Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Hank wanted to remain in the background. And what bigger spotlight could there be at this juncture in New York sports history than to be the new chief officer of the downtrodden Yankees?

  No, Hank would not run the newly rudderless Yankees. Besides, Hank understood the obvious—that Vincent would have worries about the easy collusion of a father-son tandem at the top of the Yankees leadership. And Vincent could investigate the Steinbrenners based on his suspicions. The whole idea of leading the Yankees was just not worth it to Hank.

  And that called for a new Steinbrenner plan. Vincent’s decree gave George until August 20 to find his successor, not as the Yankees’ owner, which he still was, but as the team’s chief executive, which baseball officially called the “general partner.”

  It was all semantics to George. Or so he thought at the time. But in fact, his influence on the Yankees, despite his attempts to subvert his self-imposed exile, would be greatly diminished for at least two years. Steinbrenner, who always thought big, still had grander plans. He might be mostly stepping away—for now.

  But leaving Vincent’s office on July 30, George asked this question about the lifetime ban he had just agreed to: “How long does this last?”

  7

  “Goodbye, George”

  THE YANKEES WERE playing the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium on July 30, the night that George Steinbrenner was told to stay away from the Yankees, seemingly forever.

  The smartphone was years from being invented, so there was no Twitter or texting, but it was not uncommon in 1990 for fans to bring transistor radios to games so they could follow the broadcast announcers’ commentary. And in the fourth inning, it was that cultural artifact, the transistor radio, that helped spread the news of Steinbrenner’s ban from section to section in the stadium grandstand and into the Yankees’ dugout.

  Fans were jubilant, and several times a chant of “No more George” resounded in the ballpark. Even during the seventh-inning stretch, when the PA system began to play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” fans drowned out the song with another chant of “No more George.”

  Then they switched to a different singsong chant: “Goodbye, George.”

  After the game, which the Yankees won, 6–2, the atmosphere was funereal in the home clubhouse. “It’s a shame the fans made a party out of things,” said the winning pitcher, Dave LaPoint. “For us guys playing for his team, it wasn’t a good feeling out there.”

  Said Dave Righetti: “I know I wasn’t cheering. I was sad.”

  Stump Merrill was somber as well, saying that Steinbrenner had meant a lot to his family. When quoting Merrill, the New York Daily News wrote that Merrill would forever have the distinction of being the “last Yankees manager in the Steinbrenner era.”

  Fans leaving Yankee Stadium were stopped by reporters who descended on the South Bronx to do the classic man- (and woman-) on-the-street interviews. “I wish he had lost the team completely,” said Wendy Schmid of Westport, Connecticut. “He should be banned from baseball for life.” Don Duncan of Westwood, New Jersey, said Steinbrenner should have been banned for “gross incompetence.”

  At Mickey Mantle’s restaurant and sports bar, on Central Park South in midtown Manhattan, patrons had been confused when, around 9 p.m., the loud music being played through speakers was silenced and every television was tuned to Fay Vincent as he read the details of his decision on Steinbrenner.

  Soon someone yelled, “He’s outta here.” And cheers filled the bar.

  “This is so sweet,” Mike Nisson, a thirty-year-old dentist from Connecticut, said. “Maybe it’ll save the team. Now they can build a dynasty again.”

  Others had short-term goals. “If somebody besides George is making the decisions, maybe we can get out of last place,” Rudy Rummels of Staten Island said.

  And in the two weeks after Steinbrenner’s banishment was announced, the Yankees had played .500 baseball. They no longer had the worst record in the major leagues. But things were far from rosy. Don Mattingly had not played in weeks, resting his now chronically sore back. Pascual Pérez had recently had shoulder surgery; his career was all but over. Righetti’s Yankees career would soon end when he chose to sign as a free agent with the San Francisco Giants. Jesse Barfield was begging to be traded. Deion Sanders, who was hitting .158, left for the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons. Released by the Yankees, Sanders resurfaced in the Atlanta Braves outfield and by 1992 was hitting .304 and was a World Series star.

