by Lou Piniella
I had no idea what was going on. A few minutes later, Gordon was knocking at my door and as I let him in the room I could see he was very distressed—enough so that when he saw the minibar he helped himself to a glass of gin. It turned out Bunker had apparently gone sleepwalking and wandered down to the lobby in his underwear. He had forgotten what room he was in and went around pounding on every door, shouting “Piniella! Piniella! Let me in!” The guests at the hotel had complained that there was this man running around the hallways in his underwear, and they had used the name “Piniella” to describe him. The hotel manager was in a panic and called the Royals, threatening to report this disturbance to the police and have me arrested. Somehow it got resolved without anyone’s being arrested, and Bunker got off with just a fine from the Royals.
That first year for the Royals we won 69 games and finished in fourth place in the American League West, far exceeding most everyone’s expectations for a start-up franchise. For that reason, we were all a little shocked when, five days after the season, Gordon announced he was quitting as manager. In his press conference, Gordon cited the fact that it had been eight years between managing jobs when he signed on with the Royals, and a lot of changes in the game had happened in the interim. For me, 1969 was an especially great year: I’d finally made it to the big leagues, won Rookie of the Year honors, and, most important, my son Lou Jr. was born.
I was sorry to see Gordon go—particularly so after meeting his successor, Charlie Metro, who’d previously been the Royals’ director of scouting and conditioning. Before that, Metro had been a fairly successful minor-league manager for seventeen seasons in the Orioles, Tigers, and Cardinals organizations, but as he soon demonstrated to us, he had too much minor league in him and didn’t know how to handle major leaguers. Metro was a conditioning fanatic and a stickler for rules.
In his first (and thankfully only) spring training, in 1970, he brought in Bill Easton, the former track coach at University of Kansas, and Wes Santee, the great Kansas 1,500-meter runner, and put us on a specialized running program every day in which he’d have us run all around this double field we had, then open the gates and continue the run through the streets and alleys around the ballpark in Fort Myers. Picture the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The media loved it, calling it a great innovation. Then, three days into it, three players got attacked by big dogs in one of the alleys and that was the end of it.
Among the strict rules Metro had was that, after games we lost, we were required to sit at our lockers and ruminate for forty minutes, presumably to rerun the games in our minds, during which time we were not allowed to shave, shower, or eat a meal. None of us had ever seen anything like this. Metro also had a special uniform made up for himself in which he could fit a stopwatch in his pocket. All the goodwill Gordon had built up with the players dissipated quickly, and our play in the field bore that out: from April 21 to May 7, we lost 12 out of 14, and on June 7, with our record 19–33, Metro was fired and replaced by Bob Lemon, who had been our pitching coach. Before that, Lemon had been the manager of three different teams in the Pacific Coast League as well as the pitching coach with the California Angels in 1967 when Cedric Tallis worked there as business manager.
The move was another prime example of Cedric’s baseball acumen, as Lemon proved to be the perfect antidote to Metro. A tested baseball man who broke into the game as an outfielder and then went on to have a Hall of Fame career as a pitcher, Lemon knew all the aspects of the game. He also knew how to handle players and, by his calm but firm demeanor, gained our immediate respect. As for me, I had gone into the 1970 season determined not to fall victim to the so-called sophomore jinx—which is what all players who have good rookie seasons ever hear about. I thought about it all winter but got off to a great start—I was hitting .350 after the first two months of the season—and finished at .301 with 11 homers and 88 RBI. I was now fully confident that I belonged in the major leagues.
At the same time, Lemon was able to right the ship after replacing Metro and guided us back to another fourth-place finish. The following year he won Manager of the Year honors after we became the second-fastest expansion team to a winning record, finishing second with 85 victories. Nineteen seventy-one was also the year in which Amos Otis, whom Cedric had stolen from the Mets for the third baseman Joe Foy (whose skills mysteriously deteriorated as soon as he left us), emerged as a potential superstar, hitting .301 with 15 homers and 79 RBI, stealing a league-leading 52 bases, and playing Gold Glove defense in center field. I was a popular player in Kansas City, mainly because I was looked upon as a blue-collar guy who made the most of my ability, but I could see right away Otis was much more talented than I was. Though he never quite equaled that ’71 season, he was a fixture in center field for fourteen seasons in Kansas City, a five-time All-Star, and one of the all-time great Royals players.
