Lou
Page 10
“You know,” Thurman said, “we were at a very similar deficit this time last year. I think we can do it again. It’s not too late! Tell you what, I’m gonna dedicate myself to that. We can do this!”
“I’m with you, Thurm,” said Bobby. “I wasn’t here last year but this team is too good to be this far out.”
That night we all made a pact to make a concerted effort to pull off another great comeback, just as we’d done in ’78. For Bobby it was especially important. He couldn’t stop talking about how much he resented Gabe Paul for trading him away from the Yankees. He was thirty-three now and he didn’t know how many more chances he would get. We talked and laughed into the night, dreaming, if you will, about more glory together.
During the course of that late-night bull session, Thurman talked about his new plane, a Cessna Citation 501 jet, which was considerably more powerful than the Beechcraft prop jet he’d been piloting the previous couple of years. I’d flown a few times with Thurman on the Beechcraft—to the Bahamas during spring training for fishing trips (which prompted Mr. Steinbrenner to remark one time, “Damn, you guy guys play quick spring training games!”), and on short road trips from Baltimore to New York. It was very comfortable and Thurman was a good pilot. But this plane was a lot sleeker and bigger. It looked like a huge bullet, with much more horsepower, and it was much more difficult to maneuver. Because of that, both Bobby and I didn’t feel comfortable going up with Thurman in this plane. As Thurman went on about what a great plane it was, we tried our darndest to convince him to sell it. He had two other planes as well and it was getting a little difficult financially for him. But he kept talking about his love for flying, and I knew our pleas were falling on deaf ears.
That was the last conversation I ever had with him.
After we completed the sweep of the White Sox on Wednesday night, August 1, Thurman flew his plane home to Canton, Ohio—Bobby actually accompanied him to this small airport on the outskirts of Chicago and watched him take off. The next day was an off-day and I was enjoying it in the pool with my kids at my home in Allendale, New Jersey, when Anita called me to the phone. It was Mr. Steinbrenner, she said, and he sounded very upset. When I got on the phone, Mr. Steinbrenner was all broken up and I could barely understand him—not to mention comprehend what he was saying.
Thurman was dead … plane crash attempting to land his plane at the Canton-Akron airport … didn’t get out alive. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My first reaction was anger. I was mad at Thurman for that big airplane, mad that he wouldn’t listen to Bobby and me. Then I just began crying, uncontrollably, as my mind began racing with all those great memories: the 460-foot home run off Doug Bird that won game 3 of the ’78 ALCS against Kansas City; the image of him shuffling around the clubhouse with that lumpy body and those scruffy whiskers that perpetually pushed the envelope on Mr. Steinbrenner’s facial hair code. Catfish used to say Thurman was the only guy he ever knew who could make a $500 suit look like $150.
He had this gruff exterior that was intentionally intimidating to most of the writers, but underneath that facade he was a teddy bear, a devout family man who, because of his own father’s long absences from the home during his childhood, doted on his kids, quietly visited sick kids in hospitals on the road, and took up flying so he could get back to his family in Canton every chance he could during the season. I remember one time we were on the road and Thurman sneaked off one morning to visit a hospital for kids with cancer. Somehow his wife, Diane, found out about it, and when he got home she asked him why he didn’t tell even her about it. “Because you would’ve told the writers,” Thurman replied.
Thurman was the consummate warrior, who played through pain and would never let on. He was a real clutch hitter, who loved being up there with the game on the line, and he reminded me a lot of myself. We were similar right-handed gap hitters, and I’m quite certain we’d have both hit a lot more homers if we’d played in Fenway Park instead of Yankee Stadium. Behind the plate, he took charge of our pitchers and had that unorthodox slingshot throwing style that was nevertheless very accurate. He was the captain. Our spiritual leader. If he’d stayed alive, I have no doubt he’d be in the Hall of Fame and, if he’d wanted, would have been a helluva manager.
Now, just like that, he was gone. August 2. My wife’s birthday. And so every year I am reminded of my dear friend.
