Not that the Yankees would disagree about their own loathsomeness. Babe Ruth, the Yankee star of the 1920s and ’30s, readily acknowledged how much and how widely he was hated. “I don’t mind being called a prick or a cocksucker or things like that. I expect that.”26 Indeed, Ruth was a horrific teammate; he quarreled with his manager, got into fistfights with teammates, and feuded with rivals like Leo Durocher and Lou Gehrig, with whom he seldom spoke. Meanwhile, George Weiss, the Yankees’ general manager through the glory years of the 1950s, found his own players so repugnant that he hired private detectives to follow them around at night. Casey Stengel, the team’s manager for seven of its championship titles during those years, was well aware that his players caroused, drank whiskey, and got into fights off the field. “But I have found,” he explained, justifying his tolerance for bad behavior, “that the ones who drink milkshakes don’t win many ball games.”27
It perhaps should come as no surprise, considering the character of the team, that the Yankees of the 1950s and ’60s had relatively few diehard fans. As a rule baseball fans in the Big Apple had been fonder of the city’s National League franchises—first the New York Giants, then the lovable Brooklyn Dodgers, and finally, after both of these teams left for the West Coast, the New York Mets. Even during the Mets’ first season, a disastrous embarrassment in which the team lost a record 120 games, New Yorkers openly revolted against the boringly perennial champion Yankees. Though the Yankees would win the World Series in 1962, it was the Mets that won New Yorkers’ hearts. “You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life,” wrote New York newspaperman Jimmy Breslin in 1963. “This is the team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”28
By the early 1970s the national hatred of the Yankees had cooled somewhat, as the team was wallowing through a string of mediocre seasons. The Yankee deceit of the past was forgotten, and the city of New York too, once proud and full of bluster, had become something of a shadow of itself. In recent years New York had suffered through the bad management of a corrupt city government, through garbage and other union strikes, power shortages, a highly publicized string of serial murders by a killer known as the Son of Sam, and even bankruptcy.29 Still, in 1977 the seeds of a new generation of Yankee hatred had been sewn by two important events. The first, which occurred in 1971, was the publication of Jim Bouton’s seminal tell-all baseball memoir, Ball Four. In the book, which covered Bouton’s efforts to pitch during the 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, the author also looked back, with brutal honesty, at the venal qualities of various Yankees—especially Mickey Mantle, whom Bouton portrayed as a heavy drinker and a womanizer—at the tail end of the team’s glory period in the early 1960s. The second event was the arrival, in 1973, of one man: a new Yankees owner named George Michael Steinbrenner III.
Steinbrenner and the Yankees were a match made in heaven. By all accounts a self-serving, self-righteous, complex, and manipulative human, Steinbrenner, who had made his fortune in the shipbuilding industry, was head of a purchasing group that bought the team from the Columbia Broadcasting Service for the paltry sum of $8.8 million. Promising fans above all else that he would return the team to its winning ways, Steinbrenner was immediately controversial and polarizing. He got into legal trouble in his first year as owner by trying to hire manager Dick Williams away from the A’s before his contract was up. In 1974 he was convicted of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s campaign for reelection (and for obstruction of justice during the investigation), and he was suspended from baseball for two years. When he was allowed near his team he quickly alienated himself from his players by enforcing, among other things, a strict grooming code.30
Still, despite his obvious flaws Steinbrenner was successful at his primary goal: he turned the team into winners again. After finishing in fourth place for three straight seasons, in 1974 the Yankees surged to second in the AL East, just two games behind the Baltimore Orioles. Two years later, in 1976, the Yankees were back in the World Series, after being shut out from the Fall Classic for the previous twelve seasons. New York dropped four straight games in the 1976 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, but they entered the 1977 season with high hopes. After the loss Steinbrenner had all but guaranteed Yankee fans a World Series win, and, as if to put some muscle behind his proclamation, he went out during the off-season and signed several high-profile free agents—Don Gullett and, notably, Reggie Jackson (as well as Catfish Hunter, signed a year earlier)—purchased the contract of Jim Wynn, and traded for left-handed pitcher Mike Torrez and catcher Cliff Johnson. While the team’s returning core—namely, catcher and team captain Thurman Munson, slugging third baseman Graig Nettles, speedy center fielder Mickey Rivers, and Cy Young–winning reliever Sparky Lyle—was likely more important to its success, many baseball fans around the country saw the free-agent signings (especially of Jackson) as a return to the unfair competitive advantage of the Yankee teams of the 1950s. Steinbrenner further incited the animosity of fans of opposing teams by appointing, as the team’s new manager, the feisty former Yankee player Billy Martin.
