Pinstripe Empire (64 page)

On the eighteenth, we introduced Williams as the new Yankee manager for 1974, and then took him to Shea to photograph him in a Yankee jersey. It was the first time we’d been there since Fishel and I had met with Mets VP Jim Thompson to determine the logistics of a shared arrangement. (The Yankees would be using the New York Jets’ cramped clubhouse down the right-field line.) Thompson, who had been fired as a Yankee executive years before, loved this moment.

Joe Cronin, leaving the AL presidency on December 31 to be succeeded by MacPhail, didn’t like the deal and squashed it. Williams had walked away from his Oakland contract and was taking the Yankee job. Finley was screaming that he deserved compensation. He insisted on rookie prospects Scott McGregor and Otto Velez.

“They’re our crown jewels!” screamed Gabe. “Never!”

MacPhail later said he didn’t agree with Cronin’s decision and would not have stopped the signing. Had that been known, the Yankees might have finessed the announcement until after the first of the year, and presumably been in the clear. But MacPhail did not want to be involved in anything quite so devious, and did not make his feelings known.

In the end, the Yankees gave up. It would have been nice to have Williams and it would have been nice to get their money back from Feathers in the Park, but it wasn’t to be. Williams would go on to manage other teams, make the Hall of Fame, and then finally join the Yankees as a special advisor from 1995 to 2001.

Plan B was Bill Virdon, not Howard, a decision that dismayed Ellie, his former teammates, and the many who knew him and respected him greatly. This had been his shot.

Dismissed as Pirates manager late in ’73 after winning the Eastern Division title in ’72, and already signed to manage Denver, Virdon had a long-forgotten Yankee pedigree. He had been signed by Tom Greenwade in 1950 and then traded to St. Louis in ’54 for Enos Slaughter. It qualified him to be a member of the newly formed Yankees Alumni Association, administered by Jim Ogle, the longtime beat reporter for the
Newark Star-Ledger
. (The Yankees stood alone in reaching out to alumni in such organized fashion.) Now his charter membership would include the manager job.

Modern fans remembered Virdon as a fine center fielder for the Pirates, who hit the “bad hop” grounder to Kubek in the ’60 World Series that turned game seven around.

There would be no Feathers in the Park event for Virdon. That budget was spent. Instead, desks were shoved aside in the group sales office and the press invited back for sandwiches (no shrimp) with Virdon on January 3, the first anniversary of the CBS sale. Newly elected Hall of Famer Whitey Ford was named pitching coach. (Ford and Mantle had just been elected together.)

The Williams-Virdon episode was more than just the hiring of a new manager. It was a signal that many Yankee moves in the future would come with complications. There would be contested draft choices, aborted signings of players, trades restructured—all sorts of angst in getting deals done. Fans would come to recognize that Yankee deals would often be drawn out.

ALTHOUGH NEVER SEEN at games and never granting interviews, Steinbrenner was known to be unhappy with Virdon from the start.

He wasn’t fiery enough, didn’t excite the fans, and didn’t seem to excite the players either. It bothered Steinbrenner that Ford would go to the mound and make pitching changes, and that Dick Howser, the third-base coach, would take the lineup cards out at the start of the game. Where was Virdon?

Bill had a laid-back style that didn’t play well with the man they would soon be calling “the Boss.”
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Still, he had Gabe Paul’s support—and he was winning!

The ’74 Yanks were again in the pennant race, despite the failing of Murcer to solve Shea Stadium’s dimensions. Murcer was horribly frustrated by the new ballpark, and did not hit a home run there until September 21, the 153rd game of the season—and then he hit another one the next day.

A key to the team’s success had occurred the previous December, when the Yanks traded Lindy McDaniel to the Royals for Lou Piniella. It was Lee MacPhail’s final Yankee trade. First signed in ’62, Piniella had been in five organizations before joining Kansas City in 1969. Now he was thirty, and the Royals thought they could replace him with Jim Wohlford, something his new teammates never let him forget. Lou was quickly a team leader, easy to tease, easy to like, and a guy the fans took to at once. He hit .305 in his first year with the Yankees.

Then came a big trade three weeks into the season that brought Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow to the Yankees, as they bade farewell to “half our pitching staff,” as Munson said. Munson was not happy about the deal, in which Peterson, Steve Kline, Tom Buskey, and Fred Beene went to the Indians, but Paul certainly knew what he was getting in Chambliss and Tidrow.

