After taking office on the first day of 1978, Koch ran the city much as he had run his campaign, ruthlessly and pragmatically. At the same time, though, a new Ed Koch, one that Garth had intentionally suppressed for fear that it might alienate voters, quickly came into focus. This was Ed Koch the irrepressible, wisecracking cabbie, the city’s mascot as much as its mayor.
His handling of a transit strike in early 1980 underscores the point. In stark contrast with Mayor Lindsay, who encouraged New Yorkers to stay home when the transit workers walked out, threw the head of the union and his cohorts in jail, and still wound up submitting to a 15 percent raise, Koch was determined to prevent the strike from crippling the city or deflating its spirit. He expected everyone to go to work and cheered workers on from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge as they did. He denounced union demands as “outrageous” and defiantly went about his daily business, occasionally pausing to dismiss prounion hecklers as “wackos.”
As for Bushwick, its recovery was slow, halting, to this day incomplete, yet inexorable. Mayor Koch helped jump-start plans to fill the garbage-strewn hole in the heart of the neighborhood, the infamous urban renewal zone, with low- and moderate-income housing. An influx of Asian-Americans moved in from Chinatown and Flushing, Queens. St. Barbara’s Church fixed its organ, repaired its leaky ceiling, and was soon drawing Sunday mass crowds approaching a thousand. An interracial coalition of East Brooklyn churches secured a grant from the city for its Nehemiah homes, single-family brick row houses designed for families with annual incomes between twenty and forty thousand dollars. No less important were two small weekly newspapers, first the North Brooklyn News and later the North Brooklyn Mercury, which charted the community’s rehabilitation, commending its heroes, exposing its villains, flushing out corruption, and, most of all, keeping alive the story of a neighborhood that might otherwise have been forgotten as the long, hot summer of 1977 began to fade into New York’s collective memory.
58.
NEAR the end of September, Yankee Stadium attendance passed the two million mark for the first time since 1949. Yankees’ haters were no less committed to their cause than Yankees’ rooters; the team drew nearly as well on the road.
For rhetorical purposes, the Yankees may have won their divisional flag during that dramatic mid-September series against the Red Sox, but it had been a long slog from there. Not until the penultimate day of the regular season in early October did they officially clinch, and they weren’t even on the field when they did. It was pouring in the Bronx, and the Yankees and Tigers were in the middle of a three-hour rain delay. During the extended pause the Orioles beat the Sox, officially eliminating Boston from contention.
The play-offs would be a rematch of ’76: the Yankees versus the Royals. After finishing the season with the best record in baseball, Kansas City had both the oddsmakers and popular sentiment on their side. “All of baseball wants us to win,” said Royals’ manager Whitey Herzog. “Not that they love us … they just hate the Yankees and their check writing.”
The Yankees’ clubhouse had been relatively calm for the last six weeks, but malice lurked not far below the surface. Near the end of the season Newsday’s Joe Donnelly, who’d been covering the Mets since mid July, returned to the Yankees’ beat and was shocked to find Reggie and Munson kidding around with each other. “I went to Thurman and said, ‘I’m not going to print this, but what are you doing hanging around with Reggie? Are you guys friends now?’” Donnelly recalls. “And Thurman said, ‘How could I ever like that son of a bitch after what he pulled? But we need him to win. We need him to win.’”
The first squall of the postseason blew in on the eve of game one, when Billy Martin’s fleeting moment of contentment at having again piloted his team into the play-offs curdled into a more familiar sentiment, underappreciation. Emerging from a preseries strategy session with George Steinbrenner and several Yankees’ scouts, Martin declined to talk about his opponents for fear of saying something that might help them. But he was more than happy to talk about everything else, including what he called the turning point of the season, standing up to Reggie in the dugout at Fenway. And his boss. If the Yankees went on to win the World Series, Martin told the writers gathered in his office, and Steinbrenner didn’t both sweeten and extend his three-year, three-hundred-thousand-dollar contract, he was going to have to think seriously about asking for permission to talk to other clubs. With the first pitch scarcely more than twenty-four hours away, there was no way Steinbrenner could fire him. So Martin as much as challenged him to: “If he buys $50 million worth of players, I’ll beat him with another club and he knows it … I’ll make him cry.”
