Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  In late April, reeling from a string of losses, the team traded for Claudell Washington, who at thirty-five years old was in the last of his 17 major league seasons. The lefty-swinging Washington was there to platoon in left field with Winfield, who had recently gone 0-for-20.

  Washington turned out to be a dreadful experiment. He went 8-for-55 in his first month as a Yankee.

  The team’s defense was no more efficient. The rookie third baseman Mike Blowers made four errors in one game, which led to five unearned runs and another defeat.

  Everyone in the American League seemed to be beating up on the Yankees. The defending World Series champion Oakland A’s, with Rickey Henderson leading the way, were already 6-0 against the Yankees.

  In late May, Winfield was traded to the California Angels for pitcher Mike Witt, who, in keeping with recent Yankees tradition when it came to trades, was a couple of seasons from ending his career. Winfield was less than two years away from hitting .290 and driving in 108 runs for the Toronto Blue Jays. He also had an extra-inning RBI double that won the 1992 World Series for Toronto. Winfield would play until he was forty-three years old.

  Dent had pushed for the Winfield trade, something not forgotten by the team’s owner.

  Early in 1990, most everything the Yankees did came off as clownish. Late in one game, Dent used a pinch hitter for his last available infielder, then had to play backup catcher Rick Cerone at second base, where Cerone had never before played. A miscue by Cerone as he tried to turn a double play led to another Yankees defeat.

  The dynamic rookie Deion Sanders, the future pro football Hall of Famer, was inserted into another game when the Yankees needed a stolen base. And Sanders did steal second base, to set up a potential game-tying hit by the next Yankees batter, Steve Sax. Except Sanders, on his own, broke for third base before Sax could swing the bat. The inning, the scoring threat and, in essence, the game ended when Sanders was thrown out at third.

  The bad news was piling up on the beleaguered Dent, whom Steinbrenner never expected to last the 1990 season anyway. In late 1989, Steinbrenner had told Billy Martin to stay ready, that he would be back for a sixth tour as Yankees manager, “when Bucky screws up.”

  That idea expired with Martin when he died in an auto accident on Christmas Day in 1989. But Steinbrenner’s faith in Dent remained just as shaky.

  On Monday, June 4, the Yankees went to Boston’s Fenway Park and lost their third consecutive game. They lost again to the Red Sox the next day. The Yankees had the worst record in baseball.

  Not surprisingly, George wanted to make a change in the dugout. But the usual suspects were not available. Piniella was succeeding in his first year as manager of the Reds. Michael had long ago adamantly refused to manage again. Bob Lemon was long retired. Davey Johnson, a proven winner, had recently been fired by the Mets, but he was known as a players’ manager who did not enforce strict rules—one of the reasons the Mets let him go—and that turned off Steinbrenner.

  The New York newspapers could not figure out who Dent’s heir apparent would be. But George had already hatched a secret plan for Dent’s successor, one that few in the Yankees brain trust knew about until the early days of June.

  George had been thinking about it for weeks.

  In 1990, the manager of the Yankees’ Class AAA minor league team in Columbus, Ohio, was Carl Harrison “Stump” Merrill. Columbus was the home of George’s wife, Joan, and George made frequent trips to Columbus to see his in-laws.

  This was Merrill’s second term as Columbus manager, and he had first met Steinbrenner in 1984.

  “George came to one of our home games and he was sitting right next to the dugout,” Merrill said in 2017, sitting in the lobby of his hotel a mile from the Yankees’ Tampa spring training complex, where he acts as a special instructor. “I forget which player it was, but one of the players hits a single and tries to stretch it into a double. He slides into second but he’s out. That ends the inning, and the player heads to right field for the next inning.

  “Back then, George had a strict rule that our pant legs had to be bloused, which means the socks and stirrups must show at least to the shins. This kid, when he slid into second, one of his pant legs unbloused, so he’s standing in right field with one pant leg down to his shoes.

