Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (20 page)

I had always hit fourth. I was a natural number four hitter, a power hitter, and the four spot was the natural place for me on the Yankees. My teammates understood that as well.

That was one of the great things about those Yankees, 1977–78. They were consummate pros in the end. Some of them might not have liked me. They were all about going out and trying to win, every day. They knew if they were going to win, I was an important part of the lineup. Hence the phrase about me, “Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him.” I think that came from Ken Singleton, my old teammate on the Orioles.

We were in Milwaukee, in the middle of a long road trip. We’d just dropped three out of four in Baltimore, and we weren’t feeling too good about ourselves. We were 49–39. In baseball, ten games over .500 is a start toward where you eventually want to be. We were in third place but still only a game and a half out. That night, we’d got down 9–3, then almost came back, fell just short, and lost by a run, 9–8.

Nobody felt good. We felt like we weren’t living up to what we could do; we were just dropping a couple, winning a couple. That
night, after midnight, Thurman and Lou decided they’d had enough, and they went up to Mr. Steinbrenner’s suite—he was in town. They banged on his door, and when he let them in, they told him he had to take charge of his team.

The stories that abound around that incident are amazing. I don’t know them all, and I wasn’t there. Everybody has his own rendition—but here’s the story that was told to me, by people involved in this comedy.

They told George, “You run your businesses. Why not do the same with your team?”

That whole night sounds pretty hilarious, right from the beginning. I mean, telling George Steinbrenner to get more involved running the Yankees? That’s like telling a lion to eat more red meat.

They went on telling him that he should just let Billy manage, George was putting too much pressure on him. George and Gabe had worked out a whole list of standards Billy had to live up to. They told him he should fire Billy or let him manage. They also wanted Lou to DH more … and me to bat fourth.

I had no idea this was going on. I understood later that Graig Nettles, who didn’t like me at all, was behind this, too. I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s one thing I’ll say about Nettles: On the field, he was a consummate pro and cared most about winning. Overriding it all, everyone wanted to win, and we felt we had the best team. Baltimore was great, so were the Red Sox, but we thought we could beat them.

Then, while this convention is going on in George’s room, Billy gets suspicious. He’s got the next room over. When he hears people talking in George’s room, he figures they must be plotting against him. Because Billy always thought people were plotting against him, period. Billy was being Billy. He knocks on Steinbrenner’s door and wants to know what’s going on.

George tells him, “Nothing, Billy. I’m just getting ready to go to bed.” He’d told those guys, Lou and Thurman, to go hide in the bathroom so Billy wouldn’t see them and get the wrong idea. But Billy comes barging in anyway, and he catches them, and now he really wants to know what the hell is going on. He’s yelling that George is lying to him again.

George tells him, “We were just talking about what’s wrong with
the club.” Billy tells him right to his face, “You’re what’s wrong! You’re what’s wrong with the club!”

Then, finally, Billy settled down, and the four of them had a long talk about the team. What they decided was, or so I heard anyway, that Lou would DH more, George would stop hanging over Billy’s shoulder and having all these meetings with him—and I would bat fourth.

They told Billy about me, “Why don’t you just leave the guy alone? He’s a good ballplayer. The guy wants to hit fourth; he feels more comfortable hitting fourth. He’ll be a better player for it ’cause that’s what he wants to do, and more important, we’ll be better for it.”

Later, Lou said that Martin didn’t seem happy. He was pretty pissed off that they were up there. But he finally told them, after all he put me through, he told them okay, he was going to put me in the four spot. And the next night, Billy comes out to the ballpark and bats me … sixth.

It’s funny how much you get wrapped up in the game when you’re playing. Particularly that season, on that team. That night, the night of the bathroom plot, was July 13, when they had the blackout and the terrible riot back in New York. All those stores looted. That same summer, the “Son of Sam” case was still going on, with people living in fear.

It was a terrible summer, a wild summer in New York—but we were barely aware of it.

I was caught up in my drama. That’s how you have to live when you’re playing. Like you’re in a bubble, a cocoon. Guys were aware of the killings. The really crude and insensitive way it was said around the clubhouse was, and I’m paraphrasing, “Don’t have sex in a car.”

