Lou

by Lou Piniella

  In early August Randy began grousing every day about wanting to be traded. His locker was right outside my office, and I had finally heard enough of this when Hal McCoy of the Dayton Daily News asked me about the Myers trade talk. The door to my office was open, so I knew Myers could hear me when I responded rather emphatically to Hal: “Myers is paid to wear the uniform he’s wearing. He takes the checks, doesn’t he? Does it ever occur to him that nobody wants him? He needs to shut up and pitch when he’s asked to pitch. If not, he should just take the uniform off and go home! How’s that!”

  Remembering Dick Howser, I guess that was my way of telling Randy he could “brick it.”

  The ’91 season was frustrating for all of us. Besides the pitching, Eric Davis was plagued with leg problems all year, missing most of August, and had only four RBI in September and October when we were in the process of finishing up 10–23. My frustration hit the breaking point on August 3 when, in the bottom of the eighth inning, Billy Doran hit a solo home run for us just inside the foul pole to cut our deficit to the Giants to 7–4. Dutch Rennert, the first base umpire, had run all the way down the line to make the call, only to have the home plate umpire, Gary Darling, overrule him. I went a little berserk, screaming and kicking dirt at Darling, and after being ejected, I threw my hat at his feet and scooped up more dirt and buried it. I was already upset with Darling from the day before when he ruled a foul dribbler by the Giants’ Willie McGee—which McGee didn’t even run out—a fair ball that knocked in a run in a 5–4 loss for us. But it was what I said about Darling the next day to the writers, when I was still steaming, that really got me in trouble:

  If I had a shovel, I would have dug up home plate and thrown it at him. He has a bias against the Reds. All year we’ve never gotten a call from him and I don’t think we’ll get a call from him. He should be professional enough, if he doesn’t like us for whatever reason, to at least call a good game.

  Well, that sure did it. A couple of days later I got a registered letter from Richie Phillips, the head of the umpires’ union, informing me that I was going to be sued for $5 million by Darling, who contended that my remarks had severely damaged his reputation. I went to Marge and showed her the letter and asked if she could help. I pointed out that I had done this in defense of the team, and her response was, “Honey, this is your problem. You got to protect yourself. Have fun in New York.” I never forgot that. This was the reward I got? It wound up costing me $120,000 in legal fees and fines. That winter, I was sitting at home in Allendale when Bill White, the National League’s president, called me and said, “Let’s get this resolved.”

  Needless to say, it had been weighing heavily on me. In a meeting with White and Phillips, without any lawyers, we reached a settlement in Fay Vincent’s office in which I agreed to make a contribution to a fund for indigent umpires, perform some charity work for the umpires, and issue a public apology to Darling. I went to Marge again to see if she would help me, and again she said, “No, this is your problem.” She was right. I was the one who had created the problem, but the club should have backed me. When I told this to Bill White, he said, “Let me handle this,” and a couple of weeks later I got a check for half the amount.

  I’ll always be grateful to Bill, a real baseball man, for the way he handled that situation.

  At the end of the ’91 season Myers came to me and asked me what my plans were for him.

  “My plans are to trade you for a leadoff hitter,” I said honestly, which we did. On December 8, we traded Randy to the Padres for Bip Roberts, the 5′7″, 165-pound “speed flea” who went on to hit .323 with 44 stolen bases for the Reds in ’92.

  There wasn’t much of a big deal made of my verbal clash with Randy, other than it was a typical situation in which a struggling, prideful player is unhappy about being demoted or benched and the manager has to do what’s best for the team. That was not the case, however, the following year when I got into a truly ugly and regrettable violent confrontation with my other Nasty Boy Rob Dibble. On September 17, we were in an increasingly difficult pursuit of Bobby Cox’s first-place Braves when I used four relievers—none of them Dibble, who was now my closer—to preserve a 3–2 win over them. After the game, the reporters asked me why I hadn’t used Dibble and I explained to them that he had been complaining of a stiff shoulder and I didn’t want to take a chance with him. During the course of the game I’d had Larry Rothschild check three times with Dibble to see if he was available and he’d repeatedly said no. But after the reporters left my office and asked Dibble if his shoulder was in fact the reason he wasn’t called into the game, he responded, “The manager is a liar.”

