Pinstripe Empire (72 page)

The baseball men as 1982 approached included Tallis, Bill Bergesch, Bill Livesey, and Rosen’s successor as team president, Lou Saban, the well-regarded football coach who had employed Steinbrenner as an assistant at Northwestern in the fifties. Good baseball men would follow, moving in and out of the front office over the next decade, unable to please Steinbrenner or to bask in a pennant: Murray Cook, Woody Woodward, Bob Quinn, Harding Peterson, Syd Thrift, even Lou Piniella.

The Jackson decision loomed large, and if there was anything telegraphing what was to come, it was when the Yankees traded for Ken Griffey Sr. on November 4. Griffey, a lifetime .307 hitter with Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, was slated to be the team’s DH, which seemed to squeeze Jackson out of the picture.

The Yankees ultimately made no effort to re-sign Reggie, and he went to the California Angels on January 22.

Steinbrenner came to call this the worst decision he ever made. With the
passage of time, he yearned for the excitement Reggie could provide and for the way he could carry the team when he was hot. But the ’81 season had been a bust. Steinbrenner even forced Reggie to take a day-long physical in August, questioning whether he was healthy. Reggie called it “harassment.”

As much as Steinbrenner loved the way Jackson could “put fannies in the seats,” Reggie was high maintainance, and it was time to go. The relationship mellowed over the years, and he became a special advisor to the team beginning in 1996.

Graig Nettles was named captain for 1982, but that was about the only thing that seemed to last from the start to the finish of this most dysfunctional season.

The Yankees added a number of players who could best be described as ill-fitting. Speedy Dave Collins, inspired by George’s love of Billyball, was supposed to be a table setter in the Mickey Rivers tradition. Instead he stole just 13 bases and batted .253. Doyle Alexander returned for a second tour of duty and went 1–7, forcing Steinbrenner to say, “I’m afraid that some of my players will get hurt playing defense behind him.”

John Mayberry, Butch Hobson, Lee Mazzilli, Roy Smalley, and Butch Wynegar, once good fits elsewhere, were not so on this team. The addition of Smalley made Bucky Dent expendable, and he went in the Mazzilli trade.

Dave LaRoche, who threw a blooper pitch he called “La Lob,” put his stamp on the term “Columbus Shuttle,” going back and forth to pitch for the Yankees and the Clippers four times.

Tommy John, 10–10, was shipped to the Angels in late August. He had taken the Yankees to salary arbitration, something that didn’t play well with the team, which had been very supportive the year before when his son Travis fell from a window and clung to life. He would return four years later for the final years of his career.

In a deal barely noticed, a prospect named Willie McGee was sent to St. Louis for pitcher Bob Sykes. McGee would win the National League MVP Award in 1985 and hit .295 over eighteen seasons with 352 stolen bases. Sykes won three minor league games in ’82 and then was out of baseball for good.

By the time the year ended, the Yankees also packaged Fred McGriff with Collins in a trade to Toronto for pitcher Dale Murray and a minor leaguer. McGriff would go on to hit 493 home runs—equal to Lou Gehrig’s total—over nineteen seasons.

Gossage, now one of the senior members of the team in only his fifth
season, took to calling Steinbrenner “the Fat Man” and claiming that he “treats us like animals” and has “made being here unbearable.” He’d be gone after the ’83 campaign.

Dave Winfield, enjoying a 37-homer season, sued Steinbrenner during the summer over late payments to his foundation, a matter later settled, but not without lingering bad feelings. By July, Steinbrenner was already missing Jackson and lamenting, “Winfield can’t carry a team the way Jackson did.”

During Jackson’s emotional return to the stadium in an Angels uniform, fans could be heard chanting “Steinbrenner sucks!” after Jackson homered off Guidry in the seventh to seal a 3–1 win. It was a rare moment in Yankee history when a visiting player was so welcomed.

The chant was an early example of a changing ballpark culture in which the use of obscenities (now far more extravagant than “sucks”) began to be heard, and not only by a few drunken fans. The power of thirty thousand people or more joining together was enabling, even if they would never speak like that outside the park. A freedom to be heard with more than “We want a hit!” was now part of the ballpark experience, and it seemed to have its origins in the mid-seventies. Curtailing beer sales after seven innings, or banning it altogether in the bleachers, which was to come, didn’t make much of a difference. Society was allowing more obscenities into common usage, just as it had embraced a greater use of contractions and slang. Ballparks were sort of the testing grounds, since they came complete with built-in enemies.

