Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  That night, after reading over Tebbetts’s 12-page report, Steinbrenner began to form his strategy. With each year, free agents were demanding more and more money—a trend that Steinbrenner’s own signings of Hunter and Jackson had helped foster—and he knew that it was going to take a whole lot more than the $2.96 million over five years Reggie had cost him. (In 1975, the year before free agency, the average baseball salary was $44,676; by 1980 it had more than tripled, to $143,756.) As he had done with Munson before signing Jackson, Steinbrenner decided that he now needed to sound out Jackson about the possibility of bringing Winfield to the team for a lot more money than any other player in baseball was making. Over dinner at Elaine’s, Steinbrenner told Jackson of his intentions and listened with interest as Reggie endorsed the idea.

  “I know you’re looking for a big gun to hit in front or in back of me,” Jackson said, “and Winfield can be that gun. As a right-handed hitter, I’m not so sure how he’ll perform power-wise, because he’ll be hitting so many shots to Death Valley [the deep expanse of left center field in Yankee Stadium], but basically I think he’ll help us a lot. Plus, I’m not gonna be around forever, and it’s probably the right time for you to start looking to groom someone who can be your horse when I’m gone.”

  Incidentally, Jackson leaving the team was precisely what Steinbrenner was thinking, too, but it would take another six months before Reggie began to realize the owner was intent on replacing him sooner rather than later. A couple of days after that dinner with Jackson, Steinbrenner flew to Minneapolis to meet for the first time with Winfield, who was back at his alma mater, hosting a fund-raiser with comedian Bob Hope. Over steaks with Winfield and Frohman, Steinbrenner delivered his pitch.

  “We’ve been watching you a long time, Dave,” he said, “and we feel that with a good team like the Yankees, your batting average will go up 30 points. You’ve been playing on losing teams your entire career in San Diego. It’s time you got with a winner. We have a need for an outfielder and a middle-of-the-order hitter to complement Reggie, and you’re precisely the kind of guy we want. You’re an athlete who plays the whole game. I like that. And I believe you’ll thrive in New York. There’s a lot of business opportunities there for you that you won’t be able to get anywhere else.”

  Steinbrenner then questioned him about that room service bill in

  St. Louis. (“Right then,” Winfield wrote years later in his autobiography, “I knew he’d really done his homework.”) Finally their discussion turned to Winfield’s foundation, with Steinbrenner pledging financial support from the Yankees. This made him the front-runner with Winfield and Frohman, as the agent had made clear that financial support for the Winfield Foundation was paramount in any negotiation with his client.

  By mid-December, the list of Winfield’s suitors had narrowed to the Yankees, the Atlanta Braves and their free-spending owner, Ted Turner, and, much to Steinbrenner’s alarm, the Mets. At the gathering Steinbrenner had held with reporters at Tampa Bay Downs on December 5, he’d said he had no regrets at having lost out to the Houston Astros for 35-year-old free agent pitcher Don Sutton. “We didn’t need Sutton,” he said, “but Dave Winfield is a different matter. He’s the piece to fit into the puzzle. Don’t count us out on Winfield.”

  “The Mets are a definite threat,” Steinbrenner insisted, even though the Mets had finished fifth in the NL East in 1980, losing 95 games. “That figure they’re reported to have offered—a million and a half a year for eight years—I know for a fact that’s legitimate. But when I really want a man, I confront him face to face. I camp at his door. I really go after him, the way I did with Reggie.”

  When Winfield came to New York in early December for more meetings with the Mets and Yankees, Steinbrenner was there to overwhelm him with the same full-court press he’d put on Reggie four years earlier: flowers in his hotel room, chauffeured limos, a Broadway show, dinner at “21.”

  “I like you a lot, Dave,” Steinbrenner said as they sat in the back of the limo that was taking them to Elaine’s after a show. “You’ve got class. I can take you places I could never take Reggie.”

