Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

“Well, if you don’t think it is, then good luck to you,” Steinbrenner said before hanging up the phone.

  Mattingly remembered turning to his wife, Kim, after the phone conversation ended so abruptly and telling her to start packing up the house. But as he reflected in a 2008 interview, that conversation, however acrimonious and final it seemed at the time, was actually the turning point in his relationship with Steinbrenner.

  “From that point on,” Mattingly said, “I never had another problem with him. You couldn’t just let George beat you up. He respected me for speaking my mind and standing up to him.”

  MATTINGLY WOULD STAY, but another of Steinbrenner’s employees, Harvey Greene, who had been media relations director since 1986, was plotting his escape. Greene held the dubious distinction of having lasted longer on the job than any of Steinbrenner’s previous PR directors, but it had come with a price. He’d developed a nervous cough and, for reasons he never explained, could be seen devouring loaves of bread in his Yankee Stadium office. By the spring of 1989, Greene was fried. He’d endured as the messenger and middleman through all of Steinbrenner’s bouts with Lou Piniella, Billy Martin and Dave Winfield; had obediently forsaken countless dinners with friends to stay in his hotel room waiting for phone calls from the owner that never came; and only once had taken a vacation. He longed for a job that would restore some normalcy to his life. Hell, he longed just to have a life again.

  Then, in the last week of February, Greene heard that the Miami Dolphins of the NFL were looking for a new media relations director and he dashed off a letter requesting an interview. A few days later, he got a call from Tim Robbie informing him that his father, Dolphins owner Joe Robbie, would like to meet him. Greene checked the Yankees’ spring training schedule and said he could come down to Miami the following Tuesday, an off-day for the Yankees. Even though he assumed there would be nobody in camp that day, Greene dutifully showed up at the executive trailer and worked alone at his desk until it was time to slip out for his noontime meeting with Joe Robbie. He was in the process of changing into a new suit in the trailer bathroom when he heard the thumping of feet outside. Peering through a crack in the door, he was stunned to see Steinbrenner. What was he doing here? How would Greene get out of there now?

  Greene was starting to sweat. Looking up, he noticed the open window over the toilet. Was it big enough to squeeze through? Thank God, it was! Once on the ground behind the trailer, Greene had to make his way to his car in the parking lot on the other side of the trailer without being spotted by Steinbrenner. He crawled under the trailer, continuing on his knees behind a couple of parked cars until he got to his own.

  “I often wondered,” he told me in a 2007 interview, “if George ever looked out the window and saw the car easing out of the parking lot with no driver.”

  Greene’s meeting with Joe Robbie went so well that the Dolphins’ owner, an icon in Miami, offered him the job on the spot. Now he just had to resign. The next day, Greene approached Steinbrenner in the executive trailer and informed him that he’d been offered the job with the Dolphins and that he was going to accept it.

  “You did this without telling me?” Steinbrenner said.

  “Uh, yes,” said Greene. “It just came up.”

  “Well, we’ll see about this.”

  With that, Steinbrenner ordered his secretary to get Joe Robbie on the phone. As Greene sat across the desk from him, Steinbrenner launched into a diatribe at Robbie.

  “I can’t believe you would try to do something like this to me, Joe,” Steinbrenner said. “Stealing one of my employees behind my back? So much for our friendship. That’s okay. You know that baseball team you’re trying to get for your stadium down there? Well, I’m on the expansion committee, and I don’t think you’re gonna get it.”

  Listening to this, Greene’s head began to ache.

  “I couldn’t believe I’m sitting there listening to two titans of industry arguing over a PR man who was me!” Greene said.

  Robbie didn’t back down, and the two finally agreed to let Greene stay with the Yankees until Steinbrenner had found a replacement. Of course, even that proved to be a somewhat hollow promise on Steinbrenner’s part. It wasn’t until May 1, after auditioning a pair of PR interns all spring, that he finally settled on Arthur Richman, a veteran major league exec who’d spent the previous 26 years in the Mets’ front office. On his last day, Greene made a point to visit Dallas Green’s office in order to thank him for all his help and cooperation.

  “Good luck and congratulations, Harvey,” Green said, patting him on the shoulder. “I’m probably not far behind you.”

