Pinstripe Empire (59 page)

Topping Jr. was replaced by Lee MacPhail, a move widely hailed. It would now be Burke-MacPhail-Houk charged with fixing everything.

The press immediately took to Burke’s charm, style, good looks, progressive ideas, and colorful background. He gave them his home number to call whenever they needed him. They never cared for Topping’s aloof style, which to many emboldened the staid Yankees corporate image.

Burke played halfback at Penn and won a Silver Star and a Navy Cross in World War II. Gary Cooper (who played Gehrig in
Pride of the Yankees
) played Burke in
Cloak and Dagger
, a film about his adventures in Italy with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA).

After the war he became general manager of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, putting them in big arenas instead of tents. He joined CBS in 1962 as vice president in charge of diversification, and was involved with the purchase of the Yankees.

He found a way to dress fashionably for the times while still maintaining a CBS corporate look. He drove a Datsun 260Z and dated thin young actresses. He rode horseback in Central Park and got along well with Mayor John Lindsay.

Mostly, he had a manner that was thought to appeal to a younger generation of fans. That same appeal almost made Burke commissioner. In 1969, when looking for a new commissioner to replace William Eckert, the American League backed Burke; the National League Charles Feeney. The compromise candidate was National League lawyer Bowie Kuhn, who could get a consensus.

Paley thought Burke perfect to both revive the Yankees and compete with the Mets. In MacPhail, coming off a year as Executive of the Year for his work running the Commissioner’s Office, he had a guy who could focus on the roster, while Burke attended to image and ballpark matters.

With Burke from CBS came Howard Berk, who had worked in the stadium’s mail room in 1949 and was now returning as a vice president to give the team a more contemporary marketing focus.

One of their first moves was to bring in Lou Dorfsman, creator of the CBS “eye” logo, considered a genius in the design field. He was asked to help spruce up the stadium. Dorfsman walked into Burke’s office, studied samples, and pointed to dark blue as the new color of the stadium seats. Over the winter of 1966–67, the entire stadium would be freshened up: blue paint covering the green seats, white paint covering up the outer brown concrete. Fiberglass bleachers replaced the wooden ones. Additional lighting was installed outside.

The neighborhood would follow suit as the “Yankee blue” was applied to the subway station and, in 1972, even the neighboring Macombs Dam Bridge. The ticket kiosks had blue roofs—although that was the choice of Dr. Frank Stanton, CBS’s president. Dorfsman preferred a candy-stripe look.

The dark blue became the “team color,” although the team’s jackets, caps, and sweatshirts had been dark blue for years.

New graphics were selected for signage and a “telephonic Hall of Fame” was installed where fans could lift a telephone receiver and hear great moments in Yankee history. One such moment, hastily added, would be Mantle’s five hundredth home run, belted in Yankee Stadium on May 14, 1967, which made him only the sixth player in history to reach that milestone.

Burke arranged for the stadium offices to move to Yankee Stadium, shutting down 745 Fifth Avenue and building offices for everyone along the 157th Street side of the park.

An enhanced sound system was installed at the stadium with a top CBS sound engineer, Paul Veneklassen, overseeing its quality. A deal was struck with Lowrey in 1965 to add live organ music, and the organist was Toby Wright for two years, with Eddie Layton coming along in 1967 to play a Hammond. Eddie played for the CBS soap operas in the afternoon and then hustled to Yankee Stadium for night games. Stadium “hostesses” patrolled the stands to look pretty and answer questions.

Burke hired a house photographer, Michael Grossbardt, to shoot every home game and to provide more artistic photography for team publications, some published by CBS-owned Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (Previously, the Yankees would use photographers like David Blumenthal, Luis Requena, Neil Leifer, or Bob Olen and then would ask newspapers or wire services for use of game action photography.) The New Studio was hired to design the annual yearbook, instead of just relying on the printer, Terminal Printing of Hoboken.

Columbia Records recorded a theme song, “Here Come the Yankees,”
written by Bob Bundin and Lou Stallman and recorded by a house band, Sid Bass and his Orchestra, with vocals by Mitch Miller’s famous “Sing Along with Mitch” chorus.

