Lou

by Lou Piniella

  “At the same time, we stirred it up with him. I’d walk by his office and say, ‘Anything wrong, Skip? You ain’t been ejected in a while.’ We had many laughs with him, like the time he kicked the watercooler in the dugout and really hurt his toe. They had to remove his toenail and the toe was all purple and bleeding. Then they had to cut the top of his shoe off so it could breathe. Every day, I’d say, ‘How’s that air-conditioned shoe, Skip?’ But the funniest one was after a game in Oakland. We were playing lousy and Lou starts reading the riot act. He says, ‘In times like this you have to man up to adversity and stay united. But you guys are like soft shit in the rain. You know what that is?’ And then he like makes the ‘safe’ sign, blows in his hands to make this loud ploof noise, and says, ‘All squishy like that!’ I looked at Buhner and the both of us just burst out laughing, which really pissed him off. The next day I said to him, ‘Soft shit in the rain! That was a good one, Skip.’”

  For all the talk of Junior coming up on free agency in 2001 and the enormous amount of money it was going to take to retain him, after we traded Randy I never thought the Mariners would trade him too. I always believed they would sign him long term and he’d be a Mariner for life. But in early November, when he rejected the Mariners’ initial offer of eight years, $138 million, and expressed a desire to play closer to his home and family in Orlando, I knew I would soon be saying good-bye to another one of my star players. It wasn’t a matter of the Mariners coming up with the money to sign him. Junior wanted to go.

  “When I got there, one of the first things I did was to go down to Orlando, with Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong, to talk to Kenny,” said Gillick. “I told him we didn’t want to trade him, that we were building the team back up and aiming to go to the World Series, and didn’t he want to be part of that? But he said, ‘Nope, I want to move on.’

  “I firmly believe the reason he wanted to move on was A-Rod. He didn’t want to share the spotlight with him, even though he was the more popular player in Seattle, who’d won an MVP award in ’97 and had led the American League in homers the previous three years.”

  I’m not sure if that was the main factor. If you ask me, I believe Junior’s overriding reason for wanting to leave was geography. His family was growing up and he wanted to get closer to Florida. I do know he didn’t want to leave his teammates, like Buhner and Edgar. The problem Pat had was that there were only a limited number of teams with the resources to sign Junior once they traded for him. And then Junior made it even harder by rejecting a deal Pat had with the Mets—which would have netted us a base-stealing center fielder, Roger Cedeno, and two hard-throwing relievers, Armando Benitez and Octavio Dotel. Instead, he now declared the only team to which he would approve a trade was the Reds.

  I had grown very close to Junior in the eight years I’d been with him. He was a great young player who became a superstar talent. He was also hardheaded and wanted to do things his own way, and from time to time I would have to have a conversation about that. I had a way of handling those talks. I would call him into my office and tell him to sit behind my desk, as if he were me, and I would sit in the chair facing the desk and play the role of him. I would then say to him, “Okay, Junior, you’re the manager and you’d like to have Junior conform to what all the other players on the team are being asked to do. How would you answer that question?” He would answer right away and then we’d switch chairs and we wouldn’t have a problem. I did that a few times with him and we’d have a chuckle over it. It’s how we became very close.

  “Being that I was playing both him and me, it went well,” Junior later said.

  Junior also had a great sense of humor and was the clubhouse prankster. One time we had a bet in spring training on March Madness for a steak dinner, which I won. After a couple of days had gone by, I asked, “Where’s my steak?”

  Junior replied, “Don’t worry, it’s coming.”

  An hour later, I came back off the field in Peoria and there in my office was this big old cow! Everyone got a big laugh out of that, except when I looked around the office I saw where the cow, like Schottzie in Cincinnati, had dumped all over the floor.

  They still talk about the time, in 1994, when Alex was a nineteen-year-old rookie and Junior talked him into auctioning off his sperm to the highest bidder. At the time, I was totally unaware of this caper and learned about it only years later. As the story was reported, Junior told Alex that Randy and Buhner were going to auction their sperm off, and that he should, too, because he had great genes. The more Junior went on about it, the more Alex started believing him, finally asking, “How much do you think we could make?”