  But the Yankees’ ongoing adversity was background noise, since all eyes were on Steinbrenner during what was perceived as his final days as the boss, or the Boss, as he preferred to be called. And George was indeed busy.

  On August 15, he surprised the baseball community by naming Robert E. Nederlander, one of the Yankees’ minority owners and a member of a prominent New York theatrical family, the team’s new leader. Nederlander, one of nineteen minority owners, was president of a group that owned thirty theaters in the United States and Great Britain.

  Nederlander, who was fifty-seven, admitted he knew little about baseball.

  During a 1984 meeting of the Yankees’ ownership, Nederlander had famously reviewed the team’s batting statistics and asked, “Where’s Reggie?”

  “Reggie Jackson?” another owner responded.

  “Yes,” Nederlander said. “You know, Mr. October.”

  He was told that Jackson had last played for the Yankees in 1981.

  Nederlander was viewed as a benign caretaker who wouldn’t interfere in some of George Steinbrenner’s other plans, which already included trying to get himself reinstated as chief executive in a year or two. At the least, Nederlander could shepherd the Yankees in a nonthreatening way until Hal Steinbrenner, George’s youngest child, or one of his sons-in-law could assume control of the team.

  Next, George turned to the matter of Stump Merrill’s contract, which was to expire in October. Steinbrenner called Merrill and told him the team was extending his contract through the 1992 season.

  It was the first time in Stump’s fourteen years with the Yankees that he had been offered anything but a one-year contract. “Believe me, I’d have taken anything they offered,” he said when asked for his reaction to a two-year extension.

  Merrill celebrated over light beer(s) that evening. And told his wife he was going to buy the Mercedes-Benz he always wanted.

  On Monday, August 20, his final day in power, Steinbrenner hosted about one hundred employees at a farewell lunch at Yankee Stadium’s elegant Diamond Club. His guests ate chateaubriand and green beans amandine. The meal was capped off with a dessert of strawberries and whipped cream.

  Steinbrenner spoke to the gathering for several minutes. “I’ve stepped down because maybe it’s time to move on,” he said evenly, although at one point he appeared to wipe away tears. “Things might even be better under the new people. I will still be involved in many ways. And the Steinbrenner family will be a part of the Yankees for a long time to come. We are still the owners.”

  Steinbrenner had nosily run the Yankees for 17 years and 229 days. In that time, the team had 19 managers, 14 general managers and 29 pitching coaches, because George especially liked to blame, and fire, pitching coaches.

  George said he did not plan to watch that night’s game against Toronto. The next time he wanted to watch a Yankees game in person, he would not be allowed to do so from his owner’s private box adjacent to his office. If it was a Yankees road game, he would not be permitted to sit in the opposing owner’s box.

  In either case, he could sit in the stands.

  “I hope the fans will get along with me,” he said in a brief news conference.

  He was asked if it was a sad day for him. “No,” he replied.

  What was his state of mind? “It’s fine,” he said.

  At about 4 p.m., Don Mattingly arrived at Steinbrenner’s office. Mattingly had requested the meeting and stayed for ten minutes. “It was definitely strange,” Mattingly said afterward i
n the players’ clubhouse. “I mean, the man has been a huge presence here.”

  At 5:30, two hours before the start of the game, a fan had draped a banner across the front of the Yankee Stadium upper-deck wall that read: Aug. 20, 1990. A Great Day For The Yankees.

  In his last official act that day, George appointed a new Yankees general manager. There had been much speculation that the existing general manager, Pete Peterson, was going to be jettisoned. The leading candidates were expected to be former St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog and Tom Seaver, the ex–New York Mets star who was now a Yankees broadcaster.

  Instead, George went back to his Yankees past, promoting Gene Michael, whom he had first met in 1973, when he bought the team and Michael was its shortstop. Theirs had been a long, tangled relationship ever since, with Michael serving under Steinbrenner at various times as manager, general manager, coach, administrative assistant, minor league manager and player. He had most recently been a scout for the Yankees. He knew its minor league system rosters well.