Those next few days were a blur. We opened up a four-game wraparound weekend series with the Orioles at Yankee Stadium the next day, and all I remember is the overwhelming grief I felt in left field as they played the National Anthem while, on Mr. Steinbrenner’s orders, no one stood in the catcher’s box. The other jolt to reality had been seeing Thurman’s locker when we came into the clubhouse; also on Mr. Steinbrenner’s orders, the locker had been emptied except for his catching gear, with his nameplate on top replaced with his number, 15. I have no memory of the game that night, other than we were shut out, 1–0, by our former Yankee teammates Scotty McGregor and Tippy Martinez. Before and after the game, Mr. Steinbrenner was in the clubhouse, just kind of walking around in a daze, patting guys on the back. You thought of him as the tough general but here he was breaking down, his eyes watery and red, unable to conceal his distress.
Mr. Steinbrenner really respected Thurman. He loved his toughness, loved the way he left everything on the field. He admired his baseball acumen and he was impressed with what a good family man Thurman was. He’d become very close to him. Probably the biggest measure of his respect for Thurman was the fact that he almost never took a shot at him in the papers like he regularly did with the rest of us. The only other one whom he never dared touch up was Catfish.
On Monday morning, with one more game to go in the Orioles series, we boarded a plane for Canton to bury Thurman. The airport there is only a short distance from Thurman’s house, but I remember that the bus ride felt like forever. We got to the house, and seeing Diane and Thurman’s kids made it even more difficult. But Diane was strong. She had always been a rock of stability for Thurman. We went from there to the funeral at the Canton Civic Center, which was packed, and Bobby and I both delivered eulogies. The rest of the day and the game back in New York that night also remain a blur. I just know that Bobby lifted everyone’s spirits by driving in all five runs of our 5–4 win over the Orioles, including a three-run homer off Dennis Martinez in the seventh inning. There couldn’t have been a finer tribute to his best friend, and afterward Bobby gave his bat to Diane. The only Yankees uniform I still have is the one I wore the rest of 1979 with the black armband and the “15” patch for Thurman. It’s not for sale. Ever.
With Thurman taken from us so suddenly, it was hard to imagine how we were going to get through the rest of the season. You’re professional ballplayers and you’ve got a job to do, but it’s hard to do it when your heart and mind are elsewhere. That’s why the now-famous “girl on the bus” caper, juvenile and raunchy as it may have been, turned out to be a welcome diversion for all of us—even, I think, Mr. Steinbrenner.
It seemed that after the last game in Chicago, a young girl in short-shorts managed to break through the crowd at the visiting-team gate and make her way onto our bus, whereupon she produced a magic marker, pulled down her shorts, and began asking for autographs—on her bare behind! It wasn’t until Billy and our traveling secretary Bill “Killer” Kane—who had been upstairs in the pressroom bar having drinks with White Sox owner, Bill Veeck—arrived and saw the girl and had her hastily ejected off the bus by the security guards. Everyone had a good laugh about it, and it was, we thought, quickly forgotten in the ensuing days of Thurman’s death and funeral.
Unfortunately, it was anything but forgotten in Chicago after Mike Royko, the columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times got ahold of the story from a woman in the crowd whose son had been waiting by the bus for an autograph only to be pushed aside by the girl. Royko’s column about Yankees players blowing off young kids to sign autographs on a girl’s naked butt was front-page n
ews in Chicago and back-page news in New York right after Thurman’s funeral. It was such big news that Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, announced he was conducting an investigation of the incident. The day the story broke in the New York papers, Mr. Steinbrenner came down to the clubhouse and was furious. “How could you guys do this?” he screamed. “You’ve embarrassed the Yankees and embarrassed me and now I’ve got the goddamned commissioner coming down on us!”
I listened to him going on, and in light of all the grief we had all been feeling, the absurdity of this whole thing made me start to laugh. I don’t know why, I don’t know what made me say it, I was still so mad about Thurman, I just blurted out, “Oh, c’mon, George. If you’d have been on the bus you would have given her your autograph too—and it’s a lot longer than ours! C’mon, it was all in fun.” For a moment, everyone was silent. George looked at me, at first, I think, disbelieving at what I had just said, then he smiled and waved his arms, saying, “I give up!” and walked out of the room. That’s when we all had a welcome laugh, and it was the last we ever heard about it.
