Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Nearby, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was trying to preach conciliation. “The strike was sort of like a lovers’ feud,” he said. “It’s all over now.”

  Maybe. It seemed like the fans, and by association, even the players, were still holding a grudge.

  “It was a strange situation,” Mattingly said. “I’m not sure anyone knew what to make of what was going on.”

  The Yankees won the opener behind Jimmy Key, whose surgically repaired arm had been a concern. Wetteland saved the game, and Bernie Williams and Danny Tartabull hit home runs.

  McDowell won his inaugural Yankees start two days later (with Wetteland getting a second save).

  The same day, the Yankees’ number one pick from 1994, outfielder/first baseman Brian Buchanan, who was considered the premier power hitter of that year’s draft, tore two ligaments in his left ankle at Class A Greensboro when his foot slipped as he stepped on first base running out a ground ball.

  Buchanan was finished for the season and never played for the Yankees.

  On May 5, in the top of the second inning of a game against Milwaukee, Showalter’s team lost its number four starter, Scott Kamieniecki, who felt something come loose in his elbow. In the bottom of the inning, Don Mattingly pulled up lame with a hamstring injury as he ran out a double.

  One day later, Paul O’Neill, who was hitting .413, sprained his right thumb diving for a fly ball in the outfield. The same day, Wade Boggs left the lineup with a sore back after an awkward play at third base. A few days later, Yankees doctors discovered that Jack McDowell might have strained the latissimus dorsi muscle—a lat, for short—in his rib cage.

  “We were all paying the price for a shortened spring training, which was almost like no spring training at all for a pitcher,” McDowell said in an interview more than twenty years later. “All the starting pitchers especially, who need time to develop the muscle strength to last a hundred or more pitches, were in a precarious position.”

  On May 20, Key was placed on the 15-day disabled list with inflammation in the rotator cuff of his left shoulder. That same day, Mattingly returned from his hamstring injury but then sustained back spasms so debilitating, he left the field gingerly after a mighty swing and miss at a hanging curve ball. He was placed on the disabled list as well. Team doctors advised him that he had to be cautious with his balky back.

  Mattingly had been trying to avoid violently pulling pitches toward right field for several seasons—the torque was too much for the worsening back disk problem that had first flared in the late eighties. But occasionally, he could not help himself. “I was batting in the middle of the order,” he said years later. “I was trying to drive in runs.”

  But a new reality was setting in one month into the truncated 1995 season. Mattingly’s days as a power hitter, which had been a distant image in the rearview mirror for about five years, were now officially, emphatically, all but over. If Mattingly wanted to stay an active player, he had to be content to slice base hits to left and center field and pull pitches to right field only occasionally. And it was downright dangerous to his health to go to home plate thinking about a home run.

  The Yankees left New York on May 22 for an eleven-day, nine-game West Coast swing through Anaheim, Oakland and Seattle—in that order. It would prove to be an action-packed trip that included the major league debuts of Jeter and Rivera and Pettitte’s first major league start. Along the way, the Yankees were nearly no-hit twice, almost won a game on a no-hitter, were embroiled in a ten-minute near brawl and watched as one of their catchers was beaned by a 98-mile-an-hour fastball.

  They also lost eight of the nine games. By the time they returned to Yankee Stadium, the feel-good karma of the magical 1994 season had been extinguished. Doused was the soul and spirit of that journey, and in its place was something new and wholly dispiriting.

  For starters, the 1995 Yankees were a last-place team and seven games out of first place.

  What had happened?

  “When you look back at it, I think there was still a lot of hidden, unconscious anger about how the 1994 season had ended,” Willie Randolph, the third-base coach, said. “It was like a really bad hangover. We hadn’t put away 1994 yet and it really knocked us off our axis.

  “It’s harder than you might think when you get that close to winning a pennant or a World Series—so close that you can taste it—and then someone takes it away from you. And you worked so hard to get there and then you don’t even get to play for it. You don’t win it or lose it. You slink away in shock and then you take seven or eight months off, and when you come back they say to you, ‘OK, just do it again.’

