Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  Although witnesses testified that Whitson had in fact started the fight, and Martin was ultimately exonerated by Steinbrenner, the change of managers had not produced his desired results. And while the season ended on a celebratory note with Phil Niekro, the 46-year-old knuckleballer whom King had re-signed as a free agent the previous winter, pitching a four-hit, 8–0 shutout over the Blue Jays for his 300th career win, Steinbrenner had again become convinced that Martin was simply too unstable to continue managing. But who, this time, to succeed him?

  By now Lou Piniella’s presence on the coaching staff was seen by everyone as a confirmation that Steinbrenner was grooming his “favorite son” (as reporters and players often referred to him) to become manager. Nevertheless, Steinbrenner knew the risks involved with replacing the still-popular and experienced Martin with someone who’d never managed before at any level, so he sought to keep his fingerprints off it. “I’m leaving the decision on the manager up to Clyde King,” he insisted the day after the season ended. “There will be absolutely no stipulations or input from me.”

  He couldn’t possibly have believed the New York media was going to buy that.

  In his column in the Post a couple of weeks later, when still no decision had been announced, Dick Young wrote sarcastically: “I do hope somebody has called George Steinbrenner by now to let him know that Clyde King named Lou Piniella to manage the Yankees next season, or the first part thereof.”

  In his Daily News column, Mike Lupica imagined a dinner conversation between Steinbrenner and his best friend, Bill Fugazy, in which Steinbrenner asked innocently: “Fu-gie, I wonder who Clyde will choose?”

  On October 27, the morning before the seventh game of the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the St. Louis Cardinals, the Yankees confirmed their worst-kept secret: Lou Piniella was being promoted from batting coach to manager. But rather than in a formal press conference at Yankee Stadium, the announcement was made via a conference call to reporters in Kansas City, with King and Piniella in New York. Conspicuous by his absence at either venue was Steinbrenner. It seemed almost as if King was embarrassed to be making the announcement. He dutifully reiterated that the choice of Piniella had been his and his alone, yet curiously could not confirm whether Martin had been informed of his latest dismissal.

  When asked what role Martin would now have with the team, King said, “I have no idea.”

  Chapter 13

  A “Favorite Son” Exiled

  WHEN CLYDE KING OFFERED Lou Piniella the job as manager, he was expecting it to be a fairly simple process. How foolish of him to think that anything orchestrated from afar by Steinbrenner wouldn’t come with unexpected complications. Sitting in his office at Yankee Stadium on October 26, King said, “We’re prepared to offer you $150,000 per year, Lou.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that, Clyde” Piniella said. “That’s what I’m making as a coach!”

  “Uh, no, you aren’t,” King said. “I checked it out. You’re being paid $75,000 as a coach.”

  “I think maybe you need to talk to George. Ask him about the account from American Ship that he pays me another $75,000 out of.”

  After nearly 15 years with the Yankees, the 61-year-old King had a pretty good idea about the often stealthy manner with which Steinbrenner conducted business—especially when it came to taking care of the people with whom he had close relationships. But this arrangement caught him by surprise. Piniella’s $150,000 salary was $50,000 more than those of the next-highest-paid coaches in baseball at the time, the result of an extension of the three-year, $1.1 million “golden parachutes” Steinbrenner had bestowed on him and Bobby Murcer after the 1981 season. On the books, Piniella was making the same as any other coach in baseball. Nobody had to know that AmShip was supplementing his salary with an equal amount.

  Steinbrenner always felt a special affinity for Piniella, who was born in Tampa and had become a local icon. They shared a mutual friend in Malio Iavarone, the owner of the town’s hot-spot restaurant, populated by the local sports and political cognoscenti. Piniella had grown up playing baseball with Iavarone, while Steinbrenner had become his biggest customer soon after arriving in town from Cleveland in 1973. “Lou is like a son to me,” Steinbrenner would say, to which Malio would reply, “Well, he’s like a brother to me.”

  Lou, however, sometimes resisted the owner’s attempts to impose discipline on him—as he did on the day they first met in 1974.

