Steinbrenner

by Bill Madden

  “It was nothing more than a fainting spell,” Boyer said. “He’s feeling well, and his general health is excellent.”

  If only that were true.

  Chapter 20

  The Lion in Winter

  IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING Steinbrenner’s collapse at Otto Graham’s funeral, there were no sightings of him at any of his favorite Tampa haunts. “I’ll give him the message,” his longtime receptionist, Joanne Nastal, would say when I called for an interview, but those calls, uncharacteristically, were never returned. Occasionally, his New York publicist, Howard Rubenstein, would put out a statement, cheerily reporting that he was feeling fine and hard at work putting together the Yankee team for 2004. But the Boss himself had nothing to say—about the Yankees, Torre (whose contract was to expire after the 2004 season) or his health.

  In the days preceding the incident in Sarasota, Steinbrenner had been plenty vocal about Yankee affairs—much to the chagrin of Randy Levine and Brian Cashman—as he pursued another free agent that no other teams were interested in signing, the perpetually disgruntled slugger Gary Sheffield. Because of his reputation as a chronic complainer, none of the Yankees high command wanted anything to do with the 35-year-old Sheffield, even though he was coming off a 39-homer, 132-RBI season with the Atlanta Braves. But Sheffield, the nephew of Dwight Gooden, had gone to Steinbrenner himself to pitch his wares—without an agent—and the Boss was immediately infatuated.

  Cashman and Torre warned that Sheffield represented the antithesis of the team-first culture they had so carefully created with the Yankees, but Steinbrenner persisted, beginning what, predictably, became a rancorous contract negotiation. That fall, Cashman had been a handshake away from signing free agent outfielder Vladimir Guerrero, who was eight years younger than Sheffield, only to be told by Steinbrenner to beg off. All the while, Gooden was lobbying hard in Tampa for Steinbrenner to sign his nephew, which frustrated everyone in the New York office. How could a serial drug offender, someone who’d been given so many chances, still enjoy so much influence with the Boss?

  “I’m handling this,” Steinbrenner told his front office men. “We’re doing it my way now. I’ll decide who we’re getting.”

  After initially agreeing to a three-year, $39 million contract, Steinbrenner and Sheffield got into a tussle over deferred money, and Sheffield threatened to walk away if the total value wasn’t increased to $42 million. A week of not speaking to each other went by before Sheffield finally relented, agreeing to the original terms. The only consolation for Levine, Cashman & Co. was that Sheffield’s behavior during the negotiations had proved them right.

  Steinbrenner remained curiously unavailable for comment in mid-February, when the Yankees pulled off their biggest acquisition since they had brought Babe Ruth to the Bronx in 1920. Cashman had thought the team was pretty much set, with the additions of Sheffield, outfielder Kenny Lofton and oft-injured but frequently brilliant Kevin Brown (whom he’d acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers for Jeff Weaver, the losing pitcher in the pivotal game four of the World Series against the Marlins). He had been content to watch as the Red Sox attempted to complete a blockbuster trade in which they would acquire shortstop Alex Rodriguez, generally acknowledged as the best all-around player in the game, from the Texas Rangers for Manny Ramirez, the best pure hitter in the game.

  But as the Red Sox–Rangers negotiations snagged over who was going to pay the remaining $179 million on Rodriguez’s contract, the Yankees were jolted by the news that third baseman Aaron Boone, the home run hero of their stirring ’03 ALCS triumph against Boston, had torn his anterior cruciate ligament playing basketball and would require surgery that would sideline him for the entire 2004 season.

  On January 25, Cashman and Levine had spent some time with Rodriguez at the New York baseball writers’ dinner (where the shortstop was on hand to accept his 2003 American League Most Valuable Player award).

  “What about A-Rod?” Cashman said to Levine a few days later.

  “I like it,” Levine said, “but at third base?”

  “Well, obviously he’d have to agree to switch positions, but if he would, could we afford him?”

