Pinstripe Empire (62 page)

At the Winter Meetings on November 27, in the middle of the Steinbrenner-Burke-Paul talks, Gabe traded Nettles to the Yankees for Charlie Spikes, Rusty Torres, John Ellis, and Jerry Kenney. All four had won the James P. Dawson Award as the top spring training rookie, an award presented annually since 1956 and named for the former
Times
reporter who had died during spring training in 1953. All had engraved Longines watches. There would be a good chance that between the four of them, they wouldn’t be late for games.

Gabe would be the first to say that a deal wasn’t a deal until the papers were signed, so despite later rumors about “knowing he’d be a Yankee too,” the deal was legal and uncontested. But it was Gabe at his best, working the hallways and the back rooms.

Nettles, twenty-eight, had a sweet left-handed swing for Yankee Stadium and also a sarcasm and wit that reminded some of Roger Maris’s “red-ass” reputation. And although Pete Sheehy hadn’t taken Maris’s uniform number
9 out of circulation, I saw a connection at once, and for the first and only time in my years with the Yankees, went into the clubhouse and said, “Pete, you gotta give Nettles number nine! He’s Maris.” It was a perfect fit.

On December 19, Steinbrenner stood before William S. Paley and told him that he had the partners and the financing and was prepared to make a deal. In ten days, it would be finalized.

The next meeting included Steinbrenner, Burke, and Paley. They agreed on $10 million as the sale price, which included several neighborhood parking garages and lots owned by the team. The city purchased the garages shortly after, making the sale of the club just $8.8 million. Steinbrenner’s personal cost for his share was $168,000.

Paley wanted the announcement to cover his $13.2 million purchase—to make it seem that with the depreciation of player contracts, the network had essentially broken even.

But the truth was, at least since the Great Depression, and perhaps back to the beginning of Major League Baseball, this was believed to be the only time a team had ever been sold at a loss.

Although Gabe loved to leak stories to the press, particularly to Milton Richman of UPI, the talks about the Yankees being for sale became one of the best-kept secrets in New York sports history.

Just before Christmas, the Yankees held their employee Christmas party in the Stadium Club at Yankee Stadium, with farm director Johnny Johnson presiding over his annual slide show where funny captions pertaining to current employees were applied to stock photographs. Among those present, only Burke knew about the impending sale. MacPhail, to his disappointment, was not asked to come aboard as a partner. Even Howard Berk, Burke’s closest confidant within the front office, hadn’t been forewarned. The deal was signed on December 29.

Bob Fishel was informed on January 2, 1973. The next morning, I began my task of calling the media—we were still using rotary-dial phones and dealing with busy signals and no voice mail—to summon them at once to Yankee Stadium for an urgent announcement.

Lunch was prepared in the Stadium Club, a podium was moved in, and Mike Burke announced the purchase of the team, introducing his new partner George Steinbrenner, a shipbuilder from Cleveland, and promising to introduce all the other limited partners in another week.

“We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees,” said Steinbrenner in his first exchange with the New York media. It was what he had
told Paley. “We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”

The words would come back to haunt him as he’d grow more involved over the years. Some never let him forget it. Ignored was the fact that he knew and loved sports, and may have been answering politely because those currently running the team were right there in the room. It was not the way to tell them that their time had come to move on.

In fact, another statement that day caused greater internal consternation. Forgetting Paley’s request to make the deal come out favorably to CBS shareholders, Steinbrenner said, “It’s the best buy in sports today. I think it’s a bargain!”

The statement felt like a great betrayal to Burke, whose loyalty to Paley was enormous. He was devastated. The styles and beliefs of Steinbrenner and Burke were probably never meant to coexist as a partnership, but on day one, mistrust had already emerged.

ON JANUARY 10, the limited partners were introduced at the 21 Club: powerful titans of business and industry, seated humbly, side-by-side on armless chairs, with Steinbrenner and Burke presiding. Another point of tension had shockingly emerged: Gabe Paul was a limited partner in the deal. (Rosen would become a limited partner a year later.)

