Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Right after that four-run Dodger sixth, I was sitting in the press box when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Irv Kaze, the Yankees’ VP of media relations.

  “Have you got a minute?” Kaze asked. “George wants to see you in his office.”

  I couldn’t imagine what this could be about—had I written something that angered Steinbrenner?—but I certainly wasn’t going to pass up what figured to be an exclusive in-game rant from the Yankees owner. I followed Kaze down the corridor behind the press box to Steinbrenner’s office. The curtains had been drawn across the windows looking onto the field and the room was dark. Steinbrenner was sitting at his desk, and across the room were Ed Broderick and his friend Bill Fugazy.

  “It’s pretty awful, isn’t it?” Steinbrenner said.

  “It’s not real good,” I said.

  “Well, I just want to tell you, Billy, I’m embarrassed. These players have embarrassed me and embarrassed New York, and I want the fans to know that. Here, take a look at this.”

  He shoved a piece of a paper across the desk. It was an official Yankees press release, with the Yankees logo across the top, on which he had typewritten, “I want to sincerely apologize to the people of New York and to the fans of the New York Yankees everywhere for the performance of the Yankee team in the World Series. I also want to assure you that we will be at work immediately to prepare for 1982. I want also to extend my congratulations to Peter O’Malley and the Dodger organization—and to my friend, Tom Lasorda, who managed a superb season, playoffs and a brilliant World Series. Sincerely, George M. Steinbrenner.”

  I finished reading and looked up.

  “Well, what do you think?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “I don’t know, George,” I said. “You’re the owner. If this is the way you feel . . . I just don’t know how the players are going to react.”

  “I don’t give a shit what the players think,” he snapped. “They let me down. They let New York down.”

  Not surprisingly, the players were outraged by the apology, which Steinbrenner had distributed in the press box as soon as the game was over. A few months after his 2008 induction into the Hall of Fame, Goose Gossage said to me, “George was the greatest owner I ever played for, but he was crazed that whole postseason in ’81, and after all the shit he pulled in the World Series, with the Reggie benching, the elevator fight and the apology, I said to myself: ‘In two years I’m out of here.’ ”

  Of all the players, perhaps only one shared Steinbrenner’s embarrassment. Dave Winfield went 1 for 22 with one RBI in his first World Series. A couple of days after the final game, he stopped by Yankee Stadium on his way out of town and went up to Steinbrenner’s office, where he found the owner sitting at his desk with his chin in his hand, still seemingly brooding over the loss.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Boss, I owe you one,” Winfield said. “We’ll get ’em next year, that’s a promise.”

  Steinbrenner managed a weak smile.

  “Yeah,” the owner agreed. “That’s a promise.”

  He never dreamed it was a promise that would take another 15 years to keep.

  Chapter 11

  Chaos: Reggie’s Revenge, Umpire Wars and Pine Tar Follies

  ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT he finished penning his apology to the fans, George Steinbrenner became consumed with overhauling his baseball team for the 1982 season. “I’m tired of sitting around waiting for the three-run homer,” he declared to his baseball people after the last game of the Series. “We’re gonna change that.”

  The core of the ’77 and ’78 championship teams needed to be replaced, he decided—most of all Reggie Jackson, who finished the abbreviated ’81 split season with a .237 average and 15 homers in 94 games. The success of the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals, who both played on artificial turf and relied on quick players rather than sluggers, had further convinced Steinbrenner that speed, not power, was the way to go in baseball in the new decade. On November 4, the Yankees pulled off a shocker of a deal by acquiring All-Star Cincinnati Reds outfielder Ken Griffey, a career .307 hitter, for two unproven minor league pitchers, Brian Ryder and Freddie Toliver. Even more shocking was the whopping three-year,

  $2.475 million free-agent contract they gave another Reds outfielder, Dave Collins, two days before Christmas. Though the 29-year-old Collins had hit a respectable .272 in 1981, he was considered an ordinary slap-hitting corner outfielder who had tailed off precipitously from 79 steals in 1980 to 26 in ’81. It turned out that Steinbrenner had been motivated to sign him after hearing that the Royals, now managed by Dick Howser, were hot to sign him. (This amused Howser, who would later tell reporters that the Royals weren’t prepared to go beyond one year for Collins.)

