Chumps to Champs Page 2

  Randolph had been shaken up on the play, his head having slammed into Royals catcher Darrell Porter, and he rose from the dirt around home plate slowly. The Yankees were staggered. It was hectic on the field and maybe crazier in the stands near Steinbrenner. “I looked up and saw Mr. Steinbrenner gesturing and waving at the field, giving it that disgusted dismissal wave he did—I used to call it the big shake,” Randolph said in 2017. “He was getting into it with the fans. There was wild commotion. And I thought, ‘Oh boy, I know what’s coming.’”

  The Yankees lost the final game of the series two days later, when Gossage came on in the seventh inning to protect a one-run lead and instead gave up a three-run homer to Brett.

  Although Howser and Ferraro were not to blame for Brett’s home run, Steinbrenner wanted both fired immediately. Under pressure, Howser resigned, only to resurface with the Royals, whom he led to a World Series title in 1985.

  While the volatile Steinbrenner had already changed managers six times since buying the Yankees in 1973, there was something preposterous and shameful about forcing Howser out of his job. Howser had inherited a fourth-place team, one that was rudderless and reeling from the tragic 1979 death of catcher Thurman Munson. Howser had resurrected the Yankees with compassion, baseball acumen and a calm but authoritative managerial style.

  The 1980 season was Howser’s first as a major league manager, and his team’s winning percentage (.636) was the highest of any Yankees manager in seventeen years. Now he was gone.

  It was proof that Steinbrenner might do anything after a season that did not end with a Yankees World Series victory. And that proved to be true. Howser’s departure was just the first of 13 managerial changes Steinbrenner made in the 1980s.

  The early 1980 playoff exit set a future course that became wearisomely familiar by the end of the decade. It was far from entirely Steinbrenner’s fault. There was little consistency to the team’s management structure and no overarching Yankee philosophy of how to build continuity. The minor league teams fared well, which spoke to astute drafting and amateur-free-agent purchases, but the young talent was regularly traded away for existing big league stars, usually ones past their prime. The youngsters blossomed for other teams. The Yankees were left with fading also-rans.

  Worse, the Yankees’ ceaseless pursuit of prominent major league free agents cost them picks in the amateur draft as compensation for their unrestrained spending.

  “We were denied eighteen draft picks in the 1980s,” Bill Livesey, the team’s scouting director at the time, said, looking back more than thirty years later. “We only had one first-round pick in the entire decade.”

  But the Yankees of the eighties could not change their heedless ways. The team and its fans, intoxicated by the two World Series wins in the late 1970s when Munson, Jackson and Billy Martin owned the city, were chasing an unsustainable ambition to contend for the World Series every season. And that never permitted the Yankees to rebuild or nurture from within.

  “In some ways, the success George Steinbrenner and the Yankees had in the 1970s laid the path for the bumpy ride the team had in the 1980s,” Lou Piniella, who played for the Yankees in both decades and eventually became the team’s manager, said in a 2017 interview.

  “George made a bunch of good free-agent signings in the 1970s, like Reggie and Catfish Hunter. And he thought he could just keep that up. But free agency was new in the 1970s, and George succeeded by jumping in before other teams. By the 1980s, there was a lot of competition for the top free agents and George didn’t always get the top-tier guys anymore. But he kept signing free agents anyway—and some of them were failures. And that meant signing more free agents to make up for the mistakes. What the Yankees needed to do was step back and say, ‘Hey, what are we doing here?’ But that didn’t happen for a long time.”

  This endless Yankees pursuit of yearly greatness became a relentless, exhausting marathon in the eighties that left no time to ponder and devise a coherent, articulated vision of the future. This was most apparent in Steinbrenner’s incessant meddling with the managers, general managers and eventually the roster, and that helped sabotage season after season.

  The impulsive purge of Howser was the first warning signal. It was not the last.

