Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  When Paul heard about the meeting, he was incredulous.

  “George actually invited the players up there!” he said in his tape diary. “And then he lays the law down to Martin about the batting order. How can the manager be overruled by his players?”

  But as the Yankees finished the first half of the season by losing all three games to the Royals in Kansas City, Steinbrenner decided it was time for one of his patented “Yankee pride” lectures. Addressing the team in the clubhouse before the final Sunday game, he warned: “Either you’re going to make a comeback or forever be remembered as the team that choked.” He then handed out checks for $300 to each of the players, telling them to “go out and have a good time over the All-Star break.”

  By this time, however, Paul had become convinced that Martin had to go; that he was too unstable to handle the situation with both the irrational owner and his insecure star player. And after a sloppy 5–4 loss to the Brewers in the second game of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on July 21, in which they blew a 4–0 lead in the ninth inning, Steinbrenner was inclined to agree. Meeting with Paul in his office after the game, Steinbrenner asked for his general manager’s opinion.

  “If you ask me, Billy is a mirage as a tactician,” Paul said. “He’s not resourceful or planned enough. We’re the only club in the American League that doesn’t have pitching charts.”

  “What about the players and how they feel about him?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “I don’t know or care what the players think of him,” Paul said. “They’re selfish and only out for themselves. I just think Billy is too emotionally unsound and I don’t think we can win with him. If we had made the change in June, it would’ve looked like Reggie is calling the shots and he’d have never recovered from it, but now it’s not so much about Billy and Reggie as it is about the team not performing to its capability.”

  “Who do you think we should get?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “I think we should go with Dick Howser and let the chips fall where they may.”

  “It’s your decision,” said Steinbrenner.

  “My only concern,” said Paul, “is that Howser might not want the job on a one-year basis. He’s gonna want a two-year contract beyond this, and I don’t blame him.”

  The next morning, Saturday the 23rd, Paul met with Howser and offered him the manager’s job, but was not surprised when the third-base coach turned him down. What did surprise Paul was a story by Dick Young in the Daily News the next day revealing that Howser had been offered Martin’s job. When Paul couldn’t reach Steinbrenner, who was conspicuously unavailable to anyone that day, he was sure the owner had again leaked the story to the News.

  Finally, that Sunday night, Steinbrenner called, claiming he was in North Carolina on a business trip, though Paul later learned that the owner had been laying low at the home of his friend Mike Forrest, the furrier, in New Rochelle, a half hour from Yankee Stadium.

  “I’ve thought about this, Gabe,” Steinbrenner said, “and the way I see it, we have three options here: Say nothing and do nothing, keep looking, or make a move with either Yogi, Bobby Cox, Jack Butterfield or Gene Michael, who would be my choice.”

  Paul thought about this before responding. Steinbrenner had already offered Berra the job in the spring, and Yogi had turned it down out of his loyalty to Billy. Butterfield was the farm director and, while highly regarded as a player evaluator, he had no professional managing experience and was relatively unknown to Yankee fans. Paul also didn’t think Cox was ready. And Michael, just two years removed from playing, was serving as an executive assistant to Steinbrenner in the front office and had never before managed a minor or major league team.

  “Jack Butterfield?” Paul thought. “Is he kidding? I should let him do it. They’d blow up the ballpark!”

  “What do you think, Gabe?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “I think no way on Butterfield. Yogi probably won’t take it either. And you can’t do this to Gene Michael. He’s just not ready.”

  “Well,” said Steinbrenner, “I guess that brings us back to options one and two.”

  Without a viable replacement, they agreed that Martin would stay. Paul would call Howser and instruct him to deny everything in the Young story. Later that day, before the Yankees’ game with the Royals, Paul went down to the clubhouse to give Martin the news of his latest reprieve.

  “You’re the manager,” Paul said.

  “For the rest of the season?” Martin asked.

  “In baseball, things change from day to day, Billy. No promises. Just go out and manage your way.”

