by Bill Madden
It didn’t hurt that, after opening the season with two impressive wins in Cleveland against the defending American League champion Indians, Torre’s Yankees stayed within a game or two of the American League East lead through the first month of the season before taking over first place April 30 and never relinquishing it. Of particular significance was the emergence of Derek Jeter at shortstop. Coming into spring training, there were some doubts about Jeter’s ability to handle the shortstop duties after he’d led the International League with 29 errors in ’95. Clyde King, Steinbrenner’s longtime advisor, opined in one of the staff meetings that spring that, at 6-3, 195 pounds, Jeter lacked the necessary footwork for the position. By then, however, Torre and Zimmer, his infield/bench coach, had been impressed with Jeter’s play and uncommon confidence for a 21-year-old, and the shortstop went on to reward their faith by winning Rookie of the Year honors, hitting .314 with 10 homers, 78 RBI and 104 runs scored.
That is not to say the accomplishments of 1996 came without considerable adversity.
On May 7, Cone, who was 4-1 with a 2.02 ERA, was diagnosed with an aneurysm in his pitching arm that caused him to go on the disabled list for four months. Then, on June 21, after a stirring come-from-behind 10-inning win against the Indians, Torre got a call from his wife, Ali, informing him that his oldest brother, Rocco, who’d been watching the game on TV, had died of a heart attack. At the same time, Torre’s other older brother, Frank, was gravely ill at a Florida hospital and in need of a heart transplant.
There was more. Veteran outfielder Tim Raines, an inspirational clubhouse leader, missed 75 days with nagging hamstring injuries; Scott Kamieniecki, whom Torre was counting on to be the number four or five starter, missed almost the entire season with an arm injury; and, in midseason, designated hitter Ruben Sierra clashed openly with Torre, accusing the manager of reneging on a promise to give him more playing time. Torre, in turn, called Sierra a spoiled brat who never could grasp the concept of team play, and on July 31 the Yankees traded him to the Detroit Tigers for Cecil “Big Daddy” Fielder.
The Yankees won the AL East by four games over the Baltimore Orioles, but they ranked ninth in the AL in runs, twelfth in homers, seventh in stolen bases and fifth in ERA. They never won more than five games in a row and didn’t have any players with 30 or more homers, 200 or more hits or 20 or more stolen bases. Other than Andy Pettitte, at 21-8, no Yankee starter won more than 12 games.
Once the Yankees reached the postseason, Steinbrenner seemed to be in a perpetually foul mood, especially after the team lost the first game of the best-of-five Division Series with the Texas Rangers at home and had to go 12 innings, with Torre using a total of seven pitchers, to eke out a come-from-behind 5–4 win in game two. On the bus ride from Yankee Stadium to Newark Airport after that game, the players were alarmed when Reggie Jackson (who was with the team in his capacity as a special advisor) suddenly stood up from his front-row seat next to Torre and began shouting at Steinbrenner, sitting in the row behind him.
“I’m 50 years old. Why do you treat me the way you do?” Jackson screamed before being grabbed and subdued by Torre.
“It was no big deal,” Steinbrenner later said of the incident. “Just something between Reggie and me.”
But according to Jackson, it was a big deal, something that had been simmering between the two ever since they’d supposedly reconciled their long-ago differences after Jackson announced he wanted to go into the Hall of Fame as a Yankee in 1993 and was welcomed back with open arms by Steinbrenner. Witnesses said Reggie’s rage was precipitated when Steinbrenner questioned why he was on the bus. “The next time you want to go where you’re not invited, check with me,” he reportedly told Jackson.
The next day, Jackson sought out Steinbrenner at the Yankees hotel in Texas to apologize for speaking to him like that in public.
“Reggie, you were wrong,” Steinbrenner said. “You can’t talk to the owner of the team like that. If there’s something wrong, we have to rectify it. Right now, you probably need to go on home and we’ll talk later.”
After the Yankees won the next two games to advance to the American League Championship Series against the Orioles, Jackson and Steinbrenner talked again by phone. This time, Jackson told the owner that after what had happened, he didn’t want to come to the ALCS.
