Steinbrenner

by Bill Madden

  As the 1981 baseball season got under way, negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners seemed headed toward an impasse over the issue of the mechanism to be implemented for free agency. Gene Michael had his own problem—putting up with Steinbrenner’s daily complaints—despite the fact that the Yankees hovered within a game or so of first place through the first two months of the season. Besides Winfield, the Yankees had bolstered their lineup with the acquisition of another player from the San Diego Padres, center fielder Jerry Mumphrey, who had hit .298 with 52 stolen bases in 1980. But these additions were offset by the loss of Cerone for the first month with a hand injury and a horrendous first-half slump by Reggie Jackson.

  On May 24, before a Jacket Day crowd of 53,874, the Yankees committed three errors while being humiliated 12–5 by the Cleveland Indians. After the game, Steinbrenner blistered Michael and the team, telling reporters, “I’m embarrassed and disgusted. When 53,000 people pay their hard-earned dough to come out here and witness this fiasco, I’m embarrassed. We’re being killed by a number of people. I’ve got the facts to back me up, stats about guys not producing in critical situations.” He went on to say he’d suggested to Michael moving the slumping Jackson out of the cleanup spot in the lineup, perhaps to seventh, but that the manager had resisted, claiming it would do more harm than good. “There’s going to be some things happening very shortly,” Steinbrenner told the Daily News’ Phil Pepe, hinting that Michael could soon be replaced as manager.

  A nine-game winning streak at the start of June vaulted the Yankees into first place in the American League East and temporarily assuaged the owner. Then, on June 12, the increasingly rancorous labor negotiations between the players and the owners broke down, and the players went on strike. The work stoppage would last 50 days, and the season did not resume until August 10. Commissioner Kuhn decided that there would be a split season, with those teams in first place at the time of the work stoppage guaranteed a berth in the postseason. Kuhn announced a revised postseason format with an extra tier of “division playoffs,” from which the winners would advance to the league championship series.

  But if Michael thought the assurance of the Yankees being in the postseason had given him renewed job security, he was mistaken. When his

  veteran-laden Yankees played sluggishly upon their return, the owner’s verbal attacks resumed. After a stretch of six losses in seven games in mid-August, Steinbrenner phoned Michael from Tampa and again threatened to fire him if the team’s play didn’t improve quickly.

  “You can’t expect a veteran team like this, sitting around for six weeks, to do any work when they’ve won the first half,” Michael protested.

  “I don’t know, Stick, this is just unacceptable,” Steinbrenner said. “I think I’m gonna have to make a change. You’re just too young. You can’t get it out of ’em.”

  “They’re going to be okay, George,” Michael insisted. “This is like spring training all over again for them.”

  “We’ll see,” Steinbrenner said. “This is on you.”

  After that, the calls from Steinbrenner became increasingly heated, on an almost daily basis. Complicating the situation for Michael was Jackson’s continued batting woes. Three weeks into the second half, Jackson’s batting average was at .212 and he had hit just six homers. On August 27, Michael (perhaps under pressure from Steinbrenner?) pinch-hit for him against the Chicago White Sox with utility infielder Aurelio Rodriguez, an indignity that rivaled anything Jackson had suffered under Billy Martin. The ultimate embarrassment for Jackson, however, came the next day, when Steinbrenner ordered him to Tampa to undergo a complete physical.

  “I don’t know if we can make it without him,” Steinbrenner told the Times’ Murray Chass, adding that they had to find out what was wrong with Jackson, to which Reggie responded angrily, “This is just more obvious harassment.”

  Jackson, who was in the final year of his contract, believed that Steinbrenner’s real motive was to plant seeds of doubt about his physical well-being. For months, Steinbrenner had repeatedly rebuffed Jackson’s efforts to negotiate a contract extension; perhaps this was simply a ploy to lower his value. Nevertheless, Jackson was contractually obligated to take the physical, because it was stipulated in his contract—but he would do it on his terms. He told Cedric Tallis to tell Steinbrenner that he would take the physical, but rather than going to Tampa, he flew to New York to have it at NYU Medical Center, where everything, most notably his eyesight, checked out okay. Michael was not surprised. He was sure that Jackson’s problems were all mental, derived from the stress of being in his free agent walk year without a contract—and he agreed with Reggie that Steinbrenner wasn’t helping matters.

