Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Under the terms of the major league rules of procedure, a commissioner needed the support of 75 percent (9 out of 12) of the clubs from each league to be elected. Since Kuhn had suspended him, Steinbrenner’s vote against was seen as a given, and it was reported just prior to the meeting that Finley had also enlisted the support of the Texas Rangers’ Brad Corbett, giving him the necessary four votes to fire the commissioner. Nevertheless, American League president Lee MacPhail told Kuhn before the meeting he was embarrassed by the Finley cabal and vowed to work behind the scenes on his behalf.

  Though he was not permitted to take part in the meeting, Steinbrenner was granted permission by Kuhn to attend the All-Star Game and discuss the commissioner’s reelection with Yankees officials—a development Gabe Paul viewed as suspicious. For his part, Steinbrenner told a group of reporters gathered at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee: “I would never vote against the commissioner because of anything he did within the perimeter of his authority. People seem to think the Yankees will vote against him because of my suspension, but that is not true. I will not enter into any retaliatory attempts of any sort.”

  Paul, of course, knew different. In their conversations that summer, Steinbrenner had frequently expressed his disdain for Kuhn, and Paul had agreed with him. “I don’t think he’s done a good job,” Paul said. “He hasn’t solved any of the problems baseball has, and he’s too pompous.” They agreed that Paul and acting Yankees general partner Pat Cunningham would cast a “no” vote against Kuhn on behalf of Steinbrenner.

  But the night before the reelection vote was to take place, Walter O’Malley, the powerful and influential owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, called Corbett and convinced him to change his vote to a “yes.” This, in turn, prompted Pittsburgh Pirates owner Dan Galbreath, who shared horse-racing interests with Steinbrenner, to call the Yankees owner and inform him of the changed political landscape. Realizing immediately that, with Kuhn’s reelection certain, it would now be in his best interest to vote for Kuhn, Steinbrenner asked Galbreath if he would lobby the commissioner to lift his suspension. Galbreath agreed to talk to Kuhn on his behalf—but only after the election.

  During this last-minute maneuvering, Paul, who had again assured Hoffberger that the Yankees would be voting against Kuhn, became concerned when he saw MacPhail going into Cunningham’s room at the Pfister in the morning before the vote was to take place. What had particularly disturbed him was a letter Kuhn had sent to Cunningham a few weeks earlier in which the commissioner said Steinbrenner had a “free pass” to talk to Cunningham about the reelection matter. “He’s barred from everything else, but he can talk about the commissioner’s reelection,” Paul said in his tape entry that day. “What a fine kettle of fish.”

  As they sat down at the meeting in the Pfister ballroom, Cunningham turned to Paul and said that Steinbrenner’s attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, had called to inform him the night before that if they didn’t vote for Kuhn there was no way he’d ever get the suspension lifted.

  Paul was furious.

  “Clearly, Pat, there’s been a deal made here and I’ve been double-crossed,” Paul said. “What am I supposed to say to Hoffberger now?”

  It turned out not to matter, because he never got the chance. No sooner was the vote announced as 22–2 in favor of Kuhn’s reelection than Hoffberger got up and stormed out of the room, momentarily stopping in front of Paul and sputtering loud enough for everyone in the room to hear: “Tell your goddamned boss he doesn’t have a gut in his body!”

  If Steinbrenner thought his vote for Kuhn would hasten his own reinstatement, he was mistaken. It would be another eight months before the commissioner allowed him to resume control of the Yankees.

  In the meantime, Steinbrenner returned to New York from Milwaukee, his “free pass” from Kuhn having expired with the commissioner’s reelection, and continued to watch the Yankees lose. Coming off a 3-6 road trip after the All-Star break, they won the first of a four-game series at home against the Red Sox, only to lose the next three. The Sunday, July 27, doubleheader, in which they were shut out in both games before a crowd of 53,631, the largest at Shea all year, was the breaking point for Steinbrenner. In the fifth inning of the first game, Virdon allowed .220-hitting Yankees shortstop Fred Stanley to bat with the bases loaded and none out. When Stanley grounded into a force-out at the plate, Steinbrenner could be seen screaming into the dugout.

