Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Also lost when baseball did not finish the 1994 season was the stirring opportunity to see whether Ken Griffey Jr. or Matt Williams could surpass Roger Maris’s season record of 61 home runs. Tony Gwynn’s batting average was forever stuck at .394, robbed of the chance to become the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1941.

  The 1994 season could have been one of the most distinctive, thrilling seasons in the final flourishing years of baseball’s prosperous twentieth century. Instead, it nearly ruined the game. It created a cloud of resentment that hung over every baseball constituency for years. It left baseball wounded and lurching toward an uncertain future.

  Staggering more than most were the revived New York Yankees, who spent the next several months trying to convince themselves that 1994 had been a success when it had ended in such utter disappointment.

  24

  Really Bad Hangover

  THE BAD NEWS kept coming for baseball when team owners implemented a cap on players’ salaries on December 22, 1994. The new system was meant to curb the spending of teams with the highest revenues by imposing a limit on their player payroll. That would, in theory at least, level the playing field for smaller-market teams with more meager earnings and TV contract income.

  The players’ union filed a protest with the National Labor Relations Board, citing unfair labor practices.

  By January, with nothing resolved in the strike and no meaningful negotiations scheduled, the owners also announced that they would open spring training camps in a month using replacement players in exhibition games. If needed, these baseball substitutes would open the regular season on April 2.

  That did not improve the players’ mood. For those who had remained in New York, neither did a rough, snowy and cold winter in the region.

  “Depressing,” recalled Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill. “As if I needed to be any more depressed.”

  To raise his spirits one day in late January, O’Neill drove from his suburban home north of the Bronx to visit Yankee Stadium. “I felt worse,” O’Neill said. “The stadium was cold, barren, lifeless.”

  Don Mattingly had dropped by to see his normal place of work that winter. “I swung by Yankee Stadium and hated being reminded that there was no World Series and that we didn’t know when we’d play again,” said Mattingly, who was in New York to watch his wife, Kim, run in the New York City Marathon.

  Buck Showalter had also been in the Bronx. After he had been named the 1994 AL Manager of the Year, the Yankees had feted him in a stadium news conference. He was the first Yankee manager to win the award since one of his mentors, Billy Martin, won in 1976.

  When the strike began in August, Showalter had requested that clubhouse manager Nick Priore leave his office as it was when he left after the last game of the 1994 season. It made him feel like he might be gone only a short time. That did not prove to be true, and when Showalter returned to New York to receive his award, he descended the single flight of stairs to enter the Yankees’ clubhouse under the first-base stands.

  In his office, he found the tentative lineup card he had filled out for the next day’s game on August 12, a contest never played. He found injury updates and advance scouting reports. Everything was in exactly the same place and undisturbed, except for a layer of dust.

  “I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone,” Showalter said. “I started packing some things up, but I stopped. It felt too much like packing up someone’s belongings after they had died.”

  Spring training in 1995 opened with a hodgepodge of ex–college players and castoffs from the minor leagues, who were paid $5,000 for reporting and were offered another $5,000 if they made an opening-day roster.

  “It was not real baseball, but if you were part of management, it was what the owners ordered,” Gene Michael recalled. “It was a shame but it was part of the bargaining. The owners didn’t want to say they had no plan come April.”

  Baltimore owner Peter Angelos, who had made a career as a lawyer for union causes, vehemently insisted that his Orioles would never use replacement players and eventually canceled the entire spring training schedule. Detroit manager Sparky Anderson refused to manage the substitute players and was put on an involuntary leave of absence. Toronto manager Cito Gaston found himself in a similar limbo.

  The players’ union announced it would refuse to settle the strike if replacements were to play regular-season games. In Canada, various labor boards ruled that according to existing labor laws, replacements would be prohibited on baseball diamonds in Toronto and Montreal.

  At the Yankees’ spring training complex in Fort Lauderdale, the scene was chaotic and acrimonious. To buttress their numbers in camp, the Yankees summoned dozens of minor league players to the big league camp. Normally, they would have remained at the team’s minor league spring training headquarters in Tampa. But early on, three of the minor leaguers refused to take the field for drills with the replacement players. The Yankees sent the trio home and suggested they were violating their contracts because they were not yet part of the players’ union, which was reserved for major league players.

  Interestingly, the Yankees’ best and most promising minor leaguer, Derek Jeter, was not invited to the big league camp. The Yankees clearly did not want Jeter anywhere near the replacements. The strike, the team knew, would end eventually. They didn’t want their top prospect smeared or sullied by any inference that he had crossed a picket line (even if the players were not actually walking a picket line outside the spring training complexes).

  As it turned out, Jeter wouldn’t have shown up in the big league camp under any circumstances. It was part of Jeter’s aura, as well as a telling measure of his unshakable belief that he would soon be a major league player, that he viewed the existing strike as his struggle, too.

  Approached by reporters at the Tampa minor league spring training facility, Jeter said: “I wouldn’t go [to Fort Lauderdale] no matter what. That’s an easy question, easy answer. If someone is out there striking for me, it would be like stabbing them in the back if I played. I wouldn’t do that.

