Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  He did not pitch in 1999, and the Cleveland Indians gave him a look at Class A ball in 2000, but he lasted less than three innings in five relief outings and gave up 11 runs. It was his last time on a professional mound. He was twenty-eight.

  Taylor went back to Beaufort and lived on Brien Taylor Lane, the bumpy road to his house that had been renamed for him. After a year, he moved to the Raleigh area and worked as a truck driver and at a beer distributorship.

  He moved from town to town for a few years and was involved in a series of relationships that produced five children. By 2006, he had moved back to Beaufort, where his father helped him get a job as a bricklayer, earning about $900 a month. He was often seen downtown playing pool at the Royal James Café.

  He kept to himself, and when newspaper reporters periodically made the sojourn to Beaufort to revive the story of the baseball phenom who wrecked his magic arm in a clumsy, inconsequential fistfight, Taylor would not talk to them. “We’re private people now,” his mother, Bettie, said. “Brien is minding his own business.”

  But in March 2012, police arrived at the home on Brien Taylor Lane and took him away in handcuffs. He was indicted on trafficking charges after undercover agents had purchased a large quantity of cocaine and crack cocaine over several months. Taylor pled guilty.

  At his sentencing, he said: “I made poor decisions. I just want to say I’m sorry for all the harm I caused to individuals and their families. I’m sorry to my children for letting them down.”

  US District Judge Louise Flanagan, who presided over the case, remarked in court that Taylor “seemed completely unprepared for a life after baseball.”

  In sentencing Taylor to thirty-eight months in federal prison, Flanagan also admonished him: “You were viewed by many in your community as a hero because of your baseball career. A hero dealing drugs is a very dangerous person.”

  He served roughly two years in jail in Grantsboro, North Carolina.

  The news of Taylor’s fate filtered back to the Yankees executives who had made him the top pick of the 1991 draft and rewarded him with a record contract for a high school baseball player. More than a quarter century later, they still seem shaken by the turn of events.

  “So sad,” Michael said. “And Brien was a good kid.”

  Said Lukevics: “I remember watching him in Beaufort. It’s still the most phenomenal performance I’ve seen by a high school pitcher.”

  Even Derek Jeter, Taylor’s old minor league teammate, dropped his head to his chest when asked about Taylor in 2013. “Brien was a shy, happy-go-lucky country boy,” Jeter said. “It just shows how one little decision in life . . .”

  Jeter paused.

  “Sometimes one thing goes right, one thing goes wrong, and it can change the course of a career,” he said. “Unfortunately, for him—and for us.”

  Jeter, along with Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada, will forever be known as the Yankees’ Core Four, players acquired by the team from 1990 to 1992 who led the franchise to four World Series championships from 1996 to 2000. But the plan was for Brien Taylor, drafted in 1991, to join them. It might have been called baseball’s Fab Five.

  Bill Livesey feels bad not just for Taylor and the Yankees. “I think the game of baseball got cheated,” he said. “He was that special.”

  Reminded of Brien Taylor’s drug offenses, Livesey had another thought: “Sometimes unfulfilled potential might be the greatest burden.”

  The 1990 Yankees. Their 67-95 record was the team’s worst since 1913.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Bill Livesey, longtime scouting director, at an amateur draft meeting in the 1980s. Livesey was a pivotal figure in rebuilding the Yankees’ mid-1990s roster.

  Photo courtesy of Bill Livesey

  Yankee Stadium attendance plummeted in the early nineties. Some games drew only a few hundred fans.

  AP Photo / Susan Ragan

  George Steinbrenner and his star slugger Dave Winfield in better days. The two feuded for decades.

  Barton Silverman / New York Times / Redux

  Howie Spira cashed a check for $40,000 from George Steinbrenner, allegedly for supplying “dirt” on Dave Winfield, a transaction that led to Steinbrenner’s banishment from baseball.

  Getty Images / New York Daily News Archive

  Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, left, banished Steinbrenner from baseball. Bud Selig, right, Vincent’s eventual successor, presided over the 1994 strike that canceled the World Series.

  AP Photo / Frankie Ziths

  In 1990, fans at Yankee Stadium blamed Steinbrenner for the team’s woes.

  AP Photo / Ron Frehn

  Reinstated in 1993, Steinbrenner at first rarely interfered with manager Buck Showalter.

  Larry C. Morris / New York Times / Redux

  Gene “Stick” Michael as a Yankee infielder in the 1960s.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Michael as the Yankees’ general manager, outside Yankee Stadium in the early 1990s.

  John Sotomayor / New York Times / Redux

  Don Mattingly and manager Stump Merrill clashed in 1991 when Mattingly’s hair grew over his collar.

  Getty Images / Focus on Sport

  Third-base coach Willie Randolph, left, catcher/left fielder Jim Leyritz, middle, and Don Mattingly in 1994 when the Yankees had the best record in the American League.

  Getty Images / New York Post Archives

  Jack McDowell’s famous 1995 salute to the home fans. Another headline read, “The Yankee Flipper.”

