by Lou Piniella
The 1988 season was when Mr. Steinbrenner’s war with Dave Winfield over contributions to the Winfield Foundation was just beginning to heat up. The two of them sued each other, each charging the other of failing to make required contributions to the Winfield Foundation as part of the ten-year, $23 million contract Winfield had signed with the Yankees in 1980. Mr. Steinbrenner accused the foundation—and by extension, Winfield—of misusing funds on junkets, limousines, and so forth, and the war of words between them in the papers was starting to get really ugly. It was therefore inevitable that Mr. Steinbrenner would come to me—as he did in early May—and order me to trade Winfield.
“Mr. Steinbrenner, you can’t trade Winfield,” I argued. “In addition to the nearly six million dollars left on his contract, as a player with ten years of service time in the big leagues, the last five with the same club, he can veto any trade.”
“You let me worry about that,” he said. “Your job is to call around to find what teams are interested and get a list on my desk tomorrow morning.”
If there was one thing for which I was very fortunate as a neophyte GM, it was the very capable Yankees front office staff that was already in place. My assistant GM, Bob Quinn, had previously been the scouting and player development director with the Indians for twelve years, and our own scouting and player director, Brian Sabean, was recognized as one of the brightest young baseball minds in the game. (I should say here that they are probably already polishing up a plaque for Brian in Cooperstown as the architect of three world championships as the general manager of the Giants.) I got together with Brian and Bob, as well as Gene “Stick” Michael (who’d rejoined the Yankees as a scout after managing the Cubs in 1987 and ’88), and we began calling around to solicit interest in Winfield. In the end, the only interested team that matched up with us in terms of a player of somewhat equal ability was Houston with Kevin Bass, an outfielder who’d averaged 18 homers and 80 RBI over the past three seasons. The next day I reported this to Mr. Steinbrenner.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Get Stick, and the two of you go down to Houston and take a look at this Bass and bring me back a report on him. But I don’t want anyone knowing about this! This has got to be top secret. That’s why I want you to bring raincoats and top hats, and instead of going through the press gate and sitting with the scouts, buy yourselves tickets for the upper deck so nobody will see or notice you.”
“Mr. Steinbrenner, I can’t do that!” I said.
“Why?” he said.
“Because if I do, I’m liable to be arrested as a flasher or something!”
“What are you talking about?” he snapped.
“Sir, it’s a domed stadium in Houston!” I said.
“Ahhhh, get out of here,” he grumbled. “Just get me that damn report on Bass.”
As I had told Mr. Steinbrenner, it was a wasted exercise. Over the course of the next couple of months, despite his growing hostilities with Mr. Steinbrenner, Winfield reiterated he would not approve any trades. Then, in 1989, he hurt his back and missed the entire season.
It was also no surprise when Mr. Steinbrenner and Billy soon renewed their own hostilities, only this time I was right in the middle of it and I didn’t like it. Billy got the team off to a good start—they were in first place as late as June 19—but he wasn’t happy with any of the new players I’d brought in, particularly Slaught and Santana, and was constantly critical of them to Mr. Steinbrenner. After a May 6 Friday-night loss in Texas, Billy got involved in a drunken fight with the bouncers in a strip joint called Lace, not far from Arlington Stadium, and was brought back to the team hotel beaten up pretty badly. That weekend I had rented a trailer and driven to Philadelphia with Anita to pick up our son, Lou Jr., from Villanova when Mr. Steinbrenner called to tell me about this latest incident with Billy.
“I don’t know what kind of shape he’s in,” Mr. Steinbrenner said, “but I need you to go down to Texas to manage the team for a couple of days.”
“I’m not doing that, sir,” I told him, explaining that, logistically it would be impossible and that I was driving my son home from college. I was a little surprised that he didn’t give me more of a fight about it, but after finishing loading the trailer up with all my son’s stuff, Anita and I began heading home. We were on the New Jersey Turnpike, listening to the Yankees game, when, in the eighth inning, I almost drove off the highway when I heard Phil Rizzuto say, “And pinch-hitting for Santana, here is Chris Chambliss.”
“Anita!” I screamed, “did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she said.
