Pinstripe Empire (61 page)

The ’71 team was led by Murcer’s .331 season—second to Tony Oliva’s .337—but the gains of ’70 were erased in an 82–80 year, fourth place, in which the bullpen managed only 12 saves. The only thing that put them over .500 was a forfeit victory in the season finale in Washington, when most of the 14,460 bitter fans stormed the field in anger over owner Bob Short’s decision to move the Senators to Texas. The umpires declared a Yankee victory in a game they were losing 7–5.

DESPERATE TO PULL off a big trade and reverse the team’s sliding fortunes, Lee MacPhail decided that Stan Bahnsen was his best player to offer as trade bait to bring some punch to the lineup for 1972. Teams always sought quality starters, and in four full injury-free seasons with the Yanks, Bahnsen had won 55 games with a 3.10 ERA.

MacPhail got a second baseman from the White Sox—Rich McKinney, who had batted .271 with eight homers in 114 games. He’d looked good against the Yanks. The plan was to move him to third base, where Kenney had failed to impress.

“It was the worst trade of my career,” MacPhail wrote in his memoir,
My Nine Innings.
“I did not know McKinney well enough … We figured he could make the switch to third. That should not be an automatic assumption. But more important than that, for us, he simply did not have the aggressive bear-down temperament that we had thought he had.”

And so in one bad moment, the Yankees were out a starting pitcher with eleven years left in his career, and still had a big hole at third base. The deal was so bad, MacPhail wrote a poem about his mistake and read it at the baseball writers’ annual “pre-dinner dinner.”

After committing four errors in one game at Fenway Park, McKinney was essentially written off. It did not help McKinney that he had injured his thumb participating in roughhouse hockey games, in which players used bats as hockey sticks, in the Yankee clubhouse. The Yankees dug into the Mexican League on a tip by Tomas Morales, a Mexican sportswriter, and found a likeable guy named Celerino Sanchez. He had a tenacious approach to the hot corner, taking the toughest shots off his chest and rifling them to first. He had a winning smile and was the anti-McKinney, winning him immediate fan acceptance. He bought the Yankees some time.

One trade that did work, and that took a lot of pressure off MacPhail’s blunder, was Cater for Sparky Lyle. Ralph Houk had coveted Boston’s lefty reliever, twenty-seven, a free spirit who had ice water in his veins in pressure situations. With only days remaining in spring training, I rushed to Winter Haven, the Boston training camp, to get Lyle photographed for the Yankee yearbook, which was going to press in twenty-four hours. We had only the number 28 uniform available among lower numbers, because Ron Hansen had recently been released. Sparky had been 28 with Boston. It was perfect.

With Lyle in place, the veteran Felipe Alou aboard to share first with the colorful Ron Blomberg, and (it was thought), an able third baseman in McKinney, the Yanks couldn’t wait for the season to begin.

And then the players went on strike, the first strike in the history of baseball. No one knew what to make of it because it was a new experience for everyone. The most important thing to come out of it was the solidarity of the players. The ’72 strike was brief, but it established the union as the real deal, with the players prepared to lose money and stick together. That formula would see them through all the work stoppages to come.

Compounding the confusion was the shocking death of Mets manager Gil Hodges, only forty-seven, who, in the absence of spring training games, was playing golf with his coaches. Such were the logistics of the strike disruptions that the Yankees’ plane, due to fly north to New York, would bring Gil’s body back home for his funeral, since the Mets were to open on the road. (After the funeral, Yogi Berra was named Mets manager.)

The lost games, seven or eight per team, were not made up. It meant that
Billy Martin’s Tigers would win the AL East by half a game over Boston, since they didn’t play an equal number of games.
¹⁸

After having to cancel a four-game opening homestand against Baltimore, which included opening day and a Sunday Cap Day, the Yankees’ home attendance for the year would be 966,328, ending a run of twenty-six straight seasons in which they had topped a million at a time when such a figure was worthy of an annual press release.

When play began in ’72, the Yankees looked good. With Lyle wowing the crowds with heart-stopping saves, Murcer hitting 33 homers, and Stottlemyre, Peterson, and Steve Kline winning 49 games, there were positive signs. The role of the fourth starter came to be shared by the free-spirited Mike Kekich and Rob Gardner, who won 18 between them.

