Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  As Berra stormed out of the room, leaving his cigarettes, Steinbrenner sat stone-faced. Finally, as the others in the room squirmed nervously in their seats, Steinbrenner shook his head and managed a weak smile.

  “I guess the pressure’s starting to get to him,” he said softly before adjourning the meeting.

  Instead of firing Berra, Steinbrenner listened to him, allowing him and GM Clyde King to bring up a contingent of youngsters from Triple-A Columbus: shortstop Bobby Meacham, third baseman Mike Pagliarulo, outfielder Brian Dayett and pitchers Dennis Rasmussen and Joe Cowley. The infusion of youth proved to be just the tonic for Berra’s desultory team. From the All-Star break to the end of the season, the Yankees went 51-29, the best second-half record in baseball. And though it was not nearly enough to catch the runaway American League East champion Detroit Tigers—who got off to a record-setting 35-5 start to the season and never looked back—the Yankee resurgence, led by another of Yogi’s youth brigade, 23-year-old first baseman Don Mattingly, who edged out Dave Winfield, .343–.340, in a down-to-the-last-day race for the batting title, convinced Steinbrenner to give Berra another chance with this group in ’85.

  The Yankees’ second-half surge in ’84 also earned Clyde King the confidence of Steinbrenner. For the first time since Gabe Paul had been head of baseball operations, Steinbrenner gave his general manager a free hand, beginning with the December ’84 winter meetings in Houston, where King pulled off a series of deals that would prove beneficial to the Yankees, if not to Berra. In addition to shedding some expensive, faded veterans like Rick Cerone and Steve Kemp, King netted, among others, Rickey Henderson, the game’s premier base stealer and five-time All-Star outfielder from the Oakland A’s; a young relief pitcher from the Atlanta Braves named Brian Fisher, who turned out to be an excellent setup man for Righetti; and Ron Hassey, a lefty power-hitting backup catcher from the Chicago Cubs.

  Indeed, the team that assembled in Fort Lauderdale the following spring appeared to be championship caliber. In his annual state-of-the-team spring training address on February 20, Steinbrenner said, “Yogi will be the manager this year, period! A bad start will not affect Yogi’s status. I have put pressure on my managers in the past to win at certain times, but that will not be the case this spring.”

  Just before the Yankees left New York for spring training, Steinbrenner had agreed to do a photo shoot at Yankee Stadium with Berra and others for the cover of The Sporting News, which was doing a feature story on the uniform collection of the renowned baseball memorabilia collector and limited Yankees partner Barry Halper. For the occasion, the group donned period handlebar mustaches while wearing authentic uniforms of legendary, long-ago Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Cy Young, John McGraw and Pud Galvin. For his part, Steinbrenner posed as Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees in the ’20s and ’30s, decked out in a tuxedo, bowler hat and bushy gray handlebar mustache. The picture made for a classic Sporting News cover, with Henderson appropriately wearing the uniform of Cobb, whose all-time base-stealing record he would one day eclipse. But after the shoot concluded, Steinbrenner was in a foul mood. It seemed three prominent Yankees who’d committed to take part, Lou Piniella, Willie Randolph and Don Baylor, were no-shows and had to be replaced at the last minute by Torborg and pitchers John Montefusco and Mike Armstrong.

  “I come all the way up here to do this, and those three guys don’t show up?” Steinbrenner fumed to Halper. “Well, that’s okay. I’ll take care of them. The next time Randolph wants any favors for his family, he can forget it. The same thing for Baylor, who’s always asking me for extra tickets.

  Fuck ’em!”

  After an uneasy minute of silence, Halper sought to break the tension by asking: “What about Lou, George?”

  “Piniella?” Steinbrenner replied. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m gonna really fuck him. I’m gonna make him the manager!”

  (After retiring in June ’84, Piniella had come on as Berra’s batting coach, and while he did aspire to one day become a manager, he and Steinbrenner had not yet had any substantive conversations about it.)