  Still, Michael wasn’t certain that Jackson could be a productive player in New York anymore, under Steinbrenner’s demanding presence. Steinbrenner wasn’t sure either, which is why, after being informed by Tallis that Jackson had taken the physical in New York, he said he still wanted Reggie to come to Tampa. Jackson was getting ready to rejoin the team in Chicago when Tallis reached him at the office of his agent, Matt Merola.

  “Uhhh, just checking in with you, Reggie, to make sure we’ve got everything straight,” Tallis said nervously, privately hoping Jackson had decided to comply with Steinbrenner’s order. “It’s all arranged for George’s son to meet you at the Tampa airport. We just need your flight information.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Cedric?” Jackson said. “I’m not going to Tampa. I’m going to Chicago!”

  Realizing Tallis had never told Steinbrenner he wasn’t going to Tampa, Jackson hung up the phone and took a taxi up to Yankee Stadium. Marching into Tallis’s office, he started yelling at the beleaguered GM, “What’s happened to you, Cedric? You didn’t have the guts to deliver my message to him, did you?”

  “I’m sorry, Reggie,” Tallis pleaded. “But you’ve got to go. Otherwise it’s going to cost me my job.”

  Jackson knew Tallis wasn’t overstating the situation, and he didn’t want to be responsible for getting him fired. He picked up the phone on Tallis’s desk and called Steinbrenner himself.

  “George, I’m here in Cedric’s office. I just wanted you to know that I took the physical at NYU, and all the results have come back fine,” Jackson said. “There’s no need for me to come to Tampa. I’m going back to Chicago to rejoin the team.”

  “No, no, no, Reggie,” Steinbrenner said. “I want you to come down here.”

  Jackson viewed this as more harassment from Steinbrenner. There was absolutely no reason for him to fly to Tampa and take more time out of his season. In his mind, this whole ordeal, orchestrated by Steinbrenner, had been further means to take him down. Enough was enough, he decided: their relationship was over.

  “Look, George,” he said, “maybe the way I’ve been playing is my own fault, and maybe you don’t think I can play anymore. But I’m gonna play my ass off for the rest of the season, and I’m gonna show you and everybody else there isn’t a player anywhere further from being finished than me. I’m off to Chicago to do my job, and then it’s goodbye.”

  Listening as Jackson lit into Steinbrenner, Tallis shuddered. He knew he would bear the brunt of Steinbrenner’s wrath after Jackson flew back to Chicago. Sadly, he had grown accustomed to this since taking over as GM when Michael moved down to the field. After a stint as GM of the Kansas City Royals, for whom he had supervised the design and construction of their much-acclaimed new stadium, he had been hired by Gabe Paul in 1974 to oversee the refurbishing of Yankee Stadium. But even after elevating him to GM, Steinbrenner never regarded Tallis as a true baseball man. Instead, in 1981, Steinbrenner took this opportunity to begin serving, essentially, as his own GM while preying on Tallis’s vulnerability as a family man who needed the job. Tallis kept a set of golf clubs in his office, and his fellow Yankees executives grew concerned about his mental state when they began to see him down on the field in the middle of the day, working ou
t his frustration by driving golf balls into the bleachers. Other times he’d be in his office, talking to himself, while putting balls into his overturned trash basket. Tallis finally resigned from the Yankees in 1982 to become the executive director of the Tampa Bay Baseball Group (which sought to bring major league baseball to the Tampa–St. Petersburg area). Away from the daily mental pounding from Steinbrenner, his quality of life improved considerably.

  SENSING HE’D EXERTED his quota of creative tension on Jackson for the time being, Steinbrenner turned his attention back to Michael. Shortly after Jackson rejoined the team in Chicago, Michael got a call from Steinbrenner, renewing his threats to make a manager change. But by now Michael had had his fill.

