by Madden, Bill
A few weeks after severing their radio advertising partnership in December 1986, Steinbrenner called Adler with a new proposal. He had just fired his VP of accounting and business, Dave Weidler, and now he wanted Adler to essentially take over all the Yankees’ business operations.
“I reminded George that I had my own marketing business, but he insisted that I take this job,” Adler related. “I didn’t know anything about the Yankee business operations outside of the radio, TV and marketing end of it, so the first thing I did was get ahold of the previous year’s budget and go through it item by item.”
As Adler began perusing the budget, he stopped at one particular item: “Black Muslims, $20,000.”
“I went in to George and asked him what this was all about,” Adler said, “and he cut me off, saying: ‘Never mind, just pay it.’ ”
Adler later learned from other longtime Yankees employees that, soon after Steinbrenner bought the team, he’d complained in the papers about all the vandalism and graffiti around Yankee Stadium. Someone from the Black Muslims, the separatist, sometimes militant organization, came to him and said that, for an annual “contribution,” they’d put an end to the vandalism.
And as Gabe Paul had noted on his tapes, during the 1976 World Series, Steinbrenner had also considered extending the Black Muslims’ work to address the problem that was Mickey Rivers’s wife, Mary.
Another curiosity Adler didn’t dare question—even though it cost the team tens of thousands of dollars—was Steinbrenner’s penchant for manipulating the attendance figures for his own purposes. After the crosstown Mets won the world championship in 1986, Steinbrenner was insanely jealous. He couldn’t have the Mets outdrawing him, so, beginning in 1987, Adler or ticket manager Frank Swain would have to call down to Tampa after the sixth inning of every game at Yankee Stadium to report the attendance figure before they could announce it. If Steinbrenner didn’t like it, he would simply make up a new number, which was then given to the public relations director to be announced in the press box. In order to keep books straight, the Yankees ticket department devised a secret code in which all the changed figures would end in the number 7.
“It was truly bizarre,” said Adler, “especially when you consider the visiting team shared in the gate receipts, which George was deliberately making higher than they really were. But that was George. He couldn’t stand being one-upped by the Mets, and he didn’t care what it cost him.”
It did not take long for Adler to realize there was a decided difference between working with Steinbrenner and working for Steinbrenner. Once in his employ, Adler was no different from any of the other front office minions who were made to march to the owner’s beat. This included the requirement that he be at the Yankee Stadium offices 52 weeks of the year, including holidays. Steinbrenner himself authorized vacations, and more often than not would at the last minute revoke permission while conjuring up some sort of emergency situation. In November 1987, Adler arranged a trip with a group of major league players to St. Maarten to conduct baseball clinics and play a couple of exhibition games. When he arrived at his hotel on the island, the busboy noticed a message envelope under his door. Adler instructed the busboy to leave it on the floor and, only after a couple of cocktails with his wife, Shelly, on the veranda did he finally pick up the envelope. The message, marked “urgent,” said he was to call Yankees president Bill Dowling at home, no matter the time.
“He wants you back here right away,” Dowling said when Adler called him. “There’s some problem with the WPIX and SportsChannel TV contract and you’ve got to be back in the office tomorrow to handle it. I can’t do it.”
“Well, I can’t do that,” Adler said. “I’ve got all sorts of commitments here, and I’m not leaving.”
“You’ve got to!” Dowling said desperately. “What am I gonna tell him?”
“Here’s what you tell him,” Adler said. “I was driving a car from the airport to my hotel. It was a dark road. A goat ran out in front of me. I swerved the car and it went into a ditch. My wife hit her head on the dashboard. We went to the hospital, where they determined she’s had a concussion, and I can’t leave her here. Got it?”
“Okay,” said Dowling. “Car . . . dark road . . . goat . . . ditch . . . hospital . . . concussion. I’ll try. Why are you doing this to me?”
It’s uncertain what Dowling told Steinbrenner. But knowing Steinbrenner as he did, Adler then took further steps to cover himself. Upon hanging up with Dowling, he called the St. Maarten sports commissioner.
