Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Dazed and Confused

  ANDY HAWKINS WAS never supposed to be the Yankees’ starting pitcher on July 1 in Chicago. He wasn’t even supposed to have a Yankee uniform.

  On June 5, the day before Stump Merrill was hired, Hawkins had pitched miserably—again. His 1990 ERA had ballooned to 8.56. His ERA in his last two starts was 45.00 (10 earned runs in two innings pitched).

  So the Yankees offered Hawkins a choice: be demoted to the minor leagues or be released. As a nine-year veteran, the team could not demote him without his permission.

  Hawkins, who would still receive the $1.2 million the Yankees agreed to pay him in 1990, chose to be released. He had packed his bags and was awaiting a flight home to Texas.

  Then Mike Witt was injured, again. The Yankees needed Hawkins after all. Unpack your bags, they told him. He was still under contract.

  Hawkins rebounded with four good starts in succession. Same guy, different results.

  So Hawkins was confident when he took the mound at Comiskey Park before 30,642 fans on July 1. It was 70 degrees. As the day went on, the wind blew in from the outfield with gusts up to 25 and 30 miles an hour.

  “First of all, there might have never been a no-hitter—we wouldn’t be talking about this game if not for the wind,” Hawkins told Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the game in 2015. “Because in the third inning, Sammy Sosa hit a fly ball that might have gone five hundred feet. It was a certain home run. But instead, the wind blew it back into the ballpark and it was caught for an out.”

  Jim Leyritz, a catcher/third baseman by trade, who was making just his third start in left field for the Yankees that season, zigzagged his way under the Sosa fly ball and caught it a few feet in front of the wall separating the field from the Comiskey Park picnic area, where fans ate barbecue and drank beer in a courtyard.

  In the Yankees’ broadcast booth, Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Famer whose first professional baseball game was in 1937, watched the flight of Sosa’s fly ball and said, “That was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”

  Actually, the crazy was only beginning.

  Hawkins breezed along for several innings, needing only seven pitches to induce three ground-ball outs in the fourth inning and overcoming two walks in the fifth inning without letting a Chicago base runner past second base. “I knew I was pitching a no-hitter,” Hawkins said, admitting that he wasn’t used to looking at the scoreboard and seeing all zeros, “because Greg Hibbard was pitching a no-hitter for the White Sox, too.”

  The Yankees’ first hit came with one out in the sixth inning. Hawkins retired Chicago in order, with 10 pitches, in the bottom of the sixth and threw just 17 pitches in a hitless seventh inning. The game was scoreless entering the bottom of the eighth.

  The first two White Sox batters in the eighth hit pop-ups over the infield. Yankees second baseman Steve Sax wobbled as he tried to stay with the pop-ups in the windy conditions but corralled each one into his glove.

  Rizzuto’s comment at the time? “Everything in the air is an adventure out there right now.”

  So it was perhaps a blessing that Sosa, the next batter, rapped a bouncing grounder right at Yankees third baseman Mike Blowers.

  It was a routine play for a major league third baseman, and Blowers backhanded the ball, but it popped out of his glove and fell at his feet. He snatched the baseball from the infield dirt and fired a strong throw to first base, but Sosa, who was about 35 pounds lighter than he would become in baseball’s approaching steroids era, clearly beat Blowers’s throw with a head-first slide.

  It was initially called a hit by the official scorer, Bob Rosenberg. Protests in the press box and in the Yankee dugout—the howling of players and coaches could be heard one level up, in the open-air press box—led to a reversal: It was an error. Forevermore.

  Blowers had made 106 errors in four seasons as a minor league infielder, or about one every four games. But he had some power and the Yankees stuck with him. Now he had opened a door for the White Sox. “I didn’t know what to say or do,” Blowers, a rookie, said. “It was a no-hitter. I had never been through this before.”

  Hawkins was not concerned. “No big deal—two outs,” Hawkins, who has replayed the game for countless reporters, said in an interview many years later. “I was feeling good. No fatigue. I felt great.”

