Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “The other problem sometimes was the second-base umpire. I’d have to tell him in advance so he’d be watching, but once in a while, the umpire would start laughing and give it away.

  “And at least another ten times, I was in place to do it, but the manager happened to come to the mound to take the pitcher out. He would ask where the ball was and blow the whole thing.”

  By the time Michael’s playing career quietly ended, he had already become a confidant and favorite of fellow Ohioan George Steinbrenner, who had bought the Yankees in 1973.

  One of Steinbrenner’s first acts as owner was to order certain players—Piniella, Munson and Michael—to get haircuts.

  Michael approached Steinbrenner and said he would gladly trim his locks. “Are you going to pay for the haircut?” Michael asked.

  Steinbrenner said he would.

  Stick added: “Well, the least you could do is buy us all new suits, too. I mean, if the goal is for us to look more presentable.”

  Steinbrenner was incensed, until Michael broke into a wide grin. For decades thereafter, the Yankees’ owner privately relished Michael’s cheekiness and never-ending desire to poke fun at his boss.

  The two men built a close bond, not quite like father and son but maybe something like an uncle and his favorite nephew. They also gravitated toward each other because they had mutual friends, most notably a former Heisman Trophy winner from Ohio State named Howard “Hop-along” Cassady, who had been Steinbrenner’s idol growing up and who had introduced Steinbrenner to his wife, Joan.

  Steinbrenner was not especially close to many of the 1973 Yankees. He kept his distance. But Michael was different, a well-spoken, dapper and studious presence who at first blush looked and acted more like a bank president than a professional athlete.

  Michael had diverse interests outside baseball. He devoted many hours to charities and read extensively, especially history. Once, after Steinbrenner’s death in 2010, he was asked whom he would invite to dinner if he could host any three figures from the past. Michael named three Georges: George Herman “Babe” Ruth, George Patton and George Steinbrenner.

  Asked why he included Steinbrenner, Stick, ever the scamp to the haughty Steinbrenner, laughed and said, “I’d want him there just so I could tell him off one more time.”

  But in truth, the two were exceedingly close, and Michael often called Steinbrenner one of the most important, influential people in his life. “I taught him a lot of baseball, and there was no one he listened to more than me when the topic was baseball,” Stick said in one of several 2017 interviews, not long before he died of a heart attack at seventy-nine. “But at the same time, he taught me a lot about hard work and how to use your strengths. He was impatient, difficult and a pain in the butt, but he was a teacher and a mentor, too.”

  In Michael, Steinbrenner saw a baseball savant who was in many ways more useful away from the field. Michael did his best work sitting quietly in the stands, where like a crafty poker player he silently observed and noted tendencies, trends and subtle, small movements that added up to big things.

  “My father knew that Stick had one of the best sets of eyes in baseball—he saw it all,” said Hal Steinbrenner. “We’re all indebted to Stick. He has vision, and not just in the obvious sense of the word.”

  Said Buck Showalter of Michael: “He was the best at evaluating and understanding the inner, less seen qualities of a player. He could read the person and the player, which is a gift. And he could discern opponents’ weaknesses. It was almost like reading minds. That’s why no one liked to play cards with him.”

  One example: Stick was an advance scout for the Yankees in the fall of 1977, traveling with the Yankees’ likely postseason opponents to compile reports for use by manager Billy Martin and the team’s players. On October 18, before the sixth game of the World Series between the Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, Reggie Jackson put on a prodigious display of power hitting during batting practice.

  Then he went inside the clubhouse and called Michael in the Yankees’ executive offices. “What should I look for tonight?” Jackson asked Stick.

  “Fastballs in—you should back up in the batter’s box a little bit,” Michael answered.

  The first pitch to Jackson, who was dug in at the back of the batter’s box, was an inside fastball that Reggie belted deep into the right-field stands. The next pitch he saw, an inning later, was also inside and ended up in the right-field seats as well. By the eighth inning, when Jackson came to the plate again, the Dodgers had inserted knuckleball pitcher Charlie Hough. The catcher set up inside, but Hough’s first knuckleball floated over the middle of the plate and became Jackson’s third home run.

