Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “I still have that Yankee manual and I still refer to it,” Sherlock said in 2018 when he was the Mets’ third-base coach. “They used it to train all the Yankee coaches on how to coach. It would tell you not only how to teach an outfielder to catch a fly ball, it would also tell you how the outfielder should move his feet before he caught the ball and after he caught the ball. Everything Mark Newman and Bill Livesey did was a baseball education.”

  The Yankee Way emphasized some other details, like instructing players to get to the ballpark at 1 p.m. for a 7:30 game. Why so early?

  The Yankees employed a cadre of roving infield, outfield, catching and hitting instructors—coaches who rotated through the nine minor league teams for one-week stints—and they conducted drills and worked with the Yankees’ farmhands from 2 to 4 p.m. every day. There would be a 45-minute break and then the team’s regular coaches would put the players through more practice to prepare for that night’s game.

  And every Yankees minor league team had more coaches on staff than teams from other major league organizations. While the typical team usually had a manager who doubled as a third-base coach, that was unacceptable to the Yankees. They had at least two coaches, and often three. That way the manager could remain in the dugout throughout the game. There was frequently a pitching coach as well.

  “First of all, we wanted the manager in the dugout where he could coach and instruct his team as the game is going on instead of being 120 feet away in the third-base box,” said Mitch Lukevics, the director of minor league operations. “You can’t explain tactics or explain what went right or did not go right from the third-base coaching box. And having a pitching coach was just common sense. Everyone says that developing enough good, young pitching is the hardest thing. Well, young pitchers need a lot of attention to develop. They might need a pitching coach more in their first year of pro baseball than they do in their tenth year of pro baseball.”

  The salary of the Yankees’ minor league players was about 10 to 15 percent higher than the salaries of other teams. The managers and coaches were also paid more handsomely. The equipment was of major league quality. There were full-time athletic trainers assigned to every team.

  “On some teams, the bus driver was the trainer,” said Elfering, the assistant scouting director.

  The coaches were instructed to keep track of unusual statistics, ones not found in a traditional box score. The Yankees brain trust wanted to know how many times each player got a bunt down successfully (or failed to do so), or how many times a hit-and-run was performed properly, or how many times a player lofted a run-scoring sacrifice fly. They wanted to know how many times a batter hit behind a base runner to advance him. And they kept a log for each player of something called “hard-hit balls,” which were well-struck balls that were nonetheless outs. (Buck Showalter had wondered why this stat wasn’t kept when he was a Yankees farmhand.)

  The Yankees’ scouts were reimbursed for their travel expenses promptly. The clubhouse food was constantly evaluated, and upgraded if need be. The team had started to videotape every batter and pitcher weekly, if possible. The videos were cataloged and stored. If a player was promoted to a higher level, his videotape—a clunky VHS tape back then—went with him, so his new manager could become familiar with his new player before seeing him play.

  And, of course, no player or coach was allowed to have facial hair or hair drooping over his collar.

  “We were instituting a system in every sense of the word,” Livesey said of the Yankee Way. “Some of it involved spending more money, and Mr. Steinbrenner was great with that—he never rejected spending anything on the minor leagues if we made the case for why it was important.

  “He had a football background and went to a military prep school. Mr. Steinbrenner believed in structure and organizational methods and tactics.

  “And he certainly liked to win, and knew why it was important.”

  The Yankee Way was an outlier in some ways compared to other organizations. Every team knew that the major league club would need one or two quality catchers. But in general, the Yankees did not target catchers in the amateur draft, at least not with their top picks. “A lot of high school and college coaches use players where they need them, or because it’s the only position they can play, not because they’re perfect for that position,” Livesey said. “So you have a lot of burly, more physically mature kids playing catcher. Athletically, they may have topped out. And often they weren’t all that quick. But in the minors, you want a quick, nimble catcher who is still getting better athletically. We started looking at kids we thought we could switch to catcher.”

  A case in point: Jim Leyritz, an undrafted infielder and outfielder from the University of Kentucky who also had some experience behind the plate. Leyritz would end up catching 2,348 major league innings and play nine seasons for the Yankees.