“Oh, no, no,” said Steinbrenner, “you have to be here. Come to New York and we’ll talk.”
When, the next day, Jackson arrived at Yankee Stadium and went into Steinbrenner’s suite, he was puzzled by the owner’s reaction.
“He didn’t say anything to me,” Jackson recalled. “It was like nothing had ever happened. He just treated me like a long-lost son, but I was sorry we never had that talk. Our relationship did change, though, and after that he valued my opinions and went out of his way to keep me involved with the organization.”
The Yankees lost the first game of the ALCS at home against the Orioles, only to win the next four, setting up a World Series matchup with the defending world champion Atlanta Braves, who had swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL Division Series and outscored the St. Louis Cardinals 44-18 in winning a seven-game NLCS. When the Braves thrashed the Yankees, 12–1, in the opening game at Yankee Stadium, it appeared they were going to live up to their billing as heavy favorites to retain their crown. In his 1997 memoir, Catching the Dream, Torre recounted how, in the hours before game two, an agitated Steinbrenner came into his office and began venting about how the Yankees were in danger of being swept.
“This is a must-win game,” Steinbrenner said. “I don’t want to be embarrassed.”
Torre, who’d been reading over the scouting report on Greg Maddux, the Braves’ starting pitcher that night, barely looked up from his desk. “You better prepare yourself for losing again tonight,” he said. “But then we’re going to go down there to Atlanta. I managed there. Atlanta’s my town. We’re going to win all three down there and come back here and win the Series on Saturday.”
Steinbrenner, speechless, glared at his manager before walking out of the room, shaking his head. Torre later said he couldn’t believe what he’d just said either. Nevertheless, he turned out to be a prophet: the Yankees lost game two to Maddux, 4–0, before sweeping three games in Atlanta—overcoming a 6–0 deficit in game four and following that up with a classic game five in which Pettitte outpitched John Smoltz, 1–0. That Saturday night at Yankee Stadium, they delivered to Steinbrenner his first world championship since 1978 with a 3–2 win. At the victory podium in the Yankee clubhouse after the game, Steinbrenner welled up with tears as his old friend, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, presented him with the World Series trophy.
“Here he was, finally winning another championship after all he’d been through, and I could see how much it meant to him that I was the one presenting it to him,” Selig recalled. “I had been the one constant person in his baseball life since 1973 and the one who brought him back from the suspension. After all we’d been through together, it was a very emotional moment for both of us.”
POIGNANT AND WARM as that scene might have been, it was not long after that Selig was given another rude reminder of how Steinbrenner could be the proverbial bull in the china shop when it came to the commissioner’s grand design of establishing a competitive balance between the haves and have-nots in baseball. In early March 1997, Greg Murphy, the newly minted president of Major League Baseball Enterprises, had just announced a huge new advertising campaign slated to net over $150 million in corporate sponsorships for baseball when the Yankees announced that they had independently entered into a $93 million advertising deal with the Adidas sporting goods company. The deal would allow Adidas to plaster its name on signs all over Yankee Stadium, advertise during Yankees telecasts, promote its connection to the team in local marketing, and supply footwear to the Yankees’ minor league players.
The Yankees contended that the Adidas deal did not violate the Major League Baseball Properties agreement, under which all l
icensing money was shared equally by the clubs. “We felt we could license the Yankee logo with Adidas in certain areas where MLB didn’t have the rights,” said former Yankees in-house counsel David Sussman in a 2009 interview. “It was a deal equivalent to the MSG Network television deal George had done a few years earlier.”
But this was not the way Major League Baseball, and Selig in particular, viewed it, and after a couple of weeks of studying the deal, they decided that it infringed on the league’s deal with Russell Athletic and ordered the Yankees to cease and desist selling Yankee T-shirts with Adidas logos on them.