  “I’ll talk to George,” Levine said. “In the meantime, why don’t you go talk to Texas and see if they’d be interested in trading him to us.”

  After first getting permission from Rangers GM John Hart to talk to Rodriguez and then getting assurance from A-Rod that he would willingly move to third base just to be liberated from Texas, Cashman worked out a deal in which the Yankees would send their 28-year-old power-hitting second baseman, Alfonso Soriano, to the Rangers for Rodriguez, a seven-time All-Star who had just won his third-straight American League home run crown. Levine then worked out the hard part, getting the Rangers to agree to pay $67 million of the remaining $179 million on Rodriguez’s contract. While all of this was transpiring, Steinbrenner was urging his men on behind the scenes, and even got on the phone with Texas owner Tom Hicks to formally seal the deal. But at the press conference at Yankee Stadium to introduce Rodriguez on February 17, he was nowhere to be seen. Instead, his son Hal and son-in-law Steve Swindal represented Yankees ownership.

  The acquisitions of Rodriguez and Kevin Brown escalated the Yankees’ payroll from $153 million to $185 million, some $57 million higher than the number-two Red Sox—which Boston owner John Henry found distressing.

  “There is really no way to deal with a team that has gone so insanely far beyond the resources of all the other teams,” Henry wrote in an e-mail to the Boston beat reporters.

  This brought a swift response from Steinbrenner, in the form of a statement issued by Howard Rubenstein in New York.

  “We understand John must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his team’s failure in this transaction. Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston.”

  Henry replied by saying, “I kind of liken George to Don Rickles, but if Don Rickles insults you it’s funny.”

  Never one to let someone else have the parting shot, Steinbrenner, upon hearing his former limited partner’s rebuttal, fired off another statement, in which he appeared to make fun of Henry’s skinny physique.

  “Being compared to Don Rickles is a great compliment, because Rickles is a warm, funny and caring man. As for Henry, he reminds me of Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.”

  It was vintage Steinbrenner, just not live Steinbrenner.

  Nobody was more puzzled by Steinbrenner’s reclusiveness than Rick Cerrone, the Yankees PR man, who hadn’t had a single call from the owner since the Otto Graham funeral incident—a circumstance his 11 predecessors would no doubt have considered incredibly good fortune. Cerrone regarded the approach of spring training with a sense of dread. As if bringing in A-Rod wasn’t going to create enough of a circus, there was the matter of Torre’s unresolved expiring contract, which was sure to be an ongoing issue with the media, and the status of the Boss himself. What would he be like? Would he demand to be shielded from the media? Torre probably wondered, too, as he and Steinbrenner hadn’t spoken since the previous season, and he’d been kept out of the loop on the A-Rod deal until it was almost completed.

  Immediately following the A-Rod press conference, Cerrone, Cashman, Swindal, Hal Steinbrenner and Torre took the Yankees’ charter plane back to Florida for the start of spring training. When they landed in Tampa, they were startled at the sight of a beaming Steinbrenner waiting on the tarmac to greet them.

  “Great job, men,” he said. “I’m proud of all of you.”

  “I don’t know what it was,” Cerrone said, “but George was a different person after the A-Rod trade. He seemed to be in an ebullient mood that whole spring. Don’t get me wrong—he still had his moments when he’d snap at you or call you out for something—but he became almost fatherly. Hell, he and Joe weren’t even speaking, and the next thing you know he was giving him a three-year extension.”

  Indeed, even Torre was caught off-guard when
Steinbrenner popped into his office early one day that spring and casually asked, “What do you want to do next year?” When Torre replied that he’d like to stay on the job awhile longer, Steinbrenner said, “Fine. I’ll let you and Steve [Swindal] work out the extension.” On April 8, the Yankees announced that Torre had agreed to a three-year, $19.2 million deal that made him the highest-paid manager in history. Steinbrenner even seemed to rebound from his health scare. Reporters watched him interact with fans and even make light of his mortality.