  “I didn’t consult anybody; I’m just not going to do it.”

  In retrospect, it is easy to understand Jeter’s confidence. But at the time, there were still lingering doubts about him in some quarters of the Yankee hierarchy. Just a month earlier, the team had signed the veteran, former Toronto shortstop Tony Fernández to a two-year contract.

  Jeter’s response? “They had to sign somebody,” he said with no edge to his voice. “I don’t mean that with disrespect. But to cover themselves they had to sign someone with major league experience. I don’t look at it as, ‘Oh, my God, Tony Fernández is here.’”

  It was suggested to Jeter that perhaps Fernández might impede his path to Yankee Stadium.

  “You mean, like a two-year roadblock?” Jeter asked.

  Yeah, or something like that.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re going to play whoever can help them win a championship.”

  Jeter was twenty years old.

  By early March, there was some movement in the strike negotiations. The owners were willing to consider the payroll tax proposal the players had put on the table in August of the previous summer. Except the owners wanted the penalty—now being called a luxury tax—to be greater on high-revenue teams, perhaps as much as 30 percent.

  The players’ union balked but agreed to compromise. The door to a settlement was at least open.

  The owners were also facing even more devastating losses if the 1995 season did not begin in April. Baseball’s fan base, already fed up, was turning from sullen to mutinous, a perilous tipping point.

  About a week before the regular season was to begin, the players agreed to return to work if their unfair labor practices complaint was upheld by a judge of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

  That judge turned out to be Sonia Sotomayor, the future Supreme Court justice. On March 31, Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction
against the owners, siding with the players. Two days later, Sotomayor’s decision received the support of a key appeals court panel. The ruling gave the players important leverage, which made a return to work less risky.

  It also led the players to make a new offer: They would end the strike if they could come back under the terms of the old collective bargaining agreement that had been in place during the 1994 season. It meant that there would be no new accord between the players and owners, but the games would go on while negotiations continued.

  The owners were expected to agree, though it would be a punishing setback for them. They would reap none of the financial gains they had sought throughout the impasse. A salary cap, the hot-button issue that had caused the 234-day strike, would not be part of baseball’s future.

  Nonetheless, on April 2, the day before the season was set to start with replacement players, the owners surrendered.

  The players did not celebrate. Everyone knew there had been no winners. The sense of loss spread evenly throughout the baseball community. “The fans especially were bitter—pissed off might be a better way to phrase it,” Hal Steinbrenner said decades later. “I think there was some of that everywhere. It lingered; it was there.”

  Buck Showalter welcomed many of his former players in Fort Lauderdale, but there were new faces, too. The Montreal Expos had barely survived the strike financially, and with the strike over, they commenced a fire sale, auctioning off all of their best players.

  The Yankees acquired the Expos bullpen closer John Wetteland, who had saved 25 games during the previous, shortened season with a 2.83 ERA. Wetteland came to New York primarily for cash—and one low-level minor league prospect.

  Montreal general manager Kevin Malone said his team couldn’t afford to keep Wetteland, whom he praised effusively. “John is the best closer in the business,” he said. “People on the Yankees and in the city of New York will fall in love with him. The Yankees will feel they’ve won any game he comes into. I mean that.”

  The team’s starting rotation also had the former Cy Young Award winner Jack McDowell, whom the Chicago White Sox sent to the Yankees for minor leaguer Lyle Mouton, a decent outfielder who had no future in a Yankees organization already crowded with top young outfielders. “McDowell is the kind of experienced pitcher who helps keep things calm,” Gene Michael said. “When things get tight in big games—and hopefully we’ll have a bunch of them—he’ll be a steadying force. You trade for him for the now, and for the late-season games we need to win, too.”

  In the Yankees’ spring camp, there was almost no competition for starting jobs. The lone exception was in the starting rotation, where Showalter had officially not settled on a fifth starter, even if the consensus was that Sterling Hitchcock was the most obvious, tested choice.

  Not surprisingly, Andy Pettitte did not agree with that sentiment. “I felt like I had shown enough to get my shot,” he recalled years later. “I was like, ‘Come on, give me a chance. You’ll see.’ Besides, I now had a wife and a five-month-old son. I needed that big league money.”

  Pettitte’s pleading—and conspicuous poise on the mound—earned him a roster spot, though not initially in the starting rotation. He began the year in the bullpen. Still, the baseball journey of the pudgy prospect from outside Houston—a player whom the determined scout Joe Robison had to beg Yankees executive Bill Livesey to watch six years earlier—had passed a pivotal milepost. Pettitte would pitch only two more minor league games in his career (not counting a few injury rehabilitation assignments much later in his career).

  He was a big leaguer now.

  His former minor league teammates—Jeter, Posada and Rivera—each began 1995 back in AAA Columbus. And they belonged there.

  Posada was struggling to come back from his badly broken left leg and ankle, which throughout the spring and summer of 1995 remained stiff and limited his mobility. Posada was again the Columbus starting catcher but struggled to find his old form.

  Rivera, meanwhile, was expected to be a stalwart of the Columbus starting rotation. He had put on a few pounds, and since his English had improved dramatically, his calm, confident countenance had made him a quiet leader of the Columbus team. He was also now among Jeter’s best friends.

