Pinstripe Empire (77 page)

Bernie Williams would claim center field in ’93, similarly taking hold of that spot for the long term.

“Mr. Steinbrenner was impatient about Bernie,” said Michael. “Frankly, none of us saw the power that he had. But occasionally he’d crush one in batting practice, and we knew the raw tools were there. The fact that he could switch-hit broke the hold we had with right-handed hitters like Kelly.
That was big. We needed more patience from the Tampa people, George included. I think over the years I taught him patience while he taught me business. It was coming together. Bernie was the first step. And he became a good center fielder who could really run down a ball.”

He would, in fact, become the most prolific postseason home run hitter in baseball history until Manny Ramirez passed him. And as far as crushing them in batting practice, whereas no one ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium in a game, on July 23, 2001, Bernie may have hit one onto River Avenue through the opening between the bleacher billboards and the grandstand during batting practice. It quickly became urban legend, but no one came forward who could absolutely attest to it.

“I didn’t see it,” said Williams, “but I noticed that it never came back, so that should have been some indication it was out … It was as hard as I ever hit one.”

Mike Stanley, meanwhile, unseated Nokes as the team’s number-one catcher, and his .305 showing with 26 homers made him only the tenth catcher in major league history to scale .300/25. Fans took to him quickly.

The Yankees also brought Willie Randolph “home” in ’93, making him an assistant general manager after the All-Star break, and then moving him to third-base coach in ’94 and bench coach in ’04, a position he would hold until he was named manager of the Mets in 2005.

The ’93 Yanks spent some time tied for first place, but yielded in September to Toronto. Still, they had put enough of a stake in the ground to claim that they were once again contenders. While some would claim that the foundation for the upcoming years of success was planted during the Steinbrenner absence, supporters of the Boss’s reign could point to ’93, the year he returned, as being the start of it all. Both sides had good arguments. And the team’s attendance of 2,416,965 was almost seven hundred thousand more than in ’92, and the fourth highest in Yankee history.

READY TO GO in 1994 with little turnover to the roster, the Yankees were enjoying a 70–43 season, first place, and a six-and-a-half-game lead when the season was suddenly halted by a devastating player’s strike on August 12. The issue was the owners’ desire to institute a salary cap for player salaries, something Steinbrenner supported, even when the end result meant his paying a special tax for exceeding the limit, designed to assist the lower-earning teams.

Key was 17–4; Steve Howe had a 1.80 ERA. O’Neill was hitting .359 (and
.400 as late as June 17), enough to win him a batting championship if the season did not resume. And it did not. The average would be the highest recorded by a Yankee since Mantle’s 1957 season and remained so through 2011, fifty-four years after Mantle’s .365.

As had been the history of bitter labor stoppages between union and management, this one was equally nasty with no end in sight. Finally Bud Selig had to accept the obvious and announce that for the first time in ninety years, there would be no World Series in 1994.

And so the Yankees had no championship to show for their aborted season, during which they’d been easily the best team in the AL and may have won the first in what would soon become a string of championships. With no pressure to achieve an agreement once the Series was canceled, the talks lingered on through the winter and into the following spring, when the teams decided to use replacement players—“scabs” was the union’s term—to play spring training games.

One of the replacement players was Shane Spencer, a 1990 draft pick by the Yanks who would burst onto the scene in 1998 and earn three World Series rings. Another, Dave Pavlas, came up to the Yankees in July of ’95 and was shunned by his teammates. A third, Cory Lidle, was in the Milwaukee organization at the time. He would pitch for ten organizations, but the Yankees would be his last. He was killed in a private-plane crash into a Manhattan apartment building right after the 2006 season.

Two quiet, classy players performed a small gesture of generosity at the close of the ’94 season. Since there was no final game, the batboys would not receive their year-end tips from the players. Mattingly and Abbott went to the trouble of calling Kathy Bennett in the Yankees’ accounting office to get the home addresses of the kids, and mailed them their tips.

1995 WOULD BE the last time the Yankees would gather in Fort Lauderdale for spring training. The once-beach-blanket-bingo town had lost some of its youth-oriented luster over the years, but Steinbrenner was frustrated by the city’s inability to provide him with a full minor league complex adjacent to the major league camp. With Florida’s east coast losing a number of teams, easy travel to road games had dissipated, and venerable Fort Lauderdale Stadium would lose its Yankees after thirty-four springs. (The Orioles moved in to replace them.)