  LIKE ALL THE others before him, Dallas Green thought he knew what he was getting into when he agreed to manage the Yankees. In fact, he and Steinbrenner were so much alike—they both believed in discipline and confrontational motivation—that they might have gotten along well if the feud between Steinbrenner and Winfield hadn’t burst into full-scale warfare in January 1989. That month, both men filed suit over the owner’s refusal to make what was now $450,000 in payments to the Winfield Foundation.

  In Steinbrenner’s 25-page suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, he charged that Winfield had failed to make his own $370,000 payments to the foundation and that only a portion of the foundation’s money was going to programs in the New York City area, while tens of thousands of dollars were being wasted on limousines, unnecessary branch offices in California and Minnesota and foundation-paid “board meetings” at various resorts. In addition, Steinbrenner alleged that Winfield had past associations with gamblers—a serious charge in baseball—and that he had made substantial loans, “in one case charging 700% interest” to someone he knew was engaged in gambling.

  Where did all this come from? The veteran Yankees beat reporters had a pretty good idea. For over a year, when the Yankees were on the road, Murray Chass of the Times, Moss Klein of the Star-Ledger and I had been getting late-night phone calls in our hotel rooms from a whiny-voiced man who described himself as a disgruntled former employee of Winfield at the foundation. “You know me,” he’d say darkly. “I’ve been around the ballpark, and I have credibility. . . . I have a lot of information on that bastard Winfield. . . . It’s going to come out. . . . He’s a bad guy who destroyed my life. . . . You need to check into the foundation. See where the money is going. . . . It’s a fraud . . . the whole thing.” After several calls, he began identifying himself as Howie Spira, whom the writers knew as a freelance radio reporter who showed up frequently with his tape recorder at Yankees and Mets home games, always nattily dressed in sharkskin suits. For the most part, the writers dismissed him as a crackpot and a nuisance with an ax to grind.

  But the 29-year-old Spira hadn’t been calling just them. Since 1986, he had been calling Steinbrenner, who, at first, regarded him with skepticism. But Spira persisted, and Steinbrenner grew more and more interested in what he had to say, especially since much of it fed right into his own beliefs about Winfield and the foundation. Spira acknowledged that he was a gambler who’d conned bookies into extending large lines of credit to him because of his association with Winfield. He told Steinbrenner that he had received two loans from Winfield totaling $21,000, for which he had to pay back $26,500. But what especially piqued Steinbrenner’s interest was Spira’s claim that during the 1981 World Series, in the middle of Winfield’s 1-for-22 slump, his agent, Al Frohman, had concocted a death threat scheme as an excuse for his performance. According to Spira, Frohman told him they “had to protect Dave” and ordered him to call Ed Ingles of CBS Radio in New York to inform him of a death threat letter sent to Winfield. When the FBI investigated, Spira said to Steinbrenner, he told them that Frohman himself had drawn up a letter that read: “Nigger, if you play tonight you are going to be shot and killed right on the field.” Winfield’s agent, Jeff Klein, said he had no knowledge of the letter’s origin. In April 1988, the New York newspapers reported that the FBI, which had obtained affidavits from five people saying the d
eath threat letter “was fabricated by someone close to the player,” elected not to pursue an investigation. Meanwhile, the only proof Spira was able to provide to substantiate his claims about Winfield charging him usurious interest on the loans was a copy of a $15,000 check made out to him from Winfield, which he showed to all the local TV stations after his association with Steinbrenner became public.

  Nevertheless, Spira’s allegations intrigued Steinbrenner. After consulting with his attorneys and his top security advisor, Phil McNiff, the former FBI bureau chief in Tampa, who had joined AmShip in the early ’80s, Steinbrenner elected to go ahead and use Spira’s information as the basis for his countersuit against Winfield. After Steinbrenner filed his lawsuit in January 1989, New York attorney general Robert Abrams announced that he was launching a probe into allegations of irregularities at the Winfield Foundation. Through all of this, Steinbrenner had assured Spira in vague terms that he would “take care of him” for all his assistance. Spira later said he interpreted this as meaning a job and a place to live in Tampa, and money—lots of it.

  “I’m not going to go out and serve hamburgers,” Spira later told reporters. “That man owes me.”