  The Yankees went on to finish July with seven wins in eight games. But when they lost two out of three to the California Angels in the first series of a West Coast road trip to open August, and then lost two more to the last-place expansion Mariners in Seattle, the team and the season were again in turmoil. As the Yankee players trudged into the visiting clubhouse at the Kingdome following a 9–2 trouncing, Piniella let loose on his teammates. Over the previous weeks, numerous players on the team had been complaining about a variety of issues personal to them—Munson about his salary, Rivers about his advances, Ed Figueroa about Martin periodically skipping him in the rotation, Jackson about life in general—and Piniella, renowned for his hot temper, had finally had enough.

  “Okay, all you complainers,” he shouted as he entered the clubhouse, “the writers are all here now, so tell ’em all how unhappy you are. Go on! Get it all out in the open! This is your opportunity. We just got beat nine-fucking-two by a horseshit, fucking expansion team and nobody seems to care about that!”

  The room went quiet. Some of the players would later contend that it was a turning point in their season. The next day, they beat the Mariners handily, 7–1, salvaging the last game of the road trip and beginning a stretch of 27 wins in 30 games that moved them into first place to stay. Other players would maintain that August 10 was the day their season changed. That was when Martin finally inserted Jackson into the cleanup spot, for only the 11th time in 110 games. From then on the slugger would bat fourth for the rest of the season. Martin explained the change by citing the fact that Reggie had had 20 RBI in the past 23 games batting fifth, while Chambliss had had only nine RBI in 29 games in front of him. “I was just waiting for the right time,” he said.

  From that date, Jackson drove in 49 runs and hit 13 homers in the last 53 games, 41 of which the Yankees won. They finished the season 100-62, 2½ games ahead of the Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles. Once again, they beat the Kansas City Royals in five games in the American League Championship Series, earning a return trip to the World Series. The ALCS hero was Lyle, who pitched 51⁄3 innings of shutout relief in game four in Kansas City and came back the next day to close out the clincher with another 11⁄3 innings of scoreless ball, the Yankees scoring three runs in the ninth to win, 5–3. During the celebration in the clubhouse afterward, Martin sneaked up behind Steinbrenner and dumped the remaining contents of a champagne bottle over the owner’s head.

  “That’s for trying to fire me.” Martin grinned.

  “What do you mean ‘trying’?” Steinbrenner said.

  As for Reggie Jackson, the ultimate triumph was yet to come.

  The Yankees’ ALCS victory over the Royals was tempered by the fact that Gullett, after compiling a 14-4 record during the regular season, had come up with a sore shoulder during the series. And, in the final game, there was more controversy between Martin and Jackson. In spite of his batting surge that had carried the Yankees to the AL East title, Jackson arrived at the ballpark to discover that not only was he out of the cleanup spot, he was out of the lineup altogether. Benched!

  To that point, Jackson had been 1 for 14 in the ALCS, and the Royals’ game five starter, Paul Splittorff, had been particularly successful against him over the years. Just the same, Martin had called Catfish Hunter into his office and asked him about Jackson versus Splittorff. “Reggie can’t hit that guy with a paddle,” Hunter said.


  Initially stunned at seeing he was not in the lineup—especially since Martin hadn’t bothered to tell him personally—Jackson turned surprisingly conciliatory when told by the writers that Hunter had told Martin he couldn’t hit Splittorff. “The worst thing in the world would have been to leave me in the lineup and have me go 0 for 4,” Jackson said. “At the very least, [Martin] showed some guts.”

  Nevertheless, Jackson contributed a key eighth-inning RBI pinch hit off Royals reliever Doug Bird to help the Yankees into the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  After forging a 3-1 lead in games in the World Series, Martin sought to close it out in L.A. with Gullett, who had pitched gamely in limiting L.A. to five hits in 81⁄3 innings in game one. But the 26-year-old lefty was clearly hindered by his throbbing shoulder and left the game in the fifth inning, after the Dodgers had battered him for eight hits and seven runs en route to an easy 10–4 win, sending the Series back to Yankee Stadium for game six. Though at the time it was just another mark in the box score, the final Yankee run was a homer by Jackson in the eighth inning.

  The scene for game six on that cool, clear night of October 18 was charged from the outset. As 56,407 fans began filing into Yankee Stadium, giddy with thoughts of hopefully witnessing the first Yankee world championship since 1962, Jackson put on an awesome pregame power show, knocking 35 to 40 balls into the right-field seats during batting practice. Even the crusty baseball scribe Dick Young marveled at the performance.