  That night, Steinbrenner showed up unannounced at Gabe Paul’s apartment in Manhattan with an edict. As Paul opened the door, Steinbrenner stormed in and began ranting.

  “Get rid of Virdon!” he hollered. “Do you understand me? Get rid of him! You can’t talk me out of this anymore!”

  Until that point in the season, Paul had resisted Steinbrenner’s impulses, but now even he privately conceded to himself that Virdon probably needed to go. At the same time, however, he was growing increasingly weary of Steinbrenner’s tantrums and ill-conceived ideas. In one of their conversations the previous week, Steinbrenner had told Paul that he wanted to pay for baseball scholarships at the University of South Florida, “so they’ll hold their players for us.” Paul had to explain that there was no getting around the draft in baseball, in which amateur players were selected by teams in the reverse order of the previous year’s standings.

  As he listened to Steinbrenner’s latest rant about Virdon, Paul thought to himself: “It’s getting harder and harder to defend Virdon. But this guy is relentless about this. I really ought to recommend Martin to him and serve him right! At least Virdon can control himself.”

  On July 28, the Monday after the disastrous Red Sox series that left the Yankees 10 games out of first place, Steinbrenner called Paul from Tampa and said, “It’s definite. We’re getting rid of Virdon. I want you to announce it immediately.”

  “George,” Paul said, “you can’t make an announcement until you have your replacement.”

  A few days earlier, once it had become apparent to him that Virdon wasn’t going to be able to survive Steinbrenner’s resolve, Paul had taken it upon himself to dispatch his top scout, Birdie Tebbetts, to the Yankees’ Triple-A farm in Syracuse for the purpose of evaluating the manager there, Bobby Cox. It was Tebbetts’s opinion, Paul said, that Cox wasn’t ready for the big league job.

  “All right,” Steinbrenner snapped, “then what do we have to do to get Martin?”

  Paul again summoned Tebbetts and asked him to find out where Martin was. Tebbetts placed a call to Rangers general manager Dan O’Brien, who informed him that, as far as he knew, Martin was on a fishing trip somewhere in the wilds of Colorado and couldn’t be reached.

  “Okay,” Paul said to Tebbetts, “then I want you to go out to Colorado, find him, and bring him back to New York right away. Nobody must hear about this. Fly him back to New York under an assumed name and bring him directly to Shea Stadium.”

  “But how am I supposed to find him?” Tebbetts said.

  “I don’t know, just find him, but you’ll likely find him in some bar,” said Paul before hanging up.

  Tebbetts flew to Denver, where he rented a car and drove through the mountains to a small mining town called Grand Junction, where some of Martin’s friends told him he was staying. Tebbetts parked his car and walked down Main Street, peering into every bar until he spotted Martin sitting with a friend in a smoky saloon at the end of the street. Though he was surprised to see Tebbetts, Martin had heard the rumors that the Yankees were probably going to be making a manager change and he was immediately excited when Paul’s man pulled out a $75,000 contract for him to look over.

  “Billy was out of a job, his marriage was breaking up, and he badly wanted to come back to the Yankees,” Tebbetts remembered. “I bought him a one-way ticket to fly back to New York with me. There were no complications.”

  But as the Yankees would soon come to realize, there was nothing about Billy Martin that was uncomplicated.

  While Tebbetts was in Colorado corralling Martin, Paul got a
call from Rangers owner Brad Corbett. Corbett had purchased the team in April 1974 from Bob Short, who had signed Martin to a contract with a “special services” codicil that guaranteed additional income above his base salary for things such as personal appearances. Martin wouldn’t be able to perform special services for Short or the Rangers if he was working for another team, but either way, they were obligated to pay him the extra money.

  “Can we work out something on this?” Corbett asked.

  “We want a clean contract,” Paul said. “Why don’t you simply take over Virdon’s contract and we’ll take over Martin’s?”

  “No, that’s not going to work,” Corbett said. “We already have a manager in Frank Lucchesi.”

  For the next five days, Paul, Corbett, Short and Martin haggled over the contract.

