by Marty Appel
The MVP Award went to Roger Clemens of the Red Sox, who got nineteen first-place votes to Mattingly’s five, a rare example of a pitcher winning the award over a position player. (Jim Rice had won the award over Guidry in 1978.)
The Yankees were just three and a half behind Boston on August 13, but proceeded to lose thirteen of their next twenty-one to blow their chance at a title, and in the end finished second with a 90–72 mark, a decent showing for a rookie manager. Unfortunately, the disappointment at losing out to the Red Sox was magnified by the Mets winning the pennant and then a memorable World Series against Boston. What had looked like a possible subway series in August (T-shirts were sold!) had faded.
THE YANKEES WENT to spring training in ’87 with Piniella as manager and Harvey Greene as PR director—the first time since 1974–75 that the same twosome (in that case, Virdon and me) had returned. But it was hardly a sign of new stability on the team. The season featured a ten-game winning streak in April, and first place from May 12 to August 6 (save for a couple of days), but crashed with the comings and goings of forty-eight different players, and with Henderson spending fifty-five days on the disabled list amid accusations that the injuries weren’t real.
The Henderson drama was central; the team could hardly lose their table-setting superstar for a third of the season and pretend they could cover it.
There was no question that Henderson missed Billy Martin, and Piniella was not always sure that his left fielder was giving it his all. When Rickey went on the disabled list for a second time over what he called “bad hammys” (hamstring muscles), Piniella suggested to several sources that he was “jaking it.”
Steinbrenner finally intervened in the Henderson matter, issuing a long, rambling statement on the state of the team that exonerated Henderson, while undermining Piniella by revealing that he wanted Rickey traded.
The statement also criticized Piniella for not being available for a prearranged phone call. “I don’t know of too many guys—even sportswriters—who, if their boss told them to be available for a call at a certain time, wouldn’t be there!” the statement said. Many felt the statement essentially brought a close to the season, if not to Lou’s tenure.
There was another record-breaking season from Mattingly (six grand slams, the only six of his career, and eight consecutive games with at least one homer). Obtaining Steve Trout from the Cubs (“I just won you the pennant,” said Steinbrenner to Piniella at the time) resulted in not a single win, as Trout took his place beside Whitson as failures. Only Rick Rhoden (16–10) and the returning Tommy John (13–6) cracked double figures in victories. Pagliarulo led the team with 32 homers, and the Yanks finished a disappointing fourth.
The disappointments in 1987 were many. The “special relationship” between Steinbrenner and Piniella was tarnished. And Mattingly, despite the home run records and a .327 average, began to show signs of a back problem that would ultimately reduce him from one of the best players in baseball to just a good player.
“It’s something that was there from the time I was a kid, and it’s always gonna be there,” Mattingly told Bill Madden. “When it first flared up in ’87, it was a spasm. The funny thing was, right after that I went on that home run streak.”
Mattingly missed eighteen games early in the year because of the back. He hit 30 homers in ’87, but never hit more than 23 again. He would have two decent years in ’88 and ’89, but less than stellar by the standard he had set for himself. Starting in 1990, he put up fairly ordinary stats—just 58 homers in his final six seasons, and no more 100-RBI campaigns. His fielding remained superlative, and he would always be Donnie Baseball, but he would never again be the Mattingly of 1984–87.
Piniella was fired after the season and moved up to general manager to replace poor Woody Woodward (who’d failed at his main assignment: to trade Winfield).
Piniella’s successor, sure to please Henderson, was Martin again. Billy V was anointed on October 19, an off day during the World Series, and also “Black Monday,” the day the stock market plunged 508 points. After this, the Commissioner’s Office ruled that there could be no major team announcements to interfere with the World Series.
The Yankees drew 2.4 million fans in ’87 despite all the angst, the third-highest total in team history. The Mets, however, coming off their ’86 championship, became the first New York team in history to top three million.29 This was an unacceptable development for the Yanks, but the Mets would continue to outdraw them until 1994.
