by Phil Pepe
The last year of Merrill’s managerial contract with the Yankees was 1992, but he had been let go after the ’91 season, so when the 1992 season started, he was at home in Maine getting paid for doing nothing…until George Steinbrenner called.
“He said he wanted me to go through the minor league system and he wanted every one of our minor league players evaluated,” Merrill remembered. “That’s when I got to see Rivera, Pettitte, Posada, and Jeter, all in the minor leagues. In Fort Lauderdale I saw Mariano Rivera pitch a game in something like an hour and 50 minutes.”
That assignment completed, Merrill was then sent to manage the Columbus Clippers in 1993. A year later, his roster would include for the first time all four components of the Yankees’ Core Four.
“All four were good players and considered prospects,” Merrill said, “but to look at them at that time and project that any one of them would get to the place where they ended up would be a stretch to say the least.”
Rivera started the 1994 season with the Tampa Yankees, moved up during the season to Albany-Colonie, and then to Columbus, where he would appear in six games, all starts, with a record of 4–2. In three stops that season, he would appear in 22 games, all of them starts, with a combined record of 10–2.
Andy Pettitte split the 1994 season between Albany-Colonie and Columbus, and his record at each place was practically a carbon copy of the other. At Albany-Colonie in 11 games he was 7–2 with a 2.71 ERA, 50 strikeouts, and 18 walks in 73 innings. At Columbus in 16 games he was 7–2 with a 2.98 ERA, 61 strikeouts, and 21 walks in 96²⁄³ innings.
By the end of the season, the debate among Yankees brass was which of their young starting pitchers had the best upside: Sterling Hitchcock, Mariano Rivera, or Andy Pettitte.
Merrill remembers the young Pettitte as “a stylish left-hander that could locate a little bit. I don’t want to say that back then I thought of him as a top-of-the-rotation pitcher because in those days when I first saw him, he didn’t throw very hard, maybe 88 to 90 miles per hour. I don’t think anybody could look at him back then and project that he was going to be a No. 1 or a guy that would go out and have the success he’s had, especially in the postseason.”
Jorge Posada started and ended the season in Columbus, batting .240 with 11 homers and 48 RBI in 92 games, and he would miss almost half the season with a serious, career-threatening injury.
“The first time I saw Posada [in 1992] he was playing for Greensboro and he was the designated hitter,” Merrill recalled. “When I asked about him, I was told that he was a second baseman but they were in the process of converting him to a catcher. And we all know how that ended up. Actually, Posada probably could have made it as a second baseman, but becoming a catcher was probably the best thing that happened to him. He ran well enough to play the infield and he had very good speed for a catcher until he got that ugly, ugly broken leg.”
It happened on July 25, 1994, in Columbus in a game against the Norfolk Tides.
“I can still hear the bone snapping,” said Merrill. “It was a play at the plate and if you had a picture of it, Posada was textbook in where he should have been. His foot was on the front corner of the plate pointing toward third, the exact way you teach it. Somehow, and I don’t know how, the guy [Pat Howell] sliding into home plate got underneath Posada’s foot. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened and I can still hear it snapping.”
Posada suffered a fractured left fibula and a dislocated left ankle. Not only was his season over, for a time his baseball future was in doubt. He made a complete recovery and saved his career, but he had a setback in his development as a catcher that would delay his advancement.
Derek Jeter moved rapidly through the Yankees’ minor league system in 1994, batting .329 in 69 games at Tampa, .377 in 34 games at Albany-Colonie, and ending up with Stump Merrill in Columbus, where he sent a calling card to the Bronx by batting .349 in 35 games.
“What impressed me about Jeter right away was that as soon as he came to Columbus, he fit right in like he belonged,” said Merrill. “He was not in awe of the situation and not taken aback one iota. And he played like he had been there all year. That was the first thing that struck me about him.
“The other thing that really impressed me about him is that he continually wanted to know what he had to do to improve. No matter how successful he was, he was still looking for ways to get better. ‘What am I doing wrong? In what areas do I need to get better?’ That type of thing, which is very rare for a young player, especially one who was having so much success. And it was obvious that he wasn’t just trying to soft-soap the manager or kiss his ass to stay in the lineup. It was sincere that he wanted to learn how to play the game correctly and if he was doing something that was incorrect he wanted to make sure that he knew about it and he wanted to go out and try to do it right.”
