Steinbrenner

by Bill Madden

  “What are you laughing about?” he roared. “You think this is funny? How would you like it if 40,000 people were yelling ‘Torborg sucks! Torborg sucks!’?”

  After dismissing Michael and the coaches, Steinbrenner called stadium security chief Pat Kelly into his office and ordered him to go down to the visiting clubhouse and inspect Jackson’s bats. Even though it was against baseball laws for home team officials to be tampering with property in the visiting team’s clubhouse, Kelly dutifully obliged. With a couple of other team officials in tow, he went into the empty clubhouse and began rummaging through the bats in Jackson’s locker until he found a particularly light one. Kelly sawed off the top of the bat and discovered it to be filled with cork. When Kelly reported his find to Steinbrenner, the owner became even more infuriated.

  “We’re gonna report this and get this game back!” Steinbrenner declared.

  “You can’t do that, George,” Kelly protested.

  “Why not?”

  Kelly and the others then explained that, for one thing, what they had done was contrary to baseball protocol regarding the sanctity of the visitors’ clubhouse. For another, they couldn’t be sure that Reggie had ever used the bat in a game and to attempt to discredit Reggie for this one home run might cast doubt on all the home runs he’d hit for them. Steinbrenner reluctantly agreed, and Kelly locked the bat up for safekeeping before having it destroyed. Jackson apparently never complained that the bat was missing from his locker. In the months afterward, Steinbrenner was periodically quoted cryptically in the newspapers that he had firsthand knowledge of players using corked bats.

  After Reggie’s revenge homer, the 1982 season got worse. The Yankees continued to founder, and Steinbrenner continued to panic and make bad trades.

  But if there was one player who epitomized the disaster of the 1982 season, it was Doyle Alexander, who produced exactly one win in exchange for Steinbrenner’s $2.2 million. In his third start of the season, against the Mariners in Seattle, Alexander was the victim of a five-run third inning in which four of the runs were unearned, prompting Michael to pull him from the game. Enraged at being yanked so early, Alexander proceeded to punch the dugout wall with his pitching hand, breaking a knuckle. The self-inflicted injury sidelined him for six weeks and cost him $12,500 in a fine levied by the team. He returned in midsummer and, on August 10, gave up three homers and six runs in the first three innings of a 10–1 drubbing by the Tigers in Detroit.

  In the middle of that game, Bill Bergesch, the longtime front office executive assistant who had become Steinbrenner’s de facto general manager after the resignation of Cedric Tallis, came into the Tiger Stadium press box and sheepishly began reading a statement that the owner had dictated from Tampa: “After what happened tonight, I’m having Doyle Alexander flown back to New York to undergo a physical. I’m afraid some of our players might get hurt playing behind him. He’s given up eight homers in 38 innings and, in his last two starts, 11 runs in five innings. Obviously, something is wrong and we intend to find out.”

  Though they weren’t very happy with Alexander, the Yankee players were outraged at Steinbrenner’s belittling statement. “Doyle’s getting a physical,” Goose Gossage told reporters after the game, “but George needs a mental.”

  As if the season couldn’t get any more embarrassing for Steinbrenner, after the game on the night of July 28, a Brookfield, Connecticut, family was kidnapped at knifepoint in one of the Yankee Stadium parking lots, which were owned and operated by the Kinney Company, and dumped in the middle of Harlem. Steinbrenner did not learn of the incident until two days later, when it was splashed across the front pages of the New York tabloids, whereupon he ordered his in-house counsel, Ed Broderick, to summon all the front office execs—in particular security chief Pat Kelly—to his office. Steinbrenner instructed them to take a seat around his big round desk—with the exception of Kelly, whom he ordered to stand facing the wall.

  “All my years here, I’ve never had anything as terrible as this!” Steinbrenner bellowed at Kelly’s back. “This can’t be allowed to happen! What are our rights here with Kinney?”

  As the fifty-something Kelly, who’d previously been a New York cop assigned to the maritime division, turned to offer his thoughts, Steinbrenner snapped, “Broderick, will you tell him to turn around? I don’t want to see the tugboat captain.”

  The session lasted about 15 minutes, with Kelly facing the wall the whole time, before Steinbrenner dismissed them with orders to call the family and offer the Yankees’ regrets for what had happened.