  But Reggie had not forgotten the scouting report. When he saw Stick in the clubhouse after the Yankees’ 8–4 victory, he pointed and yelled: “Right on! It was just like you said.”

  By 1979, Steinbrenner had installed Michael as manager of the team’s top minor league club. As a rookie manager, Michael proceeded to win nearly 62 percent of his games and the league championship.

  Michael took over the big league club in 1981, won a division title and 59 percent of his games and was still fired by Steinbrenner. Michael came back to manage the Yankees in 1982, only to be fired again (with a winning record). After that, whenever Steinbrenner tried to persuade Michael to manage his Yankees—as he did in ’84 and ’86—Michael refused.

  “We didn’t get along when I managed,” Stick said. “He knew me too well. He was constantly in my office, talking and arguing about things. Other managers he didn’t know quite as well and he wouldn’t bug them quite as much. But he thought nothing of calling me ten or fifteen times in a day. As I said, he knew me too well. Finally, I said, ‘I’ll work for you, but I’m not ever going to be your manager again.’”

  Besides, Michael preferred being involved with the off-the-field-personnel side of the organization. He liked finding talent, nurturing it and molding a group that was greater than the sum of its parts. The former school kid who liked to create things would happily sit in the bleachers during a high school or college baseball game and watch players he envisioned as the pillars and interlocking parts of a great edifice he would build in New York: a World Series winner.

  Better than that, a team that won multiple World Series.

  So rather than manage, Michael stayed in the organization in various roles, mostly as Steinbrenner’s counsel. He disdained Steinbrenner’s outbursts and off-the-record media machinations. But he also noticed that George routinely worked twelve-hour days. He knew he himself would have to work similar hours if he was going to get the Yankees out of the abyss they had descended into by the final days of the 1990 season.

  When George was banished from baseball, Stick knew it was a blemish on the franchise he had come to think of as home. But privately, even secretly, he was relieved. He knew how it devastated George, his benefactor and biggest supporter. But he finally saw the opportunity he had been longing for.

  “The Yankee organization needed a break from George at that time,” Michael said. “Sometimes you need an abrupt change. It was like a timeout. It was a time to rethink things.”

  Stick did not have a specific strategy, but he did have a set of overarching tenets and various baseball principles he valued. He knew the kinds of hitters and pitchers he wanted, and he would assiduously look for certain obscure but identifiable attributes in those players, whom he would draft, promote from the minors and trade for in the big leagues. Many of the abilities he sought were skills later associated with what became known as Moneyball. They were the doctrines of modern baseball’s analytics era.

  “Gene Michael was Moneyball; they just didn’t have a title for it yet,” said the Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay, a beat writer and radio or TV commentator with the team since 1987.

  It was thirteen years before Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball would be published, but Gene Michael had developed his own evidence-based, sabermetrics approach to assembling a basebal
l team. The high priest of that movement, the Red Sox and Cubs wunderkind Theo Epstein, learned the fundamentals on a laptop. Stick Michael, born in 1938, learned them as a kid at Kent, playing a version of the Strat-O-Matic board game, which became popular in the 1960s.

  “It all goes back to that baseball board game in my childhood,” he said, recalling summer afternoons sixty years earlier as he sat in the grandstand behind home plate at the Yankees’ Tampa minor league complex, where he continued to work as a special adviser in his final years. “There used to be a game where you had these disks and a spinner you used to get a number, and together with the disks you’d land on a base hit, walk, error, fly out, pop out, home run, double, etc.

  “It was all about percentages based on the real statistics of actual players, who would have individual cards with their percentages on getting a hit or walk. I would always pick the guys who got a lot of walks, guys with high on-base percentages. I’d get Ted Williams every time if I could. And I won a lot at that game with that approach.

  “We also kept our own stats on how certain teams did, and I studied what kinds of hitters were on those teams. It was all about on-base percentage—walks and runs and extending innings—never mind pure batting average.

