by Lou Piniella
That winter, Yogi called and asked me if I would be willing to serve as his hitting coach in addition to being a part-time player. I was making $400,000, I had a small tear in my rotator cuff, which prevented me from taking more than a few swings in batting practice, and, at forty-one, I knew I couldn’t produce the way I once had, so I agreed. I’d always had a passion for hitting after having had the good fortune of learning the mechanics of it from the master, Charlie Lau. For the first two and a half months I really enjoyed my new job, working with the hitters but playing infrequently. I was hitting over .300 but in only 80 at-bats when Yogi came to me in mid-June, accompanied by that “angel of death.” He needed a roster space, he said, for Brian Dayett, a promising young outfielder who was hitting over .300 at Triple-A Columbus.
“What do you think about becoming a full-time coach?” he said. “Maybe you want to talk it over with Mr. Steinbrenner?”
I knew the time was right, and after calling Mr. Steinbrenner we agreed that I would retire, with my final game and an official ceremony, on Saturday afternoon, June 16, at Yankee Stadium. But first we had to go to Boston for a midweek series against the Red Sox, and on the final game, Thursday, something extraordinary happened to me.
Yogi had put me in the starting lineup, and when I came to the plate for my first at-bat, leading off the second inning, the Fenway Park crowd of over 28,000 rose to their feet and gave me a standing ovation. I was stunned. I had been a bitter rival competing against the Red Sox, but for the great fans of Boston, time, I guess, had healed all those old wounds. After the ovation subsided, I hit a single and later came around to score. I later doubled in the fourth and singled in the sixth, finishing the day 3-for-3 to raise my average to .321. Afterward, I was thinking to myself, “What did I just do? I can still hit!”
June 16, 1984, my last day as a player, was almost anticlimactic after the reception I’d gotten in Boston. There were 37,583 fans at Yankee Stadium, including Anita, my three kids, my parents, and two of my uncles, Mac and Manuel, and it was only fitting that we should be playing the Orioles and the man in the other dugout—Earl Weaver. When I came to bat for the first time in the second inning, I got goosebumps seeing the crowd on their feet, applauding and screaming “Louuuu! Louuuu! Louuuu!” In my little speech I thanked Anita for putting up with me all those years and for the sacrifices she made, raising the kids while I was away so much, and I thanked God for the blessings of my career. I only wish I could have given the crowd the same finish I’d given the Boston fans, but I took an 0-for-5 against Scotty McGregor, a guy I’d previously had a lot of success against.
At least I was credited with the game-winning RBI on a bases-loaded groundout in the third, and I also made a nice throw to catch Ken Singleton trying to stretch a single into a double in the second. What was especially touching was Yogi sending Steve Kemp out to replace me in left field in the ninth inning so I could get one last ovation from the crowd. As I trotted in, I couldn’t help seeing Anita standing in the box seats behind our dugout crying her eyes out.
My 0-for-5, which was mostly the product of being overanxious all day, was just as well, though. I had no doubts I had made the right decision to retire, with a .302 average for the season and .291 for my career. As I told the writers, “I hope my hitters didn’t watch me today. I would have set them back years!”
A part of my life was over and I wasn’t sure what lay ahead, other than working with the hitters. I did, however, get a hint later on in the ’84 season after I’d been asked to participate in a Sporting News cover photo shoot at Yankee Stadium. My friend Barry Halper, one of the Yankees’ limited partners, was one of the foremost collectors of baseball memorabilia, and he’d arranged to have a group of Yankees—myself, Rickey Henderson, Don Baylor, Willie Randolph, and John Montefusco—pose in the original uniforms of the all-time great players (Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, and so forth), and even Mr. Steinbrenner had agreed to be in the picture, posing as the great Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert, in an old three-piece suit and a fake handlebar mustache. But the day of the shoot, I got delayed at home, and Baylor and Randolph also missed it, causing much dismay on the part of Mr. Steinbrenner. When I got to the park, Barry came up to me and warned me that Mr. Steinbrenner was in a fury.
“I was riding up in the elevator with him afterward and he told me Willie better not ever ask for another favor for his wife and that Baylor can forget about any more extra tickets for the players association,” Barry told me.
“Oh shit, he really is pissed,” I said. “What did he say about me?”
