Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  But Steinbrenner’s attempt to put Piniella in his place and drive a wedge between him and his star players backfired. After the players read the statement in the clubhouse in Detroit that afternoon, Don Mattingly and Don Baylor set fire to it in the shower room. The next day, all the New York newspapers lambasted Steinbrenner for essentially destroying his manager and blowing up the season. Mattingly was quoted as saying, “We’re behind Lou 100 percent. The only positive thing about the statement is [Steinbrenner] said he’s gonna butt out. That’s the way we like it.” And in a column in the Daily News under the bold banner headline BUTT OUT! Mike Lupica wrote: “The manager asks for pitching help and the owner gives him the likes of Steve Trout and Al Holland.”

  For his part, Piniella was devastated. The next night, the Yankees were clobbered 10–1 by the Royals in Kansas City. After the game, Piniella asked me to accompany him to the Longbranch Saloon, a bar and restaurant downtown in which he had a part-ownership. “Why is he doing this to me?” he said. “Doesn’t he want to win? This is a mess now. He’s killed whatever chances we had of winning. But do you know what really gets me? I really loved this guy. He did a lot for me and my family, and I can’t forget that. But I can’t forget this either.”

  In all probability, the season was lost anyway. Henderson did not rejoin the team until September, by which time the Yankees were in third place, five games off the pace after an 11-17 August. At the same time, shortstop Wayne Tolleson went down with a shoulder injury while the catchers, Salas, Skinner and Rick Cerone, had a combined .208 batting average. On August 28, Piniella and Steinbrenner broke their freeze with a summit meeting at Yankee Stadium, after which Steinbrenner said, “I think Lou now understands that when the boss says he’s going to call at a certain time, you should be there to take the call.” In the meeting, which Steinbrenner had requested, Piniella asked the owner to issue a retraction of his “bum” reference to Salas. “I guess Lou didn’t use that word,” Steinbrenner said. “That’s not a word he uses. It’s one I do use, so I probably misquoted him.”

  Steinbrenner gamely proclaimed that he and Piniella were “in this thing together” and that “I want to win as badly as Lou does.” But each knew too much damage had been done, both to the team and their relationship. In mid-September, Piniella confided to friends that he could no longer work for Steinbrenner. At the end of the year, the Yankees announced that Piniella was moving up to become general manager with a new three-year contract, and that Billy Martin would be taking over as manager, his fifth stint in charge of the team. Nobody was surprised about Billy’s return, but Piniella’s friends were astounded that he would continue to work for Steinbrenner and felt he had sold out his principles.

  “What happened,” Piniella told me years later, “was that Woody wanted to go to Philadelphia to become the Phillies’ general manager, and George told him the only way he’d let him go was if I’d be the GM. Plus, my family all wanted to stay in New Jersey, where my kids could finish high school.”

  But it wasn’t long after he had bailed out Woodward that Piniella began asking himself, “Why did I do this?” As general manager he now found himself occupied with the task of trading Dave Winfield at Steinbrenner’s insistence. The closest he came to a deal of even near equal value was the Houston Astros’ offer of Kevin Bass, a power-hitting right fielder seven years younger than Winfield. When Steinbrenner was told of the Houston offer, he ordered Piniella to go to Houston with Gene Michael and scout Bass for a few days.

  “But I don’t want you sitting with all the other scouts,” Steinbrenner said. “They’ll all know what’s going on. You guys go down there and dress in raincoats and bring umbrellas so nobody will recognize you, and then get a couple of seats in the upper deck, far away from everybody else.”

  Piniella remembered barely being able to contain his laughter over the phone. How much more conspicuous could he and Michael be, sitting all alone in the upper deck, with umbrellas and raincoats—in the Astrodome!

  Having witnessed firsthand the toll that the job had taken on Woodward, Murray Cook, Cedric Tallis, Al Rosen and Gabe Paul before him, Piniella had no illusions about being able to work any better with Steinbrenner in his new capacity. He quickly tired of being the middleman between Steinbrenner and Martin, whose relationship—predictably—began to deteriorate again as soon as the 1988 season began. “It just wore me down,” Piniella told me, and on May 29 he resigned, with the GM duties turned over to his assistant, Bob Quinn. His term as GM lasted barely seven months.

