by Marty Appel
Steinbrenner had a form of Alzheimer’s disease, but when I visited him in Tampa in November 2010, he knew who I was, and we talked about his early years with the team. It was the heart attack that claimed him.
His death came while baseball was gathering in Anaheim for the All-Star Game, and it was there that Girardi and Jeter held a press conference to express their warm feelings for the man who would forever be the Boss.
Steinbrenner would have been pleased by some of the circumstances on the day of his passing. He went out a winner. His team was the defending world champion and was in first place the day he died. Upstaging the All-Star Game would have made him smile, although not as much as if the Mets had been the host team.
Because there was no federal estate tax in effect in 2010, Steinbrenner’s estate—some $1.1 billion—remained in the family.
The fans reacted with respect for his legacy, and many supported his consideration for the Hall of Fame. He did not get elected on his first attempt in 2011, but the talk was alive. He had won seven world championships, eleven pennants, seen the building of a new Yankee Stadium, and took the team—and the industry with it—to remarkable levels of business success. He was the senior owner in the game and owned the team longer than Ruppert had. He redefined the way owners involved themselves in club matters.
The family would continue to operate the team, with Hal the managing general partner, and Hank, Jennifer, and Jessica general partners. The four children, the executors, could not sell the team without a majority vote of unnamed trustees.
At the first home game after the All-Star break, on July 17, Rivera and Jeter led a memorial service of sorts, Mariano placing two roses at home plate in memory of both Sheppard and Steinbrenner, and Jeter addressing the crowd to say, “We gather here tonight to honor two men who were both shining stars of the Yankee universe.” Led by Swisher, who hit a homer in the eighth and then a game-winning, two-run single in the ninth, the Yanks won the game. “On a day like this when we celebrate his life, we got to take him out with a ‘W,’ “ said Swisher afterward.
On September 20, a 760-pound plaque mounted on a base was dedicated in Monument Park, directly behind the monuments to Ruth, Huggins, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle. The entire team walked out to the area where the Steinbrenner family participated in the unveiling, including the return of Steve Swindal. Also back for the unveiling were two visitors from the Dodgers: Joe Torre, in his final weeks as manager, and his appointed successor, Don Mattingly. Lonn Trost had invited them. Torre and Cashman hugged when they saw each other. The ice was broken.
“We’ve taken the steps to start to repair whatever got broke,” said Cashman. When Torre’s return for Old-Timers’ Day in 2011 produced a tremendous ovation, it appeared as though whatever went wrong had been righted.
The team wore a patch on the sleeve for Sheppard, another over the heart for Steinbrenner, and then when Ralph Houk died on July 21, they added a black armband. In October, Bill Shannon, an official scorer at Yankee Stadium for thirty-two years, also died, in a house fire in New Jersey.
The team did not stay in first place after Steinbrenner died, finishing second by a game to the surprising Tampa Bay Rays but earning the wildcard spot for the postseason. They faced the Twins again in the ALDS and again swept them in three games, as Sabathia, Pettitte, and Hughes all won their starts, with Mo saving two of them. But in the LCS against Texas, the pitching wasn’t there. The staff allowed 25 runs in 31⅔ innings and the hitters batted only .201 as the Rangers went on to their first World Series appearance. The only high point was a four-home-run output from Cano, who had eight hits and batted .348.
Girardi would have to wear number 28 in 2011 as they tried again.
THE YEAR 2011 began with the Yankees failing to sign free agent pitcher Cliff Lee—a rare occasion when the franchise lost out on a player it coveted—and with a difficult signing of Jeter to a new contract, a negotiation that took some awkward turns. His ten-year, $189 contract had concluded, and no one, including Derek, saw him going to any team other than the Yankees. But he had come off a disappointing season, was getting old to play shortstop, and the negotiations turned more public than either side might have liked. In the end he signed a three-year contract with a fourth-year option, with the total value of $51 to $65 million, depending on the option.
In a rare display, Jeter said he was unhappy with the negotiations going as public as they had, acknowledging that he was never entertaining any thoughts of finishing his career anywhere but with the Yankees. Jeter, Rivera, and Posada would make 2011 their seventeenth season as major league teammates, something no trio had ever done before.
The Yanks also signed free agent Rafael Soriano as a setup man, going against Cashman’s desire to avoid losing a draft choice in the process, but as he acknowledged, he didn’t own the team and sometimes had to face being overruled.