  In 1981, Michael reluctantly replaced Howser as manager, under the new general manager Bill Bergesch (one of eight Yankees general managers in the 1980s). Michael had another skilled Yankees team, which included newly signed free agent Dave Winfield, and the team was in first place when the 1981 season was interrupted by a strike. When the season resumed, 38 percent of the regular-season games had been canceled, and baseball decided to split the season into two halves, prestrike and poststrike, with a champion named for each half.

  The first-place teams from each half, in each division, would then meet in a best-of-five playoff series, with the surviving teams advancing to the American and National League Championship Series. If one team won both halves, it would still have to play an extra playoff series against the runner-up from the second half of the season.

  This flawed, ill-conceived setup left the first-half winners, like the Yankees, with no incentive to win the second half of the season, and, not surprisingly, none of them did. But before the second half was concluded, Steinbrenner fired Michael for not being able to motivate his team as he did in the first half.

  Under Bob Lemon, who had led the Yankees to a 1978 World Series victory, the Yankees charged through the playoffs and won the first two games of the 1981 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. But then the Yankees lost the next three games.

  After Game 5, Steinbrenner said he got in a fistfight with two Dodgers fans in his hotel elevator. “I clocked them,” he said of the altercation. “There are two guys in town looking for their teeth.”

  The Yankees lost the next game, and the World Series, anyway.

  Steinbrenner issued a statement after the final game. “I want to sincerely apologize to the people of New York and to the fans of the New York Yankees everywhere for the performance of the Yankee team in the World Series,” it read. “We’ll make the necessary changes to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  The “necessary” changes soon included firing Lemon 14 games into the 1982 season. Gene Michael was back again, albeit unwillingly. He survived 86 games before he was replaced by Clyde King, a longtime scout and Yankees adviser.

  Three managers for one team in one season? You bet.

  That season, Boston Globe columnist Leigh Montville wrote a satirical piece in which he imagined that he was the last person on earth who had not yet managed the Yankees. He got up for breakfast and his teenage son comforted him by saying, “Don’t worry, Dad, you’ll get your chance to manage the Yankees. I remember when I was the skipper of the Yankees . . .” Montville went to a gas station and was met at the pump by an attendant, who counseled, “Don’t worry, Leigh, I remember when I managed the Yankees . . .” He went to church and the pastor opined from the pulpit, “Now when I was manager of the Yankees . . .”

  This is what the Yankees had come to.

  The three-manager charade of 1982 led to only 79 victories and a fifth-place finish—the first losing season for the Yankees since Steinbrenner bought the team nine years earlier.

  Billy Martin returned to skipper the Yankees to a respectable 91 wins the next season, but still no World Series victory, so he was let go again. The Yankees lineup had become a hodgepodge of noncomplementary talents. It especially lacked reliable pitching depth, since the Yankees put a priority on acquiring power hitters, on the premise that a high-scoring team attracted fans to the ballpark. And the Yankees, for the first time in a decade, were beginning to have trouble keeping the home stadium even half full.

  The calm, reserved Yogi Berra was named manager in 1984, but never-ending turmoil had by now bled into the fabric of the franchise like the pinstripes on the uniforms. Berra was fired 16 games into the 1985 season, and while Martin returned to lead the Yankees to a stunn
ing and remarkable 97-win season in 1985, they were still two wins short of a division title. Again, without a wild-card playoff system, the Yankees went home. Martin, his right arm still in a cast because he broke it fighting one of his own pitchers, was dismissed.

  By 1986, Piniella had made his managerial debut. He lasted two successful seasons, winning 90 games his first year and 89 games the next season, but Piniella was then supplanted by Martin. Yes, again.

  “People have said that the Yankees have become a circus,” the influential syndicated newspaper columnist Jerry Izenberg wrote at the time. “That’s not fair. Nothing in the strangest circus anywhere on God’s green earth is as bizarre as what’s going on with the Yankees.”

  In June 1988, though the Yankees were in first place in the American League East, Martin was fired for the last time after a brawl in a Texas strip club left his ear nearly torn from his head. Piniella came back yet again, leaving his post as the Yankees’ general manager to do so.

