Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  “What’s with this lineup and all these guys I never heard of?” Steinbrenner demanded. “You’re going up against Weaver and playing all these kids? We can’t have this! You’re going to get embarrassed in your very first game!”

  In truth, it was Steinbrenner who was worried about being embarrassed. He’d invited his friends Bill Fugazy, Donald Trump and former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca to Fort Lauderdale for the inaugural spring training game, and instead of Henderson, Mattingly and Winfield, they were going to see a bunch of nobodies.

  “George, I’m not changing the lineup or the pitchers,” Piniella said. “They’ve already been posted. It’s a long spring, and I need to see these kids.”

  “I would think you’d want to win your first game,” Steinbrenner grumbled before departing to join his pals in his rooftop box.

  Happily, the Yankees won the game, and afterward Steinbrenner poked his head in Piniella’s office and offered his grudging congratulations: “You got lucky today!”

  Without Burns, whom he had counted on to anchor the Yankees pitching staff, Piniella was now looking at a rotation projected to include 32-year-old Ron Guidry, the knuckleballing Niekro brothers, Phil and Joe, who were 46 and 41, respectively, and Ed Whitson, the fragile 30-year-old Tennessean who had flopped the previous season, his first in New York, after being lured from the San Diego Padres by Steinbrenner with a five-year, $4.5 million free agent contract. Whitson’s ERA jumped from 3.24 to 4.88 in ’85, and the booing from Yankee fans so intimidated him that he began to take an alternate route, under the stands, to get to the Yankee bullpen in right field before games. The “insurance policy” for this uncertain rotation was the 43-year-old Tommy John, who was in camp on a trial basis after being released by the Oakland A’s in midseason the year before.

  This was why Piniella desperately wanted the 26-year-old Rasmussen on his staff. Unfortunately, in one of his last starts of the spring, Rasmussen fell victim to a strong wind and the small ballpark in Pompano Beach. With Steinbrenner and Martin watching from the box seats next to the Yankee dugout, he gave up a three-run homer to pint-sized Texas Rangers infielder Curtis Wilkerson. As Rasmussen trudged off the field, Steinbrenner hollered at him: “I’ve seen enough! It’s off to Columbus for you!”

  After the game, Piniella tried in vain to dissuade Steinbrenner from banishing his young pitcher. It was only because of a back injury suffered by John a week later that Rasmussen earned a reprieve and made the team after all. But even that came with a caveat from Steinbrenner: If he wanted to keep Rasmussen, Piniella had to release the popular Phil Niekro, because Martin and the other scouts all said he had nothing left. “That was the hardest thing I ever had to do as a manager,” Piniella said. “Phil had no idea it was coming. After all he’d done, in a Hall of Fame career, coming off two straight 16-win seasons, he didn’t think he had to prove anything.” The one consolation for Piniella was that Rasmussen went on to lead the Yankees in victories in ’86, at 18-6. No other starter won more than nine, while Niekro won 11 for the Cleveland Indians.

  The aging and iffy pitching bore out Piniella’s concern as injuries beset Guidry and Joe Niekro (who were a combined 10-21 after May 10). In addition, problems arose for Piniella at two key positions, shortstop and catcher. After showing so much promise as a rookie in 1984, Bobby Meacham collapsed both offensively and defensively, forcing Piniella to audition several more shortstops before finally solidifying the position with Wayne Tolleson, acquired July 30 from the White Sox in a multiplayer deal. That trade, in which the Yankees also got 25-year-old catcher Joel Skinner, was viewed by many in the media as Reinsdorf’s “make-up” to Steinbrenner for the Burns deal. Butch Wynegar, who’d been Piniella’s regular catcher, suffered a breakdown and had to be placed on the restricted list in August with what was described as “mental fatigue.” Considering the upheaval of Yankee player personnel, it was somewhat of a miracle that the rookie manager was able to bring the team home in second place, 90-72.