  Upon reporting to his first Yankees spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale after having been acquired in a trade from the Kansas City Royals the previous December, Piniella was greeted by the clubhouse man, Nick Priore, who informed him that, before he could be issued a uniform, he needed to go across the way to the executive trailer and see Steinbrenner.

  “Is there something wrong?” Piniella asked.

  “You just gotta talk to the big man,” Priore said.

  Steinbrenner was sitting at his desk when Piniella entered his office.

  “I was told I needed to see you,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Steinbrenner said, “you need to get a haircut. I can’t see your neck with that long hair, and I need to be able to see it.”

  “But, sir,” Piniella said. “I always wear my hair long like this.”

  “Not here you don’t. We have a policy about that. Same thing with facial hair—beards and long mustaches.”

  “Well, I don’t understand it,” Piniella said. “What’s the big deal? I mean, as far as I’ve always been taught to believe, didn’t even Our Lord Jesus Christ have long hair and a beard?”

  At that, Steinbrenner cracked a smile. Leaping up from the desk, he grabbed Piniella by the scruff of his collar. “Come here with me,” he said, guiding him out the door and around to the back of the trailer, where there was a small lake.

  “You see that lake?” Steinbrenner said. “If you can show me you can walk across that lake, you can wear your hair as long as you want it!”

  Recounting the story years later, Piniella said, “All George needed to do was to have the clubhouse guys explain the hair policy to me, but this was his way of letting me know right up front who the boss was.”

  Nevertheless, Piniella proved to be the one Yankee who could get away with chiding and poking fun at Steinbrenner in public. During one of Steinbrenner’s patented clubhouse addresses about hard work and sacrifice, in which he talked about his youth spent working on the docks in Cleveland, Piniella interrupted, “Oh, c’mon, George. Everybody knows the only times you ever were down on the docks were when you were gassing up your daddy’s yacht!”

  Usually, Piniella’s impudence would serve to disarm Steinbrenner, if only for the moment. Steinbrenner treated Piniella like a son, and aside from the occasional wiseass effrontery, he expected obedience and respect. It gave him a great deal of private satisfaction to believe that Piniella was, down deep, always in need of his approval—a father-son relationship not unlike the one he had known with his own father—and this didn’t change after Steinbrenner named him manager.

  As part of that three-year, $1.1 million contract he had signed after the 1981 season, Piniella was required to report to spring training at 200 pounds, and if he didn’t, he’d be fined $1,000 a day until he got down to it. Piniella didn’t think anything of the clause, barely even noticed it when he signed the contract. Then, one day in early January ’82, he was awakened at his house in Tampa by the ringing of the doorbell at 8 A.M. It was Hopalong Cassady, whom Steinbrenner now had working as a minor league coach and fitness instructor for the Yankees. On this day, the grinning Hoppy was garbed in a sweat suit and sneakers and holding a huge gym bag.

  “Hoppy?” the startled Piniella said as he opened the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to work you out,” Cassady said. “The Boss wants you coming into camp in shape. We’re going over to the University of South Florida where they’ve got an obstacle course and Nautilus machines. So take this gear, get dressed and let’s go.�
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  Shrugging, Piniella donned a sweat suit and sneakers and climbed into Cassady’s car. When they arrived at South Florida, Cassady took him out to the track, where he had placed a bunch of tires and ropes around the oval.

  “It’s an obstacle course,” Cassady explained. “You run through the tires, drop down for five push-ups, get up, continue running all around the track, through the tires and ropes that are spaced out. See how they’re zigzagged? You’re gonna need to be able to get through it in under three minutes. Then we’ll know you’re in shape!”

  “Wait a minute,” Piniella said. “That’s a quarter-mile track, Hoppy! The best runners in the world need at least a couple of minutes to cover this, and that’s without running through tires and ropes and doing push-ups in between.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Cassady. “By the time we’re done these next couple of weeks, I’ll have you breaking three minutes! I’m considerably older than you, and I can do it.”