  “No one is more knowledgeable in or about the organization,” Steinbrenner said.

  Michael, who was fifty-two, insisted he had not sought the job. George had called and asked him to take it.

  Many years later, Michael added a caveat: “He called to ask, but he already knew I would take it. He knew me. He knew I saw opportunity.”

  At the same time that Michael was promoted, George Bradley, a Yankee executive normally based in Tampa, also moved up the team’s chain of command and relocated to New York to assist Michael.

  At an impromptu news conference at Yankee Stadium—Steinbrenner was to leave the building in twenty minutes—Michael called his job “a good challenge.” “I know we’re not winning now and I’m not a know-it-all, but a team can turn things around within two years,” he said. “It can.”

  Michael, fired by Steinbrenner three times already, was asked if he would have taken the general manager’s job if Steinbrenner weren’t going into exile. He smiled and then laughed. “That’s not a fair question. I wasn’t offered that,” he said.

  Michael was asked if he planned to communicate with Steinbrenner and pledged that he would not. Michael was a scout at heart. He had done some digging around the edges of his new responsibilities. Many years later, he acknowledged that he knew about the affidavit requirement before he took the job. At the time, he said he wasn’t going to let George get him kicked out of baseball.

  “I read the papers,” he said. “I know the rules.”

  But what if George were to call him?

  “Naw,” Michael said. “George wouldn’t call. Besides, I’m going to be pretty busy.”

  Steinbrenner left Yankee Stadium on the home plate side around 7 p.m. with news photographers walking backward in front of him, their camera shutters snapping as they backpedaled. There were about a dozen of them, taking pictures in the gloaming of a hot August evening as the most famous sports owner in America got into a long, black town car.

  Hal Steinbrenner was not at Yankee Stadium that day. But he was around his father in the immediate aftermath and for many months. In 2017, seated in a conference room high above the Yankees’ spring training complex, a space dominated by a life-size oil portrait of George Steinbrenner that, with its ornate frame, occupies almost an entire wall, Hal was asked to describe how his father took his 1990 expulsion from baseball.

  “He was as passionate as a man could be about the business, and very hands-on, and to be out of it like that had to kill him,” Hal said. “It’s nothing he told me. He never would have told me something like that. But it just had to have eaten him up.”

  Hal, who in 2008, at the age of thirty-nine, ascended to the role of chief executive of the Yankees, still sometimes refers to his father in the present tense, as if he were still alive. “He is—I mean he was—a strong guy,” Hal said. “But you could tell his frustration. He would not admit that he was hurting. But I was around him my whole life, so I could tell just by looking at him. I think it ate him up for quite a while.

  “It was a chapter in his life he had to endure. One way or the other.”

  8

  The Architect

  THE MAN ENTRUSTED with rebuilding the Yankees, as the disastrous, tumultuous 1990 season wound to a humiliating close, never planned on a career in baseball. He expected to be a basketball player. Or maybe an architect.

  Eugene Richard Michael, in 1955, attended his hometown university in Ohio, Kent State, on a basketball scholarship. Baseball was a second sport. Astute, thoughtful, perceptive and wily—he almost never lost money at a card table—Michael also considered opening his own business. He took college classes in architecture. Why?

  “Because I liked to design and create things,” he said.

  He was six-foot-two and a rail-thin 175 pounds, and had an upright, ostrichlike running style, so teammates in both sports started calling Michael “Stick” early in his career. It was a time when a majority of sportsmen, and sportswomen, had nicknames, and many of them outlasted the athletes’ playing careers. So it was for Stick Michael.

  A basketball star at Kent State, he then played professionally for the Columbus Comets of the North American Basketball Association and was approached by several teams for the nascent National Basketball Association. But baseball was America’s pastime, and for all his basketball prowess, Michael switched sports in 1959 when the Pittsburgh Pirates offered him far more money than any basketball team could.

