Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  “No, thanks, George,” I said. “A little too early in the morning for me.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” he insisted. “It tastes pretty good. Nice and cold. Just the way it’s supposed to be.”

  After checking out the gift shops and food court, we took the elevator up to the suite level, where we were greeted by David Bernstein, the assistant director of concessions, whose Opening Day duties included taking Steinbrenner on an inspection of all the suites. A couple of years earlier, Bernstein had experienced a most humiliating Opening Day when Steinbrenner spotted a bag of garbage on the floor outside one of the suites.

  “What’s that doing there?” he’d demanded.

  “I dunno,” said Bernstein. “One of the cleaning women must have left it there by accident.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Steinbrenner. “Well, just to make sure it’s gone from here, you carry that bag of garbage around with you everywhere you go for the rest of the day. You got that?”

  Another time, Bernstein and his boss, Joel White, were touring the suites with Steinbrenner when the owner noticed some trash on the floor of a pantry adjacent to the kitchen. Steinbrenner looked at Bernstein and said, “I don’t want to hear any of your excuses for this. Get this cleaned up immediately, and if this ever happens again, you’re fired.” Then, turning to White, he said, “As for you, you’re suspended for 30 days.”

  Without missing a beat, White pointed to Bernstein and said, “How did he get so lucky?”

  “Even George laughed,” Bernstein recalled years later. “Joel was one of the few guys who could get away with talking to him like that.”

  Fortunately, on this Opening Day, Steinbrenner found all the suites to be trash-free and sufficiently stocked with beverages and condiments, so we proceeded upstairs to the loge level and out to the bleachers. It was strange seeing Steinbrenner wandering through the bleachers, rubbing his hand along the benches to make sure they were clean, and even stranger seeing him strolling through the restrooms, turning on all the faucets and testing the soap dispensers while Lawn went into each stall and flushed the toilets. As he emerged from the first restroom, Lawn winked at me, looked skyward and mumbled out of earshot of Steinbrenner, “Forgive me, Mr. President, for what I do. I’ve come a long way, haven’t I?”

  TONY KUBEK HAD been the Yankees’ shortstop in the ’50s and ’60s. After retiring from baseball he had worked as a highly respected color analyst on NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week before he was hired in 1990 by Bob Gutkowski to broadcast Yankees games on the MSG Network. Gutkowski had hired Kubek in spite of the fact that Kubek and Steinbrenner had a long-standing feud, dating all the way back to 1978, when the Yankees owner took exception to an article by Kubek in the Fort Lauderdale News, in which he wrote that Steinbrenner “manipulates people and makes players fear for their jobs.” The article had so infuriated Steinbrenner that he sent copies to all the other major league owners with a note saying, “How’s this for the mouth that bites the hand that feeds it!” Later, Steinbrenner took further measures by prohibiting Yankee players from doing interviews with Kubek before any Game of the Week telecasts that season. Through the years, Kubek and Steinbrenner waged a kind of cold war, with Kubek occasionally making mildly critical statements about the Yankees owner, and Steinbrenner voicing his dismay at being criticized by what he felt was a disloyal former Yankee.

  Still, when Gutkowski approached Steinbrenner about hiring Kubek in 1990, Steinbrenner had no objections, saying only, “I respect him as a broadcaster. All I ask is that he’s fair.”

  But while Steinbrenner was away from the Yankees, Joe Molloy, seeking to curry favor with the owner, rekindled the feud with Kubek by collecting tapes of every remotely critical comment about the Yankees or Steinbrenner made by the announcer on the MSG Network. After the 1992 season, Molloy called Gutkowski and told him that he wanted Kubek out. Gutkowski refused.

  It was after that conversation that Gutkowski learned Molloy had been collecting the tapes. As a preemptive measure, he instructed his crew at MSG to compile their own set of tapes of Kubek’s positive commentaries about Steinbrenner. A week after returning to Yankee Stadium in 1993, Steinbrenner called Gutkowski and said, “Gutkowski, I’m coming up to your office. I’ve got a big problem and dammit, I’ve got tapes to prove it!”