“Rizzuto just said Chambliss is pinch-hitting for Santana!”
“So?” she said.
“Chris is a coach,” I exclaimed. “He hasn’t played in two years! What’s he doing in this game?”
I pulled over to a phone booth and called Mr. Steinbrenner to find out what was going on. He didn’t know what Chambliss was doing in the game either, but made it clear this needed to be nipped in the bud. It seemed that Jose Cruz, our primary left-handed hitter off the bench, had come up with a sore knee, and Billy had taken it upon himself to activate Chambliss to replace him.
“I don’t care what the reason is,” Mr. Steinbrenner said, “get him off the damn roster!”
As it turned out, Chris got only that one last at-bat for his career—but he was paid handsomely for it. Once he was activated, he had to be paid the minimum player salary for the rest of the year, which was about $20,000 more than he was making as a coach. The Chambliss maneuver was just another Billy firestorm with Mr. Steinbrenner that caught me in the middle, and I was fed up with it—fed up with them both complaining about the players I’d brought in, and fed up with their general bickering. So on May 28 I called Mr. Steinbrenner and told him I wanted to relinquish my duties as GM to Bob Quinn. I told him it had gotten very uncomfortable being the middleman between him and Billy, and, again, he didn’t argue with me. We agreed that I would stay on as a special adviser and scout.
Because we were in first place, Mr. Steinbrenner didn’t have much to say publicly about Billy’s incident at Lace, even though the papers made a very big deal of it, sending extra reporters down to Arlington to dig up all the lurid details. But anyone who knew Mr. Steinbrenner knew that kind of silence from him was like death, and considering all of Billy’s previous drunken tribulations that had led to his firings, he was clearly on borrowed time. It was after a disastrous 2–7 road trip to Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit, from June 13 to 22, which dropped the team to three games behind the then-front-running Tigers, that I got a call from Bob Quinn. I was in Albany looking at our Double-A team, and what Quinn had to say was the last thing I could have expected.
“The Boss is gonna be calling you any minute,” he said. “He’s firing Billy and he wants you to take over the team again.”
I didn’t know what to think. My wounds from 1987 had barely healed, and now he was going to reopen them?
I reminded Mr. Steinbrenner how this hadn’t worked before and told him that I was very apprehensive about managing for him again, but he kept assuring me it would be different, promising to leave me alone. “I need you to do this, Lou,” he said, and I guess the competitive spirit within me, plus encouraging conversations with Hawk Harrelson and Bobby Murcer, convinced me to agree. Still, I tossed and turned all night in my Albany hotel room before driving down to Yankee Stadium, entertaining second thoughts all the way, for the press conference announcing Lou II. If there had been cell phones back then I have no doubt I would have never gone through with it.
I should have known. All I had to do was reread the press clippings from Billy’s previous four incarnations as Mr. Steinbrenner’s manager: “This time it’s going to be different”; “Billy and George understand each other now”; “This time there’ll be no interference.”
As part of my return as manager, I was able to bring in Stick as my third base coach and Stan “the Steamer” Williams as my pitching coach, and
for the first few weeks of my tenure we played pretty well and even climbed back into first place for four days, July 24–27. But I knew it was a fragile, house-of-cards situation, especially the starting pitching; Guidry was bothered by a sore shoulder, and Al Leiter, a rookie lefty who had made the team out of spring training and showed great promise in his first nine starts in April and May, incurred a blister issue that sidelined him most of June, July, and August. Then, on August 24, John Candelaria, who was leading the staff with 13 wins, blew out his knee and was lost for the rest of the season. Once again, August (9–20) was my Waterloo, with our pitching staff compiling a 6.64 ERA for the month. On an off-day in midmonth, I was fishing on Long Island Sound when I got a ship-to-shore radio call from Bob Quinn informing me that Mr. Steinbrenner had fired Stan Williams. Once again, the pattern. As soon as I got back to New York, I called the Steamer and told him how terrible I felt about this and that I was going to get it rescinded.
“No, no, no, please don’t do that,” Steamer exclaimed.
“Why?” I said.