The team moved to Steinbrenner’s hometown of Tampa the following year
with the opening of Legends Field (it became Steinbrenner Field in 2008), but the last roundup off Commercial Boulevard near Route 95 featured some promising rookies, including catcher Jorge Posada, nonroster shortstop Derek Jeter, and pitchers Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. Pettitte would make it north with the team out of camp and win nine of twelve in the second half of the year; Rivera and Jeter would come up a month later, with Jeter making thirteen starts while Tony Fernandez nursed a rib-cage injury. Posada joined the team in September, as Jeter returned from Columbus, mostly to sit and observe. Jeter, the team’s number-one draft choice in ’92, was the Minor League Player of the Year in ’95. After Pettitte retired in 2010, and Posada in 2011, Jeter and Rivera would be the last of the Fort Lauderdale–trained players on the team.

Rivera, not considered a top prospect early on, came from Panama and threw about eighty-nine or ninety miles per hour. One day in spring training of 1992, Michael drove him to the Dodger camp in Vero Beach to see Dr. Frank Jobe, who had pioneered Tommy John surgery. Jobe examined Rivera and decided he wasn’t a candidate, but he did go in and clean out some bone fragments in his right elbow. Mariano pitched only ten games that year, had mixed success in ’93, and a 5.81 ERA at Columbus in ’94. In ’95, he was twice sent to the minors between ten Yankee starts. On his second time down, Michael was reading reports and saw that the radar gun had him in the mid-nineties.

“Must be a mistake,” thought Michael. But he asked around, and in a conversation with Tiger scout Jerry Walker, got a confirmation of the number.

“Yeah, that’s what we thought,” he told Walker matter-of-factly.

When Rivera was recalled, he was indeed throwing that hard. Whatever happened remained a baseball mystery.

“I told Buck I’d like him to start Mariano in Chicago on July 4,” said Michael. “It was a day game, and it’s a tough park for hitters by day. He came through with an eight-inning performance, just two hits and eleven strikeouts. We knew we had something.”

“Maybe he just relaxed and was able to let it all out,” Michael said. He was a new player. His career turned around.

SPRING TRAINING WITH “real” players lasted only twelve games, and the regular season was trimmed to 144 in what would be the first season of Commissioner Selig’s new division alignments, with three division
winners and a wild-card team making the playoffs in each league. The Yankees obtained Jack McDowell in the off-season to bolster the pitching staff, and then added defending Cy Young winner David Cone in July when Key needed rotator-cuff surgery. Cone had been a very popular New York Met in the late eighties, and then pitched for Toronto, Kansas City, and Toronto again from 1992 to 1995. (McDowell too was a Cy Young winner with the White Sox, for whom he twice won 20.)

Cone cost the Yanks Marty Janzen and two other minor leaguers. The Blue Jays insisted on Janzen, who had gone 10–3 at Tampa and showed a lot of promise. Going against others who wanted to keep him, and even against his own plan of holding on to prospects longer, Michael said, “We’re the Yankees. We need Cone, and we should make this deal.”

Janzen won six games for the Blue Jays and spent the rest of his career in the minors.

THEN THERE WAS the question of Don Mattingly’s future. He was in the final year of his contract, and while still enormously popular, his offensive production had become too diminished for a power position. He went 192 at-bats between his first and second homers of ’95 and was batting .203 with runners in scoring position. Many felt the Yankees might have to make the tough decision to not re-sign him at year’s end.

It was a gloomy season for all of baseball, with embittered fans staying home after the strike. Everything was affected: baseball-card sales collapsed, television ratings plummeted, booing of the players increased. Slumping Danny Tartabull, making $5.3 million, was a special target as his game seemed rapidly in decline. Eventually he wouldn’t even come out for batting practice, fearful of being singled out by the fans. On July 28, he went to Oakland for Ruben Sierra, who drove in 44 runs in 56 games.

A rare nationally celebrated event for fans came when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game streak, ending a Yankee hold on that mark that went back seventy-three years, including Everett Scott’s mark preceding Gehrig’s. When the record fell, Gehrig’s teammate Joe DiMaggio was on hand in Baltimore to honor Ripken in the ceremonies.