  It did not go well. Piniella was fired, too.

  The eighties were coming to a close, and the Yankees, as an organization, were crumbling from top to bottom. There were good baseball minds running things down on the farm, and good scouts providing top-notch players for the indispensable talent pipeline. But at the lowest levels, morale was lagging.

  What good did it do to find gifted young talent if it was constantly being traded away in shortsighted deals meant as quick fixes that ultimately failed? “By the end of the 1980s, we had traded away so many future All-Stars I lost count,” said Livesey, the scouting director.

  There were two examples: slugger Fred McGriff and starting pitcher Doug Drabek, who were each traded by Steinbrenner and his general managers. The players, all in their thirties, the Yankees got in return for McGriff and Drabek lasted about a year with the team. McGriff would go on to hit 493 home runs, most for the Atlanta Braves. Drabek won a Cy Young Award in Pittsburgh, had eight seasons with a winning record and won 155 games overall.

  By 1989, the Yankees minor league system, filled with accomplished managers and coaches, had been stripped of talent.

  The magazine Baseball America, which chronicles and studies the minor leagues comprehensively, ranks each of baseball’s franchises every year in terms of how many quality prospects they have outside of the major league roster. In 1989, the Yankees ranked 22nd of 26 teams.

  At the time, Baseball America also ranked the top 100 individual prospects. The Yankees did not have one minor leaguer in the top 40, the only club shut out in that category.

  The drumbeat of recurring setbacks and organizational disarray left the 1989 big league Yankees staggering into spring training, where they were greeted by a bold new sheriff in town. Breaking with tradition, the Yankees had turned to an outsider and directed him to shake things up as only an outsider might. The new manager was Dallas Green, the brassy, former Philadelphia Phillies skipper. As directed, Green took charge with authority and influence. He imported a slew of National League players and shoved out several Yankee mainstays, particularly the popular Willie Randolph.

  Green was a smart, honest leader, but after a few months, he warred with Steinbrenner, too. And the Yankees didn’t win much—too many aging players and not enough youthful athleticism. Green was gone by mid-August. Chastened, the Yankees once again reached into their past, hiring the shortstop from the team’s late-1970s heyday, Bucky Dent, the hero of the 1978 one-game playoff victory at Fenway Park.

  Under Dent, the team did its best to reverse all the changes Green had been allowed to make, hoping to restore the roster to its former American League and Yankees-centric look—whatever that meant at this point.

  It came off as more window dressing, the Yankees changing course yet again with no clear destination in sight. It fooled no one, most of all the players in the clubhouse, who were the people who had to put on the historic Yankee pinstripes and try to recapture the magic.

  At the close of the 1989 season, Winfield, wistful and contemplative, assessed the Yankees as he now saw them. He was approaching another long, unfulfilled off-season. In his first year as a Yankee, he had played in the World Series. To Winfield, that now seemed as far away as grammar school. “I’ve been here nine seasons,” Winfield said wearily, collapsing his thirty-seven-year-old, six-foot-six, 225-pound frame into a tiny folding chair. “I thought I was coming to an organization with all this famous tradition. You know, where the ghosts of Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle and all those cats just made the World Series happen year after year. My first year here, that did happen. It was like the cheering never stopped.

  “But let me just say this: That’s not what’s happening around here these days.”

  2

  Adrift

  GEORGE STEINBRENNER HAD many unique abilities, and one of them was that he could smile and frown at the same time. It was as if he could split his face in half. Above his nose, his brow would furrow. Almost simultaneously, he would force his lips into a grin. He did it most often when confronted with disconcerting facts about his Yankees that he refused to acknowledge.

  When something that cast the Yankees in a poor light was presented to him, George looked pained, but he might instead add a wide-mouthed chortle.

  Derogatory statements about the Yankees were to be turned into positives. Those who knew the complicated, multifaceted Steinbrenner did not necessarily view this as spin. It was, more likely, how Steinbrenner’s brain was wired, which worked like this:

  The Yankees weren’t doing anything wrong; things had just not turned out right.

