“I was encouraged by my hitting, but I had no clue behind the plate,” Posada said many years later. “I was still guessing about some things. I mean, 38 passed balls? In my major league career I averaged about eight per year.”
Nevertheless, Posada was also promised a spot at Albany in 1994.
Brien Taylor had spent the season in Albany, and while he was strangely wild (102 walks in 163 innings), he had also struck out 150 batters. He had a 13-7 record with a 3.48 ERA and 1.405 WHIP.
“But Brien was still the man, still the brightest prospect,” Lukevics said. “Yes, he was not yet polished, but his stuff was already of major league quality. Actually, he threw a higher percentage of fastballs over 95 miles an hour than anyone in the major leagues at the time. And his velocity didn’t diminish usually. He’d still be throwing really hard in the eighth inning.
“It was an amazing thing to watch. His autograph was already prized and collected.”
Taylor’s breaking ball, however, was still not as reliable as the Yankees wanted. It led to many walks. And he was only a so-so fielder. The Yankees asked Taylor to go to a winter instructional league that began in the fall to work on pitching and fielding mechanics. Taylor declined, saying he wanted to go home to North Carolina.
The Yankees could not compel their twenty-one-year-old top prospect to participate in the instructional league. They told him the plan was to have him pitch at Class AAA Columbus in 1994, and maybe later that season he would be promoted to the big league club.
Jeter, however, was going to the instructional league. He had been hit on the left wrist by a pitch late in the 1993 season, and while he played through the injury, it still bothered him to swing a bat. The Yankees’ medical team recommended that Jeter not swing a bat for a couple of months. But since it did not hurt his wrist to field ground balls, he could go to the instructional league for hours of tutelage in how to play shortstop.
Because he could certainly use it.
Brian Butterfield was the man waiting for Jeter at the instructional league in Tampa. Butterfield’s father, Jack, was the Yankees’ top player development and scouting executive who died in a 1979 New Jersey traffic accident.
The summer before his father’s death, Brian had spent his first year as a professional with the Yankees farm club in Oneonta. It was the first of five seasons in the minors, a time when the switch-hitting Butterfield played shortstop, third base and second base. When his playing career ended in 1983, he became a roving infield instructor in the Yankees farm system and later a minor league manager for the organization.
By 1993, Butterfield was considered the Yankees’ top infield guru. In the fall of that year, he was assigned to lead a five-week infield technique and skills clinic. Jeter was his only student. “You cannot explain Derek Jeter’s development as a shortstop and not talk about the weeks that Brian Butterfield spent with him,” Lukevics said. “It was the time when Brian broke things down in Derek’s technique. He kind of reversed some bad tendencies and elevated the things Derek Jeter did well. It was exhausting—just to watch—but it was critical.”
At no time did Jeter pick up a baseball bat. But early every morning, Butterfield and Jeter were on a diamond somewhere in the Yankees’ vast minor league training complex.
“Brian hit ground balls at Jeter in an endless succession,” Lukevics said. “To his right and to his left, high bouncers and slow rollers. He changed how Derek turned double plays, making him more aggressive in receiving the ball from the second baseman so he could make the throw to first base quicker and get out of the way sooner, for his own safety and longevity. Brian even changed something as simple as how Derek held his glove on his hand. He wanted it more relaxed, more open and welcoming to the ball. It was all advanced, expert instruction.”
The morning sessions, which were videotaped, would last an hour and a half. Then Jeter and Butterfield would watch the videotape to assess what Jeter did well and what he could do better. That afternoon, Jeter would either have another infield workout or play shortstop in an instructional league game—but not bat.
“Derek came to work every day ready to learn more,” said Butterfield, who from 1997 to 2018 taught infielders as a coach for five major league teams. “He’d take it all in, make it his own and ask for more.”
Jeter was also gifted enough that he could be tutored in a particular fielding lesson and then have the ability to swiftly and smoothly assimilate it into his quiver of skills.
