by Lou Piniella
Having added a left-handed power closer, a left-handed bat at first base, and a right-handed middle reliever, I couldn’t wait to get to spring training, even if it was in Plant City, a small town nineteen miles east of Tampa with little or no nightlife or fine dining places. And then, just before the start of camp, negotiations between the owners and players over a new collective bargaining agreement broke down and the owners imposed a lockout of spring training. As the lockout dragged on for nearly a month, I became more and more agitated—I needed to get to know these kids!—and when camp finally did open I admit I probably acted like a man possessed. At least that’s what Barry Larkin recalls:
Before the first full-squad spring training workout, Lou had a meeting with us which was brief and to the point. He told us he didn’t like losing, didn’t accept losing, and that we were not going to lose. We kind of looked at each other and said, “Okay? Is that it?” During that spring, he really jumped all over on a couple of players—which he later explained to me were “teaching moments”—and we’d think, “Oh my god, this guy is scary!” I remember one time in particular when he got all over Paul O’Neill for throwing to the wrong base from right field. We quickly came to see that Lou wasn’t going to accept the mental mistakes we’d had in the past.
At the same time, I like to think the players were learning some things too. Sammy Perlozzo remembers how “we’d be standing there in the dugout and our pitcher would get two strikes on the batter and Lou would turn to us and say, ‘This guy can’t hit a curveball,’ and then he would get on the top step of the dugout and shout to our catcher, ‘Call a curveball!’ The batter would look back at him and smile as if to say, ‘Are you kiddin’?’ and Lou would smile right back and call again for the curveball and the batter would strike out. He must have done that a dozen or more times during that 1990 season—‘Guy can’t hit the inside fastball!’—and damn if it didn’t work every time! We’d just stand there and laugh and laugh.”
I will say this: I wanted to prove Mr. Steinbrenner wrong in the worst way, and I kept remembering what Bench had said to me about this Reds team being extremely talented, all coming into their prime, and just needing to be shown how to win. Early on in spring training Tony Perez said essentially the same thing. I’d asked Tony, “What was wrong here last year?” He replied, “You’ve gotta push ’em, Lou. At times they give up on themselves.” I just knew I’d come from an organization where the pinstripes were all about winning, and so throughout the spring we pushed them. I told them over and over, “You guys have talent. It’s time you knocked that door down.”
In the lefty Tom Browning and the righty Jose Rijo, we had two legitimate top-of-the-rotation starters, while Myers joined the holdovers Rob Dibble and Norm Charlton to give me a trio of power-arm relievers, any one of whom could close. I thought we had the makings of a really nice pitching staff, and Joe Oliver, though only in his second year in the big leagues, was an excellent catcher who called a good game and could catch and throw well. With Larkin at short, Chris Sabo at third, and Mariano Duncan at second, I had both power and speed in my infield. Ironically, Larkin, Sabo, and Hal Morris had all played together at the University of Michigan—they were my “scholars,” although Sabo was also a little goofy. In the outfield, O’Neill in right and Eric Davis in center were ages twenty-seven and twenty-eight respectively and had combined for 49 homers and 175 RBI in 1989. Davis was one of the most cordial and intelligent players I ever managed and had a world of talent, but after the 1990 season he just couldn’t stay healthy, and had it not been for the many injuries he incurred I have no doubt he’d have been a Hall of Famer. He was that good. O’Neill, on the other hand, reminded me a lot of myself. He and Sabo were my two red-asses. They hated making an out and took a beating out on many a bat. I particularly enjoyed watching O’Neill get mad.
“Lou was always getting on O’Neill, who he always called ‘Big O’Neill’,” said Larkin. “One time he was giving O’Neill batting tips in the cage and said to him, ‘Can you dance?’ O’Neill looked at him, quizzically, and Lou goes on, ‘You know, dance? You need to establish a little rhythm up there, get a little music in your head!’ With that, he gets into the cage and starts dancing right there in the batter’s box! Eric Davis and I were standing behind the cage watching this, laughing our asses off, shaking our heads and thinking, ‘This guy is certifiably nuts.’ But in retrospect I don’t know anyone who knew more about hitting than Lou.”