Derek Jeter did it right in Columbus; he’s still doing it right.
When the 1995 season started, the Core Four was intact with the Columbus Clippers of the International League, but by season’s end they would be gone to an even better place.
7. New York, New York
Let the record show that Andy Pettitte was the first. Then came Mariano Rivera, followed soon after by Derek Jeter, and, finally, Jorge Posada four months later. The “Core Four” of the New York Yankees each made his major league debut in the 1995 season within 127 days of each other.
After 42 wins and 572 innings in four minor league seasons, Pettitte believed he had a good chance to land the fifth spot in the Yankees’ starting rotation. But he lost out to Sterling Hitchcock. However, because to start the season major league rosters were expanded from 25 players to 28 to compensate for the truncated spring training as a result of the player strike, Pettitte was kept on the big league roster as a relief pitcher. He made his major league debut on April 29 against the Royals in Kansas City in the third game of the season. With the Yankees leading 5–1, manager Buck Showalter summoned the rookie Pettitte into the game to start the bottom of the seventh in place of Melido Perez.
The first batter Pettitte faced was Wally Joyner, who flied out to center field. Pettitte then struck out pinch hitter Joe Vitiello looking, but Gary Gaetti singled to left. Gaetti then went to second on a wild pitch and scored on a double by Greg Gagne, who in turn came home on a single by pinch hitter Phil Hiatt. At that point, Pettitte’s day was done. He was replaced by Bob Wickman. The Yankees would go on to win the game 10–3.
Pettitte pitched four more times, all in relief, without a decision, and on May 16 he was optioned back to Columbus. Changing places with Pettitte was another rookie pitcher, right-hander Mariano Rivera, who had won one and lost one in four games at Columbus, all starts.
Rivera made his major league debut on May 23 in a start against the Angels in Anaheim, a debut best forgotten and, perhaps, an indication that Mariano was destined to be a reliever. The Angels knocked him out in the fourth inning, charged with five runs and eight hits, including a three-run homer by Jim Edmonds.
Three more starts followed. On May 28, he pitched a solid 5¹⁄³ innings at Oakland, allowed one run and seven hits and was the winner, 4–1. On June 6, at home against the Athletics, he pitched four innings, gave up seven runs and seven hits, and took the loss in an 8–6 defeat. On June 11, at home against Seattle, he was knocked out in the third inning, but the Yankees rallied to win 10–7. After the game, Rivera, nursing a sore right shoulder, was sent back to Columbus. Twenty-four days later came the eye-opener.
At the time, general manager Gene Michael was in negotiations with the Detroit Tigers for the acquisition of veteran left-hander David Wells. In discussing possible compensation for Wells, the Tigers had inquired about “that kid Rivera at Columbus.”
Michael recalled seeing reports from Columbus that had Rivera’s fastball clocked at 94 and 95 miles per hour. Michael was perplexed. The reading was some three and four miles per hour bet
ter than Rivera had previously recorded. Was this a mistake?
Doing his due diligence, Michael checked around with scouts from other teams. They confirmed the reports.
“Yeah,” said one scout, “that’s what our reports have.”
“I thought so,” said Michael who concluded that Rivera had finally built up his arm strength after his operation of a few years before.
“At that point there was no way I was trading him,” Michael said.
Instead, he made plans to bring Rivera back from Columbus and instructed manager Buck Showalter to clear a date for Rivera to start. It came against the White Sox in Chicago on the Fourth of July, George M. Steinbrenner’s 65th birthday. Mariano pitched eight innings, allowed no runs and two hits, and struck out 11 in a 4–1 victory that convinced even his most vocal detractors that the Yankees might have something special in the young Panamanian.
In his rookie season, Rivera would appear in 19 games, 10 of them starts, with mixed results. While he won five games and lost only three, he had a bloated earned run average of 5.51, allowed 11 home runs, walked 30 batters, and struck out only 51 in 67 innings—hardly the sort of numbers to conjure up images of greatness.