“Because,” Steamer said, “after he fired me he gave me a one-year extension and a $10,000 raise to be a scout!”
Good for him, but not for me! I had no idea who my new pitching coach was until I walked into the clubhouse the next day and there, sitting in my office, was Clyde King.
“I feel bad about Stan,” Clyde said, “but I think I can help these pitchers. I’m going to go watch them now and see what I can do.”
But later on the home stand, a resigned Clyde came to me and said, “You need to do me a favor, Lou. Call Mr. Steinbrenner and get me out of here. You’ve got a ‘no stuff’ staff!”
I had come to realize that Clyde was not my biggest ally. He didn’t think I was tough enough on the players, and I’m sure he transmitted that to Mr. Steinbrenner. During the last two months of the season I didn’t have a whole lot of communication with Mr. Steinbrenner even as he made periodic comments to the writers about his disappointment with the team’s performance. I had no doubt he was once again sharpening his ax, and then I heard he was leaking a story to the writers that I had stolen furniture from him! What had happened was, when I came back as manager the second time, I was told I was required to do a pregame radio show with WABC but that there would be no additional compensation for it. I knew Davey Johnson, across town with the Mets, had a similar pregame radio show arrangement and was paid $75,000 for it. I told Arthur Adler, the Yankees’ VP of business, that I would not do the radio show without being compensated, and after arguing that the Yankees would refuse to pay me extra and WABC had no money in its budget for it either, he came up with a compromise in which I would be instead paid in merchandise from the team’s radio sponsors. One of those sponsors was a Scandinavian furniture company. Adler sent Anita their catalog to pick out what furniture she wanted, even though it didn’t match any of the furniture in our house. Instead, I had it shipped to my restaurant in Woodbridge, New Jersey. Unbeknownst to me, Adler sent the bill to the Yankees. All Mr. Steinbrenner had to do was call me for an explanation, but he never did. The issue festered until the end of the season when, just before we were about to embark on a bus ride from Yankee Stadium to Baltimore for a four-game series against the Orioles, Mr. Steinbrenner summoned me to his office. When I walked in, he was at his desk, shuffling some papers and barely acknowledging me.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Lou,” he said.
“What kind of trouble?” I asked, assuming he was talking about the state of the team.
He then proceeded to accuse me directly of stealing from him, charging furniture for my restaurant to the Yankees, while adding that he was probably going to get the Bronx district attorney involved. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told him this was all a bunch of bullshit, that the furniture was payment to me for doing the pregame radio show and that Adler should have told him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to look into this further.”
I think he already knew, but he wanted to have this meeting with me—while the players were all waiting on the bus—to make it look like I was being dressed down by him. On my way out the door, he couldn’t resist saying, “You’re going down to Baltimore and Weaver’s gonna make you look bad again.”
I was sorry to disappoint him. We won three out of four from the Orioles, and for the first three games I called all the pitches from the dugout. I was never more exhausted in my life. It takes so much out of you, concentrating on every single pitch for nine innings.
Amazingly, despite all that had gone wrong with our pitching, after the Baltimore series, we were still only 3½ games behind the first-place Red Sox going into a season-ending three-game series in Detroit with the Tigers. The Red Sox lost their final three games but unfortunately so did we. It hardly mattered that we’d set a new home attendance record of 2,633,701 in 1988; both Mr. Steinbrenner and I knew this just wasn’t going to work between us.
On Saturday, October 3, after the next-to-last game of the season in Detroit, I told “Killer” Kane to round up all the writers, broadcasters, coaches, and support people for a party at the London Chop House. “Tell them,” I said, “this is my last supper!” And what a party it was, the wine and the merriment pouring into the night. The Chop House had a live band on Saturday nights and I vaguely remember getting up on the stage and, in my best Frank Sinatra, starting to croon, “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain …” before finally giving way to a real singer, Suzyn Waldman, who covered us for WFAN radio at the time and was also an accomplished Broadway performer. Suzyn wowed everyone with a rousing rendition of “New York, New York.” It brought tears to my eyes because that was Mr. Steinbrenner’s favorite song, which he had played at the conclusion of every game at Yankee Stadium, and I knew I would soon be putting New York in the rearview mirror. At the end of the night, the tab came to a couple thousand dollars, which I told Killer to expense to the Yankees. I figured that was the least Mr. Steinbrenner could do after all he’d put me through in ’87 and ’88.