  “Well, it’s not that easy. We had to start over and get that feel back from 1994. We had to find the old rhythm. But there was resentment still there. There was a malaise. And it was just going bad for us. Really bad.”

  25

  Limbo

  ON MAY 23, 1995, against the California Angels, the inaugural day of the Yankees’ first major road trip of the season, Mariano Rivera walked to the pitcher’s mound of a big league park for the first time. It was only his second time inside any major league stadium. The first was two days earlier, when he sat on the bench at Yankee Stadium.

  Rivera had been having a good year at Columbus, although his right shoulder had been aching for more than a month. It was diagnosed as normal soreness, the kind of thing that pitchers must endure. But Rivera felt the discomfort was inhibiting his fastball and cutter and limiting the velocity on those pitches to 87 or 88 miles an hour when he had been used to throwing about two or three miles an hour faster.

  Rivera had been given Yankees jersey number 42, something he considered a step up, since he had worn 58 in spring training. Rivera started the game with a largely uneventful first two innings. He did give up two hits but managed to escape without the Angels scoring a run.

  In the third inning, California scratched out two runs on three hits, and in the bottom of the fourth, Rivera quickly gave up back-to-back singles. California center fielder Jim Edmonds then swatted at a so-so fastball that hung over the middle of the plate, launching it over the right-field fence.

  Rivera exited with an ignominious pitching line: 3⅓ innings pitched, 8 hits, 5 earned runs, 3 walks and 5 strikeouts. His record fell to 0-1 when the Yankees lost, 10–0. California starter Chuck Finley didn’t give up a hit until the sixth inning and yielded just one single and a triple in nine innings. “I wished I had done better,” Rivera said when asked to recall his first outing years later. “But I felt like I got some batters out with good pitches. I wasn’t overly discouraged.”

  The next night, the Yankees’ Jack McDowell took a no-hitter and a 1–0 lead into the eighth inning. California’s Chili Davis broke up the no-hitter and soon after scored to tie the game. Another hit put the Angels ahead, and an error by Bernie Williams helped make the game 3–1, which became the final score.

  “Yeah, I pitched well for most of the game but that’s not what I’m paid for, am I?” McDowell said afterward. “I’m paid to win games.”

  The Angels completed the three-game sweep with a 15–2 thrashing the next day. The Yankees moved up the coast to Oakland, where their losing streak continued when Sterling Hitchcock lost a 3–2 lead in the seventh inning on a two-run homer by Athletics catcher Terry Steinbach.

  The next game was Andy Pettitte’s chance to show, for the first time in the big leagues, what he could do as a starter.

  Pettitte had good command of all his pitches but trailed 2–0 after two innings, with both runs unearned because of an error by shortstop Randy Velarde. When Oakland’s Rubén Sierra, who would be a Yankee in another few weeks, homered in the sixth inning for a 3–0 lead, Pettitte’s night was over.

  Meanwhile, the Yankees were being held hitless again. Finally, in the sixth inning, there was a solitary single for the visiting team, and the Athletics starter Steve Ontiveros closed a one-hit, 3–0 shutout. Pettitte’s line was reasonable if uneven: 5⅓ innings pitched, 7 hits, 1 earn
ed run, 2 walks and 3 strikeouts.

  “Not bad, not good enough” is how Pettitte evaluated the start more than twenty years later.

  Rivera earned his first victory the next afternoon, on Memorial Day, protecting a 4–1 lead into the sixth inning after home runs by O’Neill and Williams.

  Earlier that day, the Columbus manager, Bill Evers, woke Derek Jeter with a 6 a.m. phone call. Evers told Jeter to get out of bed, because he would be at Jeter’s hotel room in ten minutes.

  Gene Michael might have spent the last few years insisting that the Yankees would keep their homegrown talent in the team’s system, but the Yankees’ long-standing reputation for impatient and impulsive moves lingered. It still had legs. The evidence?

  Jeter was scared. He figured he had been traded.

  “I thought I was done,” he said.

  Evers instead told him that Tony Fernández had pulled a muscle in his rib cage. Fernández’s replacement, Kevin Elster, was hitting just .118, and the team’s executives knew that Jeter was batting .354 at Columbus.

