Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  “Okay,” Newton said, “so why don’t we just say Billy will be coming back in 1980. We’ll make it a three-year deal starting then. If nothing else, that’ll give you guys some extra time to really get to know and understand each other better and it’ll give Billy more time to get straightened out. As long as you pay him, it’ll be great for everyone.”

  “Okay, that’s how we’ll do it,” said Steinbrenner.

  Newton remembered how, at the Carlyle, Steinbrenner and Martin had both been overcome with emotion as they talked about their reconciliation.

  “They both cried,” he said, “and then there was the feeling of excitement in the room about this wonderful, fantastic extravaganza of an announcement we were going to make.”

  They decided that Martin would hide out in an apartment in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, owned by a friend of Billy’s, until Saturday morning, when a limo would deliver him and Newton to Yankee Stadium. Just to be sure they wouldn’t be recognized, Steinbrenner suggested they wear dark glasses and raincoats.

  They followed through with the raincoats, even though it turned out to be a sunny, hot day. When they arrived at the Stadium, a couple of Yankee security guards spirited them through a side door and downstairs to a boiler room just down the corridor from the visitors’ clubhouse, where they waited for the ceremonies to begin. As public-address announcer Bob Sheppard began introducing the old-timers, most of whom were assembled in the Yankees dugout, Martin and Newton made their way down the corridor toward the Yankees clubhouse. Suddenly, Newton froze as Rod Carew, of the visiting Minnesota Twins (whom Martin had managed a few years earlier), came out of the clubhouse and recognized them.

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” Carew said.

  “I’m gonna be the manager again in about two more minutes, pal,” Martin said, grinning. “But don’t let it out. I’ve been sworn to secrecy. I’m only telling you ’cause it’s about to happen.”

  Carew smiled and hugged Martin. A couple of minutes later, Martin walked down the runway to the Yankees dugout and ducked into a bathroom to wait for his introduction. Other than Yankees security chief Pat Kelly, Mickey Morabito and his assistant Larry Wahl in the public relations department, Steinbrenner had told no one of the surprise announcement, not even Rosen, who admitted to being a little puzzled when the owner had asked him that morning if he would agree to suit up with the old-timers in the uniform of his old team, the Cleveland Indians.

  “Why would you want me to do that?” Rosen had asked. “I mean, I’m the president of the Yankees. How’s it going to look if I’m out there in an Indians uniform? I’ll probably get booed.”

  “No, no,” said Steinbrenner. “It’ll be fine. I just want you to stand next to Lem. You were his teammate and it’ll look good, the two of you standing there side by side.”

  As he stood there on the first-base line next to Lemon, listening to the gradually increasing ovations for his former rivals—Yankee deities like Phil Rizzuto, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and, finally, Joe DiMaggio—Rosen had to admit the Yankees had a tradition like no other team.

  But as DiMaggio tipped his cap to the near-capacity crowd of 46,711, Sheppard wasn’t finished. The “Yankee Clipper” was accustomed to being the last man introduced on Old-Timers’ Day, and as such, he looked quizzically up at the press box as the venerable PA announcer intoned:

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, your attention please! The Yankees would like to announce today that Bob Lemon has agreed to a contract to continue as manager of the Yankees through the 1978 and 1979 seasons.” This was greeted by a chorus of boos from the crowd, boos that grew even louder when Sheppard announced that Lemon would become general manager in 1980. Then, as signs of BILLY WILL ALWAYS BE NO. 1 and BRING BACK BILLY! were being hoisted throughout the ballpark, Sheppard implored, “Your attention, please! Your attention, please! And the Yankees would like to introduce and announce at the same time that the manager for the 1980 season and hopefully for many seasons after that will be num-buh one, Billy Martin!”

  With that, Martin raced out of the Yankees dugout, tipping his cap to a thunderous ovation from the crowd. For seven minutes they stood and cheered deliriously. Watching this, enduring this, Rosen was at first stupefied and then, just as quickly, enraged. The moment the ceremony concluded, he raced off the field into the old-timers’ dressing room and literally ripped the Indians uniform off his body, the shirt buttons popping onto the floor. After quickly changing his clothes, Rosen took the elevator upstairs and stormed past the reception desk into Steinbrenner’s office, where the owner was sitting at his desk watching the Old-Timers’ Game on TV.