Even if the Mets were leading at the gate, in TV and radio ratings, and in revenues, a gasp went up throughout the industry when the Yankees signed a twelve-year cable-television deal in 1988 that drove a huge wedge between them and all the other teams. There was a buyout clause in the Yankees’ SportsChannel deal that would enable them to open the television rights to the marketplace, and they exercised it. (They made a $50 million radio-rights deal in 1987 with WABC, the year the majority of telecasts moved to cable.)
The Yankees were in the fortunate position of being courted by three wealthy entities: Cablevision’s SportsChannel (owned by HBO founder Charles Dolan), Madison Square Garden Network (owned by Paramount Entertainment, run by Bob Gutkowski), and their longtime over-the-air broadcaster, Tribune Company’s WPIX (which, under its president Lev Pope, had once nearly bought the team, only to have Tribune nix the deal—Tribune later bought the Cubs).
MSG Network, desperate to have summer programming, won, bidding $493.5 million. This had a seismic effect on the Yankees’ future: an influx of revenue that dwarfed everyone else’s and assured their ability to sign top stars. It happened at a time when the Mets “owned the town” but were locked into a long-term deal with SportsChannel. It had been considered lucrative when they signed it, but by the time the Mets’ deal expired, MSG Network had the Yankees, and three entities to bid up the cost weren’t there.
The Yankees weren’t the first New York team to embrace cable: MSG Network first provided home games of the Knicks and Rangers in the seventies, a novelty for the New York area that helped create the cable market. Yankee home games, of course, had long been televised. But the arrival of SportsChannel put every Yankee game on TV. In the eighties, the increasing number of games migrating from “free TV”—WPIX was down to forty games from as many as 140 in the late fifties—and the slow rate at which New York’s outer boroughs (including the Bronx) were being wired for cable made this a polarizing issue. For the first time, a new medium (cable) was creating a situation in which fewer people could watch or listen to Yankee games.
THE YANKEES ADDED free agent Jack Clark in 1988 after a stellar career in the National League, Clark responded by hitting just .242—with a team-leading 27 homers—and he was traded to San Diego right after the season. Another 1988 transaction was dealing outfielder Jay Buhner to Seattle for DH Ken Phelps. Buhner would go on to become a terrific player and nearly a cult figure in Mariners history; Phelps was a bust and the trade became grist for a joke on Seinfeld, which never missed an opportunity to parody Steinbrenner.
As for Billy V, a dangerous trip to Lace, a Dallas strip club, would pretty much be his last hurrah as a Yankee.
Billy had been thrown out of a 7–6 loss at Texas on a Friday night, May 6, and then went out with his pal Mantle (who lived in Dallas) and a couple of coaches. All but Martin left “early.” He went to the men’s room, exchanged words with someone, and the next thing he knew, he was being beaten up against the stucco wall outside the club, his ear dangling off his head.
Bad luck was with Billy as he made his way back to the team hotel, where he intended to quietly call Gene Monahan to get medical assistance. But despite the late hour, a fire alarm had sent everyone out of their rooms. Billy arrived to a packed lobby, bloodied and beaten, to be seen by all.
Piniella, wondering what he had been thinking, resigned as general manager three weeks later, turning the job over to his assistant Bob Quinn, whose grandfather had led a group that bought the Red Sox from Harry
Frazee in 1923 and sold them to Tom Yawkey in 1933.
The next day, Martin, who had been fined for kicking dirt on umpire Tim Welke earlier in the season, repeated the action against umpire Dale Ford, but one-upped it by scooping up dirt and throwing it at his chest. Not only was Martin suspended for three games, but the umpires threatened further action to rein him in. And whatever action that might prove to be, one thing was certain: No close calls were going to go the Yankees’ way with Billy as manager.
The Yanks got off to a fast 20–9 start, much of it attributable to Winfield’s record-tying 29 RBI in April. (Only since 1982 had the schedule begun in the early days of the month.) Billy had embarrassed the franchise again. Steinbrenner waited until they lost seven of eight the following month, and fired him on June 23. “How many times can a man have his heart broken?” said Billy. Counting his trade in 1957, this would be six.
“He wasn’t the same Billy Martin this time,” said Steinbrenner, who quickly named Piniella, still under his three-year contract, as successor.