  It was the beginning of a ten-year major league career, with occasional winter sojourns on the semipro basketball circuit.

  Michael was a slick-fielding, weak-hitting shortstop—a common combination of skills for a professional shortstop in the 1960s and 1970s—and he spent seven years in the minor leagues before Pittsburgh called him up in 1966. That first season, in 30 games, he hit just .152 and was summarily traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who kept him just one season (.202 batting average) before shipping him off to the Yankees in 1968.

  Stick, as he was known to everyone in baseball from the 1960s to the 2000s, managed to raise his batting average to about .240 in his seven years with the Yankees. But he knew he was no prized batsman. As he once joked, “The bat really jumps off my ball.”

  And he was forever overshadowed in the American League by the luminous Baltimore shortstop Mark Belanger, another rangy, reedy fielding maestro who won eight Gold Gloves and was a defensive standard-bearer of the Orioles’ meticulous championship teams. Belanger’s batting average was even lower than Michael’s, but Belanger was fortunate to be playing for the equivalent of baseball royalty in the sixties and seventies.

  Stick Michael’s timing was not as providential. When he joined the Yankees they were in the throes of a stormy restructuring on the field and an upheaval of the ownership group. The CBS Corporation, which had never ventured into professional sports, had bought the Yankees in 1964, just as all the team’s aging stars, like Mantle, Berra and Whitey Ford, were on their way out of baseball.

  It was a turbulent, humbling time for the once great Yankees, who were suddenly a second-division team. Still, Michael did not have to wait long to witness a Yankees revival, one fueled by the promotion of young minor league talent and shrewd trade acquisitions. By 1970, when the team finished in second place, the attentive, insightful thirty-two-year-old Michael was the team’s elder statesman. He had been in New York City long enough to become something of a man-about-town, welcomed in the best restaurants and a jocular, familiar presence in the most important Manhattan saloons, which always treated Yankees like royalty.

  Michael became a big brother to the Yankees’ biggest homegrown star, twenty-three-year-old Thurman Munson, who had also attended Kent State. He also developed lasting, lifelong relationships with a number of players who made up the core of the late-1970s Yankees championship teams, including Munson, Lou Piniella, Graig Nettles, Chris Chambliss and Sparky Lyle. Moreover, Michael was a close witness to how those superlative Yankees teams were built
after several losing seasons. (The late sixties and early seventies were the second-darkest period in the team’s modern history—only the teams from 1989 to 1992 were worse, and for longer.)

  In contrast, they were vastly different periods in big league baseball, but some of the principles of recasting a roster were similar nonetheless, and Michael, who did not retire until after the 1975 season, observed with keen personal interest how the Yankees’ pennant-winning teams of 1976–78 were reconstructed. It was another way to learn how to create and produce a successful product.

  He was already used to winning at most things. His card-playing skills were legend. When Stick joined the Yankees in 1968, Mantle had already privately told the Yankees it would be his last season as a player. By the end of it, Mantle said he owed Stick so much money that he could no longer afford to retire.

  It was—mostly—a joke. And yet, when Manhattan’s St. Moritz Hotel, where Mantle lived, sent him its bill from April to October, he told the hotel manager: “Call Gene Michael. He’s got all my cash. He can write a check.”

  Michael was more than a polished fielder; he may have been the best practitioner of baseball’s hidden-ball trick in the history of the game. With a runner on second base, Michael would often visit the pitcher on the mound and furtively take the baseball from him. Or he would take a throw from the outfield with a runner at second base and casually pretend to throw it back to the pitcher. Except that he palmed the ball like someone doing a magic trick, then surreptitiously slipped the ball into his glove. When the runner took his lead off second base, Michael would wait and then pounce, tagging him out. He did it nearly a dozen times as a minor leaguer and another five times in the majors, once tagging a runner at second base for the final out of a one-run Yankees victory.

  “I could have done it another thirty times, but the guys who got tagged out were so embarrassed and furious it was almost dangerous for me,” Michael said. “Later, they would come sliding into second base on double plays trying to kill me.