  When Steinbrenner arrived at Gutkowski’s office, a stack of tapes under his arms, he found Gutkowski waiting in front of a TV with a VCR and another stack of tapes spread across an adjoining table.

  “Okay, George,” Gutkowski said, pointing to the VCR, “be my guest.”

  For the next hour, the two of them took turns playing clips of Kubek’s commentary, all the while screaming louder and louder at each other.

  “George’s eyes were bugging and he was hollering, and I was hollering right back at him, and after a while our shouting in the closed room got so loud my assistant, who was at her desk outside, panicked and called security,” Gutkowski remembered.

  By the time the head of security at MSG arrived, the commotion had subsided and Gutkowski and Steinbrenner were emerging from the room, smiling and laughing, their arms around each other.

  “Sometimes you just had to go at it with George,” said Gutkowski. “In his own way, that was what Tony was doing all those years. I always felt, down deep, George respected Tony’s toughness.” (In August 2009, Gutkowski filed a $23 million damage suit against Steinbrenner, alleging that he had given Steinbrenner the concept for forming his own YES TV network and that Steinbrenner had reneged on repeated promises to Gutkowski that he would then run it. In January 2010, the suit was dismissed.)

  To Steinbrenner’s amazement, the 1993 Yankees had been almost completely transformed from the hopeless, last-place team he’d left behind 21⁄2 years earlier. Of the field players, only Don Mattingly remained at first base, while Gene Michael had completely overhauled the pitching staff. Besides Jimmy Key, who would lead the staff in 1993 with an 18-6 record, another left-hander, Jim Abbott, acquired from the California Angels in December ’92, won 11 games, and Bob Wickman, acquired from the Chicago White Sox in Michael’s salary-dump trade of second baseman Steve Sax, was 14-4.

  From the farm system, center fielder Bernie Williams, second baseman Pat Kelly (.273 with 51 RBI), catcher/first baseman Jim Leyritz (.309 with 14 homers), and right-hander Scott Kamieniecki (10-7) emerged in 1993. And with new right fielder Paul O’Neill hitting .311 with 20 homers and 75 RBI, catcher Mike Stanley contributing a strong .305 average and 26 homers, Wade Boggs hitting .302 in the leadoff spot and Danny Tartabull leading the team with 31 homers and 102 RBI as the full-time designated hitter, Showalter guided the Yankees to their first winning season (88-74) since 1988, good for second place in the AL East, seven games behind the eventual world champion Toronto Blue Jays.

  ON NOVEMBER 5, 1993, AmShip filed for bankruptcy, sending its stock plummeting to 50 cents a share. At the crux of the company’s demise was a contract from the U.S. Navy for the completion of two naval refueling ships, called T-AO’s, that had been rusting away through months of neglect in a Philadelphia shipyard. Through the help of two of his influential friends in Congress on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman, and Bill Young (R-Fla.), Steinbrenner had been able to win the contract with a bid of $49 million, even though a competing company, Avondale Industries of New Orleans, had submitted a lower bid and had already built or was in the process of building 16 of the 18 T-AO’s the Navy had under contract.

  When some 12,000 tons of rusted parts began arriving at the Tampa shipyard, it soon became apparent that the construction job was going to be far more extensive than the Navy had let on. On top of that, the Tampa shipyard had no warehouse nor the planning staff to map out the work. Soon, AmShip had fallen behind in payments to its vendors and was fighting with Navy inspectors. When in early 1992 the Navy turned down Amship’s request for an additional $24 million, Steinbrenner went back to his friends in Congress and was able to secure another $45 mil
lion for the two oilers from a defense appropriations bill, with the promise that they would be completed and delivered by mid-1993. It soon became apparent that AmShip wouldn’t be able to make that deadline either, and Steinbrenner offered to finish the job—which he conceded had become the lifeblood of his company—with his own money. But on August 26, 1993, the Navy terminated the contract, having already paid AmShip a total of $98 million. A year later AmShip emerged from bankruptcy after selling off all its remaining assets to satisfy its debts and not long after was dissolved.