“How many hospitals are there on this side of the island?” he asked.
When informed there were two, Adler said, “Okay. I need a favor. I need you to have my wife listed as a patient in both of those hospitals.”
The next day it was reported to him that both hospitals had received deliveries of huge floral arrangements for Shelly Adler. For weeks afterward, whenever Adler saw Steinbrenner at the Yankee Stadium offices, the owner would ask, “How’s your wife doing?”
“That was George’s way of letting me know that he admired people who could be as clever as he was,” Adler said.
Inevitably, Adler’s relationship with Steinbrenner ended the way most did: badly. Adler’s new deal with Steinbrenner called for him to receive 15 percent of all the revenue he brought to the Yankees, and by 1988 he was making over $1.5 million per year from the TV and radio advertising, Yankee Stadium signage and Yankees Magazine, which he’d founded. Steinbrenner felt that was too much. On July 4 of that year, Steinbrenner’s birthday, the two had a heated exchange in Steinbrenner’s office at Yankee Stadium. Steinbrenner accused Adler of stealing money from him. It wasn’t true, of course, and the enraged Adler lunged at him. Lurching backward, Steinbrenner tripped on the chair shaped like a giant leather glove next to his desk and toppled to the floor, and Adler stormed out. Over the next two years, the two sued and countersued each other before finally reaching a settlement.
“What it came down to,” said Adler, “is that George believed all of the Yankees revenues should be his.”
DALLAS GREEN WAS named Yankees manager in an October 8 conference call to reporters. Once again, Steinbrenner did not participate in the call. Instead, he was meeting with Piniella in Tampa, where they discussed how his again ex-manager would serve the remaining two years of his contract under the terms of a personal services clause the owner had inserted in it. Like Billy Martin on his hiatus from managing, Piniella, they decided, would move to the broadcast booth to work as a color analyst.
Steinbrenner had promised not to stand in Piniella’s way if another team offered him the chance to manage again. That, too, proved to be an empty promise. In mid-May, the Toronto Blue Jays fired their manager, and Pat Gillick, Toronto’s general manager, sought to hire Piniella. But there was no way Steinbrenner was going to allow Piniella to manage in the same division as the Yankees, least of all for Gillick, whom he still resented for leaving the Yankees years earlier. After allowing Piniella to interview with Toronto, Steinbrenner informed Gillick that he wanted compensation, specifically one of the Blue Jays’ four top pitching prospects: Todd Stottlemyre, David Wells, Duane Ward or Alex Sanchez. Gillick, who suspected that as soon as he said yes to any of them, Steinbrenner would then tell him he needed more, passed.
After the 1989 season, Piniella became the manager of the Cincinnati Reds (whose owner, the eccentric Marge Schott, took special pride in her Nazi memorabilia collection and appeared daily on the field before games with her pet St. Bernard; Piniella’s friends warned that he was going from one cuckoo’s nest to another). Steinbrenner didn’t demand any compensation from Schott, figuring there was no way Piniella, managing a small-market team in the other league, a team that had just finished in fifth place and had a crazy, tightfisted owner, would ever come back to haunt him.
Nobody expected Piniella to guide the Reds wire-to-wire to the National League West title in 1990, or that his team would sweep Tony La Russa’s heavily favored Oakland A’s in
the World Series. While Piniella was managing the final game of the World Series, Steinbrenner was in New York appearing as the host on Saturday Night Live. Steinbrenner clearly relished playing the buffoon—in one sketch he stood up from behind a desk to confront a female sportswriter, wearing only his skivvies and socks.
Behind the scenes, however, the Daily News’ Bob Raissman, the only reporter covering the show, witnessed a vastly different Steinbrenner than the public ever saw.
“He was all by himself, in the semi-darkness at the back of the set, playing a piano and softly singing ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ ” Raissman recounted. “It was eerie. He just seemed to be in total peace with himself.”
