Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126)

by Jackson, Reggie; Baker, Kevin

  I probably saw my family three or four times a month that year. After the 1977 World Series, George wanted to do something special for me. He offered to buy me a car, because I guess he heard somewhere that I liked cars. I didn’t need a car, so I got one for my dad. We bought it from our local dealer, Webb Cadillac, in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. My dad loved it. It had a remote start, so in the winter you could start it up, warm it up before you got in. He would drive up from Philadelphia to the game, or my friend George Beck or a couple of his friends would drive him up and back.

  I really got back into reading Biblical passages and talking about faith with my friend Gary Walker. At this time in my life, I was having such difficulty, and Gary was very helpful. I didn’t feel alone when I talked to him. I didn’t have time to try to figure out Billy Martin. I had that need for guidance. I was in survival mode.

  Faith is like a blanket. In life, I have learned that when I get up in the morning and get dressed, I need to put God on as well. I needed to ask Him to continue to stay close.

  It’s very much like the other things you have to concentrate on in the grind of a long season. You have to make sure that you have the right help as you go through life every day. The Bible for me became a guide. I didn’t know where I was going, but I could see light, and I tried to keep going toward it.

  On the field, when you’re a professional athlete, you’re constantly adapting. That’s because your body is changing while you’re also trying to adapt to the competition. What you rely on for that is your experience and your knowledge.

  How to make up for the half step that you’re losing. I would say that your body falls back 10 to 20 percent once you get to be thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five—and I was almost there by then. But you can keep going until you’re forty and still be productive, as many of the greats have done. As Henry Aaron did. As Pete Rose has done—Molitor, Yount, Brett, Ripken, Yastrzemski, Williams. Frank Robinson, Mariano, and others.

  Players make their adjustments to keep pace—to stay abreast. I wasn’t feeling that so much yet when I came to the Yankees. But I was already adjusting. When I went to Baltimore and then New York, I went from a bat that was usually thirty-six or thirty-seven ounces to one that was thirty-five/thirty-five—thirty-five ounces in weight, thirty-five inches in length.

  I tried to square my stance in Yankee Stadium, open up my front side a little. See the ball a little better, and try to maybe hit it to right field a little more. And I really couldn’t. It did allow me to see the ball better, but I knew I just wasn’t a pull hitter. I never was—and Yankee Stadium proved that. I ended up doing the same thing I’d done before, trying to hit the ball to the power alleys in left-center, right-center, the big part of the ballpark. After four or five years in the league, I knew what type of hitter I was.

  It helps, in adapting—in making the adjustments you have to make—to have the clutter out of your mind and concentrate on what you have to do on the ball field. There were two things that are generally credited with enabling us to get away from that clutter, from all those distractions, and get back into the race that year. One of them really was a big factor. The other is overrated.

  Replacing Billy Martin with Bob Lemon was a big change for the better. Bob was a wonderful guy, very easygoing. He was an old friend of Al Rosen’s, which was where Al really helped us; he knew he’d be good for our team. Bob had been the pitching coach back in 1976, before he had to make way for Art Fowler. Then he’d made a good run managing a kind of patchwork White Sox team in 1977—got fired the next year when he lost half his guys to free agency. He knew baseball. He liked to have a drink after a game, but he used alcohol in a very different way from Billy. He used it, it didn’t use him.

  Bob Lemon also helped create a comfortable atmosphere in the clubhouse. He liked to call everybody “Meat” in a very good-hearted, affectionate way. He’d say, “Grab a bat, Meat,” something like that.

  I know the pitchers were delighted right away. For somebody like Goose, he was just ecstatic about the change. Bob had been a Hall of Fame pitcher (after breaking in as an outfielder), and he knew what he was doing. It was easy to see he was confident and comfortable with himself.

  He also didn’t overmanage. He liked to say, “Baseball is a very simple game for children that we grown-ups have managed to screw up.” The first day he came in, he told us all, “I’m just gonna get out of the way, don’t want to make too many decisions, and let you guys play.” He said, “I hope I don’t screw up too bad. Now go have some fun.”

