Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  As if things weren’t already bleak enough, the wheels fell off completely on August 15. The roster was never whole again.

  “Stump lost the team that day,” said Buck Showalter.

  And the impetus for the implosion was a few locks of hair that somewhat obscured Don Mattingly’s collar.

  Since 1973, Steinbrenner imposed a policy prohibiting any Yankee player from having facial hair other than a neatly trimmed mustache. The players also could not have long hair, although what constituted “long” was inexact. If a player’s hair drooped too far over his collar, it was likely that someone in the organization would suggest a judicious trim.

  And usually, that’s what the players did. They might cut it one-half inch, an almost imperceptible trim, but the report would get back to Steinbrenner that the offending player had consented to the grooming protocols, and that appeased the owner.

  Before a game on August 15, Stump Merrill called Mattingly into his office and told him management was ordering him to cut his hair. He would not play until he did. It would not be hard to comply, since the Yankees’ bullpen catcher spent off-seasons as a barber. He cut hair in the clubhouse all the time.

  But given his status as the heart and soul of the team, and given the way the policy was being presented, with an on-the-spot ultimatum—his hair had not grown to that length overnight—Mattingly was incensed and chose to sit out the game. Later, he revealed to reporters why he wasn’t in the lineup and was no less infuriated.

  He also asked to be traded. He had been named the tenth captain in Yankees history earlier in the season, and now he wanted that rescinded, too.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Mattingly said of the captaincy. “Maybe I don’t belong in the franchise anymore. I’ve been impeached. I’m just overwhelmed by the pettiness of all of this.”

  No one in the Yankees’ clubhouse disagreed. “It’s nickel-and-dime bullshit,” said Steve Sax. “Somebody’s hair is a ridiculous way to tear down a team.”

  Three other Yankees were asked to cut their hair. Matt Nokes did so. Reliever Steve Farr did not cut his hair until the next day but was not needed in the August 15 game. The directive also went out to Pascual Pérez, but he was injured and not easy to find.

  But Nokes, Farr and Pérez became footnotes to history.

  That the team’s best and most beloved player—one of the most popular Yankees of the previous twenty-five years—was being persecuted for slightly long hair set off a media firestorm. Newspaper columnists nationwide used the Mattingly incident as proof of the comical, pathetic depths that the once great Yankees had now reached. Headline writers had a field day, with many playing off “the Yankee Clipper,” which was Joe DiMaggio’s nickname.

  Recognizing just how buffoonish the Yankees had become, two New York Post sportswriters had the pictures above their columns altered to make them appear bald and wondered if the Yankees might ask all their players to shave their heads. Dozens of fans showed up the following day at Yankee Stadium wearing Mattingly’s number 23 jersey and wigs of long, flowing hair.

  But when the derisive laughter subsided, a darker mood pervaded. The nation of Yankees fans had had enough. They were embarrassed and disgusted. For the second consecutive season, the team on the field was clownish. Now the Yankees were a joke off the field, too.

  Throughout the Yankees organization, it was understood that Steinbrenner—exiled but not entirely silenced—had surreptitiously sent a message through the chain of command that he wanted Mattingly’s hair cut. It was one of Steinbrenner’s best-known rules, the one he instituted during his first days as Yankees owner in 1973. Gene Michael, who told Merrill to give Mattingly the ultimatum, never admitted that Steinbrenner gave the order, and he wouldn’t revisit the subject when asked to in 2017. But from time to time in 1990 and 1991, Yankee employees confided to reporters covering the team that Steinbrenner would sometimes furtively communicate his wishes to the front office through a family member or one of his allies in the ownership group. It usually concerned something trivial.

  But if it was Steinbrenner who stealthily pushed the haircut issue, the fallout and the bulk of the searing ridicule for the fiasco fell on Merrill, who has always said that he assumed the haircut directive came at Steinbrenner’s urging. Michael took some blame, though not most of it, because he was one person removed. As for Steinbrenner, he was already in baseball jail. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Unmistakably, a majority of players turned their back on Merrill forevermore. Fans began to boo him when he went to the mound to remove a pitcher. Players argued with him behind closed doors and criticized him to reporters.

