Said Steinbrenner, looking ahead to 1985, “With that lineup, we’ve got a team that should never be out of it. We’re now the favorites in the AL East. I could manage that team and not screw it up.”
Anyone paying attention knew the quote was a missile fired across Berra’s bow.
Spring training in 1985 was calm. The Yankees had acquired Yogi’s son, Dale, to be a utility infielder and perhaps platoon at third base with Pagliarulo. If there was a frequent story line out of Fort Lauderdale that spring, it was the unusual father-son combo now in Yankees pinstripes.
The Yankees had a host of new players besides Dale Berra and Henderson. There was the talkative and excitable pitcher Eddie Lee Whitson, who was signed as a free agent. Raised in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, he was not much prepared for the pressure or the culture shock of being a Yankee. He was so confused by the bridges and tunnels of the New York metropolitan area that teammates or a coach had to drive him from his house in New Jersey to Yankee Stadium. When he tried to drive himself, he ended up in Staten Island.
Joining Whitson was catcher Ron Hassey and a diverse team built around the powerhouse at the top of the batting order. But Henderson, Mattingly, and Winfield were all injured in spring training. The Yankees were not winning often in the exhibition games, and Steinbrenner felt the laid-back Berra was once again not enforcing enough discipline. Rumors began to circulate that another managerial term for Billy was forthcoming.
Billy was resting and, as it happened, getting tanned on assignment for the team in Arizona and California.
Still, Steinbrenner insisted that Berra would be the Yankees manager for the entire season—no matter what.
“Even if we get off to a bad start,” George said.
He had said the same thing three years earlier, then fired Bob Lemon fourteen games into the 1982 season.
The Yankees did not start the 1985 season well. First of all, Henderson was on the disabled list, still nursing an ankle he sprained three weeks earlier. The Yankees lost their first three games in Boston, getting outscored 29–11. Leaving Boston, Steinbrenner said, “Our pitching stinks.”
Then the Yankees went to Ohio, George’s home state, and were routed in an exhibition against the franchise’s AAA minor league affiliate from Columbus.
Steinbrenner was not pleased and blamed Yogi for letting his players take the minor leaguers lightly.
“I’ve been a coach,” George said. “You do that and it carries over. I’d like to see more discipline from them, but the owner can’t force the manager to do something he doesn’t want to.”
That wasn’t a shot across the bow. George was getting Yogi Berra in his range finder just three regular season games and one exhibition into the season.
The Yankees won their next four games but were lurching along with a 6–7 record. Then they lost three straight games in Chicago.
It was April 29, and the Yankees were 6–10 and in last place, 4.5 games behind the first-place Detroit Tigers, who had run away with the division with an early spurt the year before.
In the middle of the Yankees’ third and final game in Chicago, Steinbrenner called Billy. George asked Billy if he would take over for Berra. Billy happily agreed. He was already under contract but received a raise and a bonus. Billy flew to Texas, the Yankees’ next stop after Chicago.
The task of informing Berra of his dismissal was given to Clyde King, the Yankees’ general manager at the time. King entered Berra’s office after the game while Steinbrenner issued a statement that read: “This action has been taken by the Yankees, and we feel that it is in the best interests of the club. I would rather fire 25 players than to fire Yogi, but we all know that would be impossible.”
Berra did not open the door to his office after King left. In the clubhouse, Steinbrenner’s statement was distributed to the players. Baylor read it, turned, and kicked a garbage can across the room. Few players had much to say other than to express their sympathy for Berra.
Henderson said he was looking forward to seeing Billy again.
After about thirty minutes, Berra’s office door opened and his son, Dale, emerged with tears in his eyes. Yogi greeted reporters with a smile.
“I’m not in a very good mood,” he said. “But this is still a very good ball club, and they’re getting a good manager in Billy Martin. I don’t think my players laid down on me.”
Berra eventually walked around the clubhouse talking to the players. He encouraged them to play for Billy.
