by Lou Piniella
“I’m the new head of baseball operations,” Syd announced proudly. “Mr. Steinbrenner thinks I can turn things around here, like I did in Pittsburgh, and that’s what I’m going to do! I’ve got a lot of ideas, particularly in scouting and player evaluation, and I can’t wait to get started! I know a lot about psychology and we can put in place some programs here that will help improve our approach to everything.”
“Well, good for you, Syd,” I said. “But just so you were forewarned—this job here can be very … uh … challenging.”
“That’s good,” Syd said brightly. “I love challenges.”
I didn’t see him again until the end of camp, when we crossed paths on the field during batting practice. He seemed a tad more subdued as we discussed the state of the team, and I couldn’t help noticing a little twitch in his neck as he talked. Then sometime in late April, after I did my pregame show with Greg, I decided to stop by Syd’s office. When I walked in, he was standing by a blender, making himself a diet drink. He looked like he’d lost some weight.
“You better be careful, Syd,” I joked. “This is a meat and potatoes job!”
As we talked I noticed that the twitch had gotten more pronounced, and he now had hives on his face. I asked him how everything was going, and he replied that it was hard getting all his plans implemented because of the constant extraneous phone calls and orders from the top.
“I know what you’re talking about, Syd,” I said. “You’ve just got to try and roll with the punches around here, because I assure you they’re gonna keep on coming.”
Then in June, the newspapers reported that Mr. Steinbrenner had ordered all the Yankees’ scouts off the road as a cost-cutting measure. Scouting being Syd’s bread and butter, I knew this couldn’t have gone over well with him. But I didn’t see him until about a month later, when he called me into his office in an agitated state. Now, in addition to the twitch and the hives, Syd was sweating profusely, and as he talked, he kept rubbing his head. I noticed his hair was falling out!
“My god, Syd,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not, Lou,” he said. “This guy is killing me! I’ve got to get out of here!”
Besides my TV work, part of my contract duties with Mr. Steinbrenner was to evaluate the minor-league players and work with the hitters. I was a little reluctant to do the latter since Dallas had his own hitting coach in Frank Howard, but in early May he approached me and asked if I could help Don Mattingly, who was really struggling. I was very appreciative of Dallas reaching out to me like that, and it just showed he was confident in his own skin, as well as in his coaches’ loyalty to him, that he would go outside his staff for the sake of helping a player or the team.
About that same time, I got a call from Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Blue Jays, who was about to fire his manager, Jimy Williams. He told me they’d like me to fly to Toronto for an interview, and Mr. Steinbrenner gave me his approval to talk to them.
“What I had always admired about Lou was that he would do whatever it took to win, and I think he got a lot of that from Billy Martin,” said Gillick. “Billy and Lou were both innovative in that they’d do things that were unexpected and weren’t afraid to make a mistake. That’s what I wanted in a manager. When George initially agreed to let us talk to Lou, I was optimistic we could work something out. But then George turned around and said he had to have our top pitching prospect, Todd Stottlemyre, as compensation, and that was it.”
I was disappointed Mr. Steinbrenner wouldn’t let me go. I’m not sure what would have happened if I’d gone to the commissioner’s office about getting released from what was really a special services contract. Pat was in the process of putting together an excellent ball club in Toronto. I told him that as much as I would’ve loved to have the job, the guy he wound up hiring, Cito Gaston, was the right choice. And he was. Cito went on to win back-to-back world championships with the Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993. I can’t count the many times I thought about how that might have been me.
Meanwhile, as I fully expected, Dallas and Mr. Steinbrenner weren’t getting along. After getting over .500 briefly in mid-July, the team lost nine out of ten games to fall into sixth place. That was when Dallas began referring to Mr. Steinbrenner as “Manager George” to the writers, and you knew it was only a matter of time before they would be parting ways. I was home in Allendale when I got a call from Mr. Steinbrenner on the morning of August 19.
“I just want you to know I’m gonna fire Dallas,” he said. “I’ve got a plane coming from Columbus, with Bucky and Stick on it, that’ll meet you in Teterboro and from there you’ll fly to Detroit to take over as manager.”
