Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  The right-handed Ellis had won more than ten games in six straight seasons for the Pirates, from 1969 to ’74, including an impressive 19-9 record for their 1971 world championship team, but his frequent temper tantrums and erratic behavior had become a constant source of irritation to the team’s management. (His latest clubhouse tantrum, in mid-August, had been directed at Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh, after which Ellis had been suspended for 30 days without pay.) Brown’s sudden inclusion of Ellis in the discussions momentarily caught Paul by surprise.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What else do you want?”

  “Nothing,” said Brown. “Just take him. I’ve got to get him out of town.”

  So Paul was able to get two starting pitchers and a top prospect in Randolph for Medich. His next call was to the California Angels, who were anxious to acquire Bonds and offered in return their speedy center fielder Mickey Rivers, who had led the AL with 70 stolen bases and 13 triples, and Ed Figueroa, a 27-year-old right-handed pitcher from Puerto Rico, who had a 16-13 record in ’75. In the cab ride from the Diplomat to the airport, Gillick looked at Paul with a smile of satisfaction.

  “Well, boss,” he said. “We pretty much filled just about all of our needs in two deals.”

  In retrospect, those two trades were among the best in Yankee history, as Rivers provided them a leadoff catalyst and was an All-Star center fielder the following year, Figueroa won 55 games over the next three years, Ellis was 17-8 in 1976 and Randolph was the Yankees’ second baseman for the next 13 seasons, earning five All-Star nominations.

  Gillick, however, did not stay around the Yankees to enjoy the fruits of his player evaluation acumen. In late July 1975, Peter Bavasi, president of the expansion Toronto Blue Jays, called Steinbrenner to ask permission to talk to Gillick about becoming the first general manager of the fledgling franchise. At first Steinbrenner refused, but when Gillick found out, he told him: “If you don’t give me permission to talk to them, I’m leaving anyway at the end of the year when my contract is up.” Steinbrenner eventually relented, albeit with the written promise from Gillick that he wouldn’t take any of the Yankees scouts or uniformed personnel with him.

  AS MUCH AS those winter trades would help the Yankees, there were events unfolding in baseball that would have far greater impact on the team and on Steinbrenner. A year after Catfish Hunter’s groundbreaking victory against the Oakland A’s, players-union chief Marvin Miller was mounting yet another challenge to the reserve clause, this time targeting section 10A in the basic player’s contract, which effectively bound players to their teams for life. Noting the wording of the clause—“If prior to March 1, the Player and the Club have not agreed upon the terms of the contract then, on or before 10 days after, the Club shall have the right by written notice to renew this contract for the period of one year”—Miller argued this should be interpreted as a one-year-only renewal and not, as the clubs had insisted for 75 years, an automatic annual “roll-over” renewal.

  Miller had urged those players whose contracts had been renewed after the 1974 season not to sign new contracts. Two pitchers, Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos, agreed to take part in Miller’s experiment, playing the entire 1975 season under renewed contracts and then rejecting multiyear offers from their clubs at season’s end. It was the union’s position the players “had completed their renewal years and now should become free to negotiate with any of the 24 clubs with respect to their services for 1976.”

  Despite fierce opposition from the owners, who maintained that matters regarding the reserve system were “expressly exempted” from the grievance procedure, the issue came before baseball arbitrator Peter Seitz, who had ruled in Hunter’s favor a year before. On December 23, Seitz again found for the Players Association, maintaining that the owners had left him no choice after rebuffing his recommendation that they negotiate a settlement with the players. In response, the owners exercised their right under the Basic Agreement and fired him.

  But they couldn’t reverse his decision. By finishing off the reserve clause, Seitz had swung open the gates to free agency. In exile, George Steinbrenner had no involvement in the owners’ desperate legal maneuverings to preserve the players’ servitude, but now he stood prepared to take full advantage of their blundering.

  It turned out that McNally, who’d been hurt for much of ’75, elected to retire after the season, passing on his chance to test free agency. Messersmith, who had won 20 and 19 games respectively over the previous two seasons for the Dodgers, looked to cash in big time. Not surprisingly, when all the owners’ legal efforts had been exhausted and Messersmith’s free agency was upheld at the start of spring training in 1976, the Yankees were first in line at his doorstep.

