Chumps to Champs Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Long Decline

  Yankee Circus

  Adrift

  Buck Naked

  Stumped

  Dazed and Confused

  Banished

  “Goodbye, George”

  The Architect

  Prospecting

  Finding One Williams, Hiding the Other

  Scouting and Hope

  Yankee Clipper

  Planting the Seeds

  Band of Brothers

  The Yankee Way

  Culture Creators

  An Ugly Duckling No More

  Gamers

  A Buzz

  Lost Promise

  Photos

  Rebirth

  A Spark

  The Jewels

  The Best Laid Plans Ruined

  Like a Dagger

  Really Bad Hangover

  Limbo

  Jedi Powers

  Yankee Flipper

  Last Stand

  “Did That Just Happen?”

  Purge

  The Living Room Summit

  The Pieces All Come Together

  To the Mountaintop

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Research and Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Sample Chapter from BILLY MARTIN

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Bill Pennington

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pennington, Bill, 1956– author.

  Title: Chumps to champs : how the worst teams in Yankees history led to the 90’s dynasty / Bill Pennington.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046434 (print) | LCCN 2018051095 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328849878 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328849854 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: New York Yankees (Baseball team)—History—20th century. | Baseball players—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Baseball managers—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Baseball / History. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA).

  Classification: LCC GV875.N4 (ebook) | LCC GV875.N4 P45 2019 (print) | DDC 796.357/64097471—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046434

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Cover photograph (top) © Douglas C. Pizac / Associated Press

  Cover photograph (bottom) © Linda Cataffo / New York Daily News archive

  Author photograph © Nina Subin

  v1.0419

  To Joyce, Anne D., Elise and Jack,

  the ultimate home team advantage

  Introduction

  IT WAS A sunny Sunday in Chicago, and Andy Hawkins, a journeyman pitcher with a career losing record, was only four outs from baseball immortality. Working briskly through the Chicago White Sox lineup that day, July 1, 1990, Hawkins had retired 23 batters without yielding a hit. There were two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning.

  For Hawkins, in his second year with the New York Yankees, it was and would be the game of his life. And it had come out of nowhere. Just a few weeks earlier, he trudged off the mound after getting only one out in a starting assignment, trailing 5–0 in the first inning. In another game that month, he faced only 12 batters, with half of them getting hits and a third smacking triples or doubles. At that point, the Yankees planned to either cut Hawkins or demote him to the minor leagues. Only an injury to a teammate had kept him on the team.

  But on July 1, the pitching gods had blessed Hawkins. It was shaping up as a milestone performance. Despite his 1-4 record, he flummoxed the White Sox lineup in a scoreless game.

  It was a typically blustery afternoon in Chicago, and late in the eighth inning, wind gusts blew debris from the grandstand onto the infield. Play was halted as several white paper wrappers were gathered by field maintenance workers. Hawkins stood motionless on the mound throughout the delay.

  “Everything was in control,” Hawkins later said. “I felt good. I didn’t sense anything else. It happened so fast.”

  The next batter slapped a crisp grounder to Yankees third baseman Mike Blowers, who bobbled the ball for an error. Two walks and two mystifying errors in the windy outfield followed in quick succession.

  It happened so fast.

  Just like that, the White Sox led, 4–0. Hawkins retired his twenty-fourth White Sox batter soon afterward. The Yankees then went quickly and quietly in the top of the ninth inning. Game over.

  The fans inside Chicago’s rusting Comiskey Park, built in 1910, seemed giddy and confused at the same time. They were celebrating something they had never seen before: a no-hitter by the visiting pitcher and a home victory.

  Hawkins’s game of a lifetime, an everlasting memory, became baseball history and an undying nightmare.

  A pitcher with an eight-inning no-hitter who lost? It had never happened before in the 114-year history of Major League Baseball. There had been lost extra-inning no-hitters, rain-shortened no-hit games lost and one nine-inning no-hit game when the home pitcher lost. But there had never been anything like what happened—and happened so fast—to Andy Hawkins.

  But as a remarkably coherent Hawkins said afterward in the locker room: “It still counts. It’s a no-hitter. They can’t take it away from me.”

  Not so fast. In fact, Major League Baseball changed a record-keeping regulation the next season, requiring a pitcher to complete at least 27 outs for the game to count as an official no-hitter. The baseball gods had abandoned Hawkins yet again.

  And so a new baseball decade that was just six months old began ignominiously for the Yankees, the most decorated American sports franchise of the twentieth century. The embarrassment of Hawkins’s Chicago outing lingered, the omen for what was to come for the country’s most renowned sports team.

  It would turn out to be the dawn of the darkest period in Yankees history, a period willfully forgotten by Yankees fans—with good reason.

  How had this happened to the team of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle?

  By 1990, the Yankees had won 22 World Series and 33 American League pennants, both major league records. Twenty-six Yankees were already in the Baseball Hall of Fame or on their way there.

