Lou

by Lou Piniella

  “The team had been struggling and, in the manner of the Yankees of that era, making the worst of a bad situation,” said Moss Klein, the Yankees beat writer for the Newark Star-Ledger:

  Everyone seemed to have a gripe. Munson wanted out, pushing for a hometown trade to Cleveland. Rivers was having bad days at the racetrack and wanted to be traded too. Bucky Dent was upset with Billy pinch-hitting for him all the time. Holtzman and Ed Figueroa were asking to be traded. Reggie was being Reggie. There was tension in the clubhouse and it was carrying over to the field. Sitting at his locker as the writers entered the silent clubhouse minutes after the Saturday-night game in Seattle, Lou launched into this stunning rebuke of the team: “The writers are all here. Why doesn’t everyone speak up now? Now’s the damn time. Everyone wants to get traded? Talk about it now after you get beat nine to f-ing two by a f-ing last-place team! How come nobody’s saying anything now?” It went on for three to four minutes as everyone, players and writers alike, looked on in stunned and uneasy silence. But the next day, in the series finale in Seattle, the clubhouse was noticeably lighter. Lou had cleaned out the tension, and when the team got back home, Billy started hitting Reggie cleanup and the team took off. That was the turning point of the season.

  I’m not sure what prompted that outburst by me, other than the fact that we just didn’t play well in the Kingdome and I was sick and tired of getting our asses beat there by bad Mariner teams. There’s no question that 9–2 loss in Seattle was the low point of the ’77 season and, coincidence or not, when Billy started hitting Reggie cleanup in the first game home against Oakland, August 10, we continued on a streak of 24 wins in 27 games to surge into first place and never look back. Once again our opponents in the ALCS were the Royals, and though we were also again able to beat them, this was one hard-fought five-game series, punctuated by the yeoman, truly heroic relief work of our closer, Mr. Sparky Lyle. The Royals won two of the first three games, and when they knocked out Figueroa in the fourth inning of game 4 to cut our early lead to 5–4, Billy did something extraordinary, for which today he’d be criticized to the heavens in the broadcast booth and on Twitter: he brought in Sparky to preserve the tenuous lead—in the fourth inning—with the Royals at second and first and George Brett coming to the plate. That was the way Billy managed—for the moment, for the game at hand, and to hell with tomorrow. He knew the game was on the line right there, and Sparky responded by retiring Brett on a liner to me in left and pitching 5⅓ innings of two-hit shutout relief to get us to game 5. We kept wondering: How long could Sparky go? But if anyone thought Sparky’s work for the series was done, having pitched in three straight games, he would soon prove to be mistaken.

  Even we assumed Billy couldn’t use Sparky again after his longest outing of the year. What could he possibly have left? What he had was a huge pair of balls and an unwavering will to win. So there we were, down 3–2 in the eighth inning of game 5, when Billy once again called on Sparky, and he pitched another 1⅓ scoreless innings while we scored three runs in the ninth to win it.

  Sparky’s workhorse, shut-the-door relief work in the ALCS was typical of what he’d done all season for us. Six times he appeared in three or more consecutive games, and in June he recorded five saves in five straight appearances. In September as we blew past the Red Sox into first place, he had four wins and seven saves in thirteen appearances. It was no wonder in 1977 he became the first reliever to win the American League Cy Young Award—he led the league in appearances (72) and games finished (60), with 26 saves and a 2.17 ERA for 137 relief innings. You have to remember, in those days we all played on one-year contracts, but Sparky always wanted to be responsible to his teammates. As I said, he was the ultimate competitor. The tougher the situation, the better he performed—and he always took the ball. When Thurman caught Sparky, he never gave him a sign. He just let Sparky throw.

  Kansas City gave us all we wanted in the ’77 ALCS, right up to the 45th inning, and after it was over, we were drained physically. But we gutted it out for 12 innings—the last 3⅔ pitched by Sparky—to beat the Dodgers in game 1 of the World Series, and after losing the next game, we went to LA and took control of the series. Los Angeles was quite a different atmosphere, with Sinatra, Don Rickles, Kirk Douglas, and all these Hollywood celebrities around everywhere. It was fun to see all the stars, but we had business to attend to out there, and after winning two out of three at Chavez Ravine, we came home on the brink of winning the first Yankees world championship since 1962.

