Steinbrenner

by Bill Madden

  The beam collapse forced the city to close the Stadium for a week while repairs were made and engineers surveyed every nook of the 75-year-old edifice. When the Yankees returned and the Stadium reopened, fans with tickets in Section 22, where the beam had fallen, were taken aback to find Steinbrenner sitting in Row A, munching popcorn.

  “Do I look worried?” he quipped.

  Steinbrenner couldn’t have been happier. The beam accident had only increased his leverage with the city in his attempt to build a new ballpark, and he celebrated this good fortune by treating all the fans in Section 22 to free hot dogs and ice cream.

  By then the Yankees, who’d begun the season 1-4 on the West Coast, were in the process of winning 16 of 18 games to take permanent hold of first place. They wound up winning the Eastern Division by 22 games and continued their domination in the postseason, sweeping the Texas Rangers, 3-0, in the Division Series and beating the defending AL champion Cleveland Indians in six games in the ALCS. They completed a record 125-win season with a four-game sweep of the San Diego Padres in the World Series. At the trophy presentation, Steinbrenner was even more emotional than he’d been with Selig in ’96.

  “This team—what can you say about this team?” he blubbered after being drenched with champagne by Jeter. “All I’m gonna say is, they’re as great as any team that’s ever been.” He then reached into a huge ice tub, pulled out a bottle of champagne, and began shaking it while pointing it at Jeter. “What the hell?” he gasped. “There’s nothing in this one!”

  A few weeks after the Series, Steinbrenner met with Jeter at his Legends Field office in Tampa and presented him with a book, Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare, with the inscription “To Derek. Read and study. He was a great leader, just as you are and will be a great leader. Hopefully of the men in pinstripes.” It was a prelude to Steinbrenner making Jeter the 11th Yankees captain five years later.

  So dominant and superior were the ’98 Yankees that, as Torre noted in his 2009 memoir, The Yankee Years, even the irrepressibly negative Steinbrenner found little cause for complaint during the course of the season.

  Cashman had put together a nearly perfect roster in his rookie year as GM. Besides Knoblauch, he had acquired third baseman Scott Brosius (.300 with 19 homers and 98 RBI, and the MVP of the World Series with a .471 average, two homers and six RBI) from the Oakland A’s on Michael’s recommendation. Then there was Cuban refugee Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez, signed at the end of spring training, who was 12-4 with a 3.13 ERA as the Yankees’ number-four starter, yielding just one earned run in 14 innings as he won both an ALCS and World Series start.

  But as Cashman knew firsthand from being around the Yankees front office for 14 years, Steinbrenner did not allow himself or any of his minions to dwell very long on success. Soon after the ’98 World Series, Cashman began negotiating with free-agent center fielder Bernie Williams. At age 30, Williams had become a Yankees icon after three straight seasons in which he’d averaged .323 with 100 RBI. His agent, Scott Boras, had earned a reputation for getting his clients the biggest contracts in baseball by taking them into free agency. At the same time, at Torre’s urging, Cashman was talking to two other prominent free agent outfielders, Albert Belle and Brian Jordan, as possible alternatives.

  As negotiations with Williams stalled over Boras’s demand for a seven-year contract, Steinbrenner conducted a meeting of the Yankees’ high command in Tampa a couple of days before Thanksgiving to discuss the situation. Steinbrenner was very interested in Belle, who’d led the American League in RBI three times and was coming off a mammoth season in which he’d hit 49 homers and driven in 152 runs for the Chicago White Sox. The downside was Belle’s truculent personality, which had alienated the media and even many of his own teammates. Still, after playing golf with Belle in Arizona, Torre insisted he could handle him.

  “You’re going to be sorry if you do this,” Michael told the group. “He’s going to be a problem in the clubhouse, where other players will be afraid to talk to the media around him, and we can’t have that.”

  “I don’t know, Stick,” said Steinbrenner. “He’s a helluva hitter, and ‘Cash’ says he thinks we can get him for five years and around $65 million. I wish you liked him a little better.”

  “Well, what’s it gonna cost us to re-sign Bernie?” Michael asked.

