Steinbrenner, the Last Lion Of Baseball (2010)

by Madden, Bill

  The next day, the Daily News greeted Torre’s return to his hometown with the back-page headline CLUELESS JOE. In the accompanying column, Ian O’Connor wrote, “He thinks he knows, but he has not a clue. . . . The fact is, Steinbrenner is giving his team to a manager who has lost more than 1,000 games, who in 30 years as a player and coach hasn’t secured a single playoff victory. Torre has won 47% of his games from the bench, Showalter 54%.”

  Alarmed over the stunningly negative press for the hiring of Torre, Steinbrenner convened his Yankees high command in Tampa.

  “The media’s killing us,” Steinbrenner said. “Are you sure Torre’s the right man?”

  “Torre can manage,” asserted Michael. “I’m confident he can handle the job and handle New York. He’s a New York guy.”

  “Was he the best man for the job?” Steinbrenner asked.

  “I told you, George, I thought Buck was the best man for the job, but you didn’t want him,” Michael replied.

  “What do you think?” Steinbrenner said, looking at Cashman.

  “I agree with Stick, boss,” Cashman said. “I always thought Buck was the best man for the job.”

  “All right,” Steinbrenner said. “What if I got Buck back?”

  Michael and Cashman looked at each other quizzically. Steinbrenner didn’t say anything further about the manager situation, and the discussion turned to various trades they were contemplating. A few days later, Showalter was in Phoenix, preparing to meet with Jerry Colangelo, the managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who was anxious to talk to him about managing the expansion team even though they would not begin play until 1998, when he got a phone call from his agent, Jim Krivacs.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” said Krivacs, “but I just got off the phone with George and he wants to talk to you again about coming back to the Yankees.”

  “He what?” said Showalter.

  “He wants you back,” Krivacs said. “He’s coming up to your home in Pensacola tomorrow to personally make his pitch to you.”

  The next day, after meeting with Colangelo and coming to a tentative agreement on a seven-year, $7 million contract to manage the Diamondbacks, Showalter arrived home in Pensacola to find Steinbrenner sitting in his living room munching on cookies that had been baked by Showalter’s wife, Angela.

  “You need to be a Yankee,” Steinbrenner said. “You need to stay here.”

  “I appreciate your support, George,” Showalter said, “but I’ve already made a deal with Arizona.”

  “Have you signed anything?”

  “Well, no. Not yet. But we have a handshake.”

  “What’s it for?

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven years? Well, I still think you need to stay with the Yankees. I want you with me.”

  “You’ve already got a manager in Torre,” Showalter said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Steinbrenner said. “I’ll just make him the president.”

  “Well, how do we get out of this then?” Showalter said. “You haven’t changed your mind on the coaches.”

  “You’re just being stubborn about that,” Steinbrenner said.

  “But Colangelo is letting me bring all my coaches with me to Arizona.”

  Steinbrenner sighed. “I don’t know what to say. I tried, but I guess you’ve got to take the job out there, Buck. I’m at least glad we had this talk. I didn’t like the way things ended back there in Tampa.”

  “Neither did I,” said Showalter.

  As with Billy Martin in 1978, Dick Howser in 1980, Lou Piniella in 1988 and Dallas Green in 1989, no sooner had Steinbrenner parted ways with his manager than he began suffering pangs of guilt and offered to bring him back. Managers: he couldn’t live with them and he couldn’t live without them. And now he’d chased off one he’d groomed himself through the Yankees’ system and replaced him with an outsider, a career National Leaguer with a losing record whom the media was already calling “Clueless.”

  Chapter 18

  Torre Glory

  THE TURMOIL AND TRANSITION that engulfed the Yankees in the weeks following the 1995 season did not end with the departure of Buck Showalter and the reassignment of Gene Michael. There were trades to be made, free agents to be signed, a coaching staff for Joe Torre to be assembled. And right in the middle of it all was Rob Butcher, the 32-year-old second-year public relations director whose job it was to arrange the press conferences where all these comings and goings would be announced.

