by Ron Guidry
The way Yogi responded to his firing said a lot about his character. After learning he was fired in Chicago, Yogi took the team bus with us back to the airport! To him it made perfect sense. He had to get to the airport—it’s not like he was going to stay in Chicago. But I doubt you’ll see many people in his position so damn practical that, even while seething in anger, they’d hop on the team bus with all the players like that.
Another aspect of Yogi, which played out over time, was his unwavering commitment to principle. You could also call it stubbornness. When he said something, when he believed something, that’s the way it was. As a player and in life, Yogi didn’t do anything halfheartedly. So when he said that because of what Mr. Steinbrenner did, he wasn’t going to return to Yankee Stadium again, even to take part in Old Timers’ Day, that’s how it was going to be. And for fourteen years the Yankees didn’t see him again. For someone like Yogi, that’s a damn eternity, because every fiber of his being itched to be down at spring training camp, on a baseball field, watching, teaching, and taking part in the action. It was hell for him being away. But he believed there was a right way and a wrong way to treat people, and he wanted to make his point.
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As I got deeper into my career, I began to be appreciated more for something that was easy to overlook earlier in my career: my fielding. I was always good at fielding—it came naturally to me. I had good hands and good reaction skills. In high school I excelled in track and field, and that speed helped me develop a certain quickness on the mound. It’s something that I had always worked on during spring training. After practice, two or three times per week, I’d have a coach hit me fifty or more ground balls on the back fields. They wouldn’t tell me which way they were going to hit it, because it was all reaction skills. Ground balls, bunts, choppers, line drives. Left side, right side, right at me.
And my pitching mechanics always tended to put me in an ideal fielding position. Because I threw the ball right over the top—from 12 to 6 on a clock, so to speak—my momentum carried me straight forward toward home plate. Other power pitchers, like Goose or Nolan Ryan, didn’t throw straight over the top. They threw with more of a three-quarters motion. Which meant they more or less spun to one side. There’s nothing wrong with that—those are two of the greatest pitchers of all time. It just so happened that my delivery allowed me to be a better fielder. Watch a slow-motion film of me throwing, and you’ll notice I have a hop right at the end of my delivery. By the time I landed with both feet on the ground, my feet were spread apart in ready position, just like an infielder’s.
I never drew accolades for my fielding earlier in my career. It’s just something that people didn’t really notice. I didn’t win the first of my Gold Gloves until 1982, when I was thirty-two years old. I won the award for the next four seasons after that, too.
But as I grew older I also changed as a pitcher. Once I hit my mid-thirties—and this is true for every pitcher, really—I started to lose some of the zip off my fastball. That didn’t mean all of a sudden I was incapable of throwing the ball ninety-six miles per hour. It meant I just couldn’t do it as frequently. In 1978, when I was twenty-seven, I could throw it as hard as I wanted for 130 pitches per night. Later in my career, I might only be able to dial it up that hard a few dozen times a game.
It required me to become smarter as a pitcher, which is why I was still able to have some great seasons in the mid-eighties. Same was true of Catfish: He had some great seasons toward the end of his career. He joked that he’d be able to get guys out if he was throwing eighty miles per hour. It had to do with the way he set up batters, located his pitches, and induced weak contact. In time, I learned to do the same.
It wasn’t always easy. My body ached more as I got older. In 1984 I had a 10-11 record with a 4.51 ERA, and I went on the disabled list for the first time in my career. Still, playing in more than two hundred games without going on the DL was quite a feat, something I attribute to either luck or maybe not overworking my arm, especially during the winter. These changes didn’t mean all of a sudden I became some sort of junk pitcher. I mixed in the occasional curveball and changeup, but I was still mostly a fastball and slider pitcher.
The difference was learning how to pitch intelligently and get outs even without blowing the ball past everybody. When I needed to, I could sling one with some oomph to get a big out. Those pitches actually became more effective, because if I’m throwing ninety-two, ninety-two, ninety-two, then whiz one at ninety-six, they don’t have much of a chance at hitting it.
Take my 1985 season. Some people wondered if I was over the hill with the injury and the struggles I had in ’84. That year I went 22-6 with a 3.27 ERA and finished second in the Cy Young voting. And although my résumé lists only four All-Star Games (’78, ’79, ’82, ’83), I was invited in ’85 as well but chose not to go. That was part of becoming older—Billy preferred that I not go so I’d have some extra days to rest my arm. I was happy to do so. The baseball season is long, and a few days off to spend with Bonnie and the kids was a rare treat.
The point about that 1985 year, though, is how different it looked from my other strong seasons. In ’78 I struck out 248 guys. In ’79, I struck out 201. In ’85, I struck out only 143 despite throwing more innings (259) than I did in any season other than ’78. That was the lowest strikeout rate of my career but one of my best seasons. I walked opposing batters at the lowest rate of my career and generally succeeded at inducing weak contact. And I think that speaks to why my fielding got noticed more. There isn’t as much fielding when so many at-bats end in a strikeout. When more balls were put in play, I had more of a chance to display my fielding abilities.