  “We’re presently at five years, around $60 million, with him, but Boras wants seven or eight years at $15 million per, and so far he’s not budging from that,” Cashman replied.

  “What?” Michael shrieked. “In that case, I love Albert Belle!”

  Everyone in the room broke out in laughter, and Steinbrenner instructed Cashman to go ahead and make a five-year, $65 million offer to Belle’s agent, Arn Tellem. The next day, Williams called Cashman at about the same time Tellem was informing the GM that Belle was prepared to accept the Yankees’ offer.

  “Is this really happening?” Williams said. “Am I really going to be forced to work someplace else after spending my entire career as a Yankee?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Bernie,” said Cashman. “We’re real close with Albert Belle.”

  “Really?” said Williams.

  At that point, Bernie Williams was all but a goner. But later that day, Tellem called Cashman to say that Belle had changed his mind and was going to sign with the Baltimore Orioles. When Cashman went in to tell Steinbrenner of this development, the owner exploded.

  “How could you blow this?” he screamed. “I knew I couldn’t trust you to handle this job! You’re just too inexperienced for these agents. I oughta fire you right now and get someone in here who knows what the hell they’re doing!”

  As Steinbrenner was yelling at Cashman, Williams called again, this time to inform him that the Red Sox had bowled him over with a seven-year offer worth over $90 million. With Steinbrenner listening on the speakerphone, Williams implored Cashman to make a counteroffer.

  “The Yankees are the only place I’ve ever been,” he said, “and it’s going to be very hard for me to go anyplace else. I’m not asking you to top that offer. I just need to feel you want to keep me by coming after me with the kind of offer you make to free agents from other teams that have never done anything for the Yankees.”

  This won Steinbrenner over. He told Cashman to bring the All-Star center fielder back into the fold for a seven-year deal worth $87.5 million. It was far more than either of them had wanted—or expected—to pay, but it worked out just fine, as Williams went on to enjoy three more All-Star seasons as a major contributor to two more Yankees world championships, while Belle sustained a hip injury that ended his career after just two seasons in Baltimore.

  Around this time, it was reported that Steinbrenner had agreed to sell 70 percent of the Yankees to the media giant Cablevision for $525 million. Steinbrenner knew that revenue sharing was coming in baseball, and he needed to find an equity partner. Under the terms of the deal, Steinbrenner was to remain general partner of the Yankees and would also oversee the operations of the NBA Knicks and the NHL Rangers. The impetus of the deal from Cablevision’s standpoint was the expiration in 2000 of its 12-year contract to broadcast Yankee games. By having a majority interest in the Yankees, Cablevision would essentially be guaranteed the rights to broadcast Yankee games forever. “All I’m doing,” Steinbrenner insisted, “is taking on a new partner. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Neither was this deal, it turned out.

  IN MID-DECEMBER 1998, Suzyn Waldman, the Yankees beat reporter for WFAN, got a phone call from her boss, Mark Chernoff, the station’s program director, informing her of a special show they were planning to broadcast from the Yogi Berra Museum, in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. “You know what would be really great?” Chernoff said. “If you could get George to come up from Tampa to be on the show.”

  It had been 14 years since Yogi Berra and Steinbrenner had spoken to each other, and just as long since Yogi had set foot in Yankee Stadium. Wald
man had never met Berra, but she had a long-standing, close relationship with Steinbrenner, and she saw the possibilities. After hanging up with Chernoff, she placed a call to Steinbrenner in Tampa, and an hour later he called her back.

  “George,” Waldman began, “I want to talk to you about Yogi.”

  “Yogi?” said Steinbrenner. “Oh, my God. What’s wrong? Has something happened to him?”

  “No, no, he’s fine,” said Waldman, who explained that she would be hosting this show with Berra from his museum and that she hoped to use it as a vehicle for a reconciliation between the two of them.

  “I don’t know,” said Steinbrenner. “I’ve tried a hundred times to make things up with him. Maybe I could invite him to the Stadium?”

  “That’s not gonna work,” said Waldman. “You’re gonna have to come to him, on his turf. And then you’re gonna have to apologize.”

  “Apologize?” Steinbrenner said. “Why do I have to apologize?”