Still more aggravating was Steinbrenner’s decision to place Paul into a high front-office position. It nearly derailed the 21 Club event. Paul wanted to be announced that day as team president. Steinbrenner assured him that would be the case, with Burke as chief operating officer, responsible for such things as the new stadium project.

To Burke, this hadn’t been agreed upon. Now, with Paul pointing his finger at him in the backseat of the car to 21, the two reached a hasty compromise. At the press conference, Burke would say, “Gabe is sixty-three and has a nice home in Florida where he and his wife, Mary, will retire in a few years. This is a nice swan song for him to end his baseball career.”

Gabe sat there and accepted it, feeling Steinbrenner would ultimately make his feelings known. For the time being, it would just simmer.

As for the other partners, there were Gabe people and George people, many from Cleveland, some not. It was a hastily assembled group. One, James M. Nederlander, was the head of a theatrical family producing Broadway shows. He would bring Steinbrenner in as an investor for one of
them—ironically, a revival of
No, No, Nanette
, the show linked to the Babe Ruth sale first produced by Harry Frazee.

It was Nederlander who told Steinbrenner, “New York likes big stars, never forget that.” He and his brother Bob were important in integrating Steinbrenner into New York’s proper “circles.”

Over the years, a number of partners would rise to significant advisory roles, however temporary or long lasting they might be. Ed Greenwald would be involved in the signing of Catfish Hunter. Lester Crown’s guidance would be frequently sought, and his family would own the second largest share of the team. Daniel McCarthy and Bob Nederlander would become caretaker general partners. Barry Halper, the acknowledged king of memorabilia collectors, would buy a piece of ownership with his neighbor Marv Goldklang and briefly run the front office. Later arrivals to the ownership team like Ike Franco, Jerry Speyer, Leonard Wilf, Mort Olshan, and Howard Rubenstein would also be involved in important decisions.

There were some partners whose lives would become unglued. John DeLorean, Nelson Bunker Hunt, Marvin Warner, and the group’s attorney Patrick Cunningham would all be brought up on criminal charges.

Ultimately, partners would come and go, although some would remain for many years. John Henry was a limited partner before winding up with part ownership of the Red Sox. The same for John McMullen of the Astros. The partners were generally happy with what proved to be handsome annual returns on their initial investments. A typical annual meeting, required under terms of the partnership, found them each handed profit and loss statements for a quick review, with the pages quickly collected so that no information left the room. There were never any leaks.

THE YANKEES’ ANNUAL winter press caravan took off to showcase Nettles to the suburban media and answer questions about the new ownership and the plans for Yankee Stadium’s fiftieth anniversary and final year. During one stop, the news broke that the American League had passed a new rule, permitting the use of a “designated hitter” to bat for one man in the lineup (the pitcher, obviously) each time he was due to hit.

This was breaking news, although not everyone at these outlying stops “got it.”

One reporter asked Houk, “How often do you plan to use this?”

The DH was not passed in the National League even though the Players’
Association had to approve any changes to the rule book, the DH was a sure thing in the AL: The union would never eliminate the DH jobs. It was first listed as “experimental,” and MacPhail explained that American League hitting had been so lackluster that a boost was really needed to add some scoring to the game. “I never expected it would be forever,” he said. “I thought it would last a few years until some parity with the National League was reached.”

The DH was used in spring training, and then officially on opening day, when the Yankees were in Boston with the day’s earliest starting time. The Yankees, of course, batted first. Ron Blomberg, intended to be a platoon first baseman on the team, had suffered an injury that prevented him from playing the field, and he was the number-six hitter in the lineup against Luis Tiant.

Blomberg, who would bat .329 that year, got to bat in the first when the three batters ahead of him all reached base. And so Sherm Feller, the Fenway PA announcer, got to make history too, reciting, “The designated hitter … number twelve … Ron Blomberg.” (Scoreboards had no way to show “DH,” so at Yankee Stadium, for instance, it was just shown as “B,” as in “batter,” since the “B” was available to show 1B, 2B, and 3B.)

Blomberg was a high-energy guy, always talking, always eating. The nation’s number-one draft choice in 1967 was extremely popular with New York’s Jewish community, and he hit some prodigious drives in batting practice, even reaching the facade as Mantle had done. So long as he was facing right-handed fastball pitching, he was a monster hitter.