  Mattingly, Michael and Merrill each got haircuts on August 16, and Mattingly was back in the Yankees lineup, but the episode was never forgotten.

  In an interview twenty-seven years later, Stump Merrill conceded that the Mattingly hair flap eventually led to his dismissal. “A fucking haircut cost me my fucking job,” he said, sitting in the lobby of a Tampa hotel. “That’s fine; that’s the way I look at it. It was certainly the start of the downfall. I lost the respect of some of the players. I don’t think there is any question about that. But would I do it again? You’re damned right I would.”

  Buck Showalter, Merrill’s third-base coach, felt badly for Stump and also thought it might have been a chance to stand up to Steinbrenner, who was clearly still watching closely. “I wanted to say, ‘Stump, this is important to Donnie, and if you do this to him, the rest of the players are going to go apeshit,’” Showalter said in 2017. “Which is what happened.”

  Showalter filed it away as a lesson—a Yankees manager has to be careful how he chooses sides in a snit initiated by George Steinbrenner.

  “What people missed was that you’re going to lose in the long run with Steinbrenner if you don’t stand up to the things you thought he might be wrong about,” Showalter said. “You couldn’t fight him on every little thing because that became a distraction, but when you were certain he was doing the wrong thing, you had to stand up and fight back. And the interesting thing is that when you did stand up to him, he had some respect for that. He might listen. But if you didn’t, you had no chance with him.”

  As for Mattingly, many years later he was asked to reminisce about the day he was benched for not cutting his hair. He compared it to a nightmare that one tries to recount the morning after. “You do ask, ‘Did that really happen?’” he said, laughing, adding that he would have cut his hair had he been warned ahead of time.

  “I was told, ‘If you don’t get your haircut today, you don’t play,’” Mattingly said. “Well, they could have told me two days earlier and I would have got it cut.”

  But an ultimatum at the ballpark hours before a game made Mattingly bristle, and he pushed back.

  He also began a seven-game hitting streak on August 16, a stretch when he hit .357 (10-for-28) with three doubles.

  “Yeah,” Mattingly said. “I was mad.”

  He also came back to earth and fell into a mini-slump at the plate. But he wasn’t the only one staggering to the finish.

  After the Mattingly hair fiasco, the Yankees lost 29 of their remaining 49 games, including one August–September period when they lost 20 of 27 games. The final record was 71-91 and 20 games out of first place. It was a very slight improvement over the disaster of 1990.

  “It wasn’t Stump’s fault; it just didn’t work out,” said Michael more than twenty-five years later. “We weren’t good enough and a change had to be made.”

  About an hour after the final game of the season, Michael met with Merrill in his mezzanine-level office. “Stick asked me if I was going to be around for a few days,” Merrill said. “And I said, ‘No, I’m going to Maine today. Tell me now. Skip to the meat.’”

  The meat of the conversation was that Stump was relieved of his managerial duties. His wife and family were waiting downstairs when he left the general manager’s office. Wordlessly, he grabbed a packed bag and got in his Mercedes, along w
ith his family, for the seven-hour trip to Maine.

  About five minutes into the drive, Stump broke his silence: “I want you to know that I just got fired.”

  And that’s how he began the rest of his life.

  “My permanent title became ‘the ex-manager of the Yankees,’” he said, knowing it was both a compliment and a snub.

  For Merrill, a dream job too good to even consider five years earlier had turned out to be, for the most part, a humbling and disquieting experience.

  In 2017, retired and living in a beautiful oceanfront home in the coastal Maine town of his boyhood, Merrill, who typically laughs easily, still could not bring himself to smile when discussing the Yankees of 1990–91. “I was the manager of nine teams that won minor league championships before I got the call to come to the major leagues,” he said. “That was my big chance. And I’m appreciative of it—even if it wasn’t much of a chance. But that’s life.”

  Merrill’s record as a minor league manager across 21 seasons was 1,745-1,474, for a winning percentage of .542. In 1990–91, he was 120-155 (.436 winning percentage).

