Gator

by Ron Guidry

  That day, August 23, I went to Yankee Stadium not knowing quite what to expect. Bonnie knew what was going on. She had coordinated the event with the Yankees without my knowledge. I don’t know how she did it, but it made it even more special. I thought they were simply honoring me, and then, with a host of Yankees legends like Yogi and Whitey on the field, they revealed my bronze plaque. I felt a surge of emotion like no other. It was an incredible acknowledgment by George and the Yankees of what I had done. Who needs the Hall of Fame when your plaque lives out in Monument Park alongside the greatest players for the greatest team in history, so many of the legends of all time?

  * * *

  —

  I grew up idolizing Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Maris’s sixty-one-home-run season, and the home-run chase between Mantle and Maris in 1961, took place right as I was falling in love with the game. Old Timers’ Days had come and passed, and I had never introduced myself to Maris. I wanted to, badly. But Roger always seemed like a very private person.

  We were in the clubhouse before the game, the old-timers talking to the current players. I leaned forward in my chair, staring at him. “Who are you looking at?” asked Mickey, seated next to me.

  “I’m looking at Roger.”

  “You’ve never met him?”

  “No,” I said. “I would love to, but I didn’t want to bother him.”

  “Hey, Rog,” Mickey called across the clubhouse. “Come over here a second. This young man here would like to say hello.”

  I stood up and shook Maris’s hand. “Mr. Maris, it’s very nice to meet you.”

  “Ron,” he replied, “I’m so glad. I’ve been dying to meet you, but I didn’t want to bother you.”

  Then we sat down and talked baseball. I asked him about the home-run chase and playing on those great Yankees teams of the sixties. And he wanted to know about me. I had won the Cy Young by this point and was an established player. Still, it was quite the feeling. Roger Maris wanted to ask me about my pitching? How I threw my slider?

  That in a nutshell is why I loved Old Timers’ Day so much. As soon as the schedule came out, I’d look at the calendar to circle whatever day it was. Because Yogi had his locker next to mine, with Elston Howard next to him, our side of the clubhouse was stacked. We’d have Mickey and Whitey Ford alongside us. Then I’d watch the rest of Yankees royalty file in. Joe DiMaggio. Vic Raschi. Eddie Lopat. Mantle. Maris. I’d be at the park by 8 A.M. just so I didn’t miss a thing.

  For a player, it’s a surreal feeling. I’d seen so many of the World Series games on television. I had read about these guys, watched them, heard about them. Then, suddenly, there they were, talking to me, telling me what it was like. And they wanted to know about me, what it was like playing for George and Billy.

  “Hey, Whitey,” Mickey hollered across the clubhouse. “How good do you think we would’ve been if we had this guy?”

  “I don’t know,” Whitey replied. “I don’t think I would’ve been as good pitching from the number two spot.”

  They went out of their way to forge a relationship with me and the others, in a way that gave me goose bumps. Mickey and Whitey could spin a great story, because they didn’t hold anything back. They came from that generation that was just brutally honest. They did what they did and didn’t try to cover anything up. I’m not breaking any news here by saying those teams were famous for carousing.

  The one thing that stood out to me most was how well those guys got along. They seemed to have a great camaraderie. It helped me to understand how they won so much. They might have been fierce competitors on the field, but they were good friends off the field. Good ballplayers can win games, but it takes a certain chemistry to win as much as they did. It’s why we won, the fighting and the camaraderie.

  Me and a few other people pushed to have the players’ wives involved. I believe it started with Mrs. Arlene Howard, when Elston passed away. All the families had grown so close that it was a shame to not have them there. They had to go through so much on their own when we were off playing that I felt they never got enough appreciation. So while Thurman couldn’t be there, his memories live on when Diana, his wife, comes. Same with Jill Martin after Billy passed; Helen Hunter, Catfish’s wife; and Kay Murcer, Bobby’s wife—to name a few.

  The Yankees are obviously fortunate to have more of these legends and Hall of Famers than any team in the world. But the club, especially under George, always had a special understanding of its history. The organization always cherished and embraced it. It was fun for the fans, as well as for the players.

  George enjoyed Old Timers’ Day. He understood that when he acquired the team, he acquired its history too.

  Once I retired, it gave me something to look forward to. Hearing your name called once again, watching the fans cheer for you again, it’s quite a thrill.

  It also gave me an opportunity to grow closer with some of the all-time greats who I had gotten to know as a player. Mickey and Whitey started holding a fantasy camp down in Florida every year, where people pay to play ball for a week, with coaching and instruction. When I retired, they invited me to be one of the coaches.

  It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t have any trouble staying close to the Yankees after I retired. After my press conference, I was summoned to George’s office.

  “Gator,” he said, “I’d still like to see you at spring training next year, working with the guys.”

  13

  COACH GATOR

  During spring training of ’93, one of our coaches, Mark Connor, came up to me and said he’d like me to take a look at one of the team’s young pitchers. Every February since I had retired, I had made the eleven-or-so-hour drive from Lafayette to Florida to participate in spring training. George’s offer to serve as a guest instructor was a generous one. I enjoyed being around the game, putting on the Yankees uniform, and getting to watch the young players. The team, I think, benefited too from having somebody around who’d had a lot of success in the major leagues, as the players got ready for the season.