“You?” Barry replied. “Oh he said he’s gonna really fix you, Lou. He said he’s gonna make you the manager!”
CHAPTER 6
Managing for the Man
Despite all the speculation about Mr. Steinbrenner’s plans for me to one day manage the Yankees, I had no illusions of that happening any time soon. Not with Yogi at the helm. Yogi was an iconic Yankee, seemingly untouchable from Mr. Steinbrenner’s public criticism and impulsive acts. Or at least so I thought.
In welcoming me to his staff, Yogi made a point of saying I needed to be concerned only with the hitters, especially the young ones coming through the system. It was understood, not so much from Yogi but from Mr. Steinbrenner, that as a coach now, I would be part of all the organization meetings but not in any of the decision making, which was fine with me.
One thing I needed to keep in mind, Yogi told me, was that, as a coach, I had to separate myself from the players. I was part of management now and, so, on the road, I found myself hanging out more with the other coaches, the traveling secretary, “Killer” Kane, and even the writers. Whenever the writers would see me in the hotel bar late at night I would joke that I was the “midnight coach” in charge of curfews. One night in late June—an off-day—we had flown into Kansas City, and, as I was accustomed to doing, I invited all the players and some of the writers down to my restaurant, the Long Branch Saloon on the Plaza, which I co-owned with my close friend Walt Coffey, and treated them to dinner. It was a popular place where, after dinner, a few of the players would take the liberty of becoming guest bartenders. This one night it got to be about 1:00 a.m., with the place nearly cleared out, when one of the writers joked that I was breaking curfew.
I smiled and pointed to the corner of the bar, where forty-five-year-old Phil Niekro, our starting pitcher the next night, was sitting all alone, nursing a scotch.
“I can’t leave here until he does,” I said, “and who am I to tell ‘Father Time’ he has to go to bed?” (For the record, we lost a 3–2 squeaker to the Royals the next night, but Niekro went all the way and gave up only three runs.)
At the time of my retirement in ’84, we had been scuffling as a team, six games under .500, and from June 29 to July 6 we lost six out of eight to fall to 25–35. It was then that Mr. Steinbrenner—adhering to his own father’s oft-repeated credo, “It’s far better to be the hammer than the nail”—began hammering Yogi with regularity. It all came to a head at a meeting in Mr. Steinbrenner’s office at Yankee Stadium in early July. The meeting included Mr. Steinbrenner, Clyde King, who had been elevated to general manager at the beginning of the ’84 season, Yogi, and all the coaches. The only person to do any speaking, however, was Mr. Steinbrenner, who, for nearly ten minutes, lambasted Yogi for the performance of the team, repeatedly referring to it as Yogi’s team. All the while Yogi sat there, seething, until finally he’d had enough.
Rising to his feet, he began shouting at Mr. Steinbrenner. “This is not my f-ing team, it’s your f-ing team. You brought all these players in here that nobody else wants. You’re not gonna blame me for this. If you want to fire me, go ahead!” With that, he stormed out of the room, but not before flinging a pack of Chesterfields at Mr. Steinbrenner, striking him in the chest.
I had the utmost respect for Yogi. Everyone did. To see him get lambasted like that by Mr. Steinbrenner was embarrassing, and I loved the fact that he didn’t take it and fought back. Yogi knew
baseball and he knew who could play and who couldn’t. His best advice to me was to not get down on myself if the hitters didn’t perform, that all a coach can do is impart his advice and work hard every day with the players. He was especially proud of his son, Dale, who joined us that year. With Dale, he told me, “Make sure you give him special attention!” When I became manager in ’86, I wanted desperately to hire Yogi as my bench coach, but by then he’d already had his falling-out with Mr. Steinbrenner and told me that as much as he’d love to help me, there was just no way he’d come back to the Yankees.
We were all stunned at Yogi’s uncharacteristic and unrestrained rage and sat there, frozen, waiting to see Mr. Steinbrenner’s response at just having been told off in front of everyone. Ignoring the pack of Chesterfields, he watched Yogi storm out the door, shook his head, and said softly, “My manager’s lost control,” before continuing on with the meeting as if nothing ever happened. The whole scene was extraordinary.