  It would have helped Butcher do his job if he was kept in the loop on events as they were playing out, but because of the stealthy manner in which Steinbrenner conducted the sensitive Showalter and Michael negotiations, Butcher was about the last person to be clued in. He was helping the Major League Baseball public relations team at the World Series in Cleveland when he was informed by his immediate superior, Yankees VP Arthur Richman, that Bob Watson had been hired to take over as general manager. Richman did not know when Watson would be available to talk to the media, and while he did know that Steinbrenner was presently engaged in increasingly contentious negotiations with Showalter, he did not bother to alert Butcher to this.

  Although there had long been an MLB embargo on teams making major announcements during the World Series, Steinbrenner had never paid it any heed. Butcher was now faced with the task of trying to round up all the local media, most of whom were covering the World Series, to announce the Watson hiring. Frantic, he had his assistant back in New York write up a press release and fax it to the Indians’ Jacobs Field office, then hustled copies across town to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the World Series gala was going on. Butcher knew that handing out press releases in the middle of a World Series gala was no way to announce the hiring of a new general manager, and he braced himself for the wave of abuse he would take from the partying New York media corps, especially since the Associated Press had already put the news on the wires.

  “I would have never left for the World Series if I’d known the Stick and Buck things were going down,” Butcher said in a 2009 interview. “After all, they’d just led us to the postseason for the first time in 14 years. Who would have believed he’d be making any changes with them?”

  Only someone who didn’t know the history of George Steinbrenner.

  Back in New York, at Yankee Stadium, Butcher put together what became known as the “Clueless Joe” press conference (thanks to the headline the Daily News ran the next day), where Torre was formally introduced as the new Yankees manager. Unbeknownst to Butcher, however, there were even more developments in the works that would illustrate the confusion within the newly splintered Yankees high command.

  For, as it turned out, Torre wasn’t the one who, as Ian O’Connor wrote, “thinks he knows but hasn’t got a clue.” Bob Watson was. In their first strategy session, Torre told Watson that the Yankees’ top priority was to get a defense-oriented catcher who could handle a veteran pitching staff. To that end, Torre’s new bench coach, Don Zimmer, who had previously worked for the Colorado Rockies, highly recommended the Rockies’ Joe Girardi. The Rockies had made it known that Girardi was available because he was due to earn $2.25 million in 1996, a salary they felt was excessive for a 31-year-old catcher who had caught over 100 games only twice in his career.

  But as Watson negotiated the trade for Girardi (for whom he gave up a minor league pitcher named Mike DeJean), Gene Michael, at Steinbrenner’s urging, was working on a much bigger deal with the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners were looking to decrease their payroll, and one of their highest-paid players, Tampa-born first baseman Tino Martinez, was going to be eligible for free agency after the 1997 season. Martinez had just hit a career-high 31 homers and 111 RBI, and he told Mariners manager Lou Piniella that his preference would be to play on the East Coast, if possible for the Yankees.

  “Then I’ll do everything I can to see to it that you will,” promised Piniella, who soon thereafter met with Steinbrenner in Tampa to impress upon him
what a perfect fit the left-handed-hitting Martinez would be as the replacement for the retiring Don Mattingly.

  Michael spent the next three weeks working with Piniella and Mariners GM Woody Woodward putting together the blockbuster deal that would send Martinez (along with reliever Jeff Nelson) to the Yankees for two of their prize young players, left-hander Sterling Hitchcock and third base prospect Russ Davis. Watson was largely excluded from these discussions, which might have explained why he kept denying to the New York media that the Yankees were talking to the Mariners about Martinez—even after all the players involved in the deal were being reported on a daily basis. The first time Watson officially acknowledged the Yankees’ involvement with Seattle was December 7, the day the deal was announced. On the same day, the Yankees announced that Steinbrenner had negotiated a five-year, $20 million contract extension with Martinez. “Now,” said Watson at the conclusion of the press conference, “I need to turn my attention to re-signing [David] Cone.”

  This should have been the cue to Rob Butcher to remain on red alert for yet another major off-season announcement.