“He’s a good man,” Berra said. “It’s not his fault that Steinbrenner is the Yankees’ owner.”
Yogi and Billy remained friends, although their paths crossed less often since Yogi refused to return to Yankee Stadium for any occasion for more than fifteen years.
Billy greeted the 1985 Yankees at the Texas ballpark the following afternoon. Baylor explained to his new manager that his trash-can-kicking outburst in Chicago—which had received much play in the newspapers—was “because Yogi got fired, not because you were hired.”
Nonetheless, Billy did something he had never done before. He announced that he had a new coach, Willie Horton, Billy’s former slugger from the 1970s Detroit Tigers. Horton, a bull of a man with an imposing glare who had been a Golden Gloves boxing champion, was named the Yankees’ “tranquillity coach.”
Billy also made several batting order changes and informed the players of various new team rules, which included a prohibition against playing golf on the road. Jackets and ties were made mandatory for flights. Infielders had to report early during the next few games for additional drills on trick plays and how to handle certain baserunning situations. Billy also called a workout on an upcoming off day to go over pickoffs, rundowns, and special circumstances, like suicide squeeze bunts.
Billy then donned his road-gray Yankees uniform and went to the visitors’ dugout to pose for a picture. Facing the field with one leg up on a dugout step, Billy smiled and looked over his left shoulder, the familiar number 1 on his jersey in full view.
The photo would become the cover of Sports Illustrated the following week under the headline BILLY’S BACK.
Meeting with reporters afterward, Billy was definitely tanned and he appeared rested. He said he was relieved.
“I had to accept that I was let go after the ’83 season but deep down it hurt and I really missed it,” he said. “Thank God, I’m back. As I told somebody today, how long can you keep watering your garden?”
Playing as if shell-shocked, the Yankees lost their fourth successive game that evening. The besieged Yankees lost the next night, too. They were six games out of first place and had the worst record in Major League Baseball.
41
THE 1985 SEASON HAD brought a shift of power in the American League. The team to beat was the Toronto Blue Jays, a nascent squad with few weaknesses. The Blue Jays had the exuberance and fearlessness of youth and a versatile lineup that had grown up together through Toronto’s stocked farm system. The Blue Jays were what the Yankees became in the late 1990s with a core of players whose skills complemented each other. Toronto’s top three hitters, outfielders George Bell, Lloyd Mosley, and Jesse Barfield, were each just twenty-five years old in 1985 but had already been in the Major Leagues for four years. The Blue Jays’ slick-fielding shortstop, Tony Fernandez, was twenty-three. The starting rotation had four quality pitchers, and three of them were in their twenties.
The Blue Jays’ manager was the future Hall of Famer Bobby Cox, a Yankees infielder in the early 1970s. The Toronto general manager was the quiet and astute Pat Gillick, a one-time rising star in the Yankees’ front office who was part of the mass exodus from New York about six months after Steinbrenner took control of the team.
The Blue Jays were poised to go on a long, successful run in the American League, a winning streak that would last into the early 1990s when they won consecutive World Series.
But the 1985 Yankees were an imposing team, too. The patchwork pitching staff was yet to jell, and
a few injuries needed to heal, but what the team was waiting for was someone to jump-start Henderson, who remained the game’s most dynamic player even if he was yet to display any of that vitality for the Yankees.
The Yankees also had a promising if unproven left side of the infield in shortstop Bobby Meacham and Pagliarulo, the third baseman. Both lacked experience and desperately needed a mentor who would stand by them. Meacham and Pagliarulo had talent—Meacham had been the eighth overall selection of the 1981 amateur draft—but they did not have the support of the Yankees’ upper management, which was constantly trying to trade them for veteran, established players.
And Meacham and Pagliarulo knew it, which eroded their confidence.
As a scout who was part of those talks in 1984, Billy had advocated for both players and voted against trading them, especially Pagliarulo, who Billy insisted would become a feared left-handed power hitter.