Chambliss, twenty-five, a soft-spoken son of a navy chaplain and a star at UCLA, replaced Mike Hegan at first base. Piniella, Munson, and Chambliss had been Rookies of the Year from 1969 to 1971 and were now all in the Yankee lineup. Tidrow, with a fierce mustache and the nickname “Dirt,”
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could start or relieve, and would prove to be a key addition.

The team got a lift on July 8 when Sandy Alomar was purchased from the Angels, bringing the Horace Clarke Era to a close. For nearly ten years, Clarke had been a fixture in the lineup. If for no other reason than “need for a change,” the arrival of Alomar was welcomed.
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On May 26, Virdon decided to put slick-fielding Elliott Maddox in center field, moving Murcer to right. Maddox, obtained from Texas during spring training, came from East Orange, New Jersey, and had studied prelaw at Michigan. He was studying for conversion to Judaism. Virdon was certainly one to appreciate the value of a top defensive player in center—he had been one himself.

This didn’t sit well with Bobby, a Gold Glove winner two years earlier, but it was a move Virdon made without much procrastination. It just made sense to him, even though “center field, New York Yankees” had so much history behind it. That wasn’t a big deal to Virdon. To him, Maddox was just a better option. And when Maddox took advantage of everyday play and hit .303, it was hard to argue with the move.

Pat Dobson and George “Doc” Medich, a med student as Bobby Brown had been twenty years earlier, each won 19 games, while newly acquired starter Rudy May had a 2.28 ERA and Lyle had a 1.66 figure in relief.

A big setback for the team was the breakdown of Mel Stottlemyre’s arm in his 15th start of the season. It happened suddenly, as if his supply of
pitches—forty-five thousand over his career—had run out. He lifted his left hand to his right shoulder and rubbed. Trainer Gene Monahan came out with Virdon, and the three of them left the mound together. (Monahan helped usher in a more sophisticated era of athletic training after succeeding Joe Soares in 1973.)

Save for two relief innings in August, Stottlemyre never threw another pitch. Rotator-cuff surgery might have enabled him to continue, but Mel’s injury came right before several important breakthroughs in sports medicine. MRIs, arthroscopic surgery, and rotator-cuff repair were all just in their infancy or not yet fully tested and approved.

Mel completed his Yankee career with 164 wins, 40 of them shutouts. He tried to return in 1975 but was released in spring training, a release he bitterly claimed came in the face of being told to take his own time recovering. (His partial salary would be due if he was not released by a certain date.)

The end of Stottlemyre’s tenure marked the last connection the roster had with the Topping-Webb days and with the last pennant winner of the 1921–64 dynasty. Mel had five All-Star selections and three 20-win seasons. He returned as a pitching coach two decades later, recouped some money he felt was owed to him, and garnered four more rings. That helped complete the Yankee story for Mel.

THE 1974 TEAM, with so many new faces, played hard. They occupied first place from September 4 to 22. On a couple of occasions, Virdon was required to play tapes recorded by Steinbrenner to rally the team. They seemed to demonstrate the Boss’s feeling that Virdon didn’t have the means to fire them up himself.

With reserve catcher Bill Sudakis’s boombox blaring Paul McCartney’s “Band on the Run,” the Yankees went town to town and kept winning. A particularly gratifying win came on September 10 when newly acquired Alex Johnson hit a twelfth-inning homer in Fenway Park to give the Yanks a 2–1 win, a game in which Chambliss had been struck in the arm by a dart thrown from the stands.

Johnson, a former batting champ and brother of Giant running back Ron, had no use for the media and was dressed and gone by the time the press arrived in the locker room. He didn’t really talk to teammates, either. He just liked Bill Kane, the traveling secretary. No matter. The Band on the Run gang was still going.

Two games were left in the season, and the Yankees were one game behind Baltimore. They would have to win both games in Milwaukee and hope that the Orioles lost their last two.

The trip to Milwaukee did not go well. Some excessive drinking took place. In the lobby of the Pfister Hotel at the late-night check-in, some words between Munson’s two backup catchers, Sudakis and Rick Dempsey, turned into a brawl, with lamps flying and chairs overturning. Murcer tried to play the role of peacemaker and broke a finger. He would be unavailable to play the next night.

