Pinstripe Empire (65 page)

If he could get Hunter, he would be adding a second superstar to the roster in a matter of weeks. On October 22, he had called me into his office as he phoned Murcer in Oklahoma City. He wanted a witness.

“Bobby? Gabe Paul. Listen, I have some news for you … I hope you’ll think it’s good news … We’ve traded you to San Francisco.”

I could tell Murcer was speechless, but eventually the news settled in, and Gabe was telling him about all the fine restaurants in the city. At the very end, Bobby asked, “Who did you get for me?”

The answer was Bobby Bonds.

It was one of the biggest one-for-one trades in baseball history.

Murcer was in shock: Steinbrenner had told him he’d always be a Yankee.

But, as Tal Smith noted, anytime you can get one of the five best players in baseball, you find a way. And that was where people ranked Bonds at the time. His ’74 totals had fallen to .256/21/71, but he had been the closest baseball had ever come to being a 40-40 man (40 homers, 40 steals), had been an All-Star Game MVP, and with Willie Mays had been the only player to twice reach the 30-30 club. He had been Mays’s protégé, as Murcer had been to Mantle in New York.

For a new generation, Murcer was the franchise. He would be leaving behind a large base of young fans who adored him.

Bonds had more natural ability than Murcer, and Bob Fishel noted that some of the Yankees’ PR during Murcer’s career may have helped influence Horace Stoneham of the Giants into thinking the two were equal.

With Bonds in place, the pursuit for Hunter went on, and the Yankees had an ace up their sleeve. Their major league scout, with the unlikely name of Clyde Kluttz, was the very scout who signed the teenaged Hunter for Kansas City a decade before. Now, by good fortune, he was working for the Yankees. And Hunter loved him.

Kluttz, a major league catcher for nine years, was also a fellow North Carolinian. He was practically a father figure to Hunter, a straight shooter. The Yankees were fortunate indeed to have this going for them, and sure enough, on New Year’s Eve, the media was called to the Parks Administration Building for a huge signing announcement.

Limited partner Ed Greenwald was busy drafting the contract as Hunter, his lawyers, and Kluttz flew to New York on a private plane registered to Steinbrenner. Even when they got to Gabe Paul’s office, nothing was final. Talks continued while I mimeographed our press release and kept the media at bay. We were messing with everyone’s New Year’s Eve plans.

At last, Hunter took a nineteen-cent Bic pen and signed a five-year contract for about $3.35 million, a figure that included premiums on life-insurance policies for his children. There was, of course, no doubt that Steinbrenner had signed off on this, suspension or not, and Kuhn later admitted he would certainly not have denied him that right.

The signing rocked the sports world. Hunter was suddenly a household name in America. The most important thing about the signing was that it demonstrated what a free agent was now worth, seven years after Ken Harrelson, a top hitter, became a free agent and signed a $150,000 contract with Boston. It was enough to get everyone’s attention, especially the Players Association. The free market had spoken, and it was suddenly clear that the existing salary structure in the game was artificially low.

Many would point to this signing as the day baseball lost its compass, and blamed Steinbrenner’s spending for it. But most of the teams were bidding at or near this figure. If the San Diego Padres could offer $3 million, then the money was there.

While the Hunter signing preceded the formal ground rules of free agency that would follow, it did establish the multiyear contract as a normal course of business, the use of an agent as expected and accepted, and million-dollar deals to be affordable.

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IF THE MANAGER OF THE YEAR just added Bonds and Hunter to his roster after finishing two games out, 1975 surely had high expectations. Which also meant little margin for error.

After getting off to a scary 0–3 start, Hunter was exactly as advertised: a brilliant pitcher on the field, a classy leader off it. He had competitiveness that harkened back to the old Yankees. There was a maturity to Hunter, the youngest of nine children, that belied his twenty-nine years of age, but at the same time a playfulness that made him a fun teammate.

In 1975 he went 23–14 (a fifth straight 20-win season), pitching 328 innings and 30 complete games, a figure never since equaled. In a sense it marked the end of an era when such numbers were recorded, certainly on the Yankees. And it would really be the only one of his five seasons in New York in which his stats inspired the awe that seemed to go with the contract. Still, he was a force throughout his years in New York, the guy who “showed us how to win,” according to many. In his remaining four years he would only go 40–39. Some thought he left it all on the mound in year one, so anxious were the Yankees to recoup their money. But no one looking back on his legacy suggested that he was overpaid or over-hyped.