  When Hal McCoy reported that to me, I lost my head. I raced out of my office and confronted Dibble and the next thing I knew the two of us were grappling on the clubhouse floor, punching and screaming, right in front of the TV cameras and all the media. Fortunately, Tim Belcher, one of my other pitchers, broke it up before either one of us was seriously hurt. It’s something I regret to this day. As a manager, I should’ve had more control over my emotions, but I didn’t appreciate being called a liar.

  The next day, Rob and I talked it out, and today we are the best of friends. I’d like to say right here that those Nasty Boys—Rob, Randy, and Charlton—were three of the greatest competitors I ever managed. I loved those three guys. I loved guys who put it on the line every time out, and they did.

  I will say this about Belcher, too: I’m forever grateful to him for saving me from getting my ass kicked by Dibble! We had acquired him (not as a bodyguard) the previous November in one of the most difficult trades I ever had a part in—for Eric Davis. God knows, I hated to trade Eric, who was one of my favorite players of all time—a five-tool guy who always had a smile on his face. Every once in a while I enjoyed having a brandy with him. But Eric’s body was breaking down from all those games on Riverfront Stadium’s artificial turf and we desperately needed another proven frontline starting pitcher behind Rijo and Browning. So we sent Eric to the Dodgers for Belcher (who was 10–9 with a 2.62 ERA in 209⅓ innings in ’91) and a minor-league right-hander named John Wetteland, on whom we had great reports from Jimmy Stewart.

  A week later, at the winter meetings in Miami Beach, we felt most of our off-season business was done, but Dan Duquette, the general manager of the Expos, kept showing up at our suite every morning—unannounced—asking us about Wetteland. Finally, on the last day, Bob Quinn noted that, in Davey Martinez, a .275 hitter with a little power and speed, Duquette had a center fielder who could help replace Davis for us. At the same time, our assistant GM, Jim Bowden, said he loved this third base prospect in the Expos’ system, Willie Greene. So after much discussion we finally gave in to Duquette and traded him Wetteland for Martinez, Greene, and another righty reliever, Scott Ruskin. For us, Greene was the key to the deal off Bowden’s high recommendation.

  I remember that within a one-week period in late August and early September, Wetteland made four appearances against us and absolutely threw the hell out of the ball, and I said to Quinn, “That Willie Greene better be a helluva player for us or else Dan Duquette really fleeced us!” Wetteland wound up closing for the Expos in his first year with them, saving 37 games, and he later went on to be one of the preeminent closers in baseball with the Yankees. As for Greene, he had a couple of good years for the Reds in ’97 and ’98, long after I was gone, but was plagued by injuries most of his career.

  We made a good run at Bobby Cox’s Braves in ’92 and were in first place as late as August 1, but we suffered two devastating injuries. Sabo, who’d hit 51 homers the two previous seasons, sprained his ankle in the second game of the season and wasn’t the same all year, and on July 1, Browning blew out his knee, and we were never able to adequately replace him. We were a half game behind the Braves coming into Atlanta, August 1, for a three-game series and had a 5–2 lead in the eighth inning when they scored five runs off Charlton. The Braves went on to sweep the series and, unlike 1990, we were
never able to recover. Still, I was proud of the way we played at the end, winning 9 of 11 from September 17 to 27, but the Braves, who were up by 10½ games on September 13, were just too far ahead to be caught.