  “You look pretty locked in,” Young said to Jackson as he came out of the cage. “I’ve never seen anything like that. But don’t you think you should save some for the game?”

  It turned out Jackson had saved three swings, which was all he needed for three consecutive home runs off three different Dodger pitchers—Burt Hooton, Elias Sosa and knuckleballer Charlie Hough—to carry the Yankees to an 8–4 Series-clinching victory. Jackson’s three home runs tied Babe Ruth’s record for most homers in a World Series game. Coupled with the one he’d hit in the eighth inning of game five, Jackson had hit four home runs on four straight pitches, and his five total home runs for the Series was also a record, earning him the sobriquet “Mr. October.”

  Afterward, in the Yankee clubhouse, the unbridled affection displayed between Jackson and his teammates belied the acrimonious tenor of the regular season. Graig Nettles, who had made no secret of his dislike for Reggie during the year, said of his teammate: “He was awesome. A very impressive performance under pressure, as good as you can do. He even caught everything that came to him in the outfield!”

  At one point during the revelry, Steinbrenner, Jackson and Martin, the unholy trinity, found themselves together in the manager’s office, drenched in champagne, hugging and swearing eternal allegiance to one another.

  “You can’t do anything to me now—I’ve got a five-year contract,” Jackson teased Steinbrenner.

  “You’re damn right,” said Steinbrenner, “and you’re not going anywhere else.”

  Later, Steinbrenner declared, “Next year we’ll be even tougher to beat,” before leaving Martin and Jackson to rhapsodize with each other over Reggie’s magic night.

  “Three home runs,” Jackson said. “Do you realize I did that?”

  “Yeah,” said Martin, grinning, “and you broke my Series record for extra-base hits, and that pisses me off!”

  As they laughed, Jackson addressed the remaining writers in the room. “I love Billy Martin,” he said. “The man did a helluva job this year. There’s nobody else I’d rather play for.”

  If Gabe Paul had been there, his eyes would have been rolling. Much as he had personally reveled in winning his first world championship after 58 years in the game, the season-long travails with Steinbrenner and Martin had left the veteran executive feeling drained. At the beginning of the World Series, other Yankees employees witnessed Paul sitting in his office, crying, after Steinbrenner had withheld his tickets for his brother, Sol. Prior to that, he’d once again had to go to the mat to dissuade Steinbrenner from placing Gullett and Hunter on the disabled list before the Series.

  Five years of trying to run the Yankees despite constant turmoil and stress, all created by the owner, had exacted a huge toll on Paul. He was sorry he’d ever gotten Steinbrenner into baseball, even though it had finally led to his own triumph as an executive. But now he’d had enough.

  Back in Cleveland, the Indians were once again searching for a new guardian angel to rescue them from having to leave the city. The latest underfinanced Indians owner, parking-lot mogul Ted Bonda, reported a

  $1.1 million loss for 1977 and was desperate to sell. Art Modell, owner of the NFL Browns, who shared Municipal Stadium with the Indians, had suggested to Bonda that he call Steve O’Neill, the multimillionaire trucking magnate who’d sold his minority share in the Indians back in 1973 to join Paul as a limited partner of the Yankees.

  The thought of coming back home to Cleveland and buying the Indians as an act of civic responsibility was appealing to O’Neill, who, like Paul, was fed up with being a limited partner of Steinbrenner’s. He would buy the club, O’Neill told Bonda, with the idea of bringing Gabe Paul back to Cleveland to run the club.

  The day after the winning of the World Series, Paul was back in his office at Yankee Stadium, pondering his future and reflecting on the season. The ’77 Yankees, he concluded, had defied all the known laws of baseball. They had won in spite of clubhouse dissension, a crazy manager and an even crazier owner.

  In one his final entries in his recorded diary, a clearly dispirited Paul ruefully summed up his feelings about Steinbrenner: “The guy is a mental case, a liar, an egomaniac and a crook, and that’s a pretty good parlay!”

  Dreary Cleveland and more losing Indians teams never looked so good to him.

  Chapter 7

  Days of Whine and Rosen

  STEINBRENNER WAS STILL BASKING in the glow of his first world championship when he assembled his high command at Yankee Stadium during the first week of November to discuss the newest class of free agent players about to hit the market.

