Steinbrenner

by Bill Madden

  By this time, Green wanted to get fired and, to the delight of the reporters, kept up a daily barrage of insults aimed at Steinbrenner. The end came in Detroit on August 18, although Steinbrenner had made up his mind two days earlier, following a third-straight loss to the Brewers in Milwaukee. That night, Lou Piniella was asleep at his home in Allendale, New Jersey, when the phone rang. On the other end was Steinbrenner telling him to get on a plane for Columbus, Ohio, the next morning. He was to meet Gene Michael, who was scouting there, and Bucky Dent, the manager of the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team.

  “You’ll bring Stick and Bucky with you to Detroit, where I’ll meet you,” Steinbrenner said. “You’re taking over the team from Dallas.”

  After hanging up, Piniella scratched his head and turned to his wife, Anita.

  “I’m not sure I heard what I just heard,” he said. “I think George just told me he wants me to manage the team again.”

  “You can’t,” Anita protested.

  “You’re right,” Piniella said, “I can’t.”

  He immediately called Steinbrenner back.

  “I can’t do this, George,” he said. “Two times was enough. I won’t be recycled again. You’re just gonna have to find someone else, or else let Dallas finish out the season. I’m done managing for you. It can’t work. I think you know that.”

  Surprisingly, Steinbrenner didn’t push the issue with Piniella. Instead, he decided to promote the 37-year-old Dent, who was in his fifth season as a manager in the Yankees’ minor league system. Dent remembered being surprised and apprehensive when Steinbrenner called to inform him he was to fly to Detroit the next day to take over as manager from Green, and that Michael would be accompanying him to serve as his bench coach.

  “I really didn’t want to take the job,” Dent said in a 2008 interview. “I knew the club was in pretty bad shape, but what was I gonna do? I said to him, ‘I appreciate the opportunity, Mr. Steinbrenner, but I just hope you’ll be patient with me.’ ”

  Now all Steinbrenner had to do was get rid of Green. For that, he would go at him where he knew he was most vulnerable: his coaching staff.

  The night of August 17, Steinbrenner flew from Tampa to Detroit, arriving too late to watch the Yankees’ 2–1 win over the Tigers. The next morning he summoned Green to his suite in the Pontchartrain Hotel, where the team was staying.

  “I’ve been thinking about this, Dallas,” he said, “and I’ve decided I want to make some coaching changes.”

  “Just a minute, George,” Green said. “I said at the beginning of this thing you were very gracious to let me have my own coaches. If you’re not satisfied with my coaches now, you might just as well fire me.”

  “Well, I’m gonna make the changes anyway,” Steinbrenner said, ignoring Green’s challenge.

  “I can’t stand by and let that happen, George,” Green countered. “Fire any of my coaches, you have to fire me. That’s the way to do it. You’ve done this before. It just never works. It’s disruptive, that’s all.”

  “Okay,” said Steinbrenner, “but I want you to know, this is very hard on me. I even talked to my wife about it.”

  Unlike with all their previous verbal clashes in the papers that had led up to this moment, there was no acrimony in the room, just resignation on both sides. In truth, Green, who, like Syd Thrift, had begun taking high-blood-pressure pills, was ready to hit the road. This had not been at all what he bargained for, and he was tired of fighting the fight. Before he went, however, he wanted one favor from Steinbrenner, and that was for the Yankees to retain Frank “Hondo” Howard, the 6-foot-8, 300-pound batting coach who had been an All-America basketball player at Ohio State in the ’50s, when Steinbrenner was taking graduate courses there.

  “That’s no problem,” said Steinbrenner. “You know I love Hondo.”

  The two shook hands and Green walked out of the room, his parting words to Harvey Greene back in May having proved prophetic.

  After Green departed, Steinbrenner called Frank Howard up to his suite to tell him that Green was leaving, but that Steinbrenner would like him to stay in the organization. Green had just told the owner that Howard was “going through a tough time,” so he was not prepared for the big man’s response.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner,” said Howard, “I came to the dance with the big boy, and I’m goin’ home with him. No, thanks.”

  “I respected the hell out of Hondo for doing that,” Green told me in 2007. “I don’t think there’s ever been a guy in baseball more loyal or with more integrity than Hondo. George could charm the hell out of you in a room, but in a baseball stadium he was a pain in the ass and an ogre. But I give him credit. He made the Yankees what they are, just not when I was there.”