  Piniella thought about that for a few seconds while gazing out at the imposing obstacle course.

  “You know what, Hoppy?” he said. “I don’t believe you can do this thing in three minutes.”

  “You bet I can!”

  “Okay,” said Piniella. “What’s that expensive brandy you like? Carlos One? I’ll buy you a bottle of Carlos One if you can do this obstacle course in three minutes.”

  “You’re on,” said Cassady, handing Piniella the stopwatch.

  With that, Piniella grabbed his newspaper, climbed up into the stands and gave the signal to Cassady to start running the course. Watching the 47-year-old former Heisman Trophy winner huffing and puffing around the track, periodically dropping to the ground to pump off five quick push-ups, Piniella smiled in amusement. Finally, when Cassady crossed the finish line, Piniella held up the stopwatch and grinned.

  “Sorry, Hoppy,” he said. “You missed by nearly a minute. You’re just gonna have to do it again tomorrow, if you want that Don Carlos.”

  And so, every morning for a week, they would get to the track and Piniella would take the stopwatch and stroll up into the stands, where he’d sip his coffee and read the paper as Cassady ran the obstacle course. As Piniella recalled to me years later: “I never had to do the obstacle course, but Hoppy got me back in the afternoons, working the hell out of me on the Nautilus machines.”

  Still, Cassady failed in his mission: Piniella weighed in at 207 pounds on the first day of spring training. When this was reported to Steinbrenner, he told assistant general manager Bill Bergesch, “You let Piniella know I’m gonna start docking him $1,000 a day until he gets that weight down. That was our deal!” As the spring wore on and Piniella still hadn’t gotten down to 200 pounds, Steinbrenner ordered manager Bob Lemon to start playing him every day, for the full nine innings, in both the “A” games and “B” games in the Grapefruit League. Finally, on March 16, Piniella blew a gasket.

  Calling the beat reporters together before the Yankees’ “A” game against the Montreal Expos in West Palm Beach, Piniella paced up and down the first base line and began to vent.

  “I am utterly disgusted with George Steinbrenner and his policies,” he fumed. “I have been playing baseball for 20 years, and I have never conducted myself in any other way but professionally for the New York Yankees. Now I’m being treated like a 19-year-old, and I find that insulting. I’m not happy with the damn fines. I’m like Smith-Barney. I’ve worked hard for my money. To be treated suddenly like Little Orphan Annie is ridiculous!”

  When told of Piniella’s tirade, Steinbrenner laughed.

  “Sometimes Lou Piniella needs to be treated like a 19-year-old,” he told reporters. “Everyone in Tampa will tell you that. I’ve got the weight requirement right here, in black and white. He knew what he was signing. If I’m a man and my employer is paying me $350,000 a year, which is more than the president of the United States is making, and there are ten million unemployed people earning nothing in this country, I’d sure as hell take seven pounds off and honor that contract!

  “Someday soon Lou Piniella will be out of baseball and in business. Boy! He’d last ten days in business!”

  Of course, that day would never come—Steinbrenner made sure that it didn’t. Steinbrenner recognized in Piniella the same fire and special connection with the fans that Billy Martin had. This was part of his calculus when he decided to give Piniella, at age 38, that three-year contract. The owner knew Piniella was smart, especially when it came to baseball. On numerous occasions through the years, he had sought Piniella’s opinion on players or the state of the team. More important, in Steinbrenner’s eyes, Lou was family. He wanted him to stay with him, to mold him into a great leader through the same tough love his father had given him.

  That began in the spring of 1986, when Piniella embarked on his first season as Yankees manager. Over the winter, Steinbrenner had concentrated his efforts on the off-season roster improvements for his new manager. Specifically, he had his eye on Britt Burns, a 6-5, 220-pound left-handed pitcher with the Chicago White Sox. Only 26, Burns had already won 70 games in the big leagues, including 18 in 1985. Despite that, Steinbrenner had heard that the White Sox might be interested in trading him before his contract ran out. What he didn’t know was that the White Sox had leaked that rumor themselves, and that they had done so because, unbeknownst to anyone else in baseball, Burns was suffering from a congenital hip condition. “I think you better trade me,” he told White Sox board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, “because I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to pitch much longer.”

