Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  What ultimately convinced Berk that he couldn’t work for Steinbrenner was the rainout of the Yankees’ April 27 game with the Minnesota Twins.

  All afternoon, as the rain came down in torrents, Berk was on the phone, getting the latest updates from the weather service at Newark Airport. After consulting with the umpires, Berk announced that the game was going to have to be postponed. As soon as Berk made the announcement, Steinbrenner, who was in Cleveland, had him on the line, screaming: “How the hell can you call that game? It’s not raining there!”

  “I’d been hollered at before by a lot better people,” said Berk, “but this was so illogical! Finally, I just shouted back at him: ‘How in the hell can you tell me it’s not raining here when you’re not even in the city?’ ”

  Berk gave his notice the next day, earning him the distinction of the first Yankee official to leave the employ of George Steinbrenner. Two days later, it was announced that Mike Burke had decided to step down as Yankees chief operating officer and would become a consultant while remaining a limited partner. In the various news reports and even in the Official Baseball Guide the following year, Burke’s departure was reported as a firing.

  In his letter of resignation to Steinbrenner, Burke wrote:

  “The scope of responsibilities and authority proposed to be assigned to me are so limited as to be incompatible with even the narrowest definition of ‘chief operating officer’ and I must conclude that you do not want me to operate the Yankees. Slowly and sadly, I have come to this conclusion. It represents a stunning, personal setback.”

  Burke concluded by saying that he would not serve as general partner, would not be directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the club and would continue on the Yankee payroll for a maximum period of four months, during which time he would actively seek other employment.

  Upon learning of Burke’s departure while listening to a Yankee broadcast on the radio, a startled Howard Berk immediately called his old boss.

  “I’ll never forget his words to me,” Berk recalled. “He said: ‘I was tired of going to the mat every day. Life’s too short. It’s just not worth it.’ ”

  Three months later, on July 27, Mike Burke was named president and chief operating officer of Madison Square Garden, with an annual salary of $100,000. In 1981, he sold his 5 percent share of the partnership for $500,000. The listed buyer on the sale agreement was Leonard Kleinman of Shaker Heights, Ohio—Steinbrenner’s tax attorney, who was merely serving as an agent for the principal owner.

  STEINBRENNER WAS STILL waiting to be approved by the American League owners when that spring’s juiciest story broke: the stunning announcement by Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich that they had decided to trade wives and, by extension, their families. The ever-cynical Dick Young wrote in the New York Daily News, “At least they did it before the inter-family trading deadline.”

  While it was left to general manager Lee MacPhail and manager Ralph Houk to provide the Yankees’ public posture on the embarrassing wife-swap story, on most other issues Steinbrenner was fully engaged behind the scenes. Houk, who had enjoyed a unique autonomy as Yankee manager during the lean years of CBS’s stewardship, found out quickly he was now working for a very different kind of owner.

  On Opening Day against the Cleveland Indians, Steinbrenner was sitting in the club box behind the Yankees dugout, frowning as the Yankees stood at attention, caps off, for the national anthem. “The hair,” he grumbled: “unacceptable.” He began jotting down uniform numbers of the players he deemed in need of a haircut. After the game, he presented Houk with the list, which had a half-dozen numbers scrawled on it, including “1” for Bobby Murcer, “15” for Thurman Munson, “17” for Gene Michael and “28” for Sparky Lyle. “Tell these players they have to get their hair cut,” he told Houk.

  The next day, in a clubhouse meeting before the game, Houk carried out the new owner’s edict, to the number.

  “It was really kind of funny,” recalled third baseman Graig Nettles, who had just come over to the Yankees from the Cleveland Indians the previous November and had taken an instant liking to Houk, reputed to be the ultimate “players’ manager.” “There’s Ralph, standing there in front of us and announcing: ‘I’ve been instructed to inform the following players to get their hair cut,’ and then he reads off just the numbers. We thought it was funny that George didn’t even know us by our names—only by our numbers and our hair.”

