Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “Catlike movements, the personification of athleticism,” Groch said nearly thirty years later, recalling his first view of Jeter in the infield. “It was a moment I have never forgotten. Scouts watch thousands of players, waiting to see a special player. You wait to see a kid who has it all.

  “I saw that in Derek Jeter.”

  Groch felt Ken Griffey Jr. was the best player he had ever scouted. In Groch’s eyes, now Griffey had an equal.

  Groch filed a report to the Yankees about the lean and not fully developed Jeter, who Groch said already had an outstanding arm, good range, speed and a quick bat. The scout called him a five-tool player and wrote, “Will be a ML Star!”

  As in Major League Star.

  The Yankees scouting brain trust believed the reliable Groch, whose territory included Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Jeter was in high school. The Yankees also knew not to tip their hand. Stick Michael, the poker ace, had stressed that.

  Part of being a good scout was recognizing whether other scouts were looking at your prospect, too, and Groch knew he was not the only person traveling all the way to frigid Kalamazoo to look at the tall, rangy shortstop.

  Per the Yankees’ instructions, Groch did not introduce himself to Jeter or to his high school coach, Don Zomer. (Twenty-five years later, Zomer had still not met Groch.)

  To watch Jeter play, Groch sometimes stood on the hill of an adjacent field or in the shade of a shed far down the left-field line. Even then, Groch would seem like an apparition, one that disappeared after a single Jeter at-bat and a couple of innings. He did this to feign disinterest in Jeter, as if Groch had other games to get to and other players to see.

  In fact, Groch had not left the scene but instead retreated to the tree-shrouded Grand Prairie Cemetery just beyond the right-center-field fence. From there, sometimes with the help of binoculars, he could observe Jeter for dozens of innings—and more importantly, not be observed by other scouts or by Jeter himself.

  The cemetery also gave Groch a good view of the subdivision where Jeter had grown up. A collection of low-slung, mostly split-level homes backed up to the Kalamazoo Central High School athletic fields. The houses, built in the mid-twentieth century, were on small lots on tree-lined streets. It was a cozy neighborhood—neat but not fancy. But what Derek Jeter liked most about his split-level home at 2415 Cumberland Street was that he could jump over the five-foot backyard fence and be practicing on the high school baseball field in less than three minutes. It became a ritual.

  For the Jeters, a typical family weekend or evening out was Charles and Dot, Jeter’s parents, hitting ground balls and fly balls to Derek and his sister, Sharlee, who was a softball star.

  Groch heard from the locals that the Jeters were fixtures on the Kalamazoo Central High fields. The scout also heard about how Charles and Dot made their children sign behavioral contracts with provisions that covered homework, grade point averages, curfews, drugs and alcohol, phone calls, television hours, conduct in public and respect for others. Jeter ranked twenty-first in his class, was a member of the National Honor Society and volunteered to tutor his younger classmates.

  It all went into Groch’s report to the Yankees scouting office.

  That same year, Bill Livesey, the scouting director, had traveled with Joe Robison, another Yankees scout, to look at about a dozen potential draft picks in Texas, a baseball hotbed. Robison had been hired by George Steinbrenner in 1985 after a chance meeting at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, where Robison was the baseball coach and Steinbrenner was making a speech. During his visit, Steinbrenner was impressed when other athletic department employees talked glowingly about Robison’s knack for finding top high school players that other college coaches overlooked. Steinbrenner offered Robison a job as a scout on the spot—with a big raise.

  “Joe Robison tells me he wants to go to a regional playoff game so I can see a kid that’s not on our list,” Livesey said of his 1990 Texas visit. “I said, ‘OK, Joe, but we’re going to get to the other games, right? That’s what I’m here for.’

  “But Joe was insistent, and I go watch this stocky left-hander named Pettitte. I also noticed that there’s not another scout in the stands anywhere. Pettitte is throwing like an 88-mile-an-hour fastball, but he doesn’t have another quality pitch. Granted, he was very competitive and had great mound composure. And at Yankee Stadium, which was friendly to lefty hitters, we were always looking for left-handed pitchers.

  “But I said, ‘Joe, I see what you see, but if we took this kid to our lowest minor league team he couldn’t survive.’ And Joe agrees with me but says he sees something. It’s like he has a hunch that the kid will improve. Best of all, Pettitte is going to San Jacinto Junior College.”