  The negotiations with Cone dragged on until he agreed to sign with the Yankees on December 20, the same day that Butcher had been planning to leave for a quick trip home to Columbus, where his nine brothers and sisters were to gather for their first Christmas together since 1989. The reunion had been planned for months, and Butcher had twice notified Steinbrenner during the previous two weeks of his intention to go home to Ohio on December 20. He had also notified Richman and Yankees general counsel David Sussman. But on the morning of the 20th, as he was about to leave his office at Yankee Stadium for the airport, Sussman and Richman told him that he should probably wait around in case something happened with Cone. When neither of them could tell him just how long he should wait, Butcher elected to make his flight anyway.

  Upon arriving in Columbus, Butcher called the office to check in, and Richman told him that Cone had indeed agreed to terms and that Steinbrenner was furious his PR man was not there to alert the media. Still, Richman said, Steinbrenner would probably get over it as long as Butcher was back in New York the next day to handle the press conference. Butcher assured Richman he’d be on the first plane to New York and then called Steinbrenner from his sister’s home to explain, again, why he was in Columbus.

  “This is the third time this off-season you’ve left your post when we had things going on,” Steinbrenner said. “I can’t have this.”

  “I’ll be back first thing tomorrow to handle the press conference,” Butcher said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Steinbrenner snapped. “I needed you and you weren’t here. We’ll pay you till January. In the meantime you need to find another job!”

  Just the same, Butcher flew back to New York the following morning, but when he walked into Sussman’s office, he was told that his sentence remained.

  “George hasn’t changed his mind,” Sussman said. “He doesn’t want you here. You’re not in a union, so there’s nothing you can do. I’d advise you to just go.”

  Butcher put his coat back on and headed out of the Stadium, but not before saying goodbye to Watson and Torre, who were having lunch in the pressroom.

  “Where are you going?” Watson asked him.

  “I’m going home. I’ve been fired.”

  “You’re joking!” Watson said.

  “I wish I was.”

  It took two days before word of Butcher’s firing got out, but when it did, Steinbrenner was thoroughly skewered by the media for firing a $50,000-per-year PR man three days before Christmas. On the back page of the Daily News, Steinbrenner was depicted in an Ed Murawinski cartoon as Ebenezer Scrooge. A week later, Steinbrenner phoned Butcher in Columbus and told him that he could have his job back after all.

  “I think you’ve learned your lesson,” he said.

  For Butcher, those words stung even more than “You’re fired.”

  “As soon as he said that,” Butcher remembered, “I said to myself, ‘He’s just being a bully again,’ and I didn’t need that. As much as I still wanted to work there, I didn’t think I’d ever done anything that I would need to be taught a lesson.”

  Butcher thanked Steinbrenner and said he’d think it over. He never talked to Steinbrenner again and, after a year working for a small public relations firm promoting the Olympic Games, he was hired as media relations director by the Cincinnati Reds—a job he still held 14 years later.

  THAT OFF-SEASON, STEINBRENNER signed one other pitcher he hoped would bolster the staff for 1996. This one, however, was greeted by more skepticism than enthusiasm. After all, 30-year-old Dwight Gooden had been out of baseball for most of the previous two years, having betrayed the great promise he’d shown as a 20-year-old 24-game winner with the Mets in 1985, ultimately being suspended three separate times for drug use.

  Steinbrenner had always seemed to relish reclamation projects, whether it was that other fallen Mets idol, Darryl Strawberry, whom he’d signed the year before, or, in 1991, Steve Howe, whom he allowed Gene Michael to sign in spite of the relief pitcher’s half dozen previous drug suspensions. And of course there were all the times he had brought back the damaged Billy Martin.

  Gooden, a Tampa product, had been working out at Eckerd College, in St. Petersburg. A former Yankees clubhouse attendant, Ray Negron, had helped Gooden to enroll in a Narcotics Anonymous program, and, acting as his agent, arranged a meeting with Steinbrenner at Carmine’s Restaurant, in north Tampa. As Gooden remembered it, there wasn’t much of a negotiation—he didn’t exactly have a lot of leverage.

  “I’m prepared to give you a three-year contract,” Steinbrenner said, explaining that only the first year would be guaranteed, at a base salary of $850,000, with incentives that could get it up over $1 million. “I hope you’ve gotten your life straightened out. I’m counting on you to help this team. I believe in you. Just don’t ever make me look bad.”