  The Yankees had been the subject of countless books and motion pictures, television miniseries and Broadway shows. The franchise was likened to titans of American industry—compared to the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s and US Steel in the 1950s.

  Yankees jerseys had been the best-selling brand in baseball, and a Yankees cap was still a fixture on streets, subway cars, bars and jet planes around the country. They were the favored team of celebrities, from Jack Nicholson to Bruce Springsteen to Jackie Onassis. The moneyed Yankees had cultivated a reputation synonymous with achievement and prosperity.

  And yet, ten years away from a new century, the great Yankees run appeared all but over. Their empire had collapsed and seemed irreparably ruined. The minor league cupboard of budding young prospects was bare. The Yankees, by every measure, were broken.

  From 1989 to 1992, the Yankees were the laughingstock of baseball, with a team that not
only was at the bottom of the standings, but had the worst four-year record (288-359) since the team first became known as the Yankees, in 1913.

  Attendance at Yankee Stadium was down 35 percent, TV ratings had plummeted, and the Yankees were in the midst of the longest World Series drought in team history, a stretch that lasted 14 seasons.

  Those are the statistics. But it was so much worse than the numbers. How bad?

  The team’s owner, George M. Steinbrenner III, had been denounced as a stain on the game and banished permanently from baseball.

  It was not the only bad karma shrouding the team after seven decades of mostly uninterrupted triumph.

  It started with Hawkins’s losing no-hitter. A year later, a prized Yankees draft pick with a 100-mile-an-hour fastball—in an era when almost no one threw that hard—got in a bar fight that ruined his career. Promising trades turned out to be embarrassing flops.

  In the midst of four successive losing seasons, the entire Yankees roster had exactly one player, Don Mattingly, who had ever been to an All-Star game. But Mattingly’s shining light was soon enveloped by a darker mood, too. An aching back was betraying him and would soon sap him of his greatest gifts.

  At this juncture, the obituary for the once great, conquering Yankees was being written across the country. The Yankees were dated, worn and lacked new ideas or a modern operating philosophy. Their players had been sullied and humiliated. Even the team’s physical plant appeared to be outmoded. The once groundbreaking Yankee Stadium, refurbished a generation earlier, was aging and had been surpassed by a host of newer, more imaginative and entertaining ballparks in Baltimore, Toronto, Chicago, Texas and Minnesota, outposts that now mocked the declining Yankees.

  The Yankees were like a once proud transatlantic ocean liner or a too-big-to-fail corporation—a hearty symbol of a robust America in perhaps the country’s greatest century—that was now slowly sinking or deteriorating brick by brick.

  But in fact, and as hard as it was to see at the time, the seemingly vexed Yankees were about to embark on a revival that ended with the last great baseball dynasty of the twentieth century.

  And so, this is a story of a wholly unexpected resurrection and rebirth. It is the story of the unlikely cast of characters—nobodies in the game of baseball at the time—who made it happen. They were baseball lifers, a mix of wandering scouts and their bosses, cubicle-bound analysts, untested coaches and junior executives led by the then obscure, first-year manager Buck Showalter and the team’s general manager Gene Michael, two cogs buried deep in the organizational structure.

  If Showalter and Michael were the duo who helped revive the Yankees, soon they were a trio. On July 9, 1992, I broke the story that George Steinbrenner would soon be reinstated by Commissioner Fay Vincent. It seemed impossible, and some of my colleagues called my scoop a bunch of hooey. But thirteen days later, Vincent announced that Steinbrenner could resume his Yankees ownership duties in March 1993.

  Steinbrenner was going to ride a white horse into the Yankee spring training complex in Florida that day—like Napoleon returned from the Isle of Elba—but he changed his mind at the last minute, saying it was too showy. The mercurial shipbuilding magnate instead landed his private jet just beyond the outfield walls and walked through a gate near a sea of The Boss Is Back! placards.

  That was George’s idea of making a small entrance.

  What transpired next is an untold story of ingenious, counterintuitive thinking that presaged baseball’s analytics era. It is a story of stirring, plucky, startling triumph—a stunning rejuvenation that put a new face on an old franchise. It is also a story of heartrending disappointment, since the Yankees’ rousing comeback, which brought them within sight of the pinnacle of the sport, ended in another devastating setback. The 1994 players’ strike canceled the World Series and thwarted the most promising Yankees season in nearly a generation. It was one of many painful lessons absorbed, and these unheralded Yankees of the early to mid-nineties showed the perseverance to rally yet again.

  And fail again in 1995.

  Then, unbelievably, from 1996 to 2000, the Yankees won three of the next four World Series. From 1996 to 2012, they would play in baseball’s postseason every year but one.

  Even the Yankees of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s could not match that postseason streak.

  The story of that unmatched success—the championship teams of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada—cannot be told without understanding the underexamined, pivotal seasons that preceded it. With the hindsight of roughly twenty-five years, those seasons did indeed foreshadow what was to come, especially if you added a little good fortune.