There was much drama to Lyle’s appearances, and at one point I asked a musician friend if he might suggest a “theme” to accompany Lyle’s dramatic entrances. The Datsun bullpen car would emerge from the bullpen, drive down the first-base running track, then Sparky would fling open the door and fire his warm-up jacket at the waiting batboy and stomp to the mound. My friend thought that since it foretold the culmination of the game—the save!—“Pomp and Circumstance,” aka the graduation march, might work.

It caught on almost immediately. Toby Wright on the organ (Toby came back in 1971 when Eddie Layton had a full soap-opera schedule) would take my signal, and on his first chord the fans would respond with thunderous cheers. The music became synonymous with Lyle. Sparky asked me not to play it after that season, citing “too much added pressure,” but he later came to say that the music had played a big part in creating the concept of the closer, and of course in having theme music for particular players. It was a prelude to “Enter Sandman” for Mariano Rivera in later years.

(The Datsun would be succeeded by Toyota; the idea of vehicles delivering relief pitchers lasted about ten years.)

Lyle’s season produced a record 35 saves and nine victories, with a 1.92 ERA. Responding to his heart-stopping moments, like a nine-pitch, three-strikeout save against Detroit, the Yanks were only a half game out of first on Labor Day, and we were making postseason plans. Tickets, programs,
press pins—lots of preparations had to be made, and most of us had not been there in ’64, the last time the team went through this.

But soon after, the Yanks lost six of seven and retreated in the standings. Mike Burke coveted Billy Martin as manager and was prepared to dump Houk, maybe even “trade” him to the Tigers for Martin. But MacPhail wouldn’t go for it.

When they lost their last five games of the season, they fell back into fourth again, this time 79–76 in the shortened season. Some were able to see progress, but for the fans it was just another disappointment, and patience with Houk was running thin.

THE FIRST SIGN that there might be structural problems with Yankee Stadium came on a Bat Day. Young fans would pound their bats on the concrete flooring to try and stimulate a rally. What they were stimulating, in fact, was the need for an upgrade of the aging ballpark. Mayor John V. Lindsay and Burke had first discussed it in general terms while sitting together at the 1970 Mayor’s Trophy game.

The pounding of the bats was resulting in chunks of concrete falling. No one was hurt, but the maintenance crews were making the Yankees aware of the problem. Burke, Berk, Fishel, and MacPhail came to the conclusion that safety was going to be an ever-increasing issue with the current structure. Besides, people were expecting more amenities from their facilities—safer passageways, better lighting, escalators, and certainly unobstructed views. The concept of luxury suites was also emerging.

The stadium and its land was owned by Rice University and the Knights of Columbus, but as the City of New York had provided a new facility for the Mets, so too did the Yankees hope that the city might step up and do the same for them. No threats were made, but small notices would appear about offers from New Orleans, which was seeking a major league team for its new Superdome—or perhaps from New Jersey. I was part of a small contingent that inspected the Superdome during the Winter Meetings to determine its usage for baseball. (Bad sight lines).

Mayor Lindsay was no baseball fan, but he knew that he didn’t want the Yankees leaving the Bronx on his watch, as the Dodgers and Giants had left under his predecessor, Robert Wagner. He especially didn’t want them suggesting a departure while he was running for president, since he was going to seek the Democratic nomination in 1972. Lindsay and Burke were similar
in manner and got along well from their first introduction. It did not take a lot of persuasion to get Lindsay on board with a plan to renovate Yankee Stadium, and in the process save the South Bronx.

The first cost estimate for the renovation was $24 million—the cost of building Shea Stadium a decade earlier. With inflation, and with this being less than a ground-up operation, $24 million was a figure people could “hang their hat on.”

Fishel used to organize a winter “caravan” on which a band of Yankee front-office people, a broadcaster, Houk, and a new player to showcase would visit five outlying areas in five days to meet the media in towns like Albany, Cheshire and Stamford, Connecticut, White Plains, and Trenton. It began in 1961 and continued until the gasoline shortage of 1974. In January 1972, we made the trip with McKinney (who asked me where in New York he could buy good marijuana. Hello? I work here). At each of these stops, the show-stopping announcement was the plan to renovate Yankee Stadium.