  “About three minutes later, I was told to go over to where Mr. Steinbrenner was sitting, and I said to myself, ‘This is great. I’m going to get to meet the boss. Maybe he wants to tell me what a good job I’m doing.’

  “I get over there and George asks, ‘Who the fuck is your right fielder?’”

  Stump gave George the player’s name.

  “Well,” George said, “you tell him if he doesn’t fucking blouse his pants he’ll be on the next fucking plane out of here. You got that?”

  Stump laughed telling the story, adding, “I just said ‘Yes, sir.’ And that was my introduction to the world of George Steinbrenner.”

  But Stump, who is five-foot-eight and picked up his nickname as a star catcher at the University of Maine in the mid-1960s, became something of a Steinbrenner favorite, at least for a minor league manager. And with good reason.

  Beginning in 1978, Stump managed at four different levels of the Yankees’ farm system, from rookie league to Class AAA. His teams had finished in first place at each level, including a streak of seven consecutive regular-season championships, from ’78 to ’84. And George Steinbrenner liked winning at everything.

  Stump had also won a championship in 1989, and his Columbus team was humming along at the top of the standings in May 1990 when George was a frequent visitor. George’s father-in-law, who had been a prominent real estate developer, had died, and it took several trips to Columbus to settle the estate. Steinbrenner became a regular in Merrill’s office.

  “One day George leaned forward and said to me, ‘Do you think you could handle our major league team?’” Merrill said. “And I said, ‘I think I can.’ And he says, ‘Don’t be watching the scoreboard for our results, but if we keep losing, we’re going to make a change. And I’m talking to you about that now.’”

  Stump admitted that he could not help but watch the Yankees spiraling down the American League East standings. And sure enough, he got the call on June 5 to meet the Yankees in Boston the next day, because he was going to succeed Bucky Dent.

  The mercilessness of firing Dent while he was in Boston, the scene of Dent’s greatest triumph, apparently did not occur to the Yankees’ owner.

  But Merrill almost did not make the Boston news conference that would name him the new manager—the eighteenth managerial change in the eighteen years Steinbrenner had owned the team.

  “The Yankees had arranged to leave an airline ticket for me at the Columbus airport so I could fly to Boston,” Merrill said. “But the ticket said ‘Stump Merrill.’ And I needed an ID to pick it up and my driver’s license reads, ‘Carl Merrill.’

  “They won’t let me on the plane. They kept talking about my alias. The airline was adamant: ‘No, sir, no way you’re getting on the plane.’ And I’m thinking that if I don’t get on that flight I’m going to be the first Yankees manager fired before he even gets to his first game.”

  Eventually, someone at the Columbus airport got in touch with the Yankees and Stump boarded his flight. His welcome in Boston was rocky. Inside the visiting manager’s office at Fenway Park later that day, reporters were disbelieving.

  One reporter asked Merrill how long he thought it would be before he was fired.

  “Really? On the first day you ask that?” Stump said.

  A New York tabloid the next day had a headline that read, “Stump Who?”

  It was a reasonable question, especially since every recent Yankees manager had been a prominent baseball figure and every Yankees manager since 1965 had at least played in the major leagues.

  Stump had underwhelming playing statistics: a lifetime .234 batting average in six minor league seasons.

  A Maine native and born on t
he coastline, he speaks with the same thick accent as the local lobstermen he worked alongside as a boy when he wasn’t playing baseball and football. Recruited by the University of Maine, where he played both sports, he was at practice one day, walking with a six-foot-six teammate. His college coach, Jack Butterfield, was the one who remarked that his catcher, beside his tall teammate, looked like a stump.

  “And nicknames stay with you in baseball,” Stump said. “The only people who call me Carl are the ones I went to high school with.”

  Those are the folks who recall Merrill as a talented athlete who played with a scrappiness that seemed to have intensified after his father died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack when Merrill was a high school freshman. “I never thought I was that close to my father,” Stump said many years later. “I found out how wrong I was.”

  He attended the University of Maine in part because Butterfield, aware that Stump’s mother was working two jobs to support her four children, arranged for cheap lodging, at $30 a month. One year, Butterfield let Stump stay at his own home.