  As stadium manager and chief of security, Kelly was a frequent recipient of Steinbrenner’s abuse and was often made to perform humiliating tasks. Once, when Steinbrenner got a piece of gum stuck on the bottom of his shoe while walking from the team parking lot to the Stadium, he forced Kelly and team president Gene McHale to spend three days patrolling the Stadium, scraping up gum from the sidewalks and corridors. Jim Naples, the VP of guest services, whom Steinbrenner put in charge of the office in their absence, remembered Kelly’s reaction to this punishment. “I got a phone call from Kelly, who was obviously feeling pretty good, and he said, ‘This is fantastic, Jimmy! You’re up there taking all of George’s shit and we’re over here at a saloon. Have a nice day!’ ”

  In early August, the Yankees played a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox at Yankee Stadium. After losing the opener, 1–0, they were clobbered, 14–2, in the second game, in which they committed numerous errors and mental mistakes. During the middle of the game, Steinbrenner ordered public address announcer Bob Sheppard to read a statement saying that all fans in attendance would be awarded free tickets to future Yankee games.

  “As soon as I heard that,” said Gene Michael, “I knew I was fired.”

  Sure enough, nearly two hours after the second game—at 1:05 A.M.—with the Yankees now in fifth place with a 50-50 record, reporters received a one-paragraph press release announcing that Michael was being replaced. The new manager would be the organization’s special pitching instructor, 57-year-old Clyde King, Steinbrenner’s trusted aide and troubleshooter, whom many in the Yankees organization, particularly Billy Martin, had over the years come to consider a troublemaker.

  Unlike the year before, when Michael challenged Steinbrenner to fire him, this time he felt betrayed by the owner for not being allowed to finish the season, never mind the next three, as Steinbrenner had promised. For two days, Michael holed up at his house in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, refusing all calls. When Steinbrenner was finally able to get through to him, it was a very different conversation from the first firing. This time, Steinbrenner was the one doing the apologizing.

  “This one hurt, George,” Michael said. “I didn’t deserve this, and you know it. I think I’m a good manager, but you wouldn’t let me prove it.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Stick,” Steinbrenner said. “I’m not blaming you. I’m sorry I had to do this, but the team is going nowhere and I just felt I had to do something.”

  “Well, I still want to manage, George.”

  “I understand you’re upset,” said Steinbrenner, “but why would you still want to manage and be constantly second-guessed by me when you can come back up to the front office and become one of the second-guessers?”

  THE YANKEES FINISHED the 1982 season in fifth place in the American League East, with a 29-33 record under King. In all, the team went through three managers, five pitching coaches, three hitting instructors and 47 players as the mad shipbuilder tried everything to right his sinking vessel. Despite the dismal finish, King expected Steinbrenner to bring him back for 1983, and, over lunch in Boston with me and Moss Klein, from the Newark Star-Ledger, at the end of September, the GM outlined his plans for trades, free-agent signings and coaching changes. Unbeknownst to him, events in Oakland were about to scuttle his plans. When we got back to our hotel rooms, there were messages from the Oakland A’s beat writers informing us that Billy Martin had just trashed his office in a drunke
n rage directed at A’s general manager Sandy Alderson. Just as he’d done in his previous tours with the Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and Yankees, Martin had clashed with Oakland’s ownership just a year after guiding the A’s to an unexpected American League West title.

  Steinbrenner had missed the passion Martin brought to the team and his ability to connect with the fans; Billy, who was in arrears with his taxes and owed money to two ex-wives, was once again in dire need of the kind of financial relief Steinbrenner and managing in New York could provide him. Martin’s agent, Eddie Sapir, negotiated a unique five-year, $2.5 million contract with Steinbrenner that gave Billy a say in all personnel decisions and, in the likely event that he was fired, a limited list of jobs—broadcaster, scout, assistant to the owner—he could work for Steinbrenner in lieu of managing. “There will be times Billy and I disagree,” said Steinbrenner, standing next to Martin at the press conference on January 11, 1983, to announce his third hiring as manager of the Yankees, “but this time it will be different, because we will communicate better with each other. Besides, I feel Billy will stir up enough turmoil and excitement without me.”

  The two men then played out a skit, which, given their headstrong personas, was a more accurate portent of the future than either of them probably wanted to admit.

  “I’ll be handling all the trades,” Martin said.