  The news of Green’s firing, Steinbrenner’s 17th managerial change in 17 years of owning the team, did not please the media or Yankees fans. If Steinbrenner thought that replacing him with the popular Dent, home-run hero of the 1978 playoff game against the Red Sox, would excite supporters, he was greatly mistaken. When the team returned home on August 21, a new chant, “George must go! George must go!” could be heard in Yankee Stadium on a regular basis.

  When Dent took over, the Yankees were 56-65 and in sixth place. The team got off to a 2-11 start under the new manager, then rallied with a 15-10 September to finish in fifth place, 14½ games behind. Their overall 74-87 record was the Yankees’ worst since 1967, when they were owned by CBS. Winfield had missed the entire season, Henderson was gone, and the team had used 16 different starting pitchers over the season, two of them (Andy Hawkins and Dave LaPoint, with a combined record of 21-24) expensive free-agent acquisitions who didn’t come close to living up to the money Steinbrenner had given them. There was little hope of the team improving anytime soon.

  At the end of the ’89 season, Bob Quinn, who had reassumed the duties of general manager after Syd Thrift resigned, quit in order to take a similar position with the Cincinnati Reds. Quinn had the distinction of making one of the worst trades in team history, at Steinbrenner’s insistence, of course, in which the Yankees sent 23-year-old minor league right fielder Jay Buhner, the best power-hitting prospect in the organization, to the Seattle Mariners for Ken Phelps, a 34-year-old left-handed-hitting first baseman. The deal had been pushed by Lou Piniella, then the manager, and Billy Martin, who was serving as Steinbrenner’s front office assistant. Quinn was adamantly opposed to giving up on Buhner, but Martin contended that the kid had holes in his swing and would strike out too much in the majors. And Piniella insisted the Yankees needed a left-handed power bat. After putting off making the deal for a couple of days, Quinn got a phone call from Steinbrenner just before the July 31, 1988, trade deadline. “I don’t want to hear any more about it, Bob. You’re a fucking plodding tortoise! I’ve got to go with what my two guys say. Make the goddamn deal.”

  Buhner went on to become a cult hero in Seattle, hitting 310 homers over the next 15 seasons for the Mariners, while Phelps, whose power was more to left center, the deepest part of Yankee Stadium, hit only eight home runs in 131 games for the Yankees in 1988–’89. The trade later became immortalized in a scene in Seinfeld in which the character playing Steinbrenner knocks on the door of the home of his employee, George Costanza, and is greeted by Costanza’s father, played by Jerry Stiller, who says, “How could you trade Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps?”

  Steinbrenner replaced Quinn on October 13 with Harding “Pete” Peterson, who had previously been general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Like Bucky Dent, Peterson too had reservations about the job. After moving the Yankees’ minor league department from New York to Tampa after the 1988 season, Steinbrenner had set up a sort of “Vichy” front office in his adopted hometown in which the farm director, George Bradley, was given just as much power as the GM in New York.

  “I was offered the job with the understanding there would be two GMs,” Peterson said in a 2007 interview. “I knew Bradley was one of Steinbrenner’s guys, on the job 24 hours a day and righ
t there in Tampa. I thought to myself, ‘This is never going to work out.’ ”

  “It was Steinbrenner’s familiar ‘divide-and-conquer’ mentality of running the Yankees,” said Peter Jamieson, an assistant general manager to Peterson in 1989, “and it made things impossible for the baseball people in New York. Basically, Bradley, being right there in Tampa, had Steinbrenner’s ear and they were calling all the shots for us.”

  That November, Jamieson found himself in Steinbrenner’s crosshairs when the Boss signed a 35-year-old free agent infielder named Dámaso García as a favor to his friend, the agent Tom Reich. García had once been an All-Star but was now washed up and, accordingly, Jamieson, who was in charge of the player payroll budget, affixed a salary of $125,000 after his name. Steinbrenner saw this as an affront to Reich.

  “How come we’re paying this guy so little?” Steinbrenner said at a meeting at his Bay Harbor Hotel in Tampa. “That isn’t what we signed him for.”

  “Well, George,” said Jamieson, “the rules say if we release a player prior to 30 days before the season, we’re only obligated to pay him one-fourth of his salary. I figured that would give us about three weeks of spring training to determine he was through.”