  Looking back, Stump said: “We didn’t have a third baseman. You’ve got Álvaro Espinoza at shortstop. At second base you’ve got Sax, who can’t throw the ball to first base. You got Mattingly on the downside of his career. And a pitching staff that was . . . whatever. It wasn’t real pretty.

  “I mean, I don’t know how we won 71 games. I wish George had been there. He wouldn’t have allowed that. Maybe my ass would have been fired, but George would have done something to help the roster, and whoever replaced me would have benefited.”

  The end of the 1991 season was the first time Merrill had been fired from a job. And he took it hard. “I almost went off the deep end,” he said in 2017. “It was bad.”

  Like many baseball lifers whose formative years in the major leagues were in the fifties or sixties, Stump drank plenty of beers after games. It was perhaps not the healthiest habit, and he was hardly alone in choosing that postgame routine. But after his 1991 firing, it became something more dangerous.

  Merrill went back to work as a manager in the Yankees minor leagues for another ten seasons, and in fact was an influential presence in the minor league careers of about two-thirds of the young, developing players who would go on to win four Yankees World Series championships from 1996 to 2000. That included Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte, Posada and Bernie and Gerald Williams, all of whom played for Merrill.

  But Stump’s failure to win during his one shot at the big time continued to haunt him. And a drink, or hundreds of drinks, did not erase the letdown he felt.

  “I had never failed at anything in my life, but when I went home to Maine in 1991, I knew I had failed,” he said. “I went through a divorce, which was the biggest mistake I ever made. It was my own fault.

  “And so I’m living by myself and the easiest thing to do was drink a couple of beers, and then you’re in a deflated mood every fucking day. I’d start thinking about my stint with the Yankees: What could I have done differently? Why did I fail? Why didn’t I do this or do that? Why did it happen? Then I’d say, ‘Oh, fuck this,’ and I’d have another drink. And another. One day I said, ‘Hey, you stupid fuck—you’re gonna kill yourself.’”

  His last drink was in 2002.

  Now Stump is remarried and in his seventies, and the biggest decision of his daily life might be when to take an excursion on his boat, based on the tides and Maine’s changeable weather.

  “I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason,” Merrill said. “I look back and think that not everybody in the world can say they managed the New York Yankees. Some people in Maine will tell me I’m a legend. But I didn’t do well enough to be a legend.

  “I did go back to do my job, which was working with all those guys who helped revive the big club. And now I have a home on the water, a boat and a beautiful wife who supports everything I do. I’m happy.”

  If the unpopular Stump Merrill era ended abruptly, it did not in any way portend a new period of prosperity for the Yankees franchise. If anything, for a few weeks, there was more chaos.

  From the outside at least, the Yankees appeared more adrift than ever.

  The day after Merrill was fired, Gene Michael called Buck Showalter at his home in Pace, Florida. Buck was happy to hear the general manager’s voice. There had been rumors in the newspapers that Showalter was a leading candidate to replace Merrill. “Stick mentioned the rumors, then said, ‘I want you to know that we’re starting over and redoing the whole coaching staff,’” Showalter said years later, recalling the conversation. “He said, ‘You’re not going to be considered for the managing job as much as people may be telling you that. I know you have a family, and I want you to start looking around for work elsewhere.’”

  Angela Showalter was in the room when her husband hung up the phone. She thought he looked scared. “Buck said, ‘I don’t have a job anymore,’” she said. “I was almost eight months pregnant. We were young. We had never been fired. We didn’t know anything about COBRA health insurance coverage that people get when you lose a job. We thought I was pregnant with no health insurance.

  “Buck was quite panicked. It was a rather numbing part of life. We were like, ‘What do we do now?’”

  All of Merrill’s coaches were fired but one. Showalter remembers thinking he would have been better off remaining a minor league manager in a little town in upstate New York, where the skipper gets a free leased car and a break on his local rent.

