Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  One Sunday morning, he took his entire family to the black church in town. “I’ll never forget all of us walking down the center aisle of the church and seeing the shocked expressions on the faces of people turn into smiles,” Buck Showalter said in a 2016 interview in the small office of his Dallas home. “I was never so proud of my father, and I knew right then what it meant to have honor and conviction.”

  Bill had his son accompany him to watch University of Alabama football games and encouraged him to observe Bear Bryant closely throughout the contests. On the drive back to Florida after one game, Buck told his father that he was surprised because Bryant was remarkably stoic on the sidelines.

  “Beware of coaches who do too much active coaching during games,” Bill Showalter said. “It means they didn’t do their jobs before the game.”

  Then Bill Showalter asked, “But do you think Bear was watching every single thing that happened on the field?”

  Answered Buck: “Like a hawk.”

  Bill Showalter smiled.

  As a lefty quarterback who mostly ran the football, Buck Showalter scored a lot of touchdowns for his high school team. He was also known for changing plays that his coach sent in from the sidelines. He did it at the line of scrimmage after assessing the defense, using code words he had explained to teammates in the huddle. It was a system rarely used in high school football in 1973, and at first Showalter’s coach protested.

  But on films of the games, the coach noticed that the revised plays Buck was calling were based on sound strategy and highly productive, too. He encouraged his quarterback to continue his role as a play caller, and the Century High School team lost only one game all season.

  But at five-foot-nine and 155 pounds, Showalter knew his future wasn’t in football. He instead accepted a baseball scholarship to Mississippi State, where he set the school’s record for batting average one season when he hit .459.

  Sometimes after a college game, a teammate would tell Buck he saw his father at the game, which was news to Buck.

  “He didn’t want to distract me or put pressure on me,” Buck said of his father. “So he would drive three or four hours to watch me play—standing way out by right field or somewhere I wouldn’t see him—and then drive home afterward.”

  Buck graduated from Mississippi State with a bachelor of science degree in education, in tribute to his father.

  The Yankees made Showalter a fifth-round draft pick, even though he was a lefty-hitting and lefty-throwing first baseman without much power. He became a lifetime .294 batter in seven minor league seasons. “He’d get 150 hits in 500 at-bats and every one would be a single,” said one of his minor league managers, and the future Yankees manager, Stump Merrill.

  And Showalter was known for sitting next to the manager during games so he could pepper him with questions. “He was very inquisitive about everything,” Merrill said. “He’d say, ‘Why’d we hit-and-run here? Why’d we steal there? Why aren’t we pitching around this guy? Why is the outfield playing back? Does it really make sense to bunt with a runner on first base and a lefty on the mound? Because the runner is going to get a bad jump.’ I’d wonder how he had time to do all that thinking and asking and play the game, too.”

  But questioning every baseball tenet was part of Showalter’s DNA. He wanted to try to verify with statistics or personal insight every strategy, theory or bromide the game had handed down through the years. Once, when he laced a blistering line drive right at an infielder for an out, he returned to the dugout and heard a familiar, age-old baseball maxim: “Don’t worry, Buck, the line drives and seeing-eye base hits even out over the season.”

  The adage is meant to describe how a batter, in the course of a season, will be credited with a certain number of base hits he does not deserve—weak grounders that nonetheless dribble into the outfield, for instance—and they will be offset by all the well-struck liners, long fly balls and hard grounders that become outs because of good fielding plays, good positioning by the defense or simple dumb luck.

  “I decided to keep track of every one of those incidences that happened to me one season to see if they did in fact even out,” Showalter told me years later.

  For the 1979 season, with the West Haven Yankees in southern Connecticut, Showalter had 526 plate appearances. He batted .279, with 51 runs batted in—a decent year. “But things did not even out,” Showalter said. “I had 15 more instances of bad luck. Give me those 15 hits, and I hit .311.”

  The next year, Showalter kept track again. He batted .324 with 82 RBI for the Yankees’ team in Nashville. “Everybody in the organization said I had rebounded with a great year,” Showalter said. “And it was a great year.”

  He laughed, then added: “But guess what? Things didn’t even out again—this time I got lucky 21 more times than I got unlucky. Take those away, and I hit .285, or pretty much the same as the season before.”

  Showalter wondered what other diagnostic tools or statistical analysis—quantifiable data—could help explain what was happening on a baseball diamond, and whether it would help predict the performance of a team or any given lineup of players. He started recording his findings in a notebook. “It taught me not to accept conventional wisdom,” he said. “I listened to everything my baseball elders told me—I even kept journals about what was said—but I wondered about all the things said that had gone unproven. Or the things nobody ever said or never thought of.”

  Meanwhile, his status with the Yankees was sagging. He was also behind two future stars on the Yankees’ first-base depth chart: the graceful, future American League MVP Don Mattingly and the lumbering but powerful Steve Balboni, who would end up hitting 181 home runs in the big leagues. Showalter probably could have latched on as a utility infielder, had he thrown right-handed.

  As Merrill said: “Buck was sneaky good. Once he weaseled his way into the lineup you couldn’t get him out of the lineup because he would get two or three hits every night. The next thing you know he’s played the whole year for you—and once he led the league in hitting.