  Throughout 1989, Spira was relentless in keeping the pressure on Steinbrenner to reward him, calling McNiff, Yankees president Bill Dowling and Steinbrenner himself on an almost daily basis, only to be put off. Once, when he called Steinbrenner’s house in Tampa, Joan Steinbrenner answered the phone.

  Repeating his complaint about being constantly put off by Steinbrenner, Spira got no more satisfaction from his wife.

  “I don’t understand why you keep bothering his house,” Joan Steinbrenner said. “I have nothing to do with his life except his children. . . . I don’t even know what it was, but it couldn’t have been anything too bad. You’re still alive and walking.”

  “Barely, ma’am,” said Spira.

  “Oh, I don’t think my husband would do anything to hurt you.”

  “No, ma’am. I was supposed to work for your husband.”

  “Well, there are millions of people who were supposed to work for my husband who don’t work for my husband.”

  “But the difference is, your husband gave me his word, and we worked on something together.”

  Joan finally cut Spira off, saying, “Howard, I think you need to see a doctor. I really do,” before hanging up on him.

  In response to Spira’s claim that he had been promised a job and compensation, Steinbrenner’s attorney, Kenneth Warner, was evasive with the media about any agreement between the two, saying only that Spira “was one of several people” who provided allegations against Winfield. As the dispute continued to rage in the newspapers, with Winfield’s character now being called into serious question for the first time, Mike Lupica proposed in his Daily News column that the two parties submit their dispute to binding arbitration. Surprisingly, both Steinbrenner and Winfield agreed. “I remember the ink was barely dry on the newspapers the next morning when Steinbrenner called me and said, ‘I’m in!’ ” Lupica recalled. “It was as if he was saying: ‘Bring it on!’ ” On January 24, it was announced that former assistant U.S. attorney Michael Armstrong, a prominent New Yorker, had volunteered his services to arbitrate the case under the condition that a gag order be imposed on both parties until he reached his decision.

  Consumed with these problems over the off-season, Winfield did not have time that winter to maintain his customary conditioning program. In addition, he’d been experiencing back pain that got worse after he reported to spring training. Finally, an MRI revealed that he was suffering from a herniated disc. His season was over before he’d played a single game for Dallas Green. On March 24, Winfield’s agent, Jeff Klein, issued a statement confirming that Winfield had undergone back surgery in Los Angeles. At the same time, the Yankees (no doubt at Steinbrenner’s direction) announced that Winfield was “still seeking options” and was “day-to-day.”

  When Green signed his contract, he thought he was going to have Winfield and Claudell Washington (who hit .308 with 11 homers and 64 RBI in ’88) in his outfield; Jack Clark, who’d led the team in homers in ’88, as his DH; and Rick Rhoden (who was 12-12 in ’88) as a proven starter. “But then,” he told me in a 2007 interview, “George didn’t re-sign Washington and traded away Clark and Rhoden for a bunch of prospects and players of no consequence without even consulting me. All of those moves were payroll-driven. Finally, I lost Winfield and all of a sudden it was not a very good team anymore.”

  In an effort to curtail media criticism that he was allowing the Yankees to become also-rans before the season even began, Steinbrenner, on March 21, announced the hiring of former Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Syd Thrift as his new VP of baseball operations (Bob Quinn was demoted to administrative status). The 60-year-old Thrift had transformed a last-place Pirates team that lost 202 games between 1985 and ’86 to an 85-win pennant contender that drew a record 1.8 million fans in 1988. A clash of egos with Pirates team president Carl Barger led to his stormy departure in September 1988, and he’d been sitting at home in Fairfax, Virginia, running his real estate business, when Steinbrenner called.

  “This job is too much for one man,” Steinbrenner said at the introductory press conference for Thrift. “It’s not the same game anymore. Syd, Bob, Dallas and Clyde King will make the moves they want to make. The fellow who will have less work than ever will be myself.”

  “It took me 40 years to make this team,” a beaming Thrift said. “I always had a feeling I would end up here.”

  As it turned out, Thrift didn’t even make it through a whole season with the Yankees. He resigned on August 29 for “personal reasons.” The personal reasons were that Steinbrenner had driven him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Lou Piniella, who spent the 1989 season in the Yankees’ broadcasting booth before moving on to Cincinnati as manager of the Reds, became one of Thrift’s closest confidants.