Across the country, to ordinary people standing in gas lines, shaking their heads at all the rising prices and wondering how to make ends meet, the privilege of the Yankees and Steinbrenner was just too much to take. The Yankees had always been privileged, always had unfair advantages. And now, in an era when it seemed the big guy—the corporate giants and stuffed shirts and overentitled—were increasingly gaining all the advantages, the Yankees of 1977 seemed to symbolize the basic unfairness of America. In Cleveland, for instance, on September 5, 1977, local radio station WWWE staged the very first “Hate the Yankees Hanky Night.” The Indians, who were on their way to a ninety-loss season and a fifth-place finish (out of seven teams) in the American League East, had at that point lost thirteen straight games to the Yankees going back to the middle of the previous season. The promotion was a success, as 28,000-plus fans (compared to the team’s seasonal average of 11,115 fans per game) watched the Indians sweep a doubleheader that day against New York. (The Indians promptly turned back around, though, and lost their next three games against the Yankees over the next three days.)
Despite the national ill will, during the first half of the 1977 season the Yankees were mostly mediocre. As late as June 21 the team’s record was a disappointing 36-31, and the team was stuck in a tie for second place, four and a half games behind the Orioles. A key problem for the team was the clubhouse atmosphere, filled as it was with strong personalities and egos, as well as a manager who clashed repeatedly with his owner and his most high-profile player, Reggie Jackson. At one point or another during the season, most of the team’s mainstays—including Munson, Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles, and Mickey Rivers—spoke of their deep desire to leave New York. But the team turned things around in the second half of the season. Jackson’s bat heated up. Billy Martin toned down his antics. The Yankees, realizing they had talent, started working together. And in the end the team fought its way into a second straight World Series appearance.
15
Klieg Lights, Smoke Bombs, and Three Massive Bombshells
The Dodgers hated going into New York because of the fans, who were obnoxious.
—Tommy John
Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are snub fighters going to be against that?
—Gold Leader, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
The difference between Los Angeles and New York in 1977, and between the characters of their two baseball teams—one a national darling of sorts, the other a national nemesis—helps explain the incoming narrative of the World Series. Earlier in the summer, when the Yankees first began to surge, a sports reporter in
Los Angeles made a connection that would later become commonplace, comparing the Yankees to the “evil Empire” of that summer’s breakout movie, Star Wars. Then, on the day before the series, the great local doyen of old-school sportswriters in Los Angeles, Jim Murray, was even more explicit. “For the Dodgers,” wrote Murray, “the problem is beating a team that was put together like Standard Oil or U.S. Steel. This Yankee team should be listed on the Wall Street Big Board. It wasn’t put together like most teams, it was bought on the commodity market. These are just a bunch of hired guns, athletic Hessians. . . . It’s baseball’s version of the Krupp Works.”1
So this World Series of 1977 would be, in the view of many observers, a showdown between the peaceful, idyllic planet of Alderaan (a.k.a. Elysian Park) versus the Death Star in the Bronx. It was left up to the Dodgers to stand up for all the underprivileged, overtaxed, endlessly struggling underdogs of the universe against the juggernaut Yankees. It was a last gambit by old Obi Wan O’Malley finally to defeat the villainous Darth Steinbrenner.
This was all, of course, an overstatement, a result of the fact that the World Series of 1977 was revisiting a classic rivalry—the Dodgers versus the Yankees—at the exact moment that a worried country was desperate for something to distract it from its troubles. Just six days before the first game of the World Series, President Jimmy Carter had paid a much-ballyhooed visit to the blighted projects, burned-out buildings, rubble-strewn lots, and garbage-choked streets of the South Bronx. The president’s grimly understated assessment of the dire state of the neighborhood—“A very sobering trip,” he said—appeared in Time and on the front page of the New York Times. The fact that Carter had come to announce plans for a national initiative to redevelop and turn around such blight seemed beside the point; for at least a brief time the neighborhood just south of Yankee Stadium was a symbol of America’s growing sense of disgrace and shame.
Once the lights came on at Yankee Stadium and the roar of the crowd could be heard ringing out across the Bronx, people, at least for a time, forgot the depressing reality of the times and fixated on the narrative of these games. Starting on October 11, 1977, the true-blue Dodgers and “evil” Yankees played six drama-filled games. At times it seemed either team could have taken the Series. Both were explosive, had capable pitching and wily and competitive managers, and knew how to win. In the end, though, of course, only one team would win.