Only Anita believed I should stay as manager. The day after the season, when Mr. Steinbrenner called and said he wanted me to fly down to Tampa and come to his Am Ship office at Rocky Point, I told her he was going to fire me again. “Well, then I’m going with you,” she said firmly. When we got to the office, Mr. Steinbrenner’s longtime secretary, JoAnn Nastal, came out to greet us. Momentarily startled to see Anita there, she rushed back into the office—whereupon Mr. Steinbrenner handed her a fistful of hundred-dollar bills and instructed her to “take Anita shopping for a couple of hours, while Lou and I talk.”
I made it easy for Mr. Steinbrenner. Before he could tell me he was going to make a change, I thanked him for the opportunity to manage the Yankees without having had any previous experience, and started to get up to leave.
“Hold on,” he said. “Where are you going? Let’s talk about the team.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, sir,” I said. “I did the best I could. I’ve done everything I can here.”
“Well, don’t you want to know who the new manager is going to be?” he asked.
I really didn’t care, but when he told me Dallas Green, I nearly fell off my chair. Big Dallas, who’d managed the Phillies to the world championship in 1983, had a reputation for being a hard-driving, confrontational, old-school guy who was not afraid to rip into his players in public. This guy’s as much of a hardhead as Mr. Steinbrenner, I thought. This isn’t gonna work out! I didn’t have to guess that it was Clyde King who’d recommended the ultimate tough guy, Big Dallas.
I wished Mr. Steinbrenner well, but again, as I got up to leave, he stopped me.
“Before you go,” he said, “I want you to sign an extension.”
“An extension to do what?” I asked. “I told you I’ve done just about everything I can here.”
“Well, we’ll figure something out,” he said.
Then, thrusting a contract in front of me, he said: “H
ere it is, a three-year extension. Just fill in the figures.”
I didn’t know what to say. Probably if I hadn’t been trying to extricate myself from some serious financial losses with a failed Cadillac dealership in Ossining, New York, and a condominium development venture in Connecticut I’d been partners in, I’d have said no thanks and been on my way. But my oldest son, Lou, was still at Villanova, and my other son, Derek, was in high school and would soon be starting college. Plus, we really liked living in Allendale.
I had been making $300,000 as the Yankees’ manager, but as long as Mr. Steinbrenner was suddenly allowing me to have the upper hand, I suggested a raise to $400,000. “You got it,” he said. “Just sign the contract and take Anita out to dinner.”
This was the mercurial George Steinbrenner. A month earlier he was accusing me of stealing from him and threatening to sic the Bronx DA after me, and now he was firing me and overwhelming me with generosity at the same time. When I left his office, my head spinning, Anita was waiting for me.
“What happened?” she said.
“Exactly what I told you was gonna happen,” I said. “He fired me.”
Then, pausing for effect, I added, “But I got a three-year extension and a huge raise out of it!”
Part of my duties in my new contract was to team up with Greg Gumbel on a pregame TV show for the MSG network. The MSG deal paid $80,000, but because of Mr. Steinbrenner’s generosity, I didn’t feel right about essentially double-dipping and I sent all the checks back to the Yankees. Greg and I had a lot of fun together. He was a real pro and taught me a lot about on-air TV work. It was also nice going to spring training in Fort Lauderdale with no worries or concerns about the ball club, not to mention the daily phone call harangues from Mr. Steinbrenner. In mid-March, I was getting into my car in the parking lot when I saw a familiar face approaching me. It was Syd Thrift, who’d previously been the general manager of the Pirates. Syd, a native Virginian, was a heavyset, convivial sort with big bushy eyebrows and a syrupy southern drawl. In my brief term as the Yankees’ GM, I’d had a few drinks with him at the winter meetings in Dallas. He was a great storyteller and not at all hesitant to expound on his knowledge and theories of baseball. I asked him what brought him to the Yankees’ camp.