  Getty Images / New York Daily News Archive

  In an overhaul of the Yankees culture, Buck Showalter, here with son Nathan, insisted that the families of players be welcomed behind the scenes at Yankee Stadium.

  Photo courtesy of Angela Showalter

  Michael and Showalter remained close friends until Michael’s death in 2017.

  Photo courtesy of Angela Showalter

  Bernie Williams expected to pursue a career in music or medicine. Instead, he signed with the Yankees on his eighteenth birthday in 1985.

  Getty Images / Sporting News

  Mariano Rivera as a 1995 Yankee rookie. Five years earlier, he was signed for $2,000.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Jorge Posada as a rookie in 1995. Posada came to the team as a second baseman, but like other infielders the Yankees converted him to a catcher.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Andy Pettitte’s rookie photo in 1995. An intrepid Yankees scout took a chance on Pettitte when few others would.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Derek Jeter as a rookie in 1996. Four years earlier, the Yankees were shocked that Jeter was still available when they picked sixth in the amateur draft.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  The view from just beyond Derek Jeter’s backyard onto his high school diamond in Kalamazoo, Michigan. From this vantage point, scouts could observe the young Jeter without being noticed.

  Photo courtesy of Joyce Pennington

  Pettitte won 149 regular-season games, and 13 in the postseason, for the Yankees from 1995 to 2003.

  Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  The 1996 Yankees celebrate the team’s first World Series championship in fifteen years.

  Getty Images / Timothy A. Clary / Stringer

  Part Three

  Rebirth

  20

  A Spark

  A DAY BEFORE the 1994 season was to begin, George Steinbrenner praised Buck Showalter: “He’s done the finest job I’ve seen in my twenty years in baseball.”

  Then Steinbrenner added an important caveat: “Of course, now Showalter
has a team with the highest payroll in baseball, and there’s more pressure on the manager than before. He’s done a great job but he can’t fall back.

  “He’s in a tough spot. It’s harder to do something well two seasons in a row.”

  Twelve games into the season, the Yankees had won only half of their games. Some of the team’s biggest hitting threats, like Mattingly, Bernie Williams and Mike Stanley, were batting about .200 or less. The eight beat writers traveling with the team, representing newspapers from Newark to Hartford, began leaving daily messages with Steinbrenner’s Tampa office. The writers were waiting for the Yankees’ mercurial owner to return their calls, fuming with concerns and condemnations.

  It was a newspaper writer’s ploy that had worked since 1976. Among the writers, it was likened to putting quarters into a jukebox, where once you push the buttons, a voice will likely sing. In this case, the voice would be that of George M. Steinbrenner, whom the Yankees writers in the 1980s began calling “Mr. Tunes.”

  But this time Steinbrenner did not take the bait. Since his return from baseball exile, Gene Michael had been begging him to only make his complaints directly to the general manager. “The more he left the press out of it, the better,” Michael said.

  He added with a snicker: “It certainly wasn’t better for me. But it was better for the team.”

  In 1994, Steinbrenner was not playing Mr. Tunes.

  Michael, who earlier that year had received a new contract that doubled his salary, had succeeded—for the most part—in diffusing a dangerous triangle of power and influence that had distracted many of the Yankees teams since the 1970s. It worked like this:

  There was Steinbrenner, there were the newspaper reporters, and there were the team’s players, manager and/or general manager.

  If Steinbrenner was unhappy with a player’s performance, or if he was flummoxed by a game strategy or a managerial decision—he was particularly obsessed with the batting order—he was more than proficient at letting the manager and general manager know of his displeasure. But he was so persistent in making his views known that virtually every Yankees manager or general manager would regularly ignore Steinbrenner’s rants. It was the only way to maintain any equilibrium.

  But when Steinbrenner’s complaints to his manager or general manager did not effect the change he sought, eventually Steinbrenner would grow frustrated enough to go to the press, speaking either on or off the record, so long as his message still got into print. Steinbrenner seemed to enjoy these phone calls to reporters, because they never argued or disagreed with him. They only took notes.

  And those calls would produce a story or stories, which would mean that the manager, general manager or a player—or all three—would end up being grilled before a game about the stinging criticism levied by the Yankees’ owner. Sometimes the player, manager or general manager—or all three—would fire back at the noisy owner. And then Steinbrenner might return the fire, usually through the press (although by 1994, New York had a 24-hour sports-talk radio station as well).

  Obviously, it was a destructive cycle. Hence Steinbrenner’s 19 managerial changes before the hiring of Showalter.

  But by 1994, things had changed. Showalter, for instance, was closing in on the record for most consecutive days as a Yankees manager under Steinbrenner. It helped that Steinbrenner had been banished, but after his return, Showalter gave Gene Michael most of the credit for keeping a semblance of normalcy.

  “Stick took a lot of the heat and he was great about that,” Showalter said. “Most of the time, he’d never even tell me about it. George would say this or that and Stick would just listen. When he was in New York, George also liked to have meetings in his stadium office hours before a home game. He’d tell Stick he wanted me up there, and Stick would say I wasn’t available. Actually, I’d never even know George wanted a meeting.