Steinbrenner’s reaction was a familiar one: he promptly sued his fellow owners, accusing them of “collaborating in a merchandising cartel that favors the weak teams.” As part of the suit, for which he hired prominent New York attorney David Boies to be the driving force, Steinbrenner singled out Selig for mismanaging the Brewers and helping to create a sort-of welfare system in baseball. Successful teams like the Yankees, he said, whose logos and brand were far more valuable than those of other teams, nevertheless had to share equally with teams that spent far less on marketing. Only four years after being reinstated to baseball, Steinbrenner had declared war on his fellow owners, some of whom had lobbied hard on his behalf.
On May 13, Selig announced that Steinbrenner had been kicked off the ruling executive council (to which the commissioner had appointed him as a kind of “welcome back” gesture after his ban from Fay Vincent was lifted) and the Yankees were barred from participating on any working committees within the game. Implicit in the punishment was the prospect of Steinbrenner’s third suspension from baseball.
“You can understand why Bud feels he’s been stabbed in the back by George,” White Sox board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf confided to me as tensions increased on both sides. “I don’t think Bud’s ever been madder with an owner like he is now with George. The other owners feel the same way. They’re fed up.”
The cold war between the Yankees and MLB continued through the summer of ’97. Eventually, Steinbrenner’s lawsuit was dropped and MLB Properties achieved a settlement of the dispute by admitting Adidas as one of its official licensees.
But soon enough, Steinbrenner was involved in another lawsuit, one that would end up costing him $3 million and lead to a falling out between him and his best friend, Bill Fugazy. In the mid-’90s, Steinbrenner had agreed to outsource the Yankees’ advertising and marketing to Sports Advertising Network Inc. (SANI), a firm that had been created by Fugazy’s son, John, and former Yankees president Gene McHale. Under the terms of their deal, SANI was to receive a certain percentage for all the advertising and marketing business they brought to the Yankees. Since Steinbrenner and his execs had negotiated the Adidas deal on their own, they did not believe it fell under the realm of their agreement with SANI. John Fugazy and McHale thought otherwise and filed suit against the Yankees. An enraged Steinbrenner called Bill Fugazy, demanding to know how he could allow his son to do this. Fugazy protested that he had nothing to do with the suit, but Steinbrenner wasn’t buying it, and for the next few years, the elder Fugazy became persona non grata around Yankee Stadium. John Fugazy won his suit against the Yankees and was awarded $3 million. As for his father and Steinbrenner, they reconciled in the early 2000s when Steinbrenner learned that his old friend had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but their relationship was never the same.
The fact that he would be allowed to reap almost all of the $93 million from the Adidas deal was no doubt of some solace to Steinbrenner after a disappointing 1997 season. The team won 96 games and Tino Martinez put up huge numbers (44 homers and 141 RBI), but it was only good enough for second place in the AL East and a wild-card berth in the postseason, where they lost in five games to the Cleveland Indians. The Yankees were just five outs away from advancing to the ALCS when Mariano Rivera, who had taken over as the closer in ’97 after the departure of John Wetteland as a free agent, gave up the tying home run. Rivera would pitch 261⁄3 innings in the postseason over the next two years before giving up another run.
Perhaps if Steinbrenner had been successful in wooing Roger Clemens, the ’97 season might have turned out differently. The 35-year-old Clemens had become a free agent after the ’96 season, following an acrimonious parting with the Red Sox, for whom he’d won four Cy Young Awards and an MVP between 1984 and ’96. With permission from Clemens’s agents, Steinbrenner had visited the pitcher’s home in Houston in November 1996, spending a half day delivering his patented sales pitch of Yankee pride and tradition and the chance to win a world championship. He left Houston confident he was going to bring the game’s premier right-handed pitcher—and a Red Sox icon, no less—to the Bronx.
A week later, Steinbrenner called his friend Paul Beeston, the president of the Toronto Blue Jays, who had just completed his own visit to Clemens’s home, to compare notes.
“I don’t know about you, Paul, but I really had a great visit with the guy,” Steinbrenner said. “We talked Texas football and had barbecue for lunch, and before I left I signed a whole bunch of Yankee items for him.”
“No kidding, George?” Beeston said. “Well, I have to say, I did even better. Before I left, I got his signature on a contract!”
“You fucking Canuck!” Steinbrenner screamed. “How did you do that? You can’t afford him!”
