by Bill Madden
“Well, you know Gabe’s leaving me,” Steinbrenner said. “I’d love to have you come to New York and take over as president of the Yankees.”
“That’s something I’d really like,” said Rosen. “I’ve been wanting to get back into baseball for a long time.”
Though Tallis had been the architect of those Kansas City Royals teams that played the Yankees in the ’76 and ’77 American League Championship Series and had even been voted executive of the year by The Sporting News in 1971, Steinbrenner viewed him as more of an administrator than a baseball talent evaluator. Rosen, on the other hand, had played the game and played it exceedingly well, winning American League Most Valuable Player honors with the Indians in 1953. He’d been a hero in Cleveland, especially to Steinbrenner.
“I want you to run the operation, just like Gabe did,” Steinbrenner told his friend. “Cedric will remain the general manager, but you’ll be the one in charge of the baseball end of it.”
“I’m ready to go,” said Rosen.
Rosen had hated the Yankees his entire life—in the ’50s the Indians had consistently battled them for the pennant—but he was ecstatic at the opportunity. Two weeks after his meeting with Steinbrenner in Las Vegas, he arrived in New York, where he worked by day with Paul, Tallis and Bill Bergesch at Yankee Stadium, going over scouting reports, waiver rules and contracts, and by night accompanying Steinbrenner on the Manhattan social scene with the owner’s friends, Bill Fugazy, the Fisher brothers and Mike Forrest. They went to Regine’s, or Elaine’s or McMullen’s. One night, at Le Club, an exclusive private establishment operated by another of the Yankees owner’s cronies, Patrick Shields, Steinbrenner introduced Rosen to the actress Candice Bergen, who was drinking champagne at the next table.
“George was the king of New York,” Rosen said in a 2008 interview, “and I felt like one of the free agents he was recruiting. And then, on my first official day as the team president, it all changed.”
Rosen had been staying at a hotel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, while he prepared to move his family from Cleveland after the first of the year. With Major League Baseball closed down the week between Christmas and New Year’s, he flew home to Cleveland to help his wife, Rita, pack their belongings. He was home one day when he got a phone call from Steinbrenner in Tampa.
“What are you doing?” Steinbrenner said.
“I’m home here for the holiday week, packing up all my things and getting ready for the move,” Rosen said. “There’s nothing going on in baseball. Everyone’s closed.”
“We’re not closed,” Steinbrenner said angrily. “Now get your ass back to New York and be in your office tomorrow!”
Tallis had also gone home to Kansas City for the holiday week and gotten the same phone call from Steinbrenner. “And for the next five days Cedric and I just sat in our office staring across the desk at each other at phones that never rang, and telling baseball stories,” recalled Rosen. “I don’t know where George was. We never heard from him the rest of the week.”
Meanwhile, Steinbrenner’s pursuit of Gossage was far less flashy than his courtship of Reggie Jackson the year before. Perhaps because he’d been told that Gossage was a country boy from Colorado Springs, Steinbrenner didn’t see a need to bring him to New York and try to sell him on the charms of the big city.
“Basically, George just blew everyone else away with his money offer,” Gossage told me. “I don’t even remember much negotiating with any other teams.”
On November 22, Gossage and his agent, Jerry Kapstein, met with Steinbrenner in Tampa and agreed to a six-year contract worth $2.748 million. Lyle’s reaction to reporters’ calls about the signing was predictable, even though Steinbrenner, in anticipation of this, had already sweetened his deal. “I want out,” Lyle said. “It’s nothing personal, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit out there in the bullpen and go stale because I can’t get enough work.”
But instead of trading Lyle, Steinbrenner added yet a third closer at the winter meetings in Hawaii, signing 27-year-old right-hander Rawly Eastwick to a five-year, $1.1 million contract. While nobody could quarrel with Steinbrenner for paying what he did for a pitcher of Gossage’s quality, the Eastwick signing shocked the rest of baseball. Eastwick had led the National League in saves in ’75 and ’76 with the Cincinnati Reds’ world championship teams, but he’d been injured for much of ’77 and had been traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. He was now viewed as damaged goods, hardly a million-dollar pitcher.