  “This was in high school. I’m still friends with my buddies who played that game with me. We joke about it now. They say: ‘Gene, you were accumulating those pesky little guys who got on base in 1952. And now they say it’s a modern baseball invention. It’s sabermetrics.’”

  Michael laughed. “I was just a kid trying to beat my friends at a card game,” he said. “But my theories stuck with me.”

  Stick understood that there’s a difference between board games and modern algorithms. “Obviously, it is more advanced now because they can break the numbers down to identify every advantage,” he said. “But back in 1990, and even before when I was managing in the minors, I was always explaining to our scouting people that we need guys with high on-base percentages.

  “Not only that, but I’d say, ‘Get me guys who take a lot of pitches and foul off a lot of pitches.’ Because I want to wear out their starting pitchers and get to the middle-relief pitchers, the weakest part of any team.

  “I used to call it the vulnerable underbelly. Every team has five starting pitchers and maybe three late-inning bullpen guys. But get the starter out early and you’re facing that team’s ninth-best pitcher and maybe their weakest pitcher. Do that and you can pull away in a game. A 6–2 lead in the sixth or seventh inning leads to a lot of victories.” On the flip side, Michael championed a new pitching stat: innings per start. He instructed his staff and scouts to look for pitchers with the highest innings-per-start numbers. He did not want opposing teams attacking the Yankees’ vulnerable underbelly.

  But Michael’s approach was more complex than simply finding guys who got on base often and took a lot of pitches. Or starters who worked into the seventh inning. He also scouted personalities and not just athletes. As someone with a career batting average below .240, he knew that baseball was a game of failure. Even the best hitters would fail seven out of ten times at the plate. The best pitchers gave up three or four runs every nine innings. He wanted players who knew how to handle disappointment or adversity, and who found ways to rebound. Scouting players, even ones who had already made it to the major leagues, Michael asked about family backgrounds and obstacles the player had overcome in his life or career—or both. He needed not only dependable players, but players who, under the harsh scrutiny of George Steinbrenner or the glare of an unblinking, unforgiving New York media machine, would not cower or fold.

  He needed to find sparkling gems where others saw rough-cut stones, and he knew the first place to look was in baseball’s bushes—the least examined reaches of amateur baseball as well as the Yankees’ multitiered minor league system.

  “It was a total rebuild, but I knew that down the ladder, down on the farm, we already had some good players because we had good scouts who for years had found players,” Stick said many years later. “The problem was that we just kept trading them all away. It was time to go find those guys and figure out which ones to keep.”

  9

  Prospecting

  MARIANO RIVERA HAD no idea why the Yankees would give him $2,000 to pitch a baseball, something he had rarely done. But the money represented nearly a year’s pay in Rivera’s current job, so he signed the Yankees contract presented to him in his family’s congested, two-room concrete house in the tiny Panamanian village of Puerto Caimito.

  It was 1990, and until then Rivera had been working twelve-hour days on his father’s fishing boat alongside his uncle Miguel. Rivera hated the fisherman’s life, which meant being at sea six days a week. His only day off was Sunday, when he went to church in the morning and played sports in the afternoon and evening. He was a 155-pound shortstop and twenty years old—ancient for a prospect from Latin America.

  A Panamanian cab driver who moonlighted as a baseball scout, Chico Heron, was at an All-Star game when Rivera had unexpectedly been asked to pitch. He threw only fastballs, at about 87 miles an hour, but Rivera could throw it wherever he wanted—outside corner at the batter’s knees, inside corner, up and in. His control was effortless.

  Heron coaxed the Yankees’ Latin American scouting director, Herb Raybourn, an Anglo who was Panamanian and spoke Spanish, to watch Rivera in a tryout. Raybourn became enamored of Rivera’s minimalist, graceful pitching motion. He knew Rivera was raw and unproven, and he certainly knew that Panama had a limited history of producing major league players—in the past fifty years, there had been only a couple of dozen.