Bonds, meanwhile, was a remarkable athlete. He was a five-tool player, although he struck out a lot, and in ’75 he broke Mantle’s single-season Yankee record with 137 punch-outs. But he enjoyed being a Yankee. On one occasion, he represented the team at the State House in Boston, speaking out against a plan to introduce a baseball lottery in Massachusetts. He showed pride in the game when the Yankees were opening-day opponents in Cleveland, where Frank Robinson became the first black manager.

He didn’t get off to a quick start at the plate, but in late May he started to show his greatness. On May 27 he began an eleven-game hitting streak, all on the road, during which he batted .408 with eight home runs, showing how he could carry a team. The Yankees won nine of those games. But then on June 7 in Chicago, he ran into the Comiskey Park wall running down a long drive and badly hurt his knee. He missed the next week, and his hot streak was interrupted.

He played the rest of the season hurt. That brief look at what might have been, all accomplished on the road, would remain forever as a quick image of a year that wasn’t. The Bonds that the Yankees saw in 1975 was not Bonds at full strength.

For the season he hit .270/32/85 with 30 stolen bases, and despite the
injuries he would be the first Yankee to record a 30-30 season. (Mantle’s stolen base high had been 21.)

ALTHOUGH STILL UNDER suspension, Steinbrenner used his proxies to cast an important vote that summer—for the reelection of Bowie Kuhn as commissioner, a surprise to many.

“Let me tell you,” he said to some New York writers when the vote was announced, “things are going to change now. The American League is going to get more respect from the Commissioner’s Office after this. You watch.”

Was this all part of some backstage deal with Kuhn to get his suspension lifted early? To many, Steinbrenner’s explanation appeared pretty flimsy. But more realistically, other American League owners had come around the night before the vote was cast, and an anti-Kuhn vote by Steinbrenner would not have caused him to lose. It would have accomplished little more than pouting. Steinbrenner, who became skilled at last-minute vote shifts, more than likely sized up the situation and decided a “yea” vote would produce more for him in the long run than the momentary satisfaction of a meaningless “nay.”

AS FOR THE ’75 team, they had a 12–20 start but began to play better and reached .500 and second place on June 4. Briefly, in late June, they took over first. But then a seven-game losing streak set the vultures in motion over Virdon’s days as a manager.

The worst thing that could have happened to Virdon was when Texas fired Billy Martin on July 20. Martin by now had earned a reputation as a quick-fix artist whose managerial skills generally produced better-than-expected results wherever he went. He’d already shown this in Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas.

He was eighteen years removed from his trade following the Copa incident. No one was left in the organization from 1957 save for some ticket-office employees. Those who were there cared little about his earlier exit, or even about his reputation for being high maintenance. Gabe Paul did not like a manager who might seek a voice in trades, but he was starting to feel the pressure from Steinbrenner to “do something!” All signs pointed to Martin, who craved a chance to return to the Yankees.

On a spring training boating trip that very year, he had told Bob Fishel,
in front of his own owner, Brad Corbett, “I’d give anything to manage the Yankees.”

Paul dispatched his longtime employee and now Yankee scout Birdie Tebbetts to find Martin, who was on a hunting trip in Colorado.

On Friday night, August 1, the night before Old-Timers’ Day, the Yanks won their third straight to go to 53–51. But Virdon’s fate was sealed. He was summoned across the street to Paul’s office and told he was being replaced.

And so on Old-Timers’ Day, Billy Martin returned to the Yankees after his exile, introduced to the cheering crowd of forty-four thousand in what was one of the happiest days of his life.

DiMaggio shook his head as I walked him to the clubhouse at Shea and told him the news, as though knowing what was to follow in coming years. He didn’t look any happier when Martin was introduced after him, violating the “always last” agreement that had been struck years before.

IN AN EFFORT to breathe life back into the ’75 Yanks, Billy arrived with a plan to evaluate what he had and make the best of what remained in the season. Martin was always a manager who quickly decided whether a player was his kind or not. He was especially loyal to veterans who had gone to “the wars” with him, to coaches who had long-term relationships with him (and weren’t after his job), and to young players he thought could be molded.