  Jeter was ordered to meet the Yankees in Seattle, where they would begin a three-game series the next night.

  The news spread to 2415 Cumberland Street in Kalamazoo, where Jeter’s father, Charles, left his home the next morning at 3 a.m. and arrived in Seattle in time to see his twenty-year-old son go 0-for-5. With two outs in the eleventh inning, Jeter struck out with his former minor league buddy Gerald Williams on third base as the go-ahead run. Seattle’s Rich Amaral led off the twelfth inning with a walk-off homer.

  In his second at-bat of the next night’s game, Jeter rapped a single to left for his first major league hit in yet another Yankees defeat.

  The Yankees couldn’t wait to get home and end their nightmare along the Pacific Ocean. But there was still one game left.

  Showalter decided to alter his personal routine in hopes of shaking his team out of its torpor. Instead of taking a taxi to the Kingdome, he walked the two miles from the team’s hotel to the stadium. Along the way, Showalter, though not impetuous by nature, unexpectedly walked into a barbershop. He had not planned to get a haircut. “I walked past it and after about ten yards decided to go back and open the door,” he said. “It looked like a nice place.”

  He struck up a conversation with the barber, who wanted to know if Showalter was in town for business.

  “Yeah, and it’s not going too well,” Showalter answered. “It’s driving me crazy, in fact.”

  The barber changed the subject to talk about the weather.

  His haircut finished, Showalter was leaving a tip on the way out the door when the barber said he hoped to see him on his next business trip to Seattle.

  Showalter chirped, “By the time I come back, I might not have any hair.”

  Seattle’s pitcher for that night’s game was Randy Johnson. It was the first start for the six-foot-ten Johnson against the 1995 Yankees, to whom he’d lost two of three games he started in 1994. His last appearance against the Yankees was a 9–3 thrashing inside the Seattle Kingdome.

  In addition to Johnson’s pursuit of redemption—as if the game needed any more weight for the Yankees—there was recent bad blood between the teams. The Yankees’ Steve Howe, a brash, trash-talking reliever who was unpopular with many opponents, had nailed Mariners shortstop Felix Fermin with a fastball in the elbow the previous night. The Yankees were so sure there would be retaliation, Paul O’Neill went to the plate the next inning of the game and told Seattle catcher Chad Kreuter, “Get it over with now; hit me in the leg and let’s be done with it.”

  But no Yankee was plunked. Some in the visiting clubhouse afterward thought the Mariners were taking it easy on an opponent they had already beaten twice. But Showalter was convinced otherwise. He predicted that Johnson, who had already led the major leagues in hit batsmen in two previous seasons, would throw at some Yankee in the series finale.

  With two outs in the sixth inning and the Yankees leading 5–3, Johnson came inside with a high fastball against Leyritz, whose batting stance had him leaning toward home plate as he began his swing.

  Leyritz threw up his left arm to deflect the thunderbolt hurtling toward him. The pitch ricocheted off his elbow and careened into his left cheek, just below the eye.

  As Leyritz lay on the ground, with trainers trying to get him to recite the alphabet or spell his name, the Yankees’ dugout emptied. Seattle manager Lou Piniella and his reserves charged from their bench to keep it an even fight. There were no punches thrown, but for several minutes there was plenty of pushing, shoving and cursing.

  Showalter was livid with home plate umpire Tim Tschida, whom he had warned about Johnson before the game. He forecast a high, inside pitch to a Yankee, and now that it had happened, he wanted Johnson ejected. Showalter stuck a finger in Tschida’s face to emphasize that point of view. Tschida didn’t throw Johnson out of the game, but he did give Showalter the thumb.

  That brought on a new level of histrionics by a slew of Yankees. When order was finally restored, Leyritz stayed in the game. Hitchcock, the Yankees’ starter, quickly gave up a host of hits, and suddenly Seattle was leading 7–5. The Yankees charged back in the seventh inning to take a 9–7 lead, but gave up that advantage as well on a long home run by Seattle first baseman Tino Martinez, who was becoming something of a Yankee killer.

  After the game, yet another heartbreaking loss, the Yankees vowed that their dispute with Randy Johnson was not over. “He better hope he doesn’t see me out anywhere,” Leyritz, sporting a golf-ball-size welt under his left eye, said as he packed for the red-eye flight home.