  “But he didn’t have a natural position for a big league prospect because he didn’t hit enough home runs for a first baseman or a corner outfielder. And he wasn’t fast enough to play center field. But he surely knew how the game should be played. He was never surprised by any signal I’d give him—suicide squeeze, hit-and-run, whatever. He was way ahead of you. He was thinking along with the manager.”

  But Buck could also recognize who the truly gifted prospects were in the major leagues. Once, in a Class AA minor league game, he faced lefty starter Mark Langston, who was on his way to a sixteen-year major league career. Langston struck out Buck with a slider that broke so sharply he missed the ball by a foot.

  Buck called his father and said, “Dad, don’t sell the mules yet. I’ll be home shortly.”

  Or so he likes to tell the story, always with a self-deprecating laugh.

  But the reality was that in 1983, Buck’s batting average had dropped to .269 and Mattingly had already made an impressive debut at Yankee Stadium. The writing was on the wall. There were 21 position players on the Yankees’ top minor league team that year; all of them eventually made it to the major leagues except one. And that player, Buck Showalter, was released by the Yankees at the end of the season.

  “The year was not a total loss,” he said years later. “I got married that spring.”

  In early 1983, Buck had been demoted from the Yankees’ affiliate in Columbus to the team’s Class AA team in Nashville. Hours before one of his first home games that year in Nashville, he approached a pretty young blond woman named Angela McMahan, who was selling programs for the team.

  “He said he was new to the team and needed the program to learn the names of his teammates—what a line, huh?” Angela Showalter said, retelling the story. “Then he asked for the program for free. I said no. And he went into the clubhouse and got money.

  “I didn’t think too much of it—these minor league ballplayers co
me and go. But not long after, one of his roommates had a birthday party and I went to it. I saw him there, and the rest is history.

  “But I’ll tell you what. I was thrust into the baseball life right away. When we got married, I remember we left our church wedding reception, got in Buck’s car and drove to spring training. We left that afternoon.”

  While the Yankees in 1983 had cut Showalter loose as a player, they did ask him to work in the franchise’s instructional league for a year and then offered him a job as manager at the lowest level of the team’s minor league system. “I had watched Buck as a player since he was in college,” said Bill Livesey, the team’s scouting director in the early eighties, who had been promoted to vice president of scouting and player development. “The way he played, he was a coach out there already. He was that cerebral.”

  With Livesey’s urging, in 1985, the twenty-eight-year-old Showalter agreed to take over a ragtag team of first-year pros in the rolling hills of a flagging, former railroad town: Oneonta, New York.

  “We had a small little apartment in Oneonta and not much money, but I remember we bought a fairly new invention, the VCR,” Angela said more than thirty years later, referring to the videocassette recorder, which in the mid-eighties still cost a pricey $400. “We needed the VCR because Buck wanted to tape all the New York Yankees games. He would manage an Oneonta Yankees game, stick around in the clubhouse until all the players left and then come home.”

  Angela would make her husband a bologna sandwich, and Buck would sit up and watch the entire Yankees game on the VCR, because he felt it was important to understand where the top of the organization was headed. Also, the Yankees’ manager in 1985 was Billy Martin, who was already a dugout legend. Showalter studied him.

  Then, after dissecting the Yankees, Showalter would turn his television to another relatively new phenomenon: ESPN. There, in the dead of night, he could watch the cable network’s highlights of baseball games from around the country.

  Years later, Angela Showalter was asked if Buck had a favorite song.

  “The theme from ESPN SportsCenter,” she answered.

  Showalter’s Oneonta team had only two position players who would ever make it to the major leagues, and that duo combined to suit up a total of 58 big league games. The roster was a mix of raw kids out of high school, college prospects and castoffs from other organizations. The team sometimes had a Bad News Bears feel to it. Visiting Oneonta that summer, I thought I heard the players discuss batting technique around the pregame batting cage. There was talk about pulling your wrist in one direction as you moved your head and chin in the opposite direction.

  But it was not a baseball conversation. It turned out that the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were talking about something else they were learning: shaving their faces.

  The team was full of dreamers, including catcher Todd Ezold, who thought his future was not behind home plate but on the mound as a pitcher.

  Showalter told Ezold he would let him pitch at some point, but first he wanted to see him throw in the bullpen before a game. Ezold began to warm up, throwing from the bullpen mound to a teammate. Buck walked over and stood next to the catcher, as if he were in a batter’s box alongside the bullpen home plate. It was the best way to see what Ezold’s fastball looked like to a hitter. Buck didn’t see any danger in that. He’d made 3,292 plate appearances in the minor leagues and had been hit by a pitch just 15 times.

  But Ezold’s first pitch with Buck standing near the plate sailed inside and struck Buck just above his right ear. He was not wearing a helmet.

  As Showalter lay on the ground, he heard his salty pitching coach, Russ “Monk” Meyer, who’d had a long stint with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, say: “Don’t get up, Buck, there’s blood coming out of your ear. You’re pretty fucked up.”