Soriano wound up as the team’s seventh-inning pitcher when Chamberlain required surgery and David Robertson burst to prominence with a remarkable season. His 100 strikeouts in just 66⅔ innings was the best strikeout-inning ratio in league history for anyone with 100 Ks. He had a 1.08 ERA, recording 14 bases-loaded strikeouts. The pitching staff was full of surprises in 2011, as Hughes fought a “dead arm” and ceded his spot in the rotation to veterans Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia, both of whom had seen better days. They won 20 games between them, while rookie Ivan Nova, a twenty-four-year-old Dominican right-hander, went 16–4, including 8–0 after a month in the minors during a roster squeeze. Sabathia won 19.
The season produced a first-place finish and the team’s fiftieth visit to postseason baseball, where they were upended in the ALDS when their bats slept in key situations against Detroit.
But it was a year of emotional statistical milestones, some of epic proportion.
There was, for instance, the day Cano, new catcher Russell Martin, and Granderson each hit grand-slam homers. Three in one game was unprecedented in major league history. Cano remained a sensational player both at bat and in the field, while Granderson led the league in runs (136) and RBI (119) while finishing second in homers (41).
Alex Rodriguez moved to within one grand slam of Gehrig’s record 23, but injuries limited him to 99 games and just 16 homers, his worst major league season to date. Brett Gardner tied for the league lead with 49 stolen bases.
Posada, in a frustrating final year of his contract, caught only one game and, serving as a DH, tumbled to .235 with just six hits off left-handers. But he had one last hurrah in him when he pinch-hit for hot-hitting rookie Jesus Montero on September 21 and delivered an emotional single to right for the RBI that clinched the division title for New York.
“I just had a feeling about it; he knows how to play in the big moment,” said Girardi.
His Yankee career ended with him sitting eighth on the team’s all-time home run list with 275.
Jeter looked lost at the plate for the first half of the year, struggling to even hit fly balls. But after a brief stint on the DL, he returned on July 4 and hit .331 in the final three months, raising his average to .297 for the season. On July 9, he became the first Yankee to reach 3,000 hits, homering for the milestone hit (his first Yankee Stadium homer in a year). He went 5-for-5 that sunny Saturday afternoon, driving in the winning run for yet another highlight-reel day. The 3,000th hit was caught by Christian Lopez, a cellphone salesman in the left-field bleachers, who returned the ball to Jeter without seeking any cash reward. Lopez’s father, wearing a DiMaggio jersey, assisted with the catch.
During the year, Jeter also passed Mantle for most games played as a Yankee.
Two days before Posada’s division-winning hit, Mariano Rivera passed Trevor Hoffman for the most saves in history, recording his 602nd in the year in which he also became the first player to ever hurl 1,000 games for a single team.
The fans were hungry to see Rivera make history in their presence, and so when Swisher grounded into a double play to end the eighth (maintaining the s
ave situation), the fans actually cheered. It was a funny moment, and even the players laughed at the reaction.
Rivera did what he’d been doing for fifteen years and closed the game with ease. His teammates rushed the field to embrace him, and Posada pushed him to the mound, where he stood alone, acknowledging the cheers of the loving fans. Finally he spread his arms wide, a gesture that recalled Roger Maris’s when he was pushed out of the dugout fifty summers earlier, one that seemed to say, “Okay? I’m feeling very embarrassed about this, may I go now?”
DAN CUNNINGHAM LIKED the moment before the game when he grabbed a hose and helped water down the infield, turning the light-brown dirt dark. It was a reflective time, very peaceful, before the Yankees took the field. There were moments when he’d be watering the infield and he’d think about Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle …
It was hard to look up at that magnificent stadium, or the historic moments playing on the video board, and not be awed by what the park and the team represented—to the city, the fans, the sport, and to the nation’s culture. It was daunting.
Danny wasn’t familiar with Phil Schenck, who laid out Hilltop Park in Washington Heights in 1903. The players came and went, but always there was the soil under their feet, the bases ninety feet apart, the pitching rubber sixty feet, six inches from home plate, and someone in charge of it all. At this time in history, it was Danny. And somewhere in the U.S., or in Latin America, or in the Far East, youngsters were running the bases, learning the game, falling in love with baseball.
Some would play on this very field one day. Or maybe, as the next century approached, at a new Yankee Stadium—built on the site of the original one, right across the street.
As Mel Allen would have put it, “How about that!”
Appendix: Yankees Year-by-Year Results
Footnotes
1 Among the candidates was Hall of Fame owner and innovator Barney Dreyfuss, who owned the Pittsburgh franchise. It was said, “He is too good a sportsman. His place is with the American League. He has given every indication that he is sick of the National League, its schemes, and his associates.” But Dreyfuss stayed in Pittsburgh.
