by Bill Madden
A few days after his conversation with Walsh, Paul received a letter from Magnus expressing a desire to go into the broadcast booth.
“This is insane,” Paul said. “Now this guy thinks he should be one of our broadcasters? He’s telling me what a good idea it would be to introduce the players by their astrological signs. Enough!”
Nevertheless, in early February Magnus flew to New York to meet with Paul about the job. Paul, however, had arranged to be out of town and turned the meeting over to his assistant, Tal Smith, with instructions to tell him there were no vacancies in the broadcast booth at the present time. Thirty-four years later, Magnus was still smarting from his brief Yankees experience.
“I was crushed,” he recalled. “Neil had called me in the middle of the night from Elaine’s restaurant in New York to tell me I had the job, but when I got there Tal Smith said he didn’t know anything about it. I never got to meet Steinbrenner. I felt like the victim of some caper.”
But that was only one of the many tempests Paul continually had to snuff out.
On January 18, he’d been asked to lunch by Jimmy Nederlander, one of the limited Yankees partners. It seemed Nederlander and the other limiteds were becoming increasingly unhappy at Steinbrenner’s obvious disregard for them. For years Nederlander had been one of Steinbrenner’s closest friends. Together, along with Joseph Kipness (owner of Joe’s Pier 52, the famous Manhattan restaurant frequented by New York’s sports and theater celebrities), they had enjoyed a great relationship as producers for a number of Broadway shows, among them Applause and Seesaw. But being a partner of Steinbrenner’s in the baseball business, Nederlander was discovering, was, by contrast, quite unrewarding.
“We never have meetings or get any information as to what’s going on with the team,” Nederlander complained to Paul. “It’s the same thing I hear at AmShip, where George just bought a plane without consulting with anyone.”
Paul didn’t have the heart to tell Nederlander that Steinbrenner had instructed him not to invite any of the limited partners to the New York baseball writers’ dinner that week.
“They’d be more upset if they knew what he uses that plane for,” Paul replied, a note of disgust in his voice. “Junkets for Neil Walsh and all his other cronies.”
Nederlander was especially disturbed by Steinbrenner’s frequent cash calls to his partners. Despite the Yankees’ improvement on the field, they were losing millions while playing at Shea during the renovation of Yankee Stadium, and the partners were concerned as to whether they could afford the Hunter contract.
“I understand your concern, Jim,” Paul said. “I’m working for nothing here, and I have to put up too.”
THREE DAYS AFTER his lunch with Nederlander, Paul and Steinbrenner were called to a meeting at Bowie Kuhn’s office. It was Steinbrenner’s hope that the commissioner was going to reduce his suspension. Instead, Kuhn wanted to know the depth of his involvement in the Hunter deal.
“I had nothing to do with it,” Steinbrenner insisted. “That was all Gabe’s deal.”
Kuhn seemed to accept Steinbrenner’s answer and noted that he was satisfied that Paul was conducting the Yankees’ baseball business with a free hand. Paul, managing to keep a straight face, said nothing, but gave a silent thanks that the commissioner hadn’t asked him how often he’d been talking to Steinbrenner or how little the content of the calls had been of a “social nature.”
He wasn’t particularly fond of Kuhn anyway, but in the weeks and months to come, Gabe Paul would begin to think more and more that “this Steinbrenner,” whom he worked for and covered for during the owner’s exile from baseball, was merely crazy.
Chapter 5
Three for the Tabloids
IF NOTHING ELSE, YOU must never forget there are three things that sell this newspaper: cops, tits and the Yankees.”
The man explaining this to me was Buddy Martin, the executive sports editor of the New York Daily News. It was a June afternoon in 1978, and we were in the Lantern Coffee Shop, on 42nd Street. Through the window I could see the Daily News building across the street. It was the city’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, and I was interviewing to become its new baseball writer. “At this place,” Martin continued, “the prototypical Daily News every day will have cops, crime and mayhem on page one, interspersed with stories about sex and hookers along with semi-naked photos of pop tarts on the inside gossip pages, and George and Billy going at it on the back page. That’s the winning trifecta here!
