by Bob Gibson
Reggie Jackson
There’s not a fan or journalist out there who knows what Dick Williams knows when he’s running a team or running a ballgame, or what Tony La Russa knows. I had the privilege of playing for both of those guys, and both of them will be in the Hall of Fame when Tony gets in. They were completely different as personalities, but completely the same in their devotion to winning and their grasp of the game.
Dick was combative and feisty, a colorful character—not unlike Billy Martin in that respect—and our A’s took on that personality. La Russa’s just as strong, but in a subtler, more cerebral way. Neither one of them would ever be undermined or outman-aged.
People view Tony as cold and calculating, but he showed me plenty of emotion when I was grinding through my final season, my Oakland encore. He once said that I was the only player he ever managed who brought tears to his eyes. (I hope he wasn’t talking about the way I ran after fly balls.)
On the other hand, I doubt that anybody ever brought tears to Dick Williams’s eyes. He could be fearsome, he could be intimidating, and he could be too heavy-handed for my taste—we clashed over that—but he was a great manager who earned my loyalty and the whole team’s. First off, we understood that managing for Charlie Finley couldn’t be easy. We respected Williams for standing up to Finley. I played for a manager who didn’t do that. We won a World Series under Alvin Dark, but Charlie put some dents in his authority.
Dick Williams was another matter. As bizarre as Finley was, and as domineering as he tried to be, Dick was strong enough to keep everybody on track and focused on winning. He ran a unique team. Took it to two straight world championships. Unfortunately, after the second one, in 1973, he’d had enough. That was the Series in which Mike Andrews, a utility infielder who’d come to us late in the season, made a couple errors in the twelfth inning of Game Two. Finley then forced him to sign a statement saying he was injured, which enabled Charlie to drop him off the roster. At least, that was his scheme. The players and Williams both made a fuss about it, and Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, intervened to put Andrews back on the active list. After we’d beaten the Mets in seven games, Williams up and quit.
Personally, I know that Dick Williams made me a better player. I can’t say that about Billy Martin.
Gene Mauch, who managed the Angels when I went to Anaheim after New York, was somebody I loved playing for. Mauch was as good and dedicated a baseball man as there ever was. He and Dick Williams were each as old-school and hard-boiled as the other. But I was more impressionable when I played for Dick. In terms of developing my fundamentals and team mentality, he took over what Bobby Winkles had started at Arizona State and Frank Robinson continued when he managed me one winter in Puerto Rico.
I was young and a long way from home when I arrived in Oakland, and Dick, as gruff as he was, was sort of a father figure to me. His toughness was what I needed.
Bob Gibson
I don’t know if I’d call any of my managers a father figure, but Johnny Keane—who, in fact, had studied to be a priest—certainly nurtured me as a pitcher. He was actually my first minor-league manager in Omaha. In my professional debut, I had a terrible time getting the ball over the plate and was letting up to throw strikes. Of course, that led to getting pounded. I remember Keane coming out to the mound and taking the ball and saying, “That’s pretty good for the first time. We’ll get back to you later.”
My first three years in St. Louis, the manager was Solly Hemus, and I’m pretty sure I’d have been traded if the Cardinals hadn’t fired him halfway through the 1961 season. Keane took over, with Howard Pollet as his pitching coach, and it was a different world. That was the year when Sandy Koufax broke through and became an all-star. Keane pointed out to me that Koufax had started out just like I had—wild and depending too much on the fastball. My manager was building up my belief in myself. And the next year, I was an all-star.
Johnny Keane telling me that, and putting his faith in me, meant more than a hundred successful hit-and-runs.
Bob Gibson
There are always exceptions—the Yankees, obviously—but on most teams, players aren’t that familiar with the owner of the ball club. We don’t see them much and don’t hear from them much and they don’t have much to do with the identity of the team. If you’ve got good ballplayers, the owner can do his thing, whatever it is, and it won’t make much of a difference.
Of course, he has to do his part in getting those good ballplayers. The owner has to give the general manager the latitude—the money, basically—to go out and put together a championship team. If he’s willing to do that, it shows the players that the organization is serious about winning and will come up with whatever it takes, at least to a reasonable extent.
George Steinbrenner messed with that Yankee clubhouse all the time, but he always signed the best ballplayers available. He did it to a more than reasonable extent. Nothing else matters as much as that.
Reggie Jackson
I played for the exceptions. Steinbrenner and Finley had a hell of a lot to do with the personalities of their teams. It all started with them.
Both of them were controversial, critical, loud, stubborn, and very successful. And so were we. Their tough-mindedness was reflected in their ball clubs.
In my opinion, they both deserve Hall of Fame recognition. Both were ahead of the times. Finley, in addition to putting championship teams on the field, was a tremendous innovator—he pushed for the night World Series, the night All-Star Game, and the designated hitter—and a master promoter (among other things, he was the first to hire ball girls). George should get credit for raising the value of major-league franchises. Under him, the Yankees became the big draw for every team they played on the road, not to mention the TV networks.