Pagliarulo, who would end up hitting 94 home runs for the Yankees from 1985 to 1988, was Billy’s kind of player—a product of a tough, blue-collar neighborhood just north of Boston. Along with his best buddy on the team, Don Mattingly, Pagliarulo, known as “Pags,” loved to take hours of extra batting practice before games. Pagliarulo and Mattingly would beg a coach to come to the park early to throw extra batting practice before a night game.
“How early?” the coach would ask.
“About one.”
“One o’clock? But the game isn’t until 7:30.”
“OK, then 1:30,” Pags would say.
Meacham was a switch-hitting, laid-back Californian who played with a smooth efficiency. He had good range at shortstop, and the Yankees thought he could become a bottom-of-the-order slashing hitter who would hit about .260—something that happened only during two seasons for Meacham. But Meacham was fast on the bases and he was a good bunter. That made him Billy’s kind of player, too.
One or two days after Billy took over for Berra, he called Meacham and Pagliarulo into his office and told them they were his permanent left side of the infield. He was calling off the trade talk.
Most of the rest of the Yankees—veterans like Winfield, Baylor, Randolph, Griffey, Mattingly, and catcher Ron Hassey—did not need Billy’s private encouragement. But they apparently needed a jolt of passion and aggression from the manager in the dugout.
Led by Henderson, Meacham, Randolph, and Winfield—four players who had each stolen 25 bases or more in one season—the Yankees began to make the running game a part of their arsenal.
“Home runs are fine when they come but I want singles and walks—it’s on-base percentage that matters,” he said, echoing some of the Money Ball tenets to come forward years later. “Then we put pressure on the defense and see what happens.”
In Billy’s third game as the 1985 manager, the Yankees won 5–2 with five singles, five walks, and four stolen bases. A run scored when Henderson induced a balk from the opposing pitcher with a bluffed steal of home plate. Meacham was thrown out trying to steal home. Most of the Yankees thought he was safe.
“We surprised the umpire and he didn’t know what to call,” Mattingly said of the call at home plate. “I know we surprised the pitcher.”
It would be the first of five consecutive Yankees victories.
But when the Yankees returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time since Berra’s firing, Billy did not get his usual rousing welcome from the home fans. The comeback act was getting old, even for someone as popular as Billy. There was an overwhelming sympathy for how Berra had been ingloriously ditched so early in the season. Also, the indifferent performance of the Yankees since 1982 and the circuslike atmosphere Steinbrenner had created with seven managerial changes since 1980 had bred a burgeoning disgust with the team’s owner and his bombastic ways. The backlash against Steinbrenner’s Yankees was substantial, and there was now an alternative in town, too.
The 1985 New York Mets were an ascending, trendy other choice with a brash, energetic, stylish team. The Yankees were fighting for the back page of the tabloids even with Billy’s return. An announced attendance of just 20,603 greeted Billy on his first game back at Yankee Stadium on May 3. In fact, the actual crowd was several thousand fans fewer.
Billy was cheered as he brought the lineup card out before the game, but there was also a first for this kind of occasion: random booing. The ovation lasted only long enough for Billy to wave his cap once. In the past, the cheers had been sustained enough to ensure at least three or four waves of the cap. When Billy walked back to the dugout, the response was muted.
Billy was back in the Bronx, but it was no longer 1978.
The 1985 Yankees would do their best to bring the crowds back. In mid-May they won seven straight, improving their record under Billy to 12–5. They were now only 2.5 games behind first-place Toronto.
The mood around the Yankees quickly changed. There was loud music playing in the Yankees’ clubhouse after most games. On Billy’s fifty-seventh birthday, the Yankees won when Pagliarulo laid down a perfect suicide squeeze bunt to score Randolph from third base.
“We all know how to play aggressively,” Randolph said afterward. “Billy just gives you the green light to go do that. His confidence in those situations is contagious and we feed off of it.”