  On a stifling hot day at the end of September, we were posing for the team picture in the outfield at Riverfront Stadium. It was 100 degrees on the field, with no ventilation, and I noticed this air-conditioned truck, with a closed back, pulling out onto the field. Browning was standing there on crutches and I said to myself, “How nice of Marge to bring a truck to take Browning out to the photo shoot”—which was 425 feet away in deep center field. Except that wasn’t what the truck was for. Inside the truck was Schottzie, nice and cool, and poor Browning had to hobble by himself all the way to where we were taking the picture. Then Marge decided it would be cute if Schottzie sat on my lap for the picture, and all of a sudden this enormous Saint Bernard was slobbering all over my face in the 100-degree heat. That was enough.

  Even though Marge and I had agreed we would not talk about a new contract until after the season, I had pretty much made up my mind I was not coming back. I was tired of the “doggie grams” and still harboring resentment over her complete lack of support in the Darling situation. But I still loved Cincinnati and its great fans, and a part of me still wanted to stay. So when Marge called and asked me to meet her at Riverfront Stadium to discuss a new contract I agreed. But soon after I got there, she said disparagingly, “I don’t want to discuss this here around all these staff people” and said we’d have our meeting at the Cincinnati Club downtown.

  That really rubbed me the wrong way. I hated the dismissive way Marge treated her employees and was aware of the fact that she was about to fire Quinn, whom she never appreciated or respected. When we got to the Cincinnati Club, she had her attorney there and we started talking about a two-to three-year extension at $800,000 a year, which I thought was very fair. But then I kept thinking about all that had upset me with her and the fact that Quinn wasn’t going to be there, and I just blurted out, “Thank you for the opportunity here, Marge, but it’s time for me to go home. I don’t want the extension.”

  Marge just looked at me, flabbergasted, but said nothing. I got up, gave her a hug, walked out, and that was the last time I ever had any communication with her.

  When I got back to the apartment, Anita had the car totally packed, and I said to myself, “What did I just do?” Anita was very upset and so were the kids. We’d all loved Cincinnati, and on the drive home to New Jersey, through the beautiful foliage of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, I could not stop myself from periodically welling up with tears.

  CHAPTER 10

  Saving in Seattle

  I had no intention of working in baseball for the 1993 season.

  When I got home to Allendale from Cincinnati I knew I was going to need time to resolve all my financial issues. I needed to sell my restaurants and divest myself from a condominium project in Connecticut I’d invested in. I also had decided to take the year to personally manage the automobile dealership in Ossining to try and get it profitable again.

  I’d been home for only a couple of weeks after the World Series, when, out of the clear blue sky, I got a call from Woody Woodward, who had gone west to become GM of the Seattle Mariners in July of ’88 after barely a year and a half with the Phillies.

  “When I took over the Mariners in ’88, I told ownership there was only one man I wanted as my manager and that was Lou, who had just signed that personal-services contract with George Steinbrenner,” Woody recalled in 2016. “Lou flew out and we had this really nice meeting with George Argyros, the Mariners’ owner at the time, but after talking it over with Anita, he turned us down, saying it was just too far from Tampa. It was very disappointing. But now, in ’93, the circumstances were a little different. Lou needed to work, and even though the media on the East Coast and a lot of his friends told him baseball could never work in the Northwest, I realized this also represented a real challenge for him.”

  When Woody called and asked me to come out and meet the new Mariners owners, I told him I’d be happy to but it would still be a waste of time. Seattle was so far away and I had so much stuff to deal with. Plus, I was planning to move back to Tampa, even farther away. But Woody was persistent. He said, “Just do me a favor and come out and meet with these people.” In 1992 Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo, had bought a 49 percent share of the Mariners, a move that had saved the team from being moved to Tampa. And in John Ellis, the managing general partner, and Chuck Armstrong, the team president, whom I already knew, Woody felt he had two very personable and convincing people who might be able to change my mind.

