Pinstripe Empire (58 page)

One could almost say that in the mid- to late sixties, baseball found only three “superstar” players: Reggie Jackson, Tom Seaver, and Johnny Bench. The greatest athletes were going elsewhere.

The Yankees’ scouting director, Johnny Johnson, who would later be the president of the minor leagues, acknowledged this. “We don’t have the quality of player we used to have,” he said. “But neither does anyone else, because it just isn’t there anymore.”

Further hurting the Yankees was the installation of the game’s first amateur draft in 1965. The draft, which excluded Latin America, was a system by which the last-place team would pick first from all eligible high school and college players. Thus, in the first such draft, the Athletics chose Rick Monday, who would have a fine career, and the Yankees, who chose nineteenth, selected pitcher Bill Burbach, who would have an undistinguished one.

So good players were getting away from the Yankees. But by dropping into the second division for five straight years—1965–69—the Yankees had better selections. They just didn’t always work out. (An exception was Thurman Munson in 1968.)

By the sixties, superior scouting was no longer the answer; everyone knew who the best players were. Having top scouts was marginalized. There were no more Mickey Mantles to find when no one else was looking.

The draft was a very inexact science. No team was “brilliant” in this area on a consistent basis. Each team had high-round draft choices that never made it and low-round choices that fooled everyone. The finest baseball minds, relying on good scouting reports, were still gambling that an eighteen-year-old might evolve into a star. All too often, they didn’t. The draft put the Yankees on equal footing with everyone else in this regard; they had no edge in signing players, even with the glamour of their name.

Another problem was the race issue, which finally caught up with the
Yankees. Once their white stars grew old, they were on equal footing with the other American League teams, who were equally slow to sign blacks.

While National League teams had been signing African-American players the caliber of Mays, Aaron, Banks, McCovey, Gibson, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams, Lou Brock, Ferguson Jenkins, and Willie Stargell and dark-skinned Latino stars like Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Tony Perez, and more, the American League wasn’t even close. The Yankees had let all those players get away.

Players of color on the American League’s 1965 All-Star team included Howard, Mudcat Grant, Tony Oliva, Willie Horton, Felix Mantilla, Zoilo Versalles, and Earl Battey. Not a Hall of Famer in the lot. The NL squad had nine.

It also hurt the Yankees’ image that the Mets, playing in their new Shea Stadium, were outdrawing them. New stadiums tended to produce strong attendance, Stengel had given the Mets a “fun” reputation, and they were building a strong fan base among affluent Long Island residents. Their open, well-lit parking felt more fan friendly than the dark streets of the Bronx did.

There could be no denying that the Yankee Stadium neighborhood was changing. The welcome-home dinners were moved to Manhattan in 1958. The Concourse Plaza had fallen into disrepair and was accommodating the homeless. By ’68 it would be strictly a welfare hotel, (although Horace Clarke preferred to live there and walk to work). Joyce Kilmer Park, across the street, was becoming a drug haven. A lot of people were fleeing the neighborhood and moving to Co-Op City, a housing development on the grounds of a failed amusement park, Freedomland. As minorities moved into the apartments, the
New York Times
was running stories with subheads like TRANSITION FELT TO BE POSING THREAT TO STABILITY OF AREA, which would only make more people move out.

The media took a liking to the Mets, and suddenly, Yankee stories tended to use words like “collapsed,” “crumbled,” and “failure.” The younger writers, dubbed “Chipmunks” and led by Stan Isaacs, Larry Merchant, and Leonard Shecter, weren’t shy about delving into the team’s woes. The old guard was much more protective of the Yankee brand. (Other Chipmunks included Phil Pepe, Vic Ziegel, George Vecsey, and Steve Jacobson.)

While the collapse was a blow to Yankee fans, for whom first place was almost a birthright, the end of the Yankee dynasty was joyous news to fans in the league’s nine other cities. Suddenly, opportunity knocked.

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IN ’65, THE season of disbelief, injuries hit the team hard. Elston Howard hurt his elbow in spring training and was out until June. When he came back, he had a .233/9/45 season. Maris missed four weeks early and then 49 games during the summer. He was .239/8/27. Mantle played 122 games and suffered his worst season, .255/19/46. For Mick, it would prove to be the beginning of the end. The 1964 season, at age thirty-two, was his last as “Mickey Mantle.” The remaining four years of his career were very ordinary.