  “Poor Syd,” Piniella told me years later. “After a month on the job, he’d developed this nervous twitch with his eyes. A few weeks after that, he was sweating all the time and his eyes were still twitching. Then one day he started breaking out in hives. I said, ‘Syd, what’s wrong with you?’ Finally, toward the end, his hair started falling out. I felt really bad for him. He said to me: ‘Lou, I gotta get out of here. This guy’s killin’ me!’ ”

  Rickey Henderson, the premier leadoff man in the game, was also disgruntled, and he showed it by demanding a contract extension that would pay him in excess of $2.7 million per year, higher than any Yankee in history, in order to forsake free agency at the end of the season. In an interview during spring training, Henderson said his teammates in ’88 had regularly drunk too much on team flights. In another interview, with the Daily News’ Michael Kay, he said, “If I was white, they’d have built a statue here for me already.” Henderson later denied saying this, telling a group of reporters in the Yankee clubhouse, “I never even talked to Steven Kay,” evidently confusing him with Reggie Jackson’s agent.

  On June 21, Steinbrenner approved the trade of Rickey Henderson to the Oakland A’s for two relief pitchers, Eric Plunk and Greg Cadaret, and a singles-hitting left fielder, Luis Polonia, who, that August, would be arrested for allegedly having sexual relations with a 15-year-old girl in the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee and was sentenced to 60 days in jail at the end of the season.

  To his credit, Green was somehow able to keep this dysfunctional team close to .500 ball as they went into the All-Star break. Beneath the surface, however, he was fast losing the players—and Steinbrenner as well. Green’s blunt style, which had served him so well in Philadelphia in 1980, quickly wore thin with the ’89 Yankees. On the first West Coast road trip, in mid-May, after starting off losing three out of four to the California Angels, Green told reporters, “We stink, and I told them so. Some of them must have had their heads in Disneyland or somewhere. They didn’t play with any life or any indication they had their minds on the game.” On the charter
flight to Oakland, many of the players donned Goofy hats with big ears and sang a parody of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, substituting lyrics of “We do stink! We do stink!” for “Mick-ey Mouse! Mick-ey Mouse!”

  Initially, Steinbrenner supported his tough-talking manager. “When Dallas said ‘they stink,’ he’s right,” Steinbrenner told Michael Kay of the News. “Dallas is the only reason we’re still in the hunt. He’s trying to turn babies into men. If they’re going to attack Dallas, they’ll have me to deal with. I’m the one who’s getting gypped here. I ought to get all their agents in a room and tell them they’re playing for a sucker.”

  But after the All-Star break, when the team lost 10 of 13 to finish July, Steinbrenner began changing his tune. Following a pair of final-at-bat 6–5 losses in Detroit on June 28 and 29, Steinbrenner told Tom Pedulla of the Gannett Westchester-Rockland papers: “I feel like the principal in Hoosiers when he questions the coach and the coach says: ‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.’ I just hope this has the same ending as Hoosiers.”

  Things came to a head on August 2, following a ten-inning loss to the Minnesota Twins in the second game of a doubleheader. The Yankees had failed to cash in on a bases-loaded, none-out situation in the ninth inning. In his column the next day, the Daily News’ Phil Pepe quoted Steinbrenner fretting, “A manager has to find a way to score in those situations.”

  It was not Green’s nature to allow such a direct slap from the owner to pass without rebuttal, and his was both pointed and classic.

  “The statement that ‘Manager George’ made about game situations is a very logical second guess,” Green told reporters. “And hindsight always being 20-20, that’s why managers get gray. My boss always chooses to use the papers to discuss the coaching staff, rather than face to face, and that’s not fair. If he’s using this as a motivational tool, he’s wasting his time.”

  By this time, Green wanted to get fired and, to the delight of the reporters, kept up a daily barrage of insults aimed at Steinbrenner. The end came in Detroit on August 18, although Steinbrenner had made up his mind two days earlier, following a third-straight loss to the Brewers in Milwaukee. That night, Lou Piniella was asleep at his home in Allendale, New Jersey, when the phone rang. On the other end was Steinbrenner telling him to get on a plane for Columbus, Ohio, the next morning. He was to meet Gene Michael, who was scouting there, and Bucky Dent, the manager of the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team.