Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Steinbrenner defended his decision to move his operations out of Lorain, telling the Associated Press: “We feel sorry for those people, believe me. Nobody feels worse about the closure on the lake than I do, because it’s part of me. I battled for three years to keep that yard open, but nobody can run a business that’s losing that much money. I kept warning the unions. If they had come right up and agreed to changes . . . it might well have been different.”

  Henry Steinbrenner had invested a lot in the Great Lakes, but he had also taught his son to be a hard-nosed businessman, so it would be pure conjecture to say how the old man would have felt about his son’s decision to abandon the region, where the Steinbrenners had been a fixture since 1885, when George’s great-great-grandfather Peter Minch founded the Cleveland Ship Building Co.

  AFTER THANKSGIVING 1983, Steinbrenner told reporters that he would decide who would manage the Yankees in 1984 by the winter meetings. But those winter meetings, held in Nashville December 5–8, came and went with no word on the Yankees manager. New GM Murray Cook did make one minor deal there, sending first baseman Steve Balboni, a onetime minor league slugging prodigy, to the Kansas City Royals for relief pitcher Mike Armstrong.

  A week after the winter meetings, Steinbrenner called Eddie Sapir to Tampa to discuss Martin’s future with the Yankees. “I’ve thought this over, Eddie,” Steinbrenner said, “and I’ve just decided that in the best interests of the team I’m going to invoke the option on Billy’s contract and reassign him to the front office, where he’ll serve as a special advisor to me.”

  Sapir never asked why Steinbrenner was making the change. Nor did he make any effort to plead for Martin’s retention. He knew this was merely going to mean extra money and extra years of security for his client. He also knew that, in good time, Martin would be back managing again.

  The next day, at a Yankee Stadium press conference, Steinbrenner introduced Yogi Berra as the newest manager of the Yankees.

  Chapter 12

  An Icon Scorned

  YOGI BERRA HAD EVERY reason to feel apprehensive about becoming George Steinbrenner’s latest manager. His ascension to the job, on December 16, 1983, marked the tenth managerial change by the impulsive and demanding Yankees owner in just eight years. At 58, Berra’s legacy as a Yankee icon was secure. He had won three Most Valuable Player awards, played on 14 World Series teams and been a 14-time All-Star, and he was arguably the most beloved and respected Yankee of all time. Yet he elected to risk all of the goodwill he had earned from the fans and media by agreeing to work for the man who’d just fired his friend and former teammate, Billy Martin, for the third time.

  In a column in the New York Post (where he’d moved from the Daily News), Dick Young seized on how Berra had gone from venerable to vulnerable: “The reason George Steinbrenner is naming Yogi Berra manager is that George wants to be the manager,” Young wrote. “George realizes he made a bad deal with Billy, agreeing to stay away from the clubhouse, away from the phone, away from the players. With Yogi in the manager’s office, George can be manager again. He can enjoy life. He can tell Yogi who should lead off and who should catch. George can re-connect the phone to the dugout too. That was the fun George missed last season.”

  Steinbrenner reacted to Young’s column (which was headlined GEORGE WILL USE YOGI AS PUPPET IN DUGOUT) by writing a humorously indignant letter to the editor of the Post defending Berra’s honor: “I really think Dick Young owes Yogi Berra an apology because in picking on Yogi Berra, you’re picking on one of the finest men in baseball. As far as I’m concerned personally, I still like Dick Young even after the article. I’m not sure I’m going to invite him to Christmas dinner this year, but then again I may have to have him over for dinner if he keeps picking Marvis Frazier to knock out Larry Holmes.”

