by Marty Appel
Then came a big trade three weeks into the season that brought Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow to the Yankees, as they bade farewell to “half our pitching staff,” as Munson said. Munson was not happy about the deal, in which Peterson, Steve Kline, Tom Buskey, and Fred Beene went to the Indians, but Paul certainly knew what he was getting in Chambliss and Tidrow.
Chambliss, twenty-five, a soft-spoken son of a navy chaplain and a star at UCLA, replaced Mike Hegan at first base. Piniella, Munson, and Chambliss had been Rookies of the Year from 1969 to 1971 and were now all in the Yankee lineup. Tidrow, with a fierce mustache and the nickname “Dirt,”21 could start or relieve, and would prove to be a key addition.
The team got a lift on July 8 when Sandy Alomar was purchased from the Angels, bringing the Horace Clarke Era to a close. For nearly ten years, Clarke had been a fixture in the lineup. If for no other reason than “need for a change,” the arrival of Alomar was welcomed.22
On May 26, Virdon decided to put slick-fielding Elliott Maddox in center field, moving Murcer to right. Maddox, obtained from Texas during spring training, came from East Orange, New Jersey, and had studied prelaw at Michigan. He was studying for conversion to Judaism. Virdon was certainly one to appreciate the value of a top defensive player in center—he had been one himself.
This didn’t sit well with Bobby, a Gold Glove winner two years earlier, but it was a move Virdon made without much procrastination. It just made sense to him, even though “center field, New York Yankees” had so much history behind it. That wasn’t a big deal to Virdon. To him, Maddox was just a better option. And when Maddox took advantage of everyday play and hit .303, it was hard to argue with the move.
Pat Dobson and George “Doc” Medich, a med student as Bobby Brown had been twenty years earlier, each won 19 games, while newly acquired starter Rudy May had a 2.28 ERA and Lyle had a 1.66 figure in relief.
A big setback for the team was the breakdown of Mel Stottlemyre’s arm in his 15th start of the season. It happened suddenly, as if his supply of pitches—forty-five thousand over his career—had run out. He lifted his left hand to his right shoulder and rubbed. Trainer Gene Monahan came out with Virdon, and the three of them left the mound together. (Monahan helped usher in a more sophisticated era of athletic training after succeeding Joe Soares in 1973.)
Save for two relief innings in August, Stottlemyre never threw another pitch. Rotator-cuff surgery might have enabled him to continue, but Mel’s injury came right before several important breakthroughs in sports medicine. MRIs, arthroscopic surgery, and rotator-cuff repair were all just in their infancy or not yet fully tested and approved.
Mel completed his Yankee career with 164 wins, 40 of them shutouts. He tried to return in 1975 but was released in spring training, a release he bitterly claimed came in the face of being told to take his own time recovering. (His partial salary would be due if he was not released by a certain date.)
The end of Stottlemyre’s tenure marked the last connection the roster had with the Topping-Webb days and with the last pennant winner of the 1921–64 dynasty. Mel had five All-Star selections and three 20-win seasons. He returned as a pitching coach two decades later, recouped some money he felt was owed to him, and garnered four more rings. That helped complete the Yankee story for Mel.
THE 1974 TEAM, with so many new faces, played hard. They occupied first place from September 4 to 22. On a couple of occasions, Virdon was required to play tapes recorded by Steinbrenner to rally the team. They seemed to demonstrate the Boss’s feeling that Virdon didn’t have the means to fire them up himself.
With reserve catcher Bill Sudakis’s boombox blaring Paul McCartney’s “Band on the Run,” the Yankees went town to town and kept winning. A particularly gratifying win came on September 10 when newly acquired Alex Johnson hit a twelfth-inning homer in Fenway Park to give the Yanks a 2–1 win, a game in which Chambliss had been struck in the arm by a dart thrown from the stands.
Johnson, a former batting champ and brother of Giant running back Ron, had no use for the media and was dressed and gone by the time the press arrived in the locker room. He didn’t really talk to teammates, either. He just liked Bill Kane, the traveling secretary. No matter. The Band on the Run gang was still going.