  The Yankee Way also favored size. Yankees minor league teams sometimes resembled a basketball roster. Or as Livesey put it, “All things being equal, a five-foot-eight guy and a six-foot-two guy are not equal.”

  The system worked, and Yankees minor leaguers won dozens of championships in the 1980s.

  “The problem was that George Steinbrenner was so competitive and that made him impatient,” Livesey said. “If the big league club was not winning enough, he wanted to change that immediately. And if that meant trading a top prospect, you couldn’t talk him out of it by saying that the prospect would be a perennial All-Star in four years. He didn’t care about four years from now.”

  But starting in 1990 and on into 1992, Steinbrenner was no longer actively making the trades that robbed the team’s stable of minor league talent. “We had time for the crops to ripen,” Livesey said. “And it was a really good harvest.”

  Early in 1992, the Yankee major league and minor league coaches and managers got their first look at Brien Taylor, who threw from a bullpen mound at the team’s Fort Lauderdale spring training complex.

  “I was Brien’s catcher in that first bullpen session with everyone watching,” Sherlock said. “Frankly, it was hard at first just to catch the ball. He had one fastball that broke to the right and another fastball that broke to the left. He also had two different curve balls. It was an unbelievable show—such an electric arm. And everyone watching was kind of covering their face, trying not to act too impressed, because he was just a young kid and raw. But he had so much energy and you could see the confidence.”

  When spring training ended in 1992, Taylor made his debut in the Florida State League for the Fort Lauderdale Yankees, where he struck out 187 batters in 161⅓ innings and had a 2.57 ERA.

  “And that’s coming out of a low-level high school without any real experience pitching against top hitters,” said Lukevics. “One of his coaches at Fort Lauderdale said to me, ‘Brien has no idea how to hold a runner on first base.’ And I said, ‘That’s because nobody has ever gotten to first base on him before.’”

  Taylor developed a cult following. His picture graced the cover of the Fort Lauderdale game program, and his face was splashed across billboards near the team’s stadium. His number 19 jersey was stolen from the home clubhouse. An opposing manager compared Taylor to Mozart. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes wanted an interview.

  “He was like the Elvis of the minor leagues,” Lukevics said. “Those Florida State League games would usually draw 500 fans. When Brien pitched, there would 2,500 people there. He would walk to his car and 20 people would be pulling on his sleeve for an autograph. I’d never seen anything like it. Everyone knew he was going to be a big star. He already was.”

  Bobby Valentine, the Texas Rangers’ manager, saw Taylor pitch that season in Florida. “That kid looked like the kind of talent you only see once every fifty years,” he said. “Dynamic stuff. Just wow.”

  Mariano Rivera was Taylor’s teammate and friend at Fort Lauderdale. Rivera had a good season, too (5-3 record, 2.28 ERA). “But I was nothing like Brien,” Rivera said. “He was the prospect. He thr
ew the most effortless 98 miles an hour I ever saw. Pure gas. We all knew we were watching greatness.”

  Taylor struck out 14 batters in his last start of 1992. Rivera’s season did not go out on the same high. He had been experiencing pain in his right elbow, and during one start, he felt a pop.

  Rivera visited Dr. Frank Jobe, the inventor of ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, which came to be known as Tommy John surgery. Dr. Jobe wanted to remove some of the loose bodies in Rivera’s elbow, but Rivera would avoid a reconstruction. Tommy John surgery usually requires a year of recovery. Dr. Jobe thought Rivera could resume throwing in four or five months.

  But that was not the word that went forth throughout the minor league baseball world. What people knew was that Rivera’s 1992 season ended abruptly, and that Dr. Jobe had performed surgery on his elbow. The understanding was that he had reconstructive surgery—Tommy John surgery. The Yankees did not dissuade such talk. It was to their advantage for the rest of the baseball community to be misinformed, since there was an expansion draft coming late that year, when two new teams, the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies, would be cherry-picking players from the major and minor league rosters of the 26 established teams.