  As events quickly played out that spring, the Sporting News photo shoot proved to be the last time Berra would have much interaction with either Steinbrenner or Henderson. Midway through spring training, Henderson sustained an ankle injury that prevented him from playing most of the exhibition games and had him on the disabled list to start the season. Without Henderson as their leadoff catalyst, the Yankees’ season began with a three-game sweep at the hands of the Red Sox in Boston. They won the next four, but then a string of five losses in their next seven games, including another two of three to the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, had Steinbrenner poised to renounce his spring training vow about his manager. Though Henderson returned after missing the first ten games, it was too late for him to help Berra.

  The end came on Sunday afternoon, April 28, in Chicago, after just 16 games. During the course of the Yankees’ 4–3 loss to the White Sox, which completed a three-game sweep, Steinbrenner, who was watching on TV in Tampa, phoned GM Clyde King in Chicago and ordered him to perform the execution. Much as he admired and respected Berra, King did not attempt to talk Steinbrenner out of it. Rather, after the game, which dropped the Yankees’ record to 6-10, King made his way down to the visiting clubhouse, entered the cramped manager’s office and asked the reporters to leave.

  “This is about as a hard a thing as I’ve ever been asked to do,” King said to Berra, “but George feels we need to make a change.”

  “Some full season,” said Berra, shrugging. “Whatever he wants; it’s his team. He coulda told me himself, though. Who’s gonna be the manager?”

  “Billy,” King said glumly.

  Outside in the clubhouse, the Yankee players reacted to the news with disgust. Don Baylor kicked over a trash can. Don Mattingly could be heard throwing other canisters against the wall in the shower room. Only Henderson, who’d played for and been spoiled by Martin in Oakland, showed pleasure over the change, blissfully singing and whistling in the shower room, oblivious to the glares from his teammates.

  Later that afternoon, the team flew to Texas, where Martin and Sapir were waiting at the team hotel to hold a press conference with the writers. The next day, Martin addressed the disgruntled players in the clubhouse prior to the game against the Rangers.

  “I know you guys are mad about what’s happened,” Martin said, “but don’t be mad at me. Y’all got Yogi fired, I didn’t. Y’all haven’t been playing the kind of baseball y’all are capable of, making a lot of mistakes, not doing the little things you need to do to win ballgames. That’s all gonna change now, and we’re gonna get back into this race and win this thing, ’cause I’m not gonna let you get me fired.”

  Meanwhile, as Martin took the Yankee reins for the fourth time, Berra went back to his home in Montclair, New Jersey, where, for the next few days, he brooded about the disrespectful way he’d been fired by Steinbrenner. It was bad enough, he thought, to have been given only 16 games, most of them without Henderson, but the sonofabitch didn’t even have the guts to tell him personally. The two previous times he’d been fired as manager, in ’64 with the Yankees and ’75 with the Mets, the owners or team chief executives had been the ones to personally convey to him their regrets at having to do what they felt they had to do. With Steinbrenner, there hadn’t even been the courtesy of a phone call. So be it, he thought. He would never have anything to do with the guy again. And as long as Steinbrenner owned the Yankees, he would never set foot in Yankee Stadium again, either.

  Unlike Steinbrenner’s vow that Yogi would manage for a full season, this was a vow that would be kept. For 14 years.

  UNDER BILLY MARTIN, the ’85 Yankees—with a healthy Henderson hitting .314 and stealing a club-record 80 bases and Don Mattingly continuing his rise as one of the elite players in the game by leading the American League with 145 RBI—gradually played their way back into contention, making it into second place on July 12. From there it became a two-te
am race as they tried to catch the Toronto Blue Jays, whose manager, Bobby Cox, had grown up in the Yankee system as a player and minor league manager and then a coach for Martin in 1977. The whole season came down to nine days in September, beginning with a disastrous four-game showdown with the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium. Before the first game of the series, on September 12, Steinbrenner decided it was time for one of his “Knute Rockne fire up the troops” clubhouse addresses.

  As the players sat at their lockers, Steinbrenner stood in the middle of the room and said, “This is the most important series of the year. We’ve got to sweep! This is a test of Yankee heart and Yankee pride! We can’t let Toronto shame us in our own ballpark. This is the whole season right here!”

  “That sure relaxed everyone,” Dave Winfield said later.