  “How could you do this kind of thing?” Rosen screamed. “You’ve embarrassed me in front of everybody! How do you expect me to run this ball club?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Al,” Steinbrenner said weakly. “I couldn’t tell you because we had to keep this thing under wraps. It’s just something I felt I had to do. I didn’t feel right about the way everything had been done with Billy.”

  “George, what you’ve done to me, and, even more importantly, to Lem, is just unconscionable,” Rosen shot back. “The poor man was booed out there! We’ve just got everything calmed down around here and you pull a stunt like this! I know why you didn’t want to tell me: You knew how I’d react. Well, you’re right, George. This is bullshit.”

  Rosen wasn’t the only one who felt that way. DiMaggio was fuming at being upstaged by Martin, who Joe had always believed was ill suited to manage the Yankees because of his often undignified behavior. “Unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head, when reporters asked for his reaction immediately after the ceremony. Instead of going upstairs to Steinbrenner’s box (where he would customarily sit to watch the game), DiMaggio left the Stadium in a huff with his friend Barry Halper, one of the limited Yankees partners. And in the Yankee clubhouse, Reggie Jackson, having watched the ceremony on the TV in the players’ lounge, was numb with shock. One week Martin calls him a felon, Jackson thought, and now he hires him back? It was at that moment, Jackson wrote in his memoir, that he understood for the very first time that “deep down Steinbrenner was a man with very few principles and a man to whom real loyalty could never be very meaningful.”

  “You’d need a psychiatrist to try and figure out George’s relationship with Billy,” Rosen told me in a 2007 interview. “George always felt Billy was like a wayward son.”

  For Rosen, Old-Timers’ Day 1978 would go down as one of the worst days of his life. After the game, in which the Yankees beat the Twins, 7–3, he and Lemon went out to dinner and “then really tied one on.” He had never felt so betrayed.

  “That day,” Rosen said, “was the first indication to me that this was not going to be a long-standing relationship.”

  Chapter 8

  From Here to Eternity

  BILLY MARTIN MAY HAVE thought Steinbrenner had brought him back like Lazarus, but barely a week later, as events quickly unfolded, the former and supposedly future Yankees manager might as well have been dead again.

  Whether he took seriously the outrage expressed by Al Rosen or merely lost patience with the details of something not scheduled to happen for nearly two years, Steinbrenner’s focus returned to the pennant race from almost the moment Martin and his agent, Doug Newton, left Yankee Stadium that Saturday. In their haste to hash out an agreement on just how, when and for how much Billy would return as manager, the parties had neglected to write up a formal contract. For weeks afterward, Newton would call Steinbrenner to ask about the contract, only to be put off. As August passed and the Yankees, under Lemon’s steady hand, continued to mount what would be a comeback for the ages, Newton couldn’t even get Steinbrenner to return his calls.

  Because the Old-Timers’ Day bombshell had been so spontaneous, reporters hadn’t had time to sort everything out that afternoon either, and in the days immediately following, Martin had gone into seclusion. After numerous requests for interviews with Martin, M
ickey Morabito, the Yankees’ public relations director, suggested to Al Rosen that they bring him in for a small press conference. “Just the beat writers,” Morabito said. With Steinbrenner’s blessing, Morabito arranged a lunch at Alex & Henry’s restaurant, in the Bronx, for August 9. That morning, they brought Martin to Yankee Stadium and briefed him in Rosen’s office as to what sort of questions he should expect to be asked and how to answer them. After all, they wouldn’t want him to say anything that would create problems with the owner, who was in Tampa. Unfortunately, in spite of all of Morabito’s good intentions, he overlooked one very critical element of any event involving Billy Martin—alcohol.

  As he watched Martin down a couple of rounds of drinks before lunch and loosen up with the reporters, Morabito began to think he may have made a huge mistake. It didn’t take long for one of the writers to ask Martin about the comment he had made about Jackson and Steinbrenner at O’Hare—“One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.” “I didn’t mean what I said about George,” Martin replied, “but I did mean it about the other guy. I never looked at Reggie Jackson as a superstar. I never put him over Chris Chambliss, or Thurman, or Willie Randolph, and there were times I even put Chicken Stanley over him.”