  Around the same time AmShip was going belly-up, Steinbrenner began negotiating with Tampa city officials and the Tampa Sports Authority to move the Yankees’ spring training operations from Fort Lauderdale to his adopted hometown. Despite opposition from some Hillsborough County commissioners to subsidizing a multimillionaire such as Steinbrenner for running a private enterprise, late in 1993 they approved a deal to commit $30 million for a state-of-the-art spring training complex directly across Dale Mabry Highway from Raymond James Stadium, where the National Football League Buccaneers play. For his part, Steinbrenner contributed another $17 million to cover cost overruns and other added amenities for the complex. Construction of what was originally called Legends Field was completed in late 1995, and provided Steinbrenner with a new base of operations now that he had vacated his AmShip offices.

  Amid the backdrop of increasingly contentious labor negotiations between the baseball owners and the players union, there was an air of optimism when Showalter convened the Yankees’ spring training in Fort Lauderdale in mid-February 1994. “I feel very good about what this bunch can achieve this year,” the manager said. Luis Polonia, the career .291-hitting outfielder Michael had reacquired over the winter after three seasons away from the Yankees, agreed. “There’s no comparison to what it was like when I was here before,” Polonia said. “That wasn’t even a team then. It was a bunch of guys worried about numbers and trying to get their money. Guys rooted for other guys to screw up so they’d get a chance to play.”

  But on February 25, the spring of good feelings was rudely interrupted by the arrival of Steinbrenner. The Boss was late to spring training, having first attended the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, where the U.S. won its most medals ever (13), including six golds, after suffering an embarrassment two weeks before the Games when the ex-husband of one of the American skaters, Tonya Harding, orchestrated an assault on her U.S. rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Instead of enjoying the optimism permeating the camp, Steinbrenner chose to challenge his troops, singling out, of all people, Jim Abbott. Abbott, who was born without a right hand, was one of the game’s all-time feel-good stories, punctuated by the September 4 no-hitter he tossed for the Yankees against the Cleveland Indians the year before. But Steinbrenner came to camp prepared to chastise him and his agent, Scott Boras, for doing too much charity work.

  “It’s wonderful for some of these agents and other people to start having players participate in this and that, but before you know it, they’re being pulled every different way,’ Steinbrenner said to the assembled beat reporters. “This is particularly the case of young Jim Abbott. Jim Abbott’s got to give 100 percent of his attention to baseball. During the off-season, he’s an All-American boy who’s going out to do a lot of extracurricular activities. Too many demands on your time are bound to show up, and so I’m going to have to ask Jim to cut down and ask all these worthy causes to understand.”

  Everyone was stunned. What was Steinbrenner thinking? Was this his idea of motivating the troops? By calling out Jim Abbott for doing too much charity work? This was like the Pope telling Mother Teresa, “Enough with the soup kitchens—get back in the church.”

  Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner was roundly panned in the next day’s papers. Typical of the criticism was the Daily News’ column by John Harper: “Way to be a sport, George. Hang around too long with Tonya in Lillehammer? You want to say Abbott was a disappointment on the mound last year, then say it. But don’t insult Abbott or the legions of lives he’s touched. Don’t suggest he went 11-14 last year because he cared enough to regularly spend a few minutes before games with ill or handicapped children to whom Abbott represents so much hope as well as courage.”

  Steinbrenner was not around to respond to the outrage, as he left camp later in the day after learning of the death of his 90-year-old mother, Rita, in Cleveland. While he was gone, Abbott did his best to quell the controversy by saying he would abide by Steinbrenner’s wishes after further clarifying for the Boss exactly what his extracurricular activities included. “I think there’s a misconception about how much I do during the season,” he said. “I do meet with kids when they write to me or come to the ballpark. It takes very little of my time, maybe five or ten minutes. Other than that, I don’t do much else.”

  Once the ’94 season got under way, Steinbrenner was hard-pressed to find fault with anyone as the team Michael and Showalter had put together wasted little time living up to their grand expectations. Beginning April 20, the Yankees won 20 of their next 24 games to take over first place in the AL East, which they never relinquished. Unfortunately for them, the season ended early, on August 11, when the players went on strike after labor negotiations with the owners broke down. When two more days of bargaining, on August 24 and 25, also failed to produce an agreement, Bud Selig, who was now the acting commissioner of baseball in the aftermath of Fay Vincent’s firing, announced the owners’ decision to cancel the season, including the league championship series and the World Series.