Stottlemyre won 20 games, Ford went 16–13, and Ramos proved a capable and colorful reliever over the full season, but otherwise the pitching wasn’t there, and the Yankees endured their first second-division finish since Babe Ruth’s bellyache of 1925.

Bouton was just 4–15.

“In those days,” he reflected, “before pitch counts and four days of rest, maybe I had just been overworked the previous two seasons. I wasn’t a big guy, but I’d pitched 520 innings and 23 complete games in those years. After ’65 I went to my own doctor and sure enough, I had a low-grade chronic strain of the brachialis, which connects the bicep to the bone.”

“I felt badly for Johnny Keane,” he added. “He was a religious man and we were a party team. That was okay with Houk and Yogi, but he wasn’t a good fit for a team like us that could party and win. Except we were no longer winning.”

Seen as an outsider who didn’t understand the culture and chemistry of the team, Keane’s relationship with the players was tense and distant. The players tended not to take him seriously. He issued fines they thought of as silly, like $250 to Mantle for drinking too much at an airport bar during a long flight delay. Keane was probably right in feeling that the “parties” needed wins, or else. But he lacked the respect that would have been needed to back it up. “Mickey was a superstar, but Keane didn’t give him that much respect,” said Ramos. “Instead of asking, ‘You think you can play today?’ Mickey had to find out if he was in the lineup.” It was just a bad marriage.

Down 92,000 on the year, the front office sprang into action. It could have been more had not 71,245 turned out for the team’s first Bat Day on June 20, with a second on August 14. When the fans responded to Bob Sheppard’s request to hold the bats high for photographers, the sea of wood was a remarkable sight both for its visual content and its acquiescence into the land of promotion, so long avoided by the Yankees.

There was a quickly arranged Mickey Mantle Day, notable for the sight of
DiMaggio turning his back on Senator Robert F. Kennedy, said to be over matters involving Marilyn Monroe.

When Mantle came to bat that day in the first, Detroit pitcher Joe Sparma walked in from the mound to shake his hand. This was the esteem in which Mantle was now held throughout baseball. Everyone appreciated how he played in pain and played the game right. He never showed anyone up. He was, in fact, a great teammate and a great opponent.

In his eighteen-year career, Mick was hit by a pitch just 13 times. This is not to say that being hit shows a lack of respect or a vindictiveness, but such a startling statistic must have a little of “Mantle respect” built in as well.

At the end of the year, Tony Kubek, just twenty-nine, retired, and the Yankees pleaded with Richardson not to do the same lest they lose their middle infield in one swoop. They even offered Richardson a rare two-year contract to stay on, but he agreed to only one more year and then retired at thirty. Kubek retired because of injuries and Richardson because he hated the separation from his family. The Yanks got nothing in return for these two All-Star players.

Kubek had an unlikely post-playing career. A shy, even difficult interview as a player, he was hired by NBC for Game of the Week and World Series duty, pulled no punches, and became a respected broadcaster who would one day win the Frick Award. From 1990 to 1994 he even broadcast Yankee games, and wasn’t shy about criticizing management.

Richardson continued his work with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Baseball Chapel, spoke at Billy Graham crusades, scouted for the Yankees, coached college ball at South Carolina and two smaller schools, and ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress.

The season began a procession of second-line players who barely resembled Yankees, and rookies with dim prospects. The team even had its first true knuckleballer in Bob Tiefenauer, which forced the team to buy an oversized catching mitt for Howard.

Two rookies did debut who would have a positive impact down the road, but in 1965 it was too early to see the promise in Roy White and Bobby Murcer. Another debut was by Horace Clarke, seen as the successor to Richardson at second.

AND JUST WHEN you thought is couldn’t get worse …

The Yanks finished dead last in 1966 for the first time since 1912.

A team with Mantle, Maris, Ford, Pepitone, Richardson, Howard, Stottlemyre, and Boyer—last. In two years they had gone from first to tenth.

