Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  In the last days of spring training in 1996, the overarching question dominating the conversation among team executives was this: Should they trade Mariano Rivera for a veteran shortstop and send Derek Jeter to the minor leagues? Because that’s where some team executives thought Jeter belonged. All these years later, with Rivera and Jeter headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame, it may sound laughable. But in late March 1996, it nearly happened.

  One voice was loudest in preventing a disaster that would have changed the course of Yankees history and probably altered the narrative of late-twentieth-century baseball.

  While Gene Michael had indeed engineered the last trade of his career, the onetime slick-fielding shortstop made a final pivotal infield save for his former team. In a sharp exchange with George Steinbrenner, Michael insisted that Jeter had to be the Yankees’ starting shortstop in 1996. And that would make a trade of Rivera unnecessary.

  “I wasn’t involved in many things when the ’96 season began, but I wasn’t going to let someone ruin the years we spent developing Derek and Mariano,” Michael said.

  When spring training in 1996 began, the Yankees had not felt any pressure to install Jeter as their everyday shortstop. It was the likely plan, but they knew the team had a backup contingency, veteran Tony Fernández, if the twenty-one-year-old Jeter faltered. But Fernández broke his arm late in spring training, and suddenly Jeter was the team’s only answer at shortstop.

  George Steinbrenner was always distrustful of fledgling, developing players. In the previous five years he had been adamant about trading Bernie Williams and willing to deal Rivera, Pettitte and Posada—more than once.

  Worse, by March 1996, Steinbrenner had distanced himself from Michael and jettisoned Showalter and the top executives who had shepherded the minor league operation: Bill Livesey, Mitch Lukevics and Kevin Elfering.

  In their place, Steinbrenner could be easily swayed by a cadre of “special advisers” he kept on the team payroll. It was a quizzical mix of former players, managers and, in a couple of cases, men who had never played professional baseball at any level. They rotated in and out of Steinbrenner’s favor.

  When it came to the decision about whether Jeter was ready to start at the infield’s most pivotal position, the person with Steinbrenner’s ear was former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Clyde King, who had become an ad hoc troubleshooter for the Yankees’ owner.

  King, an amiable Southern gentleman from North Carolina, with the drawl to prove it, had brief stints as a manager for the Yankees, San Francisco Giants and Atlanta Braves. He was a protégé of the Dodgers’ pioneering general manager Branch Rickey. King had been Steinbrenner’s general manager in 1985–86 and also served as the team’s pitching coach during several seasons. It’s not entirely clear how King, seventy-one years old at the time, came to be Steinbrenner’s oracle on Jeter in the spring of 1996, but he had convinced the owner and others in his inner circle that Jeter was not ready for such a big job. The team’s Columbus minor league affiliate beckoned.

  On Steinbrenner’s orders, the Yankees had negotiated with the Seattle Mariners to acquire shortstop Felix Fermin, who had been benched in favor of Alex Rodriguez. Once again, Lou Piniella wanted Rivera in return for Fermin, or maybe the reliever Bob Wickman. Watson said the trade was on the table. It was up to the Yankees—yes or no.

  Michael caught wind of this possibility and was irate. The ferocity of his indignation moved Steinbrenner to summon roughly a dozen coaches and team executives to Joe Torre’s office for a meeting on Jeter’s future. “There were a lot of people in that room, and it was a tense exchange of ideas,” Brian Cashman, one of those in attendance, recalled in 2017. “Derek had struggled in the spring, and this story line emerged that ‘the kid’ wasn’t ready. It was time to finalize the roster and time to either make that Seattle trade or not make it.”

  The reporters covering the team saw the gaggle of coaches and executives crowd into Torre’s office and waited outside in the hallway to see what the verdict would be. “They were looking for the puff of white smoke to appear, like when the papal decision is being made,” Cashman joked. “But it wasn’t funny; it was intense.”

  King was forced to defend his position. Essentially, he thought Jeter needed more seasoning, a little extra time to mature. The Seattle trade would provide the Yankees insurance.

  Cashman disagreed. “I spoke my mind but I wasn’t alone. There was a lot of pushback,” he said.