I have little memory of the rest of the ’79 season other than the fact that Mr. Steinbrenner’s managerial “reverse” of Billy for Lemon did not have the same desirable effect as the one of 1978. We never got out of fourth place, finishing 13½ games behind, and at the end of the year we lost our other cornerstone clubhouse leader when Catfish succumbed to the chronic pain in his shoulder and retired. At the same time, we had more internal upheaval. Rosen resigned as team president in midseason, and shortly after the World Series Billy got himself in hot water with Mr. Steinbrenner again by engaging in a barroom fight in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a guy who was described in the papers as a middle-aged marshmallow salesman.
Looking back now on the 1979 season, as far as I’m concerned it could have just as well started and ended on Opening Day—which I missed because of the birth of my son Derek, the happiest moment of that year.
Mr. Steinbrenner took a couple of months to replace Rosen before finally settling on Gene Michael—“the Stick”—as his new GM. After retiring as a player in 1976, Stick was hired by Mr. Steinbrenner as a scout and then, in 1979, managed our Triple-A farm team in Columbus. Looking back, I’m not surprised Mr. Steinbrenner chose to make Stick, who had no front-office experience, his GM. Stick—a rangy, excellent defensive shortstop in his playing days who couldn’t hit a breaking ball to save his life—was a guy who knew baseball and was an excellent judge of talent. His evaluations of players, both the ones he managed at Columbus or scouted before that, were most often spot on, and Mr. Steinbrenner recognized that. Something that was not so well known about him was his skill as a gin player, with which he made hundreds of extra dollars during the season from Yankees personnel patsies. I learned early on to avoid those late-night card games on the road in which Stick was one of the participants.
Stick had barely been in the GM job a couple of weeks when Billy had his latest off-the-field imbroglio in Minnesota, and at first Mr. Steinbrenner wanted him to take over as manager. But he was finally able to convince the Boss he should remain as GM and hired Dick Howser, our former third base coach who had left to become the head baseball coach at Florida State, to replace Billy. After that, Stick set about making over the team, post-Thurman and post-Catfish, with a series of inspired trades and free-agent signings. To replace Thurman, he traded Chris Chambliss to the Blue Jays for catcher Rick Cerone and a left-handed starter, Tommy Underwood, and off the free-agent market he signed Bob “the Bull” Watson, for first base, plus lefty Rudy May and the old Red Sox graybeard Luis Tiant for the pitching staff. With Watson hitting .307 with 13 homers as the right-handed platoon first baseman, Cerone hitting a career-high 14 homers behind the plate, and May and Underwood combining for 28 wins, we rebounded by winning 103 games in 1980, beating out Weaver’s Orioles by three games for the AL East title.
From a personal standpoint, however, the 1980 season was not as enjoyable as it should have been. Much as I had looked forward to playing for Howser—whom we called “Baby Dome” because of the size of his head—I sensed early on that my playing time was going to be curtailed considerably when I didn’t get a whole lot of spring at-bats. Neither did Murcer, and as we bided so much time on the bench when we felt we should be playing, we gave Howser a rough time. It didn’t matter that the rest of the players were getting the job done; we were both players in our late thirties, closer to the end of our careers, and we saw it slipping away right before our eyes. Before a long road trip in August, Howser called me into his office and said, “You’ve given me a hard time all year but you’ve got experience and I’m going to give you a chance to play if you think you can get it done.”