  But he would be back much sooner than anyone expected, thanks to Billy Martin’s unerring ability to find trouble and run afoul of Steinbrenner. On May 6, Martin was beaten up outside a Texas strip club after a loss to the Rangers, exasperating Steinbrenner. “Billy and the drinking,” he complained to me a couple of days later. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him, but this can’t keep going on like this.” I took that to mean Billy was once again on the way out the door. On June 23, following a 2-7 Yankee road trip that knocked them out of first place, Steinbrenner called Piniella into Yankee Stadium and told him he wanted him to take over the team from Martin. He said he would tear up his old contract and give him a new three-year deal at $400,000 per.

  “I need you to do this, Lou,” Steinbrenner said. “It was a mistake on my part, thinking Billy could handle it. He’s just too unstable. I promise I won’t interfere. You’ll have a free hand this time.”

  Piniella foolishly believed him. The team was beset with the same problems as his ’86 and ’87 teams: an aging, inefficient pitching staff, injuries, constant changes in player personnel, the lack of a quality shortstop, and general unrest in the clubhouse. The clubhouse conflict was, as usual, a direct result of Steinbrenner’s periodic sniping at players in the press, this year for their inability to make any headway on the AL East division leaders, the Toronto Blue Jays. It came to a head on August 21, when Don Mattingly unloaded on the owner following a 4–2 loss to the last-place Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium.

  The customarily low-key Donny Baseball had had a couple of spirited verbal clashes with Steinbrenner in the past—over the Yankees’ renewing of his contract in 1986 and his winning a $1.975 million salary arbitration decision in 1987—but those disputes weren’t viewed as having created any lasting hostility between the two. After losing the arbitration case to Mattingly, Steinbrenner said, “The monkey is clearly on his back now. I expect he’ll carry us to a World Series championship. He’s like all the rest of them now. He can’t play little Jack Armstrong of Evansville, Indiana, anymore. He goes into the category of the modern-player-with-agent looking for bucks.”

  Mattingly kind of laughed that off as George being George, but Steinbrenner kept up the zings as the first baseman’s continuing back problems sapped his production in 1988. Then all of Mattingly’s frustration bubbled over that August afternoon.

  “You come here, you play and you get no respect,” Mattingly said to a gathering of reporters in the Yankee clubhouse. “You get money and that’s it. They think money is respect. Call us babies, call us whatever you want—if you don’t treat me with respect, I don’t want to play for you. They treat you like shit. They belittle your performance, make you look bad in the media. After they give you the money, they can do whatever they want to. They can beat you over the head and you just take it.”

  Throughout the uncharacteristic diatribe, Mattingly never mentioned Steinbrenner by name, but the reporters had absolutely no doubt as to who he was talking about.

  What particularly irked Mattingly was the fact that the Yankees, despite all their injuries and pitching problems, were still only six games out of first place and yet Steinbrenner continued carping at them. “It’s hard to come to the ballpark when you’re not happy playing,” he continued. “I can’t imagine any other club in baseball being treated like they’re not in the race. It’s just not right. No other club should be treated like we’re treated.”

  The next day, Steinbrenner
dismissed Mattingly’s complaints in a statement from Tampa. “I think he should have never said what he said,” the statement said. “But he’s young. When he signed, he guaranteed a pennant and unless things turn around, he’s gonna have to eat some crow. It’s a very convenient thing for the team because they have an involved owner who they can blame.”

  Behind the scenes, Steinbrenner had called Piniella to talk about issuing a dual statement in which Piniella would also criticize Mattingly for speaking out.

  “I want you to authorize this statement and sign it,” Steinbrenner said.

  “I’m not doing that, George,” Piniella said. “That would finish me with my players.”

  “Yeah, well, you better decide who you’re working for—the players or me.”