  By far Piniella’s biggest problem, however, was the festering feud between Winfield and Steinbrenner. Now five years into a contract that Steinbrenner had regretted almost from the moment he signed it, Winfield’s failure to be the next Reggie was compounded by the fact that Steinbrenner believed the Winfield Foundation was being grossly mismanaged. As a result, beginning in 1982, he’d withheld those $100,000 annual contributions to the foundation that were stipulated in the contract. This prompted two separate lawsuits by Winfield, seeking to collect the back payments. And so, when Winfield’s batting average dipped to .228 in early July and he went 4 for 25 with no homers or RBI during a stretch in which the Yankees closed out a home stand with five losses in seven games, Steinbrenner pounced.

  Following an 8–3 loss to the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium on July 2, Steinbrenner called Piniella to his office. “I want you to bench Winfield,” he said. “He’s killing us. He’s just not the same player we thought he was.”

  “Oh, c’mon, George,” Piniella pleaded. “Dave’s a professional hitter. He’s gonna come around.”

  “You heard me,” Steinbrenner said. “We can’t afford to wait for him to come around. If he’s not producing, we have to get somebody else in there who will. Get him out of the lineup.”

  Piniella reluctantly obliged, but could not bring himself to tell Winfield. Instead, he merely posted the lineup in Chicago the next day with Dan Pasqua, a second-year left-handed hitter, in Winfield’s place in the outfield.

  When Winfield saw it, he was furious. “What’s this?” he said to Piniella. “I understand if you want to give me a day’s rest, but don’t I at least deserve the courtesy of being told in advance instead of coming to the ballpark and being surprised in front of everybody?”

  “I’m sorry, Dave,” said Piniella. “I should’ve told you. You probably know this is out of my hands.”

  “So when am I gonna play?”

  “Just give me a couple of days.” Piniella sighed.

  When Piniella was asked about the benching, he said, tellingly, “If it were up to me . . . to me . . . I would put Dave’s name in the lineup every day and let him produce. There’s nothing more I would like better than that, and I told Dave that.”

  After missing two games, Winfield got back into the lineup and began hitting, ultimately lifting his batting average to .262, with respectable production numbers of 24 homers and 104 RBI. Nevertheless, Steinbrenner remained on the offensive. In his column in the Post on August 25, Dick Young quoted the owner as suggesting that the reason Winfield wasn’t living up to his $1.8 million salary was that he was devoting too much time to his foundation. “Dave is not the player he used to be,” Steinbrenner said. “He’s good but not that good.”

  Winfield’s response? “That’s right. I’m better!”

  THEN THERE WAS Billy Martin. Still very much a presence at Yankee Stadium, Martin was honored on August 10 when the Yankees retired his number 1. But as the team foundered out of contention during the final months of the season, there was surprisingly little talk about Martin being recycled again. On several occasions Steinbrenner groused to reporters that perhaps he’d made a mistake in hiring Piniella without any previous experience managing a ball club. But other than a transparent column in the Daily News by Steinbrenner’s friend Howard Cosell, in which Cosell wrote that Piniella had mismanaged “ten or more games” during the course of the season, it still seemed likely that Steinbrenner intended to give his rookie manager another year. (Curiously, Cosell did not offer any specifics of those “ten or more games,” and when Piniella confronted Steinbrenner about having leaked the column, he adamantly denied it.)

  Right after the ’86 season, Clyde King, citing a need to spend more time at home with his family in North Carolina, stepped down as general manager and turned his attention to scouting and working with the pitchers in the Yankees farm system. His handpicked replacement was 44-year-old Woody Woodward, a former shortstop in the major leagues whom King had hired away from the C
incinnati Reds, where he’d been an assistant GM a couple of years earlier. King had shielded the laid-back, soft-spoken Woodward from Steinbrenner’s manic demands, but now, as with all the previous Yankees general managers, his life would become a daily living nightmare. In Piniella Woodward found a kindred spirit during the 1987 season, which proved to be the nadir of both of their baseball careers. Piniella often joked about the stash of aspirin bottles and other pills for stress and high blood pressure that Woodward kept in his desk drawer at Yankee Stadium. “Poor Woody,” he joked to reporters. “His desk drawer was like a pharmacy up there!”