My own big breakout season came in 1972, when I hit a career-high .312 with 11 homers, 72 RBI, and a league-leading 33 doubles, and lost the batting title to the Twins’ Rod Carew by five points. I also made the All-Star team for the one and only time in my career, but it was just my luck that the manager of the American League team was Earl Weaver. When I ran into Weaver in the hotel lobby, he told me, “Don’t bother bringing your glove to the ballpark.” I was offended but what the hell, it was Weaver. I guess he remembered me from Elmira. He did get me one pinch hit at-bat in the game, against Tug McGraw, the Mets’ closer with the devastating screwball. I was nervous and swung at the first pitch, grounding out to short. Afterward, my mom called me from Tampa and said, “Why didn’t you take more pitches so I could see you longer?” Wise lady.
The Royals as a team, however, regressed that year, and after a 13–24 start, we were pretty much out of the race by Memorial Day. We played much better in the second half, but with three games to go in the season, my batting average down to .306 and Carew 11 points ahead of me at .317, Lemon came to me and asked if I wanted to sit them out and preserve my .300 average. I told him, “No way, I want to play” and went 7 for 11 in those last three games. He never said as much, but I know Lem really appreciated that.
Shortly after the ’72 season, Lemon was home in California and did an interview with a columnist with the Los Angeles Times in which he talked about being a couple of years away from retirement and how he and his wife were looking forward to settling in Hawaii. Ewing Kauffman, the owner of the Royals, apparently got upset with that, and even though Lem was only fifty-two, he used it as an excuse to fire him. Mr. Kauffman even admitted that he had wanted a younger man to manage the team—in this case, Jack McKeon, who was forty-two and had managed the Royals’ Triple-A farm team in Omaha for four years—which, today, I think, would have given Lem quite an age-discrimination lawsuit. I liked Mr. Kauffman, but in this case I felt he’d made a terrible mistake.
Lem had been a terrific manager, and he also did something else that proved to be transformative for the organization: he brought in Charlie Lau as hitting coach in 1971. It is not an exaggeration to say Charlie knew more about hitting and hitting mechanics than anyone I have ever known. He helped turn George Brett from a .280 singles hitter into a Hall of Famer who won three batting titles (including .390 in 1980) and slugged 317 homers. Charlie’s gift was that he could spot things in our swings or our approaches and then quietly communicate them and instill confidence. He taught rhythm and movement in the swing, weight shift, hitting through the ball, having the bat in the launching position as soon as the front foot is down. He made me the hitter I was, and I was grateful when, a few years later after I’d moved on to New York, we were able to get him over to the Yankees in 1978.
Later that winter, my contract negotiation with Cedric wasn’t going too well and when I held out from going to spring training, Mr. Kauffman called me to his house in Mission Hills to discuss it. I was looking to get a raise to $50,000, and the Royals had been holding firm at $45,000. I told my wife if I didn’t get $50,000, I wasn’t going to report. But Mr. Kauffman
, who founded Marion Laboratories, a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company in Kansas City, was very smart. As soon as I got to the house, he offered me a nice glass of brandy and then proceeded to let me win four or five hands of liar’s poker, and before you know it, he’d gotten me to agree to play for the forty-five grand. I’d won about $500 in the liar’s poker game, but there was no way I could beat Mr. Kauffman in liar’s poker, because he was a mathematical genius. So basically he was just greasing my pockets. Mr. Kauffman had been very good to me—my first year he raised me from $10,000 to $12,500, then raised me to $25,000 after I won the Rookie of the Year, and, despite my breaking my thumb when I was hit by a pitch and missing forty games in ’71, he raised me from $33,000 to $36,000. So I just figured after hitting .312 in ’72, I should get a bump to $50,000. But the team wouldn’t budge.
The first day I showed up for spring training, which was two weeks late, I was already off on a bad foot with McKeon, who called me into his office and said, “I’m not happy that you held out. This is my first year here and we needed you here to be part of this program. At the same time, I expect you to be one of the leaders on this team.”