  “What do you mean?” Steinbrenner interrupted. “That’s not right. I’m handling the trades!”

  “That’s not the way we said, George.”

  “Damn right it is!” Steinbrenner shot back, “and if you don’t like it, you’re fired!”

  “You haven’t even hired me yet!” Martin said, laughing at the punch line.

  The fact that Steinbrenner had a cartoonist’s depiction of Martin arguing jaw-to-jaw with an umpire as the cover for the 1983 Yankees press guide was indicative enough of the kind of confrontational season he expected—and would get.

  Meanwhile, at the winter meetings in Honolulu that December, Steinbrenner went about restocking the Yankees roster for ’83 with more expensive free agents. He made by far the biggest deal for any player on the market that winter when he signed outfielder Steve Kemp, who had been with the Chicago White Sox, to a five-year, $5.5 million contract. It would prove to be an ill-advised signing, as the left-handed-hitting Kemp’s power was predominantly to right center, the deepest part of Yankee Stadium. Also costly for Steinbrenner was the spat Kemp’s signing touched off with White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, who were upset at having one of their best players taken from them for a lot more money than they thought he was worth.

  “I think we should consider putting another franchise in New York, like in the New Jersey Meadowlands,” Reinsdorf told reporters at the winter meetings in Hawaii, where the Kemp signing took place. “[Steinbrenner] is totally irresponsible. He’s got to start unloading now, but nobody would take those salaries from him unless they’re imbeciles.” Reinsdorf, who was later fined $2,500 by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for his remarks, managed to extract a measure of revenge against Steinbrenner a few days later by outbidding the Yankees owner for the services of the most coveted pitcher on the free agent market, left-hander Floyd Bannister. After watching Reinsdorf and Einhorn chortling on TV about bagging Bannister for five years, at $4.5 million, Steinbrenner could not resist firing back.

  “I watched those two pumpkins on TV, and they can say all they want, but the fact is that’s going to prove to be the most lucrative contract ever given a pitcher,” he said, later referring to Reinsdorf and Einhorn as “the Katzenjammer twins.” This prompted Kuhn (whose term as commissioner was not being renewed by the owners) to levy an even bigger fine—$5,000—which evoked a predictable response from Steinbrenner: “How the commissioner in his infinite wisdom decided that I should be fined twice as much as the other guys, I don’t know. I’m sorry one of his last official acts was fining us. I’d have liked to see him go out a different way.”

  The feud between Steinbrenner and Reinsdorf would compel both of them to deliberately screw each other in a couple of future Yankees–White Sox trades before they finally called a truce and actually became allies. Later that season, at the ’83 All-Star Game gala, hosted by the White Sox in Chicago, Reinsdorf got onstage with a microphone and asked Einhorn: “How do you know when George Steinbrenner is lying? Whenever he moves his lips.”

  “I was looped,” Reinsdorf told me in 2008, “and as I said it I looked out into the audience and saw Bowie, and asked: ‘How much is that one gonna cost me?’ He held up five fingers.”

  Reinsdorf taking a verbal shot at Steinbrenner while under the influence was nothing compared to the drunken rage the Yankees owner brought out in Bill “Killer” Kane at the Yankees’ spring training hotel in March ’83. Kane had somehow managed to endure as the traveling secretary despite constant nitpicking from Steinbrenner over mostly trivial issues regarding the team trips. On this particular morning, however, Steinbrenner was upset about a spate of stomach flu among the players following a two-day trip to New Orleans and had concluded it was a result of the food they’d eaten on the United Airlines charter. He’d been trying for months to get out of his contract with United and saw this as his opportunity. When Kane walked into the executive trailer at the Fort Lauderdale ballpark, Steinbrenner was waiting for him.

  “I’ve had enough with United!” he screamed at Kane in front of all the secretaries. “You get rid of them! You hear me?”

  “George,” said Kane, “I’ve told you we can’t get out of this contract. I’ve booked our trips for the whole first half of the season already!”

  “I don’t care. Un-book them. Or else I’ll get rid of you, too.”

  “You know what, George? You do that! I’m sick of your shit, yelling at me in front of all these people.”

  With that, Kane stormed out the door, got in his car and went to the nearby racetrack, Pompano Downs, where he proceeded to spend the rest of the day playing the horses and getting a load on. That night, thoroughly inebriated, he came back to the team hotel, took the elevator directly up to the top floor, staggered down the corridor to Steinbrenner’s suite and began pounding on the door.