  A few months into the season, Steinbrenner was sitting in a box next to the visitors’ dugout watching the Yankees take pregame infield practice at Arlington Stadium, in Texas, when Gene Michael, running out onto the field, suddenly tossed his glove up in the air and let out a shriek as a hot dog flew out of it, landing right in front of Steinbrenner. It turned out Michael was terrified of bugs and snakes and was often the butt of his teammates’ practical jokes. In this case, infielder Hal Lanier had slipped the hot dog into one of the fingers of Michael’s glove. From Steinbrenner’s standpoint, though, pregame hijinks were an indication that Houk’s players weren’t taking the game seriously. In a fit of agitation, he wrote down Michael’s uniform number and demanded that Houk discipline the tall, lanky shortstop.

  “We knew George meant business when he came into the clubhouse afterward, accompanied by a Texas state trooper, demanding to know who was responsible for the prank,” laughed Sparky Lyle, the free-spirit Yankee closer.

  Michael remembered the incident as the first time Steinbrenner really took notice of him personally. After his playing days were over, he would serve two terms each as Steinbrenner’s manager and general manager and went on to become the owner’s most respected talent evaluator in the Yankee organization. “Even Ralph could hardly keep a straight face when he called me over and told me how pissed George was,” said Michael.

  Houk wasn’t laughing as Steinbrenner continued to meddle for the rest of the ’73 season, however, especially after the Yankees went into a second-half funk, going 20-34 in August and September. On August 17, the Yankees took an 8–1 drubbing from the Rangers in the first of a three-game series in Texas and right fielder Johnny Callison dropped a fly ball for a critical error. Steinbrenner, who was again in the stands, called general manager Lee MacPhail and bellowed: “Get that sonofabitch Callison out of here. He can’t play. I want him gone, do you hear me?”

  MacPhail protested but was forced to release Callison. It was the same with Bernie Allen, a utility infielder abruptly sold to the Montreal Expos after Steinbrenner deemed him unsuitable for his team. In the book Dog Days, by Philip Bashe, Allen recalled his exile to the Montreal Expos. “I went into the clubhouse to pick up my stuff and Ralph called me into his office and said: ‘Bernie, I just wanted you to know that Lee and I had nothing to do with this.’ ”

  (In retrospect, though he may have been impulsive and heavy-handed, Steinbrenner was right about both Callison and Allen, neither of whom played again beyond the ’73 season.)

  MacPhail and Houk were also privately revolted by Steinbrenner’s hiring of Max Patkin, the so-called Clown Prince of Baseball, to perform his goofy gyrations and mimic routine from the first base coaching box during a few games that first season. Patkin had earned a living taking his routine through the minor leagues, and MacPhail and Houk, both of whom were steeped in Yankee tradition, regarded his presence as a bush league carnival act, certainly not befitting baseball’s most revered franchise.

  By now MacPhail had realized that his position as Yankee general manager under an impetuous, meddling owner and an established baseball executive, Gabe Paul, was not tenable. He had been desperately disappointed that Mike Burke had not solicited his interest in putting together an ownership group when CBS decided to put the Yankees up for sale, and now Burke was gone altogether, leaving MacPhail with no buffer between him and the aggressive new owner. He was therefore very interested to hear that 67-year-old Joe Cronin, who had served as American League president since 1959, planned to retire at the end of the
1973 season. For the American League owners, the search for a successor to Cronin was brief and uncomplicated, beginning and ending with MacPhail, whose nearly 25 years of baseball experience as Yankee farm director and general manager of both the Baltimore Orioles and the Yankees had earned him universal respect within the baseball establishment. Plus, as everyone well knew, he was eminently available.

  MacPhail would remain on the job as Yankee GM until the end of the year. One of his final acts was to trade a fading, 36-year-old relief pitcher named Lindy McDaniel to the Kansas City Royals for outfielder Lou Piniella. It was a trade that would have lasting consequences, most of them positive, for both the Yankees as a team and Steinbrenner personally.

  “For the last deal of my career, it wasn’t too bad,” said MacPhail.