  After taking six weeks to think about it, Steinbrenner announced during the baseball winter meetings in Florida that Bob Lemon would return as manager. Steinbrenner, who’d considered making Lemon the fall guy for the ’81 World Series loss, was impressed by the manager’s healthy, trimmed-down appearance. (Lemon had reported to the winter meetings 24 pounds lighter, down to a svelte 210, after swearing off hard liquor.) “When I met Lem here, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Steinbrenner said to reporters. “He looked great and so well rested, and he lost all that weight! I was uncertain as to what I was going to do, but when he asked me for one more year, that was it. He’s always been there for me when I needed him, so I owed him. This time, he’ll get a full season, no matter what.”

  Steinbrenner also announced that “Stick” Michael, who had become a scout after being replaced by Lemon in September, would return as manager for the 1983, ’84 and ’85 seasons.

  Before the start of spring training, Steinbrenner, without consulting with anyone, gave aging outfielders Lou Piniella and Bobby Murcer new three-year contracts. By rewarding Piniella and Murcer for past performance, it appeared Steinbrenner was hedging his bet on the “speed game” he had seemed so eager to implement. Birdie Tebbetts, Steinbrenner’s chief scout, was dumbfounded by the decision. “All this time, he told me he was phasing those two guys out,” Tebbetts complained to me one day that spring. “If I’d known he was gonna bring them both back, I’d have never recommended Griffey and Collins. Where are we supposed to play all these guys?”

  Lemon wondered the same thing. With Piniella, Murcer, Winfield, Jerry Mumphrey, Oscar Gamble and now Griffey, there was certainly no room in the outfield for the $800,000-per-year Collins, who was instead handed a first-base glove, a position he’d never played before, when he reported to camp. “They gave me this guy and told me to play him, but what the hell am I supposed to do with him?” Lemon said with exasperation to reporters. “We got better guys than him at every position!” Collins was equally bewildered. All spring he would ask reporters, “Why did they want me here? Are they trying to trade me?”

  Actually, Collins’s place on the team was hardly Lemon’s biggest concern that preseason. Steinbrenner ordered everyone into camp a week early, whereupon they were handed navy blue jumpsuits instead of uniforms and introduced to Harrison Dillard, the ’48 and ’52 Olympic high hurdles gold medalist, who put the team through running drills. They would not don pinstripes until the actual games began. “Those sweatpants were so damn heavy, they wore you down,” remembered Piniella, “and we weren’t allowed to touch a bat for the first two weeks. If you wanted to take a little hitting, you had to go down the street and pay $10 to use the public cages!”

  With Dillard conducting running drills, culminating each day with 45-yard sprint races in which he’d pair off two players at a time and put a stopwatch on them, the Yankees’ “track camp” got the attention of the national media that spring—though not exactly the kind of attention Steinbrenner had anticipated. After the first few days, Mike Lupica wrote a column in the Daily News mocking what he dubbed “the Bronx Roadrunners”—which sent Steinbrenner into a rage. (It was Lupica who a couple of years earlier had first referred to Steinbrenner as “the Boss,” a nickname that soon became the owne
r’s permanent title. “It came to me after reading Mike Royko’s book Boss, about Chicago’s Mayor Daley,” Lupica explained. “Here was this blustery old machine politician laying waste to anyone who got in his way, and I said to myself: ‘That’s our guy! He runs Yankee Stadium the way Daley ran Chicago!’ ”)

  Lupica’s column was written in the form of a letter from New York to “George (Boss) Steinbrenner, Commander-in-Chief, New York Yankees.” “Sorry I haven’t been able to join you down there in Florida as you were hoping,” it read, “but I expect to arrive shortly because I, like you, am really into track and field.” Lupica concluded the column by poking Steinbrenner: “You know how I swoon at those photographs of the designer jogging outfits.”