  “I don’t know, George,” said Waldman. “For whatever it was you did to him. It would sure be good for the Yankees.”

  “No, it would sure be good for Suzyn Waldman,” Steinbrenner grumped. “I would make her larger than she already is.”

  “Well, that too, George,” Waldman said, laughing.

  Steinbrenner came around, and Waldman next went to Berra to propose the peace terms.

  “How is this gonna work?” asked Yogi’s son, Dale.

  “He’s gonna fly up from Tampa and have his limo driver take him from the airport to the museum, where he’ll be at 5 o’clock sharp,” Waldman explained. “That’ll give them an hour to talk before going on the air.”

  “What if he doesn’t apologize?” Dale Berra asked. “My dad’s gonna expect that.”

  “I can assure you the man’s not going to fly a thousand miles all the way up here to say ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  On the afternoon of January 5, 1999, a nervous Steinbrenner stepped off his private jet at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport. He was met by his limo driver, who, on his orders, had already made three dry runs of the 30-minute drive to the Berra museum earlier in the day. Nevertheless, when they arrived at the museum, it was a few minutes after five and Berra was waiting in the lobby, looking at his watch.

  “You’re late,” he said to Steinbrenner.

  Already Steinbrenner was on the defensive. They proceeded to a room off the main gallery of the museum, and when their raised voices could be heard, Berra’s wife, Carmen, went in to join them. Fifteen minutes later, Steinbrenner and Berra emerged arm in arm, all smiles.

  “It’s over,” Berra quipped, a reference to his most famous Yogi-ism, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  During Waldman’s broadcast, Steinbrenner apologized—not for firing him as manager just 16 games into the 1985 season, but for having enlisted then–Yankees GM Clyde King to do the dirty deed instead of having the guts to do it himself. On July 18 at Yankee Stadium, the team presented Berra with a $100,000 check for the museum and, in the years after, Steinbrenner donated numerous Yankees artifacts to its collection, including replicas of all ten of Berra’s world championship rings.

  “I would’ve driven across the George Washington Bridge in a rickshaw to get Yogi back,” Steinbrenner told the assembled press corps at the museum. Years later, Rick Cerrone, the Yankees publicity director from 1996 to 2007, who accompanied Steinbrenner to the event, recalled, “In all the years I worked for him, that was the happiest I ever saw him.”

  Left unsaid was the urgency on Steinbrenner’s part to get Yogi back into the official Yankees family. Joe DiMaggio was terminally ill, and Mickey Mantle had died in 1995. After DiMaggio, the title of “greatest living

  Yankee” would fall to Yogi. A week after making peace with Berra, Steinbrenner paid a visit to DiMaggio’s home in Hollywood, Florida, where the Yankee Clipper was in the final stages of lung cancer. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Steinbrenner had announced that “Joe will certainly throw out the first ball at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day,” but now DiMaggio was barely able to speak. His valet, DeJan Pesut, had spent hours sprucing him up for Steinbrenner’s visit, dressing him in a shirt and tie that he could wear only by removing the collar to help him breathe. The visit lasted barely five minutes before DiMaggio had to be hooked back up to his breathing machine. “You just get better, Joe,” Steinbrenner said before leaving. “I’m counting on you to be there Opening Day.”

  Steinbrenner returned to Tampa with no idea that yet another reconciliation was in the offing for him. On February 17, a couple of days before the opening of spring training, he and Cashman and the rest of the Yankees high command were in Tampa conducting a meeting in the private room bearing his name in Malio’s Restaurant. The subject of the meeting was a proposed trade for Roger Clemens, which Cashman had brought to the group. Two years later, Steinbrenner had been proved right: the Toronto Blue Jays couldn’t afford Clemens, who, under a secret side agreement in the four-year, $31.1 million deal he’d signed with them in December 1996, was exercising his right to demand a trade. It was Steinbrenner’s second shot at acquiring the premier pitcher in the American League, but it was also going to mean giving up David Wells, the free-spirited left-hander whose penchant for mischief, curiously, had won the affection of the Boss and the enmity of Joe Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre.