  Steinbrenner decided not to issue the dual statement, but it was clear to Piniella that nothing was ever going to change between the two of them. It had been a terrible mistake to agree to be recycled like Billy Martin and the rest of them. Apparently Steinbrenner felt so too, as he never filed Piniella’s three-year contract with the league office. It wasn’t until mid-September that Piniella found out from someone in the Yankees offices the contract was never filed. Instead of calling Steinbrenner himself about it, however, he called me and asked if I would poke around and see what I could find out.

  “This is typical of the kind of shit he’s always pulling,” Piniella said.

  On September 19, I placed a call to Steinbrenner in Tampa and asked him about the contract.

  “It’s true I haven’t filed it with the league office,” he said, “but I have my reasons.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to share with me what those reasons are?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you,” Steinbrenner said, “but you can’t write this, because it’s a very sensitive matter.”

  “During the course of going through the financial records, I discovered that Lou had been stealing from me,” Steinbrenner said.

  “Stealing from you?” I said. “How could he be doing that?”

  “Well, there’s an entry in the books listing $10,000 worth of Scandinavian furniture sent to Lou’s home. I never authorized anything like that. If Lou’s stealing from me, I’ve got to let him go for the good of the organization. He’s like a son to me, and I’m certainly not going to prosecute him, but he’s got to go.”

  In Steinbrenner’s theater of the bizarre, this was the topper. He was terminating Lou Piniella for allegedly stealing furniture from him, and he wanted me to be the messenger by writing in the paper that Lou was in trouble with Steinbrenner over a personal matter and wasn’t long for his job. I hung up the phone thinking there had to be a logical explanation for all of this, and wondering why Steinbrenner would bring this up with me and not Piniella. If he wasn’t going to talk to Piniella about it, I was.

  The next day Steinbrenner flew back to New York for a meeting with his limited partners at Yankee Stadium. After the meeting, I happened to see Ed Rosenthal, one of the Yankees limiteds, standing at the batting cage.

  “What are you hearing about our boy Lou?” I asked him.

  “He’s gone,” said Rosenthal. “George is really down on him. If I were you, I’d be getting ready to write Dallas Green is the next Yankee manager. I hear the deal’s all but done.”

  Steinbrenner’s selection of Green, the strapping 6-foot-5 taskmaster who’d managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1980 world championship before moving over to the Chicago Cubs as general manager, was not all that surprising. It had been widely rumored that Steinbrenner had reached out to Green earlier in the season as a possible replacement for Martin if Piniella wouldn’t agree to take the job again. The die was obviously cast, and my conversation with Piniella about the furniture would have to wait. The next day, under the headline BRONX BOMBSHELL, the Daily News ran a front-page story with my byline, quoting sources as saying Dallas Green would be hired to replace Piniella as Yankee manager at the end of the season. There was no mention of furniture.

  When I walked into Piniella’s office at Yankee Stadium that night, he was understandably upset.

  “Why couldn’t you have waited to write this until the season was over?” he asked me.

  “I wish I could have, Lou,” I said. “But it couldn’t wait. Too many other people were starting to know about it.”

  Much as I wanted to ask him about the furniture, given his mood, I didn’t want to seem like I was accusing him of anything, so I made my exit. A week went by and, after the Yankees lost two out of three to the Red Sox to fall into fourth place, Steinbrenner and Piniella had what the manager, speaking with reporters, called a “clear-the-air” meeting at Yankee Stadium. After this session with the writers, I got Piniella privately in his office and asked him whether, during his meeting with Steinbrenner, there had been any mention of off-the-field issues of concern to the owner.

  “Oh, you mean that shit about the furniture?” he said.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, suddenly feeling as if an anvil had been lifted from my shoulders. “What is it with that furniture?”

  “Do you believe that sonofabitch thought I was stealing furniture from him?” Piniella exclaimed. “I’m making $400,000 a year! What the fuck does $10,000 worth of furniture mean to me?”

  Piniella explained to me that, when he agreed to take over for Martin, he was told that one of his extra duties was to do a five-minute pregame radio show for which there was no compensation. This was part of the record $50 million package WABC had paid for the Yankees’ radio broadcast rights the previous winter. Though he had never had to do a radio show in his previous stint as manager, Piniella was aware that other managers were paid as much $50,000 extra to do radio shows.