  It was then, of course, that Reggie had his finest moment—and to his credit, he had a lot of them—hitting three home runs, each better than the other, to tie Babe Ruth’s World Series record and complete the job. With three majestic swings, Reggie erased all the bullshit that had surrounded him his first year as a Yankee. Truthfully, we were all very happy for him. It brought us closer together as a team and it was especially great to see Reggie and Thurman hugging. As the season wore on, Thurman had started to come to the realization that Reggie was a winner and, as such, gained more respect for him. Reggie had said some stupid things but he was basically a good guy. At the same time, Reggie respected Thurman as the legitimate leader of the team and cultivated Thurman’s friendship so he would be more accepted by the rest of the team. In a lot of ways, that mutual respect steeled us for more adversity that was to come in 1978.

  CHAPTER 5

  Death of a Captain and a Dynasty Detoured

  I needed the full three and a half months of winter to recover from my first world championship.

  If that sounds a little strange, it’s only because, upon reflection, I realized it shouldn’t have been so hard. We were a team that had learned how to win, with a core of hard-edge veteran players: Thurman, Reggie, Nettles, Roy White, Chris Chambliss, Rivers, Bucky, Sparky, players who didn’t buckle under pressure. And yet it seemed as if we spent nearly the entire season on the precipice, dealing with our own self-inflicted wounds. Much of this had to do with Billy and his inability to get along with Reggie.

  As I’ve said earlier, Billy, in my opinion, was a managerial genius, a brilliant in-game strategist, both fearless and cunning. At the same time, I came to see during the course of the 1977 season just why Billy, after always achieving instant success, had been subsequently fired so quickly in his three previous managing jobs. Think about it: in his first full season as the Yankees manager he’d taken the team to its first World Series in twelve years. He was the unquestioned toast of the town, and yet, in 1977, he was on the brink of being fired at least three times. How does that happen? We all rejoiced in that triumphant clubhouse celebration after the World Series; Billy right in the middle of it, pouring champagne over Mr. Steinbrenner’s head while wrapping his arm around Reggie and heaping praise on him for his three-home-run night. It was probably the happiest moment of Billy’s entire life.

  But after thinking back on all that had gone down in 1977, I knew it wouldn’t take much in ’78 for Billy and Reggie to renew their hostilities, and I worried that the mix of Billy, Reggie, Mr. Steinbrenner, and a new team president in Al Rosen was just going to be too combustible.

  You could see this coming when Gabe Paul resigned as the Yankees’ general manager after the ’77 season and Mr. Steinbrenner wasted no time in replacing him with Al Rosen, his longtime friend and a former American League MVP with the Indians whom he’d idolized as a kid growing up in Cleveland. On his way out the door, Gabe said: “I’m going to miss New York, but I’m especially going to miss the excitement of Billy Martin. I know people think he’s tough to get along with, but I didn’t find that at all. We got along a lot better than people think we did, especially at the end.”

  That was true. Gabe was Billy’s one ally in the front office, who many times had served as a sounding board for Billy, as well as a buffer between him and Mr. Steinbrenner, and the peacemaker between Billy and Reggie. I should say here also that Gabe was the one Yankee executive who could restrain Mr. Steinbrenner from making impulsi
ve deals, which would become an issue in the years to come.

  So when the ’78 season began unraveling, us falling fourteen games behind as late as July 19, there was no one to intervene for Billy when he went on that drunken rage about Reggie and (by association) Mr. Steinbrenner at O’Hare Airport in Chicago four days later. Instead of trying to save Billy, as Gabe had done so many times, Rosen told Mr. Steinbrenner the only way to calm things down would be to get rid of Billy and allow him to bring in his man, Bob Lemon. Rosen and Billy had no use for each other, going all the way back to their ’50s playing days as mutually hotheaded principals in the fierce Yankees-Indians rivalry.