  As in 1986, the 1987 Yankees were plagued by injuries. Twelve different players spent time on the disabled list before it was over, including Rickey Henderson for 55 games. By the end of the season, Piniella had fielded a team-record 48 players. Only two starting pitchers, 44-year-old Tommy John (13-6) and 34-year-old Rick Rhoden (16-10), were with the team for the entire season. The back problems that would ultimately force Don Mattingly to retire prematurely in 1995 first surfaced in 1987, sidelining him for 18 games. (Yet this somehow did not stop him from homering in eight consecutive games, tying a major league record, or from setting another by hitting six grand slams.)

  It was not until after the All-Star break that the injuries finally began taking their toll. At the break, the Yankees were 53-34 and in first place, with a comfortable three-game lead over the Toronto Blue Jays. After beating the Chicago White Sox, 6–2, in the final game of the first half, Piniella was sitting in his office at Yankee Stadium when the phone on his desk rang. It was Steinbrenner, calling from Tampa.

  “I just won you the pennant, Lou,” he declared. “I got you Steve Trout!”

  Trout, an injury-prone 30-year-old left-hander, had been having a decent season (6-3, 3.00 ERA) for the last-place Chicago Cubs. He came from good baseball bloodlines—his father, “Dizzy” Trout, was a two-time 20-game winner with the Detroit Tigers in the ’40s—but it soon became apparent to Piniella that the old man’s nickname more than applied to the son. When he got to New York, Trout, who’d spent his entire career in Chicago with mostly losing teams, was completely overwhelmed. His inability to throw strikes (37 walks, nine wild pitches and 27 strikeouts in 461⁄3 innings overall) drove Piniella to the point of exasperation. Finally, after being kayoed after just 21⁄3 innings by the Milwaukee Brewers on September 22, Trout surrendered. As he handed the ball off to Piniella, he said disconsolately, “I’m just not worth a shit, Lou. You better get me out of here.”

  Not only did Trout not win Piniella the pennant, he never even won a game for the Yankees.

  In spite of the injuries and misguided acquisitions, like Trout and defensively challenged catcher Mark Salas (who committed 10 passed balls after being acquired from the Minnesota Twins in June for pitcher Joe Niekro), the Yankees managed to hang on to second place until August 6, when a stretch of seven losses in eight games dropped them to third, where they would stay for the rest of the season. After watching in disbelief one game in which Trout surrendered five walks and three wild pitches and Salas was charged with a passed ball, Piniella invoked a bit of gallows humor by telling reporters, “Watching Trout and Salas out there today, I thought maybe they were betting on the game! I wanted to get in on the action! I told Salas: ‘I bet you’re having a lot of fun here. You’ve gotten to know everyone in the front-row seats behind the plate on a first-name basis!’ ”

  Following an 8–5 win over the Detroit Tigers on August 2, the last day of a home stand, Steinbrenner called Piniella up to his office, where they started talking about the state of the team. Piniella complained about Salas’s catching and Henderson’s lingering stay on the disabled list, while Steinbrenner countered by saying he wanted Piniella’s primary situational left-handed reliever, Pat Clements, replaced on the roster by another reliever, Al Holland, whom he’d signed in April ’87 as a favor to agent Tom Reich, one his longtime friends and periodic “advisors.” It didn’t matter that Holland had pitched so poorly that spring that he had to be demoted to Columbus, where the manager, Bucky Dent, recommended he be released. Steinbrenner wanted him up. “I was looking through my binoculars at Clements warming up in the bullpen out there today, and I’ve never seen an athlete look so scared,” Steinbrenner said. “And I know athletes, having coached football at Northwestern and Purdue.”

  “Clements is the least of our problems, George,” Piniella protested. “My catcher can’t catch, Trout can’t pitch, I can’t get Henderson on the field and you’re only interested in taking care of your agent friends!”

  “Never you mind that,” Steinbrenner shot back. “You stick to managing. I’ve gotten you everything you asked for!”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Piniella said before heading down to the team bus to the airport and then on to Cleveland.

  The next night, the Yankees were shut out, 2–0, by the Indians. After the game, Steinbrenner called the Yankees’ PR man, Harvey Greene, in the press box and instructed him to tell Piniella to be in his hotel room the next day at 2 o’clock for a phone call.