2 Oddly, it was the only .500 season in the team’s history.
3 Daniels, an outfielder, skilled base stealer, and hit-by-pitch specialist, played for the Yanks from 1910 to 1913.
4 Bush set the record that year for most wins in a season without a shutout.
5 Until 1939, when the radio ban was lifted, evening re-creations were common with Jack Ingersall, the best-known of the announcers.
6 The five-year waiting period for the Hall of Fame was not enacted until 1954, but waived for DiMaggio because of his strong support immediately after his retirement.
7 Broaca is believed to have been the first Yankee to wear glasses.
8 Painter, bitter after receiving no explanation for his firing after thirteen seasons, went to see McCarthy in Buffalo, but to no avail.
9 The teams rotated against each other, with the total runs for each team’s seven innings at bat producing a winner: Dodgers 5, Yankees 1, Giants 0.
10 Of course, he still suspended Mantle (and Willie Mays) from their jobs as spring training instructors for taking post-career PR jobs with Atlantic City casinos.
11 “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain” was the rhyme that made them famous.
12 Perhaps the most notable of these “Phantom Yankees” was Pitcher Robin Roberts, who spent two weeks with the team in April 1962, without an appearance. He does not appear on the club’s all-time roster.
13 The price included $650,000 for Blues Stadium, formerly Ruppert Stadium, in Kansas City, where the Athletics would now play.
14 Cooperstown gained the honor thanks to the tale of General Abner Doubleday inventing the game there in 1839. The tale was debunked by the time the Hall of Fame opened in 1939, but the setting was deemed just right to celebrate the game’s origins.
15 The second game was added in 1959 to increase contributions to the players’ pension fund. The experiment ended after four years.
16 A brief return to the Yankees came in 1974 when Home Box Office, still a small regional cable service, presented nineteen Yankee games, with Marty Glickman, Dick Stockton, and McDougald sharing the booth with the Yankee announcers.
17 More than fifty-three thousand fans welcomed the world champion L.A. Dodgers to Yankee Stadium in June 1960 for the game’s resumption, the Dodgers’ first return to New York.
18 Martin may have managed the Tigers, but he remained a New Yorker at heart. One Friday afternoon, stuck in horrendous Third Avenue traffic, he pulled his starting nine off the team bus and led them to the Lexington Avenue subway, just in time to arrive for the game. Few managers could claim to know where to find the 4 train to the Bronx.
19 Clancy the doorman (who had a line in the film Bang the Drum Slowly as himself), hadn’t seen the caper.
20 This nickname was first used in print by Mike Lupica.
21 His appearance conjured memories of a TV commercial for motor oil, showing “Mr. Dirt” gumming up engines.
22 Over the years, some of the children of Yankee players who ran around the club house were Roberto Alomar, Sandy Alomar Jr., Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., and Prince Fielder.
23 Flood had refused a trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia and sued Major League Baseball, but ultimately lost in the Supreme Court by a 5–4 vote in 1970. The court seemed to be saying, “Congress needs to resolve this, not us,” but MLB saw it as a vindication of the status quo and was hoping the arbitrator would agree.
24 The nickname actually grew from a sarcastic remark made by Munson during the ALCS when Martin sat the slumping Jackson. “Billy probably just doesn’t realize Reggie is Mr. October,” he said.
25 Not out of any lack of respect for tradition: The flagpoles in the new stadium were no longer easily accessible for such a ceremony.
26 Also: the playing of Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” after Yankee victories, which began in the late seventies; Liza Minnelli’s version played after losses.
27 Steinbrenner was speaking to Jack Butterfield, the team’s vice president of player development and scouting, who would himself perish in a Paramus, New Jersey, auto accident three months later. His son Brian would later manage in the Yankee organization and coach in the major leagues.
28 Roger Clemens became the second in 2003.
29 The Dodgers, by then a Los Angeles team, were the first to cross the threshold in 1978.
30 The Yankees went twenty-two years—1981 to 2003—without leading the American League in attendance.
31 Clemens later said he confused the piece of the bat with the ball, an odd claim that still doesn’t explain why he threw it at Piazza.
32 Jose was Robinson’s selected pitcher in the 2011 Home Run Derby at the All-Star festivities. Robinson won it.
33 Andrew Brackman, at six foot eleven, beat that record in 2011 and became the fifteen hundredth Yankee in the process.
34 Advertising signage in Yankee Stadium seemed to grow each year as new spots became available. Rotating signage behind home plate began in 1994, irritating purists, but it eventually became an accepted part of the modern stadium landscape.
35 The Core Four, along with the rest of the roster, participated in a community outreach program called HOPE Week, begun by Media Relations Director Jason Zillo in 2009—an annual weeklong program in which the team recognized individuals, families or organizations; visited them, brought them to the Stadium, and called attention to their special needs.
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