Bob Fishel pointed out that no last-place team had ever won 70 games before, but that thought barely resonated.

When they started out at 4–16, Keane was fired. He was sacked on a Friday night after a loss in Anaheim, and the timing helped bury the story in New York, where most people didn’t catch up with it until Sunday’s papers had a sad photo of Keane heading one way—for a taxi—while the players headed the other way, for the team bus. (Keane would die just eight months later; many wrote “of a broken heart,” although it was a heart attack.) It was the first time the Yankees had fired a manager in midseason since Chase replaced Stallings in 1910.

Houk named himself as successor, with Dan Topping Jr. elevated to GM. Houk’s move was well received when the Yanks won 13 of his first 17 games. But it was an artificial boost. This was a bad club, with Stottlemyre’s 12–20 record tying rookie Fritz Peterson’s 12–11 for most wins on the team. Ford, bothered by circulation problems, won just two. Jim Turner’s return to the team as pitching coach after five years in Cincinnati was no tonic.

Mantle and Maris hit just 36 homers between them.

Clarke spent most of the year at shortstop and then took over at second in September as Richardson prepared for his retirement. His first two homers (he hit only 27 in his career) were both grand slams.

Clarke, a mild-mannered twenty-six-year-old, was just the fourth major leaguer from the Virgin Islands. Over the next decade, the press would view him as the symbol of all that had gone wrong. Criticized for bailing out on double plays, he nevertheless led the league in assists six times, putouts four times, fielding percentage once, and never in errors. A decent offensive player, he led in singles twice. In 1970 he broke up three no-hitters with ninth-inning singles in a course of four weeks. His 151 stolen bases in ten Yankee seasons spoke to some speed. The problem, of course, was that he was just a very ordinary player, and even his fielding honors could be attributed to limited range. It wasn’t his fault that nobody better came along.

The fact that Houk stuck with him year after year came to be dispiriting to fans. Not once did he take a chance on a rookie just to “shake things up” out of spring training. Clarke was his guy, and the fans would groan.

Gloomy as the 1966 season was, the low point came on September 22 when only 413 fans were in the park for a weekday makeup game against the
White Sox. It was only three days after Michael Burke became the new team president.

Such a game would usually not have been on the broadcast schedule, but the season had run out of dates on which to make up the rainout, and so the WPIX cameras were there for the lackluster 4–1 loss in a continuous drizzle.

In the Channel 11 booth, Red Barber was thinking like an unbiased journalist and knew that the attendance was the story. It was hard to hide it. He spoke to director Jack Murphy between innings about paying more attention to the crowd. Murphy was hesitant. Barber became insistent. He talked about the small total on the air. He wanted Duilio Costabile, the cameraman at his side, to pan the stands.

Fishel asked Topping Jr. about inviting the 413 fans back for another game.

“We don’t do things like that,” he answered.

ON BURKE’S SEVENTH day with the team, he invited Barber to breakfast in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel. The team had played its final home game the day before, and Red was scheduled to do broadcasts in Washington before driving home to Florida.

Some small talk ensued. At last, Burke took a deep breath and said, “There’s no use in our talking this way. I have to tell you we’re not renewing your contract.”

Red said he was stunned, although he’d seen Mel Allen shown the door two years earlier. But he had figured that CBS knew professionalism and would retain him. His partners, Rizzuto, Coleman, and Garagiola, were amateurs in his mind, ex-players. He never made it comfortable for them in the booth. And his patrician style also felt a bit condescending to younger fans, whom the Yankees were now desperate to reach.

Barber had not been beloved like Allen, but he was erudite and respected. This was a rough way for Burke to break in, although he told people the decision had been made before he got there. It came to be believed that Red’s insistence on showing the 413 fans was the final straw.

“I inherited [the decision],” said Burke. “But I agreed with it. I believe that for every man there is a time to come and a time to go. In my opinion it was Red’s time to go.”

Barber did the games in Washington and bristled at Burke’s concern that
there was a danger in letting him go on the air. His professionalism was being needlessly questioned.

BURKE BECAME PRESIDENT on September 19. Topping sold his 10 percent interest to CBS and departed. Suffering from emphysema, he would die in May 1974. Del Webb died less than two months later.