The ritual resumed, it was now Steinbrenner’s turn. “He’s crazy if he tries to take credit for our success,” the Yankees’ owner told reporters, presenting them with evidence—the team’s day-by-day wonloss record—that the season’s real turning point had been August 10, when Martin finally started hitting Reggie at cleanup. “He is just trying to work up public support,” Steinbrenner said dismissively.
Public support was one thing Martin didn’t have to work up. When he was introduced before game one on October 4, which was played on a clear, mild afternoon in New York, the fans stood and cheered themselves hoarse. “This is in recognition of Billy telling off his boss,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News, “by 55,000 people who dream of telling off the boss.”
Martin trotted out to the first base line and lifted his cap toward the sky. A wincing smile spread across his narrow face. Several Yankees joined the ovation. Martin looked younger than his forty-eight years, but he did not look good. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his shriveled frame had practically disappeared inside his increasingly baggy uniform. But for the moment anyway, he was happy.
Martin bathed in the clamor, unaware that his starting pitcher, Don Gullett, was having trouble getting loose. The lanky left-hander, who had torn his rotator cuff while fielding a bunt during the season, didn’t tell anyone that the tightness in his shoulder was back. By the middle of the second inning, having surrendered four runs on four hits and two walks, he confessed to the team’s trainer that he wasn’t right. The trainer passed the word along to Martin, and Gullett was finished for the night.
So were the Yankees. Reggie went hitless, and the Yanks dropped the game, 7–2. The ailing Catfish Hunter, who hadn’t set foot on a mound in three weeks, was already out for the series. Now Gullett appeared to be too.
59.
THE following morning the South Bronx got a surprise visitor. His presence was announced by a long line of motorcycle escorts and police cars. Sirens blaring, the caravan chugged up the Grand Concourse as helicopters buzzed overhead. In the back of the motorcade, peering through the windows of a cream-colored limousine at the grand façades of this once-opulent boulevard was President Jimmy Carter.
He was a couple of months late, but the president, in town to address the United Nations, had finally decided to pay a surprise visit to one of New York’s worst ghettos, a neighborhood that had been ignored by most of the borough’s blackout looters. By July 1977 there was virtually nothing there to steal.
Anticipating Carter’s arrival a week earlier, the Daily News had taken the liberty of mapping out a more ambitious itinerary for him, beginning at St. Barbara’s Church in Bushwick: “There the few working, middle-class families left in the dying neighborhood can give Carter the kind of first-hand knowledge of what’s killing the nation’s cities.” But Carter had chosen to limit his slum tour to the South Bronx.
As the presidential caravan wended its way through this urban prairie on this mild, early fall morning, small clusters of people began appearing in front of burned-out and abandoned tenements, shouting, “We want money,” and, “Give us jobs.” The motorcade stopped abruptly along Charlotte Street, and the president disembarked to walk through the wasteland, a two-block stretch of rubble unbroken by so much as a single building.
It was a powerful image, a
natural for front pages nationwide, and scores of politicians would soon follow in Carter’s footsteps, all seeking to underscore their commitment to saving the neighborhood.
A closer look would have revealed that the neighborhood was already saving itself. By the time of Carter’s visit local community development groups with mottoes like “Don’t move. Improve,” had already begun to form. They beat back the city’s wrecking crews, rebuilt battered buildings, and fought for the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law requiring banks to provide loans in low-income neighborhoods. In time the city did its part too, earmarking some five hundred million dollars a year for affordable housing, much of which found its way to the South Bronx.
But these seeds of rebirth remained buried beneath the debris on October 5, 1977, the day the South Bronx became the most famous slum in America.
60.
THAT night was a cool and windy one at the stadium. Guidry was serving smoke, but the Yankees still weren’t hitting, even against Andy Hassler, the weakest of the Royals’ starters.
