Pinstripe Empire (75 page)

THE YANKEES ADDED free agent Jack Clark in 1988 after a stellar career in the National League, Clark responded by hitting just .242—with a team-leading 27 homers—and he was traded to San Diego right after the season. Another 1988 transaction was dealing outfielder Jay Buhner to Seattle for DH Ken Phelps. Buhner would go on to become a terrific player and nearly a cult figure in Mariners history; Phelps was a bust and the trade became grist for a joke on
Seinfeld
, which never missed an opportunity to parody Steinbrenner.

As for Billy V, a dangerous trip to Lace, a Dallas strip club, would pretty much be his last hurrah as a Yankee.

Billy had been thrown out of a 7–6 loss at Texas on a Friday night, May 6, and then went out with his pal Mantle (who lived in Dallas) and a couple of coaches. All but Martin left “early.” He went to the men’s room, exchanged words with someone, and the next thing he knew, he was being beaten up against the stucco wall outside the club, his ear dangling off his head.

Bad luck was with Billy as he made his way back to the team hotel, where he intended to quietly call Gene Monahan to get medical assistance. But despite the late hour, a fire alarm had sent everyone out of their rooms. Billy arrived to a packed lobby, bloodied and beaten, to be seen by all.

Piniella, wondering what he had been thinking, resigned as general manager three weeks later, turning the job over to his assistant Bob Quinn, whose grandfather had led a group that bought the Red Sox from Harry Frazee in 1923 and sold them to Tom Yawkey in 1933.

The next day, Martin, who had been fined for kicking dirt on umpire Tim Welke earlier in the season, repeated the action against umpire Dale Ford, but one-upped it by scooping up dirt and throwing it at his chest. Not only was Martin suspended for three games, but the umpires threatened further action to rein him in. And whatever action that might prove to be, one thing was certain: No close calls were going to go the Yankees’ way with Billy as manager.

The Yanks got off to a fast 20–9 start, much of it attributable to Winfield’s record-tying 29 RBI in April. (Only since 1982 had the schedule begun in the early days of the month.) Billy had embarrassed the franchise again. Steinbrenner waited until they lost seven of eight the following month, and fired him on June 23. “How many times can a man have his heart broken?” said Billy. Counting his trade in 1957, this would be six.

“He wasn’t the same Billy Martin this time,” said Steinbrenner, who quickly named Piniella, still under his three-year contract, as successor.

Without much pitching to work with (John Candelaria led the team with a 13–7 record), Piniella somehow kept the Yanks in contention. An inspiring eighteenth-inning home run by the productive Claudell Washington (.308) against the Tigers on September 11 put the Yanks in second place, just three and a half behind the Red Sox, and that’s where they found themselves when they got to Fenway for a four-game series starting September 15.

(Washington hit just 26 homers for the Yankees over four seasons, but one of them, in April ’88, was the ten thousandth in franchise history. While a lot of people contributed to that total, the team’s all-time top twenty had themselves hit almost half of them: 4,888, with Ruth, Mantle, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Berra hitting 2,407.)

Hopes for a repeat of the 1978 Boston Massacre were high, especially after a 5–3 win in the opener behind Rick Rhoden. But then the Yanks lost three straight, dropping them to fourth with time running out. When they lost four of their last five, dropping Piniella’s record to 45–48, the team was done, and so again was Lou.

THE 1989 SEASON WAS MARKED BY departures, beginning with Piniella’s. His replacement was Dallas Green, fifty-four, a pitcher turned manager who led Philadelphia to the 1980 world championship, their first ever. From 1982 to 1987 he was general manager of the Cubs. At six foot five and 260 pounds, he was the biggest manager in Yankee history, and he arrived with no experience in the American League in a pro career that stretched back thirty-four years. He brought in five coaches, mostly with National League backgrounds.

Willie Randolph, co-captain with Guidry, was not re-signed after ’88 and signed with the Dodgers as a free agent. He played another four seasons before retiring, hitting .327 for the Brewers in 1991. Randolph was thirty-four and the Yankees replaced him with free agent Steve Sax, twenty-nine, the Dodgers’ second baseman for the previous eight seasons. While Sax hit .315 for the Yanks with 205 hits, he never enjoyed the same popularity that he had in Los Angeles. The fans missed Randolph, a five-time All-Star, who was an understated presence in the lineup—.275 in thirteen seasons—seldom struck out, and always played great defense.