  “Come out of there, you fat, fucking Fauntleroy!” he shouted. “I’m gonna kick the shit out of you right here!”

  A startled Steinbrenner came to the door in his pajamas and attempted to calm Kane down.

  “What’s the matter with you, Killer? Don’t you know you’re disturbing my wife?”

  “Why should I give a shit about your wife, when you don’t give a shit about my wife?” Kane slurred.

  “All right,” Steinbrenner said. “You’re disturbing everybody on this floor. Go back downstairs to the lobby and I’ll get dressed and meet you down there in a few minutes.”

  When Steinbrenner got down to the lobby, he found Kane sitting in a chair, sound asleep. Steinbrenner shook Kane, who woke up and took a swing at the owner, missed, and lurched onto the floor. The hotel clerk rushed from behind the desk.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the clerk said.

  “I dunno,” Kane moaned, looking at Steinbrenner. “I think I hurt my back.”

  “Do you want to file a report?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but first I gotta go to the hospital.”

  “Ah, geez, Killer,” Steinbrenner said. “C’mon. We’ve had fights before. You’re okay. Let’s forget about this.”

  In a 2008 interview, Kane laughingly recounted how, at the hospital, he was able to get a doctor he knew to give him an X-ray of another patient’s bad back—which he brought to work the next day. “George never bothered me again after that,” Kane said. “It got me another seven years as road secretary. But George knew he was wrong. He knew he was a spoiled brat, and he knew I had a right to be pissed about being screamed at in front of all the secretaries like that.”

  STEINBRENNER RAN AFOUL of Bowie Kuhn several more times—and for substantially larger penalties—before the commissioner offici
ally left office at the end of 1984. During an ’83 spring training game in Fort Lauderdale between the Yankees and the Montreal Expos, Steinbrenner was standing along the fence next to the Yankees dugout when National League umpire Lee Weyer called a Yankee out at first base. “National League homer!” Steinbrenner screamed, within earshot of New York Post reporter Mike McAlary, who dutifully scribbled down the remark in his notepad. “That’s the way [National League president] Chub Feeney tells them to do it. If it’s close, give it to the National League!”

  Upon reading McAlary’s account the next day, Kuhn reacted swiftly, fining the Yankees owner $50,000. Steinbrenner’s war on umpires, which he’d inflamed with that silly caricature of Billy Martin arguing with one on the cover of the press guide, was further ramped up on May 27, when Dave Winfield was brushed back by a pitch, setting off a fight between the Yankees and the visiting Oakland A’s. As Winfield charged Oakland pitcher Mike Norris, he was intercepted by catcher Mike Heath, whom he put in a choke hold. Both benches cleared and a wild melee broke out; when order was restored, only Winfield was ejected by home-plate umpire Derryl Cousins.

  Watching the game on TV from Tampa, an enraged Steinbrenner phoned Yankees PR director Kenny Nigro in the press box and told him to get a pen and paper. For the next five minutes Nigro feverishly scrawled up and down and into the margins of a piece of yellow legal paper as Steinbrenner dictated a blistering attack on Cousins and his partner, John Shulock, both of whom, he noted, had been awarded their jobs after serving as replacements during the recent umpire strike. “I was scribbling furiously until my wrist started aching,” Nigro recalled, “but he just kept dictating. Finally, when he was done, he asked me to read it back to him. I started stammering, which set him off even more.”

  After somehow organizing Steinbrenner’s rant into a cohesive statement, Nigro distributed it in the press box, where, it so happened, one of the occupants that night was Bob Fishel, the former Yankees PR director who was now assistant to American League president Lee MacPhail. Upon reading Steinbrenner’s release, Fishel immediately called his boss, who in turn dictated his own release, which said in part, “Mr. Steinbrenner’s intemperate blast at the integrity of the American League umpires is completely unacceptable and will result in disciplinary action.” When told by Nigro of MacPhail’s threatening response, Steinbrenner showed no contrition. Instead, he decided he would have the last blast and dictated yet another release, this one slamming the American League president: “We are all free to express our opinion,” Steinbrenner said, “unless Lee MacPhail has authored a new Constitution or Bill of Rights of the United States.”