I didn’t take that well, only because I had signed for $5,000 less than I felt I should have had. I also had really enjoyed playing for Lem and I felt McKeon had undermined him with Mr. Kauffman. McKeon was a whole different type of guy. He was a talker and he had this big chaw of tobacco. The writers all liked him because every day he would regale them with stories of his exploits in the minor leagues, always keeping their notebooks filled. McKeon had the bullshit. Now he was asking me to be a leader when I wasn’t happy with my contract. It was not a good beginning for either of us.
Then, to compound everything, we had moved from Municipal Stadium to the new Royals Stadium, which had artificial turf, and I didn’t adjust to that at all. My legs bothered me all year, my ankles were sore, my knees were sore, and the field was really, really, really hot. In fact, we had this ice trough in the dugout, and you’d come in from the outfield and you’d just dip your feet into it, almost to your midcalf. But by the time you got back to the outfield, your feet were dry and just as hot and you had to do it over and over. At the same time, the infielders on Astroturf could play me a little deeper, so they took base hits away from me and I had a bad year. I hit .250, by far the lowest of my career, except for 1975, when I missed half the season with an inner ear infection. The Royals as a team had a real good year under McKeon, winning 88 games and finishing second, but I didn’t have a whole lot to do with it. It all came to a head in the next-to-last series of the season, when we were facing the White Sox for three games—in which two of their starting pitchers, Jim Kaat and Terry Forster, were lefties—and McKeon benched me all three games.
The next day, we were playing Texas with Jim Bibby, a 6′5″, 240-pound, very intimidating, hard-throwing right-hander, and I was more than a little surprised to see that McKeon, after benching me against the two White Sox lefties, had me in the lineup again. I went in to see him to ask what was going on and he explained to me that Otis had told him that he was a little scared of Bibby because he threw so hard and had once almost hit him with a pitch. I forget what I said to McKeon, other than I thought this was bullshit and that I suddenly didn’t feel so well myself. That didn’t go over so well with him. He kept me on the bench for the final three games and I had a sense I wouldn’t be playing any more for Jack McKeon.
I really liked Kansas City. By this time, Anita and I had bought a beautiful home there in Leawood, and on Christmas Day 1971, our second child, my beautiful daughter, Kristi, was born. The first time I saw her, she was presented to us in a Christmas stocking. That was the best Christmas present I ever got. Over the winters, I’d worked for a local financial firm selling muni bonds for the new Royals stadium. We had our first son and our daughter there, and I had met a wonderful, wonderful lifelong friend, Walt Coffey, with whom I bought a Honda motorcycle dealership and opened up a bunch of restaurants in the Kansas City area, including the Long Branch Saloon on the Plaza. All of them were successful ventures, and to tell you something about the kind of friend Walt was, we wrote up the agreement for all those ventures on a paper napkin—that was all we had between us, no contract, no lawyers—and we never once had a disagreement! Life was good. But after that ’73 season I had a pretty good idea it was over in Kansas City.
On December 7—D-day—I got a call at home from Cedric, and when he started off telling me how much he appreciated all I had done for him, I knew I had been traded. Initially I was sad, but when he mentioned it was to the Yankees, I have to say, even though they weren’t that good at the time, I was really excited. The New York Yankees and all their tradition. The city of New York. I asked him who I’d been traded for and he told me Lindy McDaniel, who’d been the Yankees’ closer, with 12 wins and 10 saves in ’73, and it was flattering knowing they’d gotten a substantial player for me.
My last souvenir of Kansas City was the banged-up watercooler I took home to Tampa with me. I had destroyed it with my bat in one of my tantrums, and as long as the Royals made me pay for it, I figured I’d keep it as a souvenir. I actually hooked it up with new plumbing in my garage, but it eventually went to the junkyard after I came home too many times from a bad day on the golf course and took a golf club to it for old times’ sake.