Hours after managing the Reds to a 2–1 victory over the A’s, Piniella was still sitting at the desk in the visiting manager’s office of the Oakland Coliseum, basking in the afterglow of his finest achievement in baseball. I had filed my column for the Daily News and stopped in to offer him my congratulations.
“Quite a ride,” I said. “You sure paid your dues for this. I hear George was on Saturday Night Live tonight, pulling down his pants. Did he send you a telegram?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Piniella said. “He’s too busy with his acting career.”
“I’ve got to write a follow-up column tomorrow,” I said. “Anything else you want to say?”
Piniella smiled weakly.
“Yeah, there is something, something I’ve been meaning to say for a long time: George, I can manage!”
Chapter 14
Tale of the Tapes
ON A COLD FRIDAY night in mid-January 1984, the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association gathered at the Shea Stadium Diamond Club for its annual roast. For this occasion, the writers decided to hold a reunion of the seven New York Yankees public relations directors who had served under George Steinbrenner, beginning with Bob Fishel.
On the dais before each man was a small cardboard tombstone inscribed with his name and the years he served, underneath the large letters R.I.P. “They should have all the managers up there too,” observed Yogi Berra. Steinbrenner, who had also been invited, initially indicated that he might attend. But as the event drew closer, he put out word through his emissaries that he would be occupied with other business that night. So too, the writers discovered, were most current Yankees employees.
Moss Klein, the chairman of the New York baseball writers that year, remembered getting a telephone call a couple of days before the roast from Doug Melvin, the Yankees’ assistant director of scouting. “He called me from, I think, a telephone booth outside of Yankee Stadium,” Klein said, “and told me that George had forbidden everyone from attending under threat of firing and that he was checking up on everyone.”
Sure enough, only a handful of Yankees employees were allowed to attend the event, including their present PR man, Joe Safety, and Gene McHale, the team president. McHale’s primary duty was to make sure the only Yankees attendees were those Steinbrenner had approved. “Mr. Steinbrenner was always tentative about coming,” Safety explained to the writers. “He’s involved in a lot of heavy things right now in Tampa.”
Safety wasn’t offering an alibi for Steinbrenner. Unbeknownst to the writers, Steinbrenner had something much more serious on his mind than a silly roast by his former PR men.
BY THE LATE ’80s, Steinbrenner’s two principal entities, the Yankees and American Shipbuilding Co., both of which were thriving at the beginning of the decade, had begun experiencing hard times. The Reagan administration’s decision to eliminate government subsidies had proved to be a death knell to the shipbuilding industry, causing more than 40 American shipyards to go out of business between 1984 and 1989. (Ironically, on January 19, 1989, Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner for his 1974 conviction for illegal campaign contributions to President Nixon. The pardon stunned even Steinbrenner’s closest friends, since there was no indication of any close relationship between the Yankees owner and the president, though he did acknowledge that some of his Republican friends, including Bill Fugazy, had written letters to Reagan on his behalf.)
From 1987 to ’89, AmShip reported losses of $21.7 million and its stock plummeted from a high of $17 a share to $2. In order to keep it from joining the ranks of other closed-down shipyards, Steinbrenner was forced to start pumping his own money into the company in exchange for stock. He bought AmShip’s private plane for $891,000 and in 1989 gave the company $3 million. Thus, in a dramatic shift of financial resources, the company whose hefty profits had allowed Steinbrenner to purchase the Yankees in 1973 was now being kept on life support through money from the Yankees.
In particular, Steinbrenner was subsidizing AmShip with the revenue from the record $50 million ABC radio rights deal he got for the Yankees in 1987 and his TV rights bonanza in April 1986, when, through his friend Sonny Werblin, the former owner of the New York Jets and CEO of Madison Square Garden, he was introduced to Art Barron, the president of Paramount Entertainment, and Bob Gutkowski, the president of Madison Square Garden Network.
In the 1980s, the Madison Square Garden Network, which televised the NBA’s New York Knicks and the NHL’s New York Rangers games, was a basic service on most local cable TV systems, with the exception of Cablevision (which dominated the Bronx, Long Island and New Jersey), where it was a pay channel. Paramount’s parent company, Gulf+Western, which owned the Garden, the Knicks, the Rangers and the network, had enlisted Barron and Gutkowski to take the fight to Cablevision to liberate the MSG Network from pay status.