For the injured Maddox, the hiring of Martin was not good news. He was a player Billy had not liked when he managed him in Detroit and Texas, and he had ordered him thrown at during spring training in ’75, which led to a brawl.

Martin was only 30–26 in finishing out the ’75 campaign, but he kept telling people, “Wait until I get a full season, with my own spring training.”

ON SEPTEMBER 29, the day after the season ended, Casey Stengel died in Glendale, California, at eighty-five. Martin, whose relationship with “the old man” was strained after his trade, was emotional over the loss. He flew to California as the representative of the Yankees at Casey’s funeral and slept in his bed that night. In 1976, he alone would wear a black armband on his uniform to honor Casey. The two men had reconciled without ever discussing the trade.

The Yankees’ two seasons at Shea quietly came to a close, a piece of their
history largely forgotten. One manager, Virdon, and one star, Bonds, would be on a short list of post-1923 Yankees who never appeared at Yankee Stadium as a member of the home team. When Shea Stadium came down after the 2008 season, retrospectives showed two concerts by the Beatles, but nary a mention of the 159 Yankee home games, nor the destruction of the outfield fence on Salute to the Army Day.

ON NOVEMBER 21, 1975, AN ARBITRATION hearing that would shake the foundation of Major League Baseball took place at New York’s Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Peter Seitz, who had decided Catfish Hunter’s fate, would decide whether Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were free agents, too, having gone through the season without signing a contract. (Sparky Lyle had almost been “the one,” having gone until the final days of the ’74 season with an unsigned contract before finally agreeing.) The Players Association argued that that constituted their option year, and that the Reserve Clause should not bind them permanently to their team. Major League Baseball felt cautiously optimistic that Seitz would decide that court rulings, which included Curt Flood’s Supreme Court defeat, would prevail.
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MEANWHILE, THE WINTER MEETINGS were held at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. The week was passing with few announcements, and the media was hungry for news.

Finally, on Thursday, the Yankees broke the silence with not one, but two major trade announcements.

First was the announcement that Bonds, after just one season as a Yankee,
was going to the California Angels for center fielder Mickey Rivers, who had led the league with 70 stolen bases, and 16-game winner Ed Figueroa, who had previously spent eight seasons in the minors.

Then came the trade of Doc Medich to Pittsburgh for starting pitchers Dock Ellis and Ken Brett and a rookie second baseman, Willie Randolph, who’d batted .339 in triple-A.

Because Randolph was fairly unknown, having played just 30 games for Pittsburgh, his name was overlooked by even some of the more astute media. “Medich for Ellis and Brett,” was one report heard on New York television. Others said, “Medich for Ellis, Brett, and a minor league prospect.” Gabe knew better.

“We know he can field,” he said, “and anyone who comes up in the Pirates organization can hit.”

Randolph, although born in South Carolina, had gone to Tilden High in Brooklyn. He brought New York street smarts with him. When he was assigned number 23 in spring training, he asked for 30, which he had worn for the Pirates.

“We’re keeping that out of circulation in honor of Mel Stottlemyre,” said Pete Sheehy. Randolph, all of twenty-one, looked at the legendary Yankee equipment manager and said, “I don’t care about Mel Stottlemyre, I want thirty.” He got it. When Stottlemyre and Randolph were both coaches on the Yankees in the nineties, it was Randolph who wore 30.

Ellis, thirty-one, had been a fixture with Pittsburgh since 1968. Sometimes controversial and always outspoken (he later claimed to have pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD), Dock would be a key contributor. Figueroa spoke little English and never quite got comfortable in New York, but Munson took a leadership role in making him feel part of the team. He would one day write a book called
Yankee Stranger.

In one day, Paul added four key players to the roster. Both Bonds and Medich would go on to play for six more teams, never quite reaching their earlier promise.

The Yankees also traded Pat Dobson to Cleveland for outfielder Oscar Gamble, who brought a perfect Yankee Stadium swing with him. Gamble also brought the biggest afro hairdo in the game, and as soon as he arrived in spring training, Gabe Paul knew it had to go. He assigned me the task of getting it trimmed—immediately—on a Sunday afternoon.