CHAPTER 4
Pinstripes
Having reached the age of thirty and looking back on my winding road of twelve years in professional baseball, I saw one thing clearly: I was destined to be a Yankee. Too many signposts, too many ex-Yankees intersecting with my life, including Lee MacPhail twice, and, so, after my wife, Anita, and I had a good cry about leaving Kansas City—a place we’d gotten to love, fostering deep community ties—the Yankees and the big-city lights of New York loomed as a great new adventure for us that we somehow almost expected.
Growing up in Tampa in the ’50s and ’60s, I had never been a great fan of the Yankees, who seemed to win monotonously year after year, but you certainly had to respect their legacy of great players, from Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Phil Rizzuto, Tony Lazzeri, and on and on, and the thought of just dressing in the same clubhouse and playing on the same field as all of them was exciting.
Except that would have to wait for two years.
The Yankees team I joined in 1974 was slowly trying to emerge from the darkest era in their history—five losing seasons since their last trip to the World Series in 1964, including the previous one, in which they’d gone 80–82. Not only that, Yankee Stadium was undergoing a $160 million renovation, and for the next two seasons the Yankees would be sharing the Mets’ Shea Stadium for their home games. As usual, my first order of business upon joining the Yankees was my contract. I was still disgruntled about settling for $45,000 from the Royals in ’73 and even though I’d had a bad year, I felt I was at least entitled to a cost-of-living raise moving to New York. This was also the first year of salary arbitration—a wonderful development for the players won by our union chief, Marvin Miller—and instead of being told by ownership, “This is the offer, take it or leave it,” players could now name their own figure and put it in the hands of the arbitrator.
I was hoping not to have to go to arbitration, but when Gabe Paul, the Yankees’ general manager, sent me a contract for the same $45,000, I knew things were going to be no different with the Yankees. I sent the contract back to Paul and told him I was looking for $57,500 and then braced myself for a call from him inviting me to his office to play a few rounds of liar’s poker! I didn’t know it, but Gabe Paul was possibly the most tightfisted baseball executive in history, and here I was already starting off with him with a $12,500 difference of opinion on my worth. After weeks of stalemate, we both resigned to go to arbitration, with Gabe having hiked his offer to $52,500 and me holding firm. When I arrived in New York for the hearing, Gabe invited me out to lunch at a little Chinese restaurant in Queens, not far from Shea Stad
ium. Over lunch Gabe began making his pitch.
“Oh, Lou, you don’t really want to go to arbitration. It’s a distasteful process, requiring us to say a lot of disparaging things about you and the season you had last year. This is no way to get off on the right foot with each other. Think about it, we’re willing to give you this nice raise and you really need to get to spring training …”
By the end of the lunch, Gabe—along with a few cocktails—had worn me down, and I said what the hell and decided to take the $52,500 and get started with my Yankees career. That was when Gabe told the waiter to bring over some fortune cookies. I couldn’t help noticing the sly smile on his face when I opened mine and the little message said, “Be happy with what you get.”
I should point out here that George Steinbrenner had bought the Yankees the year before but was almost immediately served with a two-year suspension from baseball after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign donations to President Nixon. So we didn’t know a whole lot about the new Yankees owner and didn’t see him except when he was in the stands watching our spring training games.
That first spring in Fort Lauderdale with the Yankees was a getting-to-know-you process for more than just me. We had a new manager in Bill Virdon, who we quickly came to discover was a stern taskmaster. Virdon was like a marine drill instructor. All that was missing was the combat fatigues. He never smiled, said little, and was all business, a stickler for physical fitness and fundamentals. One of my first days of camp, Virdon, a Gold Glove outfielder with the Pirates in the ’60s and acclaimed as one of the best defensive center fielders ever, came up to me and said, “If there’s one thing I know about this game it’s that you can’t win unless you have a good outfield.” He then proceeded to make his point by putting me and all the other outfielders through the most extensive and grueling drills I ever experienced. Every day, during the workout, Virdon would grab these two fungo bats—a long one for flies to the outfield and a shorter one to hit line drives and grounders forty to sixty feet—and he’d start hitting to us, long flies from right field, to left field, to right field, to left field. Then he’d bring us in close and hit line shots and one-hoppers. It was exhausting for everyone but him. He worked our butts off, but looking back at it now, I can see that he turned us all into good outfielders. I had 16 outfield assists in 1974, the most in my career.