However, starting on August 1, the difference in his numbers between when he started a game and when he appeared in relief was stark. In two starts over 10 innings, he allowed 10 runs and 14 hits. In nine relief appearances, over 17 innings, he allowed eight runs and seven hits. And in his last six appearances covering six innings, he allowed three runs and two hits. A pattern had been established that soon would be familiar.
Pettitte returned from Columbus on May 27 to start against the Athletics in Oakland. He pitched 5¹⁄³ innings and allowed seven hits and three runs, one earned. He was the losing pitcher (his first major league decision) in a 3–0 defeat. His first victory came on June 7 in Yankee Stadium, when Pettitte pitched seven innings in a 6–1 victory over the Oakland Athletics. Pettitte took his regular turn in the starting rotation and would make 26 consecutive starts, winning 12, pitching three complete games, and averaging almost seven innings a start.
Pettitte’s 12–9 record and 4.17 ERA earned him a third-place finish in the American League Rookie of the Year voting behind Minnesota’s Marty Cordova and California’s Garret Anderson.
On May 29, Derek Jeter’s name appeared in a major league box score for the first time. He had been brought up from Columbus to replace veteran shortstop Tony Fernandez, who was placed on the disabled list with a strained ribcage muscle. Starting at shortstop and batting ninth against the Mariners in the Kingdome, Jeter was hitless in five at-bats—a pop-fly to short right field, a ground ball to shortstop, a line drive to right, a ground ball to second base, and a strikeout—in the Yankees 8–7 defeat in a four-hour-and-five-minute, 12-inning game.
Jeter got his first major league hit the following day. Leading off the top of the fifth, he sliced a ground ball through the left side off Tim Belcher and scored his first run later in the inning on a double by Jim Leyritz. A day later, again in the top of the fifth, he bagged his first major league RBI when he singled home Danny Tartabull, and this time it came against a brand name, “the Big Unit,” Randy Johnson, who would finish the season with a record of 18–2 and win his first of five Cy Young Awards, before ending his career with 303 wins, two no-hitters, and 4,875 strikeouts (second all-time to Nolan Ryan).
Jeter would start 13 consecutive games at shortstop, batting .234, with three doubles and six RBI before being sent back to Columbus on June 6. He would return to the Yankees in September and appear in two more games.
The last member of the Core Four, Jorge Posada, came to the Yankees as a September call-up in 1995 and managed to get into one game. On September 4 in Yankee Stadium, with the Yankees blowing out the Seattle Mariners 13–3, manager Buck Showalter made wholesale changes in the ninth inning. Russ Davis replaced Wade Boggs, Gerald Williams replaced Don Mattingly, and Derek Jeter came in and replaced Tony Fernandez at shortstop. Joe Ausanio, a right-handed pitcher from Kingston, New York, replaced Andy Pettitte on the mound. And Posada, making his major league debut, took over for Jim Leyritz behind the plate.
In announcing the changes, the stadium public address announcer introduced the new catcher as “Jorge Posado,” a slip of the tongue that would not be lost on his teammates, especially the impish Jeter. From that day on, the Yankees catcher had a nickname. He was “Sado.”
Greg Pirkl, the first batter to hit with Jorge Posada behind the plate in a major league game, popped to third. Chris Widger, the next batter, struck out for Posada’s first major league putout. Felix Fermin singled and Alex Diaz grounded out, first baseman Dion James to Ausanio, and Jorge Posada was the catcher on a winning team in a major league game on his way to shake hands with the pitcher for the first of hundreds of times.
Posada, Rivera, and Pettitte all saw some action in the postseason. Among the Core Four, only Jeter would not participate in the Division Series in which the Yankees were eliminated in five games by the Seattle Mariners.
The Yankees had jumped out in the Division Series by winning Game 1 at home, a 9–6 slugfest. They then sent rookie Pettitte to the mound to start Game 2, which turned into a 15-inning marathon. Although he wasn’t dominant, Pettitte managed to keep his team in the game, which would become a Pettitte trademark in the postseason. He left after seven innings with the score tied 4–4. John Wetteland, the Yankees’ closer and their third pitcher in the game, entered with one out and a runner on second in the top of the ninth and pitched out of the jam by striking out Vince Coleman and Luis Sojo.