  “I wanted to get to the big leagues, but be careful what you wish for, right?” he said. “If I was still in the minors this wouldn’t be happening. But it was another lesson, too. Regardless how well you may be doing your job, if the team doesn’t win, you get fired. Still, I was just thirty-five years old. It was very sobering, and very unnerving for your family, who you’re supposed to be protecting and providing for.”

  Showalter’s angst did not last long. His exit from the Yankees came as a stunning development in the greater baseball community. Soon, the Seattle Mariners called about their vacant manager’s position. Six other teams called, offering top coaching positions.

  “There was a lot of interest and I went to Seattle,” Showalter said. “I was starting to figure out my post-Yankee life after fifteen seasons in the organization.”

  At the time, and decades later, Gene Michael said his first goal had been to find a manager with major league experience. “I liked Buck, and once I got to know him, later, I liked him a whole lot more,” Michael said. “But at first I wanted an experienced manager. The minor league people were telling me about Buck’s qualities, although some of them didn’t like him. Everybody didn’t like Buck.

  “Firing managers is awful, and hiring a new one is really tough. I don’t like talking about that period. Even now.”

  In the fall of 1991, Michael had narrowed his choices to two candidates, Doug Rader, who had been the manager of the Texas Rangers for three years and was recently dismissed after three seasons at the helm of the California Angels, and Hal Lanier, who had spent three largely successful years as the manager of the Houston Astros, from 1986 to 1988. Interestingly, Rader and Lanier had both had lengthy careers as players in the major leagues, at the same time Michael had played for the Yankees. Lanier had even been Michael’s teammate for two years in New York.

  A frequently cited Showalter shortcoming at the time was his lack of experience as a major league player. It had been said about Merrill, too. Michael was wary of the Yankees making the same mistake twice.

  A week passed, with Michael weighing the candidacies of Rader and Lanier. The former Yankee Don Baylor, who was a hitting coach in Milwaukee, asked to be interviewed. Because Lou Piniella’s Cincinnati Reds had slumped to a fifth-place finish in 1991, there was talk that Piniella might return for a third stint as Yankees manager.

  Michael was being patient, and holding his cards close to his vest.

  Then, on October 18, Georg
e Steinbrenner, still the Yankees’ principal owner, convened a quarterly meeting of the team’s partners, or limited owners, in Cleveland. Steinbrenner was allowed to fully participate in such meetings. Michael told the roomful of owners that he was deciding between Rader and Lanier for the manager’s job. Michael was then excused from the meeting.

  A couple of hours later, Robert Nederlander, the new managing general partner, informed Michael that the new and top candidate for the managerial job was to be Buck Showalter.

  “I don’t know what changed. I just know what Nederlander told me,” Michael said. “They wanted Buck. I mean, George was there. George never told me anything about what he felt about Buck, but he could tell the other owners.”

  In an interview at his Tampa hotel in 1994, Steinbrenner acknowledged that he wanted Showalter all along. “Billy Martin had told me several years earlier not to let Buck out of the organization—that he was my future manager,” Steinbrenner said. “And Billy was right.”

  Another voice influenced the decision: Hank Steinbrenner. He had traveled throughout the Yankees minors from 1985 to 1987 and watched Showalter closely. He had also been one of the few in the organization to read Showalter’s elaborate, detailed reports as the team’s eye-in-the-sky coach. And he had observed him as a third-base coach. In October 1991, Hank lobbied his father to overrule Michael and bring Showalter back into the Yankees fold.

  On October 20, Showalter was summoned to Yankee Stadium and offered the job, which he accepted. It would be officially announced after the World Series ended later in the month.

  In roughly two weeks, Showalter had gone from being expendable to being the thirtieth manager in Yankees history.

  “I know that initially Stick didn’t think I was ready, and rightfully so, because I would have felt the same way,” Showalter said in 2016, sitting in the office of his Texas home, where plaques commemorating his three American League Manager of the Year awards hang from the walls. “Obviously, Billy’s input from a couple years earlier probably moved George to do something. But I also think it helped that I would come cheap. Mr. Steinbrenner wasn’t exactly throwing gold coins around at that point.”