  As a junior at the 1964 College World Series, Stump led Maine to upsets of Southern Cal and Arizona State and a third-place finish, a rare feat for a Northeastern institution, let alone one with a campus where the snow did not melt until April.

  Stump became a second-round draft pick of the Philadelphia Phillies, but a knee injury stalled his career. He did play in six leagues and five states in a minor league odyssey that was highly educational for the perceptive and quick-witted Merrill. He played for several managers, trying to pick up something from every one, including his last, Lou Kahn, who had played an astounding seventeen years in the minor leagues, from 1936 to 1953.

  But it was Butterfield, who became the Yankees’ director of player development and scouting in 1977, who brought Merrill into the Yankees fold. And that, too, was something that always endeared Merrill to Steinbrenner, because Steinbrenner personally recruited Butterfield to the Yankees after Butterfield left Maine to coach at the University of South Florida.

  Butterfield died in an auto accident in November 1979, just after Merrill’s second year of managing in the Yankees minors. Showalter was on that team, as was future Yankees starter and closer Dave Righetti.

  Showalter went with Merrill when he was moved on to the Nashville Sounds, where the roster included Mattingly. But by 1981, the big star on that team was a fleet, switch-hitting outfielder, Willie McGee, the Yankees’ 1977 first-round draft choice, who batted .322 with 63 RBI.

  Merrill nurtured a lot of top Yankees talent in those years and gritted his teeth when they were traded away. McGee, for example, was traded in 1981 to the St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Bob Sykes. McGee would go on to win two National League batting titles and the 1985 NL Most Valuable Player award before retiring after eighteen major league seasons with 2,254 hits and 352 stolen bases. Sykes never pitched for the Yankees but did eventually compile a forgettable 23-26 career major league record.

  As McGee said in a 2016 interview: “In the Yankee organization as a minor leaguer, we were always told that if you were good enough, you’d make it. But back then everybody knew that getting traded somewhere else was your best bet because the Yankees then were signing free agents instead of going with young players.”

  Toiling away in the minors, Merrill tried to remind himself that he was still helping the big league club by developing the down-on-the-farm Yankees. But he scratched his mostly balding head from time to time in befuddlement. “There were some frustrating trades of young talent we had nurtured,” Merrill said of his time in the minors. “You hoped we’d learn our lesson eventually.”

  He kept his head down and stayed busy. Every fall, he returned to Maine, where he refereed high school basketball games, helped coach the football team at tiny Bowdoin College and jogged through the often snow-covered streets of his hometown of Topsham (population 9,000), where he lived on Merrymeeting Road, across the street from his brother.

  “It was a good life,” he said in 2017, looking back. But he also recalled that his wife, Carole, spent every winter trying to persuade him to use his two college degrees to become a teacher instead of a baseball lifer.

  He would argue: “But I’m already good at what I do. I loved what I was doing.”

  Replied Carole: “Just so you know that you’ll never manage the New York Yankees. You have to be famous or a great ex–major leaguer to do that.”

  “I don’t care,” Stump said. “It’s not on my bucket list.”

  Still, summer after summer, the victories kept piling up for Stump’s minor league teams. Finally, in 1985, he was promoted to Yogi Berra’s Yankees coaching staff. But Steinbrenner fired Berra after just 16 games that season, and Billy Martin, the new manager, sent Stump back to the minors.

  Stump was back with the Yankees when Lou Piniella became the manager in 1986, and coached first base for parts of the next two seasons. He was expecting to return to that job in 1988, but Steinbrenner fired Piniella and hired Martin again. Stump was out. “George fired Billy five times, but I might be the only guy that Billy fired twice,” Stump said with a smirk.

  Back in the minors, he was dispatched to the Yankees’ affiliate in northern Virginia, where the team was floundering and 10 games under .500. By the season’s end, Stump had another championship team.

  And then, one June day in 1990, he was the forty-six-year-old Yankee skipper in the visiting clubhouse at Fenway Park.