  Finally, Paul worked out new contract terms for Martin, in which, to make up for the lost “special services” money on his Rangers contract, Billy would get a percentage of the money the Yankees recovered on Virdon’s contract once the former manager was hired by another club. Fittingly, the next day was Old-Timers’ Day, the perfect venue for the Yankees to announce the return of their prodigal son, Billy Martin, as their new manager.

  Knowing Steinbrenner’s penchant for tipping off his favorite reporters, it was not surprising to Paul that, despite all his efforts to keep the Martin hiring under wraps, news of the manager change began leaking out that night. Around 7 P.M. he got a call from Milton Richman of United Press International.

  “I understand the Daily News is reporting tomorrow that Virdon’s out and Martin’s in,” said Richman. “You’ve got to play fair with me, Gabe. Steinbrenner gave me this four days ago and I agreed to sit on it.”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Milton,” Paul said. “Do what you feel you have to do.”

  It turned out Steinbrenner had been an equal-opportunity leaker. Apparently forgetting he’d promised Richman the scoop, he called Phil Pepe at the Daily News to tell him about the impending managing change. Pepe and News columnist Dick Young quickly composed their front-page story for Saturday’s editions, MARTIN YANKS’ PILOT’TAKES OVER FROM VIRDON. Richman only found out the deal was done because UPI’s headquarters was in the Daily News building and a UPI staffer, having drinks in Louie’s East, the bar next door, overheard one of the Daily News printers talking about the big story coming tomorrow.

  “I have no illusions as to why George gave me the story,” said Pepe. “He gave it to me because I was the guy from the Daily News, where he knew he’d get his biggest splash.”

  Pepe compared covering Steinbrenner to a bakery. “With George, you got your ticket and he’d leak you stories, but the first time you wrote a story he didn’t like, you went to the back of the line for a new ticket to get a return call from him,” Pepe said.

  With the press conference set for 9:30 Saturday morning, Paul sent word over to Virdon’s office at Shea Stadium after the Yankees’ Friday-night

  5–4 win over the Indians for the manager to come see him in the Parks Administration building across the street. A half hour later, Virdon came into his office, a look of resignation on his face.

  “Bill, this doesn’t look very good,” Paul said, avoiding coming right out and telling him he was fired.

  “I understand, Gabe,” said Virdon. “You have to do what you think is necessary.”

  With that, Virdon departed without bothering to say goodbye to the players.

  “I really wasn’t aware it was in the process,” Virdon told me in 2008. “You have to remember, because George was on suspension, I didn’t have much dealing with him. In that respect, I was the lucky one of all his managers. Other than the tape incident, he didn’t really bother me much.”

  The Old-Timers’ Day celebration of Martin’s return was an overwhelming success, culminating with a 5–3 Yankees win over the Cleveland Indians. The ovation for Martin was almost as loud as those for the Yankee icons, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, and the newspapers all hailed the hiring of the popular, combative Martin as a master stroke. That night, when Gabe Paul got back to his apartment, he found a note under his door, written in longhand.

  “If there was any doubt in your mind today, the excitement and the electricity we produced in the stadium I haven’t seen in a long time. You deserve the credit for having the guts to do it. We’re going to put a lot of fannies in the seats. This was a triumph for you and Birdie, but particularly you. You’re the big winner. You deserve it and I wanted you to know that!” It was signed “George.”

  Paul was touched, and stunned. He couldn’t ever remember such an expression of gratitude and praise, spoken or written, from Steinbrenner. As he read the note again, and thought back to the Kuhn vote two weeks earlier, Paul shook his head in amazement at how quickly things had changed with “this Steinbrenner.”

  The good feelings didn’t last long. Paul awoke the very next morning to a call from Steinbrenner, who was now furious over a column by Dick Young in the Daily News critical of the Martin hiring. It seemed a few days before telling Richman about Martin’s hiring, Steinbrenner had intimated to Young that Virdon’s job was safe. Young was in the process of writing a column to that effect when Pepe told him of the “Martin in, Virdon out” scoop Steinbrenner had just given him. Feeling he’d been misled by the Yankees owner, Young wrote a Sunday “day after” column strongly suggesting the Martin hiring was a mistake and that the Yankee players were not reacting well to it. The column, which was headlined, YANKEE PLAYERS GRIM ... GONNA BE PROBLEMS, was the only negative article about the manager change in any of the New York papers the next day.