  It was a mostly tongue-in-cheek poke at Young, not nearly as stinging as the verbal barbs Steinbrenner so frequently leveled at baseball officials, other owners or umpires, probably because the owner knew deep down that Young was right. Even Berra’s wife, Carmen, voiced reservations over his giving up the easy life of a bench coach and thrusting himself squarely into Steinbrenner’s line of fire. At the December 17 press conference at Yankee Stadium, Berra explained: “My age had something to do with it. I’ve achieved just about everything a man can achieve in this game. I’ve won the Most Valuable Player award, I’ve made the Hall of Fame and I’ve won two pennants as a manager [with the Yankees in 1964 and the Mets in 1973]. But I’ve never won a world championship as a manager, and I felt that this club is capable of winning one.”

  Otherwise, Berra echoed much of the same familiar rhetoric of the three previous press conferences at which Steinbrenner had named Billy Martin manager. “I’m sure I’ll argue with George about things, probably,” Berra said, “and then I’ll find out, I guess, whether I can win one. But I can accept losing an argument, too.”

  It had to be a bit disconcerting for Berra to see Martin’s agent, Eddie Sapir, at the press conference. Sapir was there, he said, to assure everyone that relations between Martin and Steinbrenner were just fine, despite their latest parting. “Billy is available,” Sapir told the writers. “Billy is disappointed he won’t be managing the Yankees next season, but George has helped Billy tremendously and has been a real friend to Billy.”

  Steinbrenner, standing next to Sapir, insisted that Martin had not been fired but rather “shifted” to an unnamed position in the front office. When pressed as to whether Martin might resurface as manager, Steinbrenner answered with the old cliché “Nothing is sure but death and taxes.”

  So, with Billy Martin’s shadow hovering ominously over him, Berra’s second voyage as Yankees manager was launched with no guarantees from the owner that it wouldn’t end as abruptly and rudely as the first. (In 1964, Berra was fired after just one season as manager by then-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb.)

  Then, just two days into the job, Berra learned he’d lost his closer, Goose Gossage.

  Throughout the tumultuous 1983 season, Gossage, in the final year of his contract, had expressed disenchantment with the Yankees’ constant state of upheaval under Steinbrenner. In particular, Gossage had no use for Billy Martin, going all the way back to his first Yankees spring training camp, in 1978, when Martin had ordered him to deliberately throw a pitch at the head of Texas Rangers outfielder Billy Sample. He also took offense at the owner’s periodic blasting of players, both privately in the clubhouse and very publicly in the newspapers. In a memorable clubhouse tirade in 1982, preserved for the ages by a radio reporter’s tape recorder, a frustrated Gossage lashed out at the New York media for their eagerness to quote Steinbrenner ripping the players. “You motherfuckers with the fucking pens and fucking tape recorders,” he said, “you can turn it on and take it upstairs to the fat man! Okay?”

  By the end of the 1983 season, Gossage had made up his mind to leave the Yankees. But after declaring for free agency right after the World Series, he was surprised when no other team called him with an offer. At first he thought it was a confirmation of the rumors of owner collusion that had been circulating around baseball, but then he realized it was a matter of the rest of the clubs believing that Steinbrenner would spare no cost to retain him. That’s what Steinbrenner had counted on as well, but he also believed that replacing Martin with Berra would entice Gossage to re-up with the Yankees.

  The day after the Berra press conference, Steinbrenner called in Gene Michael and pitching coach Jeff Torborg and instructed them to go on a recruiting mission to La Jolla, California, where Gossage was staying with his agent, Jerry Kapstein.

  “Goose likes and respects you two guys,” Steinbrenner said. “So I want you to go out there and convince him he needs to stay with us.”

  “Much as I loved Yogi, I wasn’t going back,” Gossage said in a 2009 interview. “Still, when Gene and Jeff called me and asked if they could come out and see me, I agreed. I felt they deserved to hear it from me directly.”

  Indeed, whe
n Michael and Torborg arrived at Kapstein’s office, they had no idea the meeting was going to be so brief.