  When the writers asked him about it afterward, he told them, “It went like every other clubhouse meeting. The manager talks and the players don’t say a word. At least I wasn’t booed.”

  I always got along great with Bob. What he told me was, “Meat, I’m gonna hit you cleanup every day. Sometimes you’ll play right field, and sometimes you’ll DH. You know what to do. Just hit some over the wall. I’m just going to let you have fun.”

  And it was fun. Bob Lemon made it fun again—as much fun as a job can be. He cut out the distractions, but beyond that he went back to letting us play the way we should’ve been playing all along. I was in right field and the cleanup spot. He put Thurman back behind the plate, put Roy White and Lou Piniella alternating in left and at DH again. That gave us a pretty strong bench, with all the guys we had there—Jim Spencer, Thomasson, Paul Blair, Jay Johnstone, Cliff Johnson.

  Under Lemon, we put together one of the great stretch drives of all time. We went 48–20 for him, but 40–14 from August 5 on.

  The year before, we’d gone 40–10 from the time Gabe—along with Thurman, Lou, George, and finally Gabe again—told Billy to cut the nonsense and hit me fourth to when we clinched the division. You look at those statistics, when we were playing for Bob Lemon, or when we were playing for a Billy Martin forced to do what made sense … we went a combined 80–24. That’s almost .770 ball, or almost 125 wins over a full season, which would easily set a major-league record. With Billy running the team the way he wanted to, we went 120–101. That’s about 88 wins over a 162-game schedule.

  In other words, doing things Billy’s way, we were an okay club, finishing a few games over .500, good for maybe third or fourth those couple years in the American League East. Doing it our way, we put together the two greatest back-to-back stretch drives in history.

  Now, that’s not entirely fair. There are other factors involved. But without Billy we were just a much looser, more relaxed team—in a good way. Guys around the league knew it. I remember that Freddie Lynn on the Red Sox said something at the time, when he heard about Billy being fired: “Oh, s—t, that’s the worst! With Billy they were fighting each other in the dugout. Now they’ll come after us.”

  The other factor everybody gave for why we came back was the newspaper strike. On August 10, the big three dailies in New York—the Times, the Daily News, and the Post—all went on strike. Supposedly, because of the newspaper strike, we went on a winning streak.

  I’ve got something I want to say about that. Please believe that while the power of the press certainly is valuable, and it helps the brand, it does not help you win a baseball game. It does not help a guy come out of a slump. It does not help a guy get a victory on the mound.

  I would say it probably did help in getting rid of some of the clutter. But you have to remember, even with the big three papers in the city gone, we still had plenty of writers in the locker room every day. Guys from the Newark Star-Ledger and the Bergen Record. From the Hartford Courant and Newsday, and all those other papers from New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut.

  The other thing you have to remember was that we won without a newspaper strike in 1977. Even with all the craziness, we still won. And by the time the strike happened in 1978? We’d already cut the Red Sox’ lead almost in half, down to seven and a half games, and were in the middle of a six-game winning streak.

  The real reason we won in 1978? Because we played great!

  I think th
e fatherly hand of Bob Lemon helped. I think the easy hand of Al Rosen, who was the president, helped. I think you have to say, no matter what the owner did, he was helping. The ball club that was being put together by Gene Michael and his staff behind the scenes—that was working.

  I’m more apt to give credit to the ingredients than to the sauce of the press. Most of all, that meant getting our team back. That’s why it’s not altogether fair to judge Billy Martin, either, purely by the statistics. The first half of the year, he had a badly dinged-up team. True, he exacerbated everything by just dumping pitchers he didn’t like and creating a crisis every day. But we didn’t have the horses.

  In the second half of the season, our guys started to get healthy, and the Sox started to get injured. The game can be as simple as that.

  Back behind the plate, Thurman hit over .300 for the second half. So did Willie. He also stole twenty bases in twenty-two attempts, played the great defense he always did for us when he was healthy. Piniella had a terrific second half once he could play all the time, led the team in batting again. Same with Roy White, he hit .337 in September. Mickey Rivers was back with us; he had a very good second half, had twenty-eight extra-base hits, stole fifteen bases in seventeen tries. I had a better second half myself, got my average up, hit another fourteen home runs. Hit .319 the first month and a half after Billy was gone.