  Gooden made good on Steinbrenner’s commitment to him, throwing a 2–0 no-hitter against the Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium on May 14, 1996, even as his dad was awaiting heart surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital, in Tampa. He would go on to win 11 games for the Yankees in ’96, earning most of his incentives, but the payback to Steinbrenner was short-lived. A shoulder injury limited his 1997 season and prompted his release by the Yankees, and after a brief comeback with them in 2000, he was released again and signed by Steinbrenner as a “special assistant” working out of the team’s Himes Avenue minor league complex in Tampa. However, Gooden relapsed into drugs and was arrested and jailed in August 2005 for fleeing a DUI traffic stop in Tampa, then arrested again later that year on domestic violence charges filed by his girlfriend.

  Steinbrenner remained silent during all of this, just as he had when Strawberry, to whom he’d offered a similar postcareer “special assistant” job at Himes, also wound up in a Tampa jail in 2000 after yet another drug bust. None of Steinbrenner’s front office and coaching staff could understand his continued compassion for these serial drug offenders, which seemed to contrast so thoroughly with the hard-ass George Patton image he’d crafted for himself. When Don Zimmer, who’d been a close friend of Steinbrenner’s for more than 25 years, left the Yankees’ coaching staff after the 2001 season, he bitterly assailed Steinbrenner for his bafflingly inconsistent treatment of his underlings. “All year long, he’s bad-mouthing the coaches, who only work their asses off for him, and he says nothin’ about those other two guys he’s paying $100,000 a year and have done nothing for it but embarrass him. Who can figure him out?”

  In a 2009 interview, Gooden admitted to being ashamed at how he’d let Steinbrenner down.

  “The day after my no-hitter, George was having an important meeting with his baseball people in Tampa when somebody told him about my father waiting on heart surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital,” Gooden said. “He adjourned the meeting and rushed over to be at my dad’s bedside to give him a pep talk and assure him everything was going t
o be all right. That meant more to me than anything anyone ever did.”

  IN HIS FEBRUARY 1996 inaugural address to the Yankees at their new Legends Field spring training complex in Tampa, Torre acknowledged the absence of any World Series appearances on his baseball résumé. Pointing to his coaches—Zimmer, Mel Stottlemyre, Chris Chambliss, Jose Cardenal and Tony Cloninger—Torre noted that they all had World Series rings. “That’s what I want,” he said. “But I don’t want to win just one. I want to win three in a row and establish something here that’s special.”

  His players found Torre’s quiet confidence and relaxed candor refreshing, and as the 1996 season progressed, it became more and more apparent that he was just the opposite of the tightly wound Showalter, whose controlling style had worn thin on most of the veterans. In particular, Showalter’s decision to give up on John Wetteland, the popular closer and spiritual leader of the relief pitchers, had left a bad taste with them. More important, Torre’s ability to disarm Steinbrenner served as a welcome change to the players, who were accustomed to the owner’s intrusions into the clubhouse and propensity for public critiques of their performances.

  Early in the 1996 season, the Yankees had an off-day and Steinbrenner called Torre from Yankee Stadium, chastising him for not taking part in a meeting of his baseball operations people.

  “Here we are, working on things to help make the club better for you, and you’re out there in the woods somewhere,” Steinbrenner complained, to which Torre replied: “I can’t believe it, George. How did you know my ball was in the woods? I haven’t been able to keep it in the fairway all day.”

  It didn’t hurt that, after opening the season with two impressive wins in Cleveland against the defending American League champion Indians, Torre’s Yankees stayed within a game or two of the American League East lead through the first month of the season before taking over first place April 30 and never relinquishing it. Of particular significance was the emergence of Derek Jeter at shortstop. Coming into spring training, there were some doubts about Jeter’s ability to handle the shortstop duties after he’d led the International League with 29 errors in ’95. Clyde King, Steinbrenner’s longtime advisor, opined in one of the staff meetings that spring that, at 6-3, 195 pounds, Jeter lacked the necessary footwork for the position. By then, however, Torre and Zimmer, his infield/bench coach, had been impressed with Jeter’s play and uncommon confidence for a 21-year-old, and the shortstop went on to reward their faith by winning Rookie of the Year honors, hitting .314 with 10 homers, 78 RBI and 104 runs scored.