At the same time, the less offensive “wave” was being hatched as a fan-participatory event (generally believed to have started for baseball in Oakland during the Yankees-A’s playoff series of 1981). It involved sections rising in sequence, arms extended on high, creating a distracting but visually interesting effect.

While fans were getting more profane, the Yankees chose 1979 to introduce an ill-fated mascot to roam the stands. Hardly the success of Mr. Met, the San Diego Chicken, or the Phillie Phanatic, “Dandy” lasted three unspectacular years before sailing into mascot heaven. He wound up confined to the upper deck, where rumor had it that he was once beaten into submission by fans who were not necessarily drinking.

Chaos in the dugout made ’82 painful for Yankee fans who longed for the days when the team’s stability echoed its onfield professionalism and success. The ’82 team employed three managers, three batting coaches, and five pitching coaches. One of the batting coaches was Joe Pepitone, who
hadn’t been in baseball since 1973. Lemon, assured during the off-season that he would manage the full year, was fired after starting the season 6–8 and replaced by his predecessor, Gene Michael, who had been scouting. When Lemon was rehired in December of ’81, Michael was announced as the manager in waiting, with a deal to lead the team from ’83 to ’85. As with Martin’s 1979 return, the schedule was advanced. Michael’s first game was the game in which Jackson returned as an Angel, provoking the fan outburst.

Lemon could have been more aggravated by yet another abrupt dismissal, but it wasn’t his style. “It’s like Shakespeare,” he said. “He writes the plays, and we act them out.”

When the Yanks lost a doubleheader on August 3 and Bob Sheppard announced that fans were invited back for free to a future game, Stick knew he too was done. He was replaced by scout Clyde King, a onetime Brooklyn Dodger pitcher who had become a favored advisor to Steinbrenner. He would go 29–33 down the stretch as the team finished a humbling fifth, 79–83, sixteen games out of first. This would be the first time since 1946 that the Yankees had three managers in a season, and King wouldn’t make it to ’83—not with rumors that Steinbrenner was again coveting Martin, who was finishing his third year in Oakland. Baseball seismologists, knowing of the attraction between Steinbrenner and Martin, felt it was only a matter of time.

The year had one shining moment whose true significance was still to come. In the top of the ninth on September 8, Sheppard proclaimed, “Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen … playing left field and batting third, number forty-six, Don Mattingly. Number forty-six.”

Mattingly, the nineteenth-round draft pick in 1979, made his major league debut, replacing Griffey in the lineup. On October 1, facing Boston’s Steve Crawford, the twenty-one-year-old singled to right in the eleventh inning for his first of 2,153 hits. Trainer Gene Monahan, as was his self-appointed task, retrieved the ball, inscribed it, and presented it to Mattingly after the game. Something good was in the wind.

BILLY MARTIN’S THIRD shot at managing the Yankees began with a press conference on January 11, 1983, at which time he said, “I think George and I have a better understanding of each other than we did before.”

Whatever. The Martin hirings and firings were now material for Johnny
Carson. Ticket brochures—box seats $675 for full season, $9 per game—arrived with Billy pointing to the number 1 on his back, beckoning you to follow him to the top.

THE YANKEES BROUGHT in free agents Don Baylor, Steve Kemp, and Bob Shirley for ’83, and added Omar Moreno to replace Mumphrey in center. Baylor would be the team’s DH for three years, and he hit .303 with 21 homers in his first season in pinstripes.

A memorable moment came on George Steinbrenner’s birthday—July 4—when Righetti, battling New York heat and a tough Red Sox lineup, pitched the Yankees’ first no-hitter since Don Larsen, first regular-season one since Allie Reynolds, and first by a Yankee southpaw since George Moridge. He struck out the tough Wade Boggs for the final out.

On June 20, preparing to recall the emerging Mattingly (who was hitting .340 at Columbus), the Yankees released Bobby Murcer and assigned him to the broadcast booth. Murcer’s playing time had been limited to DH and pinch-hitting roles. He had barely made the roster in 1981, then smashed an emotional opening day pinch-hit grand slam. But he played only 50 games that year, and went to spring training in ’82 as a nonroster player. Six days before opening day, he signed a three-year contract. It may have been an emotional signing by Steinbrenner, as Bobby again played just 65 games with seven homers. He hadn’t played the field since 1980.