  ON THE NIGHT of Sunday, December 14, Steinbrenner met with Frohman, Winfield and Bob Erra, the foundation’s chief financial officer, at the Loews Summit Hotel in Manhattan, where the trio was staying. The Mets had bid $1.5 million per year for five years (not eight, as Steinbrenner had said two weeks before), and Steinbrenner was determined to blow Winfield over with his offer. He told Winfield he would give him $1.4 million per year, but for ten years—the biggest and longest contract ever for a professional athlete. In addition, he would pay Winfield a $1 million signing bonus and he would pledge $3 million to the David M. Winfield Foundation over 30 years and provide Frohman an office at the Stadium.

  Winfield smiled in satisfaction at the offer, but before he could say anything, Frohman interjected that, because of the length of the contract, there needed to be a cost-of-living escalator.

  “Okay,” said Steinbrenner. “I’ll match the rate of inflation up to 10 percent annually over the 10 years. In exchange for that, I want the option of buying out the last two years of the contract at 50 percent, or $700,000.”

  Winfield and his negotiators looked at each other and asked for a private caucus. Adjourning to the room next door, Erra expressed his astonishment at Steinbrenner’s offer. “I don’t think he realizes how a cost-of-living escalator works—that it compounds! By the eighth year of the contract your base salary could be over two million dollars!”

  Returning to the negotiating room, Frohman told Steinbrenner he had a deal. Steinbrenner beamed. They agreed to have Dick Moss, a prominent agent who was formerly assistant executive director of the Players Association, draw up the contract and bring it to Yankee Stadium the next morning for them all to sign. At 10 A.M., Steinbrenner met with his in-house counsel, Ed Broderick, and his comptroller, Dave Weidler, and asked them to read over the contract while he went into security chief Pat Kelly’s office to personally type out the addendum about the $3 million contribution to the Winfield Foundation.

  At the press conference later that day, at Jimmy Weston’s restaurant in Manhattan, Jackson showed up to welcome Winfield to the team. In his remarks, Steinbrenner attempted to downplay the magnitude of the deal, focusing instead on the charity aspect. “We didn’t get started in youth work 15 minutes before Winfield became a free agent, you know,” he said. “I really think David felt that what he does for youth could be done better from Yankee Stadium. He’s totally committed to helping youngsters. I know people may not believe that, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a finer young man. I don’t question his sincerity.”

  The next day, Murray Chass’s column in the New York Times reported the details of the Winfield contract, in particular the compounding cost-of-living escalator, which, based on the maximum 10 percent annually, he wrote, could make the deal worth nearly $25 million. Had Steinbrenner allowed himself to be duped? Chass’s column sure made it look that way. After reading the story, an apoplectic Steinbrenner summoned Broderick to his office.

  “I can’t have this, Eddie!” he screamed. “I can’t be made to look like that fucking little kosher caterer got the best of me! You’re gonna have to take the blame for this!” Broderick knew there was no point trying to reason with Steinbrenner; no point trying to explain that they had all understood the compounding part of the cost-of-living clause, and that it wasn’t likely to exceed more than 3 percent in any year, meaning the contract probably wouldn’t wind up being worth much more than the $15 million face value they had figured. He understood what his job was, and that was to take the fall so his boss could save face. Accordingly, Broderick made a series of phone calls to the Yankees beat writers, informing them that he was the one who’d negotiated the contract with the cost-of-living clause, with full understanding of its potential value. In the meantime, at Winfield’s urging, Broderick and Frohman quietly renegotiated the cost-of-living clause to be triggered every two years.r />
  On Opening Day in 1981, a cold, damp, miserable April afternoon, Al Frohman showed up at Yankee Stadium expecting to watch the game from the comfort of that office suite Steinbrenner had promised him. Instead, when he arrived at the reception desk in the Stadium lobby, he was surprised to learn he’d been assigned a seat in an outdoor loge box way down the right-field line, next to the foul pole. Broderick remembered seeing him come into the foyer of the Yankees offices during the middle of the game, seeking refuge from the cold. “The guy’s hands and face were white, and he was ice cold,” Broderick said. “He looked awful. I told him I was taking a risk if Mr. Steinbrenner saw him in there, but the poor guy looked like he had pneumonia.”

  STEINBRENNER HAD SIGNED Winfield and sent Gene Michael to the dugout, but the Yankees still didn’t have a president until March, when he tapped his old friend and football mentor Lou Saban. The much-traveled Saban was between football jobs, having been athletic director at both the University of Miami (Ohio) and the University of Cincinnati within a span of a year and half, when Steinbrenner called and asked him to run the Yankees.