  I headed to one of the back fields that day to watch this young pitcher throw. He was just coming off surgery, so I didn’t know what to expect. But I was curious because Mark told me the pitcher reminded him of someone, except he didn’t tell me who. So I settled in to watch him throw. Zip. Swoosh. Despite recovering from surgery and being a skinny guy, the pitcher, Mariano Rivera, had incredible speed and movement on his ball.

  “Who does he remind you of?” Mark asked after I had seen the kid throw his bullpen session.

  “Well, if he was left-handed, he’d be me.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody said.”

  I walked over to George with a message. The Yankees had left Mo unprotected in the 1992 expansion draft and were lucky that no team had claimed him. After seeing him pitch, I couldn’t let them make the same mistake. “If you ever trade that kid right there,” I said to George, pointing to Mo, “you’ll never win any more championships.”

  The first couple years of spring training weren’t that fun for me. Not because I was too close to my playing days but because I was one of the only steady guest instructors down there. I enjoyed leading the drills, getting to know the younger players, but there were fewer and fewer people I actually knew. This was at the height of the feud between Yogi and George. Whitey Ford would come, but he wasn’t there every day. I just felt a little out of place.

  When George called me during the winter before ’92 spring training, he was a little surprised at our conversation.

  “Gator, you planning on coming down again?”

  “I’m not so sure, Mr. G.”

  “What?” he rasped. “What’s the problem?”

  “I’m having a great time, but I’m by myself,” I told him. “Would you entertain the thought of asking somebody else to come?”

  “Well, of course. Bu
t who?”

  “Cat.”

  His voice boomed over the phone with excitement. “You think Catfish would come?” He was almost incredulous, and honored by the idea. I told him to give me a moment, that I’d call him back. I called Cat; his wife, Helen, answered the phone and put him on. I asked him if he’d be interested in being an instructor at spring training, and he laughed.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Tell George to call me.” Half an hour later I got a call from Cat saying I’d see him in February.

  It was Buck Showalter’s first year as manager, and I think he was a little worried about me and Cat being there, maybe because we might overshadow him or because he feared we’d act as pipelines to George, giving reports about him. So on the first day he told me and Cat to go work with guys on the back fields, out of sight of the action. We did some drills with the players, worked on fundamentals, and so forth. Next day, we were in the back fields again. And every day afterward for the rest of the spring. About halfway through, we looked at each other and realized we hadn’t been to the main field the entire time. It was as if we were intentionally being given nothing to do.

  We weren’t there to spy on or upstage Buck. But he didn’t know that. It’s nothing against Buck. He went on to have an incredible managerial career in New York, Arizona, Texas, and Baltimore. He has won AL Manager of the Year three times. But I took it personally, because I had recruited Catfish, a guy who’s in the Hall of Fame and doesn’t deserve to be treated like that. Of course, Cat being a class act, he didn’t say shit about it. We just minded our own business and did our best to have a good time.

  George got to doing some old-fashioned ass-chewing when he found out about it. He had asked if I’d be coming back again, and I told him it didn’t go so well and that he shouldn’t bother Cat by asking again. I can still hear his voice through the phone after I told him why. “What?” The following spring I don’t think we went to the back fields once. And we all got along well with the other coaches, because it was clear we weren’t there to spy on anybody. We were there to be a set of helping hands, a resource for the players. I was especially glad Cat became part of the fold, because in just a couple of years, he would be diagnosed with ALS. He passed away in 1999. I lost a great friend and kindred spirit, and the Yankees lost a great player and instructor.

  Over the years, that coaches’ room grew more and more crowded every spring with familiar faces. Goose retired after ’94 and became a regular. The current players would walk by us and think we were having way too much fun. We enjoyed wearing the uniform and being around baseball for a month. And beyond the instructional aspects of our job, I think it was good for the current players to see that. The perceptive guys picked up on it.

  * * *

  —

  I never ruled out the possibility of coaching. I never wanted to be a manager, but I thought in the right situation, I might enjoy the opportunity to coach the pitchers. I never angled for it, though, because the kids were still growing up and I wanted to spend as much time as I could back home. I would also only do it for the Yankees.

  In the mid-2000s, Joe Torre felt me out. There were signs his longtime pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, might retire; Torre wanted to know if I’d consider replacing him. So for about a month, I shadowed Mel to see what the job entailed. I saw how he worked with certain guys. Who he would baby and who he would chew out. Who was serious and who was always cracking jokes. So much of the game had become about coaching by the numbers, using computerized charts and whatnot, and I knew I couldn’t coach that way.

  When Joe was looking for a new pitching coach after the 2005 season, I made that abundantly clear to him. I was eager to work with the pitchers and coach, but computerized baseball wasn’t me. The Yankees front office wanted somebody who had those skills. But Joe loved the way I interacted with the guys during the spring and how they responded to me. He told me I wouldn’t have to mess with the computers. He talked to George, and the old man was eager to have me back on board.