  At the time of the cessation of play, the Yankees were 70-43 with a 6½-game lead over the Baltimore Orioles; Paul O’Neill, with a .359 average, was declared the American League batting champion; Wade Boggs had a .342 batting average with 11 home runs; Showalter’s two catchers, Mike Stanley and Jim Leyritz, had combined for 34 homers and 115 RBI; and Jimmy Key led the majors with 17 wins. Though personally upset at this lost opportunity to return to the World Series, Steinbrenner was firmly in the majority of hawkish owners who were in favor of implementing a salary cap in baseball. Upon Selig’s cancellation of the season, Steinbrenner, who, along with all the owners, was under a gag order from the commissioner, issued this statement to Yankees fans: “I can’t tell you how sorry I personally am that baseball has announced the cancellation of the 1994 season. We regret that no agreement with the players could be reached and we apologize to our fans for disappointing them, especially this year in which we felt we had a good chance to be in postseason play. When baseball resumes, I can assure you that I am committed to fielding a championship caliber team at Yankee Stadium, as we did this year. I sincerely hope the labor situation will be resolved soon.”

  It was no doubt of little consolation to Steinbrenner that the New York Times, long his harshest critic, sought to commend him for his loyalty to his fellow “hawks.” Wrote Times columnist George Vecsey, the day after Selig’s cancellation declaration: “There were few heroes among the owners, but one of the least self-centered of the owners in this long and ugly battle has been George Steinbrenner of the Yankees. Steinbrenner may be acting avariciously in his lust for a new stadium in New York, but he has consistently been willing to accept a salary tax against his high payroll because he saw it in his best interest and the best interests of baseball. Among baseball owners, he counts as an altruist.”

  As the labor impasse dragged on through the winter, the 28 clubs continued to go about their business in anticipation of the 1995 season, and Gene Michael made two more important acquisitions for the Yankees. On December 22, Michael pulled off a stunner of a trade when he acquired 28-year-old right-hander Jack McDowell, one of the premier starting pitchers in the American League, from the Chicago White Sox for a couple of fringe minor league prospects. The reason Michael was able to acquire McDowell, a two-time 20-game winner, for so little was that White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, the primary “hawk” among the owners, had grown weary of the rancorous yearly contract negotiations with the pitcher and was unwi
lling to pay him more than the $5 million that he figured to get in salary arbitration for 1995. There was also some question about McDowell’s status, as he was one of 11 players who fell short of the six years of major league service time required to become a free agent because of the players’ strike. Reinsdorf didn’t want to deal with that issue, either, which is why he let it become the Yankees’ problem and asked for so little in return.

  It was not until March 31, 1995, that the players ended their strike, after U.S. District Court of New York judge Sonia Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against the owners, ordering them to restore the baseball work rules regarding free agency and salary arbitration, which they had revoked in February when the mediator, W. J. Ussery, declared an impasse in the negotiations. The labor dispute would go on, but both sides agreed to resume play, with a 144-game schedule in 1995, while they continued to hammer out a settlement.

  On April 5, Michael swung one more deal that he hoped would provide the final element of the “championship caliber team” Steinbrenner had promised New York fans, when the cash-strapped Montreal Expos traded him their stellar 28-year-old closer, John Wetteland, for another lightly regarded minor league prospect, outfielder Fernando Seguignol. Despite their having done a superb job of scouting and player development, enabling them to fashion the best record in baseball (70-40) at the time of the work stoppage in 1994, the Expos were the club hit hardest by the strike. Between their unattractive and antiquated Olympic Stadium and an underfinanced and infighting ownership group, the Expos, who lost a reported $16 million because of the cancellation of the season, were hemorrhaging money and gradually becoming an endangered franchise. As a result, team president Claude Brochu was left no choice but to start peddling his best players who were nearing salary arbitration eligibility and free agency in order to make ends meet.