  Showalter was whisked by ambulance to the nearest hospital, which was in Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  “It was not exactly how I planned to get to Cooperstown in a baseball uniform,” he later said.

  He was back with the team a few days later. But to this day, he has some trouble hearing out of his right ear. If someone is speaking to him in a crowded, noisy place, he will crook his head so that his good ear is free to hear the conversation.

  If the 1985 Oneonta team was an irregular bunch, the players nonetheless listened to their young skipper. He treated them like men, even if many were still boys, and he was still Bill Showalter’s son, which is to say he was a disciplinarian. He might have been close enough in age to be their older brother, but he wanted to lead his charges, not be their friend.

  And Showalter’s band of young misfits won more than 70 percent of their games and the league championship. The next year at Oneonta, with different players, Showalter’s Yankees won more than 76 percent of their games and another championship. Promoted to the Yankees’ Class A farm affiliate in Fort Lauderdale in 1987, he won another minor league championship. Sent up the ladder again, this time to Class AA Albany, New York, he set a record for wins in a league that had been around for seventy-five years. And he won yet another league title.

  Decades later, Showalter would point to his five seasons as a minor league manager as a formative period when he was allowed to develop his own style of managing. “You’re in a little town in upstate New York and you’re really there all by yourself,” he said. “Especially back then, before the widespread use of video. What you are doing or what you were trying to do was unseen by your bosses. They got reports, but as the manager, as the guy sitting in the front of the bus, you’re all by yourself.

  “But I learned that it’s really about what you do when nobody is looking that shapes you. You get a lot of opportunities to do the right thing or the wrong thing when nobody’s looking. And how you respond to that, it can set the course for everything to follow.”

  Showalter’s record as a minor league manager was 360-207, a winning percentage of .635. His teams won 14 of 18 postseason games.

  Clete Boyer had been a Yankee All-Star infielder who became a roving instructor in the team’s minor leagues and was a coach for Billy Martin in 1988. In 1990, Oakland Athletics manager Tony La Russa was widely considered the greatest baseball mind working in a dugout. Said Boyer that year: “I wouldn’t say Showalter is better than Tony La Russa. But I’d say he and La Russa are the two best managers around. He’s just got a great knack for the game. He’s like Billy Martin. He keeps other guys off balance.”

  Boyer also knew that Martin was fond of Showalter and had taken him under his wing during spring training in 1988.

  Granted, Showalter, who did not drink much, was the perfect designated driver for Martin’s hard-drinking crew during their late-night escapades. And Showalter still tells stories of dumping half a dozen drinks in potted plants when no one was looking, so he could survive trips to “dinner” with Martin that, in fact, never included eating.

  But during the day, Martin also had Showalter walk around the Yankees’ training complex with him, schooling him on finer points of the game. He had Buck sit next to him during exhibition games, and Martin never turned away a question. “I thought I was pretty observant,” Showalter said. “Billy opened my eyes to all the other things I wasn’t seeing from the dugout. He talked about reading a pitcher’s front foot to know when a base runner could break for second base on a steal. He talked about not just following the ball on a play but watching the fielders.

  “Take a ball that one of your guys hits into the right-center-field gap. Billy said don’t watch the ball; you know it’s going to be a double or a triple. Watch to see if the pitcher is backing up third base. Is the left fielder moving? Are the relay guys in the proper order? How are the outfielders’ and infielders’ arms? You have a checklist of things to look for that might tell you something that you can use later.”

  Martin taught Showalter one of his favorite managerial sayings: Preparation always shows itself in the spontaneity of the moment.

 
; And Billy Martin schooled Showalter in a manager’s most magical advantage: stealing the other manager’s signs to his players and coaches.

  “Every team has the batter give a return signal to the third-base coach that acknowledges that a bunt or a hit-and-run is on,” Showalter said, recalling part of Martin’s sign-stealing advice. “If you watch, you can pick up the return signal—the batter taps his cleats or touches the brim of his cap. The key is to watch closely early in the game when they’re not doing any of those things, then notice the difference later in the game when more of those kinds of plays are going on.”

  Others in the Yankees chain of command started to recognize Showalter’s skill at stealing signs. “Buck was probably the best I’ve seen other than Billy, who was just a genius at it,” said Gene Michael, who was then a team scout and an adviser to George Steinbrenner. “Buck’s baseball IQ was extremely high; he was way ahead of the curve for someone so young. More than that, you could just see that the wheels were always turning in his head. He was kind of plotting a course, always thinking ahead.”

  Michael would know, since he was doing the same thing. The Yankees needed all the help they could get when it came to someone making a plan and having the fortitude to stick to it.

  And as it happened, the Yankees brass had plans for their precocious strategist from the Florida panhandle. Buck Showalter just didn’t know it yet.

  4

  Stumped

  SIX WEEKS INTO the 1990 season, the Yankees were already in last place, six games under .500 and seven games out of first place. Pascual Pérez, the team’s enigmatic ace, pitched five shutout innings and won his first start of the year, but left his third start with a shoulder spasm. A day later, he was on the disabled list, where he would remain for the rest of the season.