  “You guys all know how I feel about Wells,” Steinbrenner said. “That’s why I’m not going to cast a vote on this. At the same time, though, if everyone in the room is in favor of this deal, I won’t stand in the way.”

  Everybody was.

  As Steinbrenner and his group finished conducting their business, Lou Piniella happened to come into the restaurant to have lunch. Even though Piniella, as Malio Iavarone’s best friend, and Steinbrenner, as Malio’s best customer, frequently dined in the Tampa hot spot, their own relationship had been severely ruptured ever since Steinbrenner had smeared Lou’s name in the Howie Spira trial by saying he had a “gambling problem.” Malio especially was outraged at Steinbrenner for that, telling him, “Lou’s only gambling problem was betting on your damn horses!”

  For years, Malio had been tiptoeing a fine line when Steinbrenner and Piniella were in his restaurant at the same time, but now he saw an opportunity to bring them together and finally patch things up. He knew Steinbrenner was sorry for what he’d done to Piniella, and he also knew that Lou was not one to hold grudges.

  “You know, the Boss is here in his room with all his guys,” Malio said to Piniella. “Why don’t you go say hello?”

  “I don’t know,” Piniella said. “I don’t want to bother him.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” Malio said, leading Piniella by the arm to the other side of the restaurant and into the Steinbrenner Room. “Look who I got here, Boss!” he said. Rising from his seat, Steinbrenner rushed over to Piniella and affixed a bear hug on him.

  “It’s great to see you, Lou,” he said.

  “You, too, Boss,” Piniella said. “It’s been too long.”

  Chapter 19

  Billionaire George

  IN THE WEEKS AFTER initially agreeing to sell 70 percent of the Yankees to Cablevision, Steinbrenner was slowly coming to the conclusion that this was not a good deal for him. For one thing, Cablevision czar Charles Dolan was now insisting that Steinbrenner’s term for continuing to run the Yankees would be limited to five years. For another, Steinbrenner realized that the only reason Cablevision was willing to pay him $525 million for a temporarily inactive majority share of the team was that their 12-year contract to broadcast Yankee games on their MSG Network was due to expire after the 2001 season and, without the Yankees, the network’s primary programming would be just the NBA Knicks and the NHL Rangers. More important, if Cablevision owned the Yankees, they would not have to pay a rights fee, which promised to be significantly higher than the $40.5 million per year they were paying under the present deal. Cablevision needed the Yankees a lot more than the Yankees needed Cablevision.

&n
bsp; For tax reasons, the deadline for completing the deal was January 1, but as the date approached, Steinbrenner decided he would not be saying “Happy New Year, partner” to Charles Dolan. In fact, it was not long after he’d made the landmark $486 million rights agreement with the MSG Network in 1989 that Bob Gutkowski, the president of Madison Square Garden, who had brokered the deal, gave Steinbrenner the idea of one day creating his own regional network—and now he was seeing the merits of it.

  To do so, Steinbrenner would need a basketball or hockey team to provide the bulk of the network’s winter programming. Obviously the Knicks and Rangers weren’t options, but across the river in New Jersey, the Nets of the NBA, who had enjoyed only three winning seasons in 15 years, were struggling for an identity. The Nets were owned by Ray Chambers and Lewis Katz, two prominent New Jersey businessmen. Steinbrenner contacted the men, and, after a series of discussions in conjunction with the Allen & Co. investment firm, they announced in February 1999 that the Yankees and the Nets would be merging into a 50-50 corporate partnership called YankeeNets LLC. A $750 million value was put on the holding company, with the Yankees’ worth established at $600 million and the Nets’ at $150 million.

  Although much was made of the fact that the company would be engaging in joint sales operations to market the two teams, Steinbrenner made clear that, from his end, the primary purpose of the merger was to create a regional sports network. He enlisted as chairman of the new company his old U.S. Olympic Committee cohort Harvey Schiller, who had since become head of TV sports programming for the Turner Broadcasting System. But as time went on, Steinbrenner became more and more impatient with the lack of progress being made in finding an equity partner for a new network, and he was also becoming annoyed at what he perceived as Chambers and Katz’s attempts to put together sponsorship deals designed to enhance the Nets while diminishing the value of the Yankees.