In ’83, he had just four hits in 22 at-bats before his career closed down. Although inexperienced as a broadcaster, he was well accepted by the fans. Bobby continued as a broadcaster for the rest of his life (missing one season), and then fell victim to brain cancer, which claimed him at sixty-two in 2008. His popularity never waned among Yankee fans, and his wireless mike broadcasts from the field on Old-Timers’ Days added a special dimension to those telecasts.

As bizarre moments go, few in baseball history ever approached what came to be known as the Pine Tar Game.

On July 24, Yankee nemesis George Brett belted a ninth-inning Gossage fastball for a two-run homer to give the Royals a 5–4 lead. Egged on by Nettles (who in 1974 had been fined for used a bat plugged with Super Balls), and by coach Don Zimmer, who seldom missed anything, Martin made his way to plate umpire Tim McClelland contending that Brett’s bat was illegal: Its
application of pine tar was too high on the bat’s handle, well into the sweet hitting surface.

As Brett sat quietly in the Royals dugout, savoring his big homer, McClelland placed the bat beside home plate to take a measurement of how high the pine tar reached. Satisfied that Martin was correct, he waved his right arm to indicate “out,” reversing the homer.

Brett made a frenzied leap from the dugout in attack mode. He was barely contained from hitting McClelland. It may have been the most replayed baseball moment since videotape arrived. The game would end with the homer excised, a 4–3 Yankee win. Brett, his manager Dick Howser, his coach Rocky Colavito, and teammate Gaylord Perry (who tried to make off with the evidence but was stopped by a stadium guard), were all ejected.

The Royals appealed to the league office, where Lee MacPhail presided. Feeling the call was in accordance with the rules but not in the “spirit of the rules,” MacPhail reversed the decision and ruled that the game needed to be continued from the point of the home run, with the Royals leading 5–4. MacPhail acknowledged that it was unlikely that the presence of pine tar would do much to assist in hitting a home run.

Steinbrenner’s reaction: “If the Yankees lose the pennant by one game, I wouldn’t want to be Lee MacPhail living in New York. Maybe he should go house hunting in Kansas City.”

Bowie Kuhn acknowledged that he came very close to suspending Steinbrenner over the remark, knowing that passionate Yankee fans might well interpret this as a call to physically go after MacPhail. In one of his last acts as commissioner, he fined Steinbrenner $300,000.

The matter went to court, twice. A few fans sued, claiming a separate admission to the remaining outs was not legal. The remaining four outs—an oddity in baseball history by any standard—were played before 1,245 people on August 18. Martin treated it like a joke, playing Guidry in center and the left-handed Mattingly at second, as the Royals recorded their only out, and then the Yankees went down 1-2-3 in the ninth to lose the game.

In the press box, Yankee PR man Ken Nigro handed out cans of pine tar and T-shirts reading, I WAS THERE FOR THE PINE TAR GAME, which did not go over well with Steinbrenner. Nigro was also planning to testify about Steinbrenner’s involvement in recruiting fans to sue the league in State Supreme Court over the admission plans in an effort to derail MacPhail’s agenda.
Nigro’s days were numbered. Not only that, but Steinbrenner didn’t attend a “roast” for all the former PR men after the season because of Nigro’s presence. We would have liked to have had him there.

In early August, with the Yankees in Toronto, Winfield found himself under arrest after striking and killing a seagull at Exhibition Stadium while throwing warm-ups between innings. The charge was eventually dismissed.

On the day of the Pine Tar conclusion, Yankee shortstop Andre Robertson was involved in an auto accident on the West Side Highway near the George Washington Bridge, which left his female passenger paralyzed and altered his up-and-coming career. By the following season, he ceded the position to Bobby Meacham.

Despite all of these distractions, plus the ongoing bickering between Martin and Steinbrenner, the Yankees stayed in contention in 1983 until they dropped three out of four to Baltimore in early September and wound up second, seven games back. They drew almost 2.3 million fans.

Martin’s future hung in the balance. There was no one moment this time, no punch-out, no ill-tempered remarks. It was just another year of Billy turmoil, picking a fight with a female reporter, battling over his buddy Art Fowler’s dismissal as pitching coach, suspended for kicking dirt on an umpire, rebuked for smashing a clubhouse urinal at Cleveland Stadium.