“Oh, and one other thing. When you hear how Steinbrenner thinks he owns our back page? The fact is he probably does.”
Martin was preparing me for life at a New York City tabloid, a place where, after five years of owning the Yankees, George Steinbrenner had created a permanent niche for himself. He had done this by systematically restoring the Yankees to a championship-quality team. There had been the trades for Lou Piniella, Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss early on, followed by the momentous free agent signing of Catfish Hunter. All of a sudden, not only were the Yankees getting considerably better under the direction of Steinbrenner and Gabe Paul, but they were also developing a personality.
Of course, when it came to personality, Steinbrenner loomed over all. Winning breeds celebrity, and as the Yankees began to matter again in the mid-’70s, the man behind their renaissance became as much a presence on the New York social scene as he was on the sports pages.
When he wasn’t sitting in his private box on the mezzanine level at Yankee Stadium, Steinbrenner was hobnobbing at Upper East Side spots like Elaine’s, P. J. Clarke’s, McMullen’s and the private Le Club.
In the spring of 1975, Steinbrenner was indeed the most visible face of these reborn Yankees, thanks largely to the historic signing of Hunter while he was supposed to be serving a suspension.
WITH THE ADDITIONS of Catfish Hunter and Bobby Bonds—bona fide baseball superstars—to a Yankee ball club that had finished a surprising second in 1974, it appeared George Steinbrenner and Gabe Paul now had a team capable of returning to the franchise’s old glory. But amid the lingering good feelings from the team’s finish the year before and the optimism that Hunter’s and Bonds’s presence brought for 1975, a pall was cast on the final week of spring training in Fort Lauderdale, when one of the veteran team leaders, Mel Stottlemyre, the fifth-winningest pitcher in club history and ace of the pitching staff from 1964 to ’73, was without warning handed his unconditional release.
Stottlemyre had sustained a torn rotator cuff in his shoulder on June 4, 1974, but hoped that a winter of complete rest would enable him to pitch again, and Paul had agreed to wait until May 1 to make that determination. During spring training, however, as Stottlemyre showed no improvement, Paul realized that if he released him prior to April 1, the Yankees would have to pay him for only 30 days of the season, or one sixth of his contract, in severance. Stottlemyre had continued on an exercise and soft-tossing program throughout the spring, unaware of the Yankees’ intentions, and was thus blindsided when Paul called him into his trailer office on March 29 and informed him he was being let go.
“But you told me I had until May 1,” Stottlemyre said.
“Well, that was merely an arbitrary target date,” Paul said uneasily. “If you want, I’ll call around and see if there’s any interest from other clubs.”
Stottlemyre couldn’t believe what he was hearing; couldn’t believe the Yankees were doing this to him after all he’d meant to them over the past decade. That night, his head was still spinning when the phone rang in his apartment. It was Steinbrenner, who had not been around the team all spring because of his suspension.
“I’m not happy about what happened today,” Steinbrenner declared, “but I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. Gabe’s running the team, and I’m not allowed to get involved.”
Steinbrenner then recommended that Stottlemyre contact a friend of his, Charlie Beech, a professor of kinesiology at Michigan State, who could put him on an arm-strengthenin
g program that might save his career.
“I’ll pay you $40,000 to go work with him, even if you aren’t able to pitch again,” Steinbrenner said.
Stottlemyre thought this was a very magnanimous gesture on Steinbrenner’s part and spent three days with Beech at Michigan State in late March. He then flew to Los Angeles to work out with Mike Marshall, the former Cy Young Award–winning relief pitcher, who had a doctorate in physiology from Michigan State.
Ultimately, none of the programs were able to strengthen Stottlemyre’s shoulder to the point that he could pitch again, and he went home to Seattle concluding his career was over.
At least, he thought, there was still $40,000 coming from Steinbrenner. But as weeks and then months went by, there was no check. Nor did Stottlemyre hear anything more from the Yankees owner. As he said years later, he was too proud to call him. It wasn’t until 21 years later, when Joe Torre hired him in 1996 as a pitching coach, that he finally got his money.