  His apparent calm was believable. At thirty years old, Hawkins was far from a greenhorn. The July 1 start was the 220th of his major league career. Before joining the Yankees as a free agent from San Diego in 1989, he had three seasons with 10 or more victories. He won a game for the Padres in the 1984 World Series, the first World Series victory in the franchise’s history.

  Hawkins was seasoned enough to be careful with the next Chicago hitter, the pesky, clever shortstop Ozzie Guillén, who would be playing in the All-Star Game in another nine days. Hawkins worked Guillén to a 3-2 count, but eventually walked him.

  As the tension mounted, Hawkins walked the next batter, Lance Johnson, on four pitches, to load the bases.

  Leyritz was an undrafted rookie who had played 363 games in the Yankees minor leagues—most of them for Buck Showalter. In just 32 of those games he had been asked to play the outfield. “Jim usually was in the outfield because of an injury or a substitution,” Showalter said. “He was an athletic guy, but we didn’t try him in the outfield at all until 1989.” But it is also true that Leyritz had made a dandy sliding catch on the first play of the bottom of the first inning. Then again, no one at the time thought of it as saving the no-hitter.

  The situation, and the pressure, was different now. The bases were loaded in a scoreless game that was also a no-hitter.

  Hawkins’s first pitch to Chicago’s lefty-swinging Robin Ventura was slapped toward Leyritz. It was a high, lazy fly ball ten feet short of the warning track. In his pursuit of the ball, Leyritz at first turned his back to the infield and started running to his left as he looked over his right shoulder. Then he spun to his right with a crossover step and faced the ball as he backpedaled.

  But the wind gusts were pushing the fly ball around in the sky. Soon Leyritz had turned again, running toward his right and looking over his left shoulder.

  Finally, Leyritz appeared to have squared up and zeroed in on the descending ball, pausing as he raised his glove to about head high. The whole sequence, from contact with Ventura’s bat to contact with Leyritz’s glove, took 5.3 seconds. And at the end, the ball sharply ricocheted off the top of his glove, as if the mitt were made of steel, not soft leather. Leyritz amplified the sense of tragicomedy with a pratfall that sent him to his knees. In an instant, the ball was a dozen feet from Leyritz, bounding through the grass toward the left-field foul line.

  Most of the fans in Comiskey’s left-field picnic courtyard threw up their hands. One dropped his beer. Another put both hands on the top of her head, as if aghast at what she had just witnessed.

  Rizzuto’s call was classic. “Leyritz going back,” he said, then yelped, “Don’t fall!”

  Finally: “Whoa, he dropped it.”

  Leyritz had a good postgame explanation. Even if it revealed his confusion, or the effect of the wind. “I thought it was to my left, then I thought it was to my right, and then I didn’t catch it,” he said.

  Three runs scored on the play.

  Iván Calderón was the next hitter, and he looped a soft fly ball to right fielder Jesse Barfield, who was one of the league’s best outfielders and had already won two Gold Gloves.

  Barfield did not have trouble with the wind. But he did struggle to find the ball in the sun. Barfield tentatively tracked the fly ball, then turned and shied away from it as he raised his hand to shade the sun. At the last minute, he stabbed at the orb going past him and the ball deflected off his glove for the third error of the inning.

  Ventura scored. The White Sox were ahead, 4–0. They had not hit one ball hard in the inning.

  As Rizzuto said after Barfield’s miscue: “W
hat’s coming off here? It’s still a no-hitter.”

  Dan Pasqua, an ex–Yankees phenom, popped up in the infield for the third out.

  Hawkins walked off the field still throwing a no-hitter.

  In the dugout, Hawkins found Leyritz and told him to forget about his gaffe, blaming the wind. Then he went to Barfield and blamed the sun.

  “Classiest thing I’d ever seen,” Stump Merrill said of Hawkins’s reaction.

  Only three Yankees batted in the ninth inning, with the last two outs coming on a double play.

  Hawkins was immediately congratulated for his no-hitter in the Yankees’ dugout afterward, shaking hands with nearly every player. Interviewed on the field by local broadcasters, Hawkins was cheered by the White Sox fans who had remained in the stands. Which led to something that may never have happened before: The visiting, losing pitcher who held the home team without a hit doffed his cap to the home fans, thankful that they were cheering him.