“Wait a minute, Mr. Steinbrenner,” I said. “I’m not doing that. You want to change managers, that’s fine. But we both know it won’t work with us.”
Bucky Dent had been managing our Triple-A team in Columbus and Stick had been out there evaluating the team. I told Mr. Steinbrenner the logical thing would be to make Bucky the manager. He’d been managing for five years in the Yankees’ system and had earned a chance, and, grudgingly, Mr. Steinbrenner agreed.
Ten days after the Green firing, it was announced that Syd Thrift had resigned as the head of Yankees baseball operations.
Incredibly, when the team struggled under Bucky in 1989, there were recurring rumors that Mr. Steinbrenner was preparing to bring Billy back for a sixth time! I have no doubt that would’ve happened, too, had Billy not been killed in a car crash on Christmas Day 1989. I was skiing with my family in Killington, Vermont, when I heard the news. While I was initially shocked, once the details began coming out—that Billy and his friend Bill Reedy, a bar owner from Detroit, had been drinking all day and had driven off an icy road and into a ditch in front of Billy’s wife’s home in upstate Fenton, New York—I was not surprised, especially when it was revealed that Billy was the driver and, because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, went through the windshield and broke his neck. Billy had a lifelong problem with the booze—when I was his coach I was also his designated driver after games—and he went through life not wearing a seat belt. Still, I felt a sense of deep sadness. I had really grown to like Billy. I didn’t respect the fact that he drank so much, but he was mostly a fun guy to be around and he had a great sense of humor. I felt especially bad for his son, Billy Jr., a great kid who went on to become a player agent.
Because of a blizzard in Killington, I was unable to attend Billy’s funeral, an elaborate mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, arranged by Mr. Steinbrenner’s friend Bill Fugazy, who had close ties to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Billy was buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester, where Babe Ruth and the actor Jimmy Cagney are interred. There’s no question Mr. Steinbrenner used Billy, and there may well have been a degree of guilt behind the send-off fit for a Yankee icon he gave him. But he also gave him wonderful opportunities that nobody else would have. I only wish he’d made a more concerted effort to get Billy help with his drinking.
As for me, I went to a Catholic church near the ski resort and asked if the pastor would be kind enough to say a special mass for Billy. I gave him a nice donation and even though I think he was a Red Sox fan, he did a wonderful job commemorating Billy. I wasn’t one of Billy’s buddies, but I can say here that my life was enriched by him.
Billy along with the Boss helped get me started managing, and for that I will always be grateful. It was hard saying no to Mr. Steinbrenner, but at least after turning him down this time, he knew I would never manage for him again—and that the next time another team called for permission to talk to me about being their manager, he would finally let me go.
CHAPTER 8
Red October
As the 1989 season was coming to a close, I began to wonder what the future held for me. As refreshingly therapeutic as it had been, working with Greg Gumbel in the TV booth and content in the knowledge there would never be a “Lou III” with Mr. Steinbrenner, I was getting restless
. I needed to sever ties with the Yankees and I very much wanted to manage again, away from Mr. Steinbrenner. I just didn’t know where, when, or how that would happen.
And then, twelve days after the season, Bob Quinn, who’d had to endure the humiliation of Mr. Steinbrenner bringing in Syd Thrift over his head back in spring training, resigned as the Yankees’ general manager and immediately signed on as GM of the Cincinnati Reds. Whether he knew it or not, in Marge Schott, the chain-smoking, blunt-talking Reds owner (who herself would be repeatedly rebuked by baseball’s hierarchy for a series of anti-Semitic and racially charged remarks before eventually being forced to sell the team in 1999), Bob had enlisted for a whole different—but equally frustrating—trip from Mr. Steinbrenner. (For the record, I never heard Marge make any racial or anti-Semitic remarks in my three years there.) Days after Bob took over in Cincinnati, he made a call to me.