  I was a close witness to this period, as a Yankees beat writer and syndicated columnist at the Bergen Record in New Jersey and later as a sportswriter at the New York Times. I have remained in contact with the principals involved and spent the past two years revisiting them, to both help them recall their memories and listen to perspectives gained through the prism of history. In scores of interviews, they have helped me reconstruct an unobserved phenomenon that forever altered baseball’s twentieth-century narrative.

  The Yankees of 1990 were treated as a wasteland by the baseball community. But surreptitiously, the quietest of revolutions was taking place, an uprising that would conquer every unsuspecting opponent in the sport and install a new ruling force in baseball for years thereafter.

  It is the dynasty no one saw coming, spawned by the worst teams in New York Yankees history. It was a time when a phoenix rose unforeseen from the ashes.

  Part One

  The Long Decline

  1

  Yankee Circus

  “WE WERE THE best team in baseball in the 1980s,” George Steinbrenner said at the dawn of the 1990 season. “We just didn’t win very much.”

  Steinbrenner was, as he often could be, both right and wrong. The Yankees were indeed the best team in major league baseball from 1980 to 1989, if the measurement is the total number of victories (854). The Yankees also had the best winning percentage (.547) of the 26 major league teams playing at the time.

  And yet, when the baseball community looks at the Yankees in the 1980s, it sees only what those teams did not win: a World Series.

  It’s a high standard, but the Yankees created it. The 1980s were the first decade since 1910 to 1920 that the Yankees did not win at least two World Series, if not five or six. And people took notice of that, especially because the Yankees began the 1980s with such boundless promise. They seemed on the verge of another era of preeminence.

  The 1980 Yankees, for example, won 103 games, which was, by three games, the best record in baseball. They were a deep, balanced team, led by Reggie Jackson, who hit .300 for the only time in his career and slugged 41 home runs. They were a mix of young and old, from the twenty-six-year-old catcher Rick Cerone, who drove in 85 runs, to the thirty-four-year-old first baseman Bob Watson, who hit .307. The pitching staff had two future Hall of Famers (Rich Gossage and Gaylord Perry) and four starters (Tommy John, Jim Kaat, Ron Guidry and Ed Figueroa) who collectively would end up winning more than 800 major league games.

  The roster was also filled with prominent leaders. Shortstop Bucky Dent and outfielder Lou Piniella would end up Yankee managers, with Piniella also managing four other major league teams, including Cincinnati, where he won a World Series. Second baseman Willie Randolph would become the New York Mets’ manager and be a longtime Yankees coach for four World Series champions. Watson was destined to be the Yankees’ general manager sixteen years later.

  The off-the-field leadership was as impressive and experienced. Manager Dick Howser and general manager Gene Michael both had been with the Yankees since the mid-1960s, when they were infielders for the team. Each had held a variety of central roles in the franchise as it won three American League pennants and two World Series in the late seventies.

  But after a superlative regular season, the 1980 Yankees were swept in w
hat was then a best-of-five American League Championship Series, losing to George Brett’s Kansas City Royals, who had won 97 regular-season games.

  There was no shame in being upset by the Royals, who were more than worthy opponents. But the defeat turned out to be more than a simple setback.

  In many ways, it set in motion a decade of Yankee baseball that was simultaneously successful and dysfunctional. Year after year, the team won a ton of games and were regularly in sight of a World Series championship—much more than fans remember.

  In fact, had today’s current wild-card postseason system been in place in the 1980s, the Yankees would have qualified for the playoffs seven times. But it is just as true that every time the Yankees made a charge toward the top, the team’s organization, in a variety of ways, did something to shoot itself disastrously in the foot.

  This pattern of achievement coexisting with disorder became a Yankee calling card in the 1980s, one that portended the comprehensive folly of the early 1990s. And the genesis of the Yankees’ decade-long template of accomplishment mixed with chaos—the very moment it all began—can be traced to one critical play of the 1980 playoff series with Kansas City.

  The crucial, decisive sequence happened in the eighth inning of Game 2 at Kansas City when Randolph was thrown out at home plate trying to tie the game on a Watson double. George Steinbrenner was fifty years old at the time and still feisty and defiant enough to sit in the stands with the Royals fans. As Randolph was called out, he immediately began waving his arms at the field in disgust as he shouted at Yankees third-base coach Mike Ferraro.

  In the seat adjacent to Steinbrenner, Gene Michael tried to calm his boss, who felt (at least after the play) that Ferraro should have held Randolph at third base. But Steinbrenner’s hissy fit was not to be bridled, and it was broadcast on national television. Also, Steinbrenner’s presence—he was wearing a bright white sweater—was unmistakable to Royals fans near him, who began to goad the Yankees’ owner with catcalls and jeers. George responded in kind, engaging the crowd in ways that only fanned the incendiary atmosphere.