  Perhaps because he had held 18 different jobs in 33 years, Saban didn’t feel it was necessary to consult with Rosen about the difference between being Steinbrenner’s friend and working for the man. He would last two years before resigning from what, in title anyway, was one of the most prestigious jobs in sports, to take over as head football coach at the University of Central Florida, a fledgling Division III school. In a 2002 interview with Wayne Coffey of the New York Daily News, Saban told a familiar tale about why he’d had to leave Steinbrenner’s employ. The breaking point, it turned out, was the same as it had been for Howard Berk a decade earlier—the postponing of a game because of rain. In Saban’s case, there were already 50,000 fans in Yankee Stadium, many of them there as part of a benefit the Yankees were hosting for the family of a police officer who had been killed in the line of duty. The Yankees were leading 5–0 in the third inning when the skies opened and it began to rain about as hard as Saban could ever remember. After nearly an hour with no abatement, the phone rang in Saban’s office. It was Steinbrenner, calling from Tampa.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” Steinbrenner yelled. “Why isn’t the game on TV?”

  “It’s pouring rain here, George,” Saban said. “The field is inundated.”

  Steinbrenner hung up. Ten minutes later, he called again.

  “What’s going on now?”

  “I told you, George, it’s pouring. Water is cascading into the dugouts!”

  “Well, get down there and talk to the umpires. Tell them they have to do everything they can to get the game in!”

  Again, Steinbrenner hung up, only to call back in another 15 minutes in even more of a frenzy.

  “Is it still raining?” he shouted.

  “Yes, it’s still raining, George,” Saban said.

  “Well, why didn’t you know it was going to rain?”

  “George,” pleaded Saban, “I’m not the guy upstairs! I don’t turn on the valves!”

  “Oh, yeah, well, you’re fired!”

  Dumbfounded, Saban called Yankees security chief Pat Kelly, who had also been on the receiving end of Steinbrenner’s rain rant all night, and the two of them polished off a bottle of Scotch in the owner’s office. That night, Saban went back to his apartment and began packing his bags to go home. At 9 o’clock the next morning, Steinbrenner showed up unannounced at the Yankee Stadium offices and immediately confronted Mary Pellino, Saban’s secretary.

  “Where the hell is Saban?” he demanded.

  “He’s not here, sir,” she replied. “You fired him last night.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You tell him to get his ass into this office in an hour.”

  When Saban arrived back at the Stadium at 1:30 that afternoon, Steinbrenner was still in a foul mood over the ruined night for the slain cop and having to now honor all those rain checks, but he said nothing about the firing. Nevertheless, Saban knew it was time to go. They parted amicably a few months later and remained friends until Saban’s death in 2009. “George has great feelings for people and, down deep, he’s a really tender guy,” Saban told Coffey. “But the one question in my life, knowing George, is that I never could quite understand how he could do a complete three-sixty in a period of 24 hours.”

  Still, Saban should have known what he was getting into—in his very first month as Yankees president, he witnessed several classic Steinbrenner blowups, sufficient warning as to what he could expect in his new job.

  After a breakthrough season as Thurman Munson’s replacement at catcher, in which he hit .277 with 14 homers and 85 RBI, Rick Cerone filed for salary arbitration, seeking a raise from $110,000 to $440,000. (Salary arbitration was a concession the owners made in a collective bargaining agreement that allowed players with at least three years of major league service to have an arbitrator determine what they’d be paid the following year.) Steinbrenner, who regarded being taken to arbitration by a player as a personal affront, was outraged. There was no way he was even going to attempt to compromise on such an exorbitant demand. Fearing he might be fired by Steinbrenner if he lost the decision, general manager Cedric Tallis elected to delegate the duties of making the Yankees’ case to Broderick, the team’s in-house counsel. Broderick told Steinbrenner that the Yankees should not attack Cerone but rather offer him $350,000 and try to sell the arbitrator on the fact that they recognized the catcher’s considerable contributions to the team and were rewarding him by more than tripling his salary. Steinbrenner agreed, the offer was made, and Cerone rejected, preferring to present his case to the arbitrator. As soon as Broderick arrived at the hearing and saw a bunch of employees from the American Arbitration Service asking for autographs from Cerone, he knew his case was in trouble.