  Meanwhile, another Yankees pitcher, Andy Pettitte, was in his second season of professional baseball in 1992. He had won six of nine decisions with a stellar 1.55 ERA in 1991, most of them for the Oneonta Yankees, where he was teammates with Jorge Posada, the starting second baseman.

  Posada hit only .235 in 1991, but he also had four homers and 33 RBI. And most significantly, he began the transition from infielder to catcher. He caught only 11 games that season but then spent much of the winter of 1991–92 in Tampa, playing instructional league games at catcher.

  “He had a lot of the natural skills you need—good feet, good hands, strong arm,” said Sherlock, one of the organization’s top catching instructors. “He asked a lot of questions, which is something you want, because a good catcher has to be a thinker.”

  Posada was also being schooled in the many facets of the position with an endless succession of grueling catching drills. No one enjoys flinging himself in the dirt to block pitches fired at 90 miles an hour, but the Yankees had ways to keep Posada motivated for the task. They told him that there were several middle infielders ahead of him on the franchise depth chart.

  They did not, however, have a switch-hitting catcher. That would be a truly valuable asset.

  What was that Yankees saying? “If you can’t get to the ball, we have a place where the ball comes to you.”

  Though resistant at first, Posada got the message. By 1992, when he was at a higher level of Class A in Greensboro, North Carolina, Posada spent 90 percent of his time on the field as the team’s catcher. And his hitting improved—.277, 12 homers, 58 RBI.

  Pettitte was on the Greensboro team, too. Posada caught Pettitte one night when he pitched a complete-game one-hitter without a walk and threw only 90 pitches. After the game, Posada called his father. “I know what a major league pitcher looks like now,” Posada said to him. “Because I just caught one.”

  Late in the Greensboro season, Derek Jeter, skinny and unseasoned, joined the team. He would play 11 games and make nine errors. At the plate, he was a sucker for a breaking ball and hit .243.

  Said an incredulous Pettitte: “This is our top pick? This is our best prospect?”

  It had actually been worse for Jeter earlier in the year when he played for the Tampa Gulf Coast League Yankees. In 47 games, he had hit .202.

  And he might have hit under .200 if a friendly official scorer hadn’t mercifully given Jeter a hit on a bobbled ground ball in his last game, just to get him over .200.

  “Everyone in the organization noticed that batting average,” said Lukevics. “I saw Mr. Steinbrenner in the hallway of his Tampa hotel, which is where Jeter and all those rookies were staying, and he said something to me like, ‘How’s your top pick, the .200 hitter?’”

  Normally, Lukevics only heard from Steinbrenner about the newest and youngest Yankees minor leaguers because one of them had left his swimming trunks hanging on a balcony outside his hotel room. That was a major no-no at Steinbrenner’s hotel, and Lukevics and the player would be called into the Boss’s office for the offense.

  Jeter may have been hitting poorly, but he was not violating hotel protocol. Indeed, it seemed he never left his room. It was where, Jeter confided years later, he was constantly on the phone, calling his home in Michigan. He’d sometimes cry to his mother, asking if he could go back to Kalamazoo, wondering why he hadn’t just gone to the University of Michigan.

  “That first year away from home was a hard lesson for Derek,” Lukevics said. “He struck out seven times in his first doubleheader and booted a couple of ground balls. He was the ugly duckling out there. His feet weren’t under him fielding ground balls, and he was off-balance when he threw, so he was airmailing throws. He had great range and got to so many balls, but that gave him more chances to make errors.

  “We saw potential not performance, but the failing was still there.”

  At the Yankees’ expense, Jeter’s parents flew to Tampa, as did his high school girlfriend. They stayed for a weekend and buoyed his spirits.

  “I talked to Derek every day in Tampa,” Livesey said. “He was struggling but he never showed self-doubt. I’m sure that he did, in fact, have self-doubt. Baseball is a game of failure. But it’s how these high school kids respond that matters.

  “Derek would go 0-for-4, and the next morning he would be there bright and early—earlier than he had to be. He would be ready to work; he was determined. “People in the organization asked me a lot of questions about Derek. What’s going on? Are you worried? And I would answer, ‘I’ll be worried when he looks worried.’”