  “Everybody’s coming up to me and yelling, ‘Sign this baseball,’ ” he said. “You all think I’m gonna die. You want one of the last autographs.”

  Knowing Steinbrenner’s impatience for reading scripts and having to do multiple takes, Cerrone was surprised when he agreed to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman in February, where he recited a top 10 list of good things about being a New York Yankee. Number 1: “You think this A-Rod deal is good, huh? We’re about to sign Ty Cobb!”

  For most of that spring, however, Steinbrenner limited his appearances to the clubhouse and Max’s Café, the media dining room (operated by his old friend from Buffalo, Max Margulis, whom he’d lured to Tampa years earlier to serve as food and beverage manager, first at the Bay Harbor Hotel and then at Legends Field). He was seldom seen on the field, which puzzled the newspaper photographers and TV crews accustomed to his almost daily accessibility there.

  After opening the 2004 season with a two-game series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in Japan—a trip Steinbrenner did not make—the Yankees returned home for their Yankee Stadium opener, on April 8, against the Chicago White Sox. Steinbrenner had agreed to a pregame interview with WCBS’s veteran sports anchor, Warner Wolf. To get to the set, which was atop a platform in the left-field seats, Steinbrenner was transported on a golf cart under the stands, past the marching band and the military color guard. Wolf remembered how Steinbrenner appeared to struggle as he climbed up onto the platform, and how distracted he seemed by the West Point color guard and the fans shouting and waving at him. He looked to be tearing up a little.

  “These fans really love you, George!” Wolf said, attempting to start the interview on an upbeat note.

  “This is a very important thing . . . that we’ve had the strings on . . . this is the people’s team—” Steinbrenner began to say.

  Suddenly, he was overcome with emotion and began to cry.

  “I can see it really affects you,” Wolf said.

  “You know . . . I’m getting older,” Steinbrenner stammered. “After you get older, you do this more.”

  Changing the subject, Wolf said, “What about the business of baseball and how it’s changed, George? You bought the Yankees for $10 million in 1973, and look what they’re worth now.”

  “Actually, it was $8.5 million,” Steinbrenner said, his voice still cracking but his emotions slightly more under control. He made it through the rest of the interview without further incident, but after he departed for his private box upstairs, Wolf thought to himself that something didn’t seem right about him.

  “I never told this to anyone,” Wolf said in a 2009 interview, “but the more I thought about it, I realized there was something different about his eyes. Those blue piercing eyes that always looked right at you, penetrating you . . . the spark was missing from them. Instead, there was a distance, a kind of vulnerability to them.”

  A month into the ’04 season, Steinbrenner sat for an interview in his office at Yankee Stadium with New York Times reporter Juliet Macur. For the first time, he spoke seriously about growing old and his own mortality. Macur reported that, periodically during the interview, he had begun to tear up.

  When she asked if he had a retirement plan, Steinbrenner said, “You don’t want to leave because you’re a competitive human being and the juices are still flowing. So you just hope you’ll go out one way—horizontal.” Then, as if to emphasize that, he whispered: “Yep . . . hor-i-zontal.”

  Macur noted that Steinbrenner would be turning 74 on July 4, to which he responded, “My God, a guy I knew just died and he was only 60! I’ve been to a lot of funerals. So sure, when you see your friends die, you think about dying yourself. You never know when your time is going to come. It could be—it could be tomorrow.”

  It was then that Macur asked him about his crying.

  “Well, I don’t cry all the time,” he said, explaining that his welling up with Warner Wolf on Opening Day had been the result of seeing a group of West Point cadets cheering for him. “Those men and women may be going into harm’s way next year and they’re applauding me? What have I done that’s so great? They appreciate me for what I’m trying to do. I’ve never really felt that before.”

  “I’ve been different,” he said toward the end of the interview. “As you get older, you can’t remember everything and then you get impatient. You’re not the same anymore. It’s hard.”