Bob Gibson
Gussie Busch didn’t have a lot in common with those guys except success. And certainly stubbornness. He was rigid in his defense of the reserve clause and his opposition to collective bargaining for the players.
As far as putting a team on the field, I never really understood whether or not he cared if we won. I know that Bill DeWitt does. The Cardinals have great ownership these days. When they’re short on something, he makes sure they have the means to get it. With Busch, I never had that sense one way or the other.
But he deserves some credit. He shelled out the money to pick up a big hitter from time to time—Cepeda, Dick Allen, and Torre. And he made an effort to accommodate the players. The motel situation in St. Petersburg was the most dramatic example, but it says something that we had four Hall of Famers during my time, and only one of them—Steve Carlton—ever left the Cardinals. Musial and I spent our entire careers in St. Louis, and Lou Brock was there for his last sixteen seasons. If you add it up for the three of us, the total is fifty-five straight seasons in the organization. On top of that, guys like Red Schoendienst, George Kissell, and Bing Devine were fixtures in the dugout and front office. That’s a lot of continuity and stability.
Reggie Jackson
I won’t attempt to associate those words with Charlie Finley.
We heard more of Charlie than we saw of him. He was usually back home in Indiana, but he listened to the games over the phone line and thought he always knew exactly what we needed. Of course, he wasn’t interested in paying much for it. Once, he was about to send Phil Garner to the minors so he wouldn’t have to give him a major-league contract. I had to get him on the phone to explain that all Garner wanted was $800 a month. When he heard it laid out that way, Charlie okayed the contract.
I could talk to Finley, but most of the talking seemed to be about money. After I hit forty-seven home runs in 1969, I had to fight him tooth and nail to get $50,000 for 1970. Charlie was so furious about the contract that he ordered me to the bench. A couple weeks later, I came through with a pinch-hit grand slam and raised my fist toward his box when I crossed home plate. He called me to his office and told me I’d be sent to the minors unless I signed a public apology. He
was a proud man and I’d openly challenged his authority. Well, I’m a proud man, too, and he’d openly humiliated me. I never did sign that apology.
Charlie O was so stingy he wouldn’t even supply stamps for the fan mail we answered. We wore the same uniforms for two years. We were given two hats to last us the season. We also had a limited number of bats, and if we broke them all we didn’t get new ones. We borrowed from other players.
Maybe the most generous thing Charlie ever did was offer all the players $300 to grow mustaches for Mustache Day. I already had one, and Rollie Fingers and Darold Knowles had started to grow their own just to make me shave mine. That gave Finley the idea for a cheap promotion. Naturally, a bunch of us took it further and grew out our hair and beards. It gave us the look of a rebellious, free-spirited team, and frankly, we were.
Mostly, we rebelled against Charlie.
Of course, he could also be a sweetheart. He showed me a lot of compassion when I tore my hamstring in the 1972 playoffs and couldn’t play in the World Series.
All things considered, Finley was great practice for The Boss.
Bob Gibson
Whatever opinion people might have of Steinbrenner, he was good for the Yankees and good for New York and probably good for baseball, because he raised the bar.
A lot of owners talk about winning, but it’d be hard to find another one who ever went after it like Steinbrenner.
Reggie Jackson
That’s the bottom line. George never spared any expense when it came to putting a team on the field. A lot of people have complained about other teams having to compete with the salaries he paid, but that’s on baseball. He was just playing by the rules of the game, and playing hard. Losing was a disgrace to him, and that set the tone for the franchise. He created an atmosphere that was all about winning, no matter the cost. He wanted to win every game.
As a player, I had my share of problems with Steinbrenner. Okay, more than my share. We had our shouting matches and our times when we didn’t talk to each other. I thought he blamed me for every little incident—like the fight with Nettles. I also thought he should have kept Billy Martin off my back a little more than he did. At the same time, though, Billy was upset because he thought I had George’s ear. And I suppose I did. George and I were friends. We respected each other. He gave me the biggest contract in baseball history, and that put the two of us in it together. We discussed things. We met for dinner every once in a while. He got to know my family. He thought I should be hitting cleanup and told Billy. But it certainly wasn’t all peaches and cream between us. I don’t think it was all peaches and cream between George and anybody—at least, until the last ten years or so.
People thought I was the reason that George and Billy had problems and George was the reason that Billy and I had problems and Billy was the reason that George and I had problems. Maybe. That’s a lot of ego for one building. In general, though, the biggest problems I had with Steinbrenner came when I wasn’t playing well.
Most of the 1981 season falls under that category. I was hurt for part of the year and struggled through the rest of it. At one point, George ordered me to get a physical. I didn’t care for that. I wasn’t crazy about it when he failed to re-sign me after the season, either. (His advisors convinced him he should rebuild the team around speed. George has since said that it was the biggest mistake he ever made as an owner.)