The Yankees lost that game 3–2 in ten innings on a single up the middle by George Scott off Medich. In Detroit, Baltimore beat Houk’s Tigers 7–6 with a run in the ninth. It eliminated the Yankees from the race with one game remaining. It was a disappointing end to an exciting season, displaced as they were from their home ballpark. Virdon was named Manager of the Year by the
Sporting News
, something that amused Murcer, Munson, and Nettles, as they had spent much of the summer ignoring his signs and giving their own.

ON JUNE 26 in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, in the Township of Pequannock, a baby named Derek Sanderson Jeter arrived, the first child for Charles and Dorothy Jeter. He would be heard from again.

BOB FISHEL LEFT at season’s end to join MacPhail in the American League office as its chief publicist. He’d served for twenty years, and the writers gave him a Horace Clarke number-20 Yankee jersey as a parting gift. He loved it.

Steinbrenner, although suspended, called and asked if I felt capable of succeeding Fishel. I’d been elevated to PR director in ’73 when Fishel became a vice president (just in time for Peterson-Kekich), but now I’d have the top job. I said I could do it because I had been lucky enough to observe Fishel for six years. He was the best PR man in the game. And so George Steinbrenner made me, at twenty-four, the youngest PR director baseball had ever had, and the third in franchise history.

THE SHEA STADIUM experience for the Yankees was not a satisfying one. The Mets were accommodating, but it was clearly their home.

The clubhouse safe that had been in Hilltop Park, the Polo Grounds, and then Yankee Stadium never made it to Shea and disappeared forever. There went the last link to the Highlanders. It wasn’t a part of Bert Sugar’s haul, and it never appeared at auction. It had just vanished in the demolition, its historical value never realized.

Even Met fans were down on Shea, a utilitarian ballpark built for football and baseball and ideal for neither. Little was done to make Shea feel more “Yankee” during Yankee home games. A sign atop the scoreboard displayed the Yankees’ logo instead of the Mets’. Some billboards were purchased in Queens to alert area fans that the Yankees would love to have them come to games, but there was little indication that such attempts at recruitment helped. Compounding the problem was the gasoline crisis of ’74, which created lines at gas stations and forced people to cut back on travel. A lot of the Yankee fan base from New Jersey, Westchester, and Connecticut was going to sit out this sojourn to Queens.

The Yanks drew just 2,561,123 for their two seasons at Shea, while the Mets drew 3,452,775.

One of the great fiascos of the Shea years was Salute to the Army Day on June 10, 1975, which featured a twenty-one-gun salute from cannons placed in the outfield. Unfortunately, the firings blew a section out of the outfield wall while another section caught fire. The fire was quickly doused, which was a good thing because the Yankees and Mets would have been out of ballparks at that point, but the start of the game was held up for more than a half hour while boards were brought in and hammered into place.

Three days later, Elliott Maddox became a victim of the swampy outfield when he severely injured cartilage in his knee. Maddox, hitting .305, had to undergo surgery and was never the same player again. He wound up suing just about everyone—the doctors, the City of New York—but his real goal, to return to the form he showed in 1974–75, eluded him.

DURING THE 1974 World Series, a distraction arose that would change baseball forever.

An agent named Jerry Kapstein stepped forward to claim that his client, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, the best pitcher in the league, had not received an insurance-annuity payment in time from the Oakland owner, Charles O. Finley. The late payment, claimed Kapstein, was enough to void Hunter’s contract and make him a free agent. People laughed.

But Kapstein was right. When the matter fell into the hands of arbitrator Peter Seitz, Hunter was declared a free agent. And while some thought the penalty too severe, the owners had signed on to the arbitration process when they okayed it for salary negotiations in ’72.

In December ’74, every team—including the A’s—hustled to Hunter’s farm in Hertford, North Carolina, and his nearby lawyer’s office in Ahoskie, to show off their checkbooks.

“Gabe,” I said to Gabe Paul during the early stages, “could this possibly reach a million dollars?”

“Damn right it could,” he thundered. “This is war!”

Paul, who had worked his whole career with shoestring budgets (he had me mimeographing our daily press notes while every other team used Xerox copying, claiming it would “save hundreds a year!”), was suddenly rolling up his sleeves and playing with the big guys now that he had a well-financed ownership group behind him. And he was loving it.