Two games were left in the season, and the Yankees were one game behind Baltimore. They would have to win both games in Milwaukee and hope that the Orioles lost their last two.
The trip to Milwaukee did not go well. Some excessive drinking took place. In the lobby of the Pfister Hotel at the late-night check-in, some words between Munson’s two backup catchers, Sudakis and Rick Dempsey, turned into a brawl, with lamps flying and chairs overturning. Murcer tried to play the role of peacemaker and broke a finger. He would be unavailable to play the next night.
The Yankees lost that game 3–2 in ten innings on a single up the middle by George Scott off Medich. In Detroit, Baltimore beat Houk’s Tigers 7–6 with a run in the ninth. It eliminated the Yankees from the race with one game remaining. It was a disappointing end to an exciting season, displaced as they were from their home ballpark. Virdon was named Manager of the Year by the Sporting News, something that amused Murcer, Munson, and Nettles, as they had spent much of the summer ignoring his signs and giving their own.
ON JUNE 26 in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, in the Township of Pequannock, a baby named Derek Sanderson Jeter arrived, the first child for Charles and Dorothy Jeter. He would be heard from again.
BOB FISHEL LEFT at season’s end to join MacPhail in the American League office as its chief publicist. He’d served for twenty years, and the writers gave him a Horace Clarke number-20 Yankee jersey as a parting gift. He loved it.
Steinbrenner, although suspended, called and asked if I felt capable of succeeding Fishel. I’d been elevated to PR director in ’73 when Fishel became a vice president (just in time for Peterson-Kekich), but now I’d have the top job. I said I could do it because I had been lucky enough to observe Fishel for six years. He was the best PR man in the game. And so George Steinbrenner made me, at twenty-four, the youngest PR director baseball had ever had, and the third in franchise history.
THE SHEA STADIUM experience for the Yankees was not a satisfying one. The Mets were accommodating, but it was clearly their home.
The clubhouse safe that had been in Hilltop Park, the Polo Grounds, and then Yankee Stadium never made it to Shea and disappeared forever. There went the last link to the Highlanders. It wasn’t a part of Bert Sugar’s haul, and it never appeared at auction. It had just vanished in the demolition, its historical value never realized.
Even Met fans were down on Shea, a utilitarian ballpark built for football and baseball and ideal for neither. Little was done to make Shea feel more “Yankee” during Yankee home games. A sign atop the scoreboard displayed the Yankees’ logo instead of the Mets’. Some billboards were purchased in Queens to alert area fans that the Yankees would love to have them come to games, but there was little indication that such attempts at recruitment helped. Compounding the problem was the gasoline crisis of ’74, which created lines at gas stations and forced people to cut back on travel. A lot of the Yankee fan base from New Jersey, Westchester, and Connecticut was going to sit out this sojourn to Queens.
The Yanks drew just 2,561,123 for their two seasons at Shea, while the Mets drew 3,452,775.
One of the great fiascos of the Shea years was Salute to the Army Day on June 10, 1975, which featured a twenty-one-gun salute from cannons placed in the outfield. Unfortunately, the firings blew a section out of the outfield wall while another section caught fire. The fire was quickly doused, which was a good thing because the Yankees and Mets would have been out of ballparks at that point, but the start of the game was held up for more than a half hour while boards were brought in and hammered into place.
Three days later, Elliott Maddox became a victim of the swampy outfield when he severely injured cartilage in his knee. Maddox, hitting .305, had to undergo surgery and was neve
r the same player again. He wound up suing just about everyone—the doctors, the City of New York—but his real goal, to return to the form he showed in 1974–75, eluded him.
DURING THE 1974 World Series, a distraction arose that would change baseball forever.
An agent named Jerry Kapstein stepped forward to claim that his client, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, the best pitcher in the league, had not received an insurance-annuity payment in time from the Oakland owner, Charles O. Finley. The late payment, claimed Kapstein, was enough to void Hunter’s contract and make him a free agent. People laughed.