Despite the aborted spring, I was able to get all the things I needed accomplished with the kids, and because we were a young team we were able to get in shape faster. About all we were lacking was a bona fide leadoff hitter, and at the end of spring training, Bob took care of that by acquiring Billy Hatcher, who’d averaged over 35 stolen bases the previous four seasons, from the Pirates.
Above all, we needed to get off to a good start, which is what we did.
We started off on a six-game road trip to Houston and Atlanta and won all six, and continued that streak with three more wins at home. After the 9–0 start we kept on winning through the rest of April and May, and by June 3 our 33–12 record was the best getaway by any team in Reds’ history. Most of that was accomplished without the services of Davis, who was on the disabled list with a strained knee ligament from April 24 to May 19.
The big key to our success was the late-inning bullpen trio of Myers, Dibble, and Charlton, who came to calling themselves the “Nasty Boys.” And they were nasty—Dibble with his 100 m.p.h. unhittable fastball, Charlton with a 97–98 m.p.h. splitter, and Randy with that 96 m.p.h. slider that he used to pound the outside corner. They revolutionized baseball. Dibble did not allow an earned run in his first 15 outings, and Myers had a win and two saves the first week. By season’s end, they’d combined as relievers for a 1.89 ERA, 44 saves, and 234 strikeouts in 184⅔ innings. Charlton was almost as dominant as my principal seventh-and eighth-inning setup man, but in mid-July when Rijo went down with an injury, I had to move him into the starting rotation. Charlton was the ultimate competitor who, when I called him into my office and told him I needed him in the rotation, answered, “I’m ready.”
Another big factor in our flying start was the breakthrough (or at least we thought it was a breakthrough) by the right-handed starter Jack Armstrong, who, after spending most of the previous two seasons in the minor leagues, won a spot in the rotation out of spring training and won eight of his first nine starts. By midseason, Armstrong was 11–3 with a 2.28 ERA and was named the National League’s starting pitcher for the All-Star Game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. And that was about the last Armstrong ever did in the major leagues. He lost six of his next nine starts after the All-Star Break and at the end of August I had to take him out of the rotation. He pitched three more full seasons in the big leagues, never approaching that first-half brilliance in 1990, and was out of organized baseball before he was thirty. I was always mystified at what happened to Armstrong (whom I even left off the roster for the first round of the playoffs in 1990) but Stan Williams offered this theory:
I think after getting the All-Star start, that satisfied him. I remember complimenting him at the All-Star Break at what a nice season he was having. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he’d had enough work on his mechanics and he was ready to go home. To him, he had proven other people wrong.
My only regret of the 1990 season was that after that hellacious start, we played .500 ball the rest of the way and the fact that we were in first place from start to finish was never fully appreciated by the fans and media. We received a lot of criticism for what was perceived to be lackluster play in the second half, even though the smallest our lead ever got was 3½ games. Despite how it may have looked, I knew I was getting the effort and didn’t feel a need to air the team out. More often than not, after a tough loss, I would vent my frustrations with my coaches. According to Larry Rothschild, one such venting session early in the 1990 season left the coaches speechless and in disbelief.
“I
hadn’t yet seen Lou’s volcanic temper,” he said, “but after this particularly bad loss he came into the coaches’ office ripping mad. Just before, I had come into the room with a Styrofoam cup of beer which I set on this small, low refrigerator. Lou starts pacing back and forth, grousing about the team’s play, and suddenly kicks the container of beer. What happened next was nothing short of amazing. The top rim of the cup was severed cleanly, as if with a razor or something, and it landed on the floor in front of us while the cup itself remained upright on the refrigerator with not a single drop of beer spilled! We were just astounded. But Lou didn’t even notice. He just kept pacing and venting while all of us were sitting there, staring dumbfounded at that lip of the cup lying on the floor. To this day I am in total disbelief at that incident.”