“The only way to do that,” Gutkowski told me in a 2008 interview, “was for us to get baseball.”
At the time, Steinbrenner was in the midst of a 15-year deal with Cablevision, which televised 75 Yankee games on its own SportsChannel network. But Gutkowski had heard there was a clause in the contract in which the Yankees, two years hence in November 1988, could buy back the rights for $6 million. It was with this in mind that Barron and Gutkowski, in April 1986, approached Steinbrenner, who was sitting in Suite 200 of the Garden during a Knicks playoff game.
“Through all our discussions, George never came right out and confirmed the clause,” Gutkowski said. “All he said was he was free to make a deal. He was pissed at Cablevision because his revenues from his deal with them weren’t coming close to their initial projections. That was because they’d been based on the Yankees being on pay TV, which a lot of people back then still couldn’t afford.”
What Gutkowski and Barron proposed to Steinbrenner was a deal in which the MSG Network would televise 75 Yankee games in both 1989 and ’90 and then 150 Yankee games beginning in 1991, all on basic cable. For this, they said, they were prepared to pay Steinbrenner $493.5 million over 12 years. It was a staggering amount of money that sent shockwaves through baseball, since no team in any sport was getting anything remotely close to that for their TV rights. But as Gutkowski said, “We had to have baseball to make the network a viable entity. Our summer programming had been reruns of The Untouchables, for God’s sakes! It was a landmark deal in that both parties came out big winners, and it changed the industry, all because George had the foresight to put that buyout clause in his Cablevision contract.”
But while the Yankees’ TV and radio deals were bringing in previously unimaginable revenues, on the field the team was failing as badly as AmShip. The Yankees hadn’t been to the postseason since 1981, and Steinbrenner had made ten managerial changes and employed six different general managers. The team had finished in second place in 1986, fourth in 1987 and fifth in 1988. This is part of the reason that Steinbrenner went outside the Yankee family and hired 54-year-old Dallas Green, the straight-talking, old-school disciplinarian who was credited with literally browbeating the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1980 world championship.
“What surprised me most when I got hired was that George allowed me to bring in all my own coaches, who were all non-Yankee people,” Green said in a 2008 interview. “I knew in the past he always wanted to have his guys in the clubho
use, but I guess he was seeing how his ways hadn’t been working.”
One of Green’s first actions upon taking over the Yankee reins was to call Don Mattingly. Mattingly had experienced a difficult 1988 season. Back problems had curtailed his home-run and RBI production from 30 and 115 to 18 and 88, respectively, and this was compounded by his escalating hostilities with Steinbrenner. Green had gotten wind that Steinbrenner was quietly calling around to other clubs to determine Mattingly’s trade value, and this was something he wanted to nip in the bud.
“I need to know if you want to play here, Donny, or if all this stuff with George last year has soured you on the Yankees,” Green said.
“No way,” said Mattingly. “I’ve got my issues with George, but I still want to be here. This is the organization I grew up in, and I don’t want to go anyplace else.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Green, “but if you do want to stay here, you need to call George and straighten this out with him. He’s getting ready to shop you around, and you’re one of the guys I really need here.”
Mattingly called Steinbrenner in Tampa, but the conversation did not go very well.
“I appreciate you calling me, Donny,” Steinbrenner said, “but I’m telling you, I can’t have you popping off like that in the papers. You have to understand I’m your boss, and I expect and deserve respect.”
“Respect,” said Mattingly, “is what I’m talking about here, Mr. Steinbrenner. I came into camp each year in shape and on time. I play every day banged up, and you complain about the team and belittle my performance.”
“I pay you well,” Steinbrenner said. “I have a right to say what I feel.”
“Money is not respect!” Mattingly shot back. “That’s what I said last summer. You think just because you pay us a lot, that’s respect. Well, it isn’t.”