“Damn straight,” I said, and from August 15 to September 5, I started almost every game and lifted my average from .261 to .310. But then Howser called me in and said, “You look tired and look like you could use a day off.” I agreed, but inexplicably one day off turned out to be just three starts over the better part of three weeks. Things came to a head in a September game in Toronto in which I’d gone in to play left field late in the game. It was a cold and foggy night in old Exhibition Stadium and Yogi was in charge of positioning the outfielders, but I couldn’t see him. I could only hear someone yelling, and I finally just gave him a hand wave as if to say “leave me alone.” When I got back to the dugout, Howser came up to me and said, “I didn’t appreciate the way you showed up Yogi out there.” When I protested that I couldn’t see anything in the fog and got a little testy with him, he said, “Why don’t you just brick it.”
We were on the bus to the airport and I was telling Nettles about what transpired with me and Howser and asked him what “brick it” meant. “It means, why don’t you just go home,” he said.
Now I was really pissed. On the plane ride to Boston, I went up to the front and confronted Howser, who told me to see him later in his suite at the hotel. When I got up to Howser’s suite he was sitting there with our pitching coach—Stan “the Steamer” Williams—who also served as his enforcer.
“Just so you know,” Howser told me, “from now on I’m gonna platoon you.” (I’m thinking, “This is my reward?”) “And if you’re not happy about that,” Howser continued, “I suggest you demand a trade and get the hell out.”
Looking back, I can understand why Howser took that stance with me. He was a first-year manager who’d done a heck of a job keeping the team in first place for nearly the entire season despite constant criticism and barbs from Mr. Steinbrenner—and I’m sure he viewed Murcer and myself as Mr. Steinbrenner’s boys, who weren’t being team players and making his job even more difficult.
The otherwise rejuvenating 1980 season came to a screeching and shocking end when we were swept in the ALCS by the Royals. We were a much better team than Kansas City, but nothing went right for us—most notably the play in the eighth inning of our 3–2 game 2 loss in which Willie Randolph was thrown out at the plate attempting to score on Watson’s two-out double only because George Brett was in perfect position to catch Royals’ left fielder Willie Wilson’s overthrow of the relay man. Not long after, Mr. Steinbrenner took out his wrath by firing our third base coach, Mike Ferraro—which proved to be the last straw for Howser, who resigned as manager a few days later. At the press conference in Mr. Steinbrenner’s office in Yankee Stadium, it was announced that Stick would be moving down from the front office to become manager.
Toward the end of the press conference, Howser was asked by the writers if he had any advice for Stick, who was about to become Mr. Steinbrenner’s sixth manager—not including Billy twice—in nine years.
“Yeah,” he said, “have a strong stomach and a long contract.”
Words to remember.
I had always liked Howser when he was a coach. We kidded around a lot and periodically had drinks together on the road. But when he became a manager the relationship changed, and, looking back, I learned something from that. He had his reasons for doi
ng what he did with me, and he won the most games of any Yankee manager since 1963. But when it happens to you, losing playing time for no good reason, you don’t like it, and I was thirty-seven then and wondering what was going to happen to me. That’s when Mr. Steinbrenner called and told me he wanted me back.
With Stick as the manager—a guy we knew Mr. Steinbrenner liked and respected—and the addition of Dave Winfield, the premier player on the free-agent market, whom Mr. Steinbrenner signed to a monster ten-year, $23 million contract, I had high hopes about the 1981 season. But while we did manage to get back to the World Series, it was another season fraught with turmoil, starting with the two-month players’ strike that resulted in the cancellation of 713 games from June 12 to August 9. Once the strike was settled, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn announced a split-season format to determine the postseason, with all the teams in first place on June 12—one of which was us—automatically qualified for the postseason. That should have put Stick in good stead with Mr. Steinbrenner, but we were a veteran team, and after the long layoff it took some time for us to get on track again. Too much time.
As we struggled out of the second-half gate, losing 10 of our first 16 games in August, Stick was hearing it every day from Mr. Steinbrenner until finally losing it on August 28 in Chicago, when he told the writers he was tired of being threatened. “If George wants to fire me he should just go ahead and do it,” he declared. I cringed when I heard that, knowing there was no way out once you challenged the Boss in public, and sure enough, on September 6, Mr. Steinbrenner dropped the ax on Stick and brought old reliable Bob Lemon out of the bullpen to manage the team for the rest of the season.