  “Did you just call me George?” Steinbrenner said.

  “Uh, yes, sir,” Jameson said. ”My mistake.”

  “Who died and made you general manager here?” Steinbrenner shot back. “You can call me George after you’ve made your first million. Now get the fuck out of here and redo that entire budget!”

  For the record, García was released after three weeks of spring training.

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1989, Steinbrenner was at home in Tampa celebrating the holiday with his family when he caught a news bulletin on TV. Billy Martin had been killed when his pickup truck crashed in upstate New York. Steinbrenner’s first reaction was disbelief. There had to be a mistake. Why, just six days earlier, they’d been together in Tampa entertaining 2,000 underprivileged kids at the annual Christmas pageant Steinbrenner sponsored and produced. They had even discussed the 61-year-old Billy coming back to manage the Yankees for a sixth time, replacing Bucky Dent at the first sign of a slump in ’89.

  Steinbrenner made a series of phone calls that allowed him to piece together most of the details. Billy was indeed gone. He’d been drinking all day with a pal, Bill Reedy, and as the two men drove back to Martin’s house in Fenton, New York, a suburb of Binghamton, the pickup truck skidded about 120 feet on the icy road before falling into a four-foot ditch and hitting a culvert. Martin’s neck was broken in the crash, while Reedy, who initially claimed to have been the driver, suffered a couple of broken bones but was otherwise okay. Neither had been wearing a seat belt.

  Steinbrenner then phoned Martin’s house, where Jill Martin, Billy’s wife, had just returned from identifying his body in the hospital and was pouring herself a glass of scotch.

  “Don’t you worry, Jill,” Steinbrenner said. “I’m taking care of everything.”

  Four days later, a funeral service comparable to any of the grandiose productions Steinbrenner put on at Yankee Stadium was held for Martin at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, which Bill Fugazy was able to secure through his connections with the Catholic Church, even though Billy was thrice divorced. Among the 6,500 mourners was former president Richard Nixon, who sat next to Steinbrenner in the front pew, along with Martin’s three best friends on the Yankees, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Phil Rizzuto. With thousands of fans lining Fifth Avenue outside Saint Patrick’s, the funeral cortege took Martin’s body on the 45-minute journey to Gate of Heaven Cemetery, in Hawthorne, New York, where he was laid to rest in a casket bearing the Yankees logo, not far from the graves of Babe Ruth and Jimmy Cagney. It could be said this was Steinbrenner’s ultimate act of contrition to Billy for the five firings and all the times he dangled the managing job in front of him, like a narcotic to an addict: a funeral fit for a Yankee icon.

  THE DECLINING FORTUNES of American Ship and the Yankees, combined with the death of Billy Martin, had made 1989 a terrible year for Steinbrenner. The one bright spot came on September 6, when the arbitrator in Steinbrenner’s dispute with Dave Winfield agreed with most of the charges the owner had made about wasteful spending and questionable allocation of monies by Frohman and the Winfield Foundation. At a joint press conference at Yankee Stadium, a settlement of the dispute was announced, with Winfield agreeing to pay $30,000 in reimbursement for “certain monies inappropriately expended by the foundation” and another $229,000 in delinquent payments to the foundation. For his part, Steinbrenner agreed to pay the foundation $600,000 that been placed in escrow.

  “Certain allegations made by Steinbrenner and the Yankees were accurate,” stated the eight-page agreement. “Winfield admits he was delinquent in making his required contributions and as president of the foundation accepts full responsibility for these mistakes.”

  “These things are never pleasant,” a gracious and conciliatory Steinbrenner said to the phalanx of reporters. “It’s difficult for a man to admit he’s made mistakes, but David is doing that, and that makes him a bigger man in my eyes. I will be most happy to have him back with the Yankees next season. I am calling him Mr. May, June, July, August, September and October, because that’s how much we’ve missed his bat. I say that most sincerely.”

  But that was not the end of it. Still lurking behind the scenes was Howie Spira, the architect of Winfield’s fall from grace. Spira watched highlights of the press conference on TV in his small apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and read with interest the newspaper accounts of the settlement the next day. He’d been calling Steinbrenner incessantly throughout the summer, always taping their conversations, but he’d been unsuccessful in convincing the Yankees owner that he should be compensated for helping him bring down Winfield. In one of the conversations, Steinbrenner told Spira that his information “didn’t produce for me anything we didn’t already have,” but instead had “helped substantiate what we found.”