The previous August, Pete Rose, “Mr. Red,” had been banned from baseball for life for betting on the game during the time he was the Reds’ manager, from 1985 to 1989. Rose’s longtime Reds teammate Tommy Helms had finished out the ’89 season as interim manager, but as Bob explained to me, he wanted to start off with his own manager, someone, who, as he put it, was comfortable enough in his own shoes to step in and handle the intense scrutiny and pressure of replacing a Cincinnati native and the most popular Red of all time. To further emphasize that point, Bob said, “Just so you know, the road you’ll be driving in to work at Riverfront Stadium is Pete Rose Way.”
None of that mattered to me. I just wanted to get back to the work of managing a ball club, but I still needed Mr. Steinbrenner to let me out of my special services contract.
“Don’t worry about that,” Bob said, “I’ll have Marge call George directly.”
After his conversation with Marge, Mr. Steinbrenner gave me the okay to talk to the Reds, but I wondered if this was going to be the same as what happened with Gillick and the Blue Jays—that in the end he was going to want significant compensation for me.
I flew out to Cincinnati and met Marge at Riverfront Stadium, where we subsequently drove out to her house, a big German tudor in the suburb of Indian Hill. That’s when I was introduced to her two large Saint Bernards, Schottzie and Schottzie II. We spent a lot of time talking about family, something she made clear was very important to her, and then she asked, “Do you want to come to Cincinnati and manage for me?”
I told her I did but that I was concerned Mr. Steinbrenner was not going to let me out of my contract with the Yankees.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that. George will do anything I want! I’ll call him and work out everything,” to which I said, “Good luck!”
Much to my surprise, Marge was right. She did have a way with Mr. Steinbrenner, and a day later he called me and said if I wanted to go to Cincinnati he wouldn’t stand in my way. I figured he realized he was paying me $400,000 a year, for which I wasn’t doing very much, and this was a way to save him some money. I think he also saw where the Reds had finished in fifth place, 17 games behind, in 1989, and that, as a small-market team with a tightfisted owner, there was very little chance of my succeeding there.
“I have to say, Marge was very persuasive, Lou,” he said. “I hope you realize, though, replacing Pete Rose out there is not gonna be an easy fit for you.”
“I understand, sir,” I said. “I thank you for letting me go.”
Now all I had to do was reach an agreement with Marge, which proved to be somewhat tougher than I anticipated.
“I have one little problem,” she said. “Your $400,000 salary with George is more than I want to pay.”
“Well how about this, then,” I said. “Let’s make it $350,000 with an agreement that my salary will be adjusted after the first year.”
Once again, I was negotiating without an agent—and in the process agreeing to a $50,000 pay cut. But I was finally getting away from Mr. Steinbrenner and looking forward to a new challenge with a new team. On November 2, the Reds held a news conference at Riverfront Stadium to announce my hiring as manager. I brought Anita and my youngest son, Derek, with me. I had been in the American League my entire life and didn’t know the National League, but what most impressed me was how big baseball and the Reds were in Cincinnati. Anita and Marge hit it off right away and I could see that we were going to be happy in Cincinnati. Plus, it was close enough to New Jersey, an hour’s plane ride away, so we wouldn’t have to sell our house in Allendale.
During the press conference Bob Quinn said that I would have a free hand in naming my coaches, with one exception: the future Hall of Famer Tony Perez, another Reds icon as the powerful cleanup hitter on the 1975–76 Big Red Machine world championship clubs, would be remaining as first base and batting coach. I certainly had no problem with that. I had the utmost respect for Tony as both a person and a baseball man. In the days to come, I hired my old Yankee colleague Stan “the Steamer” Williams, who’d spent the last year scouting the National League for Mr. Steinbrenner, as my pitching coach, along with Jackie Moore as my bench coach and Sammy Perlozzo as my third base coach. Moore had previously been bench coach with the Expos and before that was Billy Martin’s bench coach with the Oakland A’s, and Billy had highly recommended him to me. Perlozzo had previously been the third base coach for the Mets. I had also wanted to hire Don Gullett, my former teammate and roomie with the Yankees, to be my bullpen coach and work under Stan to get ready to be pitching coach. I thought it would be a great fit, as Gullett had been the ace of those Big Red Machine pitching staffs. But before I could hire him, Bob Quinn told me the Reds had a very talented pitching coach in their minor-league system, Larry Rothschild, whom they were worried about losing to another organization.