  Even though he knew Steinbrenner was famous for ordering his underlings to wait in their hotel rooms for phone calls that never came, Piniella fully intended to be there for this one. But after a few drinks with lunch at the Pewter Mug that afternoon, Ed Rosenthal and Mickey Friedman, two of Steinbrenner’s limited Yankees partners from Cleveland, talked Piniella into going shopping instead, and he later went directly to the ballpark. There he endured a horrendous 15–3 loss in which Salas committed three more passed balls and Holland, in his debut, surrendered five walks and six runs in 12⁄3 innings of relief.

  The next day, Piniella phoned Woodward to discuss getting another catcher.

  “I can’t talk to you, Lou,” Woodward said.

  “What do you mean?” Piniella asked incredulously.

  “I’m not allowed to. He’s ordered all of us in the organization not to talk to you.”

  “You gotta be kiddin’!”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Lou. You’re just going to have to call him and take it up with him. I just know I can’t talk to you. If I do, I’ll be fired.”

  Instead of calling Steinbrenner, Piniella took his case to the media. That night, he summoned the writers together in the visitors’ clubhouse in Detroit (where the Yankees had moved on from Cleveland). “For three weeks now, I’ve been trying to get a catcher, Joel Skinner, called up from Columbus,” he said. “Lately I’ve intensified my efforts, but he still hasn’t made it on the Columbus shuttle. When I asked my general manager about it, he informed me he can’t talk to me.”

  Upon hearing Piniella’s complaints, Steinbrenner immediately went on the offensive. After first placing a letter of insubordination in Piniella’s file, he dictated a statement over the phone to Harvey Greene, who, like his predecessor, Ken Nigro, on the night of the dueling press releases in 1983, frantically scribbled Steinbrenner’s words on the front and back of a piece of paper and up into the margins. His arm began to ache as the owner continued to ramble. The result was a bizarre, almost comical “statement”: “Reacting calmly to what he termed ‘inaccurate newspaper reports aimed at creating sensationalism rather than in reporting the facts’, New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner confirmed that he had not planned to talk to Yankee manager Lou Piniella in the near future.”

  Having established that point, Steinbrenner used the rest of the statement as a public flogging of Piniella over the missed phone call: “The simple fact is that Piniella didn’t even bother to come back from lunch—if that’s where he really was—to get a call from his boss at 2:00 P.M. I don’t know of too many guys—even sportswriters—who, if their boss told them to be available for a call at a certain time, wouldn’t be there!” Then Steinbrenner proceeded to completely undermine Piniella’s relationship with one of his key players: “As far as the Rickey Henderson matter is concerned, Woody called me and told me that Piniella wanted to disable Henderson right away because h
e was ‘jaking’ it, his teammates were mad at him and he [Piniella] wanted guys who wanted to play and he would win it all without Henderson. I told Woody to get me a doctor’s report—that I wouldn’t disable a man as punishment. . . . I said we should talk to Lou. We did, and Piniella told us he wanted Henderson traded as soon as possible. Both Woody and I agreed—‘no way,’ and we told him so. . . . Dr. John Bonamo told us on Thursday that Rickey might be ready for the weekend in Detroit. Then on Saturday he reversed that completely and said Rickey’s leg was sore with some swelling and told us the prognosis was not good. I went into the training room personally—told Rickey of our plans—patted him on the back and then told some writers that Rickey was indeed hurt, that he was not jaking it, and that we would disable him.”

  Bonamo recalled that episode as being the most trying of his nine-year term as Yankees team physician, and the turning point that led to his resignation.

  “George told me I was to check Rickey out and tell them whether he was capable of playing,” Bonamo said. “They had a letter all prepared to suspend him if I said he could play. I said to myself: ‘This is really getting out of control.’ George never crossed the line with me about making up medical reports. If he had, I’d have been out of there. But this was the closest he came, and I told him shortly thereafter I wanted my life back.”

  Steinbrenner concluded the statement by saying: “As far as me not talking to Piniella, that’s pure horseshit—ask Woody. . . . A couple of the players think I should not get involved as much as I have been all year to this point—fine. That’s okay with me. I’ve got other things to do. They think they can do better that way, that’s just fine. I’ll keep the whole month of October open, anxiously awaiting the World Series at Yankee Stadium.”