The idea was for the city to acquire the land and the ballpark through condemnation proceedings, paying Rice and the Knights of Columbus a fair market price for the property and taking on ownership, just as they owned Shea. The renovation would include removal of all the pillars in the ballpark that caused obstructed views, a matter of removing the existing roof and creating a new configuration for the seating. The city would improve access roads and make the subway station safer. There would be new lighting, new parking garages, about a dozen luxury suites, and a great new scoreboard. The Yankees would sign a thirty-year lease, ending all talk of moving elsewhere.

The work would begin the day after the 1973 season ended and the stadium was to be ready in time for opening day of 1976. In the meantime, the Yankees and Mets would share Shea Stadium for two seasons.

Burke insisted that the new design not lose the facade that ringed the current ballpark. He wouldn’t sign off on anything that didn’t include it. The architects, Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury, placed a replica facade above the billboards at the rear of the bleachers. Burke had recognized the facade as almost a fourth logo for the team—apart from the interlocking NY, the pinstripes, and the top hat.

Part of the fallout of all of this was the end of the football Giants’ days at Yankee Stadium. Unwilling to commit to a thirty-year lease, the Giants followed the call of the Meadowlands of New Jersey, where they would move into their own park in 1976. It would end a sixteen-and-a-half-year residency
at Yankee Stadium, with the Giants playing two September games from their 1973 schedule in the Bronx before demolition began.

The Giants’ departure also empowered opponents of the renovation, who could now argue that the park would be empty for half the year, reducing the number of jobs the stadium provided and affecting the economy of the neighborhood. The press on the caravan stops were learning of this even before the New York media, who were briefed when the caravan ended.

The 1972 Yankee yearbook had featured a two-page spread of an artist’s rendering of the new stadium, although the final product would look somewhat different. The plans were in place, but two seasons, 1972 and 1973, in the historic old structure still remained.

GABE PAUL HAD BEEN WHEELING and dealing in the game for decades, going back to his days in the thirties as the Reds’ traveling secretary. He moved through the Cincinnati organization, briefly to the presidency of the new Houston Colt .45s, and then to Cleveland as president of the Indians. There may not have been a better politician in baseball, and Gabe was a champion survivor no matter how many times ownership above him changed. Mostly, he knew how to operate a team on a tight budget, for that had been his fate in the game: He’d never worked for owners with deep pockets when it came to baseball.

And that’s why he perked up one day in the summer of 1972 while sitting with Al Rosen on a flight to New York. Rosen, the former Indian star, knew all the movers and shakers in Cleveland, including an up-and-comer named George Michael Steinbrenner III. Rosen had introduced Steinbrenner to Indians owner Vernon Stouffer, who’d made a handshake deal to sell him the team. The deal would have made Steinbrenner Gabe’s boss, so Gabe was anxious to hear more about the fellow, even after the Cleveland sale fell through when Stouffer had a change of heart.

“Is he for real?” Paul wanted to know. Assured that he was, or at least had the ability to raise money among other Cleveland businessmen, Paul said, “He asked me if I ever heard of a club for sale to let him know. And I know of a club for sale.”

Told it was the Yankees and that CBS was ready to sell, Rosen shared the news with Steinbrenner. Paul and Steinbrenner began communicating
directly, and Paul met with Mike Burke on September 17, 1972, at the Plaza Hotel. At that meeting Burke confirmed that William Paley said he could buy the team himself if he could find investors. Burke agreed to meet Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner had turned forty-two on July 4; Gabe was sixty-two and hadn’t really considered a “next act” in the game. But Steinbrenner was a powerful force, a can-do sort of guy who had already owned a pro basketball franchise in the American Basketball League. He had been an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue. He was now running American Ship Building, a company started by his father. Sports was his passion. He pronounced “athlete” with three syllables as though to add an extra beat of admiration. He was in the family business because “We’re German, that’s what we do.”

Jacob Ruppert would have understood.

MEANWHILE, GABE PAUL went about running the Indians, whose best player was Graig Nettles. Nettles drove in 70 runs that year, tops on the club, and played an exceptional third base. Knowing the Yankees had barely gotten through the McKinney-Sanchez season at third, he let it be known that Nettles was available. All of Gabe’s players were always available. And if he could shed some salary in the process, all the better.