  Carole Merrill drove down from her modest home on Merrymeeting Road and stood beneath the Fenway grandstands that evening with a look of shock and wonder. “Never in a million years,” she said, shaking her head with a smile. “Never dreamed this.”

  Earlier that day, in a room at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, Buck Showalter’s wife, Angela, was sobbing. Buck had just told her that Dent was going to be fired. Word had leaked that Stump was on his way to Boston, but none of Dent’s coaches—and that included the eye-in-the-sky coach—knew of their fate.

  Buck expected to be let go along with the rest of the coaching staff, which was customary. Angela quickly recalled the June rent she had already paid back in New York, money she could barely afford even when Buck had a job. She had considered the trip to Boston a fun perk; she wanted to show the city’s historic sites to her four-year-old daughter, Allie. Now, in tears, Angela started packing to check out of the hotel, wondering where they would be going next.

  Back to the minors? To another organization? To what?

  Buck, the son of a decorated Army veteran, was not going to be dismissed out of uniform. “I went to Fenway at 11 that morning, put on my uniform and sat at my locker,” he said. “I figured, I’m going to be at work if they come to fire me. I’m not going to be sitting around somewhere.”

  George Bradley, one of the team’s front-office executives, approached his locker to tell him that he was soon going to be named the new third-base coach under Stump—and he would be the hitting coach until another hitting coach was hired. Oh, and his salary would be doubled.

  “I went from not having a job to making $100,000 and having to work in the third-base coaching box at Fenway Park that very night,” Showalter said twenty-seven years later, his eyes widening as he told the story.

  It was about five years before cell phones would be ubiquitous, so Buck had no easy way of reaching Angela. There was a phone in the manager’s office—not available amid the tumult of the day—and one other phone in a hallway near that office, but that was in constant use by Yankees officials as they arranged Dent’s exit news conference and Stump’s first briefing with New York and Boston reporters.

  The clubhouse was soon a madhouse. And Showalter had a new job to prepare for.

  “I was scared shitless,” he said.

  He never did phone Angela.

  “I didn’t know what was going on, but I had a ticket to the game so I figured I better go,” she said, recalling the day many years later. “No news was good news, right?”

  At her seat wi
th Allie, she looked onto the field as the game was about to begin and saw her husband in uniform on the top step of the Yankees’ dugout. That had never happened before. Not at game time.

  Then Buck jogged across the diamond and stood in the third-base coaching box. And that’s how she learned that Buck had not been fired—and he had a new, prominent job, too.

  “When I got back to the hotel I told her that my salary had been doubled,” Buck said. “We almost went crazy.”

  In his pregame press briefing, Stump had said: “My main concern is to get them to playing and having fun. I’m not saying anything against Bucky—I don’t want to throw darts—but from watching them, it looked like a listless ball club from what I saw.”

  He added, “But I’m not someone thrown here from outer space that’s going to perform a miracle.”

  Indeed. The Yankees went out and lost the game that night. And three more after that, extending the team’s losing streak to eight games. They had also lost 12 of their last 13. That led to a streak of 18 defeats in 22 games. By the last days of June, the Yankees were 15 games out of first place and 17 games under .500. Some Yankees home games were now drawing about 10,000 or less, though the official paid attendance was announced as closer to 20,000.

  That might not have been the worst news for George Steinbrenner. Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent had recently received the report of John Dowd, the Pete Rose investigator, who was looking into Steinbrenner’s $40,000 payment to Howie Spira for incriminating evidence on Dave Winfield’s foundation. Vincent now wanted Steinbrenner to appear at a hearing in his office on July 5, one day after Steinbrenner’s sixtieth birthday.

  One New York newspaper wrote that Vincent had already decided to ban Steinbrenner for one year, which Vincent denied. “George has yet to make his presentation,” the commissioner said.

  But there was an unmistakable uneasiness enveloping the 1990 Yankees, an almost palpable cloak of doom. The bad karma was mounting.

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