  It had been two weeks since Gabe Paul had informed him of his intentions to join Steve O’Neill in Cleveland. Paul took pains to explain to the media that his decision was based solely on his allegiance to O’Neill, and Steinbrenner had publicly expressed disappointment at losing a person he said he considered a “mentor,” but both men knew they could no longer coexist in New York. Too much friction and ill feeling had built up from all their arguments over the last five years. Still, Paul agreed to stay around through the reentry draft and winter meetings to help the transition of baseball operations. After that, Cedric Tallis, whom Paul had brought in from the Kansas City Royals to be his assistant in 1974, would take over as general manager.

  Paul, Tallis, Gene Michael, Birdie Tebbetts, Jack Butterfield and Bill Bergesch, another assistant GM, were sitting with Steinbrenner at the big round table in his office, which was covered with a mound of scouting reports and statistics sheets.

  “All right,” Steinbrenner said, “I want to know who’re the best players here.”

  Paul nodded to Tebbetts, his chief scout, whose primary assignment that season had been to follow the pending free agents around the league. Tebbetts noted that two Minnesota Twins outfielders, Lymon Bostock and American League RBI leader Larry Hisle, were clearly the class of the hitters, but he wondered whether the Yankees, with Jackson, Rivers, Piniella and White, really needed to spend a lot of money on another outfielder.

  “What about the pitchers?” said Steinbrenner.

  Everyone at the table agreed that Rich “Goose” Gossage, the 26-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander whose 100-mile-per-hour fastball was complemented by an equally devastating hard slider, was unquestionably the cream of the crop that included the Yankees’ own Mike Torrez (who had won 14 games in 1977) and one of their exes, Doc Medich. There was, however, one problem. Gossage was a closer who’d saved 26 games and struck out 151 batters in 138 inn
ings, and, in Sparky Lyle, the Yankees already had the premier closer in the American League, coming off a Cy Young Award–winning season.

  “There was a lot of debate about how two closers could be a real problem,” remembered Gene Michael. “Would we be able to give each of them enough work? How would Sparky deal with it? In the end, though, I guess George was the driving force.”

  The way Steinbrenner saw it, he’d built the Yankees into a championship team by taking advantage of the new era of free agency and signing the best of them: Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson and Don Gullett. Now Gossage was the best free agent of this year’s class, and Steinbrenner saw no reason to abandon his philosophy. If two of everything was good for Noah, why not him?

  “We’re going after Gossage,” he declared. “I’ll handle this. Don’t worry about Lyle. I’ve taken care of him.”

  Steinbrenner had met with Lyle at Yankee Stadium a few days after the World Series and rewarded the left-hander for his Cy Young season (in which he’d gone 13-5 with a 2.17 ERA, saved 26 games and led the American League in appearances) with an extra year on his contract and a bonus of $35,000. The 34-year-old Lyle was pleasantly surprised by the owner’s magnanimity; he had never been one of the owner’s favorites, given his penchant for practical jokes and the fact that he frequently showed up late for spring training. However, Lyle later began to understand that Steinbrenner’s generosity had been designed not so much to reward him as to placate him for signing Gossage—at even more money—to share his job.

  “George had clearly made up his mind to go after Goose, probably even before the season ended,” Lyle said in a 2008 interview. “In retrospect, I can understand why he did it. I was getting older and didn’t throw 97 miles per hour, and Goose was in his prime. But at the time, I was pretty upset.”

  A couple of days after the meeting about newly available free agents, Steinbrenner flew to Las Vegas with his pal Bill Fugazy for the Ken Norton–Jimmy Young heavyweight title fight at Caesars Palace, November 5. While there, he made a point of looking up his old friend Al Rosen, from Group 66 in Cleveland. Rosen had left Cleveland a couple of years earlier, in the wake of the same failed Texas real estate deal that had forced Sheldon Guren and Ed Ginsberg to sell their original 11 percent share of the Yankees back to Steinbrenner. Rosen’s friend Billy Weinberger, the president of Caesars, had offered him a greeter’s job at the casino. But Rosen was miserable in Las Vegas. He despised everything about the town and yearned to return to a job that actually mattered. Over dinner at Caesars Palace the night before the fight, Rosen said as much to Steinbrenner.