It was 2–1 Yankees in the top of the sixth when Hal McRae came barreling into Willie Randolph, knocking the ball loose and sending the Yankees’ second baseman tumbling head over heels toward the edge of the outfield grass. The Royals had tied the game, but they had also awakened the slumbering Yankees, who exploded for three runs in the home half of the inning. With Guidry going, that was more than enough to put the game away. They were now even at one, but with the series moving to the artificial turf in Kansas City for the last three games, the Royals still had the edge.
Whitey Herzog had been saving his best pitcher, Dennis Leonard, for game three in Kansas City and the young right-hander didn’t disappoint. The Yankees managed just four hits, and Reggie was blanked. He was now one for eleven in the postseason, and his one hit had been an infield single.
For his part, Martin spent most of the night shrieking at the umpires. He knew there was more at stake here than a pennant. In case he didn’t, Royals’ fans held aloft a banner to remind him: BYE, BYE, BILLY. By the end of the night his voice had been reduced to a rasp. The next day would be an elimination game. Desperate for an edge, the Yankees’ skipper set about tormenting the Royals’ game four starter, Larry Gura, whom Martin had cut from his Texas Rangers team back in 1975. “If I had my way,” Martin told every reporter he could, “I’d put a bodyguard around his house tonight and get him a chauffeur so he doesn’t get into an accident on the way to the ballpark.”
Gura made it safely to the ballpark but soon wished he hadn’t. The Yanks touched him up for four runs on six hits in two innings. Just about everybody participated, with the exception of Reggie, who posted yet another oh-fer. When the Royals rallied to pull within one run in the fourth, Martin skipped right to his closer, Sparky Lyle, who pitched five-plus scoreless innings to force a winner-take-all game five.
61.
AT Royals Stadium the following afternoon, not long before the Yankees were scheduled to take the field for their pregame cuts, Billy Martin summoned his backup catcher, Fran Healy.
Poking his head into the manager’s office, Healy, who’d been to the plate sixty-seven times all season, wasn’t expecting to be told to be ready to play. He wasn’t. Martin had an even more surprising request: “I’m sitting Reggie tonight, and I want you to tell him.”
“I’m not telling him, you tell him,” an incredulous Healy replied. “You’re the manager.”
“I don’t want to tell him.”
“Why don’t you have one of the coaches tell him?” Healy asked.
“They don’t want to tell him.”
Healy pulled up a stool in front of Reggie’s locker and told him.
Martin headed out to the dugout, took a seat on the top step, and informed the newsmen that Paul Blair, his late-innings defensive specialist, would be starting in right field. This time there were no winking references to Reggie’s hyperextended elbow. The three-million-dollar slugger wasn’t hitting for “spit” (as the papers wrote it), and he was butchering balls in the outfield. “If I played him and he dropped a ball that cost us the game, I wouldn’t forgive myself for the rest of my life,” Martin said. “I don’t like to do this bastard thing, but if I don’t do what’s best for the club, I shouldn’t be manager.”
It was an act either of noble courage or of sadistic insecurity. An unconvincing argument could be made that starting Blair was the best thing for the club. Reggie was in the grip of a one-for-fourteen postseason swoon, and he looked about as surefooted as a beery weekend softballer on the artificial turf. What’s more, he did have trouble with that night’s pitcher, the left-handed junk baller Paul Splittorff. In fifteen at bats against Splittorff during the regular season, Reggie had picked up just two hits, a double and a home run.
But Martin never put much stock in stat sheets; number crunching, to his mind, was for managers who didn’t trust their baseball instincts. More likely, the only calculus that Martin made was this one: If the Yankees won without Reggie, he would be vindicated. If the Yankees lost, well, he was going to be fired anyway.
Batting practice started, and Reggie, burning, remained in the locker room. Eventually he emerged and gave a disingenuously stoic interview to Howard Cosell, admitting that he was disappointed but adding—you could almost read the humiliation on his face now—that it had taken “guts” for Martin to sit him.