  “I’m really sorry you guys had to come all the way out here for this,” Gossage said. “But there’s nothing you can say to me that’s going to change my mind. I’ll be honest: I’ve just had enough of all the bullshit that goes on there. I’ve grown stagnant there. I know George will probably offer me a generous deal to stay, but I want you to know I have no interest in a contract offer from the Yankees. I need a change of scenery.”

  Michael and Torborg looked at each other in astonishment. “It felt like I’d been punched in the stomach,” Torborg later said.

  That night, Gossage issued a statement confirming he’d informed the Yankees of his intentions not to return. Two weeks later, on January 6, it was announced that Gossage had signed a five-year, $25 million contract with the San Diego Padres, for whom he would play a pivotal role in their first trip to the World Series in 1984, with a 10-6 record and 25 saves.

  THOUGH STUNG BY the loss of Gossage, Steinbrenner refrained from bad-mouthing the closer, vowing instead to find an equally capable replacement. A month later, however, the loss of another pitcher, who never even threw a pitch for the Yankees, would send him into a volcanic rage that would ultimately lead to the end of Murray Cook’s tenure as general manager. The pitcher was Tim Belcher, a highly touted right-hander from tiny Mount Vernon Nazarene College, in Ohio, whom the Yankees had selected and signed as their first pick in the secondary phase of the January amateur draft. What they didn’t realize was that once Belcher signed his contract, he had become part of their organization and was subject to the newly created free agent compensation pool in which teams who lost free agents could be indirectly compensated by selecting unprotected players from any of the other major league clubs.

  On February 8, the Oakland A’s announced they were selecting Belcher from the Yankees’ unprotected list as compensation for having lost free- agent pitcher Tom Underwood to the Baltimore Orioles earlier that winter. Cook was stunned. “How can they do that?” he asked the American League administrator. “How could we protect Belcher when he wasn’t even in our organization when the protected lists were submitted?”

  It did seem as though the Yankees had a valid argument, and the Players Association joined forces with them in filing an official protest with the league. Since all the affected clubs—Oakland, Baltimore and the Yankees—were in the American League, the decision was left to AL president Lee MacPhail, whose decidedly acrimonious relationship with Steinbrenner was now well documented, to arbitrate the case. After hearing all the arguments, MacPhail determined that the A’s had acted within the rules and, while he sympathized with the Yankees’ plight, he said it was a mistake to sign Belcher before February 8 and allow the A’s to take him through a loophole.

  Cook was in his Yankee Stadium office when he received the news of MacPhail’s decision in a phone call from the league president. Upon hanging up, he called his assistant, Dave Hersh, and Yankees in-house counsel Mel Southard into the office, where they proceeded to bolster themselves with a bottle of Scotch while waiting for the phone call that would inevitably come from Tampa.

  “I can’t believe how fucking stupid you are,” Steinbrenner railed when he called Cook not long after. “How could you make a mistake like this? I should have known you were too inexperienced to be a general manager. They love fucking us over there at the American League office, and you played right into their hands!”

  Before Cook could begin to offer a defense, Steinbrenner hung up. The next time Cook heard from him was two days later, when the owner called to inform him that he was to stay in New York for the first couple of weeks of spring training and that, when he did report to Fort Lauderdale, he would be consigned to the executive trailer to handle paperwork. “I don’t want to see you on the field watching the games or evaluating players,” Steinbrenner said.

  On April 9, ten months after he’d been named general manager, Cook was demoted to scouting director and replaced by Clyde King. All that spring, Cook was the palest person in camp, and for years afterward, whenever someone would arrive for spring training from the cold north, the writers would joke that he had a “Murray Cook tan.”