“I remember we discussed Eastwick at the winter meetings and we all pretty much agreed we shouldn’t sign him,” Rosen said. “But George wouldn’t listen. I think he just signed him because of the name familiarity.”
It was the same way with Andy Messersmith. Two years after his trailblazing free agency, in which he almost signed with the Yankees, Messersmith was out of favor with the Atlanta Braves and their wacky owner, Ted Turner, after suffering an elbow injury that required season-ending surgery in ’77. When he had signed Messersmith in April 1976 to a three-year, $1 million contract, Turner proclaimed: “Andy will be a Brave as long as I am. His contract is forever, until death or old age do us part.” But after getting only a 16-15 performance from the right-hander’s first two seasons in Atlanta, Turner was now anxious to recoup the remaining $333,333 on his contract, and delivered Messersmith to Steinbrenner for a mere $100,000.
For Al Rosen, those winter meetings proved to be quite an introduction to life with Steinbrenner’s Yankees. Steinbrenner seemed bent on putting his own imprint on the championship team his outgoing president had built. Paul left for Cleveland right after the new year. On the first day of spring training in Fort Lauderdale, Steinbrenner was talking to a couple of reporters and bristled as they began praising Paul for the job he’d done with the Yankees. “He was in baseball for 40 years, 25 of them as a general manager, and did he ever win a pennant before?” Steinbrenner said, his voice rising. “You think he made all those moves with this team himself? You think all of a sudden he got brilliant?”
Because he’d been out of the game so long, Rosen chose to stay in the background, mostly observing at the winter meetings in Hawaii and offering his opinions only when asked. He knew that once he was entrusted with running the baseball operations and had a better familiarity with all his scouts, he would be asserting himself (and inevitably butting heads with Steinbrenner). For now, he was more concerned about how he was going to deal with Billy Martin.
Perhaps because he had become immune to Steinbrenner not bothering to seek his opinions on players, Martin kept to himself in Hawaii, spending his nights in the hotel bar with baseball friends and the days sleeping off his hangovers on Waikiki Beach. He would later refer to Eastwick and Messersmith as “George’s boys.”
Martin’s indifferent attitude at the meetings didn’t faze Rosen. Going all the way back to their minor league playing days in 1949 in the Pacific Coast League, when, according to Rosen, Martin sucker-punched him in a fight, he viewed Billy as an incorrigible troublemaker. “I couldn’t warm up to Billy Martin if I was embalmed with him,” Rosen once said.
Martin felt the same way about Rosen, but managed to contain his animosity when the team assembled for spring training in February 1978. After all, unlike Rosen, Martin was a true Yankee, wasn’t he? And he’d just managed the Yankees to the world championship. Rosen, on the other hand, hadn’t been around the game in over 20 years. Nevertheless, Steinbrenner had made it clear how much he respected Rosen. “It’s not so easy,” he said, “for Billy to look at Al Rosen in the face and say, ‘What do you know about baseball?’ which he can do with me.”
Martin was not surprised when Sparky Lyle failed to show up for the early spring training camp for pitchers and catchers that Steinbrenner had ordered. In truth, Martin felt empathy for his yeoman closer, who was about to be displaced by Steinbrenner’s new marquee free agent, Gossage. Martin had not forgotten how Lyle had saved him, and the Yankees’ season in ’77, with his sterling r
elief work against the Royals in the ALCS the previous fall. Nor did he relish the task of trying to keep both closers sufficiently busy and happy. And also by now, Lyle had come to realize that, at $135,000, his salary ranked eighth on the Yankee pitching staff, what with the raises given Ron Guidry and Ed Figueroa and the additions of Messersmith at $333,333 and Eastwick at $220,000.
When Lyle finally arrived, a week after the early camp had begun, Steinbrenner arranged to have him greeted as he emerged from the jetway at the Fort Lauderdale airport by the Hollywood Hills High School marching band playing “Pomp and Circumstance,” the closer’s trademark entrance anthem at Yankee Stadium. For once, the practical joke was on Lyle, but it proved to be the only bit of levity in another otherwise uneasy spring.