  “I’m sick and tired of your threats, George,” Michael said, his voice rising. “I can’t take this anymore. If you want to fire me, then get your fat ass out here to Chicago and just do it!”

  “You just wait,” Steinbrenner shot back. “I’ll be there.”

  An hour later, Michael received a call from team president Lou Saban.

  “Whatever it was you two guys talked about, it’s off,” Saban said. “He’s not coming to Chicago. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  “I’ll tell you what it was,” Michael said. “I challenged him.”

  That afternoon, in the visiting manager’s office of Comiskey Park, Michael challenged Steinbrenner again—only this time publicly, in the presence of the Yankees beat reporters. Unprompted, Michael abruptly shifted the topic of conversation from Jackson’s physical to his own situation, saying, “I heard from George again today, and I’m tired of getting these phone calls after games and being told it’s my fault if we lost. So when he said it again to me today, I said: ‘Fine. Do it now. Don’t wait. I don’t want to manage under these circumstances.’ ”

  At first, the writers thought Michael was just joking around with them. But as soon as he looked at them, unsmiling, and said, “I’m serious,” they scurried from his office and up to the press box to feverishly type their stories. Later that night, at the hotel bar, Michael confided to Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger, “I know I’m going to be fired for this, but I wanted to get it out there . . . what it’s like to work for this guy. Howser would have gone through the same thing, but he had me as a buffer. I don’t have any buffer.”

  Steinbrenner didn’t fire Michael right away. Rather, he maintained an ominous silence, explaining during an interview on the NBC Saturday Game of the Week that he was still trying to make up his mind. This prompted

  Michael to call him in Tampa, but not for the reason Steinbrenner had hoped. In Steinbrenner’s version of the phone call, which he later relayed to reporters, he told Michael he hadn’t meant to threaten him but also reminded him that he was the owner of the team and that “when you take your boss on publicly, you can’t just get away with it.”

  Steinbrenner said he was hoping that Michael would then apologize. “I begged him to say ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he said, “but he wouldn’t say it. I wasn’t going to put him in front of a microphone, I just wanted him to say he made a mistake.” When Michael didn’t, Steinbrenner made good on his threats. “Under these conditions, I had no choice. There was no question he would do the same thing again. This was the toughest decision I ever had to make, because I nurtured him.”

  “I’ve got no reason to apologize, because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Michael told reporters.

  Hoping to achieve the same dramatic improvement of play by his team as in 1978, when he’d fired Billy Martin, Steinbrenner once again called on Bob Lemon to bring the team home. This time, however, the results were mixed. After finishing out the “second season” 10-14 under Lemon, the Yankees won the first two games of that year’s special best-of-five Division Series against the Brewers in Milwaukee, only to lose the next two games at Yankee Stadium. After the game four loss at home, Steinbrenner stormed into the Yankee clubhouse and began blistering his players. As he ranted about all the mental mistakes and shoddy base running in the 2–1 loss, Steinbrenner was shocked to be interrupted by a voice in the back of the room. “Fuck you, George!” Rick Cerone said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know a fucking thing about baseball!”

  Momentarily stunned, Steinbrenner glared at Cerone, and then shot back: “It’s over. You’re gone next year!”

  (A couple of weeks earlier, still miffed that Cerone had beaten him in arbitration, Steinbrenner had singled out the catcher for the bad year he was having. “He’s gotten a big head,” Steinbrenner told reporters. “Suddenly, he’s ‘Mr. New York,’ ‘The Italian Stallion.’ He’s going to disco joints. I have a way of bringing guys down to size, and I’ll bring him down or he may not be here.”)

  But after the Yankees responded to Steinbrenner’s latest clubhouse dressing-down by dispatching the Brewers 7–3 in game five—ironically, with the help of a two-run homer by Cerone—the owner was ebullient. “They did it!” he crowed to reporters afterward. “They rose to the occasion. I can’t say enough about them.”