As the newspapermen stalked Reggie, hoping for a more honest comment, another bomb was ticking away. The Yankees’ leadoff hitter, Mickey Rivers, was holed up in the trainer’s room refusing to get dressed. He’d been having problems with his wife all year. Earlier in the season she’d reportedly chased him from their apartment in New Jersey up to the stadium and then repeatedly smashed into his car until a parking lot attendant intervened. Now she had racked up a huge shopping bill in their Kansas City hotel, and the front office was refusing to advance Rivers the money to cover it.
Rivers was eventually coaxed out, and the game got under way. By the end of the first the Royals’ George Brett had slid into third spikes high, and the two benches had cleared.
The Royals took an early lead against a worn-out Guidry, who had pitched nine innings just three days before, and Martin quickly replaced him with Mike Torrez. The score was 3–1 Royals after three innings, and then the two teams started matching zeros. Every now and then NBC would advance the subplot, pointing a camera at the best-paid man in baseball history sitting on the bench in a warm-up jacket. No one believed it would end like this.
It didn’t. In the eighth the Yankees mounted a rally, and Reggie got his chance. With one out and runners on first and third, Martin called on him to pinch-hit for the team’s designated hitter, Cliff Johnson. The Royals’ closer, Paul Bird, was on the mound. Reggie took ball one and then fouled off a pair of fastballs. Now Bird tried to sneak a slow curve by him. Reggie lunged, chipping the ball into center field for a run-scoring base hit, pulling the Yankees within one.
They won it in the ninth. The unlikely hero was Reggie’s replacement, Paul Blair. Most baseball scouts believed that Blair had never really recovered from a cheek-shattering beaning a few years earlier and that he was at his most tentative when facing right-handed power pitchers, such as Dennis Leonard, who was brought in to finish the game for the Royals. Martin stuck with Blair anyway. After spoiling a good fastball and a couple of diving sliders, he caught a pitch on the bat handle and looped it toward shallow center for a base hit. Roy White followed with an eight-pitch walk. Mickey Rivers singled to drive home the tying run, moving White to third in the process. Willie Randolph finished it with a sacrifice fly.
Most of the nation’s sports editors chose one of two images to illustrate their game stories: a first-inning photograph of Royals’ third baseman George Brett on all fours, with Yankees’ third baseman Graig Nettles’s foot embedded in his chest, or a postgame shot of the Royals’ five-foot-four-inch shortstop, Fred Patek, sitting alone in the dugout, head in hands, his pants torn from a n
asty spiking. Goliath had apparently defeated David. As one Kansas City Tîmes columnist wrote, “Truth doesn’t prevail. There is no justice.”
In the locker room after the game, Billy Martin, for whom victory always tasted more like vindication, went looking for Steinbrenner with a full bottle of champagne. “That’s for trying to fire me,” Martin said, after sneaking up on his boss and soaking him from behind. Steinbrenner, a protective raincoat over his navy blazer, wheeled around. “What do you mean, try?” he said, half grinning. “If I want to fire you, I will.”
Paul Blair hugged Munson and thanked him for working with him on protecting the outside part of the plate. “Yeah,” Munson said, “the beachball can’t stir the fuckin’ drink, but he can teach you how to hit.”
A few lockers away Reggie ended his short-lived experiment with stoicism. “Can I explain what it meant?” he blurted, reflecting on his bloop single to a few writers. “I can’t explain it. I can’t explain it because I don’t understand the magnitude of Reggie Jackson.” Not that he had forgiven Martin. On the team’s charter plane a few hours later, Reggie sat alone in silence.
Martin was several rows up, listening to country music on a cassette recorder and wondering if any manager had ever gone into his second consecutive World Series still fighting for his job.
62.
THE Yankees’ charter touched down at Newark Airport in the predawn darkness of October 10, 1977. Five thousand fans were waiting for it. The Port Authority had called in reinforcements from the Newark Police Department, but the extra twenty officers who had been dispatched to help contain the crowd made little difference. When the DC-8 taxied to a stop at 4:19 a.m., the mob broke through the barricades and charged it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 34