For starters, it didn’t take long for Gossage to incur the enmity of Billy Martin. The morning before one of his first spring outings, Gossage was shocked when Martin approached him and said he wanted him to deliberately throw at the head of Texas Rangers outfielder Billy Sample. Martin had managed Sample in Texas and, for reasons he didn’t bother to tell Gossage, didn’t like him. Gossage resisted, telling Martin, “I can’t fight your battles for you.”
“I tell you to drill a guy and you say you’re not gonna do it?” Martin hissed. “You’re a worthless piece of shit!”
“I guess he was trying to test my loyalty, but from that day on, I never had any use for Billy,” Gossage told me. “He was a big reason for me leaving the Yankees like I did six years later.”
Since early that spring, Gossage had been hobbled by a staph infection in his right foot, one of the pitching staff’s many ailments that preseason. Gullett and Hunter were still experiencing severe pain in their shoulders. Then, on March 2, the Daily News’ Phil Pepe broke the story that Catfish Hunter had diabetes.
“How could you do this to us?” Steinbrenner railed at Pepe. “You’re helping the enemy by putting something like that in the paper!”
“I don’t work for you, George,” Pepe shot back. “I work for the Daily News, and this was news.”
“Ah, well,” Steinbrenner sighed. “At least we got the back page.”
And when Messersmith, who was having an excellent spring, took a fall while covering first base and separated his pitching shoulder, Steinbrenner was apoplectic. Suddenly, the multimillion-dollar starting rotation he had assembled was decimated.
“You couldn’t tell George that injuries were a part of the game,” said Rosen. “He was mad at everyone. He blamed Pepe for the Catfish diabetes story, he blamed the team doctors and trainers for the Gullett and Hunter shoulder injuries and, for all I know, the groundskeepers in Sarasota for not having softer grass where Messersmith took his fall. It was a mess, and it didn’t help that Billy hated Ken Holtzman, one of our few healthy starters, and wouldn’t pitch him.”
Finally, on March 25 in Fort Lauderdale, after the Yankees had played sloppily against the Mets in another game that was telecast back to New York, Steinbrenner blew a gasket, much as he had after the Mets game the previous spring in which he and Martin nearly came to blows. This time the Yankees had actually won, 9–6, but only after a six-run ninth inning against the Mets’ secondary relievers. Earlier in the game, incensed over five Yankee errors, Steinbrenner had stormed from his private box on the rooftop of Fort Lauderdale Stadium, down through the stands and right into the Yankees dugout, where he began voicing his disgust with the team’s sloppy play. Martin was outraged at Steinbrenner’s intrusion into the dugout in the middle of a game.
“George, you’ve got to get out of here,” he shouted, and was surprised when, this time, Steinbrenner didn’t challenge him. Instead, he retreated down the runway into the clubhouse. After the game, however, the owner was not at all mollified by the ninth-inning rally.
“The manager had better start pulling this team together,” he said pointedly to reporters. “I know the players say these spring training games don’t mean anything, but they do to me. When I look out there and see all those errors on the scoreboard, I care. Billy Martin and Al Rosen tell me they’re on schedule, but personally I don’t think that they are.”
Rosen and Martin, of course, had no control over the injuries. Gullett would make only eight starts in ’78 before undergoing career-ending shoulder surgery in July; Messersmith came back in late May but made only six starts before reinjuring his shoulder. And while Hunter (who’d struggled to a 9-9 record in ’77 when his shoulder soreness first cropped up) was able to start the season in the rotation, he spent two stints on the disabled list and was only 2-3 at the All-Star break.
As a result of all the injuries, Martin was forced to move Dick Tidrow into the starting rotation from the bullpen (where he’d served as an able setup man for Lyle in ’77) and enlist two rookies, right-handers Jim Beattie and Ken Clay, into emergency starting duty. Holtzman was placed on the disabled list, then traded when he filed a grievance over it with the league and made disparaging remarks about Martin and Steinbrenner. Fortunately, Rosen was able to find a taker for the disagreeable left-hander’s services in Bob Kennedy, his old ’50s Cleveland Indians teammate who was now the general manager of the Chicago Cubs. In exchange for Holtzman, Rosen was able to extract from Kennedy a hard-throwing minor league right-hander named Ron Davis who, the following year, established himself as an equally intimidating setup reliever for Gossage.