  “I’m not doing it unless I get paid,” he told Arthur Adler, the Yankees’ VP of business.

  They worked out a compromise in which Adler arranged to compensate Piniella for the show with advertisers’ merchandise. Handing him the Scandinavian furniture catalog, Adler told Piniella to have his wife, Anita, pick out what she wanted.

  Of all the executives, from in and out of baseball, to pass through the Yankees in the ’70s and ’80s, none understood Steinbrenner better than Arthur Adler. Adler’s association with Steinbrenner began in 1977, after the Manchester Broadcasting Co., which owned the Yankees’ radio rights, declared bankruptcy, leaving the Yankees with zero radio broadcast revenue after their championship season. Adler, who owned a marketing business, had been selling all the advertising for Manchester, and Steinbrenner asked him if he would continue handling the Yankees’ radio rights. Adler suggested that he and Steinbrenner become partners, with Steinbrenner paying all the production costs and announcer salaries and Adler selling all the advertising. Steinbrenner would get 75 percent of the advertising revenue and Adler 25 percent. The first year of the partnership, the Yankees netted $750,000 (as opposed to zero the year before), and by 1986 their net radio revenues were over $6 million.

  That was when Steinbrenner told Adler he wanted to sever the partnership.

  “You’re making too much,” he said, to which Adler replied: “Well, maybe, George, but you’re making five times what I’m making!”

  The truth was, Adler loved being around the Yankees’ broadcasts, where Phil Rizzuto was a humorous diversion from his day-to-day business dealings with Steinbrenner. Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame Yankee shortstop of the ’40s and ’50s, was the lead announcer on the TV and radio broadcasts. His habit of veering off the game and riffing about his personal life and those of his friends invariably drove Steinbrenner into a frenzy. As such, Adler never allowed himself to stray far from the famed red phone installed in the Yankee Stadium production booth.

  “George loved Rizzuto, and Phil, I think, really feared George,” Adler said in a 2007 interview, “but he nevertheless couldn’t resist getting George upset by talking about things on the air that had nothing to do with the game.”

  Once, Rizzuto’s broadcast partner Fran Healy, who was in on the joke, said, “So, Ph
il, I hear you and your wife, Cora, took a little trip this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, Healy,” Rizzuto said, “we went to the Amish country in Pennsylvania and wound up in a place called Intercourse. Intercourse, Pennsylvania! Would you believe it? It was pretty hot there, and by the end of the day we were all sticky and sweaty.”

  Listening in his booth, Adler cringed as the red phone began ringing.

  “This is outrageous!” Steinbrennner screamed. “We’re gonna be pulled off the goddamn airwaves! Shut him up, will you?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Adler said. “I can’t control him.”

  He was right about that. Nobody could control the incorrigible Scooter. Once, on a West Coast road trip, Rizzuto ran into an old World War II buddy who had lost one of his feet. The guy was wearing a prosthetic foot that he had invented himself. Rizzuto invited him up to the booth for that night’s Yankees-Angels game. Shortly after it got under way, Rizzuto decided to put his buddy on the air and invited him to launch into a dissertation about his prosthetic foot invention.

  “The problem,” related Adler, “was that Phil hated going on the West Coast trips, and he’d tried in vain to get out of that one, only to be told that George insisted he be there. So this was Phil’s way of tweaking George and me for making him go on the trip. The other thing was, Phil didn’t believe anyone was ever listening to the broadcasts back in New York at one o’clock in the morning.”

  As Rizzuto and his friend carried on about the prosthetic foot, completely ignoring the game, Steinbrenner called Adler at home in a fury.

  “I don’t care how you do it,” he screamed, “but get that fucking guy with him off the air!”

  Adler immediately phoned Brian Fergenson, the radio engineer in the Anaheim Stadium press box, and relayed Steinbrenner’s order: “Get him out of the booth!”

  “I can’t,” Fergenson said. “Phil’s got his chair jammed up against the door so it won’t open. Nobody can get in there!”

  It wasn’t long after that Steinbrenner began to excuse Rizzuto from going on the West Coast trips.