  “The little sonofabitch isn’t even here!” Steinbrenner growled to his PR director, Irv Kaze. “This isn’t funny! I want his credentials pulled when he gets here. And tell all the other writers they better not write any more smart-ass shit about what we’re doing here if they ever want to get a return phone call from me!”

  (Kaze was let off the hook when Lupica didn’t show up at camp until a couple of weeks later, by which time Steinbrenner had forgotten about the column.)

  For the rest of the spring, Steinbrenner was in a constant state of agitation, fueled no doubt by the Yankees’ desultory (9-16) play in the Grapefruit League. They failed to steal bases the way he’d envisioned, and they weren’t hitting as many home runs as they had in the past. After each loss, Steinbrenner would order Lemon and all the coaches to a meeting in his executive trailer alongside Fort Lauderdale Stadium, where, for two hours, he would harangue them about the team’s failure. This forced the writers to hang around until midnight after night games, our only source of entertainment being to watch Joan Steinbrenner power-walking around the trailer as she waited for her husband to finish berating his coaching staff.

  By midspring, Lemon was once again hitting the hard stuff. One night he was with a couple of reporters at the restaurant across the street from the Yankees’ hotel, where he ordered a Canadian Club and water.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the waitress said, “but we only serve wine or beer here.”

  Frowning, Lemon rolled his eyes and said, “For Chrissakes, don’t tell me the asshole owns this place too!”

  Realizing that his attempt to implement a “speed game” had been a colossal waste of time and energy, Steinbrenner had begun frantically reshuffling the roster. He acquired Butch Hobson, a washed-up third baseman, from the California Angels, with the idea of having him platoon with the switch-hitting Collins at first base and hopefully provide a little power at the position. And on March 30, Steinbrenner acquired right-handed pitcher Doyle Alexander from the San Francisco Giants. Although Alexander had won 25 games for the Giants over the previous two seasons, his dour disposition did not endear him to his teammates or to reporters. Indeed, the Yankees were able to get him only because he’d become embroiled in an acrimonious salary dispute with the Giants, which was resolved when Steinbrenner gave him a four-year, $2.2 million contract extension to approve the trade to New York. The Alabama-born Alexander hated New York, but for that kind of money he was willing to go anywhere. Lemon was in his room at the Galt, watching his favorite TV show, Barnaby Jones, when I called him for comment on the trade.

  “I hear you got yourself a new pitcher, Lem,” I said.

  “Oh?” Lemon replied. “I’m just the manager here, and the last person to know anything. Who am I getting?”

  “Doyle Alexander.”

  After a few seconds of silence, I heard a sigh on the other end of the phone. “Just what I need, another hemorrhoid.”

  By the time the ’82 season began, Lemon was already a beaten man. The meetings, the nightly phone calls from Steinbrenner, and the constant threats had worn him down. Riding together in a taxi on our way to dinner at Miller’s Pub in Chicago on the opening road trip of the season, Lemon said to me, “I’ve had it, Meat. I can’t take this guy any longer. No matter what I do, I can’t please him. I’m gonna quit.”

  “Quit? What are you talking about, Lem?” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Serious as I’ve ever been, Meat. I’m only telling you this ’cause you’ve been a good friend. I don’t need this aggravation. Life is too short.”

  “You can’t quit, Lem,” I said. “If you do, you’re liable not to get your money, and I’d hate for that to happen to you. You’ve got to play it out. If nothing else, wait till he fires you. At least then you’ll get paid for all the aggravation he’s given you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Lemon said.

  It turned out Lemon only had to think about it another few days. After winning two games in Chicago, the Yankees came home and lost three out of four to the Detroit Tigers. With their record at 6-8, Steinbrenner announced he was replacing Lemon with Michael—so much for that “full season, no matter what.” But at least Lemon got paid, and not only that, got paid for life: Steinbrenner gave him a lifetime scouting contract for $50,000 per year.

  As Lemon’s case illustrated, Steinbrenner could be heartless and magnanimous in almost the same gesture. And when it came to people in need—often people with no connection to baseball or the Yankees, whom he met either in person or through friends or the media—his benevolence knew few bounds.