  But as 1990 dawned, even George’s well-honed scowl/smile reflex was being challenged. And he was not in an especially good mood because of it.

  The Yankees might have won more games than any other major league team in the previous decade, but each victory cost roughly $161,500 in player salaries.

  The Yankees payroll in the 1980s, which ballooned with the nearly annual restructuring of the team’s roster, was $137,883,665, which was nearly $22 million more than any other major league team’s payroll. The average player’s salary was about $485,000. That may seem like a steal today, but not in 1990, when the average salary for all of baseball was $153,000 less.

  Making matters worse, the collective bargaining contract between the players’ union and the owners had expired, and players were balking at the owners’ proposal for a salary cap.

  In response, the owners forbade players from coming to spring training, locking them out of their workplace.

  Steinbrenner, meanwhile, was fighting fires on multiple fronts.

  Yankee Stadium lacked corporate luxury boxes, a bountiful revenue stream already in place in the new baseball palaces that were sprouting up in other cities. This irked Steinbrenner mightily. How could the little-market, small-city Baltimore Orioles be taking in tens of millions of luxury box dollars when the Yankees, a baseball monolith, were not?

  It filled Steinbrenner with stadium envy. He, like other sports team owners around the country, ramped up the pressure on municipal leaders for stadium improvements. New York City owned Yankee Stadium, which had been almost entirely reconstructed in 1976. Steinbrenner wanted more upgrades—new highway exit ramps and a sophisticated train station—if not a new stadium altogether.

  Desperate, the borough president of the Bronx, where the Yankees first put down roots in 1923, proposed a new stadium in the little-used Ferry Point Park, at the foot of the congested Whitestone Bridge connecting Queens and the Bronx. A stadium in that spot would create a traffic nightmare, something Steinbrenner already had in his current location. The Ferry Point Park baseball project never gained traction. About twenty-five years later, the site would instead become an elite golf course, built and operated by Steinbrenner’s friend Donald Trump.

  But in 1990, Steinbrenner knew a bad idea when he saw one. Huffing his disapproval of the Ferry Point plan, Steinbrenner did what was then unthinkable in New York: He suggested that the most famous sports franchise in the world, a team as em
blematic of New York as the Statue of Liberty, be moved to New Jersey.

  Steinbrenner initiated talks with New Jersey officials about a new Yankee Stadium next to Giants Stadium, in northern New Jersey’s Bergen County, which had become the prosperous home to the NFL’s New York Giants and New York Jets.

  In the early nineties, flying over northern New Jersey in his private jet with a New Jersey reporter, Steinbrenner peered out the window and pointed toward Giants Stadium and the hundreds of acres of undeveloped land near it. He smiled and said: “We’re going to put the new stadium right there. There’s plenty of room for parking and major highways all around.”

  When Steinbrenner’s comments were published the next day, New Yorkers revolted. The New Jersey Yankees? It was inconceivable. What next? The New York Stock Exchange in Hoboken?

  Steinbrenner refrained from further comment on his relocation plan—at least initially—but the stadium firestorm raged throughout the nineties. New York City’s leaders, and Yankees fans, had been forewarned. And it quickly made Steinbrenner the least favorite team owner in New York.

  But Steinbrenner had other, far more substantial and lasting worries. On March 18, 1990, the day that season’s baseball lockout ended, the New York Daily News uncovered shocking information about Steinbrenner. In January that year, he had paid Howie Spira, a former quasi-employee of Dave Winfield’s charitable foundation, $40,000 for damaging information—“dirt,” to use Spira’s word—on the workings of Winfield’s foundation.

  Steinbrenner had been warring with Winfield for almost a decade, mostly because he felt Winfield had duped him when the two agreed to a record-setting, ten-year, $23 million contract before the 1981 season. The contract had a cost-of-living escalation clause—one not calculated correctly by the Yankees front office—that could inflate Winfield’s pay dramatically.