  I knew going into it that I didn’t want to be a long-termer. A few years at most. More than anything, I didn’t want to grow old and never have tried coaching the newer players, to wonder “what if?” Bonnie agreed.

  I’m not sure I would have done it if I weren’t working for Joe Torre. Joe was an outstanding manager and an absolute pleasure to work for. We didn’t win the World Series the two years I coached, 2006 and 2007, but we had some fun in the dugout. Don Mattingly, Lee Mazzilli, and I knew the balance between taking the game seriously and having fun. That’s the thing about former players: We could be fiery as hell, but we never treated the game like a business, as is so often the case today. The clubhouse, the dugout, it shouldn’t be stoic and 100 percent serious. And if you saw Joe Torre’s face on television, you would see that he was quite a serious man. But we also made him laugh a lot.

  During one game Joe made me go out to talk to Randy Johnson in the first inning. Now, Randy is one of the greatest pitchers to ever step onto a baseball field. He won 303 games and five Cy Young Awards and struck out 4,875 batters with a 3.29 career ERA. “The Big Unit,” as he was known, threw hard as hell, and he was six foot ten. But RJ was hard to talk to. He didn’t want much advice on his pitching and more generally wasn’t perfectly cut out to handle the twenty-four-hour, in-your-face pressure of New York. Before playing a game for us, he got into some heat when he shoved a cameraman on the street.

  During that game, I went out to talk to RJ in the first inning. The second inning didn’t go much better, so Joe sent me out there to talk to him again. It wasn’t fun, because I didn’t have much to say to Randy, who was never in the mood to listen too much. So later in the game when Joe asked me to go out there a third time, I just exploded. “I don’t wanna go out there and talk to that guy. If you want to, then just go do it.”

  So Joe went and did just that. He chatted with RJ on the mound, and when he came back he had this glazed, faraway look in his eyes. He turned to me and Mattingly on the bench and said, “He just doesn’t get it, does he?” Joe always said he would’ve loved to have me pitch for him. I told him there was no way in hell I could’ve pitched for him.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You come out to the mound too damn often.”

  “But if it had been you out there,” Joe replied, “I wouldn’t have to.”

  Even in the heat of battle, we could laugh at the little things. As I said before, catchers often make the best managers, and Joe was another example of that. He’d won four World Series and two more pennants with the Yankees.

  What made Joe so great was his ability to keep the peace. He was the perfect manager at the perfect time. He had the innate ability to be calm when things got out of hand. It made him the opposite of Billy in many respects. Joe could balance everything, from the front office to the players to the day-to-day turmoil the team faces in the tabloids whenever the Yankees lose a game. He could compartmentalize extremely well.

  He was also able to keep George in check better than any other manager I knew. George had mellowed over the years—by the time I was the pitching coach, he was in his mid-seventies—but the players in Joe Torre’s clubhouse never had to face George the way we did. The way, when I was playing, George would come into the clubhouse screaming and hollering—that was mostly a thing of the past. Joe’s calm demeanor put George at ease, and that put the guys on the team at ease. And that fit the personality of the players in those years. Joe’s teams had some all-time Yankees greats, such as Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte, but they also weren’t the types who would have told George to screw off if he got in their faces.

  From 2008 to 2010, Joe went on to manage the Dodgers for three season. I’m not sure he would’ve asked me to join him as his pitching coach, though he might have. That never happened. I think I made it clear in previous conversations with him why. I stated it pretty simply:
I could never wear Dodger blue. We had too many big games against them when I was a player, and I had worn only Yankees pinstripes my entire life. It wouldn’t have been right.

  The game was evolving quickly, too. The shift, more than anything, is one of the ways the game had changed between my time playing and coaching. It felt more like a business. Granted, there’s a middle ground between the craziness I experienced as a player and the stoic, businesslike atmosphere today, but over the years the players had become far more clean-cut. As a coach, I’d walk onto the bus during a road trip and the first thing I noticed is that everybody had whipped out their phones or put their headphones on. Nobody talked to anybody. The magic of our Yankees teams was built on rowdy bus rides where there was no telling what would happen. Whatever shit went down, we had built a brotherhood on the buses, and if often felt like we were going to war together.

  It built character. We tested one another. You could insult a man’s dog, his house, his family, his accent, his schooling, his shoes, his hometown, his clothes, and none of it was taken personally. Nobody was overly sensitive about it, because it was all about whether or not you were quick enough and tough enough to dish it right back. It’s why Lou Piniella was so beloved—nobody could talk shit like him.

  Another thing that’s different: Now when you see any team celebrate, with the champagne and whatnot, it’s all so structured. They put these Visqueen plastic sheets all over the lockers and the floor, they have goggles for the players to protect their eyes from the spraying champagne, and it’s this big to-do. We just soaked each other. It was all pure heat-of-the-moment stuff.

  This shows just how informal it was: The first time my wife, Bonnie, met Yogi Berra, he was stark naked. Her words were he was “naked as a jaybird.” We had just won the ’77 World Series and we were all celebrating, going crazy, of course. He didn’t have a care in the world. Why would he? We had just won the World frickin’ Series.