  But the Yankees were known for taking risks internationally. Maybe with better nutrition and tutelage, the Yankees thought, this waif of an infielder turned pitcher, who hailed from one of Panama’s poorest districts, could become something.

  Still, it was a mighty gamble. Rivera did not speak English, had left school in the ninth grade and had never been outside Panama. He had never flown in an airplane. He could name only a few major league teams. When the Yankees talked to him about their minor league training complex in Tampa, he asked, “What’s a Tampa?”

  Rivera himself sensed the long odds against him. He wondered if he shouldn’t just stay at home. “I wasn’t even a pitcher,” he said. “I was scared.”

  The alternative was to head back to sea, where only a few months earlier his uncle Miguel had been fatally injured in an accident with the rigging on his father’s boat.

  Mariano Rivera signed and boarded his first flight to Tampa.

  Fast-forward several months. The New York Yankees were going down in flames, their pitching staff on its way to 95 losses, the most in Yankees history. (The 1912 New York Highlanders, who were one year from being recast as the Yankees, lost 102 games.)

  But down on the farm, in the Gulf Coast League, Rivera had the lowest earned run average in the league. Sure, it was a rookie circuit that played about sixty-five games in a season, but Rivera was still averaging more than a strikeout per inning and allowing roughly one base runner every three innings.

  At the time, the Yankees handed out $500 bonuses to minor leaguers for winning certain statistical titles, like having the lowest ERA in a league during a season. And Rivera surely wanted his bonus. There was only one problem. Rivera, used exclusively as a reliever, had pitched just 45 innings, and the Gulf Coast League regulations required pitchers to have at least 50 innings to qualify for the ERA title.

  But Rivera made it plain to his manager, Glenn Sherlock, that he really needed that $500.

  “I went to my pitching coach, Hoyt Wilhelm, and said we have to do something for Mariano,” Sherlock said in an interview decades later. “He was such a dedicated guy and good teammate. You wanted to make him happy. Heck, I always thought Mariano could have been a great outfielder and decent hitter if he hadn’t been a pitcher.”

  In 1985, Wilhelm had become the first pitcher who had appeared almost exclusively in relief to be induc
ted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He told Sherlock that he wasn’t going to let a fellow bullpen ace be deprived of an honor. Rivera got to start the Gulf Coast Yankees’ last game of 1990. Perhaps if he pitched well enough, Rivera would get to 50 innings, win the ERA title and collect his bonus.

  Except until that point in 1990, Rivera had not pitched more than three innings in any game.

  Nevertheless, he started the final game of his first professional season.

  And pitched a seven-inning no-hitter. He finished the year with an ERA of 0.17, with 58 strikeouts in 52 innings. He averaged 0.46 walks and hits per inning, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio was 8.29.

  Not bad for a prospect who just a few years earlier was using discarded cardboard for a baseball glove because he could not afford a real mitt. He also wrapped up snippets of fishing nets and bound them with electrical tape to fashion a makeshift baseball. Rivera and his friends used tree limbs for bats.

  “Raw baseball background for sure,” said Mitch Lukevics, the Yankees’ farm director at the time. “But his delivery was fluid, unforced and unnaturally accurate. That skinny guy could throw a baseball into a teacup.”

  Bill Livesey went further. “Mariano could throw it into a thimble.”

  Stick Michael had read the reports on the obscure, $2,000 pitcher from Panama. “I knew of Mariano in 1990,” he said many years later. “But a lot of kids tear it up in rookie league. You didn’t know what it meant yet. We kept him in A ball the next year. But yeah, you kept your eye on him.

  “We had decided to keep our eye on all of them. We were definitely going to need some of them. We were going to need them in a big way.”

  The Yankees were also closely, quietly watching players who were not yet Yankees.

  One was a tall, reedy shortstop in western Michigan who had been wearing a Yankees necklace, and even Yankees boxer shorts, since he’d spent summers at the New Jersey lake house of his grandmother, a devoted Yankees fan. And the Yankees had been aware of Derek Sanderson Jeter since a scout, Dick Groch, saw him as a fifteen-year-old playing on a top summer travel team.