  This time, Steinbrenner, who knew that Kuhn was still mulling over whether to reinstate him early, allowed Paul to conduct all the negotiations with Messersmith’s agent. On March 31, Messersmith and the Yankees agreed to a four-year, $1 million contract, but no sooner had the announcement been made than a dispute arose over the interest on the deferred money in the deal. It was left to Kuhn to resolve the issue, and the commissioner ruled that the contract was not binding. A week later, Messersmith instead signed with the Atlanta Braves. “It’s all right,” Paul told Steinbrenner after Kuhn ruled against the Yankees on the Messersmith contract. “It was going to be a lot of money and, after the deals we made with Pittsburgh and California, we’re okay with our starting pitching.”

  In contrast to 1975, where injuries had contributed to unfulfilled expectations (and the ultimate undoing of Bill Virdon), Billy Martin’s first full season as Yankees manager in 1976 was a success from the beginning, starting with a 10-3 April. As Paul had maintained, the Yankees had the best pitching staff in the American League (3.19 ERA)—further bolstered by a midseason trade with the Orioles for veterans Ken Holtzman and Doyle Alexander—and with the leadership of catcher Thurman Munson (who won MVP honors with a .302 average, 17 homers and 105 RBI), they stayed in first place most of the season and easily won the AL East by 10½ games. While Munson, Nettles (93 RBI), Chambliss (96 RBI), Oscar Gamble (17 homers) and Roy White (14 homers) provided firepower up and down the lineup, it was the speed of Rivers and Randolph (who combined for 80 stolen bases) that prompted the media to dub Martin’s aggressive and opportunistic bunch “the Bronx Bandits.”

  From Steinbrenner’s point of view, nothing was sweeter about the 1976 season, the first year of the renovated Yankee Stadium, than the “fannies in the seats”—2,012,434 of them all told, the first time since 1950 that Yankees attendance had surpassed the two-million mark. “Remember three years ago, when our group bought this club from CBS, I said it would take us three years to build this team back to where it once was?” Steinbrenner crowed. “Nobody believed it, but here we are. Do you know how hard it is to build a business in three years?”

  Still, the season was not entirely without some contentious times. When the Yankee players reported to spring training in Fort Lauderdale, there was a notice on the bulletin board headlined “Neatness Counts,” in which a new club grooming-and-appearance policy was outlined: “No beards. No beads. No mutton chops. No long hair. No long stirrups.” It was signed “George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin.” Some of the players were annoyed. Sparky Lyle complained that it had cost him $50 to have his hair curled, “and they said it was still too long.” And it took an hour and $30 for Oscar Gamble to shear his trademark Afro into a shape that fit acceptably under his cap. But most of the players reacted with amusement over the new regulations, playfully shouting out “ten-shun” whenever Steinbrenner would walk into the clubhouse.

  The players still didn’t quite know what to make of Martin, especially after the cocky address he gave them on Opening Day in Milwaukee. “You just do what I tell you and we’re gonna win,” he said. “That’s a promise, so don’t worry about it. Just do what I say.”

  On the second day of the season, Martin showed them wha
t he meant. The Yankees were leading 9–6 with one out in the ninth inning when the Brewers loaded the bases. Dave Pagan, the Yankees’ rookie right-hander, gave up an apparent game-winning grand slam to Don Money. Elliot Wahle, Gillick’s assistant in the Yankees farm department, remembered the reaction in the team front office back at Yankee Stadium.

  “We had just moved back into the Stadium,” Wahle said, “and a lot of boxes and things were piled up in the hallway outside our offices, including a TV from Gabe’s old office in the Parks Administration Building at Shea. The TV was on and we were all listening to the game from our offices.”

  Steinbrenner, who’d had his suspension lifted a month earlier, was also back in his office, from which he would emerge periodically to check the score. Right after Money hit the home run, Wahle heard a tremendous crash in the hallway and scrambled to the doorway to see what had happened.

  “There was the TV . . . in smithereens, glass all over the floor and smoke coming out of it,” Wahle said. “George had kicked in the screen, leaving everyone dumbfounded.”