But on this at-bat, he walked, driving in a run. After the game I retrieved his bat and sent it to Cooperstown, where it would be the only bat on display representing a walk.

He would later write an autobiography called
Designated Hebrew
and talk with exaggerated humor about the day he ruined the game of baseball.

SPRING TRAINING OF 1973 would have a drama all to its own, and had Steinbrenner been approved by the other American League owners, he would no doubt have weighed in on the matter. But silenced by the waiting period, he simply listened in as the baseball world was jolted by news that Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, the team’s left-handed starters who wore numbers 18 and 19 and had become very close friends, had in the offseason decided that they were in love with each other’s spouses more than
their own and would participate in a “wife swap,” which would be, in fact, more of a “life swap”—involving homes, cars, kids, pets, and possessions. The wives went along, but by the time the story broke, things had already ended between Kekich and Marilyn Peterson. The two pitchers were barely speaking.

The news broke just as spring training was starting (Peterson was a holdout). At first, the Yankees decided to treat the matter as private, something between the players and not for public information. It would be unimaginable in a later age of tabloid television, Facebook, and Twitter that such a story could hold. But in 1973, it was considered possible.

It “held” for less than a day, and then the story was headline news across the country for a week.

Ballplayers can handle the news of most any behavior in a matter-of-fact style, but this one shocked even the pitchers’ teammates, who naturally had to discuss it with their wives. Suddenly, the fun-loving Fritz and Mike were not the same guys who organized hockey games using baseball bats in the clubhouse. Kekich wanted to call the whole thing off, but it was too late for Fritz and Susan Kekich, who were genuinely in love and who celebrated thirty-eight years of marriage in 2011.

One thing was certain, now that the two were at war: One had to go. And that would be Kekich, who was traded to Cleveland on June 12, a sad turn of events in that it removed him from proximity to his children, who now lived with Peterson and his ex. Peterson was never the same quality starter again, and ten months later, after Kekich had moved on to Japan, he was traded to Cleveland too. Fritz left with the lowest ERA in Yankee Stadium history, 2.52.

ON APRIL 15, 1973, the Yankee players lined up along the first-base line at Yankee Stadium for its golden-anniversary celebration, with Mel Allen doing the introductions. A fiftieth-anniversary patch graced the sleeves of their new double-knit uniforms, highlighted by the frieze design. (The Yanks had joined the Expos and the Royals as the last teams to change from flannel to knit.) Bob Shawkey threw out the first pitch to Whitey Witt; Claire Ruth joined Betty Houk in placing wreaths at the monuments. All the fans received replicas of the inaugural 1923 program.

The players were all neatly trimmed. At the opener, a week before, the new co–general partner, George Steinbrenner, furiously wrote down the
numbers of all players he thought wore their hair too long. The Yankees, to his thinking, had grown apart from the traditions that made them stand out—a fault of the careless leadership of the long-haired Burke. He had bristled at Burke’s appearance in Fort Lauderdale for a yearbook photo, Burke arriving in a blue denim shirt, his long gray hair blowing in the wind, while Steinbrenner wore a sharp navy sport jacket and a close-cropped haircut. A team needed discipline before it would begin to win. It was going to begin with haircuts, and Steinbrenner had his list delivered to Houk with orders to restore a more dignified appearance. Under Steinbrenner’s watch, Yankee players would be permitted mustaches but no beards (Wade Blasingame was the first to wear a mustache in late ‘72), would wear conservative and dignified clothing while traveling, and would comport themselves as he had been trained at Culver Military Academy. The free-spirited, longhaired style represented by the world champion Oakland A’s would not be acceptable for the Yankees. As for winning, Steinbrenner told fans he would deliver a championship to them within four years.

Fan behavior at the games was an issue in the early seventies, as it was throughout big cities. In 1970, the Yanks instituted a “Good Kids” program to reward good behavior, run by Howard Berk. It helped a little, but it was a time when respect was not a given in society. The graffiti-laced subway system and the graffiti-laced outer walls of Yankee Stadium spoke to that.