“There was a lot of progress being made, and we started to see groups of young Yankee players maturing at the same pace,” Livesey recalled. “We didn’t know who was going to be matched together exactly. But players like Pettitte and Posada, Rivera and Jeter, were coming along at the same time and they were on a lot of the same teams. They were developing alongside each other.
“That’s never a bad thing.”
17
Gamers
WHILE THE YANKEES’ prospects were getting familiar with each other in the minors, the players on the big club were hastily trying to adjust to the newness all around them. Compared to the 1992 season opening lineup, there were new starters in center and left field, at third base, shortstop and second base, behind the plate and on the pitching mound. There was a different principal owner, if not a new one, overseeing the whole operation.
The manager in the dugout was not new, but he had something new in his pocket. It was a cell phone, Showalter’s first. It did not ring that often. But George Steinbrenner insisted that Buck Showalter keep it with him at all times nonetheless.
The new-look 1993 Yankees won their home opener against the Kansas City Royals, 4–1, behind a complete-game eight-hitter by Jim Abbott. Paul O’Neill had four hits and made a diving stab of a sinking line drive in left field that prevented two runs from scoring. After O’Neill’s grab, which ended the inning, Abbott walked halfway to left field to congratulate his teammate. The two then jogged to the dugout together with the crowd of 56,704 on its feet cheering.
Bernie Williams caught the final out of the game and jumped in the air with both arms raised over his head. Then, when Williams left the field, he went directly to the training room, lay down on a table with a towel for a pillow and prepared to nap. Despite the blare of loud music from the adjacent locker room, Williams was sound asleep within 90 seconds and awoke without an alarm in exactly 20 minutes.
It was, as his teammates would grow accustomed to saying, “just Bernie being Bernie.” It happened often.
George Steinbrenner had strolled into the bleachers early in the game to greet fans and shake hands. He did the same thing in the players’ locker room after the victory. “The stadium was alive—I haven’t heard electricity like that in years,” Steinbrenner told reporters.
He was reminded that he wasn’t allowed in the building for almost a year and a half.
“Well, even before that,” George said.
He was asked how his time went in the bleachers.
“Terrific,” he said. “It was fun.”
Asked why he had not taken a bow before the entire stadium before the game—it was, after all, his first game back in the Bronx—George answered: “Because I feared for my safety. I don’t know if I’m popular enough to try that. Nobody likes being booed.”
O’Neill enjoyed the stadium atmosphere with a childlike glee. “This place is so cool,” he said. “I was looking around during the whole game. The fans, the fights, the beer throwing. Man, just awesome.”
In the next six weeks, O’Neill became a fan favorite, hitting well and keeping up a running chatter with people in the stands. He also was benched against left-handed pitchers, a managerial choice he hated. He talked to one and all about wanting to be an everyday player. Showalter tried to stay out of the debate.
The manager would post a lineup without O’Neill in it and then jog into the outfield for batting practice, trying to blend in with the rest of the players and team personnel. “I was trying to hide from Paul,” he said.
But eventually O’Neill would emerge from the dugout and search for his manager. “I’d be running from left field to right field and then to the infield just trying to get away from O’Neill,” Showalter said. “But Paul would always find me. He was never nasty; he just wanted to plead and make his case. In essence, he was pissed at me.
“At the time, Paul was a .191 hitter versus left-handed pitching. I knew I was going to have to start off platooning him. It wasn’t a permanent thing. But as I tried to explain to Paul, it’s really important—really big—that a new Yankee player gets off to a good start. The fans and media will eat you alive if you start the season with a bunch of hitless games. I was trying to protect him from that. I told him he’d be an everyday player eventually. ‘Just trust me.’”
O’Neill was only slightly appeased, and decades later his recollection of how Showalter would deliver the news of a benching differed as well. O’Neill said he would be standing in the outfield with first-base coach Brian Butterfield before a game and see Showalter coming toward him.