  But that was the last time in that 1981 season there would be such an aura of good feelings. Even after sweeping the Oakland A’s, now managed by Billy Martin, in the American League Championship Series, the team was frayed. At the victory party at Vince’s restaurant, down the street from the Oakland Coliseum, a scuffle erupted between Jackson and Graig Nettles. Jackson had shown up at the party with an entourage of family and friends, who inadvertently took over the table where Nettles and his wife, Ginger, had been sitting. When Ginger Nettles came back from the buffet and didn’t see her purse, her husband verbally confronted Jackson. After a heated exchange, Nettles punched Jackson, knocking him to the floor. Steinbrenner was in the hallway outside during the commotion, but when he came back in, he wasted no time in deciding who the culprit was.

  “God dammit, Reggie, you’re embarrassing me again,” he exclaimed before ordering everyone out to the buses. The Daily News’ Dick Young was at the party and phoned in a front-page story for the next day’s editions in which he quoted Steinbrenner as saying, “I’ve had it up to here with Reggie. He’s got to be the boss of everything. He has to be the big shot and run everything. Well, he’s not going to get away with it anymore. This is it.” According to Young, Steinbrenner was infuriated because it was supposed to have been a “family only” party and Reggie, in the owner’s opinion, had deliberately flaunted that by bringing friends. Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner’s reaction further embittered Jackson, who told Young, “I haven’t liked the dude for 10 years. I’m tired of this nigger-nigger shit. I don’t care if I play in the World Series or not. I don’t have a contract anyway.”

  What is it about being careful for what you wish for?

  Because of a calf injury he suffered in the Oakland series, Jackson and Lemon had already agreed that he would sit out the first two games of the 1981 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, giving him a full five days of rest and therapy. After the Yankees won the first two games of the Series in New York, he was eager to become part of October again. He was especially anxious to face Fernando Valenzuela, the Dodgers’ game three starter, who had been the sensation of baseball in 1981. Signed as a free agent out of the Mexican League, Valenzuela, with his herky-jerky delivery and mystifying screwball, had begun the season with 36 consecutive scoreless innings before going on to lead the National League in strikeouts and complete games. “We’ll see about all this Fernandomania shit,” Jackson said confidently to his teammates after game two. But when he approached Lemon before game three to confirm his availability, he found the manager’s response strangely distant.

  “Just to be on the safe side, I think I’m gonna hold you out one more game, Reg,” Lemon said.

  Jackson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He began to argue, only to be cut off tersely by Lemon: “One more day.” That’s when he realized it was not Lemon’s decision. It had been dictated from above. “The sonofabitch,” Jackson said to a couple of report
ers. “He’s so determined to take me down, now he’s even taking October from Mr. October.”

  With Jackson on the bench and Graig Nettles also sidelined with a sprained thumb, the Yankees lost game three, 5–4, as Valenzuela pitched a complete game, giving up nine hits. Restored to the lineup for game four, Jackson went 3 for 3 with a home run and two RBI, but he also lost a fly ball in the sun in the sixth inning that led to a Dodger run, and the Yankees lost again, 8–7. The Series now tied, Steinbrenner came into the clubhouse after the game threatening all sorts of repercussions if the team didn’t right itself. “For one thing,” he said, “we’re instituting a curfew. I want all of you in your rooms by 10 o’clock.” In response to this, Lemon told reporters, “Even George’s horses lose sometimes, but he doesn’t go out and shoot ’em.”

  Despite the curfew, the Yankees lost game five in Los Angeles, 2–1. That night, David Szen, the new Yankees publicity director, was just dozing off in his room at the Hyatt Wilshire Hotel when the phone rang. It was Steinbrenner, asking him to come up to his suite. When Szen got there, Steinbrenner was there with team trainer Gene Monahan. Steinbrenner told him how he had been in the elevator, on his way downstairs to meet his friend and former Yankees limited partner Sheldon Guren for dinner. When the elevator stopped at the seventh floor, two drunk Dodgers fans got on. “Steinbrenner, huh?” one of them said. “Go back to those animals in New York and take those choking ballplayers with you!”

  Photographic Insert

  AIMING HIGH: Steinbrenner was a high hurdler at Culver Military Academy and Williams College (pictured here). George won his share of races, but wasn’t the world-class hurdler his father was, and Henry Steinbrenner never let his son forget it. (Williams College)