While negotiating the contract, Stottlemyre told Joe Molloy, who was then Steinbrenner’s son-in-law and serving as the Yankees’ acting general partner, that he would have to have an additional $40,000 “as a way of bringing closure to his bitterness toward Steinbrenner.” Molloy, not wanting such an embarrassing story to become public, agreed to defer the $40,000 with interest. Stottlemyre wound up with nearly $80,000 in “deferred bonus” money for serving as the Yankees’ pitching coach from 1996 to 2005.
Other than Stottlemyre, who could have used the Yankees owner’s intervention, it was rather refreshing for everyone else around the team that Steinbrenner was still on suspension and not inflicting his wrath upon them. Still, the owner managed to assure his players that he was still very much around.
On Opening Day 1975, sitting in the box seats watching pregame batting practice, Steinbrenner summoned manager Bill Virdon and handed him a cassette tape.
“I want you to play this for the team,” he said. “It’ll get ’em going today.”
Virdon looked at Steinbrenner quizzically but said nothing as he stuffed the tape into his pocket. When the Yankees finished batting and infield practice and returned to the clubhouse, Virdon was standing by a table in the middle of the room, where the traveling secretary ordinarily would be sitting with a stack of envelopes, filling all the players’ ticket requests. This time the table was bare except for a tape recorder.
“I’ve been instructed to play this tape,” Virdon announced before touching the play button.
“Basically, it was just George delivering one of his patented ‘I sign your checks and I expect results’ speeches,” remembered Graig Nettles. “It was George doing his Knute Rockne thing without being there in person.”
While the tape played for a full four minutes, Virdon just stood there, smiling, as his players tried to keep from laughing.
“The one thing I do remember about it,” said Lou Piniella, “was that at the end, George made like he was on Mission: Impossible by saying, ‘This tape will self-destruct in 30 seconds.’ That was funny!”
Though The Sporting News named him manager of the year for guiding the Yankees to within one game of the American League East title in 1974, Virdon’s strict, detached managing style had worn thin with most of the players, especially the veterans who were used to having their egos constantly massaged by Ralph Houk. Virdon’s base-running drill at the conclusion of each spring training workout—in which the manager stood at home plate like a drill sergeant and gave a thumbs-up to go into the locker room or a thumbs-down to take another lap—was a particularly grueling ritual the players hated.
After another Virdon spring training boot camp, the Yankees began the 1975 season by losing their first three games, including the home opener, in which Hunter surrendered a three-run homer to Detroit’s Nate Colbert in the fifth inning and lost to the Tigers, 5–3. In his second start, against the Red Sox four days later, Hunter was unable to hold a 3–0 lead and was beaten again, 5–3. By the end of April, the Yankees were 9-10 and Hunter was 0-3 in four starts with a 7.66 ERA.
It wasn’t until June—when they went 20-9 and actually climbed into first place for a brief spell—that the ’75 Yankees began to look like a team capable of contending with the Red Sox and the defending division champs, the Baltimore Orioles, for the AL East title. But then a series of injuries decimated their outfield and served to undercut career seasons by Nettles, Chambliss and catcher Thurman Munson, and even the return to form by Hunter, who wound up winning 23 and hurled more complete games (30) than any American League pitcher since 1946.
On June 7 in Chicago, Bobby Bonds, who was leading the AL with 15 home runs and 45 RBI, fell down in the outfield while making a game-saving catch against the White Sox and injured his right knee. X-rays later revealed torn cartilage, but Bonds played through the rest of the season, though at a clearly diminished capacity. Six days after Bonds hurt his knee, Elliott Maddox, who’d hit .303 as Bobby Murcer’s center field replacement in 1974, slipped and fell on the wet sod of Shea Stadium and tore the ligaments in his right knee. Maddox, who was hitting .307 at the time, missed the rest of ’75 and most of ’76 and later filed a $1 million negligence suit against the city of New York, citing the field condition at Shea for having prematurely ended his career. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) Also during June, Piniella suffered a mysterious inner ear infection and designated hitter Ron Blomberg tore the rotator cuff in his shoulder while taking an unusually hard swing of the bat. The two players, who in 1974 had both hit over .300 and, with Maddox, accounted for 185 runs and 163 RBI, were also lost for most of the season.