That’s awful. That’s an awful thing to say when people are actually being killed and maimed, which they were. But it wasn’t meant to be as bad as it sounds. That’s just the hard logic of the locker room talking.

The game requires so much concentration you have to be brutal sometimes about tuning things out. It was like, “It’s too bad about
that nut running around shooting all the brunettes. Now, can I go to the ballpark and get a couple of hits?” I’m sure we saw the riot in all the papers and on TV. But I can’t say it affected us much. We weren’t there.

There was so much nonsense and craziness that I was personally at the center of—between the players and the manager, and myself and Billy and Thurman, and the media. The cliques and the factions, and how this writer hated me, and that guy hated me … You know, all I wanted to say after a while was, “Can I go and hit, please? Can I get in the batter’s box and get some peace?”

There wasn’t room for anything else, no matter how bad it was. I had to block it out to survive.

Sometimes I’d go to hang out. Usually in Manhattan, where I knew people wouldn’t bother me. It was quite a scene then.

I would go out to a restaurant called Oren & Aretsky, up on Third Avenue and Eighty-fourth. All they had was a little, nineteen-inch black-and-white TV over the bar with the sound off. Nothing to bother you. I would go to McMullen’s, at Seventy-sixth and Third, where they’d always hold a table for me. It was a classy place, a steak house. I wouldn’t stay out late, didn’t drink much—maybe a beer. Just went there to unwind, eat, and look at all the models who would come in.

Sometimes I’d go to Studio 54. I could just walk in there, see all the celebrities. Richard Pryor would hang out there, Diana Ross hung out there, Liza Minnelli. Lots of Elite and Ford supermodels. It was a great watering hole. All the stallions and the fillies went there.

I could park my Rolls in the street out in front of Studio, and a policeman would watch it for me. I could park it anywhere, park it and leave the keys in. Inside, they had movie seats up top. You could sit and watch the whole scene and not be bothered. Liza and Diana would often wind up singing. Good time.

More and more, though, it was the game that took up all the time, all the concentration, I had. The game makes you commit to it like that.
All the aches and pains of the long season. I had a badly bruised knee by then, and my arm was killing me. I took another cortisone shot for the elbow. I must’ve taken three that year. Now they wouldn’t let you take more than one or two. But that’s all right; that’s what it’s like playing the long season.

Trouble was Billy still wouldn’t bat me fourth, and we still couldn’t jell as the team we should have been—and would be. We went out to the West Coast for another road trip, and you could see we didn’t have our game together. We swept Oakland three straight, but Billy North, my old friend, came right out and said what the difference was between the A’s teams we had been on and the Yankees. He said about us, “You see all the talent they have, and they’re caught up in all that bull.” He called us a bunch of hens and said we should be ten games out in front. He talked about how the A’s used to play: “Players bitch and moan, we all do it over a drink after the game, cut up the whole team. But on the field, show me some heart.”

In other words, you can complain and criticize each other all you want, but get it together on the field! He had a good point. He had an even better one when he said, “For that money, they
conscripted
to every bit of scrutiny.”

He was right. Taking that money, we couldn’t object to anything. By then, I was speaking out. Back in Oakland, with the press guys I knew, I said right out, “Right now, they all think of us as a zoo.” I told the Oakland media, “Ninety percent of what the New York press has written about this team isn’t true.”

The New York writers confronted me about that comment after they heard it, but that’s how I felt. I didn’t care who was hurt by anything or who said what anymore. I was through with that. I was just going to say what I wanted.

And what I wanted was for all the nonsense to stop. I wanted us to stop making excuses, even when it came to Billy or George.

There were all these rumors still circulating that Billy was going to be fired—because nothing ever totally dies in New York, I had learned that by now. But I told the press, “The manager, he’s a fine man. He doesn’t try to discipline anybody. He tries to let everybody be their own man. We don’t have to like the guy. You don’t have to
be his friend, but we should stand by him for nine innings a day. The manager doesn’t strike out, he don’t make errors and he don’t throw up [pitch badly] on the mound.”