  WHEN THE PITCHERS and catchers reported for spring training on February 17, Yogi Berra announced a decision that he and Steinbrenner had reached a month before: 25-year-old Dave Righetti would replace Gossage as the Yankees’ closer. The left-handed Righetti, whom Al Rosen had acquired as the “extra player” in the Sparky Lyle trade with the Texas Rangers back in 1978, had enjoyed meteoric success in just 2½ seasons as a starter, winning Rookie of the Year honors in 1981, pitching a no-hitter against the Red Sox on July 4, 1983, and amassing 33 victories all told. But as Berra explained to the writers in making the announcement that first day, “He throws hard and can get strikeouts for two to three innings; he’s never given up a home run in the first two innings of games he’s pitched, and he has the ability to warm up faster than any of the other starters.” Later that day, pitching coach Sammy Ellis, Righetti’s mentor, confided to me, “I’m afraid for his longevity as a starter. With his delivery, every time I watch him throw, I brace myself for his arm exploding. I really believe this is the best thing for his arm.”

  While Righetti’s conversion from starter to closer proved to be an overwhelming success—he would go on to record 248 saves over the next eight seasons—the 1984 season, under Berra’s direction, was, at best, mixed. When Berra said he thought the team he’d been handed could win it all, he did not know that left fielder Steve Kemp and shortstop Andre Robertson would never fully recover from the injuries they’d incurred the season before, or that Steinbrenner would order the trading of team captain Graig Nettles, and that 35-year-old Toby Harrah would prove to be a woefully inadequate third base replacement for him. (At the start of spring training, Steinbrenner observed that the 38-year-old Nettles, who’d slumped to a .232 season with just 18 homers in 1983, “is in the twilight of his career” and not worth the $500,000 salary he was earning. The two exchanged snipes all spring until March 30, when Nettles approved the deal that sent him to his hometown San Diego Padres for pitcher Dennis Rasmussen. “Maybe San Diego will help me, because twilight comes later there,” he quipped. “With the time difference, I could add three years to my career.”)

  In addition, Berra didn’t know his 33-year-old pitching ace, Ron Guidry, would struggle through his worst season with an earned run average of over 4.00 for the first time. The Yankees were suddenly an old, decaying team, and it showed as they staggered into the All-Star break with a 36-46 record, 20 games out of first place.

  Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner was frantic and began chipping away at Berra’s coaches. On June 17, he demoted bullpen coach Jerry McNertney to the minors as punishment for Righetti accidentally cutting his finger on the jagged edge of a water cooler in the bullpen. Convinced Righetti had actually been in a fight, Steinbrenner personally interrogated everyone who’d been in the bullpen at the time, threatening to subject each of them to a lie-detector test. When the stories checked out, the frustrated Steinbrenner cited McNertney for his failure to impose discipline in the bullpen.

  Then, at a meeting in his Yankee Stadium office with Berra and his coaches and Clyde King just prior to the All-Star break, Steinbrenner sought to cast further blame on his coaching staff for the state of the Yankees’ season.

  “This is just unacceptable,” he moaned to the group. “I’ve given you guys everything you asked for and this is what I get? This is the team you wanted, and look how they’re playing! All of these guys, they’re all stinking up—it’s embarrassing . . . and who’s to blame for that? This is your team, and it’s on you guys for the way they’re playing!”

  As Steinbrenner continued, the coaches kept glancing at Berra, who was sitting silently across the big table, his head down, clenching the arms of his chair to the point where his knuckles were turning white. Finally, at about the fifth mention
of “your team” by the owner, Berra rose from his chair and glared menacingly at Steinbrenner.

  “I’ve heard enough of this shit!” Berra shouted. “You keep saying this is my team? That’s a fucking lie and you know it! This is your fucking team. You put this fucking team together. You make all the fucking moves around here. You get all the fucking players nobody else wants. You put this fucking team together and then you sit around and wait for us to lose so you can blame everybody else because you’re a chickenshit fucking liar!”

  Now it was the coaches’ faces that were turning white. No one had ever seen Berra so enraged. As he started heading for the door, Berra abruptly reversed course and leaned over the desk. Flipping a pack of cigarettes off the desk right onto Steinbrenner’s chest, he yelled, “You want me to quit? I’m not quitting. You’ll have to fire me!”