  Junior. What a prankster.

  There’s no question there was a clubhouse rivalry between Junior and Alex—they were never particularly close—but it was never anything that had any undercurrents in the clubhouse. They both had egos and, in effect, competed against each other. And even though Junior had also made no secret of his disappointment at the ownership’s trading of Randy and Tino, I truly believe that the overriding factor in his desire to leave was that his kids were growing up, he’d bought the house in Orlando, and Seattle was just too far away. I could certainly relate to that. I do know this: nobody was more affected by Junior’s departure than Buhner. They were the closest of friends, center fielder and right fielder, and almost inseparable. Shortly after the trade, Jay said he wanted to retire. Fortunately I was able to talk him out of that, and he rewarded me by rebounding from two previous subpar seasons with 26 homers and 82 RBI in a part-time role in 2000.

  What was truly amazing was Gillick’s ability to get a very decent package back from Cincinnati, the only team Junior would let him talk to. In return for the best player in baseball, Gillick got center fielder Mike Cameron, a serviceable right-handed reliever in Brett Tomko, and a highly regarded Dominican third base prospect, Antonio Perez. I’d remembered seeing Cameron when he broke in with the White Sox in the mid ’90s. He was very athletic, played the right way, and had average power and good speed. His only negative was he struck out too much. One day in Chicago, I was talking to my good friend Hawk Harrelson, who was now the White Sox’s broadcaster, and telling him that I really liked Cameron and that I thought I could help him with his hitting. Hawk had Cameron call me, and that winter Cameron even flew down to Tampa to work with me. While Cameron would never be confused with Junior, he was an excellent defensive center fielder who became a real force for the Mariners over the next four years, averaging 22 homers and 86 RBI.

  Once he had Griffey traded, Gillick set about doing what he did best—putting together a championship-caliber team. The 40-plus homers, 120-plus RBI? That was almost impossible to replace. Instead, he filled in all around the places where we were lacking in 1999. From the free-agent market, he signed John Olerud, a professional hitter and superb defensive first baseman whom he’d originally drafted and signed in Toronto; Mark McLemore, a speedy handyman who could play almost any position; and Arthur Rhodes, one of the most proficient left-handed relievers in the game.

  We still needed a closer, however. Jose Mesa, my closer in ’99, had done a creditable job, saving 33 games, but too many of them had been high-wire acts. In talking to our scouts in Japan and our Pacific Rim operations director, Jim Colborn, Pat got some interesting reports on a thirty-two-year-old right-hander, Kazuhiro Sasaki, who’d had an ERA of around 1.00 the previous three years in Japan and was said to have a deadly split-finger pitch. We signed Sasaki and brought him into spring training to compete with Mesa for the job. It reminded me a little of 1978 when the Yankees signed Goose and had him compete with Sparky, who’d only won the Cy Young Award as our closer the year before. Mesa was just as jealous as Sparky was.

  “I don’t like this,” Mesa told me one day early in the spring. “Dammit, I did a good job for you last year!”

  I could understand his bitterness, but once he saw Sasaki, he realized Colborn and our Japan scouts were not wrong. Sasaki wound up saving 37 games in 2000 and af
ter the season broke my record as the oldest player to win Rookie of the Year honors.

  Sasaki, Rhodes, Mesa, Tomko, and Jose Paniagua, a hard-throwing Dominican right-hander we’d acquired off waivers from Tampa a couple of years earlier, gave me the deepest, most effective bullpen I’d had in Seattle. You could say, however, that the entire staff showed great improvement in 2000, and for that I have to give credit to Bryan Price, whom we promoted to pitching coach after he’d spent ten seasons working in our minor-league system. Before Bryan, I had been criticized by some people in the Seattle media for being too hard on young pitchers and pitching coaches. But I had nothing to do with the dismissal of the four previous pitching coaches, and if you look at my history, I gave more opportunities to young pitchers than anyone else did. But it’s always been my contention that if you want to win in the majors, your pitchers have to be tough and throw strikes. When a starting pitcher starts nibbling and not pitching in the strike zone, that’s a formula for losing. You can either coddle young pitchers or react. I reacted. I loved giving young pitchers chances, but you still want to see performance. I got paid to win. If I just tolerated mediocrity, I wasn’t doing my job.