I told them, also, “You can’t ask for a better owner.”

I just wanted to put it all behind us. By then, it really was becoming farce. August was looking like it was going to be as awful as July. We went to L.A. to play the Angels, and I visited Dr. Frank Jobe, from the renowned orthopedic group Kerlan-Jobe, still a significant medical group today, to have my elbow looked at. Some woman rear-ended me on the freeway. Then, when she saw who it was, she asked for my autograph.

Half the team was in revolt by then. Munson and Don Gullett were starting to grow beards, in defiance of one of George’s strictest rules, against unruly facial hair. Mickey Rivers was pouting over something, probably about not getting an advance to play the ponies. Gullett’s horse farm back in Kentucky got raided by the state police because they found pot growing there.

Really, it was something new every day. The only trouble was we weren’t getting anywhere.

By August 6, we were 59–49—still just ten games over. We’d just spent twenty games treading water, going 10–10, after losing two games in Seattle to a truly horrible expansion team they had. We were still in third place—only now it was a lot worse. We were two and a half back of Earl Weaver’s Orioles, who obviously weren’t going away. We were now
five
back of the Red Sox. They had turned hot again, winning nine in a row and sixteen out of seventeen.

We had fifty-four games—exactly one-third of the season—left. If we didn’t start to make a move soon, we were going to get left behind.

By then, I didn’t even know if I cared anymore. I was talking openly to the press about trying to get out of my contract, going to play somewhere else. Going to play somewhere sane.

Billy had started benching me again against left-handers, saying it was because my elbow was hurting. That was a lie and he knew it, and I was beginning to think this stuff would never end. There was a rumor going around that Billy was going to be fired at last, and Frank Robinson, who had been fired from managing the Indians, was going to be brought in to take over. When one of the writers asked me about
that, I told him, “Just say that Reggie Jackson smiled for the first time all year.”

This time it was Gabe Paul who took care of things. We took the last game in Seattle, then flew back east and went up to Syracuse to play an exhibition game against our top farm club—about the last thing we wanted to do right then. Gabe used the occasion to corner Billy and get him to promise to hit me fourth.

The next day, back in New York, he followed through by having Billy meet with George, too. George got on him to bat me fourth, every day, the way he had promised in that Milwaukee hotel room drama, and Billy agreed. The way I heard it was, to save face, he made out he was thinking of doing it anyway because I was swinging the bat well, and Chambliss was in a bad slump.

Whatever. What he asked in return was that George let him keep Art Fowler, his pitching coach and drinking buddy, who loved being hammered more than anyone I knew. Gabe thought that Art wasn’t a good influence on Billy—really?—but by then he’d try anything. It was me for Fowler.

Wow, how far I had slipped!

So Billy makes another trade to save his drinking pal. Nothing for the good of the team! Just to save his buddy to go to the watering hole. The Yankees that year were not your usual baseball team.

But from then on, there was no stopping us. Everything just came together. August 10, we come back to New York, the Son of Sam gets arrested—thank goodness—and we took off. Including that last game in Seattle, we won forty out of fifty games, and twenty-four out of twenty-seven. Even though the Red Sox kept winning, we went from third to first, from five back to four and a half on top, in a little over three weeks.

I’ve never seen a team play that well. I don’t think many have, save for maybe the 1951 Giants on their run, the Yankees of 1998 all year long—or us, in our stretch drive in 1978.

Certainly, it wasn’t all me. I was playing great, and I’m sure it made a difference. But everybody seemed to get hot together, everything
jelled. Ron Guidry had pitched well all year, but now he really came into his own. He ran off eight straight wins, including three shutouts. Mike Torrez became the ace of the staff, the workhorse. He won seven straight complete-game victories. Seven straight complete games! Can you conceive of anyone doing that today?

Playing all the time now, Piniella got hot. Nettles was blistering; he was doing everything. Making every play in the field. He was Player of the Month for August, with ten homers and twenty-five ribbies. Chambliss revived and hit .386 over a two-week stretch.