  As Martin spouted off, Morabito sank into his seat. He could just see the headlines in the New York tabloids the next day. BILLY: REGGIE’S NO SUPERSTAR . . . BILLY RIPS REGGIE, SAYS HE’S STILL A BORN LIAR. There was no point pleading with the writers to treat Martin’s remarks as off the record. Morabito hadn’t set any ground rules for the luncheon, and now he was going to have to live with the consequences. On the way back to his office, Morabito braced himself for the call from Steinbrenner, whom all the reporters had, of course, phoned for reaction to Martin’s latest public blast of Jackson.

  The call came just minutes after Morabito got back to his office.

  “What the hell happened up there?” Steinbrenner demanded. “I told you this wasn’t a good idea, that Billy’s not stable enough to handle these kinds of situations. You and Rosen have really screwed up!”

  Morabito attempted to explain. “I understand, sir, it’s just . . . I thought . . . with all the media requests for Billy . . . we could—”

  “You think you’re so fucking smart,” Steinbrenner shouted, cutting him off. “We’ll see how this comes out in the papers! If it isn’t too negative, fine. But if it’s more of this Billy-Reggie shit, you’re gone! I can’t have this!”

  Morabito didn’t have to wonder how it would play out in the papers the next day. He knew he was gone. To fill time while he waited in his office that night for the early editions of the Times, Daily News and Post to hit the stands, he got some boxes from a utility room and began packing up his personal belongings. But then he received a phone call from a friend downtown informing him of a most unexpected development: There were no New York newspapers—they had all gone on strike! The Newark Star-Ledger, Newsday and the Westchester-Rockland papers would report Martin’s assailing of Jackson, but Steinbrenner didn’t pay attention to them.

  The newspaper strike, which would continue for 88 days into November, had saved Morabito—and the Yankees, Bob Lemon would later say.

  The easygoing Lemon had had a positive, calming effect on the Yankees, just as Rosen had predicted to Steinbrenner. After Martin’s firing, the Yankees finished July 11-4, then went 19-8 in August. At the same time, the first-place Red Sox began to slip, losing nine of 10 from July 20 to 28, cutting their lead to only 4½ games over Milwaukee. The Yanks were coming, and it didn’t take Paul Revere sounding it to every Middlesex village and farm for New England and Red Sox Nation to be alerted to the fact that the summer of ’78 suddenly had a pennant race. Martin was gone, Jackson was content for the first time and the injured had healed, most notably Catfish Hunter, whose chronically sore shoulder was cured (miraculously, as it was reported) by an arm manipulation performed by Dr. Maurice Cowen, the Yankees’ team physician.

  Still, as of August 25 the Yankees were 7½ games behind the Red Sox. Lou Piniella told his teammates, after they lost three out of the last four games of a West Coast road trip in mid-August, that they had better close some ground before going to Boston for a showdown four-game series the first week of September. Lemon reiterated when they got home August 25 that it was important to keep the pressure on the Red Sox in the next two weeks, and his team responded. By winning 10 of their next 14, the Yankees were able to cut the deficit to four games by the time they arrived in Boston on September 7. Now it was the Red Sox who were beset with nagging injuries and feeling the toll of the long season. In what became known as “the Boston Massacre,” Lemon’s rejuvenated troops, unencumbered by the clubhouse hostilities to which they had become accustomed under Martin, swept the four-game series by a combined score of 42–9.

  With the Yankees and Red Sox now tied for first and just three weeks remaining in the season, American League president Lee MacPhail began making provisions for a playoff. On September 15, he summoned Al Rosen to his office at 280 Park Avenue to conduct a coin flip by which the home field for a one-game playoff would be determined. When Rosen entered MacPhail’s office, Red Sox general manager Haywood Sullivan was already on the speakerphone from Boston.

  “You’re right there, Al,” said Sullivan, “so why don’t you just go ahead and make the call.”

  With that, MacPhail flipped a 50-cent piece into the air and Rosen called out “Heads.”