  Nevertheless, after sitting down with Bryan and listening to his philosophy on pitching and realizing it was the same as mine, I told him in spring training, “You know the system. The pitching staff is yours. Do with it what you want.” The result was an improvement in team ERA from 5.24 in ’99 to 4.49, second in the league in 2000, and in 2001 an American League best of 3.54.

  Despite our greatly improved pitching, our numbers one and two, Jamie Moyer and Freddy Garcia, missed significant time with injuries in 2000. As a result, after leading the division from June 29 to September 28, we were unable to hold off a scorching Oakland team that won 18 of their last 22 games, and we had to settle for the wild card. I was still greatly buoyed about our chances of going to the World Series when we swept the White Sox in the AL Division Series. I was especially pleased at how we won the final game—on a ninth-inning squeeze bunt.

  The score was 1–1, with one out and Rickey Henderson (whom Gillick had signed in May as outfield insurance) on third base, and Carlos Guillen, pinch-hitting for my catcher, Joe Oliver, at bat. I told Guillen in the dugout, “I’m going to pinch-hit you here, but all I want you to do is lay one down to Frank Thomas at first base.” I knew Thomas couldn’t throw, and with Rickey’s speed, he could score easily on a good bunt. So what happens? Guillen swings away at the first pitch! Fortunately on the next pitch he got the bunt down and it eluded Thomas as Rickey crossed the plate. After the game, I asked Guillen what the hell happened on that first pitch.

  “I’m sorry, Skip,” he said. “I just got caught up in the moment.”

  Because the Yankees were extended to five games before they were able to win their division series with the A’s, we had three days of rest in Seattle, which should have been a good thing—except the day before he was supposed to fly to New York to be our game 1 starter in the ALCS, Moyer was hit by a line drive in the knee on his final pitch of a simulated game. Just before, Jamie had asked to pitch to a couple more batters without the protective screen. I wasn’t comfortable about that, but I take full responsibility. It was a devastating loss. Jamie, the master of illusion, had pitched well against the Yankees with all their big left-handed bats. My lineup was as good as Joe Torre’s, but without Jamie, we were one ace short against the Yankees’ formidable trio of Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez in the ALCS.

  I suppose the one thing that will be forever remembered about our 9–7 loss in the final game of the ALCS in New York was the monster three-run homer David Justice hit off my lefty setup man Arthur Rhodes in the seventh inning. The homer, which caromed off the upper-deck facade in right field, touched off a six-run Yankees rally and broke our backs. On the pitch before, it looked to me (along with a whole lot of other people) that Justice had swung, which would have made the count 2-2, but John Hirschbeck, the home plate umpire, ruled he checked his swing. As I said at the time, it was a huge call, in that Rhodes now had to throw a 3-1 fastball instead of a 2-2 slider. Such are the breaks of the game. It was just too bad, because afterward I would have much preferred to be talking more about the great night Alex had. Starting with doubling home our first run in the first, Alex went 4-for-5 with a homer, 2 doubles, 2 RBI, and 2 runs scored.

  It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I came to realize this had been his good-bye to me.

  CHAPTER 12

  Rising Sun, Setting Sun

  Only a couple of days after the loss to the Yankees in the 2000 ALCS, the Mariners’ high command of Howard Lincoln, John Ellis, Chuck Armstrong, and Pat Gillick had redirected their attention to a matter of pressing importance to the future of the franchise: Alex Rodriguez’s pending free agency. Despite the constant speculation in the press, it was something I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought about during the 2000 season, primarily because I couldn’t conceive of the Mariners ever letting Alex leave, especially after having had to trade both Randy Johnson and Junior.