  Shortly after the ’73 season, Bob Fishel, the vice president of public relations who was himself a Yankee institution, having presided over countless historic press conferences, including the 1960 Casey Stengel firing, Roger Maris’s 1961 home run record chase, the return of Houk to the field in 1966 and the selling of the team by Dan Topping and Del Webb to CBS and then by CBS to Steinbrenner, announced that he, too, was leaving to join MacPhail in the same media relations capacity at the American League. Fishel’s then-25-year-old assistant, Marty Appel, remembers feeling both shock and trepidation at his boss’s departure.

  “He told me he was leaving out of loyalty to Lee,” said Appel, “but instead of feeling excited about being promoted, I felt a little scared. There had never been anyone as young as I was heading up public relations for a major league team, and now, instead of reporting to Bob, I was reporting directly to Steinbrenner.”

  As time passed, Fishel told friends that the real reason he left was Paul’s presence as front office chief. “He just didn’t trust Gabe and considered him an outsider, and he hated being around him. That became even more unbearable when Gabe took him off the road in ’73,” Appel recalled.

  Ralph Houk also resigned after 1973, severing his 35-year relationship with the Yankees, where he had gone from backup catcher to coach, manager, general manager and manager again. But it was not quite as seamless as the resignations of his close colleagues, MacPhail and Fishel. In fact, there was very likely some behind-the-scenes skullduggery about it, although no one would ever fess up to it and nothing was ever proved, even in the aftermath of a league inquiry.

  Nicknamed “The Major” (in reference to his Army rank in World War II, when he earned a Silver Star for bravery in leading his battalion’s resistance to German panzer divisions in the town of Waldbillig during the Battle of the Bulge), Houk had replaced the popular Casey Stengel as Yankee manager in 1960 and become the first manager in baseball history to win world championships in his first two seasons. But in Houk’s second term as Yankee manager—he’d gone upstairs as general manager in 1964, only to return to the field in April 1966, after the team started the season 4-16 under his handpicked successor, Johnny Keane—his standing with the fans deteriorated in conjunction with the quality of his teams. When the Yankees went into their late-season collapse in ’73, Houk was booed lustily by the home fans almost every time he came out of the dugout to make a pitching change.

  Between the booing from the fans and Steinbrenner’s meddling, Houk was ready and actively looking for a change of venue. Sometime in early September, after firing his manager, Billy Martin, Detroit Tigers general manager Jim Campbell contacted Houk to solicit his interest in coming over to Detroit. Houk never admitted to what would have been a case of tampering, even though it was an open secret he was planning to resign as Yankee manager at the end of the season and that the Tigers were his likely new employer. Houk always insisted it was more the continual booing he took from the fans that last season than Steinbrenner’s interference that prompted him to leave. What was somewhat surprising—especially given his future lack of regard for managers—was Steinbrenner’s overture to Houk to stay, in a meeting they had in the manager’s office after the last game of the season.

  “I’ve decided to resign, George,” Houk said. “This losing and the booing has really been hard on me. It’s time I moved on.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Ralph,” Steinbrenner said, “because I’m gonna go out and get ballplayers that’ll make this team great again.”

  “Looking back, that’s exactly what he did, and maybe I have a little regret about that,” Houk told me in a 2002 interview. “But if I’d stayed, I’m sure he’d have gotten me too, just like all the rest of ’em.”

  The Yankees never made an issue of Campbell’s likely tampering with Houk, probably because Steinbrenner had been guilty of the same thing that season with Oakland A’s manager Dick Williams, who’d managed the A’s to consecutive world championships in 1972 and ’73. Like Houk, Williams worked for a meddlesome, irascible owner, Charles O. Finley, who quarreled publicly with the Oakland players and regularly called Williams in the middle of the night.

  The final straw for Williams was Finley’s infamous “firing” of second baseman Mike Andrews in the middle of the 1973 World Series, against the New York Mets. Andrews, a late-season acquisition, committed two errors in the 12th inning of Oakland’s 10–7 loss in game two. Because Andrews had been nursing a sore shoulder, Finley seized the opportunity to try to replace him on the roster with another second baseman, Manny Trillo, by coercing him into signing a statement that he was too injured to play.