  It was unfortunate Steinbrenner had chosen to kill the messenger, in this case the TV, because he and everyone watching in the Yankees office missed what happened next: Martin charged out of the dugout and began screaming at the first-base umpire, then the home-plate umpire. He had noticed that, prior to Pagan’s last pitch, the first-base umpire had called time-out, thus nullifying the home run, and the Yankees wound up winning the game, 9–7.

  “If nothing else,” Wahle said, “George let everyone know he was back with all his uncontrolled fury.”

  Three months later, Wahle would personally feel that fury when Gillick offered him a job as his assistant GM with the Blue Jays.

  Since Wahle was the assistant farm director, he did not fall under the category of scout or uniformed employee, positions that Gillick was prohibited from hiring away from the Yankees. But when he informed Steinbrenner of his decision to follow Gillick to Toronto, he was not prepared for the Yankees owner’s reaction.

  “You ungrateful sonofabitch!” Steinbrenner screamed. “How can you do this? Oh, fuck it. It doesn’t matter. I can get 2,000 people to do your job better than you—and for less money. So just get the fuck out of here. If you’re not out of your office in one hour, I’ll just call security and have the cops throw you out!”

  Wahle was trembling as he went back to his office and began frantically emptying desk drawers into cartons. Sure enough, an hour later, two security guards appeared at his door to escort him out of the stadium. He figured he’d probably never talk to Steinbrenner again, but two months later, at an owners meeting at the O’Hare Hilton in Chicago, Wahle stepped into an elevator that had just one other occupant.

  “How’s everything going in Toronto, pal?” said Steinbrenner, smiling. “It’s good to see you.”

  Steinbrenner’s suspension had been lifted by Bowie Kuhn on March 1, 1976, with the commissioner noting, among other things, that the financial problems incurred by the Yankees having to play two years at Shea Stadium “would be significantly alleviated by his reinstatement and attendant benefits to the team and Yankee fans.” In a letter to Steinbrenner, Kuhn welcomed him back and urged him to “get on with making the Yankees a competitive team.”

  Those last words would come back to haunt the commissioner. Steinbrenner, with his free spending on players and constant criticism of umpires and fellow owners, gradually replaced Finley as Kuhn’s most difficult and exasperating owner. In his 1987 memoir, Kuhn cited the litany of Steinbrenner’s offenses against baseball after he’d lifted the Yankees owner’s suspension and concluded: “He was like the Titanic in search of an iceberg; only in George’s case it was never wise to bet on the iceberg. . . . He behaved as if he were guided by a compass that pointed unerringly to trouble.”

  After experiencing a relatively injury- and trouble-free 1976 season under Billy Martin and coasting to the American League East title, the Yankees earned the right to represent the American League in the World Series by beating the Kansas City Royals in a stirring best-of-five AL Championship Series. The climax was Chambliss’s ninth-inning walk-off home run, which touched off a near riot at Yankee Stadium as thousands of jubilant fans stormed onto the field, preventing the Yankee first baseman from even touching home plate. Arriving at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium for their workout the next afternoon, the Yankees showed the effects of having partied all night. As they staggered off the bus and walked across the

  Riverfront Stadium outfield, pitching coach Bob Lemon tripped over a duffel bag full of baseballs and sprawled onto the turf as everyone roared with laughter.

  It was as if, by bringing Yankee fans their first pennant in 12 years, they had already won the World Series. They were outmatched against the Reds, losing in a four-game sweep. Behind the scenes, Steinbrenner ranted continually at Paul and anyone else who happened to be around him. Most of his ire was directed at Mickey Rivers, whose lackadaisical play over the last month of the season—which was directly related to his financial and marital woes—had worn thin on everyone around the team.

  “Mick the Quick” had proven to be a valuable acquisition in ’76, a top-of-the-order igniter the like of which the Yankees had never had. Off the field, however, his life was a mess—he would gamble away his paychecks on losing horses at Aqueduct Racetrack, which in turn created a hostile environment on the domestic front with his missus. As the season wore on, Paul would hear regularly from Rivers, asking for advances on his salary, and from the center fielder’s wife, Mary, who would call to complain about her husband’s missing paychecks. One time that season, Mary Rivers actually showed up unannounced at Steinbrenner’s office, demanding that the owner have the checks sent directly to her.