  Hawkins admitted to being thunderstruck afterward. “Reporters were asking me how I felt, and frankly I didn’t know how I felt,” he said during an interview in 2015, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the game. “I felt kind of in shock about the whole thing. What are you supposed to feel?

  “It’s not how I envisioned a no-hitter. Obviously, you expect to win in that situation and come off the field in jubilation. That’s not what happened.”

  When his playing career ended in 1991, Hawkins became a pitching coach for the Texas Rangers. Like a lot of coaches, his assignment kept changing. By 2010, he had been a pitching coach for several Class AAA minor league teams affiliated with various major league clubs.

  In a 2017 interview, he conceded that the no-hitter in a loss has come up often during his coaching career. Minor league pitchers Hawkins has tutored will inquire about his major league career, and he will talk about winning a World Series game for the San Diego Padres and his 18-8 record in 1985.

  But those same young pitchers will eventually go to social media or Google to look up Andy Hawkins and come across the eight-inning no-hitter. “They usually ask about that game at some point,” Hawkins said. “And I tell them about it. I mean, it did happen. It’s part of baseball history.”

  But at the time, in the wake of the game on July 1, 1990, Hawkins remained dumbfounded by the circumstances. As he entered the clubhouse after the game, his teammates gave him a standing ovation. Hawkins offered an uneasy smile. “I feel dazed,” he said.

  The next day, George Steinbrenner called and offered to buy him a car. Hawkins said thanks, but declined. The TV shows Good Morning America and Late Night with David Letterman each called and wanted to have him as a guest. He said thanks, and declined again.

  “It didn’t feel like I was being recognized for the right thing,” he said.

  In Hawkins’s next start, he fared almost as well as he did in Chicago, pitching 11⅔ innings before losing to Minnesota, 2–0.

  The next time Hawkins pitched, again against the White Sox but at Yankee Stadium, Chicago starter Mélido Pérez—the brother of the Yankees’ Pascual Pérez—pitched a rain-shortened, six-inning no-hitter as the White Sox won, 8–0. “It bothers me a little because I think I could have pitched a whole game without a hit,” Pérez said. “But it’s still a no-hitter.” (Until, that is, baseball changed its definition of a no-hitter the next year, with a new ruling that required the pitcher to pitch nine innings.)

  But in the wake of Pérez’s rare performance, and given that he was part of another no-hitter that left a bad taste in his mouth, Hawkins, whose record was now 1-7, seemed understandably stunned. “I don’t know what to say—this has been a crazy year,” he said in the Yankees’ locker room, tossing his cap in his locker and running his hands nervously through his hair. “I mean, what else is going to happen?”

  6

  Banished

  GEORGE STEINBRENNER CELEBRATED his sixtieth birthday on the weekend before his actual Fourth of July birthday, at a lavish gala in a hotel outside Ocala, Florida, where he owned a prosperous horse farm. More than two hundred guests attended. At one point, a large video screen showed the opening scene from the movie Patton, which was perhaps Steinbrenner’s favorite film.

  The scene shows Patton in uniform and wearing a helmet in front of an enormous American flag, which became the lasting image of the 1970 Academy Award–winning movie. On this night, however, when the camera zoomed in on the general, everyone in the room saw Steinbrenner’s face under the helmet, not Patton’s.

  It was a rare, carefree, lighthearted highlight for Steinbrenner in 1990. On his birthday, the Yankees lost again, 13–6, to Kansas City, which dropped their record to 28-48.

  George also flew to New York that day. He was to report for a hearing before Fay Vincent in Manhattan the next morning.

  The two men were actually old associates, if not quite friends. Both had graduated from Williams College, an elite liberal arts institution in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. They had communicated and did small favors for each other over the years, as Steinbrenner took over his father’s American Ship Building Company and bought the Yankees, and Vincent became a finance lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the chief executive of Columbia Pictures and the executive vice president of Coca-Cola.

  But they were also very different men from disparate backgrounds.