They got opera star Robert Merrill to record the national anthem, and, beginning in 1969, he often performed it live, sometimes in his own Yankee uniform with 1½ on the back.

Promotion days proliferated. Aside from Bat Day, Ball Day, and Cap Day, there was Postcard Day, Keychain Day—anything one could imagine, and eventually they were offered to sponsors who added their logos to the products and picked up the cost. Senior Citizens’ Day was added, around the same time that Ladies’ Day disappeared after a few men sued over discrimination.

MacPhail, paying attention to his area, traded Clete Boyer to the Braves for outfielder Bill Robinson, and sent Maris to the Cardinals for third baseman Charlie Smith after the ’66 season. Boyer’s eight years with the Yanks saw him become the best-fielding third baseman in the team’s history.

Smith was a journeyman who was just the best the Yanks could get for Maris at the time. Roger’s skills had faded. He would claim the Yankees had not properly informed him of a hand injury that severely affected his play, and his parting was bitter.

Maris’s injury prevented him from gripping the bat properly. He was in pain. Once Dr. Sidney Gaynor ruled out a broken bone, the front office thought it was taking Maris too long to get back into the lineup. They dropped hints that he might be “jaking it.”

“For three months, everybody questioned if Roger was really hurt,” recalled Al Downing to Maris biographers Tom Clavin and Danny Peary. “That is a long time to be ridiculed. He wanted to play but he just couldn’t hit or throw. The sixties was the last decade before there was any kind of sports medicine. Today they’d do an MRI and it would’ve been taken care of.”

Roger finally saw his own physician and an X-ray revealed a fracture of the hamate bone at the base of the hand. When Roger went to Houk with the evidence, Houk said, “Rog, I might as well level with you. You need an operation on that hand.” As Clavin and Peary wrote, “The words ‘I might as well level with you’ etched themselves in Maris’s brain. He would quote them often over the years to convey his sense of betrayal by Houk and a Yankee organization that had known the severity of his injury but kept it from the press, the fans, and him.”

Maris played two final years for St. Louis, regained his love for baseball,
and played in two more World Series before retiring to Florida, where appreciation for his career finally blossomed.

AFTER A WINTER spent fretting over the state of the team, the Yankees played their opening game in Washington in ’67, with President Johnson throwing out the first ball. In the third inning, in his second at-bat, Bill Robinson homered to break a scoreless tie, and the Yanks went on to win 8–0 behind Stottlemyre.

Robinson was a personal favorite of Burke’s. He wanted him to succeed badly. He was tall and rangy, he was black, and he seemed like a good statement for a team “moving in new directions” (wink).

But that was the high point of his season.

The team moved up to ninth place with two more victories than the year before, 72. Robinson never got going: He batted .196 with just six more homers and lost his outfield job to another promising but ultimately disappointing player, Steve Whitaker.

Ford, who had passed Ruffing as the winningest pitcher in Yankee history in 1965, ran out of gas in ’67 and retired.

After breaking the record, Ford won only four more games. One of his last two wins was a shutout against the White Sox, the 45th of his career, and his ERA for his final season was 1.64, but he was getting by on cunning and wile, and at age thirty-eight he wanted to leave with dignity. His .690 career winning percentage was the highest in history for any 200-game winner.

ON 1967 OPENING DAY in New York, a Boston rookie named Bill Rohr had a no-hitter into the ninth when Ellie Howard broke it up with a base hit. Each time the Yankees went to Boston that season, Howard was booed.

On August 3, the Yankees traded him—to Boston! They didn’t get much in return, but they cleared the roster of another aging player and Jake Gibbs, a converted infielder, became their catcher.

Few players have ever been traded so kindly. Praise and affection were heaped on Howard for his Yankee service. He was sent to a nearby team that was going to the World Series. He was essentially promised a job with the Yankees whenever his career ended. (He would indeed return as first-base coach two years later, the first black coach in the league.)

Just the same, Arlene Howard told the media her husband had been treated unjustly. “The Yankees are not the Yankees we knew and loved. It’s a completely different organization,” she said. “I could never get used to mediocrity, and that’s what we have now.” It was another low moment for a team that just couldn’t seem to get it right anymore.