  Throughout 2004, the media and Yankees staffers noticed that Steinbrenner was spending very little time at Yankee Stadium, flying in from Tampa only for big opponents like the Red Sox, and then staying out of the spotlight. After the Yankees won their seventh-straight American League East title, he was on hand for the first two games of the Division Series against the Minnesota Twins, but was back in Tampa when they won the last two games in Minneapolis to advance to the ALCS against the Red Sox. The Red Sox became the first team in major league history to come back from being down 0-3 to win a best-of-seven series, eradicating their 86 years of cursed history, and the deciding game seven at Yankee Stadium was excruciating for Steinbrenner. Afterward, Steinbrenner’s nemesis, Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, chortled: “All empires fall sooner or later.”

  But unlike previous postseason losses, like the one in 1981, when he issued the apology to Yankee fans after losing to the Dodgers, or in 2001, when he stalked around the clubhouse in Arizona vowing to make changes, this time Steinbrenner did everything he could to avoid the media. To the small group of reporters camped outside the Yankees offices as he exited the Stadium, he uttered tersely: “I want to congratulate the Boston team. They did very well.”

  Three days later, Robert Merrill, one of Steinbrenner’s closest friends, died at 85. Merrill, the Metropolitan Opera baritone for 31 years, had become equally renowned as the Yankees’ “in-house” national anthem singer at Yankee Stadium. Howard Rubenstein, not Steinbrenner, issued a press release from the Yankees calling Merrill “a friend and close associate of the Yankees” who “sang the anthem at Yankee Stadium for many years and provided a true inspiration for us, the ballplayers and all of our fans.”

  Hundreds of Merrill’s friends turned out to pay tribute at a memorial service on December 15, with Steinbrenner a conspicuous absentee. And for the rest of the winter, there was nothing but radio silence out of Tampa.

  I was one of many reporters who’d been unsuccessful in numerous attempts to reach him at his office. And when the Yankees gathered for spring training in Tampa the following February, he continued to be this Oz-like figure, seldom heard from, and only in statements made through Rubinstein. I concluded that he must be seriously ill, especially when he failed to respond earlier that month after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Jason Giambi had testified to a grand jury in San Francisco that he had used steroids in 2003, the year before the Yankees signed him to a seven-year, $120 million contract.

  “George is not sick,” I was told by Reggie Jackson, who claimed to have visited him almost daily in his Legends Field office. “He’s changed, but he’s not seriously ill. Why don’t you just call up there?”

  Despite all my previous failed attempts, I took Jackson’s advice, went up to the press box at Legends Field and called the office upstairs. Much to my surprise, Steinbrenner got on the phone and told me to come on up. As I was being escorted into his office on the fourth floor, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but then I heard him hollering to his secretary about Randy Levine and Brian Cashman not straightening out some problem with G
ary Sheffield’s contract. At least it sounded like the old Boss.

  “What do you want, Madden?” he barked.

  “I want to know what’s wrong with you,” I said.

  “Do I look sick?” Steinbrenner asked. “I’m just busy, that’s all. I don’t have time for all of you guys. These things . . . Sheffield’s got a problem with his contract, Reggie’s got a problem . . . they all call me. I’ve got to take care of everything here.”

  “So people can still get through to you?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Then why have you become so reclusive?” I asked. “Any other year, the Red Sox are taking potshots at you, Giambi’s got this steroids mess, and you’re all over that, on the back pages.”

  “I’m just not gonna do that stuff anymore,” Steinbrenner said, even though the day before he’d made big news with just one small sound bite, when a flock of reporters intercepted him getting onto the elevator. Someone asked if he was going to give Hideki Matsui a contract extension, and Steinbrenner shot back, “We’d like to have the player, but fuck the agent.” The agent in question, Arn Tellem, also represented Giambi.

  “The Red Sox can say all they want,” Steinbrenner told me. “They won and they deserved it. I admit I took last year very hard. I’m still not over it. But we’ll settle this on the field, not in the newspapers.”

  “So what about all those statements through Howard Rubenstein?” I asked. “They’re not just because you’ve lost something off your fastball?”