Under the terms of his suspension, Steinbrenner was prohibited from making any public comments about his team or baseball in general. But with the mounting injuries, coupled with the team’s nine losses in 10 games from June 20 to July 5, his growing frustration was apparent in the way he scowled and waved his arms in disgust from the field box next to the Yankees’ dugout. Behind the scenes, Steinbrenner vented furiously to Gabe Paul, who came to expect nightly phone calls from the banished Yankees owner that were of anything but “a social nature.”
Most of the time, Steinbrenner’s wrath was directed at Virdon, whom he blamed for losing control of the team. Virdon’s stoic demeanor especially irritated Steinbrenner, who complained to the Daily News’ Yankees beat man, Phil Pepe, that he wanted to see a more animated manager. “I don’t like a manager who walks out to the mound with his hands in his back pocket and his chin on his chest like he’s carrying the weight of the world and doesn’t know what to do,” Pepe quoted him as saying. “I like a guy who charges out to the mound and waves decisively to the bullpen; a guy who knows exactly what the problem is and what to do about it! I want a guy who shows some fire!”
On July 21, 1975, precisely such a manager became available when the Texas Rangers fired Billy Martin. For Martin, the notorious “bad boy” who had played second base for the Yankees in the ’50s, it was the third time he’d been fired as a manager, all for the same reason: a personality clash with ownership. (As a player with the Yankees, despite his reputation for being a clutch performer on the ’52, ’53, ’55 and ’56 World Series teams, the owners regarded Martin as a bad influence on the team’s biggest stars, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. It was after Mantle, Ford, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer and pitcher Johnny Kucks had been involved in a fight at the Copacabana nightclub while celebrating Martin’s birthday in May 1957 that “Billy the Kid” was traded to the last-place Kansas City Athletics.)
Martin brought the same flinty, uncompromising persona to managing. Just as he had immediately made winners of the Minnesota Twins in 1969 and the Detroit Tigers in 1971, in late 1973 Martin took over a Texas team that had lost 105 games that year and led them to an 84-win season the following year, only to find himself fired again because of his hard drinking and his combative personality.
Indeed, when Steinbrenner made those remarks to Pepe, he probably had Martin in mind. The suggestion that Martin manage the Yankees h
ad actually been made two years earlier by Mike Burke. As the former Yankees general partner recounted to friends, he’d told Steinbrenner, in their final meeting at the Yankee Stadium offices in April 1973, that if George ever got the chance, he should hire Martin as his manager. When he was with the Yankees, Burke would have dinner with Martin when Billy was in New York, and he told Steinbrenner that in 1972 he had tried to hire Martin away from the Tigers at the risk of tampering charges.
“Billy’s driving ambition is to manage the Yankees and become baseball’s first $100,000 manager,” Burke told Steinbrenner. “He never got over being traded by them when he was a player. The Yankees are in his blood.”
With the Yankees staggering into the All-Star break at 45-41 after losing 12 of their previous 18 games, Steinbrenner might well have ordered Paul to fire Virdon then, had he not been preoccupied with league politics.
At the All-Star Game in Milwaukee, the owners scheduled a meeting to vote on Bowie Kuhn’s reelection as commissioner of baseball. In the weeks leading up to it, there had been grumbling about Kuhn’s job performance, particularly from the American League, where Charlie Finley was attempting to muster a coalition to oust the commissioner. The Chicago Sun-Times reported in June that a “Dump Bowie” club was being formed, with Finley, Steinbrenner and Baltimore Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger as its charter members. Their dissatisfaction with Kuhn stemmed from a feeling that, as the former National League attorney, he had favored the rival league and was, in fact, controlled by Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley.