  Third-base coach Willie Randolph, who had started for a pennant-winning Yankees team at second base when he was the same age as Jeter, chimed in. “Derek is gifted and very confident,” he said. “You’ve got to just support him and let him breathe.”

  Steinbrenner remained unconvinced. Then Michael, who had known Steinbrenner longer than anyone else in the room, stood up and faced the owner. “You promised you wouldn’t do this,” he said, all but shouting at Steinbrenner. “We all agreed to give Jeter at least the first half of the season. We were going to leave him alone until then, remember? Why are we even here discussing this?”

  Most everyone in Torre’s office had been in team meetings throughout the off-season when it was indeed decided that Jeter would be the team’s everyday shortstop, even if he had a bumpy start to the season.

  Michael’s exhortation had left him red-faced. Steinbrenner looked at his longtime employee. “OK, I know, I know,” he said with a smile. “I was supposed to stay at home in Tampa and not say a word until July.”

  With the tension broken, everyone in the room laughed. Michael, remembering the scene twenty years later, said: “Let’s face it, no one was counting on George being silent forever. But the argument was over. Derek was our shortstop. We dumped the trade talks.”

  Good thing. Fermin’s major league career lasted only 11 more games and he became a footnote to Jeter’s history. Wickman went on to save 256 games in a 15-year career, albeit primarily for teams other than the Yankees, who beginning in 1997 no longer needed a closer because they had Rivera.

  As Gene Michael liked to say: Sometimes a general manager’s legacy is measured by the trades he doesn’t make.

  In his second at-bat on opening day in 1996, Jeter smashed a home run. That day, with David Cone protecting a slim lead in the seventh inning and a runner on base, Jeter turned his back to the infield and dashed between the sprinting outfielders Gerald and Bernie Williams to make a spectacular over-the-shoulder catch in shallow left field to preserve the first Yankees victory of the year. The following afternoon, Jeter had three hits, a stolen base and scored three runs in the team’s 5–1 victory. Pettitte pitched seven strong innings for his first win of the season.

  “We were off and running,” Cashman said. “We didn’t look back. Jeter’s value and worthiness certainly did not come up again.”

  But the rest of the season wasn’t as easy as Cashman made it sound.

  Tino Martinez, for instance, seemed overwhelmed in his first month as a Yankee. He was booed mercilessly by Yankees fans who were unwilling to see Mattingly replaced. By late April, Martinez had three home runs and was hitting just .244. Sometimes when he came to the plate at Yankee Stadium, the fans would chant, “Don-nie Base-ball,” in homage to Mattingly—and to mock Martinez.

  The fans had long memories in other ways. Joe Torre was jeered at Yankee Stadium, too. Torre, unlike twelve of the previous thirteen Yankees managers, had no ties to the organization, and more than anyone he represented the startling change that disrupted the feel-good mood emanating from the 1994 and 1995 Yankee seasons.

  But Torre understood the Yankee fans’ mentality in 1996. “They’re being loyal and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Those of us new to the uniform are simply trying to earn their loyalty.”

  Torre was good at that. He may not have been a Yankee, but he was a New Yorker, born and raised in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, and he understood all of the city’s influential constituencies and power brokers. He courted noted celebrities, like New Yorker
Billy Crystal and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and welcomed them into the team’s dugout before games. Their luster reflected well on the new Yankees manager.

  Torre was also honest, diplomatic and had a steadfast calm. His communication skills, at all levels, were sophisticated, and his sagacious handling of the media won him allies. His desire to protect his players from criticism established a priceless credibility in the clubhouse. Torre neither lashed out at his critics nor looked worried. Instead, he waited.

  But if Torre was unshakable, it still took a while for the 1996 Yankees to become a well-oiled machine. The pitching rotation was shaky at best and struggling to find a consistent rhythm. Pettitte was the staff’s rock and on his way to becoming the Yankees ace at twenty-four years old. But Jimmy Key was only gradually regaining his arm strength after another arm surgery. Dwight Gooden, signed in February, was inconsistently mounting a comeback after not pitching an inning of baseball in 1995. Kenny Rogers, another free agent, had spent the previous seven years in Texas, where it’s always football season and the major league baseball team is often an afterthought. In New York, Rogers was warily and stiffly trying to acclimate to pitching in the pressure cooker of Yankee Stadium. It was a rocky adjustment. Cone, meanwhile, had won four of his first five decisions but was suffering from a peculiar numbness and chill in the fingers of his right hand. Tests revealed an aneurysm in his pitching arm. Surgery kept Cone off the mound until September 2.