  Finley’s ploy was swiftly rejected by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who fined him $5,000 and ordered Andrews restored to the A’s roster. For the disgusted Williams, the Andrews incident became his justification for resigning as A’s manager immediately after the last game of the Series.

  As they stood side by side at the World Series trophy presentation ceremony, Finley said, “Even though you’re not going to be with us next year, I want to thank you for the great job you’ve done for the three years you’ve been with me,” to which Williams replied, “Thank you, Charlie, very much, and I’m going to miss being with you, but I’ve made a decision and I’m going to stick with it.”

  It appeared to be an amicable parting of ways, except that Williams had been secretly negotiating with the Yankees months before the World Series, and Finley quickly came to surmise as much. For, sometime in early August, as the Yankees began slumping badly, Steinbrenner decided to make a manager change at the end of the season. Hearing of Williams’s dissatisfaction with Finley, he asked Gabe Paul to look into it. Wily to all the inner doings in baseball, Paul instinctively knew the man to talk to: Nat Tarnopol.

  Growing up in Detroit, Tarnopol had been a star shortstop in high school and was offered contracts by both the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers in the late ’40s. The low wages earned by baseball players at that time and the anti-Semitism directed at Jewish athletes, especially his boyhood hero, Hank Greenberg, prompted Tarnopol to pass on the offers, and instead he embarked on a career in the music industry, becoming, at age 25, manager of the legendary rhythm-and-blues singer Jackie Wilson and later taking control of the record label that produced Wilson’s albums.

  Once an established music mogul, Tarnopol used his wealth and influence to ingratiate himself with baseball players, especially the Jewish big-leaguers like the Yankees’ Ron Blomberg. In the ’70s he was a regular at Yankee Stadium and in Gabe Paul’s office, suggesting trades and lobbying the Yankee president to have an “appreciation day” for Blomberg. Though he considered himself a Yankee insider, Tarnopol wasn’t friendly with just the home team. He would often entertain friends on visiting teams at his mansion in upstate Purchase, New York. Among them was Irv Noren, a former Yankee outfielder in the ’50s and now one of the A’s coaches. When the A’s came to New York on August 23 for a three-game series, Tarnopol called Noren at his hotel room to inform him of the Yankees’ interest in his boss, Dick Williams.

  At Noren’s urging, Williams immediately called Tarnopol, who bragged to him that he’d talked to Paul and could get him the Yankee mana
ger’s job if he was interested. Williams definitely was.

  “I’m no idiot,” Williams told me in 2007. “I didn’t quit Finley in the middle of the World Series without knowing I had another team in my pocket!”

  Once Williams made his resignation official at the World Series, Steinbrenner instructed Paul to proceed with negotiations to sign Williams. But then, on October 23, two days after the World Series, Finley confronted Steinbrenner at an owners meeting in Chicago.

  “I know what you’re up to,” Finley said after calling Steinbrenner aside in one of the conference rooms, “and I’m letting you know right here and now, Williams can resign all he wants to, I’m not letting him out of his contract. If you go ahead and try to sign Williams, I’ll charge you with tampering!”

  In a series of interviews immediately after that meeting, Finley reiterated that he was not going to let Williams out of his contract without being properly compensated, citing a similar 1968 circumstance in which the Mets had given the Washington Senators pitcher Bill Denehy and $250,000 in exchange for their releasing Gil Hodges from his contract so he could return home to manage New York.

  The stalemate continued into the December winter baseball meetings in Houston, where Paul, realizing that the precedent set by the Hodges deal favored the A’s, offered Finley a package that included two minor league players and $150,000 in exchange compensation for Williams. Finley flatly rejected the offer, saying that neither of the minor leaguers was a major league prospect. A frustrated Steinbrenner instructed his in-house counsel, Tom Evans, to pore over Williams’s contract for any loopholes. On December 17, Evans reported back to Steinbrenner.