Clemens later explained that it would have been very awkward for him to go from Boston right to the Yankees. Toronto turned out to be a temporary layover before he did join Steinbrenner’s Yankees, but in his two years there he won two more Cy Young Awards and in 1997 had a 21-7 season in which he led the league in wins, ERA, innings and strikeouts.
By the end of the ’97 season, Bob Watson was convinced there was no worse job in the universe than general manager of the New York Yankees. When it came to advice on trades and player evaluations, Steinbrenner invariably turned to Gene Michael, or his player development people in Tampa. The only time Watson ever seemed to hear from the Boss was when something went wrong. Michael, it seemed, was still Steinbrenner’s GM, while Watson merely had the title. Gabe Paul, Steinbrenner’s first general manager, had a favorite saying: “One man’s shit is another man’s ice cream.” Bob Watson came to know what that meant.
And so, after just two years on the job, Watson went into full retreat. According to Yankees employees, during his last few months on the job, he would arrive at his office, shut the door, order out lunch and spend the rest of the day watching soap operas on TV.
The day after the New York baseball writers’ dinner on February 2, 1998, Watson summoned his assistant, Brian Cashman, into his office.
“I just told the Boss I’m out,” he announced. “I have to do this for my health and my sanity, and I recommended that he give you the job. I think he’s gonna offer it to you. So good luck, buddy.”
The 30-year-old Cashman immediately felt a rush of excitement come over him, which was quickly tempered by apprehension. After 11 years in the Yankees organization, where he’d started as an office intern and worked his way up through the ranks as an assistant, first to Michael and then to Watson, was he ready to report directly to the owner? It didn’t matter that Cashman’s father, John, who operated a horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky, was a friend of Steinbrenner’s. Brian would be the second-youngest GM in league history, and he had seen firsthand how Steinbrenner devoured general managers with much more experience than he had.
When he went back to his office, Cashman received the call from Steinbrenner asking him to meet him at the Regency at noon. At the meeting, Steinbrenner began by telling Cashman he’d talked to both Michael and Mark Newman, the VP of player development in Tampa.
“I can go out and recycle someone,” Steinbrenner said, “but Stick and Newman think you’re ready. I want to know: do you think you can handle this?”
Cashman remembered his body trembling at the question before he said firmly, “I think I can, sir, but I want to prove to you I’m the right man for the job. Th
at’s why I’d like only a one-year contract.”
“One year?” Steinbrenner said.
“Yes, sir. I want to show you I’m the right man, but I feel that right now, any more than one year wouldn’t be right for either of us.”
“Okay,” said Steinbrenner, already satisfied that, if nothing else, Cashman appeared to have the right outlook. “One year it will be.”
Cashman’s first order of business was to complete a trade with the Minnesota Twins to bring the career .304-hitting second baseman Chuck Knoblauch to the Yankees. The Twins wanted three of the Yankees’ top minor league prospects, left-hander Eric Milton (their 1996 number-one draft pick), shortstop Cristian Guzman and outfielder Brian Buchanan.
It was a hefty price, but the trade paid immediate dividends for the Yankees. Knoblauch—the team’s first bona fide leadoff hitter since Rickey Henderson—hit 40 points below his career average in Minnesota, but he stole 31 bases and scored 117 runs. More important, he allowed everyone else to find their proper niche below him in the order. Most notable in this regard was Jeter, who hit .324 and scored 127 runs from the number-two hole and finished third in the American League Most Valuable Player voting.
The ’98 Yankees would set an American League record with 114 victories, but their stadium wasn’t nearly as robust. On April 14, a 500-pound concrete-and-steel beam suspended beneath the upper deck in left field came loose and crashed into the empty seats, touching off renewed speculation (fostered by Steinbrenner) that Yankee Stadium was falling apart. Now that Steinbrenner had his proof, he was content to let Mayor Rudolph Giuliani pick up the baton for him.
“I think George is right that the Yankees are entitled to a new stadium,” Giuliani said. “This could have been a terrible tragedy. We were fortunate it happened before the gates had been opened to let the fans in.”