A couple of days later, Billy brought in the twenty-three-year-old reliever Brian Fisher to face Reggie Jackson with two runners on base in a tight game. Billy had called up Fisher from the Yankees’ minor leagues on his first day back as manager, and he had become Billy’s bullpen project, a setup man for closer Dave Righetti. Now Billy was testing the young right-hander’s 94-mile-an-hour fastball against the lefty-swinging Jackson. Fisher induced a tapper back to the mound that became a double play.
“Within a few weeks after he got there in 1985, I knew Billy was going to be a better manager than he was in 1983,” said Gene Michael, who was the third-base coach in 1985. “He was a little distracted in ’83, but in ’85 a lot of that off-the-field stuff was behind him. He looked better and was eating better.
“He was sharp during games and doing all his usual things—stealing the team’s signs, talking to the players a lot during the game. He watched the interaction of the opposing catcher and opposing manager and instinctively understood everything they were trying to do. Having been a middle infielder, he could watch their body language and know what they were planning. He was always one or two innings ahead of his opposing manager and that guy knew that, which got the opposing manager to start second-guessing himself. Billy had that edge. He hadn’t completely turned back the clock to 1977, but it was the old Billy in a lot of ways.”
Michael had been fired by Steinbrenner twice at this point and vowed never to manage for George again. Michael meant it and Billy knew it. That was like a badge of honor to Billy, so he welcomed Michael into his inner circle, which now also included Piniella, who had retired and was the hitting coach. The former player Bobby Murcer was a Yankees broadcaster, and Murcer was included in the group close to Billy (Art Fowler was not a coach in 1985).
The foursome spent a lot of time together, some of it on the golf course before games when they would pair off in teams and wager a couple of hundred dollars in best-ball matches.
There was a rule against players golfing, but it did not apply to coaches, managers, or broadcasters.
“The golfing was actually a strategy I dreamed up to get Billy out of the bars earlier,” Michael said. “You know, if nothing was planned for the next day, Billy might be more likely to stay up late drinking. But if we had a golf date the next morning, Billy would turn in early because Billy loved to compete at anything and he hated losing. If he was hung-over, he wouldn’t play well and he knew it.
“I think that really worked in 1985. We played a lot of golf because Billy could make a call and get on any golf course in the country. And Billy laughed a lot on the golf course. It relaxed him. That might have been when he had the most fun during the season. Baseball games were tense to him and he had trou
ble unwinding after games, too. But on the golf course, he was a funny guy. Although he would cheat a little to win. We used to kid him that his cheating at golf was the real Billy Ball.”
The Yankees’ longtime trainer Gene Monahan also felt that Billy had changed in 1985. He thought Billy had reestablished some measure of control over his life.
“Billy was a tough guy but he had a soft, compassionate side, and that year I think he was willing to show the players more of that other side of him,” Monahan said. “He was getting a little older. I think one of his best attributes was that he was very sentimental. He had a lot of empathy for people and he read people very well right from the start. Billy knew how to manage a game but he knew how to manage personalities, too.
“With the ’85 team, he had guys like Winfield and Randolph who didn’t need much from him. Billy would say, ‘You play hard every day and I’ll have your back.’ And he would do that. If Mr. Steinbrenner or an umpire went against one of those guys, he would fight to the death to protect them.
“But there were younger guys, like Pags, Meacham, or the rookie outfielder Dan Pasqua, who needed Billy and he was there for them. He would alternatively ride their ass and coddle them to get the most out of them. He was always very good around young people; he had an instinct about what to say. He’d have these half-hour conversations in a hotel lobby with a young player.
“He was the same way with a teenager or college kid he had just met. Here was this tough bastard and he’d be talking at length about their lives and their dreams. If it was a younger kid, he’d be sure to go to the kid’s parents and say, ‘That’s a great kid you got there.’” Ron Guidry said the 1985 team was also more pragmatic than Billy’s previous Yankees teams in 1983 and 1979.
“We were tired of losing,” Guidry said. “By 1985, it was more businesslike. We were like, ‘OK, Billy, we don’t care about the drama and all the other off-the-field stuff, just help us win. You do your job during the games and we’ll do ours.’”
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