Without much pitching to work with (John Candelaria led the team with a 13–7 record), Piniella somehow kept the Yanks in contention. An inspiring eighteenth-inning home run by the productive Claudell Washington (.308) against the Tigers on September 11 put the Yanks in second place, just three and a half behind the Red Sox, and that’s where they found themselves when they got to Fenway for a four-game series starting September 15.
(Washington hit just 26 homers for the Yankees over four seasons, but one of them, in April ’88, was the ten thousandth in franchise history. While a lot of people contributed to that total, the team’s all-time top twenty had themselves hit almost half of them: 4,888, with Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Berra hitting 2,407.)
Hopes for a repeat of the 1978 Boston Massacre were high, especially after a 5–3 win in the opener behind Rick Rhoden. But then the Yanks lost three straight, dropping them to fourth with time running out. When they lost four of their last five, dropping Piniella’s record to 45–48, the team was done, and so again was Lou.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
THE 1989 SEASON WAS MARKED BY departures, beginning with Piniella’s. His replacement was Dallas Green, fifty-four, a pitcher turned manager who led Philadelphia to the 1980 world championship, their first ever. From 1982 to 1987 he was general manager of the Cubs. At six foot five and 260 pounds, he was the biggest manager in Yankee history, and he arrived with no experience in the American League in a pro career that stretched back thirty-four years. He brought in five coaches, mostly with National League backgrounds.
Willie Randolph, co-captain with Guidry, was not re-signed after ’88 and signed with the Dodgers as a free agent. He played another four seasons before retiring, hitting .327 for the Brewers in 1991. Randolph was thirty-four and the Yankees replaced him with free agent Steve Sax, twenty-nine, the Dodgers’ second baseman for the previous eight seasons. While Sax hit .315 for the Yanks with 205 hits, he never enjoyed the same popularity that he had in Los Angeles. The fans missed Randolph, a five-time All-Star, who was an understated presence in the lineup—.275 in thirteen seasons—seldom struck out, and always played great defense.
I was in the Fort Lauderdale parking lot one day in spring training when I spotted Dave Winfield walk to his car and drive off while practice was still going on. It turned out his Yankee career was about over. He had back surgery on March 24 and missed the full ’89 season. Few players could miss a full season at age thirty-seven and return in peak form. Winfield, a marvelous athlete, was able to do it, but his Yankee days were effectively done. He returned in 1990, but after an 0-for-23 slump in April, the Yankees traded him to the Angels on May 11 for Mike Witt, who would be an oft-injured starting pitcher for them.
In Winfield’s eight-plus seasons, he batted .290 with 205 homers and 818 RBI, earning five Gold Gloves and selection to the All-Star team in each full season. He would go on to a twenty-two-season career and shed his “Mr. May” reputation by driving in the winning run in the 1992 World Series for Toronto. When he went into the Hall of Fame, he chose to have a San Diego cap on his plaque, a decisive blow to his relationship with the Yankees, who had already assigned his uniform number 31 to Hensley Meulens the year they traded him. He would be an occasional Old-Timers’ Day guest, but it was never a very happy post-baseball relationship for the two parties.
Winfield and Steinbrenner sued each other in January of 1989 for the third time over payments not made to the Winfield Foundation. Lurking in the background was the presence of one Howie Spira, for whom the term “gambler” came to be used. It was actually a compliment: It implied he had a profession. In reality, Spira was a ne’er-do-well who thought he could make a killing offering incriminating information on Winfield to Steinbrenner, audaciously asking for payment in return. Steinbrenner was intrigued; he might be able to discredit Winfield as consorting with lowlifes like Spira, possibly even being involved with “gamblers.” He began taking his calls. Aside from that, the Winfield Foundation lawsuits were settled in September. Sadly, this story still had legs.
VETERAN FRONT-OFFICE OPERATIVE Syd Thrift was hired as general manager during spring training of ’89. Having gone through a stint as Charlie Finley’s GM, he figured he could surely work for George Steinbrenner. Bob Quinn, promoted and demoted during this stretch, became the number-two man to Thrift, but then replaced him on August 29 when Thrift departed for “personal reasons.”