  That game got off to a bad start when a singer named Mary O’Dowd butchered the Canadian national anthem, forgetting both the words and the tune, before rushing off the field in tears while the fans booed. Upstairs in his box, Steinbrenner went ballistic, demanding to know who had hired her. He was calmed by the close Yankee victory, 7–5, but the next day he gathered his front office staff in his office, where he picked up his rant about “this insult to our Canadian friends.” The Yankees would issue an apology for O’Dowd’s horrendous performance, he told them, and he ordered his secretary to call down to the pressroom and have public address announcer Bob Sheppard come up to the office.

  The 74-year-old Sheppard, the “Voice of God,” who had served as the PA announcer for the Yankees since 1951, was not accustomed to being interrupted during his pregame routine of a meal and a Manhattan, and when he came to the phone he said politely to the secretary: “Tell him I’ll be up as soon as I finish dinner.”

  When informed by the secretary of Sheppard’s response, Steinbrenner squinted.

  “He said what? Who does he think he’s working for here? I oughta fire him right now!”

  Nevertheless, a good 15 minutes went by before Sheppard appeared in Steinbrenner’s office, by which time the owner was more consumed with what he wanted in the apology.

  “Now, this is what I want you to say,” Steinbrenner began, reading from a release he’d written up.

  “I’ve already taken the opportunity to write something,” Sheppard interrupted him, pulling a piece a paper out of his jacket pocket.

  Startled, Steinbrenner grabbed the paper and began reading it over.

  “This is fine,” he snapped, “but I want to add a few things.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Sheppard said softly. “It needs to be succinct.”

  For the first time in the memory of anyone in the room, Steinbrenner was left both disarmed and speechless. They had never seen anyone stand up to him with such confidence.

  Following their first-game win, the series became nothing but despair for the Yankees—and triggered outright lunacy in Steinbrenner. The Blue Jays won the next two games, then staged a six-run third-inning rally to win the series finale, 8–5, building their AL East lead back up to 4½ games. During the late innings of the previous night’s 7–4 loss, in which his third and fourth hitters, Winfield and Baylor, were a combined 0 for 8 with one double-play grounder, Steinbrenner startled the press corps by charging into the press box and plopping himself down in the empty seat between Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger and Murray Chass of the Times. He then began to recite a litany of his own players’ negative hitting stats, disparaging almost everyone on the team, including himself.

  “We’ve been out-ownered, out-front-officed, out-managed and out-played,” he fumed. “We need the big performances from Winfield, Griffey and Baylor—the guys who are making the big money. My big-money players aren’t playing like money players. Where is Reggie Jackson? We need a Mr. October or a Mr. September. Dave Winfield is Mr. May!”

  A couple of weeks later, the mounting hostility between Steinbrenner and his highest-paid player came to a head when Winfield, the Yankee player rep, clashed with the owner in the clubhouse over a letter from Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, urging the players to participate in a drug-testing program. At the time, the Players Association and Ueberroth had been in negotiations over the program, and the commissioner’s personal appeal to the players was viewed by the union’s executive director, Donald Fehr, as a preemptive union-busting tactic. As such, when Steinbrenner arrived to personally distribute the letter to the players in the clubhouse, Winfield stopped him.

  “The Mets have already voted unanimously in favor of this,” Steinbrenner said (falsely, as it turned out). “So I want everyone here to do the same. I’ll even stand there and piss in the bottle with all of you. We need to have this. But don’t forget, I’m the guy who signs your paychecks.”

  “Excuse me!” Winfield interrupted. “But what you’re trying to do here is override the negotiation process. It’s my responsibility as the player rep to pass out these letters.”

  “Not for long,” Steinbrenner shot back.

  “Is that some sort of threat?” Winfield countered. “Because you and I both know I’m not going anywhere next year but right here.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Steinbrenner snapped.

  “Yeah,” said Winfield, “we’ll see about that.”

  Glaring at Winfield, Steinbrenner tossed the stack of letters onto the table in the middle of the room, walked into Billy Martin’s office and slammed the door as the players started their meeting. When the meeting was over ten minutes later, Steinbrenner told the clubhouse attendant to have Winfield come into the manager’s office.