  “I don’t want anyone here talking to Dick Young anymore,” Steinbrenner told Paul. “He’s got to learn to take the good with the bad.”

  But Young was on to something. Barely a week into his tenure as the new manager, Martin and the Yankees arrived in Oakland for a weekend series against the Athletics, with Steinbrenner along for the trip. Though most of the visiting American League teams stayed at the Hyatt, because of the price and its proximity to the Oakland Coliseum, where the A’s played, the hotel’s bar had a reputation back then for turning a blind eye to drugs, prostitution and other assorted vices. The Yankees had lost three straight to the Angels in Anaheim prior to arriving in Oakland, and the team closer, Sparky Lyle, had blown a couple of saves.

  Calling Paul from his room phone, Steinbrenner ranted: “I told Billy I don’t want Lyle pitching anymore. And this hotel! There’s too many whores running around this place! The manager is supposed to control that, and I don’t see Billy doing anything about it.”

  In fact, Martin was in the middle of it. Since he was a native of Berkeley, Oakland was as good as home to him, and the Hyatt bar was one of his favorite drinking spots. Whenever Martin visited with one of his teams, he seldom left the hotel except to go to the ballpark.

  The Yankees finished September with a 16-10 record, and Steinbrenner and Martin were optimistic that, with a few additions to the roster, a championship could be in the offing for 1976. Right after the ’75 World Series, Paul met with Pat Gillick, the Yankees’ director of scouting and development. The 32-year-old Gillick had been given expanded duties that August when Paul’s assistant, Tal Smith, resigned to become general manager of the Houston Astros. (The move met with considerable resistance from Steinbrenner, who initially wanted compensation for him.) Paul and Steinbrenner soon came to respect Gillick’s player evaluation ability and had asked him to size up the Yankees’ needs and offer whatever suggestions he might have to fill them.

  With Steinbrenner listening on speakerphone in Paul’s office, Gillick mentioned that the Yankees had finished next to last in runs in the American League in ’75, and said the Yankees needed to add more speed to their lineup. Gillick was also concerned about the Yankees’ “up-the-middle” position players, with the exception of Munson behind the plate. Their shortstop, Jim Mason, had hit an anemic .152 in ’75; Sandy Alomar, the aging second baseman, hit only
.239; and the knee injury to Maddox made center field a question mark.

  “It’s my recommendation,” Gillick said, “that now would be the time to trade Bonds—while he still has good value. We have a lot of needs—pitching, infield, possibly center field—and he could help us fill a few of them.”

  “But isn’t he our biggest asset?” Steinbrenner asked.

  Paul pointed out that, despite Bonds’s courageous play for the Yankees after sustaining the knee injury, he was a heavy drinker who didn’t take care of himself. Gillick was interested in a young second baseman from Brooklyn, Willie Randolph, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Triple-A team in Charleston, West Virginia. “I think we should try to get him if we can,” Gillick said.

  “Okay,” said Steinbrenner, “see what you guys can do.”

  Pirates general manager Joe Brown had been calling Paul for weeks, hoping to trade for the Yankees’ number-two pitcher, Doc Medich, who had 16 wins in ’75. At the December winter meetings at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, Paul ran into Brown and told him that he’d consider trading Medich, but he’d have to get a left-handed pitcher in return—perhaps Ken Brett, who’d been a fifth starter for the first-place Pirates. “I also need a second baseman,” said Paul, “and you’ve got a kid, Randolph, at Triple-A, who we like a little.”

  “Let me think about it,” said Brown. “I’ll get back to you before the meetings are over.”

  By the last day of the meetings, Paul still hadn’t heard from Brown, and was beginning to assume the deal was dead. Finally, as Paul was packing up his bags in his room that morning, the Pittsburgh GM called him.

  “I think we can do the Medich deal,” Brown said. “We’ll give you Brett and Randolph, but you’ve got to take Dock Ellis too.”