“Would you just talk to Rothschild before you do anything with Gullett?” Quinn asked.
I agreed. I met Rothschild for lunch at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant in New York. But what I figured would be a perfunctory two-hour lunch instead turned out to be a four-hour session in which he blew me away with his knowledge of pitching. When I got home to Allendale, I called Bob and said, “This is the guy!” To this day, Larry, who later worked for me with the Cubs, remains one of the most respected pitching coaches in baseball, with the Yankees.
I remember vividly that one of the first Reds people I talked to was Johnny Bench, who told me, “You’ve come into a great situation, Lou. I don’t know what happened here last year, but this is a very good team you’re taking over. They’re ready to win. They just need to be shown how.”
That was very reassuring, but as Quinn said, there were still a few pieces we needed to add. As such, Bob and I and our three main scouts, Jimmy Stewart, Chief Bender, and Gene Bennett, got to the winter meetings in Nashville a couple of days before they were officially scheduled to begin, and went to work. We had a situation with our All-Star closer, Johnny Franco, who’d saved 32 games for the Reds in ’89. He’d just gotten almost a million-dollar raise in arbitration and was coming into free agency, and Quinn said we needed to trade him because we weren’t going to be able to afford him after the ’90 season. At the same time, we couldn’t trade him without having a replacement for him. Jimmy Stewart said the Mets had interest in Franco, who was a Brooklyn native, and thought they might be willing to swap Randy Myers, a twenty-seven-year-old lefty who appeared to be coming into his own as a potentially dominant back-end reliever. (As I would later find out, Myers was also a bit of a wild man in terms of his habits and demeanor. He liked to wear army battle fatigues under his uniform jersey and kept a couple of deactivated hand grenades in his locker.) Quinn was able to move quickly on that deal, only to have Marge nearly kill it.
“I’d shaken hands with Joe McIlvaine, the Mets’ GM, and now I just had to call Marge for her approval,” Quinn recalled. “I couldn’t imagine any problem. But when I told her what the deal was, she screamed, ‘No, no, no! You can’t trade Johnny Franco! He’s my favorite player! Tell them the trade is off!’ That’
s when, coward that I was, I turned the phone over to Lou, who managed to sweet-talk Marge into giving her okay.”
As the winter meetings were coming to a close, it looked as if the only things we were going to be able to accomplish were the Myers trade and the taking of Tim Layana, a young right-handed reliever, from the Yankees in the Rule 5 draft. But then I got to talking with the Stick, Gene Michael, who was now the Yankees’ GM. Stick was looking for a starting pitcher and asked me about Tim Leary, a workhorse right-hander who’d been 8–14 with a 3.52 ERA and in 207 innings for the Dodgers and Reds in ’89.
During that summer of ’89 I’d taken some time off from broadcasting to tour the Yankees’ minor-league system—that’s where I saw Layana—and I’d been particularly impressed with a twenty-four-year-old left-handed-hitting outfielder, Hal Morris. Morris was a big kid—6′3″, 200 pounds—who had a very unorthodox hitting style but made really good contact. He was also really a first baseman, but with Don Mattingly entrenched at first with the Yankees, they were trying to force him into an outfielder. One of the “pieces” Bob Quinn and I had talked about adding was a left-handed hitting first baseman to platoon with our incumbent, Todd Benzinger. So when Stick asked me if we’d be willing to trade Leary, I said to him that I liked Morris while pointing out to him that his path was pretty much blocked with the Yankees. Stick agreed and we had a deal. Later that summer, when Morris was on his way to hitting .340 and Layana was doing a really nice job as a middle reliever for us, Mr. Steinbrenner sent word to me to “leave my players alone!” and then accused me of being a fox in the henhouse with the Yankees in 1989. I got a kick out of that.