  Although he and Steinbrenner had made amends for their costly series of run-ins back in 1983, Reinsdorf thought the Yankees owner had gotten the better of him in a trade the previous August, in which the Yankees dealt the White Sox fading infielder Roy Smalley in exchange for two minor league pitchers, one of whom, Doug Drabek, was a top prospect. Reinsdorf had been widely criticized by the Chicago media for giving up Drabek, and now he saw a chance to get even with Steinbrenner.

  “George called me to ask me about Burns, and I kept telling him I didn’t want to trade him,” Reinsdorf recalled in a 2008 interview. “I kept offering another pitcher, Rich Dotson, and he kept saying he had to have Burns. I wasn’t about to tell him that, in between starts at the end of the season, Burns was walking around on crutches.”

  Reinsdorf finally agreed to trade Burns in exchange for catcher Ron Hassey and right-hander Joe Cowley (who had been 12-6 for the Yankees in 1985), subject to Burns passing a routine physical administered by the Yankees. When the Yankees’ team physician, Dr. Bonamo, examined the X-rays of Burns’s hip, he was aghast. He had never seen a hip so deteriorated on an athlete, and at a meeting in Steinbrenner’s office with GM Clyde King and the baseball operations group, he expressed his concerns.

  “I would have to tell you, as your team physician, George, do not under any circumstances trade for this player,” Bonamo said. “I can’t be any more emphatic about this. I’m looking at these X-rays and they’re awful. If nothing else, at least let me bring him in and check him out personally.”

  “No, no, no,” said Steinbrenner. “We can’t do that. People will recognize him, and we’ve got to keep this deal under cover.”

  “Who would recognize Britt Burns?” Bonamo asked incredulously. “It’s a very bad hip, and it’s not gonna last, in my opinion.”

  “Okay,” said Steinbrenner. “Everybody understand this?”

  As the rest of the group nodded in agreement, Steinbrenner thanked Bonamo for his appraisal and dismissed him from the meeting. Then, turning to the others in the room, he said, “What does he know? He’s just a doctor. We’re baseball men! This kid Burns is an ace pitcher, and they don’t come along every day.”

  Thus, Steinbrenner went ahead with the deal.

  During the second inning of his second spring training start in 1986, Burns limped off the mound, wincing in pain. The next day, after Burns had consulted three hip specialists, Steinbrenner announced to the re
porters that the pitcher was going on the 60-day disabled list and would likely have to undergo a hip replacement. His career was over before he ever pitched a game for the Yankees. Yet despite the disastrous turn of events, Steinbrenner insisted he would not seek any restitution from the White Sox.

  “There’s no way Chicago could have known,” he insisted to the media. “There’s no way I could blame them. My relationship with the White Sox owners is a good one. They’re two of my closest friends in baseball.”

  “I never admitted to George I knew about Burns’s condition,” Reinsdorf told me. “I think he just figured that I’d gotten even with him. You have to understand, that was the morality I found back then when I came into the game. Everybody was out to screw everybody, and they all knew it.”

  Losing Burns was one of many ominous developments for Piniella in his first spring as manager. Another was the sudden reemergence of Billy Martin, who’d been invited to camp by Steinbrenner to serve as a special advisor. Martin became a constant presence that spring, sitting with the owner at all the exhibition games. He was particularly critical of the young left-handed pitcher Dennis Rasmussen, whom Piniella was hoping to keep on the staff as his fifth starter. Though 6-7 and 225 pounds, Rasmussen did not throw particularly hard, and Martin viewed him as “soft,” an opinion he never tired of voicing to Steinbrenner.

  If Piniella thought there’d be a honeymoon period before Steinbrenner started telling him how to manage, he was mistaken. Before the very first exhibition game of the spring, against Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles, Piniella had just posted the lineup, which did not include Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson or Dave Winfield, and was sitting in his office when Steinbrenner burst in.