  Francis T. Vincent Jr. was the son of a Connecticut telephone company employee who dug the holes for telephone poles. His father, also called Fay, had grown up poor but had been a western Connecticut baseball and football star who attended the refined Hotchkiss prep school and Yale University on what amounted to athletic scholarships. Graduating during the Depression, Fay Sr. felt lucky to have a secure job at a utility company, even if it meant his family lived a frugal life. On weekends, he worked baseball and football games, even NFL games, as a respected umpire and referee. He was the man who made the rulings that changed games, the arbiter of right and wrong.

  His son, called “Little Fay” despite being six-foot-three and 230 pounds as a young teen, revered his father and tagged along to the weekend games, developing an affinity for the tough job that officials of all kinds in sports face when they have to make important decisions. Fay Jr. also became an ardent Yankees fan. He made pilgrimages to Yankee Stadium from his New Haven home and grew to idolize Joe DiMaggio.

  Fay Jr. was a football prospect at Hotchkiss who spurned Yale—and the shadow left there by his father, who had been captain of the football and baseball teams—to attend Williams.

  At Williams, Vincent played tackle on the freshman football team in 1956 and looked forward to his time with the varsity. (Freshmen were not eligible for NCAA varsity football until 1972.) But that winter, a roommate, in a prank, locked Vincent in his third-floor dormitory room. Fay climbed out a window, planning to tiptoe three feet across a narrow ledge to an open window of a neighbor. But the ledge was icy and Vincent fell forty feet, crushing two vertebrae. The mishap left him temporarily paralyzed and ended his athletic career. He kept a cane at his side forevermore. It was the only way he could walk.

  Steinbrenner, who was eight years older than Vincent, literally sprinted through his time at Williams. His father, Henry, had been an Olympic-level hurdler and insisted that his son run the same grueling race, periodically arranging for the four-time Olympic gold medalist Harrison Dillard to train George.

  George had come to Williams from Cleveland by way of the Culver Military Academy in northern Indiana. His father, who was also a marine engineering scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was strict, austere and domineering—a dictatorial style that exasperated George, even if he nonetheless adopted it himself as an adult. “George was not touchy-feely,” Hal Steinbrenner, George’s son, said in 2017. “And he got that from his father.”

  Besides being a fixture on the Williams track team, Steinbrenner spent one season as a halfback on the football team. He wrote a sports column in the college newspaper, playe
d the piano in the band and sang with the glee club, standing one row in front of Stephen Sondheim, who would go on to become perhaps the best-known composer in American musical theater.

  “I had a better singing voice than Stephen,” Steinbrenner insisted in a 1980 New York magazine story.

  George did not join his father’s shipbuilding empire after his college graduation in 1952 but instead spent four years as an assistant football coach for Northwestern and Purdue universities. (After a winless season at Northwestern, Steinbrenner was fired.) George also coached football at an Ohio high school.

  By 1957, his father reminded him that he had not financed a privileged, private education to produce an assistant football coach. The family business beckoned, and George threw himself into it.

  He was a success and well known in the capitals of commerce along the Northeastern seaboard. In the early 1970s, Penthouse magazine called him “the best-dressed businessman in America.”

  He maintained his interest in sports, becoming a part owner of the Cleveland Pipers basketball team, which played in a professional league meant to challenge the NBA. In the seventies, with a consortium of business associates and Williams College–related investors, he tried to buy the Cleveland Indians. When the Indians purchase failed, one of his financial partners told him the Yankees were likely for sale.

  Steinbrenner expanded his circle of investors to raise additional funds and secure some loans to purchase the Yankees in 1973 for $10 million. George had contributed about $170,000 to the effort, which was the principal share.

  From then until 1990, Steinbrenner and Vincent had interacted only occasionally, even after Vincent was named deputy baseball commissioner in 1989 by his friend Bart Giamatti, the Yale president who had become the baseball commissioner. “But in that time he had been supportive of me and I of him,” Vincent said in a 2017 interview.

  Still, based on observations he made in his 2002 memoir, Vincent clearly regarded Steinbrenner warily. Steinbrenner also had harshly scolded Vincent in a bizarre phone call after a deadly earthquake interrupted the 1989 World Series in San Francisco. A month earlier, Vincent had been promoted to baseball commissioner, days after Giamatti’s sudden death.