  Jeter was biding his time in the Class AAA International League. He was a consistent, graceful fielding machine in the middle of the infield, a shortstop who made the spectacular play and the routine one with equal aplomb. In the batter’s box he was feared by opposing pitchers, a hitter who would turn on an inside pitch to rip doubles down the left-field line. But he was cagey, too, and even more likely to use his inside-out swing to scorch a rope into right field—and occasionally over the right-field fence.

  At the start of the Columbus season, Jeter had a 17-game hitting streak, a period in which he batted .440. “By 1995, if we didn’t know before, we knew for sure that at least one of our number one picks was going to make it big,” Michael recalled. “Jeter definitely helped make up for the bad feelings we were all still feeling about what happened to Brien Taylor.”

  The 1995 major league season was set to begin on April 26. Two days earlier, George Steinbrenner was asked about the contracts of Gene Michael and Buck Showalter, both of which were set to expire at the end of the season.

  “No, I’m not expecting to extend either of their contracts,” Steinbrenner said. “That’s not necessary. They each know what I think of them. They did great work last season.”

  The Yankees’ owner was asked why he wouldn’t prolong the two contracts if Michael and Showalter had performed so well. Why risk losing either at the end of the season?

  “Gene and I have been through this before—many times, in fact—so I’m not going to change that dynamic,” Steinbrenner answered of Michael’s status.

  And what about the thirty-eight-year-old Showalter?

  “Pressure is part of this game and Buck understands that,” Steinbrenner said. “He’ll be more of a man as he gets older because he’s able to understand pressure and knows how to operate under it.”

  The comment irked Showalter. But he didn’t bite. Steinbrenner’s words were an example of the kind of pressure the owner believed he needed to exert on his charges. He wanted to see how Showalter would react.

  Showalter did not respond. Yes, he knew a manager with the benefit of an extended contract held more sway in the clubhouse. He knew that if the team had a loss of confidence—from a long losing streak or a spate of injuries—players would begin to look inward and feel even less secure because the manager might be gone soon. A manager without a contract for the next season could have trouble wielding his authority. It could be a dangerous brew in the quirky cauldron of a major league clubhouse.

  If it spelled trouble, Showalter chose to feign contentment. At times, it wasn’t even a ploy.

  “I had already been through about eight years of one-year contracts as a nobody minor league manager and coach,” Showalter said twenty years later. “Sure, a contract extension would have been nice. But, you know, I wasn’t owed anything. My father always told me that you can be fired any day if you haven’t done the job.”

  Showalter added: “It was always Mr. Steinbrenner’s way to keep you on edge.”

  As for Michael, he said in 2017 that he was not fixated on a new contract in 1995. “Nah, I was too preoccupied with making sure we showed everyone that our success in 1994 was the real thing—something we earned and deserved,” he said. “I had the attitude that we had to defend the title, even if we never actually won it.”

  The first game of the 1995 season was held in Miami, where the Marlins hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers. The opening-day custom then, as it is now, was for the uniformed members of both teams to be introduced on the infield foul lines before the first pitch.

  The majority of the 42,125 fans at Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium responded to the sight of the players with robust, sustained and enthusiastic booing.

  Around the country, the reaction was much the
same, and in some cases far more antagonistic.

  At the New York Mets home opener at Shea Stadium, three fans wearing T-shirts inscribed Greed dashed onto the field and confronted the infielders, tossing more than a hundred $1 bills at their feet. The crowd erupted in cheers.

  In Detroit, near the start of a game, fans booed and hurled beer bottles and cans and other debris, including a car’s hubcap, at the players on the Tiger Stadium field, causing a twelve-minute delay. There was a similar demonstration in Pittsburgh, where fans littered the field with trash, food and large plastic containers of beer that were still full. In Cincinnati, someone paid for an airplane to fly over Riverfront Stadium dragging a banner that read, Owners & Players: To hell with all of you!

  The atmosphere was toxic in myriad ways. The major league umpires were without a labor contract and on strike. Groups of them picketed outside major league stadiums, even as the games went on with minor league umpires as substitutes.

  In an oddity of allegiance, many fans resented the replacement umpires as well. Players and managers complained about their competence.

  “The whole mood during that early part of the 1995 season was sour,” said Yankees infielder Pat Kelly. “We were happy to be back, but all around us, people weren’t happy.”

  The Yankees home opener was attended by 50,245 people, but that was about 8,000 short of a sellout. Fans along the third-base line held aloft two signs. One read, R.I.P. Baseball 1869–1994. Another read, You owe ME money.

  Robert Liebowitz, thirty-five, a Brooklyn playwright, stood outside Yankee Stadium on the home plate side, next to the eight-story replica of a baseball bat that graced the plaza adjacent to the ballpark. He held a placard: There are times in one’s life to draw a line in the sand. Approached by a reporter, Liebowitz said: “I’ve been a Yankees fan since the days of Jake Gibbs (a 1960s Yankees catcher). But I’m not going in there, inside the stadium, today. As soon as I hear them make the first pitch, I’m getting on the subway and going home.”