But Kapstein was right. When the matter fell into the hands of arbitrator Peter Seitz, Hunter was declared a free agent. And while some thought the penalty too severe, the owners had signed on to the arbitration process when they okayed it for salary negotiations in ’72.
In December ’74, every team—including the A’s—hustled to Hunter’s farm in Hertford, North Carolina, and his nearby lawyer’s office in Ahoskie, to show off their checkbooks.
“Gabe,” I said to Gabe Paul during the early stages, “could this possibly reach a million dollars?”
“Damn right it could,” he thundered. “This is war!”
Paul, who had worked his whole career with shoestring budgets (he had me mimeographing our daily press notes while every other team used Xerox copying, claiming it would “save hundreds a year!”), was suddenly rolling up his sleeves and playing with the big guys now that he had a well-financed ownership group behind him. And he was loving it.
If he could get Hunter, he would be adding a second superstar to the roster in a matter of weeks. On October 22, he had called me into his office as he phoned Murcer in Oklahoma City. He wanted a witness.
“Bobby? Gabe Paul. Listen, I have some news for you … I hope you’ll think it’s good news … We’ve traded you to San Francisco.”
I could tell Murcer was speechless, but eventually the news settled in, and Gabe was telling him about all the fine restaurants in the city. At the very end, Bobby asked, “Who did you get for me?”
The answer was Bobby Bonds.
It was one of the biggest one-for-one trades in baseball history.
Murcer was in shock: Steinbrenner had told him he’d always be a Yankee.
But, as Tal Smith noted, anytime you can get one of the five best players in baseball, you find a way. And that was where people ranked Bonds at the time. His ’74 totals had fallen to .256/21/71, but he had been the closest baseball had ever come to being a 40-40 man (40 homers, 40 steals), had been an All-Star Game MVP, and with Willie Mays had been the only player to twice reach the 30-30 club. He had been Mays’s protégé, as Murcer had been to Mantle in New York.
For a new generation, Murcer was the franchise. He would be leaving behind a large base of young fans who adored him.
Bonds had more natural ability than Murcer, and Bob Fishel noted that some of the Yankees’ PR during Murcer’s career may have helped influence Horace Stoneham of the Giants into thinking the two were equal.
With Bonds in place, the pursuit for Hunter went on, and the Yankees had an ace up their sleeve. Their major league scout, with the unlikely name of Clyde Kluttz, was the very scout who signed the teenaged Hunter for Kansas City a decade before. Now, by good fortune, he was working for the Yankees. And Hunter loved him.
Kluttz, a major league catcher for nine years, was also a fellow North Carolinian. He was practically a father figure to Hunter, a straight shooter. The Yankees were fortunate indeed to have this going for them, and sure enough, on New Year’s Eve, the media was called to the Parks Administration Building for a huge signing announcement.
Limited partner Ed Greenwald was busy drafting the contract as Hunter, his lawyers, and Kluttz flew to New York on a private plane registered to Steinbrenner. Even when they got to Gabe Paul’s office, nothing was final. Talks continued while I mimeographed our press release and kept the media at bay. We were messing with everyone’s New Year’s Eve plans.
At last, Hunter took a nineteen-cent Bic pen and signed a five-year contract for about $3.35 million, a figure that included premiums on life-insurance policies for his children. There was, of course, no doubt that Steinbrenner had signed off on this, suspension or not, and Kuhn later admitted he would certainly not have denied him that right.
The signing rocked the sports world. Hunter was suddenly a household name in America. The most important thing about the signing was that it demonstrated what a free agent was now worth, seven years after Ken Harrelson, a top hitter, became a free agent and signed a $150,000 contract with Boston. It was enough to get everyone’s attention, especially the Players Association. The free market had spoken, and it was suddenly clear that the existing salary structure in the game was artificially low.
Many would point to this signing as the day baseball lost its compass, and blamed Steinbrenner’s spending for it. But most of the teams were bidding at or near this figure. If the San Diego Padres could offer $3 million, then the money was there.
While the Hunter signing preceded the formal ground rules of free agency that would follow, it did establish the multiyear contract as a normal course of business, the use of an agent as expected and accepted, and million-dollar deals to be affordable.