  A few words here about Bob Lemon: While on the exterior he came across as calm and easygoing, you did not want to cross him. Because if you did, he would not hesitate to confront you, even with his fists. He was from the old school. When I was playing for Lem in Kansas City, I remember having this particular shirt, a flowery thing with a big collar and ruffled cuffs like Elvis used to wear, and he didn’t like it. Combined with the fact that my hair was always too long for him, he told me I “looked like a hippie with that foo-foo shirt” and ordered me not to wear it anymore. A couple of weeks later, we were going on a road trip and I wore the shirt under my sport jacket to try and hide it, but Lem saw it, came up to me, and ripped the buttons off! Like I said, you didn’t defy him.

  He also liked to have his cocktails, a telltale sign of his drinking being his very pronounced, bulbous nose, for which he took a lot of good-natured kidding. One time we were on the team bus going to a spring training game and made an unexpected stop at a gas station. Everyone was wondering what was going on, and Nettles yells out from the back of the bus, “We have to stop to get batteries for Lem’s nose!” Lem had a saying: “I never bring bad losses home with me. I always leave ’em in a bar somewhere along the way.”

  Lem was the antithesis of Billy’s high-strung persona, and with the help of the New York newspaper strike, we played relaxed, confident baseball the rest of the ’78 season. After beating the Red Sox in the playoff game, it continued that way in the postseason against the Royals (again!) and the Dodgers.

  In 1977, the Royals had taken us the full five games in the ALCS, with Sparky having to pitch a total of 9⅓ innings of one-run relief over four of them. This time, we knew we were the better team. After splitting the first two games in Kansas City, we broke their backs in game 3 at Yankee Stadium when George Brett hit three home runs (all solo shots) off Catfish and we came back to win the game, 6–5, on Thurman’s two-run homer off Doug Bird in the eighth inning; a homer which can only be described as a howitzer shot, over 400 feet into the left-center-field monuments. It was Thurman’s first home run in 54 games and probably the longest of his career. Afterward, even the Royals’ manager, Whitey Herzog, couldn’t contain his admiration, telling the writers, “That darn Thurman sure did hit it, didn’t he?”

  We closed it out the next day, Guidry and Gossage combining to outpitch the Royals’ ace, Dennis Leonard, 2–1, and it was on to Los Angeles for a second straight World Series matchup against Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers. After losing the first two games in LA, we came back to New York and won all three in Yankee Stadium to take command of the series. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that in game 3, Nettles put on one of the most spectacular displays of fielding artistry in World Series history, robbing the Dodgers of extra-base hits in the fifth and sixth and ending bases-loaded rallies with diving stops of balls in the hole. In all, Nettles saved at least five runs behind Guidry.

  The next night we went ten innings before winning, 4–3. I don’t know why it was, but I felt particularly cocky when I came to the plate with two out, White on second, and Reggie at first in the tenth. I just remember saying to Jerry Grote, the Dodgers’ catcher, “You can tell Lasorda this game is over,” before lining an RBI single off Bob Welch into right-center field.

  That was the backbreaker for the Dodgers. We beat them handily the next two games, 12–2 and 7–2, and what made it especially satisfying was Catfish limiting the Dodgers to two runs over seven innings to win the final game of the 1978 World Series.

  On the joyous flight back to New York, I thought about something Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News said to me after the playoff game in Boston, about my play off Remy and Bucky’s homer being the capper on this “miracle” comeback season. Miracle my ass.

  As I told Mike, my play against Remy, Bucky’s homer—or Reggie’s homer and Goose gutting it out for the final 2⅔ innings—were merely products of a team that knew how to win. Just like in the postseason afterward, Thurman nullifying Brett’s three homers in game 3 of the ALCS against Kansas City; Catfish shrugging off his loss to the Indians that forced the playoff game by winning the final World Series game against the Dodgers; or Nettles making those game-saving plays in game 3 of the World Series. If we’d spent ’77 learning how to win, we spent the second half of ’78 proving it.

  We were all in our prime, with an owner who would spare no expense when it came to replenishing the team with talent, and there was every reason to believe that the consecutive world championships in 1977 and ’78, hard as they were to achieve, were the beginning of a new Yankees dynasty.