  The responsibility for bridging the gap between the erratic starting pitching and the revived bullpen closer John Wetteland fell to three relievers: the newly acquired Jeff Nelson, Wickman and most especially to the elastic-armed Rivera, who was frequently asked to pitch as many as three innings per outing.

  “Whatever role we needed, Mo could do it,” Girardi, the new everyday catcher, said, using Rivera’s nickname. “That first year I was with the Yankees he was multipurpose, multisituational.”

  Wetteland had bounced back from his disastrous performance in the Seattle playoff series, for which he blamed himself, not Showalter. “I never gave Buck a reason to be confident in putting me out there,” said Wetteland, who early in 1996 led the major leagues in saves.

  But with Wetteland headed to free agency after the 1996 season, everyone on the Yankees could see who the team’s closer of the future would be. By late April, Rivera had made ten appearances and had an ERA of 1.27. His WHIP, which measures walks and hits per inning, was a superlative 0.84.

  Still, on April 29, the AL East standings had the Yankees trailing the Orioles, a consensus pick to win the division. That day, the two teams met at Baltimore’s Camden Yards for the first of what was expected to be a quick two-game series. In the opening game, Pettitte had the worst outing of his career to that point, giving up nine runs before he had registered an out in the second inning.

  At that moment, the Orioles, whose lineup featured two future Hall of Famers in Roberto Alomar and Cal Ripken Jr., surely seemed like the class of the division, if not the major leagues. But the 1996 Yankees proved to be more resilient than expected. While young, the roster had been tempered in the crucible of the 1995 playoffs. Most of the players had also been on the 1994 team, which seemed World Series bound until the players’ strike.

  So despite the shock of Pettitte’s rare implosion on the mound, the Yankees battled on. A Leyritz home run in a five-run fifth inning helped the Yankees climb back into the game, and Martinez’s three-run home run in the seventh gave the Yankees a lead they never relinquished in a wild, 13–10 victory. The game took 4 hours and 21 minutes to play, which made it the longest nine-inning game in major league history at the time.

  The next day saw Rogers and David Wells square off, but the two starting pitchers were long forgotten by the time the game wound into extra innings, tied 6–6. That score was unchanged when Pettitte came on in relief to start the thirteenth inning. Pettitte would hold the Orioles scoreless for three innings and pick up the win when a grand slam by Martinez blew open a taut contest in the top of the fifteenth. The game had lasted 5 hours and 34 minutes. It took nearly 10 hours to play the two games of the short series, but the Yankees left Baltimore in first place.

  The Yankees did not run away from the Orioles, who would battle the Yankees for American League supremacy into October. But many things kept falling into place, just as they had been designed and nurtured.

  One midsummer game against Boston at a teeming Yankee Stadium illustrated how well the Yankees’ best-laid plans, many that were traceable to the early nineties, were coming to fruition.

  Singles by O’Neill and Jeter, who would go 4-for-4, staked the Yankees to an early lead that was extended by a long home run to left field by Bernie Williams, who had become the Yankees’ most versatile and potent power hitter. The multiskilled Williams, now a sinewy, sturdy twenty-seven-year-old, posed an onerous, complex challenge to opposing pitchers because they might see him as the leadoff hitter or in the cleanup spot in the batting order. As a switch-hitter who rarely left the lineup, he had acquired a keen grasp of the strike zone and walked frequently.

  Williams’s on-base percentage in 1996 was .391 (the team’s OBP would be .360). But Williams could also drive the ball to the deepest reaches of any ballpark, and his midseason slugging percentage hovered around .600. He would finish the season with a team-leading .535 slugging percentage, bat .305 and drive in 102 runs. He would also lead the team in stolen bases (17) and home runs (29).