I was in the Fort Lauderdale parking lot one day in spring training when I spotted Dave Winfield walk to his car and drive off while practice was still going on. It turned out his Yankee career was about over. He had back surgery on March 24 and missed the full ’89 season. Few players could miss a full season at age thirty-seven and return in peak form. Winfield, a marvelous athlete, was able to do it, but his Yankee days were effectively done. He returned in 1990, but after an 0-for-23 slump in April, the Yankees traded
him to the Angels on May 11 for Mike Witt, who would be an oft-injured starting pitcher for them.

In Winfield’s eight-plus seasons, he batted .290 with 205 homers and 818 RBI, earning five Gold Gloves and selection to the All-Star team in each full season. He would go on to a twenty-two-season career and shed his “Mr. May” reputation by driving in the winning run in the 1992 World Series for Toronto. When he went into the Hall of Fame, he chose to have a San Diego cap on his plaque, a decisive blow to his relationship with the Yankees, who had already assigned his uniform number 31 to Hensley Meulens the year they traded him. He would be an occasional Old-Timers’ Day guest, but it was never a very happy post-baseball relationship for the two parties.

Winfield and Steinbrenner sued each other in January of 1989 for the third time over payments not made to the Winfield Foundation. Lurking in the background was the presence of one Howie Spira, for whom the term “gambler” came to be used. It was actually a compliment: It implied he had a profession. In reality, Spira was a ne’er-do-well who thought he could make a killing offering incriminating information on Winfield to Steinbrenner, audaciously asking for payment in return. Steinbrenner was intrigued; he might be able to discredit Winfield as consorting with lowlifes like Spira, possibly even being involved with “gamblers.” He began taking his calls. Aside from that, the Winfield Foundation lawsuits were settled in September. Sadly, this story still had legs.

VETERAN FRONT-OFFICE OPERATIVE Syd Thrift was hired as general manager during spring training of ’89. Having gone through a stint as Charlie Finley’s GM, he figured he could surely work for George Steinbrenner. Bob Quinn, promoted and demoted during this stretch, became the number-two man to Thrift, but then replaced him on August 29 when Thrift departed for “personal reasons.”

Part of the personal reasons was the growing influence of an alternative front office emerging in Tampa. With George Bradley there as the vice president of player development and scouting (essentially the farm director), the Tampa office began a period in which it sometimes overrode decisions made by the New York “baseball people.” This arrangement often caused inner turmoil in the management of the team, the Tampa people vs. the New York people, a problem that continued for many years until Brian
Cashman finally brought it to a halt in 2005 when his insistence on full authority became a condition of his re-signing as GM.

Quinn didn’t last long in this latest stint as GM; he quit. Harding “Pete” Peterson became the team’s newest general manager in October, but he too was handicapped by the Tampa operatives who sat down the hall from Steinbrenner.

RON GUIDRY DEPARTED in 1989. He continued to struggle with shoulder problems, and was only 2–3 in 1988. In ’89, he only pitched for Columbus, going 1–5 in seven starts, then announced his retirement in July. One of the great pitchers in Yankee history, he was fourth in wins and second in strikeouts, with a 170–91 career record. Ron Guidry Day was held in 2003, at which his uniform number 49 was retired.

Rickey Henderson departed in 1989. The gifted and popular left fielder stole 93 bases in 1988, but was not playing well in ’89. In 65 games he was hitting only .247 with 25 steals, and at times looked lackadaisical in the field. Fans were starting to turn on him; management certainly was. Dallas Green questioned his work ethic when he didn’t voluntarily report early for spring training as was requested. “Rickey Henderson is not going to run the Yankees in 1989,” said Green. “Dallas Green is. We sent letters to everybody about when to report. Maybe Rickey can’t read.”

It was the final year of Henderson’s five-year contract, and it appeared certain he’d leave at year’s end for free agency, especially if Green was still managing. Instead he agreed to a trade back to Oakland on June 21, the Yankees getting pitchers Eric Plunk, Greg Cadaret, and outfielder Luis Polonia (who would hit .313 for them, but would be convicted of having sex with a minor two months after he joined the team; he served sixty days in prison after the season). Henderson would play another fifteen seasons in the majors and would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but his Yankee stint was just a brief stop in a twenty-five-year career.

Still, in the brief stop, he became the Yankees’ all-time stolen base leader with 326, a mark that stood until Derek Jeter broke it in 2011.