I honestly don’t remember losing my temper much during that 1990 season, except for perhaps the August 21 game against the Cubs, which earned me a lifetime dubious achievement award since it’s still aired on TV almost as much as George Brett’s pine tar explosion. We had lost five games in a row and maybe I was having visions of those three disastrous Augusts with the Yankees from 1986 to 1988. I just felt I needed to do something to get my team out of the August doldrums, and I used a close play at first base early in the game—which Dutch Rennert called against us—to do it. Didn’t matter that Dutch was one of the better umpires. I wanted to let off some steam. I charged out there and after getting in his face and screaming the magic words to earn myself an ejection, I looked down and saw this beautiful shiny white base. So I reached down, pulled it out of its moorings, heaved it thirty feet toward second base, then picked it up and threw it again into right field. I’m told that was the first time in anyone’s memory a manager had pulled up a base and thrown it in anger. I’m not proud of having that distinction—I did it once again years later with Seattle—but it did serve its purpose. In my absence we went on to win that game, 8–1, to break the losing streak.
About the only other time I got really mad that 1990 season had nothing to do with a bad call in a game or a mental mistake or lack of effort by any of my players. Rather, it was an unwelcome intrusion back into my life by Mr. Steinbrenner. In the aftermath of his being suspended from baseball for giving $40,000 to an admitted gambler named Howie Spira in exchange for supplying damaging information on Dave Winfield’s foundation, the transcript of Mr. Steinbrenner’s testimony to Commissioner Fay Vincent was released in mid-July—with me smeared all over it. In attempting to explain away why he gave the money to Spira, Mr. Steinbrenner said he did it to protect me because Spira supposedly had information that I had a gambling problem. I was completely blindsided by this outrageous claim on Mr. Steinbrenner’s part and now, in the middle of the pennant race, was forced to call a press conference to defend myself.
You have to remember, I was in a very difficult position as the manager of the Reds who replaced Pete Rose after he was banned for life for betting on baseball, and now Mr. Steinbrenner was claiming that I, too, had a gambling problem. The only gambling I did was on the horses and dogs. I went to the track a lot to get my mind off baseball, especially on the road, rather than be bored hanging around the hotel.
That spring, I’d gotten a call from Vincent, who then sent his security director, Kevin Hallinan, to meet with me for a couple of hours in Plant City. I wasn’t sure what any of this was about other than baseball doing its due diligence regarding gambling after the Rose investigation. I told Hallinan that I enjoyed betting on horses and the dogs but that I absolutely never gambled on sports and didn’t know any bookmakers. Shortly thereafter Vincent called me back to tell me everything was okay. He never once mentioned Spira, whom I never met, and I thought that was the end of it. Now, at my press conference, I told the writers emphatically that if I’d had any skeletons in my closet I’d have never come to Cincinnati, and then I added, “George is always saying how much he likes me and my family. And this is how he repays me.”
Looking back, I’m thinking it was rather ironic Mr. Steinbrenner would be connecting me to gambling and horse racing since, a few years earlier, we had actually gone into the racehorse business together. After a Yankees spring training workout in Fort Lauderdale, Bobby Murcer and I went down to Hialeah for the yearling sale. I’d already done my homework and had a list of five or six horses with good bloodlines I thought would be worth buying if the bidding didn’t get too out of hand. But when we got there, who do we run into but Mr. Steinbrenner, who immediately wanted to see my list.
“Who gave you this? This is garbage!” he declared. “These horses are no good. You come with me. I’ve got my own list. I’ve done my studying and you’ll invest with me.”
With that, he showed me the name of this filly who was supposed to also have great bloodlines, and instructed me to sit across from him in the bidding area and raise my hand when he gave me a signal.
“If I do the bidding myself, it’ll run the price up,” he said.
We wound up getting the horse for $55,000, and shortly thereafter Mr. Steinbrenner ran her at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. In three races there, she never passed a horse. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help noticing how small she was compared with the other fillies and how fragile she looked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Steinbrenner,” I said, “this horse is really small. I’m even taller than her!”
“That’s okay,” he said. “She’s a young two-year-old. She’ll fill out. We may have started her out in too strong competition up here at Monmouth. I’m going to send her down to Tampa Bay Downs where I can keep an eye on her progress. I’m also going to get a new trainer.”