  Still, there were always going to be postseason changes. Although he handled it with typical unselfish class, Sparky was extremely unhappy at being supplanted by Goose as the team’s closer a year after winning the Cy Young Award, and Mr. Steinbrenner acceded to his demand for a trade a month after the ’78 season, sending him to Texas for a package of players that included a nineteen-year-old left-handed pitching prospect named Dave Righetti. It was a trade that would eventually pay huge dividends for the Yankees as Righetti went on to become first a dominant starter who pitched a July 4 no-hitter against the Red Sox in 1983, and later an equally dominant closer who saved 223 games for the Yankees from 1984 to 1990.

  But initially the trade had huge repercussions at the start of the 1979 season in the wake of a shower room scuffle on April 19 between Goose and Cliff Johnson, the big, lumbering first baseman and DH. As the two tussled, Goose slipped to the floor, and tore ligaments in his right thumb. He was out nearly three months and, with Sparky gone, there was no one to adequately replace him. We had a particularly bad road trip in mid-June, losing five out of six in Minnesota and Texas to fall to 33–30, and that’s when Mr. Steinbrenner decided we needed a “reverse” personality change with managers and fired Lemon in favor of bringing back Billy. By the time Goose got back, July 12, we were in fourth place, nine and a half games behind.

  Two days earlier, I had managed to get myself embroiled in one of the silliest tantrums of my career when I went at it with Ted Giannoulas, the famous San Diego Chicken. We were playing the Mariners in Seattle and I was in a bad mood anyway because we never played well in the Kingdome. As I was trotting out to left field in the bottom of the fourth inning, the Chicken was standing in the infield, doing his thing, waving his hands as if to cast a hex on Ron Guidry, who was throwing his warm-up pitches. I didn’t see any need for this sort of shenanigans so I started chasing the Chicken off the field, and when I couldn’t catch up to him, I threw my glove at him. I’ll say this: he was genuinely startled.

  When I got out to left field, he followed me out there, waving a white flag of surrender, and tried to shake hands with me. I just waved him off and screamed at him to get the hell out of there. Later I told the writers he didn’t belong on the field, clowning around out there where players are making a living. Bucky Dent said afterward that it was the funniest thing he ever saw at the ballpark. I was just sick and tired of losing all the time in the Kingdome. Giannoulas, for his part, said he couldn’t understand my being upset, adding, “And to think I voted for him for the All-Star team.” I did feel bad about it later and when I saw him a couple of years after, I apologized to him.

  I took pride in competing. I used my temper to give me a second gear to get me to perform better. It was probably a lot of wasted energy, but it wa
sn’t a show, especially when I was a player. I was really pissed. Maybe in this instance, with the Chicken, I might have been more restrained if it had been anywhere else but in the Kingdome. In retrospect, it was stupidity on my part. I should have just ignored him.

  There was one good thing to come of the Chicken flap: I later found out my dustup with the Chicken served to put the kibosh on plans the Yankees had for their own mascot. Earlier that year it seemed one of the creators of The Muppet Show had come to the Yankees about creating a mascot for the team—a pear shaped “Yankee blue” creature named “Dandy”—to parade around the park and in the stands as an added attraction for young fans. The Yankees had quietly signed a $30,000 deal to lease “Dandy” for three years with plans to unveil him in late July. But after my blowup with the Chicken and reading my quotes about mascots having no place on the field, Mr. Steinbrenner agreed with me and canceled the deal. “Dandy” never saw the light of Yankee Stadium, unconditionally released before he ever set foot on the field.

  About the only good thing that happened during Goose’s absence in ’79 was the trade with the Cubs that brought Bobby Murcer, my old running mate, back to the Yankees after a four-year absence. I was glad to have Bobby back but at the same time I felt sad that he had missed out on those three American League pennants and two world championships.

  Even after Goose’s return we didn’t play much better and had fallen to fourteen games behind when we swept a three-game series from the White Sox in Chicago at the end of July. During that series, Thurman and I stayed with Bobby at the apartment Bobby had rented there in Arlington Heights during his stay with the Cubs—and for those couple of days it was once again the best of times for three close friends. On Tuesday night after the second game, we stayed up late, till 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., talking about old times. Thurman and I were so glad to have Bobby back with us and Bobby was so glad to be back. But he couldn’t get past missing out on those two championships. For that he hated Gabe Paul, and we all cut up Gabe pretty good that night. At one point we started talking about the season at hand.