  Indeed, the next day, he got a call from Barry Rona, one of baseball’s labor relations attorneys, informing him that the arbitrator had ruled in favor of Cerone.

  “What do you mean we lost?” Steinbrenner yelled when Broderick reached him in Tampa. “You’re a fucking idiot!” Steinbrenner yelled before abruptly hanging up. A few minutes later he called back.

  “OK, Broderick, you lost and it’s your fault, so this is what we’re going to do. Monday is the Presidents Day holiday, and everybody up there was planning to have the day off, right? Well, you tell each and every one person in the office that, because you lost the Cerone case, they all have to work a full day Monday. You got that?”

  Everyone came to work that Monday, and at 1 o’clock Steinbrenner called from Tampa to say that they could all go home—except Broderick.

  “So what’s the lesson you’ve learned?” Steinbrenner said.

  Broderick sighed. “Never lose an arbitration.”

  The easygoing Broderick was single, in his early ’30s. He enjoyed the perks and prestige that came with working for the Yankees, the rubbing of elbows with celebrities and power brokers in Steinbrenner’s private box, but he didn’t need the job to support a family. And over time he learned how to handle his boss, so that he seemed to enjoy a unique relationship with Steinbrenner. He had met Steinbrenner through his uncle, Bishop Edwin Broderick, who was head of the world Catholic Relief Services and who, in the mid-1980s, was among a half-dozen of Steinbrenner’s prominent friends to write letters in his behalf asking President Ronald Reagan to pardon him for his Watergate conviction.

  “You never challenged him in front of other people,” Ed Broderick said of Steinbrenner, “because leaders don’t want to be made to look like they’re not right. But if you got him one-on-one, you could talk to him. You could also have fun with him.”

  A prime example of that was the day Steinbrenner came into Broderick’s office and spotted a magazine with Barbara Walters’s picture on the cover. In the article, the writer described Walters’s physical attributes, prompting an impish smile from Steinbrenner, who had obviously read the story.

  “Watch this!” he said,
picking up the phone.

  “Hi, Barbara, George here. Hey, I’m reading this magazine over here in which they’re describing your considerable physical attributes. How come I’ve never gotten to see them?”

  After a few minutes of playful, lighthearted conversation, Steinbrenner hung up with Walters and looked at Broderick, chuckling.

  “Well, what did you think of that?”

  “I think,” said Broderick, “that a guy like you, Mr. Steinbrenner, with all your wealth, power and fame, could do a whole lot better than Barbara Walters.”

  “What? How dare you!” Steinbrenner shrieked in mock outrage, before jumping up and chasing Broderick around his desk.

  JUST BEFORE THE start of spring training, Steinbrenner managed to run afoul of the commissioner’s office again when a trade he’d worked out with the financially strapped Pittsburgh Pirates for slugging first baseman Jason Thompson was rejected by Bowie Kuhn because of an excess of money thrown into it on the Yankees’ part. Kuhn had set a limit of $400,000 that could be included in trades, and Steinbrenner had agreed to give the Pirates first baseman Jim Spencer, two minor leaguers and $850,000 for Thompson. When he received the letter informing him that the deal had been voided, Steinbrenner phoned Kuhn’s administrator, Bill Murray, who had previously worked in the Mets’ front office, and lit into him.

  “I know where this is coming from, you little sonofabitch,” Steinbrenner screamed. “You’re just making sure to help out your Mets friends, and I’m telling you right here, you’ve made an enemy for life. I’ll get you back for this, no matter how long it takes!”

  A shaken Murray wrote a letter to Steinbrenner the next day, copying Kuhn, in which he said: “I was shocked and disturbed by your phone call yesterday immediately prior to the termination of the Thompson-Spencer deal. Your comments and threats that I had made an enemy for life were those you might expect from a gangster hit man rather than the principal owner of a major league baseball team. Your comments are completely out of character with Yankee tradition and, I’m sure you would agree, not exactly what you would like to see framed and hung on the walls of the Great Moments Room at Yankee Stadium.”