The end of the story is she never passed a horse at Tampa Bay Downs either.
After Mr. Steinbrenner’s testimony about me with Vincent became public, it was a long while before we ever spoke to each other. Our mutual friend Malio Iavarone was the peace broker when one day we both happened to be in his restaurant and he sent me over to Mr. Steinbrenner’s table. It was like nothing had ever happened. He never mentioned anything about it and never apologized to me, and by then, I had just let it go. (An aside here: Malio had a special private room off the main dining room that he named the “Piniella-Steinbrenner Room.” But one day I came in and noticed the placard over the door had been changed to the “Steinbrenner-Piniella Room.” As Malio explained weakly, “What can I say? He wants everyone to know who’s the boss here.”)
Still, while Mr. Steinbrenner’s comments were a distraction, I tried to keep my head down and manage a team that I knew had what it took. There were a lot of people who had doubts about us going very far in the postseason, but I wasn’t one of them, because I had seen how every time we were tested, we answered—most notably when we lost three in a row in mid-September to see our lead shrink to 3½ games over the Dodgers and proceeded to win six of our next seven to put the NL West division away. As it was, no Reds pitcher won more than 15 games in 1990—Browning was 15–9 and Rijo 14–8—and no Reds batter hit more than 25 homers. Davis, with 86, led the team in RBI. It was truly a team effort. I also have to give a lot of credit to Pete Rose and the scouting director, Julian Mock. They had put this team together.
Our biggest challenge of the 1990 season was Jim Leyland’s Pittsburgh Pirates team, which we met in the National League Championship Series. They had won 95 games in the regular season, had the best all-around outfield—Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke, and Bobby Bonilla—in baseball, and in my old Yankee protégé Doug Drabek, they had the National League Cy Young winner at the top of their rotation. To beat them we were going to have to play our complete game.
When the Pirates won game 1, overcoming a 3–0 deficit against Rijo at Riverfront Stadium, it was a jolt. It was the first time all season we were behind in games to anyone. But as I said, every time that ’90 team was tested, they answered. In game 2, Browning gave up singles to Gary Redus and Jay Bell to open the game, setting the table for Van Slyke, Bonilla, and Bonds. This was the mettle of Browning: he retired all three, the latter, B
onds, by strikeout, to end the inning unscathed. Leyland later said that was the turning point of the whole series. The three of them, Van Slyke, Bonilla, and Bonds, had driven in 311 runs that season, but our pitchers held them to a collective .190 average and 5 RBI in the six-game series. O’Neill was the game 2 hero for us, singling home one run in the bottom of the first against Drabek and doubling home the winning run in the fifth. He also made the defensive play of the game, throwing out Van Slyke at third base after catching Bonds’s fly to right for a 9-5 double play in the sixth. In game 4 we demonstrated more of that complete-game finesse when Billy Hatcher gunned down Sid Bream trying to score from second on a single to center by José Lind, and Davis threw out Bonilla at third trying to stretch a double into a triple. For the series, our outfielders had four assists and no errors.
We were a complete team in every way. That was no better illustrated than in the final game 6. I used six different lineups in the series, including three different batters in the number three spot. My game 6 number three hitter was O’Neill, who had a .471 average for the series when, much to his dismay I’m sure, I sent a pinch hitter, Luis Quinones, up for him with runners at first and third and one out in the seventh inning against the Pirates’ tough lefty Zane Smith. After we scratched out a run against Smith in the first inning, he’d held us scoreless into the seventh, and in this situation I was looking for someone just to make contact. Paul had not had a whole lot of success against Smith, so I figured with Quinones being a switch hitter, I’d let Leyland make the choice as to whether to stick with Smith. He left him in and Quinones, who’d hit .241 with just 17 RBI in 83 games during the regular season, made me look brilliant when he singled to right for what proved to be the winning run and series-clinching hit. It was a further tribute to our bench that Glenn Braggs, a reserve outfielder who’d replaced O’Neill, recorded the next-to-last out of the game with an excellent running catch of a Carmelo Martinez drive to deep right field.