I led the league in home runs the next year, with California, and number one came against Ron Guidry in New York. It was my first game against the Yankees since I’d left. I hit it well, and the fans chanted abuse at George as I jogged around the bases. He deserved better than that. He had given them a hell of a ball club. (Of course, I won’t mention that after the Yankees let me go they weren’t in the playoffs again for another fifteen years … I had to get that in.)
George sent me a silver Cartier plate in 1984, when I was with the Angels and hit my five hundredth home run. He also hired me as a special advisor. In the big picture, George Steinbrenner was great for me. We will always be family, a pair of friends and proud Yankees.
Bob Gibson
A player wants an owner who will compete. Steinbrenner was the epitome of that. Under him, the Yankees became the team to beat.
They became the team that everybody loved to beat, if they could. Nothing wrong with that.
Reggie Jackson
George was about winning.
Bob Gibson
And he won. He won championships.
Reggie Jackson
Amen!
My feelings now about The Boss are that we’re bound together as part of the history of the “Steinbrenner Yankees.” The same way that it’s Bill Russell and Red Auerbach, Roger Staubach and Tom Landry, Bart Starr and Vince Lombardi, I feel it should always be Reggie Jax and George Steinbrenner.
CHAPTER NINE
TOWERING FIGURES
Reggie Jackson
I’ve always been fascinated by greatness. Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Mantle, Koufax, Frank Robinson, Montana, Unitas, Russell, Jerry West, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali …
Maybe, early on, it was my desire to be looked at and revered the way the great ballplayers were, to be the guy whom everybody stops to watch when he walks by or steps up to the plate. Maybe it was pure admiration. I grew up in a generation when black players were rising to the top level of major-league baseball, even dominating it, and those guys were heroes to me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a deep reverence for the stars of that era. They’re just fifteen or so years older than I, and I was captivated by what they did in the way of paving the road for minorities. But it wasn’t just the black players who intrigued me. It was the great players.
My favorites at the time were Willie Mays and Duke Snider. I didn’t say much about Snider because, if you were black, your favorite Dodger had to be Jackie Robinson. He was an icon in the black community, and so were the athletes who picked up where he left off—Aaron, Mays, Frank Robinson, Gibson, Ali, Marion Motley, Calvin Peete … They made us walk taller. I’d check the newspaper every morning, and if Gibson had pitched a shutout or Mays had hit a home run, I had a good day at school. It sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but that’s the truth.
Bob Gibson
The difference for me was that I grew up around the game but not around the players. There was nothing to see in Omaha, other than A-ball, which later became Triple-A. I never even made it to the ballpark. By the time I might have been interested in going, I was out of Creighton and playing for the Cardinals and Globetrotters. In my neighborhood, the only professional athletes we paid much attention to were Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis.
So I never gave a thought to being like Satchel Paige or Don Newcombe, or like Monte Irvin if I’d become an outfielder. I was mainly concerned with making a good living—which is why I stayed with the Globetrotters until the Cardinals said they’d make up the difference in salary if I quit—and with winning. We all have different ideals.
Reggie Jackson
I wanted not only to play like the great ones and live like the great ones; I wanted to look like them. There was a certain way that Mays and Mickey Mantle wore their uniforms. They had their stirrups—their baseball socks—at a certain height. Mays left the top button unbuttoned, and if you were a superstar that was okay. He introduced tailored uniforms and tight pants, stuff like that. I thought it was cool. I wanted to wear my pants the way the stars did. I wanted to drive free cars like they did. I wanted everything about me to be just like them.
When I made it to the big leagues with the A’s, we trained in Arizona, where the Cubs and Giants also had their camps. That provided me with the opportunity to hang out with Ernie Banks, Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams, and Willie McCovey. Mays didn’t run around with us, but that was okay because Willie was magical to me. I didn’t want to lose that feeling.
As it was, I was surrounded by my idols. I was a kid and they were who I wanted to g
row up to be. Besides that, three of us were left-handed. I was in my glory.
Bob Gibson
You can learn a whole lot just by hanging out with guys like that. You can see for yourself what the best players eat, how they manage their schedules, how they respond to certain situations on the field and off it. You can start to see what it takes to be at that level.
But I didn’t make a study of greatness like Reggie did. To me, greatness meant that I shouldn’t give that guy anything good to hit.
I didn’t pal around with superstars, but I wasn’t oblivious to them either. It certainly made an impression on me in spring training of 1960 when I pitched against Ted Williams. I remembered distinctly—or thought I did—that I got two strikes on him with fastballs and then he ripped a curveball up the middle for a single. Years and years later, at an old-timers game, I brought that up with Williams and he said, no, that wasn’t quite how it was. He said he took a fastball for a strike and hit the curve on the second pitch. It’s understandable that I would remember pitching to him, because he was Ted Williams, but how in the hell could he remember batting against me? At that point, I was nobody. Except that I was a pitcher, and that was enough for Ted Williams. That, to me, is a study in greatness.