Back on September 29, when the Yankees had clinched their division, a magnanimous Tom Lasorda, whose team had been the first in the league to clinch a playoff spot, called Yankee manager Billy Martin to congratulate him. Lasorda and Martin were friends, unlikely though that may have seemed. It helped that both had come from similar molds. Both were sons of tough Italian immigrants and marginally talented athletes who had succeeded through their own guile and will. Both had risen to the top in one of the most difficult of all human pastimes, the upper echelon of the professional sport of baseball. Both were charismatic leaders, each in his own way, and both possessed very capacious egos that often served them in their pursuit of winning. Still, in the first meeting between Lasorda and Martin, the two had been anything but friends. Mickey Mantle, the great Yankee star of the 1950s and ’60s, told the story to an L.A. sportswriter. One day in 1956 the first-place Yankees were playing against the last-place Kansas City A’s, to whom Lasorda had been traded by the Dodgers. According to Mantle, several A’s batters had been brushed back by the Yankees’ pitcher. As Mantle told it the A’s manager then yelled, “That’s what’s wrong with this lousy club! Everyone is afraid of the Yankees.” At that Lasorda went to his manager and insisted he be put in the game. Lasorda then knocked down the first two Yankee hitters and threw behind the heads of Hank Bauer and Billy Martin. “Well, you can guess what happened next,” said Mantle. “Martin yelled something, Lasorda yelled back—and pow. The two of them went after each other like pit bulldogs. In the middle of the action, Bauer tried to get at Lasorda, who shouted at him between punches, ‘Stay out of this, Bauer. This is an Italian fight.’ . . . When the blood dried, Billy and Tommy shook hands and they became great pals.”2
Whatever the reason for their friendship, despite the differences in the franchises they worked for and loved, Lasorda admired Billy Martin and sincerely supported the embattled manager’s efforts to lead the rival Yankees to the Series. “I look at Billy and I see myself,” Lasorda told reporters after the two met at a Manhattan restaurant the day before the first game of the World Series. “It’s never come easy for him. He’s had to scrape and hustle. . . . I sympathize with what he’s gone through this year. He has to be Manager of the Year. He’s put up with so much and yet here he is.” Reportedly, many in the baseball world were startled by the meeting of two World Series–rival managers, but both Lasorda and Martin were unapologetic about their social meeting. “It’s strictly a personal thing. Billy and I are friends,” said Lasorda. “To be managing a team in the Series and to have that team playing a Yankee team managed by Martin is the ultimate for me. . . . We’re like brothers.” Martin, for his part, pointed out to reporters that the meeting did happen on Columbus Day, “and us Italians have to stick together.”3
What the rival managers talked about has not been recorded. Perhaps the two men shared memories of old times, of fights they’d both fought, of people they once knew. Possibly they bonded over the frustrations and vicissitudes of their positions. It is certain, however, that they dared not speak about their teams and the battle they would be fighting in a few days. “Bill and I are friends, was all Lasorda said of their dinner when asked, before he tellingly added: “But when we’re on the field, it’s a war.”4
War, indeed. The first skirmish of the 1977 World Series occurred even before the first game started. On Monday, October 10—Columbus Day in New York—the Dodgers had arrived in New York, chartered a bus, and headed out to Yankee Stadium to get in some light practice before the opening game on Tuesday evening. “When the bus arrived at the House that Ruth Built,” wrote a writer who was embedded with the team for the Series, “a howling mob of 100 or so youths descended happily on it, some slamming fists on windows, all of them jeering as the Dodgers ran a gauntlet of abuse.”5 That the incident disturbed many of the Dodgers is evident in later comments made by some of the more vocal Dodgers. For now, however, Lasorda’s squad rushed inside and bunkered down until the real fight began.
Game One of the 1977 World Series was played on Tuesday, October 11, in front of the Yankees’ unruly home crowd. In the top half of the first inning, in the midst of an early Dodger rally, a second critical skirmish took place. With two Dodger runs already in, and Reggie Smith at first base with one out, Steve Garvey came to the plate. On a 3–1 count Smith took off toward second base as Yankee pitcher Don Gullett delivered a sharp fastball on the inside corner. It was not a particularly good jump; Smith was not trying to steal. Instead, with contact hitter Garvey at the plate the calculating Lasorda had called for a hit-and-run. “If I can’t run a guy on a 3–1 count with Garvey hitting I better get out of the game,” Lasorda would say afterward. “I’d do that a thousand times in a row. One thousand times. There was never a doubt in my mind about that play.”6 Unfortunately, and portentously, contact hitter Garvey miscalculated and overswung at the pitch, missing badly, and Smith was flat-footedly thrown out by Yankee catcher Thurman Munson. Was this a potential Series-altering event? Probably not. But had Garvey gotten wood on the ball, perhaps poking a hit through the gap on the left side of the infield where Yankees second baseman Willie Randolph had moved to cover second, it’s likely Smith would have scored. And this would have given the Dodgers a first-inning lead of three runs that may have knocked the starter Gullett out of the game. Instead, the Dodgers settled for just two runs, and Gullett remained in the game, eventually pitching into the ninth inning.
While these two small early battles would play a role in the ultimate outcome of the World Series, they were of less consequence than what took place later, in the top of th
e sixth inning and the score 2–1. With one out Garvey bunt-singled his way on base. One out later Glenn Burke poked a soft single through the right side of the infield that seemed to take forever to reach the outfielders. Garvey tore around second, and, as he rushed to third, Dodgers third base coach Preston Gomez noticed that right fielder Reggie Jackson had backed off to let the weak-armed Yankee center fielder, Mickey Rivers, field the ball. Gomez signaled, just a bit late, for Garvey to go home, and the first baseman, who had slowed momentarily, now scrambled to reach the plate. Rivers’s throw was a bit short and slightly offline. Thurman Munson, the Yankees catcher, caught it a bit up the first base line, and then swung around and dove to tag Garvey as he slid. And here is where fate intervened, putting its stamp on the outcome of the game and the entire Series.
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