  What helped us most of all was getting the pitchers back and getting them healthy. Ed Figueroa’s arm got well, he went 13–3 in the second half with a 2.46 ERA, seven complete games, two shutouts. Figgy went 7–0 for us in September, and that was huge for us.

  So was Catfish. He got his arm worked on, let our team doctor do this new procedure where he put him out, then massaged the lesions on his shoulders to try to break up the adhesions. Catfish was saying by then he’d have let him cut the arm off if it would’ve eased the pain. Instead, there was the famous story about how when the doctor massaged them, the adhesions made this big popping sound, and his arm loosened right up. Suddenly he was back for us, went 10–3 in the second half with a 2.88 ERA, five complete games and a shutout—almost the Catfish from a couple years earlier.

  Dick Tidrow settled into the number four spot in the rotation for us. Jim Beattie pitched a no-hitter down in Triple-A, came back up, and won four games for us in September, with a 2.70 ERA. Second half of the year, our rotation went 42–16.

  But the guy who really did it for us all year long was Ron Guidry. He was the piece that couldn’t be replaced. That year, he had everything going. A tremendous fastball. That slider that looked just like the fastball coming out of his hand, then it would fall off the table at the last moment. I’ve never seen a better one. He learned that from Sparky Lyle when he first came up, but he could throw it even harder, make it look more like a fastball than Sparky could.

  Guidry was the most dominant player in the game that year. Jim Rice had his greatest year for the Red Sox; he was the MVP in the American League.

  But Guidry was the dominant player in the game. He was every time he stepped on the mound. He was the one who kept us in it when everything was going wrong early on. Won his first thirteen in a row. He went 13–1 in the first half that year, with a 1.99 ERA. Tied the American League strikeout record at the time, when he struck out eighteen in a game against the Angels in June. That was the game where the fans at the Stadium first started the habit you see all the time now of clapping for a strikeout once you got two strikes on a batter. They started doing that, and the whole game it just kept getting louder and louder. The Angels just swinging and flailing up there—and they were a very good hitting team.

  But you know, the second half, Ronnie was even better. Went 12–2, but with a 1.48 ERA. That’s right, he already had an ERA under 2.00, and he lowered it by half a run. Finished with sixteen complete games, nine shutouts. More than a strikeout an inning.

  His final record was 25–3. But that’s not even the whole story. He lost a win on Opening Day when he held Texas to one run but we couldn’t get anybody home, and then Goose lost it. He lost another game against the Orioles where he gave up one earned run and struck out ten—but Bucky made an error, Doug DeCinces hit a two-run homer, and we lost, 2–1. He didn’t get credit for another game we won when Lou Piniella dropped a fly ball out in left against the Twins. In the thirty-five starts he made for us that year, we went 30–5. With a few more breaks, Ronnie could easily have finished the year at something like 30–2, 31–2.

  I never saw anybody do what Guidry did that year. And I played in Oakland with Vida Blue, when he had that great year in 1971.

  Guidry was such a great guy to play with, too. He was a real gentleman, but so laid-back, didn’t let anything bother him. He gave us a real scare at the end of August when he got hit in the ankle with a line drive in Baltimore. Fortunately, the X-rays came back negative. He’d broken that ankle three times growing up.

  “I got ankles like a racehorse,” was all Guidry said about it. “If I break it one more time, they’re going to shoot me.”

  There was one more factor in our comeback. Who was hitting in the cleanup spot when we went 40–10 in 1977? Who was hitting there when we went 40–14 in 1978?

  Oh, yeah. Just saying. I wasn’t the most important ingredient; I didn’t have my best year in 1978. But when I was there, every piece was in place. We were a great team.