  “Sorry, Al,” MacPhail said. “It’s tails. If we need to have the playoff, it’ll be played at Fenway Park.”

  All the way back to his office, Rosen dreaded having to make the call to Steinbrenner about this unhappy turn of events. Though he fully anticipated a scathing rebuke, he was not prepared for the owner’s incredulous reaction.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, George, but we lost the coin flip,” Rosen said.

  “You lost?” Steinbrenner said. “How could you lose? What did you call?”

  “I called heads. Why?”

  “Heads?” Steinbrenner shrieked. “You fucking imbecile! How in the hell could you call heads when any dummy knows tails comes up 70 percent of the time? I can’t believe it! I’ve got the dumbest fucking people in baseball working for me!”

  Click.

  Rosen, who by now was accustomed to having to hold the phone away from his ear as Steinbrenner ranted, placed it back in the cradle and shook his head in disbelief. “Is he crazy?” he thought. “Did he just say what I thought he said? Is there anyone so irrational?”

  Perhaps there was: Mickey Rivers. On September 22, the Yankees were locked in a desperate head-to-head race with the Red Sox and were playing the Indians in Cleveland. Before the game, a Cuyahoga County deputy sheriff came into the visiting clubhouse at Municipal Stadium with a subpoena for Rivers. It seemed the outfielder was once again late with his alimony payments to his ex-wife, Mary (she of the bumper-cars infamy in the Yankee Stadium parking lot a couple of years earlier). After the sheriff departed, a few of the players sauntered over to Rivers’s locker to ask what the problem was.

  “No big deal,” Rivers said. “Mary’s just upset ’cause she don’t like some of the ’vestments I’ve been making. She lives here. We had lunch today at the racetrack.” In fact, Rivers wasn’t staying at the team’s hotel—he was staying with his ex-wife.

  That night, however, Rivers made a call to his agent and attorney, Nick Buoniconti, to ask him for advice. When Rivers informed him he was staying with Mary in Cleveland, Buoniconti said, “Mickey, you don’t need a lawyer. You need a psychiatrist!”

  When Rosen reported the incident to Steinbrenner, the owner shrugged and told him that they needed Rivers to get through the season even if meant continuing to give him advances on his salary.

  “What are we doing here?” Rosen asked. “We might as well just pay him by the game!”

  After Steinbrenner’s apoplexy over the coin flip, Rosen felt sure that the season was fated to come down to a playoff—and it did, when the Red So
x rallied to win their last eight games of the season and the Yankees and Catfish Hunter were beaten by the Cleveland Indians on the final day, leaving both teams with a 99-63 record. Though Hunter had won 12 of his previous 14 starts since the arm manipulation, he was driven from the game after just 12⁄3 innings, having given up five runs and two homers. The Indians went on to a 9–2 win behind five-hit pitching by an undistinguished left-hander named Rick Waits. During the game, Bill “Killer” Kane, the team’s traveling secretary, was in the press box checking all the hotel reservations for the trip to Boston when he was told Steinbrenner wanted to see him in his office.

  Kane remembered the eerie scene as he walked into the big man’s office. The shades had been drawn on the windows that looked out onto the field and Steinbrenner was sitting alone at his desk, in the dark.

  “He couldn’t bear watching what was going on down on the field,” Kane said. “He was beside himself.”

  And in need of someone on whom to take out his anger and frustration.

  “I just want to make sure you’ve got everything arranged for Boston,” Steinbrenner said.

  “Yeah, everything’s set, boss,” Kane said.

  “Where’s the plane?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “Newark.”

  “Newark?” exclaimed Steinbrenner. “Oh no, no, no, we’re not taking off from Newark. We’ve got to go out of LaGuardia! Newark’s too far away.”

  “We’ve been flying out of Newark all season, George,” Kane said.

  “I don’t care,” said Steinbrenner. “I want the plane moved to LaGuardia.”

  “We can’t move the plane!” Kane protested.

  “I don’t want to hear anything more. Get it moved. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you, George, but it can’t be moved.”

  “Well, if you can’t get it moved,” said Steinbrenner, “I’ll get someone else who can. Now just get out of here. You’re finished.”