  Another time Mary Rivers took her wrath out on her husband’s car—and, in the process, a few others belonging to his teammates. She had come to the Stadium on the day of a game hoping to retrieve Rivers’s paycheck. John Addeo, the Yankees official in charge of the players’ parking lot, remembered seeing Mary Rivers angrily getting into her husband’s car but paying little heed to her until, a few moments later, he heard cars being smashed at the other end of the lot.

  “It was unbelievable,” Addeo said. “I run over there and she’s smashing Mickey’s car into the other cars in the lot. It was like bumper cars at the amusement park!”

  Rivers was 0 for 9 in the first two Yankee losses to the Reds in Cincinnati. On the off-day at Yankee Stadium, Steinbrenner called Paul to his office and began railing about the team’s missing-in-action leadoff man.

  “Rivers is killing us!” Steinbrenner shouted. “You’ve got to get rid of him, Gabe! Trade him!”

  Paul couldn’t believe his ears.

  “What are you talking about, George?” he said. “You can’t trade players in the middle of the World Series! Besides, he’s what got us here the first five months of the season.”

  “Well, then, we’ve got to get rid of the wife,” Steinbrenner said. “She’s the problem. She’s the one causing all this trouble!”

  “What do you suggest we do about her?” Paul asked.

  “I know what to do,” Steinbrenner snapped. “I’m going to get the Black Muslims on this.” That would take care of it.

  Paul had no idea what Steinbrenner was talking about. Only years later would it be learned that, shortly after purchasing the Yankees from CBS, Steinbrenner had been approached by the Black Muslims militant group, who made a secret deal with him to provide a little extra security around Yankee Stadium. For now, Paul merely thought Steinbrenner was talking crazy.

  “Black Muslims?” he said to himself. “This man will stoop to anything!”

  The Yankees went down easily, 6–2 and 7–2, in the two games at Yankee Stadium, bringing a quick end to the Series. Martin, who had lost nearly 20 pounds during the season, was not willing to let it go. He had been thrown out of the final game of the Series for tossing a baseball onto the field and verbally baiting home-plate umpire Bill D
eegan. After the game, sitting red-eyed and crying in his office, he told reporters, “People say it was a great year, but how can it be a great year when we lost four straight?”

  Sparky Lyle agreed. The stellar closer conceded that the Yankees hadn’t been prepared for the Reds. “We were coming off the high of beating the Royals, and the World Series was over before it started,” Lyle said.

  Lyle and the rest of the Yankees were sitting in the somber, silent Yankee clubhouse when Steinbrenner strode in.

  “All he said was: ‘You oughta hang your heads!’ and then he walked out.”

  At least Steinbrenner could now turn his attention to the new frontier of the off-season and the pursuit of free agents in the wake of the McNally-Messersmith decision. Beginning the morning after the last game of the World Series, Steinbrenner, Paul and occasionally Martin had a series of meetings to discuss the 22 players who had played out their contracts and been declared free agents. Among them were: Reds pitching ace Don Gullett, who had beaten the Yankees in the first game of the World Series; Baltimore Orioles All-Star second baseman Bobby Grich; and four stalwarts from Charlie Finley’s three-time world champion Oakland A’s: shortstop Bert Campaneris, third baseman Sal Bando, outfielder Joe Rudi and closer Rollie Fingers. Steinbrenner, Paul and Martin all agreed that Gullett should be their first objective. He would further solidify what was already one of the deepest starting rotations in the American League and also deal a blow to the team that had just vanquished them in the World Series.

  As for the rest, Martin wanted to pursue Rudi to play right field and Grich to play shortstop. “Rudi’s one of the best outfielders in the game,” Martin contended, “and even though Grich is a second baseman, he has the range to play short, and we got no production out of shortstop this year.”

  Steinbrenner looked at Paul. “What do you think, Gabe?” he said.

  “I like Grich,” Paul said, “and Billy’s right about Rudi. He’s a good player.”