Tommy John also left in 1989, released on May 30 with a 2–7 record. His appearances in 1989 gave him twenty-six major league seasons, including fourteen after his game-changing Tommy John surgery in 1975. Ninety-one of his 288 career victories came as a Yankee.

Cablevision’s SportsChannel ended its relationship with the team after
televising Yankee baseball since 1979, at various times employing Mantle, Martin, Allen, Hawk Harrelson, and Murcer as announcers. (MSG hired Tony Kubek, the former shortstop but frequent critic of Steinbrenner’s; he lasted five seasons.)

Charles Dolan and Cablevision weren’t out of the picture forever. Cablevision bought MSG Network in 1994, and some four years later made an agreement with Steinbrenner to purchase 70 percent of the team, a deal that would keep Steinbrenner running the Yankees, and also the Knicks and Rangers, while Cablevision essentially got free rights to the broadcasts through its ownership. But the deal was never consummated; Steinbrenner came to realize it was not in his best interests to lose the broadcast revenue and to be essentially working for Dolan.

BILL WHITE DEPARTED the Yankee broadcast booth in 1989, named to succeed Bart Giamatti as National League president. A Yankee broadcaster since 1971, his work with Rizzuto was loved by Yankee fans. Frank Messer had left the TV booth after 1984 (he did one year on radio only), and many felt the Rizzuto-Messer-White team of ’71 to ’84 was a perfect baseball broadcast experience. White was replaced by Met legend Tom Seaver, with George Grande being the third man in the booth, while MSG’s new broadcast team would bring newspaperman Michael Kay into the studio for a wrap-up show, beginning his long career as a Yankee announcer. In 1992 he became a full-time broadcaster. Also new to the radio booth was John Sterling, a onetime sports talk host on WMCA in New York, and then an Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks announcer. Sterling too would enjoy a long run on Yankee radio broadcasts, and his “
Thuuuuuuu
Yankees win!” call after team victories became a signature part of the Yankee experience.

Another ’89 departure was Dallas Green himself. He had been unable to make the team play better than it should have. Mattingly’s back had robbed him of his power; Jesse Barfield, a star in Toronto, wasn’t hitting much in New York, and only one pitcher—Andy Hawkins—was en route to a 10-victory season. (He would go 15–15.) Players like Alvaro Espinoza, the shortstop, and Mel Hall, an outfielder, appeared to be stopgaps. A team-record fifty players paraded in and out of action during the season. As the team kept losing, Steinbrenner decided he wanted to change Green’s
coaches. This had become a familiar tactic to force the manager out. Green wouldn’t have it.

“Let’s face it, there is absolutely no hope that their organization will be a winning organization as long as Steinbrenner runs the show,” said Green to Bill Conlin of the
Philadelphia Daily News.
“It’s sad. He has no organization there now. He has absolutely no pride. The ballplayers there now have no feeling of being a Yankee.”

The statement would ordinarily have been enough to get Green fired, but it took a few more days. With the club nine games under .500 on August 18, Green was out.

Steinbrenner wanted Piniella back, but Lou turned him down and stayed in the broadcast booth, where he’d been consigned at the start of the season. So he turned to his Columbus manager, Bucky Dent, thirty-seven, the hero of 1978. It was the seventeenth managerial change in seventeen years for the Yanks. Dent went 18–22 for the remainder of the season, as the Yanks again finished fifth in the East, thirteen games under .500. The mood in the stadium had grown dark; attendance fell almost five hundred thousand from the previous year. Fans were turning on the owner.

People close to Steinbrenner felt that he was considering dropping Dent and bringing back Billy Martin for a sixth term. Piniella, meanwhile, was hired as the new Cincinnati manager when Bob Quinn emerged as their GM. He managed the Reds to the 1990 world championship, with Paul O’Neill his star right fielder. He won the Series on the night Steinbrenner was guest host of
Saturday Night Live.

Piniella went on to manage Seattle, Tampa Bay, and the Chicago Cubs—a twenty-three-year managing career that included a 116-victory season with the Mariners.

BILLY MARTIN WAS killed in an auto accident on Christmas Day of 1989 on an icy road near his home in Binghamton, New York.

Billy’s personal life was a mess. His fourth marriage, to Jill, quickly followed his third, to Heather, someone he’d begun seeing when she was sixteen. But he never returned home to her after the 1985 season.