  “I’m not happy with what went on out there,” he said. “We can’t be having these sort of public confrontations. It’s not good for team morale.”

  “Not good for team morale?” Winfield said. “You’re a fine one to talk about team morale, after blasting us the way you did after the Toronto series. You may employ us, but I’m in that locker room every day, and I know what goes on in there and how the players feel. You don’t.”

  Steinbrenner didn’t like this. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said, before exiting the clubhouse.

  The next day, when Winfield arrived at the clubhouse, he was told Steinbrenner wanted to see him in his office. Unlike the last time he’d been in the big man’s office—when they had consoled each other in the aftermath of the crushing ’81 World Series defeat—this encounter further emphasized just how badly their relationship had deteriorated.

  “I’ve thought about what happened in the clubhouse yesterday,” Steinbrenner began, “and I didn’t like it. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to resolve our differences. You’ve been insubordinate and you’ve challenged my authority in front of the team. I can’t have that. I can’t have you throwing me out of the clubhouse. I’m the leader. I’m the admiral. There may be vice admirals, but I’m the only admiral around here. I can’t have anyone thinking you own this team. That’s why you need to pick a team that you’ll agree to be traded to and I’ll get on it right away.”

  “I’m not interested in that,” Winfield replied. “I like it fine right here.”

  “I can make it hard for you,” Steinbrenner threatened.

  “Like how, benching me?” Winfield asked.

  “You have to understand, I’m always hard on the biggest guy on the team. I feel that’s the way to motivate the other players. I’m a football guy, and that’s how the great coaches in football do it.”

  “Well, as you can see, I don’t seem to respond to that,” Winfield said. “I’m a baseball guy. So how do you propose we resolve this issue?”

  “I don’t know,” Steinbrenner said. “I think we need to have another clubhouse meeting.”

  They decided to address the team together that night, declaring a truce. Winfield spoke first, asserting that he and Steinbrenner agreed on two points: “We both want a winner, and we both feel there is no place for drugs in baseball. And I want to assure you,” he added, “that what happened in this clubhouse yesterd
ay between me and Mr. Steinbrenner was not a confrontation.”

  Winfield sat down, and the players began gathering their bats and gloves for pregame batting practice. Before they could leave the clubhouse, however, Steinbrenner called them to attention once again.

  “That’s right,” he said, “everything Dave said is right. But as long as you understand there’s only one admiral on this ship!”

  DEMORALIZED AFTER LOSING three of four to the Blue Jays, and by the ripping they’d received from their owner in the papers, the Yankees went on to lose five more games in a row. Their season was over. All that was left was the latest disintegration of Billy Martin, which began in Detroit on September 18 when Martin consternated both his players and the media by ordering left-handed-hitting Mike Pagliarulo to bat right-handed against the Tigers’ junk-throwing lefty Mickey Mahler. (He struck out looking.) Martin never fully explained his reasoning, but even Tigers catcher Bob Melvin was caught off guard.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to get a base hit,” Pagliarulo replied.

  Three nights later, in the bar of the Cross Keys Hotel, in Baltimore, where the Yankees were staying, Martin got into a drunken fight with Yankees pitcher Ed Whitson.

  The fight began when Martin approached Whitson’s table after teammate Dale Berra, Yogi’s son, told him the pitcher was becoming agitated about something.

  “I’ll see what the trouble is,” Martin said.

  Suddenly, Whitson and Martin began grabbing each other and throwing punches, toppling to the floor as Gene Michael and catcher Ron Hassey rushed over from another part of the bar to break it up. When they were finally separated, Martin began shouting, “That guy’s crazy! I just tried to help him! Can’t he hold his liquor?”

  This further infuriated Whitson, who began advancing at Martin again as they were being shoved out the door and into the parking lot. It was there that Whitson shoved Martin to the sidewalk and kicked him in the groin with his cowboy boots. “Okay, now I’m gonna kill you,” Martin moaned as he stood up. But before Martin could get to him, Dale Berra grabbed Whitson and slugged him in the mouth in response to the pitcher tearing his V-neck sweater. Whitson broke loose again, tackling Martin to the pavement in front of the hotel entrance. When order was finally restored, Martin was left with a broken arm and a bloodied nose.