  More than twenty years later, Williams credited his steady maturation, one begun when he was first indoctrinated in the Yankee Way as a teenager. “My production came from years of patient development. I had been schooled by many of the same people, like Buck Showalter, Brian Butterfield and Stump Merrill, since I was in the minors at eighteen years old,” Williams said in a 2017 interview. “It was paying off.”

  Also in the game against Boston, Wade Boggs had a pivotal hit. Boggs, though thirty-eight years old, would bat .311 in 1996 with a .389 on-base percentage.

  Wickman, acquired for Steve Sax in Gene Michael’s steal of a trade with the Chicago White Sox in 1992, relieved a struggling Kenny Rogers in the sixth inning. Wickman had become the wingman to Rivera and Wetteland, picking up his bullpen mates whenever either needed a rest. Wetteland was on his way to 43 saves. Rivera was building a reputation as a steely, dark-eyed relief assassin. Twice, Rivera had consecutive scoreless-inning streaks of 23 innings or more.

  Wickman, Rivera, Wetteland and Jeff Nelson all pitched against the Red Sox, who scratched out just one run against the Yankees bullpen quartet. The Yankees cruised to an easy victory, boosting their lead in the AL East to four and one-half games.

  And there was also a bit of theater during the contest. O’Neill kept teammates amused by breaking his bat over his thigh when a line drive he had smoked to right field was caught for an out. O’Neill entered the dugout and, using one of the shards of his splintered bat, destroyed the team water cooler. “I’ve got to start getting some hits,” he said afterward.

  At the time, O’Neill was leading the American League with a .352 batting average.

  Gerald Williams, the usual Yankees left fielder and a valued teammate with a variety of skills that did not always show up in the box score, threw out a Red Sox base runner trying to advance to third base on a caught fly ball.

  Jorge Posada did not play in the Boston game, although he was on the bench—one of about 30 games Posada spent with the Yankees. Torre, with the encouragement of his vocal bench coach Don Zimmer, had thrown his support behind Joe Girardi as the team’s catcher, even though some in the organization thought Posada’s development was being unfairly stunted. “Posada was ready for the majors in 1996. It just took the big league club a year or more to see that,” said Stump Merrill, the AAA Columbus manager that year.

  The advancement of Posada, twenty-four at the time, was hampered by the absence of Bill Livesey and Mitch Lukevics, the executives who had signed him and brought him along in the minors. He had lost some of
his biggest advocates. Posada’s last minor league season was nonetheless productive, as he drove in 62 runs in 106 games. He had something highly unusual for a catcher, a .405 on-base percentage. Posada would be Girardi’s backup in the next season, and by 1998 became the full-time Yankees catcher (and frequent All-Star), a job he did not relinquish until he retired in 2011.

  The 1996 Yankees lead in the AL East grew to 12 games by the end of July, then shrank to four games on the last day of August, after they lost 14 of 20 games late that month. Torre remained a tranquil presence, disinclined to make substantial changes. “We’ll keep trotting out the guys who got us into first place,” Torre said. “They’ll be the ones who keep us there.”

  And just like that, Pettitte stopped the bleeding with a solid victory on August 31. In 1996, Pettitte compiled a 13-3 record when he pitched after a Yankees loss. He would win five of his last six decisions and become the first homegrown Yankees pitcher to win 20 or more games since Ron Guidry did it in 1985.

  In September 1996, the Orioles stayed close to the Yankees but never seriously threatened to take over the top spot in the AL East, which the Yankees won with a 92-70 record. It was the Yankees’ first full-season division title since 1980. Jeter would hit .314 and win the American League Rookie of the Year Award. O’Neill cooled off in the last six weeks but still drove in 91 runs and hit 19 homers. Leyritz was a pesky clutch hitter off the bench who drove in 40 runs.

  Jimmy Key rebounded after losing five of his first six 1996 starts to win 11 of his next 17 decisions. More importantly, Key pitched nearly 170 innings after pitching about 30 innings in the previous injury-riddled season. Dwight Gooden, who pitched a no-hitter in May, posted an 11-7 record even if his earned run average was 5.01. Kenny Rogers had a 12-8 record, although big crowds and crucial games still seemed to unnerve him. David Cone had returned from arm surgery to post a 3-1 record in September.