We won ninety-seven games in 1985, falling just two short of Toronto in a year when Don Mattingly won the MVP. We didn’t make the playoffs again in my last years. Which is why to me those years are much more about the people. Showing the younger players how to handle George, teaching them about the game, going out there on a day-to-day basis and doing my best to set an example about the right way to play ball. I never knew exactly when my career would end, but most of all I wanted to retire with my family financially secure. Which, for a time, was sadly uncertain.
12
BECOMING A MONUMENT
I never let the night life, city life, or any other type of New York City shenanigans athletes get into interfere with what I was trying to do. When we were at home, a big night was having a beer in the clubhouse, or stopping on the way home for a bite and a drink with Catfish or one of the other players at the TGI Fridays on Route 4. More often than not I was just eager to get home to heat up whatever Bonnie had left me for dinner. On the road, the most I ever spent was on my room service bill up in Toronto, because there was a Trader Vic’s in the hotel and I couldn’t get enough of that food. So I was pretty low-maintenance. When I was a kid we never had much money, but we were happy. With my earnings as a Yankee, I was mainly concerned with buying a nice piece of land in Lafayette for our family, a pension, and lifelong security.
Given that, I was shocked, heartbroken, and troubled to discover I was on the verge of bankruptcy before the start of the 1984 season. When I was a free agent after the 1981 season, I signed a four-year deal for $3.95 million. That was quite a bit of money at the time, and I thought it might be the last contract I would sign. It was more than enough for me. But without my knowledge, most of it vanished. It’s not something I have spoken about much. I didn’t want to burden my teammates with a personal problem. It wasn’t because I was boozing, gambling, or buying stupid shit. Really, it was a lesson about putting too much trust in one person.
My agent and lawyer handled my investments and such for my company, Ron Guidry Enterprises. He wasn’t just my lawyer and agent, though. He was a lifelong friend, someone who I knew growing up and played ball with in Lafayette. I gave him power of attorney because I understand with some business t
hings you need to act at the snap of a finger. But it turned out, as time went on, that he was signing my name on things I’d never approved. Many of the deals or investments I never even knew about. Creditors and debtors don’t care who signed. So I had a giant mess to clean up.
Eventually, when he told us what was going on, we parted ways. But the damage was done. And he had told us about a few of the things going on, so I wasn’t blameless. In my eyes, if I lost ten dollars, three dollars of it was my fault and seven dollars was his. There was a time around Lafayette earlier in my career when industry was booming. When the oil companies are doing well, so is Lafayette. But when the recession hit, it was clear he had overextended himself. He was involved in too many things, and some of them he had put my name on.
There was nothing to do but take a sober look at everything I had and face the music. I threatened to file for bankruptcy—some people advised that. It would’ve been the easiest thing to do. But if you do that, they seize all of your assets. I didn’t want to lose what I had—the beautiful piece of land in Lafayette, which I still have today. I laid all my problems out on a table with a new attorney, and we went one by one to the various people and businesses I learned I owed money to and worked out deals.
And in the grand scheme of things I was still in good shape. I wasn’t out on the street starting over again. I had a job; I was making good money. Outside of the business, I had saved money. So we got everybody on the debt list to agree to what I was offering them. If I owed them one dollar, I’d give them fifty or sixty cents. It worked for everybody, because if I declared bankruptcy, they would’ve gotten less. They also knew their claims were on shaky grounds, because I hadn’t signed the deals. They were done behind my back, without my knowledge. If they didn’t take my offer, I could’ve fought to pay them nothing.
But we went to court, the judge agreed, the creditors agreed, and the case was closed. I was clear. I lost a lot of what I had earned, but they couldn’t come after me again. I didn’t want to be walking around owing people money. That’s something George told me to avoid, and he was right. And I still had what mattered—the house, my long-term security, and a job. I was also able to play longer than I expected. I didn’t keep playing because of the money, but I was essentially as good in 1985 as I was in my prime. There was no sense in hanging up my spikes yet.
It’s not something I’m proud to have gone through, because it was difficult for both me and the family. And my family was and always has been more important to me than what happened on the field. But we tackled it. After that, I gave Bonnie power of attorney so it could never happen again.
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Eventually, however, my age and all the innings I threw caught up to me. It’s an inevitability in this game. But you never know how or exactly when it will happen. My final big-league game came in 1988. In ’86, I was solid if not spectacular, with a 3.98 ERA in thirty starts and a 9-12 record. The next year, ’87, I had a 3.67 ERA but made it into only twenty-two games. In 1988, that number declined to twelve.
The end really came during the spring of ’89, when I had surgery on a bone spur in my elbow. But it wasn’t just the injury—I could’ve come back, and I actually had the best spring training of my career before I got hurt, not that I ever put much stock in spring performance. Still, it showed I had gas left in the tank. It also had to do with our new manager.
Before the ’89 season we hired Dallas Green, who previously had some success managing the Phillies. But we would never have got along had I actually played for him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t want me there for some reason, but that wasn’t his call.