Used ostensibly as a one-inning man in the regular season, Wetteland was still on the mound in the top of the 12th when, after disposing of the first two batters, he was tagged for a home run by Ken Griffey Jr., putting the Mariners ahead 5–4. When Edgar Martinez followed with a single, Wetteland was replaced by the rookie Mariano Rivera, who promptly struck out Jay Buhner to end the inning.
Down to their final out, the Yankees tied the score in the bottom of the 12th on an RBI double by Ruben Sierra that scored pinch-runner Posada with the tying run, and the game played on. So did Mariano Rivera. He would pitch 3¹⁄³ innings, allow only two hits, strike out five, and be credited with the win on Jim Leyritz’s two-run home run in the bottom of the 15th.
It was a portent, by far the most important performance of Rivera’s brief major league career to that point, and the first time he would show even a trace of the greatness that was to come over the next two decades. It also would become the center of criticism over Buck Showalter’s use (or lack thereof) of Rivera in the playoffs, which many believe cost the manager his job.
8. “Clueless Joe”
The 1996 season was one of transition for the New York Yankees. George Steinbrenner was still the man in charge, however, after his reinstatement following his two-year suspension and nearing his 66th birthday, he seemed content to begin the process of winding down and letting “the elephants into the tent.”
After five years as general manager, Gene Michael stepped down after the season to assume his preferred role as director of major league scouting. Bob Watson replaced Michael as general manager, ably assisted by young Brian Cashman, Michael’s right-hand man. Cashman would assume the same role under Watson, but they both continued to rely on Michael’s expertise in the area of player procurement to improve the team as he had done so skillfully in Steinbrenner’s absence.
Before leaving the GM’s office, Michael had begun the process of engineering several significant and vital deals in the off-season between the 1995 and 1996 seasons. With Don Mattingly in decline because of age and a chronic bad back, Michael identified his top priority as finding a replacement to take over first base for Mattingly. He settled on Tino Martinez of the Seattle Mariners. Looking to stock their roster with young talent, the Mariners were willing to part with Martinez and asked the Yankees for third baseman Russ Davis and a youn
g pitcher, either Sterling Hitchcock or Andy Pettitte.
Long a supporter of Pettitte, Michael held his ground and succeeded in persuading the Mariners to take Hitchcock in the deal along with Davis in exchange for Martinez and relief pitchers Jeff Nelson and Jim Mecir.
Michael was also instrumental in deals that brought catcher Joe Girardi in a trade with the Colorado Rockies; outfielder Tim Raines, who came over in a trade with the Chicago White Sox; pitcher David Cone, plucked from the Toronto Blue Jays for three minor leaguers; as well as second baseman Mariano Duncan and pitchers Kenny Rogers and Dwight Gooden, all signed as free agents.
For the stretch run of 1996, the Yankees would pick up sluggers Cecil Fielder in a trade with the Detroit Tigers, and Darryl Strawberry, purchased from the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League. They would also reacquire third baseman Charlie Hayes in a trade with the Pittsburgh Pirates (they had obtained Hayes from the Phillies for the 1992 season, but lost him in November of that year to the Colorado Rockies in the expansion draft).
But the most prominent acquisition (it also would prove to be the most important) was in the manager’s office, where young Buck Showalter had been for the previous four years. Given the reins at the age of 36 in 1992, Showalter improved the Yankees by five games and moved them up from fifth place in the American League East to fourth.
The improvement continued for the Yankees under Showalter over the next few years. He led the team to a second-place finish in 1993 with 88 wins, and in 1994 he was on his way to leading the Yankees to their first pennant in 13 years. On August 12, the Yankees had a record of 70–43 and a 6½ game lead over the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East when players walked off the job, touching off the longest and most damaging work stoppage in sports history. It caused the cancellation of more than 1,000 games, including the 1994 playoffs and World Series, and it would last 232 days and extend into the start of the 1995 season.