  Alex was now the face of the franchise. I’d had him for seven seasons, “raised” him, if you will, from when he was a nineteen-year-old summoned to the big leagues in 1994, barely eleven months after being the number one overall pick in the amateur draft out of high school, and I’d watched him quickly grow into a superstar of unlimited greatness. I never imagined that greatness being achieved anywhere else but in Seattle. I still felt that way when Pat, Howard, John, Chuck, and I went to the December winter meetings in Dallas and prepared to make our pitch to Alex and his agent, Scott Boras. I especially hoped to talk personally to Alex.

  Pat and the others had informed me that they were prepared to offer Alex a six-year deal worth $120 million. I felt very comfortable with that. It was a helluva commitment. But when Boras arrived at our suite, without Alex, I immediately felt uneasy. There was very little small talk. Boras got right to the point and wanted to know what our offer was. When Pat presented it to him, Boras said simply, “Okay, thanks. You’re not even close,” and walked out the door. That was it. Not even a counteroffer. We were astounded. We didn’t know if he was bluffing or if he really meant it.

  The next day we found out he wasn’t at all bluffing. We knew the Texas Rangers were heavy in the bidding for Alex, but like everyone else in baseball, we were stupefied when their owner, Tom Hicks, announced he had signed Alex to a ten-year contract worth $252 million—more than double our offer. Until then, the richest contract in baseball history had been the eight-year, $121 million deal the left-hander Mike Hampton had gotten from the Colorado Rockies in 2001. When word of Alex’s contract spread around the winter meetings there was mostly outrage. Sandy Alderson, who was Major League Baseball’s head of operations, called the numbers “beyond alarming.” My friend Brian Sabean, the GM of the Giants, put it in even more perspective as far as Alex was concerned when he said, “All I know is, he better be pretty good for a long time. Just figure out the percentage that contract is going to be against their payroll now and in the future. It’s a lot to live up to.”

  As for us, I was shocked, while Pat was just disgusted.

  “When we lost Griffey and then A-Rod there was absolutely no pushback from Lou,” Gillick later said. “Griffey wanted to go, and with A-Rod, it wasn’t as if we didn’t do everything we could to keep him. We were willing to go to six years for one hundred and twenty million until Boras spit in my face. I knew we had no chance. Hicks was a new owner and the winter meetings were in Dallas and he wanted to walk away with the big trophy.”

  I wished I could have gotten the chance to talk to Alex personally. I couldn’t blame him for taking that offer. It was a business decision and Boras didn’t open the door any further for us, not that it would have mattered with an offer in hand more than double ours. I was almost as disappointed that Alex was staying in our division. The bottom line is, when you hire an agent, you’re telling him, “I’m gonna
play and you’re gonna handle the business,” and Boras was as good as any doing that.

  I did feel that if we’d gotten Alex in that room we could have convinced him to stay, but Boras came in alone, and once he took over, all the emotions went out of it. It became all business. I had grown much attached to Alex, and he had grown very close to me and Anita—to the point where he used to call her “Mom.” This was much more than just a player-manager relationship. Rather, it was more like father and son. I’d watched him grow. I was responsible for bringing him up the right way in baseball, teaching him the ropes. But there was no way he could’ve turned down that kind of money—twice as much as anyone else offered him. So now I had to watch him go. It was not unlike a parent sending his kid off to college, knowing he was on his own now. When Alex called me to say good-bye, it was a very painful conversation for both of us.

  “I called Lou right after I made my decision,” Alex said in an interview for this book. “I told him, ‘I’m gonna sign with Texas but I wanted to tell you first so you wouldn’t have to read it in the news.’ Obviously, it was a very sad day for me because playing for Lou, I was spoiled. I had great protection and he was a great mentor for me. There were tears on both sides. He was the only manager I’d ever had for six and a half years in the big leagues. In many ways I wish I’d had another five years under Lou’s tutelage and protection. But I don’t look at it in ‘what might have been’ terms anymore. Everything that’s happened in my life and career, good or bad, I look at myself in a much different light now. I’ve tried to learn from it and make the best of it. But Lou made me a better person and a better player.”