At the beginning of spring training, he called a meeting and something happened. You could say we got off on the wrong foot. He was standing right at the entrance to where you go to the lavatories and showers, and I was sitting nearby on a bench in front of my locker. As he started to address the team, he began walking. He stepped, hard, on my foot. I got up to move my feet, but I was rather shocked. I felt that he was in the wrong and should’ve acknowledged it and apologized in some sort of way. He never said he was sorry or anything, and just kept talking as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t just that, though. It was what he was saying. “This is what I want done. I want it done this way.” I was taken aback. I had dealt with plenty of managers, got on differently with all of them, but none of them spoke in the way that he was talking. They’d say, “This is what we’d like to accomplish. We’d like to work on this. We’d like to get better at this.” It was that “I” versus “we.” It grated on me, and I thought it said a lot about how he viewed us and the team.
So the next day, I knew Dallas was gonna give us another talk. But beforehand, I looked across the locker room and Don Mattingly had the locker directly across from mine. He had a bunch of bats, and one was cast off to the side.
“Hey, Donnie, that bat that’s by itself. You doin’ anything with it?”
“Nope.”
“Mind if I borrow it for a minute?”
“Sure.”
So I sat down with it and sat in front of my locker, just as I had the day before. But this time I had the bat in my hand. Dallas comes in and gets ready to start talking again. I leaned over and kind of tapped it a couple times against the ground. He looked at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“If you walk on my feet again this morning,” I said, “I swear to God I’ll break your frickin’ ankle.”
Of course, he got pissed. After the meeting, he sent one of our coaches to tell me to go meet with him in his office. He was cursing, ranting and raving, because I had showed him up in front of everybody else. I told him he was the one who started it and who didn’t treat me with common decency. I don’t mean to attack the man’s character here; other people have spoken highly of him. This was just my experience. It was just clear it was never gonna work between us. (And, it’s worth noting, he was fired after less than a full season.)
After some rehab, I came back from the arm surgery and felt physically fine. There was no question that I wasn’t my former self. But I thought I was at maybe 85 percent—which still made for a viable starter, especially on a team that was often hurting for starting pitchers. But after the surgery the Yankees had me pitching in Double-A to prove my health, endurance, and effectiveness. And at a certain point, it just felt like I was spinning my wheels. Why go through all of this?
I had made all the money I needed to make. I had a beautiful house and family in Lafayette. I was eager to spend more time there. I loved the game, but at the same time I knew I wouldn’t miss it. I was ready to begin a new life, from a different perspective. It made me happy to see Dave Righetti in my former locker, in the corner of the clubhouse, and players like Don Mattingly, knowing the Yankees tradition would carry on.
Being away from guys like that would be the hardest part, I knew. In the clubhouse, I had twenty-four brothers. I knew I would miss them. Still, I wouldn’t miss my arm aching and hearing the voices of my kids over the phone as they grew up. Jamie was twelve already. My son Brandon was nine, and Danielle, our daughter, was four. I had an exciting new career ahead of me as a full-time father.
I didn’t make a big show of it when I retired in July of ’89. I met with reporters at Yankee Stadium, and we reminisced about my ’78 season, the eighteen-strikeout game, and the craziness of what was now a decade earlier, although still fresh in my mind. I just wanted a chance to say good-bye, and wanted to do it alongside Bonnie and my three kids, who all joined me that day. It wasn’t easy—baseball and hunting were the only two things I knew anything about, I told the reporters. But I didn’t see myself as losing baseball. I was just about to see it from a new lens.
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From time to time I’m asked whether I’m disappointed not to have made the Hall of Fame. The answer is no. I didn’
t need that. The game had given me so much. Bonnie and I had moved from the little apartment we shared behind my parents’ place to a beautiful house in Lafayette, where we grew up. It was the house we raised our children in, and now it’s home to our grandchildren. Maybe if I’d made myself miserable and won a few more games, or notched a few end-of-career saves in the bullpen, I would have made a better case for the hall. But I won 170 and lost 91. I was proud of my achievements. I never regretted retiring when I did.
What really made me tear up was having my number, 49, retired in 2003. It was quite a gesture by Mr. Steinbrenner. He and I had grown close during my later years as a Yankee, but our relationship really became something special when I was no longer a player. Then we could sit and talk as equals. He would eat my rabbit stew, put his arm around me, and we’d watch the current players together. I was choked up by his decision to put me out in Monument Park alongside the names of people like Reggie, Yogi, Billy, Thurman, Don Mattingly, Whitey Ford, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, and Babe Ruth.
I was always cognizant of the fact that when I retired, I did so quietly. I essentially said, “I’m going home.” To me, this moment was the chance to properly thank the Yankees fans for everything they meant to me, everything they did for me, and everything they said to me over the years. They would always ask me if I could hear them when I was on the mound. I didn’t hear anyone in particular, but I could hear the roar. It was a distant thunder. It lifted me up to be the best that I could. It always made me proud to perform at Yankee Stadium. There are a lot of things at work when you talk about home-field advantage: The grounds crew can cut the grass in a certain way that fits your style, and you know the dimensions of the ballpark down to the inch. But pitching in front of Yankee Stadium fans is different than pitching in front of any other fans. They actually made me better than I probably made myself. I wanted to thank them for that.