  But Spira continued to plead for payment, citing a large gambling debt, and on January 7, 1990, against the advice of his team president and in-house attorney, Bill Dowling, and AmShip chief of security Phil McNiff, Steinbrenner agreed to pay him $40,000. “I can’t give you a job, Howard, for obvious reasons,” Steinbrenner said in a phone call with Spira. “So this is it. You’ve been harassing my family and bothering me, McNiff and Dowling to no end. I’m sorry about all your problems. Hopefully this will help you get a start on putting your life back together and get out of my life. You need to get away from New York, get away from me now and leave me alone.”

  In exchange for the $40,000, which was paid the next day in the form of two separate checks for $30,500 and $9,500 made out from Dowling’s law firm, Gold & Wachtel, Spira had to sign an agreement of secrecy in which he agreed “not to seek or create any publicity regarding the nature of this matter.” (In his testimony to baseball special prosecutor John Dowd, Dowling later explained that the payment had been made with two checks because Spira had no bank account and needed some money right away. “The largest amount the bank would cash a check for was $9,500,” Dowling said.) Yankees VP Leonard Kleinman interceded with officials at Chase Manhattan Bank, who opened an account for Spira even though he had none of the required credentials—a major credit card or even an accredited photo ID such as a driver’s license or a passport.

  Steinbrenner, of course, should have known Spira was never going to keep his end of the deal; was never going to be satisfied with just the $40,000; and was never going to stay quiet about it. No sooner had he received the checks than Spira was back on the phone to Phil McNiff.

  “He gave me the 40; I want another 110,” Spira said.

  “Howard, that’s extortion,” McNiff replied.

  “He made a deal with me,” Spira said.

  “You made a deal with him, Howard. You made the bargain.”

  “Well, why won’t he give me a job in Tampa like he pro
mised? Just because it might look bad?”

  “Basically, yes,” said McNiff.

  Spira told McNiff that if Steinbrenner didn’t come up with more money he was going to go public about the deal.

  “He’s not going to be happy about this, Howard,” McNiff said. “He thought everything had been worked out, that he helped you. If someone gave me $40,000 to get started on a new life, I’d be very appreciative of it.”

  A few days later, Spira called Steinbrenner, pleading again for one more check.

  “No, I’m not going to do that, Howard,” Steinbrenner said. “That would be the worst thing I could do. All of these people know. You’ve called them all and told them, ‘He’s not doing this, he’s not doing that.’ Then suddenly if I turn around and do it again, shame on me. Well, this time it’s shame on you, Howard, because you told McNiff, ‘If he doesn’t do this or that, I’m going to the papers with these tapes. I’ll ruin him.’ That’s the absolute worst thing you could’ve done.”

  “I promise I won’t come back again,” Spira said. “Please write me one more check.”

  “I can’t, because you’ve done it to me once, and if I did it, I’d be giving in to those threats that you’ve made. I’m telling you, Howard, no more. And don’t bother my people anymore!”

  “I’m forced to slit my throat, but before I do, I’m going to make everything I’ve been through made public to the whole world. There’s nothing wrong with that, right?”

  “Listen,” snapped Steinbrenner, “let me tell you something, Howard. That’s extortion in its purest form!”

  Six days later, four FBI agents raided Spira’s home in Riverdale with a search warrant for all his tapes, diaries, telephone records and correspondence with Steinbrenner. Having won his war with Winfield, Steinbrenner had now declared war on Spira.

  But unbeknownst to Steinbrenner, Spira had been relating the details of his dealings with the Yankees owner to a dogged investigative reporter from the Daily News named Richard Pienciak. All during the 1989 season and in the months after, Pienciak had spent considerable time with Spira and his parents at their apartment in Riverdale, ultimately winning Spira’s confidence and gaining access to the phone tapes. “When Howie first started calling me, I was like all the other reporters in that I thought he was a nut job with an agenda,” Pienciak said. “But the more I talked to him, the more I felt there was something there to his story once you cut through all his exaggerating. At the same time, it had to be somehow corroborated. Everything was in the tapes.”