  Piniella, the former Yankees player and manager who was a veteran of many years of open feuding and fisticuffs between the Yankees and Boston Red Sox, seemed to relish the budding, hostile rivalry between his old team and the up-and-coming Mariners. “You can tell the Yankees that we’re not going anywhere,” he said.

  Piniella, whose team was beginning to take on his pugnacious approach to the game, added, “We’ve got some feisty guys, too.”

  The Yankees took their browbeaten, wounded team back east. And the hits to their psyche and lineup kept coming. After the game, the team announced that second baseman Pat Kelly would need arthroscopic surgery to repair torn ligaments in his left wrist. Kelly would become the sixth Yankee on the disabled list in a season that was not much more than a month old.

  Said Wade Boggs: “It’s MRI heaven around this place. MRI, surgery, rehab, ice, rehab—that’s us.”

  If the Yankees were physically ailing, when they returned home there was news that jabbed at their psyches as well. It was, in a way, the resurrection of the 1991 Mattingly haircut flap. Except this time it was about facial hair. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. The Yankees responded by losing the first two games of their ten-game homestand to fall into last place, nine games behind first-place Boston.

  George Steinbrenner’s policy about longish hair and facial hair had been in place since the mid-seventies. Hair could only tickle the collar, not obscure it, and the Yankees were expected to be clean-shaven (or close to it) except for mustaches.

  But then Jack McDowell came to the Yankees. Nicknamed “Black Jack,” McDowell was a six-foot-five, intimidating presence on the mound. Throughout his seven years with the White Sox, when he won a Cy Young and more than 61 percent of his decisions, he sported a full goatee that was almost like a Fu Manchu mustache.

  During one of his earliest days as a Yankee in spring training, McDowell asked to meet with Steinbrenner, and when he was summoned to the owner’s office, McDowell explained that part of the “Black Jack McDowell” persona was his goatee. He told Steinbrenner that he thought it added to his aura as a tall, hard-throwing pitcher. It was a psychological advantage he held over hitters and part of why he had averaged almost seven strikeouts per nine innings for most of his career.

  “I’m a better pitcher with the goatee,” McDowell said.

  And Steinbrenner, softened by his banishment, agreed to let
McDowell wear a goatee. “I figured that everyone would know it was just a one-time thing,” Steinbrenner later said.

  Except it wasn’t.

  By June and the Yankees’ disastrous West Coast road trip, Mattingly, Pat Kelly and John Wetteland had grown goatees. When the Yankees got back to New York, Showalter and Michael—who were close witnesses to the calamitous 1991 Mattingly haircut dustup—informed the players that the old facial hair policy had been reinstated.

  McDowell, Mattingly, Wetteland and anyone else halfway to a goatee or Fu Manchu had to shave.

  Times had changed. Steinbrenner’s dictum did not fracture the clubhouse or prompt the insubordination it did previously. Back in 1991, significantly, the order had not come directly from Steinbrenner, because officially he was forbidden from communicating with his players and manager. In 1995, there was no mistaking the origin of the newly reenforced facial hair policy.

  The players shaved. But they weren’t happy about it. “Slap-on-the-wrist bullshit,” Mattingly said. “They shouldn’t have relaxed it in the first place if they were going to take it away.”

  Steinbrenner, meanwhile, sounded like a school principal who had finally put his foot down after he realized the bad kids were leading the good kids astray. “I didn’t figure it would be player see, player do,” he said. “I thought they would understand what I was doing for Jack and realize it was a way to make him feel at home as a Yankee. But pretty soon all of them had one. I just got tired of it.

  “They’re all such good-looking guys, and the beards were making them start to look like not such good-looking guys.”

  McDowell was annoyed but sardonic. “I guess I wouldn’t get the full flavor of what the New York Yankees are without something like this coming up during the summer,” he said. “It’s great for the New York tabloids.”

  McDowell’s goatee was not as big a deal as Mattingly’s clipped locks four years earlier. It did not make for screaming headlines because McDowell simply didn’t move the needle that much.