That left only Mickey Mantle from the Stengel years on the ’68 team, and that was where I came in, hired by Bob Fishel to answer Mantle’s fan mail. I had written a letter looking for a summer job and was assigned to an office not far from the clubhouse catching up with about forty cartons of unopened mail. Fishel knew every unanswered letter represented a possible future Mets fan.

There was a sign near my office that said, ABSOLUTELY NO WOMEN BEYOND THIS POINT. That meant the clubhouse was near; the taboo would be broken in 1978 when a court ordered the clubhouses open to all journalists.

That summer, I walked in the outfield to look for the drain on which Mantle tripped in ’51. I was shocked to discover that the outfield wasn’t flat, but contained many small hills and gullies, as you’d find on a golf course. I discovered storage areas in the basement where old trophies and photo blowups were stored. Employees and groundskeepers would bring bag lunches and sit in the stands. It was remarkable what a different feel the park had when it was empty.

Mantle treated me well. He saw right through my scheme of saving up “important mail” to review with him personally. There was no important mail. Everyone just wanted an autographed baseball.

It was sad to watch Mick in what would be his final season. No announcement was made, but there was a feeling. It was his fourth straight bad year. What was Mickey Mantle doing hitting .238? And who were these teammates? What was he doing batting behind Andy Kosco?

The ’68 team had a shortstop named Gene “Stick” Michael, purchased from the Dodgers, and a third baseman named Bobby Cox from the Braves organization. No one would have thought that there were two future Hall of Famers on that year’s team—Mantle and Cox—but Bobby went on to an illustrious managing career. Cox and Mantle even pulled off a triple play, started by pitcher Joe Verbanic, and it would be the last triple play the Yankees would execute for forty-two years.

Michael went on to one of the most multifaceted careers in history, as player, coach, scout, minor league manager, major league manager, general
manager, and special advisor. His later influence would be huge. In the meantime, he’d emerge as the team’s regular shortstop, pairing with Clarke in the middle of the infield for seven years.

Stan Bahnsen was 17–12 and won Rookie of the Year honors, Stottlemyre had a 21-win season, and Roy White became a regular and hit 17 homers.

Mantle hit 18. Much to his disappointment, his lifetime average dropped to .298. His 535th homer became somewhat “notorious” in that Detroit’s Denny McLain, en route to a 31–win season, “grooved” a pitch for him to enable him to break a tie with Jimmie Foxx for third place.

Wrote Red Smith, “When a guy has bought 534 drinks in the same saloon, he’s entitled to one on the house.”

White, a switch-hitter who often choked up, came from Compton, California, where he played sandlot games with a stuffed sock and formed a double-play combination with Reggie Smith. It was hard to believe that he’d briefly been a gang member in L.A. (the Van Dykes), as soft-spoken and polite as he was. Signed by the Yankees in 1962, he was converted to the outfield, played for the Yanks in ’65 and ’66, and then was farmed out to Spokane in 1967, where he could have been forgotten. But he hit .343, returned to New York, and went on to enjoy a fifteen-year career, sticking around long enough for the team’s return to the World Series. He would become one of the most respected players in town and would rank high on many Yankee lifetime offensive charts, including fifth in games played at the time he retired.

The ’68 Yanks finished fifth in the last year of one-division, ten-team baseball, and in the Year of the Pitcher, they scored two runs or fewer in 73 of their 162 games.

FOR 1969, THE centennial of professional baseball, the American League added teams in Seattle and Kansas City (managed by Joe Gordon), the pitching mound was lowered, and Frank Crosetti left the coaching lines after thirty-seven years as a Yankee to join Seattle. Cro was the last link to the Ruth and Gehrig teams.

In Seattle, Crosetti would be joined by Jim Bouton, whose time in New York had also run out, and who would learn a knuckleball and have a second act with the expansion Pilots. (A brawl between the Yankees and the Pilots at the aptly named Sicks Stadium was a memorable moment of the Pilots’ only season.)

The Yankees hoped to coax Mantle into another season, happy to pay him $100,000 just to suit up. He had played first base in his final two years, taking to the position quite nicely once his chronically painful legs made the outfield impossible for him. As his popularity remained high, his skills continued to diminish. “I just can’t hit anymore,” he told Dick Young, who prematurely headlined his retirement months earlier.