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IF THE MANAGER OF THE YEAR just added Bonds and Hunter to his roster after finishing two games out, 1975 surely had high expectations. Which also meant little margin for error.
After getting off to a scary 0–3 start, Hunter was exactly as advertised: a brilliant pitcher on the field, a classy leader off it. He had competitiveness that harkened back to the old Yankees. There was a maturity to Hunter, the youngest of nine children, that belied his twenty-nine years of age, but at the same time a playfulness that made him a fun teammate.
In 1975 he went 23–14 (a fifth straight 20-win season), pitching 328 innings and 30 complete games, a figure never since equaled. In a sense it marked the end of an era when such numbers were recorded, certainly on the Yankees. And it would really be the only one of his five seasons in New York in which his stats inspired the awe that seemed to go with the contract. Still, he was a force throughout his years in New York, the guy who “showed us how to win,” according to many. In his remaining four years he would only go 40–39. Some thought he left it all on the mound in year one, so anxious were the Yankees to recoup their money. But no one looking back on his legacy suggested that he was overpaid or over-hyped.
Bonds, meanwhile, was a remarkable athlete. He was a five-tool player, although he struck out a lot, and in ’75 he broke Mantle’s single-season Yankee record with 137 punch-outs. But he enjoyed being a Yankee. On one occasion, he represented the team at the State House in Boston, speaking out against a plan to introduce a baseball lottery in Massachusetts. He showed pride in the game when the Yankees were opening-day opponents in Cleveland, where Frank Robinson became the first black manager.
He didn’t get off to a quick start at the plate, but in late May he started to show his greatness. On May 27 he began an eleven-game hitting streak, all on the road, during which he batted .408 with eight home runs, showing how he could carry a team. The Yankees won nine of those games. But then on June 7 in Chicago, he ran into the Comiskey Park wall running down a long drive and badly hurt his knee. He missed the next week, and his hot streak was interrupted.
He played the rest of the season hurt. That brief look at what might have been, all accomplished on the road, would remain forever as a quick image of a year that wasn’t. The Bonds that the Yankees saw in 1975 was not Bonds at full strength.
For the season he hit .270/32/85 with 30 stolen bases, and despite the injuries he would be the first Yankee to record a 30-30 season. (Mantle’s stolen base high had been 21.)
ALTHOUGH STILL UNDER suspension, Steinbrenner used his proxies to cast an important vote that summer—for the reelection of Bowie Kuhn as commissioner, a surprise to many.
“Let me tell you,” he said to some Ne
w York writers when the vote was announced, “things are going to change now. The American League is going to get more respect from the Commissioner’s Office after this. You watch.”
Was this all part of some backstage deal with Kuhn to get his suspension lifted early? To many, Steinbrenner’s explanation appeared pretty flimsy. But more realistically, other American League owners had come around the night before the vote was cast, and an anti-Kuhn vote by Steinbrenner would not have caused him to lose. It would have accomplished little more than pouting. Steinbrenner, who became skilled at last-minute vote shifts, more than likely sized up the situation and decided a “yea” vote would produce more for him in the long run than the momentary satisfaction of a meaningless “nay.”
AS FOR THE ’75 team, they had a 12–20 start but began to play better and reached .500 and second place on June 4. Briefly, in late June, they took over first. But then a seven-game losing streak set the vultures in motion over Virdon’s days as a manager.
The worst thing that could have happened to Virdon was when Texas fired Billy Martin on July 20. Martin by now had earned a reputation as a quick-fix artist whose managerial skills generally produced better-than-expected results wherever he went. He’d already shown this in Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas.
He was eighteen years removed from his trade following the Copa incident. No one was left in the organization from 1957 save for some ticket-office employees. Those who were there cared little about his earlier exit, or even about his reputation for being high maintenance. Gabe Paul did not like a manager who might seek a voice in trades, but he was starting to feel the pressure from Steinbrenner to “do something!” All signs pointed to Martin, who craved a chance to return to the Yankees.