But in the days following, Yogi began lobbying Clyde King about infusing the team with some youth, particularly in the infield, where he wanted to give Bobby Meacham a full shot at shortstop and bring up Mike Pagliarulo, a promising left-handed power hitter at Columbus, to play third. King agreed and was able to trade our incumbent third baseman, Roy Smalley, to the White Sox on July 18, opening the door for Pagliarulo. Now, as Yogi told me, it was my job to help make these kids major-league hitters, working with them on their mechanics and approach, and helping them read defenses and study pitchers—as I’d done with Don Mattingly.
I first got to really observe Mattingly during spring training in 1983, and I could see right away he had great hand-eye coordination and didn’t swing and miss much. He had more of a left-handed inside-out swing, to left center. But as he was playing a power position—he was alternating between left field and first base that first year—we needed to get him pulling the ball more to take advantage of that short right field porch at Yankee Stadium. So I used the weight shift approach with him, which I learned from Charlie Lau, in which the swing starts at the feet and then uses the lower body to generate more power. We got Mattingly to use his bottom hand to give him full arm extension to get power. We also incorporated a little body movement to improve the quickness in his swing.
Mattingly had about the smallest takeaway I ever saw in a hitter—the only one I could compare it to was Paul Molitor’s—where his hand went back, at most, a couple of inches until he was fully cocked. One of the fallacies of hitting is that your head has to stay stationary. In fact, your head should release with your stride. It should be centered over the belly button, which allows you to get to your front side so much easier. The idea is to set that front foot quick and let your legs get to the ball. With Donnie’s small takeaway, it made it much easier to work with him.
Years later, Mattingly reaffirmed how those sessions helped in transforming him into a power hitter.
“I was a gap hitter when I first came up, using mostly my top hand,” Mattingly said. “Lou taught me how to use the bottom hand and get backspin on the ball, and all of a sudden the power came. Essentially, he taught me how the swing works, how everything causes something else, like a chain reaction. The best advice I got from Lou was, ‘Give it a try and if it doesn’t work get rid of it, but if it does work, make it yours and it becomes what you are.’ The first time he said that to me was in ’83, [at] my first major-league spring camp. Lou was watching me from behind the batting cage and he said, ‘Put your head back, just a little. Just try it.’ I went back to the minor leagues and hit 8 homers in 43 games and I could see the power starting to come. I’d never hit more than 10 homers in my first five seasons in the minor leagues, and I hit 23 in 1984.”
Yogi had a great way of simplifying things. He said we needed Donnie to hit for power. Same thing with Pagliarulo. And, with Meacham, we didn’t want him hitting fly ball outs, not with his speed.
Mattingly in ’84 had the first of six straight Hall of Fame–caliber seasons, beating out Dave Winfield for the batting title, .343 to .340, on the last day of the season while also leading the league with 207 hits and 44 doubles. Pagliarulo had 7 homers and 34 RBI in just 67 games, Meacham hit .253, and two other rookie pitchers, Dennis Rasmussen and Joe Cowley, combined for 18 wins after joining the rotation late. With the infusion of the kids, the Yankees went 51–29 after the All-Star Break—the best record of any team in baseball—and we just assumed Yogi had been exonerated in Mr. Steinbrenner’s eyes.
In fact, after acquiring another superstar in Rickey Henderson over the winter, Mr. Steinbrenner made a public promise that Yogi would get “a full season in 1985, win or lose.” As it turned out, Yogi’s “full season” was all of 18 games, and Rickey was a participant in only six of those, having started the season on the disabled list with a hamstring injury.
Even though we started out sluggishly (6–12), nobody saw this coming, especially Yogi, who, as a result of his firing, went fourteen years without setting foot in Yankee Stadium or speaking to Mr. Steinbrenner. We’d gotten Rickey to be a big part of the offense and he was hurt, and we thought we had plenty of time to turn it around. Everybody loved Yogi. He was a one-of-a-kind individual. It was shocking, but George was developing a pattern with his managers. Almost as shocking was that, to replace Yogi, he was bringing back Billy Martin for the fourth time.