  “Sometimes Stick would call me and say, ‘OK, George wants a meeting with you and the coaches. So this time you have to come up here to his office. But don’t bring the coaches.’ And I would do that, keeping the coaches out of the fire. And then, rarely, he’d say, ‘OK, this time you do have to bring the coaches.’ But for the most part, he tried to shield as many people as he could.”

  Michael adopted this approach after decades as a player, scout, adviser, general manager and manager for Steinbrenner. “Most of all, I had been a manager for many years, for George and elsewhere,” said Michael, who was the Chicago Cubs’ skipper in 1986–87. “You’re pretty damned busy. You’re trying to win games and trying to juggle a lineup. You’re worrying about your starting rotation and the scouting reports on the opposing teams. You’ve got to talk to the press before the game.

  “You don’t have time to defend every move you make to the owner. And even if you do have to do that, it causes so much stress the players see it in your eyes or in your mood around them. And that affects team morale—it puts everyone on edge. It can ruin the flow of a season. So I worked as hard as I could to be the buffer. And frankly, George trusted me on baseball matters.”

  Michael also believed that Steinbrenner’s time away from the game, and the gains the franchise made in his absence, had altered the dynamic between the owner and his chief baseball executives. “We had credibility by 1994,” Michael said. “We had rebuilt things. I remember, after he came back from his sabbatical, he said to me, ‘While I was away, you guys have messed things up.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really, so things were going well when you left in 1990?’

  “And he said, ‘Yeah, for the most part.’ And I said, ‘Let me ask you something, George. If things were going so well in 1990, how come we had the number one pick in the amateur draft the next year? Because that goes to the team with the worst record in all of baseball.’

  “He laughed and said, ‘Oh, you’re a wise guy.’ But he got the point. He backed off.”

  Showalter and Michael had developed a close partnership, a tandem of astute, incisive baseball minds. Both had been good, productive players but not stars, and both had been studying the game faithfully since they were teenagers.

  “Stick was not only smart, he was as good an ally as a manager could have,” Showalter said. “I would be stewing in my office ninety minutes after a tough loss, rewatching a tape of the game, and Stick would come down and try to push me out of the building. He’d say, ‘Get in the car and drive home.’”

  The Showalter family was then living in the leafy suburb of Rye, New York, north of the Bronx.

  “So then I’d be driving up I-95, and he’d call again and say, ‘How’s the traffic?’” Showalter said. “And we’d talk about traffic or something to get my mind off the game. And finally he’d say, ‘You can’t win every game, Buck. If you win 60 percent in baseball you’re considered a fucking genius. Now go home and kiss your wife and kids goodnight.’”

  Angela Showalter saw the pressure building on her husband—it was in his eyes, she said—although she insisted he spent the hours at their home happily playing with the couple’s children. “Buck was always totally devoted to his job—that was a given,” she said. “But he could see the big picture. And in 1994, I really think he knew the Yankees were about to get pretty good.”

  After a 6-6 start to the 1994 season, the Yankees won 27 of their next 37 games. They moved into first place on May 7 and never left. By mid-June, they had the best record in the American League, which was newly realigned into three divisions. Their record was 38-25, a winning percentage of more than 60 percent. Managerial-genius territory.

  The new third-base coach, Willie Randolph, had been skeptical in spring training of what the 1994 team could accomplish. He was largely an outsider to the coaching staff and wasn’t versed in their methods.

  “I figured we’d be competitive, but I didn’t really get a feel for the team until the season started and we started to jell,” Randolph said. “Then I said to myself, ‘Wow, we’ve got an actual squad here, man.’ We’ve got some guys that are stepping up and doing some nice things.
Everyone seemed to have a nice feel for each other. The young players on the team seemed to understand the Yankee Way. It was the way we played. And they were tough enough to understand their responsibilities.”

  There was little going wrong for the Yankees. Paul O’Neill was batting an astounding .462. Boggs was hovering around .350 and had shown surprising power, having clubbed eight home runs. Mattingly, who was hitting .184 in mid-April, had raised his batting average to .323. Backup catcher and sometime outfielder/designated hitter Jim Leyritz already had 30 RBI and 10 homers.

  In the starting rotation, Jimmy Key was 9-1, Scott Kamieniecki was 5-1 and Jim Abbott was 6-2. The trio of Bob Wickman, Steve Howe and Xavier Hernandez, an off-season acquisition, handled the late-inning bullpen situations.

  Most notably, the Yankees enjoyed playing with each other. The culture creators had infused the team with a harmony of effort, purpose, fun and accomplishment. The clubhouse was alive and exuberant.

  Luis Polonia, the disgraced outfielder discarded by the 1990 Yankees, returned to the team in 1994 as a pesky leadoff hitter (and was hitting .310 in mid-June). Polonia saw stark differences from his last time in Yankee pinstripes. “There’s no comparison to what it was like when I was here before,” he said. “That wasn’t even a team then. It was a bunch of guys worried about numbers and trying to get their money. Guys rooted for their teammates to screw up so they’d get a chance to play.”