Meanwhile, Rosen’s relationship with Martin was deteriorating further. Ten days prior to the Holtzman deal, Thurman Munson’s aching knees prompted the gritty captain to ask for a rare couple of days off. Uncertain whether he’d have to place Munson on the disabled list, Rosen called up catcher Mike Heath from Triple-A Tacoma—without informing Martin, who, when he found out, was furious at being undermined, as he saw it, by the new team president. In the pressroom after the game that night, Rosen was informed by pitching coach Art Fowler, who’d been drinking with Martin at a table across the room, that the manager was really upset. Moments later, Rosen confronted Martin at his table.
“I understand you’re bad-mouthing me for the Heath situation, Billy,” Rosen said. “Do you want to just settle this thing right here?”
Martin refused to respond to Rosen’s challenge, but the two exchanged some heated words before eventually calming down when they realized that everyone in the room was listening to them. While explaining that he’d been unable to locate Martin and that the decision to recall Heath had to be made immediately, Rosen promised that in the future he would make every effort to inform him beforehand of any player moves.
In mid-June, the Yankees made their first trip to Fenway Park to face the first-place Red Sox. Steinbrenner accompanied the team on the trip and was incensed when they were clobbered, 10–4, in the opener. Two days later, rookie Jim Beattie, who hadn’t pitched in nine days, lasted just two innings in another rout, 9–2, that dropped the Yankees into a third-place tie with Milwaukee, eight games behind the Red Sox. As Beattie exited the game, Steinbrenner erupted at Rosen and Tallis in the visiting-team box.
“Get Beattie out of here!” he screamed. “I want him on a plane to Tacoma now!”
Assuming he meant after the game, Rosen and Tallis said nothing. Steinbrenner couldn’t believe it.
“Don’t just sit there,” Steinbrenner hollered at Tallis. “I told you what to do. Get your ass down to that clubhouse and get him out of here! Do you hear me?”
After the game, Steinbrenner lambasted Beattie to the reporters.
“Did you guys see the way Beattie pitched?” he said. “He looked like he was scared stiff!”
When asked about the overall state of the team and particularly Martin’s handling of it, Steinbrenner snapped, “It’s Al Rosen’s decision. But I’ll tell you one thing. I won’t put up with this shit much longer.”
Beattie was recalled in mid-July and given a regular spot in the rotation. After a month’s exile in Tacoma, he was pitching much better, and would go on to win games in both the ’78 American League Championship Series again
st Kansas City and the World Series against the Dodgers. Years later, the Dartmouth-educated Beattie served as general manager of the Montreal Expos and Baltimore Orioles, and the writers and other baseball execs always speculated that he never forgave Steinbrenner for that public slight. But in a 2009 interview, Beattie dispelled that notion.
“What nobody ever knew,” he said, “was that in September of that year I got married, and when we came in off a road trip, there was an envelope waiting for me with $1,000 in it as a wedding gift from George. For a guy making $21,000, that was a pretty nice gift.”
Between the patchwork starting rotation and the nagging injuries to many of the regulars—Munson played through his aching knees all season, while Bucky Dent and Mickey Rivers each missed a couple of weeks in the first half—Martin’s Yankees continued to fall behind in the pennant race. They were swept by the Brewers in a three-game series in Milwaukee to fall 11½ games behind the Red Sox at the midseason break. The sweep also enabled Milwaukee to jump ahead of the Yankees into second place in the American League East. All of this made for a very satisfying three days for Brewers owner Bud Selig, who sat side by side throughout with a fuming Steinbrenner in his private box in County Stadium.
During the final game on Sunday, Gullett was forced to leave after just two thirds of an inning, his shoulder throbbing, and the reporters, who could see Steinbrenner and Selig through the glass partition that separated the press box from Selig’s, asked Mickey Morabito, the Yankees’ public relations man, if they could talk to the Yankees owner. Morabito dutifully went into Selig’s box and emerged a minute or so later.
