in drive, back to reverse. Incredible … I was parking my car at the same time, and it was painful to watch. Funny at the same time.

  Mickey was devastated afterward. He was just slumped over the steering wheel. But you know Mickey. That was the morning. That afternoon, the game started at 2:10. Mickey came into the clubhouse and just sat in front of his locker until about ten of two. Then he got dressed, went out, and got four hits that day.

  He was a lot of fun. He was very witty. He used to get on me a lot in the clubhouse and on the bus. He had that famous line where we were going back and forth on the team bus, and he says, “Reginald Martinez Jackson. You got a white man’s first name, a Hispanic man’s middle name, and a black man’s last name. No wonder you’re confused.”

  I laughed my head off. He could be hilarious. But while what he was saying was in the spirit of fun for him, so many of the other guys enjoyed anything that would come back negative toward me. What he was saying became a big joke for players who didn’t have the guts to say it directly to me.

  Too often, Mickey was used as a court jester for the team. I felt there was a racial component to it. Sure, Mickey could hold his own; he was very witty. Mickey Rivers could hold his own with anybody. But other guys made fun of him. They made fun of the way he spoke, the English he used. And when he’d go at it with me, I was laughing, but I don’t know if they were. Or put it this way: They were all laughing a little too loud. Egging him on. Pitting one of us against the other.

  I think it was hurtful for both of us. We got by it. To this day, Mickey and I get along very well. But I regret what happened then.

  Early in May, in a game in Kansas City, Billy got mad because he thought Mickey didn’t hustle after a double Amos Otis hit in the ninth that scored the winning run. When he got to the ball, he didn’t bother to make a throw to the plate, and Billy didn’t like that either. Mickey had no shot at the runner, but that didn’t matter to Billy.

  It was a tough loss, a back-and-forth game where we blew a 6–3 lead, then battled back. You don’t like to lose those games, but it was mid-May. We were 17–12 at the time, just three games out of first.

  But Billy let it get to him; he couldn’t really help himself by then. We had a long plane ride home, and Billy never did too well on long plane rides after a tough loss. They gave him too much time to think and too much time to fuel up.

  It was all starting up again. It was like a forest fire that couldn’t be doused. But then, what fire can be doused with alcohol?

  He started yelling at Lou Piniella for playing cards with Rivers. Then he got on Thurman for letting his music play for a little while with the headphones out. When we landed, Billy even went back and started yelling at Munson, calling him a “bad influence.” Thurman Munson—a bad influence!

  Where was he going with that? Thurman had carte blanche.

  Thurman gave it right back to him, told him the only reason Martin was saying that to him was that there were too many guys in between them. That enraged Billy; he made out like he was really trying to get to him then, just the way he had with me up in Boston the year before. Somehow, the same coaches managed to get in the way again.

  I think even Billy was genuinely shocked by how he acted. He issued a public apology to Thurman the next day. I was still waiting for mine—not. But you know, for him to go after a guy like Thurman, to me it showed how much he was coming apart.

  George Steinbrenner tried to smooth it over. He told the writers, “A ship that sails on calm seas gets nowhere. You have to have some turbulence.” Al Rosen, who was the new president of the club, came out and said, “Ballplayers fight. What do you think our ball club is called, the New York Choirboys?”

  Which was a good line. But I think we were missing Gabe Paul by then. Rosen was very smart; he was a good GM and would make some good moves later on down the line. Later
he took the Giants to a pennant. And the Yankees certainly had plenty of other smart people in the front office still, guys like Cedric Tallis.

  But Gabe had been in the game so long he had a way of seeing the bigger picture. He had a way of not letting anything get to him—at least not for very long. He had a sense of humor about things, with all his little sayings, and he was pretty fair, I thought. He made for some good grease between the big wheels, people like George, Billy, and the stars of the team.

  However, after the 1977 season, Gabe had had enough. He packed up and went back to Cleveland, to run the Indians again. I think it was a loss. Because he had known George for years, he knew how to keep him calm, how to advise him. He understood just how much he should take from Billy.