  A couple of months before the ’82 season began, Steinbrenner was having lunch in Manhattan with his friend Jim Fuchs, the former world shot-put record holder and ’48 and ’52 Olympian. On the news that morning, Steinbrenner had seen the funeral of a slain New York City policeman, and had been particularly struck by the visage of the officer’s widow, flanked by her four small children, accepting a folded American flag.

  “Who’s gonna pay for those kids’ education?” Steinbrenner said to Fuchs.

  “I don’t know,” Fuchs said.

  “We have to do something.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “We’ll start a foundation, and you’ll run it.”

  “How do you start a foundation?” Fuchs asked.

  “You go out and raise a lot of money and then you give it away!”

  “Well,” said Fuchs, “I do have a lot of wealthy friends. I’ll get 100 of them to give $1,000 apiece.”

  “That’s good,” said Steinbrenner, “and for my part, I’ll donate the entire gate receipts from one of our games. I’ve got the perfect game to do it with. On April 27 the Angels come to the Stadium. It’ll be Reggie’s first time back. We should have a real big house. It’ll be a great night!”

  From that casual lunch, Steinbrenner formed the Silver Shield Foundation, which, from 1982 until 2000, paid for the college educations of over 200 sons and daughters of New York City police and firemen, New York Port Authority officers and New York, New Jersey and Connecticut state troopers killed in the line of duty. In the aftermath of 9/11, it paid for 700 more, and after that it expanded its bounds to accept corporate donations. By 2010, the foundation had an endowment of nearly $4 million.

  Michael’s first game in his second term as Yankees manager, April 27, happened to be that same night Jackson made his return to Yankee Stadium wearing the uniform of the California Angels, with whom he’d signed as a free agent on January 22. To that point in the season, Jackson was hitting .173 with no homers—numbers that, ordinarily, would have earned him a seat on the bench against a lefty as formidable as Ron Guidry. But Angels manager Gene Mauch had been in baseball since 1943 and understood that this was a unique circumstance. Calling Jackson aside before the game, Mauch said: “Don’t worry, Reggie. I know you have to be in there tonight.”

  Mauch’s instincts told him that Jackson’s desire to prove Steinbrenner wrong would somehow bring out Reggie’s flair for the dramatic. It happened in the seventh inning, just before the rains came to end the game early. Having singled and scored the go-ahead run on a suicide squeeze in the fifth inning, Jackson came to bat in the seventh inning with the Angels leading 2–1 and Guidry still dealing. Reggie c
ould hear the 35,458 fans—who had stayed in the rain—cheering for him, as if it were 1977 all over again. On his first pitch, Guidry hung a slider over the plate. Jackson’s eyes widened as he swung mightily and launched a towering drive to right field that just kept on rising until it struck the facing of the upper deck and fell back onto the field. As Yankee right fielder Ken Griffey calmly retrieved the ball and tossed it back into the infield and Jackson began his tour of the bases, the crowd erupted, the roar crystallizing into a chant of “Reg-gie! Reg-gie! Reg-gie!” When Jackson finally crossed the plate and disappeared into the dugout, the crowd, still standing, began pointing toward the owner’s box on the mezzanine level, and a new chant took hold: “Steinbrenner sucks! Steinbrenner sucks! Steinbrenner sucks!”

  Watching this scene from his box, Steinbrenner was devastated. After that inning, the rain started to come down harder and the umpires called the game, declaring the Angels 3–1 winners. Minutes later, Steinbrenner sent word to the clubhouse that he wanted to see Michael and his coaches in his office. This was not the ending Michael had envisioned for his first game back as manager. As Michael walked through the door, Steinbrenner was sitting behind the big round desk, scowling.

  “You’re killing me, Stick!”

  Michael couldn’t believe his ears. “My first friggin’ game and I’m killing him?” he thought.

  Once Michael and his staff had taken their seats around the desk, Steinbrenner started in.

  “I can’t believe what went on out there tonight!” he moaned. “How could they do this to me? How could these fans, who I’ve done so much for, turn on me like this?”

  As he continued, the coaches desperately tried to contain their laughter until, at one point, Steinbrenner spotted bullpen coach Jeff Torborg covering a smirk on his face with his hand.