  So even though it was Woody who owed me a favor when I agreed to be the Yankees’ GM so he could escape to the Phillies back in ’87, I said okay to going out to Seattle, where he’d arranged a dinner meeting at the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge, overlooking this spectacular waterfall about thirty miles from downtown. I have to say that was the first time I’d ever been taken to dinner by a baseball owner. Ellis, Armstrong, Howard Lincoln (the former chairman of Nintendo), and three or four of the minority partners were there, and we had a great time, with a lot of laughs, until the minority owners started peppering me with questions about how I managed. That’s when Ellis cut them off. I found it rather amusing, but he was afraid they’d start to aggravate me with all their ideas of how to run the team. I already knew Armstrong was a great guy and now I’d gotten to know that Ellis was likewise, and while no offers were made, I flew home feeling a little less firm in my convictions about not managing in 1993.

  The next day, Woody called to thank me for coming out and asked me what I thought of the meeting. I told him I really liked all the people there, especially his bosses, but that, frankly, all of my friends, both in and out of baseball, had said Seattle was a dead-end place. In their sixteen years of existence since 1977, the Mariners had had only one winning season, and they were stuck with a horrible stadium situation. The Kingdome was a dreary, deteriorating facility with particularly hard artificial turf and a lot of overhead wires and structures that periodically obstructed fly balls. The Mariners had sustained over $50 million in losses the previous two years because of the lack of revenue from skyboxes and luxury suites. For years, the Mariners had attempted to get funding for a new baseball-only stadium, only to have the state legislature and taxpayers continually vote it down. “Baseball is slowly dying there,” my friends all told me. “Why would you ever consider going there?”

  Woody listened patiently as I recited all the reasons why I’d be better off just sitting out the ’93 season than going to Seattle, and then said, “Okay, Lou, I hear you, but this is precisely why I want you as my manager here.” He told me to think about it and we hung up. One thing I had noticed, however, in our conversations: Woody had learned a lot from Mr. Steinbrenner in the time he worked for the Yankees. When Mr. Steinbrenner wanted something, he could really turn on the charm and Woody, I saw, had adopted a lot of that smoothness. A day later, he called me again and this time he had Ellis and Armstrong on the phone with him.

  “I’m gonna be honest with you, Lou,” he said. “You are our first and only choice for our manager.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said, “but I still just don’t think it’s possible.”

  At that point, Ellis jumped in.

  “I don’t understand, Lou,” he said, “are you scared of this situation?”

  “Well,” I said, “they did have the second-most losses of any team in baseball last year.”

  “This is a great challenge for you, Lou,” Ellis countered, “and I know you love challenges.”

  John was very convincing. “Let me think about this,” I said again.

  But when I talked it over with Anita, she almost freaked out. “No, no, no!” she said. “You can’t do this! It’s all the way across the country. All your friends have told you that you can’t succeed there!”

  “That’s the lure of the job for
me,” I said. “This is a real challenge. But it’s a young team, with a superstar player in Ken Griffey Jr. I really believe the situation can be turned around.”

  Probably if I didn’t need the money and had an actual income to help me turn around my financial situation, Anita would have prevailed. But we both knew it was going to be tough sledding if I didn’t have a regular income in ’93. I called Woody back and told him I’d take the job. We’d never discussed money or a length of contract but we quickly agreed on a three-year deal for $800,000 a year, along with an attendance clause of $50,000 if we drew more than 1.2 million, and a fourth-year team option for another $800,000. Once again, I didn’t have an agent and I should have said I wanted $800, $900, and $1 million. Still, I was now one of the highest-paid managers in the game, and even though I didn’t do a very good job of negotiating, what made it easy was my relationship with Woody. I loved working with Woody. He had a great way with people, he knew baseball, and I was confident we could turn the Seattle situation around.

  I was able to bring in four of my coaches from the Reds—Sammy Perlozzo for third base, John McLaren for the bullpen, Lee Elia for my bench coach, and Sammy Ellis as my pitching coach. We also hired Sammy Mejias, a Dominican-born former outfielder with the Reds, Cubs, and Expos, for first base, and he turned out to be about the best outfield coach I ever had. As I told the writers at the press conference announcing the coaching staff, “I brought everyone over from Cincinnati with me except Schottzie!”