  I don’t know why Gabe left. Probably sheer exhaustion. He had a bad heart by then, some health issues. But I think, too, it might have been how he had this minor stroke the year before, one that left his speech a little slurred. Lots of people made fun of how he talked and how he sounded after that.

  Gabe was plenty tough, so I doubt if he cared. But who should have to put up with that? There were a few players on the team who had something to say about everything. They’d be sadistic about it—about George’s style, Billy’s style, my style. Anyone who was different. They were the same ones who would make slurs and anti-Semitic remarks. They would mock everything. That’s pretty normal in a clubhouse, but we seemed to have more of them.

  Without Gabe, there was nobody to really rein in Billy, nobody to give the Boss some perspective. When we started to slump, George started to let his football side come out, expecting us to win every game.

  He needed to understand we had all these nagging injuries. And we were also playing against the most competitive division I’d ever seen.

  The American League East Division in 1978 was unreal. It wasn’t just Boston. You had Milwaukee, which came out of nowhere to win ninety-three games. They had an amazing team, amazing depth. A pair of Hall of Famers up the middle in Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. My old teammate Sal Bando, who was still one of the best third basemen in baseball. Great all-around hitters like Cecil Cooper and Ben Oglivie. Larry Hisle had a monster year, must’ve beat us three times that season with home runs, just putting that ball in the right-field bleachers. Gorman Thomas hit thirty-two homers; you had Sixto Lezcano, Don Money, who hit more than twenty home runs a year. Their pitching was a little weaker, but they had Mike Caldwell, who had a breakout year and won twenty-two games and was always lights out against us.

  You had Baltimore, which won ninety games again under Weaver. They had a Hall of Famer in Eddie Murray, guys like Ken Singleton, Lee May, Doug DeCinces, who were terrific players. They had that great rotation of Jim Palmer, Mike Flanagan, Denny Martinez, Scott McGregor. They finished fourth with that team and those ninety wins. You had Detroit, which already had Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker. Ron LeFlore, Lance Parrish, Steve Kemp, Jason Thompson, Rusty Staub, who had 121 RBIs that year. Jack Morris was on the staff already, one of the dominant pitchers of his era—in my opinion, a Hall of Famer. They won eighty-six games with all those guys—and finished fifth.

  Every one of those teams, the Brewers, the Orioles, and the Tigers, would make it to the World Series over the next six years—and each with the same cores they had already put together by 1978. This was the sort of competition we were facing day in and day out, and never mind the excellent teams you had in the West Division, like Kansas City, the Angels, and Texas. Almost every day, you had another tough game against a team that was tough in a different way.

  And the Red Sox were better than ever. Maybe they didn’t have quite as much power, quite as much hitting, as they had the year before. But they were a much more balanced team.

  They’d gone and got Jerry Remy, who was a very good glove and a decent bat at second base and who gave them a little team speed for a change. Most of all, they’d improved their pitching, which was always their Achilles’ heel. They signed Mike Torrez away from us, who was a proven big-game pitcher. They’d brought Dennis Eckersley over from Cleveland, who was just coming into his own. He had a breakout season, won twenty games and pitched us very tough. That gave them a lot of depth in their starting staff, and it let them move Bob Stanley to the pen when Bill Campbell’s arm finally gave out.

  Boston started putting together some serious winning streaks. Won eight in a row in April, another seven in a row in early May, still another eight in a row at the end of the month. Jim Rice was having an unbelievable year for them, hitting everything out, hitting for average. By the time we went to Fenway to play them for the first time in mid-June, they had just run off still another winning streak, nine straight this time.

  Going into the series, they were seven games up on us, which was beginning to get serious, even for June. Standard rule of thumb, it’s almost insurmountable when you get ten games behind in the loss column, no matter what time of year it is.

  So we were concerned. I wouldn’t say we were panicking. At least not the players. I couldn’t speak for other people associated with the team.

  The first game, a Monday night game, was just a typical, wild Yankees–Red Sox game. We were down to starting Ken Clay against Luis Tiant by then, but Thurman hit a home run, Roy White homered, and we managed to get up by 4–1 going into the bottom of the fourth.