“I found out later that Paul would tell Butterfield, ‘Here comes that stumpy little fuck to give me his bullshit on why I’m not playing,’” Showalter said in 2017, laughing.
Or, as O’Neill, with a smirk, said many years later, “I might have said something like that.”
But a sense of détente nonetheless continued between Showalter and O’Neill. Winning helped.
By mid-May, the Yankees were six games over .500 and two games behind the first-place Detroit Tigers in the American League East. Starter Bob Wickman was 4-0 and Jimmy Key was 3-0. Danny Tartabull was leading the team in home runs, just ahead of catcher Mike Stanley. Boggs was hitting .310 and minding his own business, usually with a smile on his face. New second baseman Pat Kelly was flirting with .300.
Bernie was being Bernie, and playing stellar defense. Gerald Williams, after an early-season demotion to Columbus, was filling a variety of roles. In one game with Chicago, after Showalter shrewdly detected a defect in the delivery of White Sox pitcher Wilson Álvarez, Williams stole home, breaking from third base as soon as Álvarez came to the set position.
“Buck explained to me how Álvarez had a routine that he had to follow after the set position, and it was slow,” said Williams.
It was one run in an 8–2 Yankee win, a game that saw Abbott take a no-hitter into the eighth inning. Bo Jackson hit a broken-bat single with one out in the eighth, then tipped his cap at Abbott, who saluted back.
“I’d love to throw a no-hitter one day,” Abbott said. “Maybe my day will come.”
Overall, the Yankees’ attendance and TV ratings were up. The owner was startlingly quiet, and the Yankees had somehow become New York’s only feel-good baseball story of the summer.
The crosstown Mets had reached the dismal depths that the Yankees had found themselves in three seasons earlier. On the field, the Mets were putrid and would lose more than a hundred games for the first time since 1967. Off the field, the players on the last-place team were caught up in a series of repugnant episodes.
Early in the season, Bobby Bonilla, the Mets’ major off-season acquisition, tried to pick a fight in the locker room with New York Daily News sportswriter Bob Klapisch. Bonilla, who was brought to the Mets to provide veteran stewardship and leadership, didn’t like something Klapisch had written. It was an ugly, public scene that dominated the back pages of the New York tabloids for a week. In the same room in June, pitcher Bret Saberhagen filled a large water pistol with bleach and shot it at reporters, staining their clothing.
Later, outfielder Vince Coleman injured teammate Dwight Gooden with a wild swing of a golf club in the clubhouse. Gooden would go on to have the worst season of his career. Coleman wasn’t done. He also lit a firecracker and flung it out the window of a car toward a crowd of autograph seekers outside a stadium, burning three of them.
The Mets were in the midst of a long, rough stretch. It would be four years before they had another winning team, and thirteen years before they won their division.
In this climate, the Yankees were once again the favored team of the Manhattan glitterati, admired if not yet beloved because they were a team of fresh faces, and because they had an enigmatic, thirty-six-year-old manager who answered reporters’ questions with quizzical homespun proverbs, spoken in a drawl honed on the Alabama-Florida state line.
Even Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian raised on Long Island to be a Mets fan, chose instead to feature the Yankees on his top-rated television show by 1993.
The Yankees were woven into a Seinfeld episode a year earlier, but in 1993, the new stars of the team were well enough known that Seinfeld’s producers approached the Yankees to see if Showalter, Steinbrenner, O’Neill, Tartabull and other players would be willing to appear with the show’s cast. It was the beginning of a long run for the Yankees on Seinfeld, with the show shooting scenes in the locker room, at spring training and in other locales.
O’Neill made an early appearance, arguing with Seinfeld’s neighbor Kramer because Kramer promised a hospitalized boy—without the player’s permission—that O’Neill would hit two home runs in a game for him.
“Two? Where’d you get that?” O’Neill yelped. “That’s terrible.”
Kramer countered that Babe Ruth had done it, which O’Neill disputed.