  Late in 1992, Jeter was in Greensboro because the team’s starting shortstop had been injured. For weeks, Posada had heard his Greensboro teammates talk about the organization’s top draft pick. It was always “Jeter this and Jeter that,” said Posada, who was still grasping the nuances of the English language, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  Then Posada watched as Jeter ran onto the diamond to warm up before his first game. He was gangly and no more than 160 pounds, with long spindly legs that sprouted from high-top shoes and ankle braces, which Jeter wore to protect against the bad ankle sprain he had sustained that spring in high school. His cap was tilted backward, as if it didn’t fit his head.

  Said Posada: “That’s a Jeter?”

  Posada was more impressed when Jeter hit a long home run in his first Greensboro game. He also made two spectacular fielding plays—one to his left and one to his right. Jeter was soon returned to the lower rung of the Yankees minors.

  “I hadn’t said a word to the kid,” Posada said. “But I knew what they were talking about now. That’s Derek Jeter.”

  That year, Baseball America ranked the talent in the Yankees minor league system 4th among all franchises. Brien Taylor was the top-rated prospect and Jeter was ranked 44th. Four other Yankees, Gerald Williams (52nd), third baseman Russ Davis (60th), reliever Bob Wickman (75th) and starting pitcher Sterling Hitchcock (90th), made the top 100. Bernie Williams, who spent much of 1992 at AAA Columbus, was not on the list because he had by then played 147 major league games. Baseball America had yet to size up Rivera, Pettitte and Posada.

  Much of what was going on in the Yankee minors went unobserved. The franchise was less than two years removed from its laughingstock season of 1990. The high-flying Toronto Blue Jays, led by the ex–Yankees star Winfield, were the talk of baseball. The Atlanta Braves, whose sterling center fielder Otis Nixon was a former Yankees farmhand, were on their way to 98 wins. Oakland, behind another sparkling season by ex-Yankee Rickey Henderson, would make the playoffs for the fourth time in the past five years.

  The Yankees? No, nobody in baseball was talking about the Yankees, or paying much attention to what the team’s executives were plotting in Oneonta, Greensbo
ro or Fort Lauderdale.

  “It was a great blessing to be under the radar,” said Livesey. “We knew what we had and we knew our system—the Yankee Way—was working. And it helped an awful lot that people weren’t really looking at us, at least not on the big league level. There was already a lot going on with George Steinbrenner’s suspension and Buck and Stick starting over up there.

  “In the minors, we were just determined to keep our heads down, stay the course and keep the young talent under wraps a little longer. If we could do that and get a little lucky, we thought we could be sitting on something special.”

  15

  Culture Creators

  MIDWAY THROUGH 1992, the Yankees’ fast start to the season, halcyon days for a franchise desperate for something uplifting, became a distant memory.

  “We don’t win as much as we used to, do we, Daddy?” Allie Showalter, the manager’s five-year-old, asked.

  “No, honey, we don’t,” her father replied.

  “When do you think that will change?” Allie inquired.

  “Go brush your teeth,” Buck Showalter said.

  But Showalter was not as downtrodden as he might have seemed (for starters, with a laugh, he told the story to reporters the day it happened). The Yankees had descended to the middle of the pack in the American League East, but Showalter knew that his Yankees, one game under .500 at the time, were still a work in progress.

  While the Yankees minor league operation was shaping the future of the franchise in outposts far from New York, the renovation of the big league club continued in the Bronx. Showalter and Michael were tinkering with the team, though not necessarily making more immediate roster changes. What they were doing was watching, assessing and scheming about significant alterations in the off-season. Showalter was definitely making mental notes.

  On July 11, the Yankees hosted their annual Old-Timers’ Day, a tradition dating back to the 1940s. Showalter, a baseball historian, revered the Yankee elders and considered Old-Timers’ Day one of the most valuable days on the calendar. He wanted his players to soak up all the wisdom from the Yankees who had played for the franchise’s many championship teams. With a wide smile, he would walk around the clubhouse, where for a day the old-timers dressed in the same stalls as the current players—all the while hoping the gilded touch of the elders would, like osmosis, pervade his young charges.