  Then the roof fell in. They strung together a bunch of hits off Clay, and Willie Randolph, who was hurting, made an error down at second, and they tied the game. Billy was playing it like it was the seventh game of the World Series. He brought Goose in during that fourth inning. Think of that today: bringing in Mariano in the bottom of the fourth inning. Forget June—anytime!

  Goose really pitched very well and shut the Sox down until the eighth inning. More than four innings of shutout relief! But in the eighth, the Sox caught up to Goose, batted around against him and Sparky, and broke the game open.

  We kept our composure as a team. Don Gullett went out the next night, gutted it out. Pitched a complete-game win despite allowing five hits and seven walks. We got down early again, 4–0, after Butch Hobson hit a three-run homer for them, but like I say, nobody was panicking, and we came back on Mike Torrez, who didn’t have his best stuff. Chicken Stanley, our backup shortstop, hit a grand-slam homer off him, which you might say was a sign of things to come.

  We ended up winning, 10–4. And that would make you wonder why Gullett, who was in constant pain from a sore arm, was left out there to throw nine innings and 154 pitches. Just as there was no need to wear out both of your best relievers the day before.

  But by that time, I don’t think anybody with the team was thinking very clearly. The next night, in the rubber game of the series, we had to throw our rookie, Jim Beattie, against Eckersley, another future Hall of Famer, who was pitching very well. Beattie only lasted a couple innings. He walked a few guys, threw a couple wild pitches, and the Sox stomped us.

  Billy capped off the night by putting Catfish out there for the ninth, even though we were already down 7–2 and he knew his arm was killing him. The first two batters he faced, Freddie Lynn and George Scott, hit home runs off him. They loaded the bases then, before Yaz struck out.

  A lot of people thought he struck out intentionally at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised. That might have been a nice gesture on his part, but having Catfish out there pitching mop-up in the first place was an insult to a great pitcher. I thought it demeaned the whole organization.

  It was an ugly game and a bad loss. Boston was eight games up on us after it was over, and they were going great. I even said afterward, “If they keep playing like that, we won’t be able to catch them with a race car.”

  But you know, they’d only taken two out of three from us. It wasn’t some beat down like it had been the year before. They just got us when they were hot and we were banged up.

  Nobody had any perspective anymore. Immediately after the game, the Boss in his two-fisted style had Beattie sent back down to the
minors, telling the media that he looked scared stiff. He said Beattie and Ken Clay had “spit the bit” in that series, which is a horse-racing term for choking and wasn’t anything any young pitchers needed to hear just then. This was all in the press.

  We’d had nine starters or potential starters at the beginning of the season, including six former all-stars. Now we were down to two.

  When we look back now, it’s pretty easy to understand the health problems of the pitching.

  Well, what a surprise: a Billy Martin team where the wheels came off the pitching staff a couple short years later. That happened nearly wherever he ever went.

  The Boss’s reaction to the situation just made everything worse. I think it was the end of that series George came into the clubhouse and ran right over Billy, telling him, “Okay, this is how it’s gonna be. If we keep losing, I’m just going to back up a truck and unload the whole team over in Jersey.” He was going to make trades or do whatever it takes, telling everybody, “I’m not gonna stand for this. We’re gonna win or else.”

  We all knew George got excited. That was because he cared. We all had to put up with it.

  Billy was a beaten warrior by this time. The drinking got bad again. At times he was sleeping over in the clubhouse. Dick Howser was back to running the team a lot by that time. Billy was stressed by all the pressure being piled on him. And when Billy got stressed, he ran away, and rather than hit the issues head-on, he looked to put the blame off on others.

  I was the star of “others.”

  20

  FORCING THE ISSUE

  I’D BEEN HAVING an okay year. Not as good as I wanted—yet. I figured I would get going. I didn’t think there was a big problem. I was still hitting about .265–.275, with some power. Had something like fourteen or fifteen home runs, about fifty RBIs with less than half the season gone.

  Going into July, I’d been slumping a little, struggling some against lefties. But nothing terrible. I knew I’d break out. I just didn’t realize I wouldn’t be given the chance.