“You’re calling Babe Ruth a liar?” Kramer retorted.
“I’m not calling him a liar, but he wasn’t stupid enough to promise two,” O’Neill said.
In another episode, Jerry’s friend George Costanza decides to do the opposite of every normal instinct he has. The tactic leads to great success, and Costanza even lands a job interview with George Steinbrenner. Walking into Steinbrenner’s office, Costanza greets the Yankees’ owner with a diatribe:
“In the past twenty years, you have caused myself and the city of New York a good deal of distress, as we have watched you take our beloved Yankees and reduce them to a laughingstock, all for the glorification of your massive ego.”
Steinbrenner answers, “Hire this man.”
Costanza becomes the team’s assistant traveling secretary, which in another episode permits him to corner Showalter in the Yankees’ clubhouse and propose that the team should be wearing cotton uniforms, not polyester ones.
“Cotton?” Showalter said. “I think you’ve got something there, George.”
The team switches to cotton, which works for a while. Until the uniforms are washed and shrink dramatically.
Near the end of the episode, a Yankees game is on the television in a New York bar and a broadcaster is heard yelling, “Oh my God, Mattingly just split his pants.”
More than two decades later, Showalter said people still stop him and recite his Seinfeld lines back to him. “I didn’t realize it at the time because I didn’t have time to watch the show back then,” Showalter said, “but that show was wildly popular. So it was really a big deal for us and all of the team. I guess we had arrived.”
Showalter has a quibble, though. To appear on the show, he had to join the Screen Actors Guild. And somehow, all these years later, he is still paying dues, or taxes, on the residuals when the show airs in reruns. As Showalter explained: “When people walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, Buck, I saw you on that Seinfeld show,’ I say back to them, ‘Nineteen dollars and twenty-seven cents.’ Because every time they play that show, it costs me $19.27. It really does.
“The Actors Guild, the taxes they pay every time there’s a residual on the episode . . . when you figure all this stuff in, it costs me money. I’m not kidding. It was great for us then—a nice step up from where we had been—but I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
The Yankees were clinging to second place, even as the Toronto Blue Jays vaulted into first. But the Yankees remained in sight of a division crown, which disrupted the reasoned thinking of some.
As the July trading deadline neared, George Steinbrenner was getting antsy. He loved the idea that the Yankees’ long playoff drou
ght—no full-season division crown since 1980—could end in the same year that he had returned from baseball exile. The pressure was on Gene Michael to make a deal that might put the Yankees over the top in a stretch run.
As he often had, Steinbrenner zeroed in on Bernie Williams, whose batting average had dropped to around .240. Williams continued to play a superior center field and it was just his first full season in the major leagues. Michael and Showalter were determined to be patient. Williams was too good a talent to abandon, they said.
Yes, the Yankees had been nurturing Williams for eight years now, which was a long time to wait. That did not mean it was time to quit on the seventeen-year-old they had sequestered in Connecticut in 1985.
But Steinbrenner felt differently. He was tired of hearing about what Bernie Williams could become. The Yankees were only two games out of first place, and Steinbrenner wanted a playoff berth and the postseason games (and revenue) that would come with it. So ordered Michael to call every team in the majors to gauge their interest in Williams.
“We were in a meeting and George told Stick that it was time to move Bernie,” Showalter said. “He said, ‘You guys messed up and he’s not what you think he’s going to be.’ Then George got up and left.”
Showalter looked at Michael worriedly, asking: “What are we going to do? You’re not going to move this guy, are you?”
Michael shook his head. “No, I’m not doing that.”
What Michael did do the next day was call the general manager of every other major league team and have a conversation. Then he went to Steinbrenner and informed him that he had talked to every team and nobody expressed an interest in Bernie.
“Of course,” Showalter said with a laugh, “what Stick didn’t say was that he never brought Bernie’s name up. And neither did any other team.
“But George’s reaction was ‘See, I told you nobody likes him. Now we’re stuck with him.’
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