  All of a sudden everything was the reverse of how Yaz described the situation earlier in the year. Now we were getting a well-pitched game almost every night. And almost every day, they’d lose somebody else to the disabled list. Yaz himself had a bad back; he was playing with some sort of steel corset wrapped around him. Dwight Evans got beaned late in August; he was never the same that season. Butch Hobson had elbow chips; he went from being the guy who hit thirty homers and drove in 112 runs from the nine spot to someone who had to take a running start across the infield to throw the ball to first. They left him in to make forty-three errors on the year.

  Fisk cracked a couple ribs down the stretch; he was in pain every time he threw. Boomer—George Scott—hurt his finger. Burleson was injured, and Remy did something to his wrist, which was the key to their infield defense. They had to put Jack Brohamer and Frank Duffy out there, who were capable players—but not the same as having the second-best infield up the middle in the league, after us. (My opinion, of course.)

  The Red Sox maybe—maybe—had better talent than we did, overall, when you look at every starting position. But I don’t think they had our depth. That got exposed as their replacements just went south for them. Boomer was no longer the player he once was; that became evident that year. Bill Lee—a true Yankee hater—lost seven in a row, and Don Zimmer yanked him from the starting rotation.

  And then, when they started losing some games, they started to have some controversies in the clubhouse. Which affirms what Joe Torre always likes to say about how you don’t win because you have a happy locker room—when you’re winning, you get a happy locker room. They had guys starting to complain and second-guess Zimmer. Controversies in the media. Clutter. I recognized that!

  Meanwhile, we were finally what we should’ve been all along: a great ball club that was playing well, with everybody now being supportive of everybody else. We enjoyed playing well. We enjoyed playing with no distractions, no clutter. There was no more negativity about me or anything like it.

  We were so far behind—fourteen games—that we weren’t really concentrating on catching up to Boston. We were just trying to play well every game. It was connoisseur baseball again. But the funny thing was we weren’t even getting that much luck, and we were still closing the gap.

  We lost that game where Guidry pitched so well against Baltimore but Bucky made a miscue at short. Lost another game out in Seattle when Ronnie had a 3–0 lead, but then we made a big error, and Goose came in and lost on some freaky hits. Figgy lost a game in Baltimore where he gave up just one earned run and we came back from 3–0 down, scored five runs in the top of the s
eventh. But it was raining, and Earl Weaver made sure it took the grounds crew just about forever to bring the tarp out. When they did, they dumped more water on the field than they kept off it. They stalled enough to get the game called, and the score reverted to the last full inning, making it a 3–0 win for them. They went and changed the rule after that, it was so audacious. But that was Earl for you. He’d always find a way to win.

  We thought we might have a chance to pick up some ground on Boston when they came to town for a two-game set early in August. There were still a lot of games to go, and we were only six and a half back now. We got up, 5–0, in the first game before a huge crowd of more than fifty thousand. But it was a rainy night and a sloppy game. Tidrow didn’t have his good stuff, and we left eleven guys on base. Wasted a great seven innings of relief by Goose, another two by Sparky.

  Those guys pitched the equivalent of an entire game and allowed just three hits and one run, but it was all wasted. They still had the curfew back then, where you couldn’t start any inning after 1:00 a.m., and they finally had to postpone the game to the next day when it reached the fifteenth inning. We lost it in the seventeenth the next evening, then lost the regularly scheduled game, too, 8–1, to Mike Torrez. We just couldn’t get to him.

  There was another factor that night, too: I stunk. I had a terrible couple of games, went a combined 0–10 with five strikeouts. Made a bad play in the field. In that first game, especially, I had four strikeouts, kept killing rally after rally. Afterward, we were still in fourth place, eight and a half games out, with just fifty-five left to play.

  But you know what? It wasn’t a big thing. None of it was, at least not back in the clubhouse. Bob Lemon didn’t make it a big thing; nobody else made it a big thing, not in his clubhouse. Nobody got blamed for anything that went wrong in any of those games. Nobody made a bunch of comments to the press about my hitting or my fielding. Or about anyone else who didn’t play well. Nobody changed the lineup all around, or seethed, or threw things against the wall. Nobody acted like we’d just lost the seventh game of the World Series. We won games and lost games as a team.