Part of the personal reasons was the growing influence of an alternative front office emerging in Tampa. With George Bradley there as the vice president of player development and scouting (essentially the farm director), the Tampa office began a period in which it sometimes overrode decisions made by the New York “baseball people.” This arrangement often caused inner turmoil in the management of the team, the Tampa people vs. the New York people, a problem that continued for many years until Brian Cashman finally brought it to a halt in 2005 when his insistence on full authority became a condition of his re-signing as GM.
Quinn didn’t last long in this latest stint as GM; he quit. Harding “Pete” Peterson became the team’s newest general manager in October, but he too was handicapped by the Tampa operatives who sat down the hall from Steinbrenner.
RON GUIDRY DEPARTED in 1989. He continued to struggle with shoulder problems, and was only 2–3 in 1988. In ’89, he only pitched for Columbus, going 1–5 in seven starts, then announced his retirement in July. One of the great pitchers in Yankee history, he was fourth in wins and second in strikeouts, with a 170–91 career record. Ron Guidry Day was held in 2003, at which his uniform number 49 was retired.
Rickey Henderson departed in 1989. The gifted and popular left fielder stole 93 bases in 1988, but was not playing well in ’89. In 65 games he was hitting only .247 with 25 steals, and at times looked lackadaisical in the field. Fans were starting to turn on him; management certainly was. Dallas Green questioned his work ethic when he didn’t voluntarily report early for spring training as was requested. “Rickey Henderson is not going to run the Yankees in 1989,” said Green. “Dallas Green is. We sent letters to everybody about when to report. Maybe Rickey can’t read.”
It was the final year of Henderson’s five-year contract, and it appeared certain he’d leave at year’s end for free agency, especially if Green was still managing. Instead he agreed to a trade back to Oakland on June 21, the Yankees getting pitchers Eric Plunk, Greg Cadaret, and outfielder Luis Polonia (who would hit .313 for them, but would be convicted of having sex with a minor two months after he joined the team; he served sixty days in prison after the season). Henderson would play another fifteen seasons in the majors and would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but his Yankee stint was just a brief stop in a twenty-five-year career.
Still, in the brief stop, he became the Yankees’ all-time stolen base leader with 326, a mark that stood until Derek Jeter broke it in 2011.
Tommy John also left in 1989, released on May 30 with a 2–7 record. His appearanc
es in 1989 gave him twenty-six major league seasons, including fourteen after his game-changing Tommy John surgery in 1975. Ninety-one of his 288 career victories came as a Yankee.
Cablevision’s SportsChannel ended its relationship with the team after televising Yankee baseball since 1979, at various times employing Mantle, Martin, Allen, Hawk Harrelson, and Murcer as announcers. (MSG hired Tony Kubek, the former shortstop but frequent critic of Steinbrenner’s; he lasted five seasons.)
Charles Dolan and Cablevision weren’t out of the picture forever. Cablevision bought MSG Network in 1994, and some four years later made an agreement with Steinbrenner to purchase 70 percent of the team, a deal that would keep Steinbrenner running the Yankees, and also the Knicks and Rangers, while Cablevision essentially got free rights to the broadcasts through its ownership. But the deal was never consummated; Steinbrenner came to realize it was not in his best interests to lose the broadcast revenue and to be essentially working for Dolan.
BILL WHITE DEPARTED the Yankee broadcast booth in 1989, named to succeed Bart Giamatti as National League president. A Yankee broadcaster since 1971, his work with Rizzuto was loved by Yankee fans. Frank Messer had left the TV booth after 1984 (he did one year on radio only), and many felt the Rizzuto-Messer-White team of ’71 to ’84 was a perfect baseball broadcast experience. White was replaced by Met legend Tom Seaver, with George Grande being the third man in the booth, while MSG’s new broadcast team would bring newspaperman Michael Kay into the studio for a wrap-up show, beginning his long career as a Yankee announcer. In 1992 he became a full-time broadcaster. Also new to the radio booth was John Sterling, a onetime sports talk host on WMCA in New York, and then an Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks announcer. Sterling too would enjoy a long run on Yankee radio broadcasts, and his “Thuuuuuuu Yankees win!” call after team victories became a signature part of the Yankee experience.