MICKEY MANTLE, DEBILITATED from years of drinking, rehabilitated at the Betty Ford Clinic and received a liver transplant in Dallas on June 8. He did
a soul-searching, “Don’t be like me” press conference from the hospital when the baseball world descended on Dallas for the All-Star Game, suggesting that he could indeed be a role model—a negative one. He established an organ-donor drive. Baby boomers wept. This was the Mick, and he had touched that whole generation.

He couldn’t make it to Old-Timers’ Day on July 22 and sent a touching video message to the fans, wearing a uniform that no longer fit him well, saying that “I’ll see you next year … maybe … hope.”

In late July, cancer spread to his lungs and he went back to the hospital on the twenty-eighth. One by one, his teammates—Bauer, Blanchard, Skowron, Ford—came to the hospital to say good-bye. Richardson provided religious comfort.

He died on Sunday morning, August 13, and his funeral was carried live from Dallas by ESPN, with Bob Costas poignantly saying, “He was our guy.”

“I just hope God has a place for him where he can run again,” said Costas, making everyone remember the young teenage sensation who burst into America’s consciousness forty-four years before. It seemed like every baby boomer in America wanted to play center field and wear number 7 in Little League. The Yankees wore a 7 on their sleeves for the balance of the season.

Phil Rizzuto did not make it to the funeral. WPIX had told him he was needed for the broadcast that night, and Phil, no fan of travel, was happy to have an excuse. But when he saw the funeral on TV, he had great regrets. He felt so badly, he resigned as a broadcaster, ending a thirty-nine-year run. “I’ve overstayed my welcome,” he said. (He did reconsider and came back to do some games in 1996 to make it an even forty years as a broadcaster.)

As the Yankees battled for a playoff spot in the first year in which a wildcard team would make the postseason, attention fell on Mattingly. He would end the season with 1,785 games played—but would he ever have one in the postseason? There was a lot of sentiment for the Yankees because of him.

The Yanks won twenty-six of their last thirty-three games to clinch the first American League wild-card slot on the season’s final day in Toronto. Pat Kelly’s homer in the third-to-last game, a 4–3 win in the Skydome, kept them alive. In the last game, Sterling Hitchcock got the win; Mattingly homered, and the Yanks beat the Jays 6–1 for the clincher.

Cone had delivered, winning nine of eleven down the stretch. Pettitte
was a 12-game winner. Bernie Williams hit .307 and John Wetteland saved 31 games after being picked up in a spring training trade with Montreal.

THE YANKEES FACED Piniella’s Mariners in the Division Series after the Mariners won a one-game tiebreaker with the Angels. Seattle had played refuse-to-lose baseball all year, led to their first postseason by emerging stars such as Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, Tino Martinez, and an eighteen-year-old phenom named Alex Rodriguez who rode the bench watching Luis Sojo play short.

The Yanks won the first two games at Yankee Stadium, the second decided on a fifteenth-inning home run by Jim Leyritz at 1:22 A.M. In that game, Mattingly hit his first postseason home run. He hit .417 for the ALDS and went out in a big way: His career would conclude with a .307 lifetime average, but sadly, the bad back had taken away the torque that had once made his swing so lethal. His final home run was a tremendously sentimental moment for a generation of Mattingly fans, who sensed he would not play again.

Things didn’t go well in Seattle. Johnson beat McDowell in game three, the Mariners evened the series 2–2 in game four, and it all came down to a dramatic game five on October 8.

In the last of the eighth, with the Yanks up 4–2, Griffey hit his fifth homer of the series to make it 4–3. Three walks and a single let the Mariners tie the game. Into extra innings they went, and now Johnson and McDowell were pitching in relief. This was as tense a postseason game as could be remembered.

In the top of the eleventh, the Yanks’ all-purpose Randy Velarde singled home a run to give them a 5–4 lead. Then, in the last of the eleventh, McDowell allowed singles to Joey Cora and Griffey. Edgar Martinez, who hit .571 in the series, doubled to left, scoring Cora, with Griffey following him in, sliding home with the dramatic winning run.

The victory was enormous for the Mariners. Many credited it with getting voters to approve financing for the new Safeco Field project to replace the Kingdome. It was a game that may have saved a franchise.