Yogi was fired on Sunday, April 28, in Chicago, and from there the team flew to Texas, where Billy and his agent, Eddie Sapir, were waiting for us in a suite at the hotel, with Mr. Steinbrenner on a speakerphone from Tampa. In explaining the change to the coaching staff, Mr. Steinbrenner said he thought we had better talent than how we were playing. Then he said something that made me very uncomfortable, telling Billy in front of Sapir, “The reason Lou is up there [on the coaching staff] is for you to prepare him to manage at the big-league level.” That caught me totally by surprise. Why me? I think maybe Mr. Steinbrenner knew how I got along with all the different factions on the team. I also think he always wanted to have someone who was popular with the fans, ready in the wings, in the (likely) event he would have to fire Billy again.
I’ll say this: it was to Billy’s credit that he did do everything he could to prepare me. I could talk to him about different strategies during the course of a game or over drinks later. I liked his aggressive style and the fact he wasn’t afraid to take chances. The one thing I didn’t like about him was that he either liked you or he didn’t, and there was no gray area. I also knew how badly he wanted to manage the Yankees.
That was never more apparent than the crazy four days in Cleveland, July 29 to August 1, when Billy was hospitalized in Texas with a punctured lung and I was asked by Mr. Steinbrenner to manage the team in his absence—with one caveat. Billy had come up with an idea in which he would help me manage the team by phone from his hospital room. He would call me before the game with the lineup, and then, with an open line to the dugout in Cleveland, he would call periodically during the course of the game with strategy decisions and pitching changes. He just didn’t want to let go.
It went okay, without incident, for the first two games, which we won, 8–2 and 8–5, but then, in an effort to give Billy the credit, I made the mistake of telling the media what was happening. All of a sudden, the next night we were getting crank calls to the dugout from all over the place—and at the same time, the Indians’ president, Peter Bavasi, mischievously directed the stadium’s switchboard operator to relay all of Billy’s calls to the Indians’ dugout. In addition, Billy had apparently left the hospital after the first two games and was now making his calls from a bar. It was absolute chaos. I had assigned Butch Wynegar, our backup catcher, to answer the dugout phone and relay Billy’s strategy instructions to me, but at one point, Butch came back to me, crying.
“What’s wrong, Butch?” I asked.
“Billy keeps telling me I’m a horseshit catcher who doesn’t know how to call a game,” Butch said. “I thought he was supposed to be managing this game.�
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We lost the last three games of the series, the final one 9–1, and by then I had had enough. When I got home that night, I told Anita, “I’m done. I’m not going back to work tomorrow,” and despite her urgings to “just do your job and concentrate on your hitting coach job,” I was AWOL for the first game of the home stand. Early that evening, Mr. Steinbrenner called me to ask what was going on.
I told him what happened in Cleveland. “I didn’t sign up for this, getting caught up in this firestorm for four days in Cleveland. It became a joke and took all the fun out of the game for me.”
“Okay, Lou, just calm down,” he said. “You’re doing a really good job as the hitting coach and Billy needs you back.”
Billy called me as well and they were both very charming. But I was hurt and upset. Billy just wanted total control.
Because of Anita, my second “retirement” from baseball lasted just that one day, and we began to play well in August, going 20–7 to climb back into the pennant race with Toronto. Rickey was everything we (if not Yogi) could have hoped for, leading the league with a club-record 80 stolen bases and the most runs scored (146) since Ted Williams in 1949. As late as September 10 we were just 1½ games behind the division-leading Blue Jays. That was when it all, especially Billy, fell apart. After losing three straight to the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium, Mr. Steinbrenner went on a tirade in the press box, ripping into the team to the writers and sarcastically calling Winfield “Mr. May” in reference to Reggie’s “Mr. October.” The team reacted by losing five more in a row, and then, on September 21, Billy got into an ugly barroom brawl with our pitcher Ed Whitson at the Cross Keys Inn in Baltimore. I could almost see this coming. Billy and Whitson had no use for each other and Billy had been in a foul mood after losing to Earl Weaver and the Orioles in the first game of the series the night before. As such, even though we won the next day to end an eight-game losing streak, I decided to avoid Billy and the other coaches and went out to dinner Saturday night with “Killer” Kane at Sabatino’s in Little Italy. When we got back to the hotel, which was actually in a suburb of Baltimore, there were all these police cars in the parking lot. I saw Willie Horton, one of Billy’s top lieutenants on the coaching staff, standing in the lobby, and I asked him what happened.