  That became something of a game changer for Livesey. San Jacinto had the preeminent junior college baseball program in the nation. The future seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens had blossomed from a nondrafted high schooler into a major prospect at San Jacinto under its coach, Wayne Graham, who had never had a losing season as a high school or college coach.

  Graham, who went on to build a powerhouse baseball program at Rice University, had turned the once rotund Clemens into a feared mound presence, and he told Robison he thought he might be able to do the same for Pettitte.

  In 1990, in the twenty-second round, the Yankees selected Andy Pettitte, and the team kept in constant touch with him, although they did not push to sign him. They wanted to see his progress under Graham. And Pettitte did not seem in any hurry to sign with the Yankees either. He knew that he was the fourth left-handed pitcher the team had taken in that year’s draft—the others went in the fourth, eighth and twenty-first rounds. He was not an immediate priority.

  In the twenty-fourth round that year, the Yankees had also drafted Jorge Posada, a switch-hitting shortstop with a rifle for an arm who played for Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama. Posada was born in Puerto Rico to a Cuban father, a talented ballplayer who had fled his home country to escape the Fidel Castro regime, and a mother who was from the Dominican Republic.

  Posada, like Rivera, was not a dedicated student. He had hoped to play major college baseball in the States, but scored too low on the SATs to qualify for an American college baseball scholarship. But his father, Jorge Sr., had become a scout for major league teams in the United States, and through some of his contacts, word was passed to Fred Frickie, the coach at Calhoun Community College. Frickie, who needed a shortstop, called the Posadas’ home in Puerto Rico. A neighboring aunt who spoke English came over to interpret for the two parties.

  Frickie made his pitch for Jorge Jr. to come to Alabama.

  Said Jorge: “Where’s Alabama?”

  Posada came from a baseball family and had been intensely tutored in all the nuances of the game by his father. In fact, the entire Posada family had a high baseball IQ. Leo Posada, Jorge’s uncle, had played for three years for the Kansas City Athletics in the early 1960s.

  Jorge Jr., who was naturally right-handed, was also taught to bat left-handed by his father at a young age. Jorge Sr. knew that a switch-hitting but right-hand-throwing infielder was always a valuable commodity, in any league. Jorge’s father insisted that he use wood bats as a youngster as well, even though all his contemporaries were using the easy-to-swing aluminum bats. Major leaguers only swing wood bats, said Jorge Sr.

  But as a young teen, Jorge was only five-foot-six and 135 pounds. He was never an All-Star and never the best kid on his team. He would spend hours hanging upside down from a bar affixed to a doorframe at home, hoping it would make him taller.

  In time, he did grow, and landed at Calhoun, but the transition was challenging. Since he did not speak English, Posada was noticeably out of his element in Decatur, Alabama.

  In a 2017 interview, he related a story about his first trip to the Decatur Walmart, looking for bed sheets. Conjuring his best English, he asked a woman clerk for some “shits.”

  Eventually, the clerk deciphered what Pos
ada wanted and corrected his pronunciation.

  On the field, the universal language of baseball was more familiar. And with the help of several teammates, Posada’s English gradually improved. He was a popular teammate, especially since he was batting over .350.

  “And we had a scout down there, Leon Wurth, and he found Posada,” said Mitch Lukevics. “He had good hands and a strong arm. We weren’t sure where he would fit in. His leg speed and quickness wasn’t quite the major league level for a shortstop. At first we thought he could be a power-hitting second baseman—a Jeff Kent type, if you look at the ideal.”

  Kent played 17 major league seasons and hit 377 home runs with more than 1,500 RBI.

  Still, the Yankees obviously did not assess Posada as a bona fide prospect. He was the 646th pick of the 1990 draft. But there was one other thing about Posada that piqued the Yankees’ interest.

  Wurth, going the extra step like a sage scout, happened to be observing a Calhoun game when the regular catcher did not show up. Posada, who had been the backstop on his father’s fast-pitch softball team, volunteered to catch the game.

  The word got out that the 646th pick, the infielder with the strong arm, might be a catching prospect down the road.

  “We used to have a saying for guys who didn’t have the greatest range in the field,” said Livesey. “We’d say, ‘If you can’t get to the ball, we’ve got a place where the ball comes to you.’”

  If he could be converted to catcher, the Yankees would like their pick of Posada even better. But like Pettitte, Posada did not sign with the Yankees in 1990. The team would retain the rights to both players for one year. If neither player signed by May 25, 1991, they would reenter the draft pool and could be drafted by any team.

  The clock was ticking. But Gene Michael had a lot of draft picks and minor leaguers to assess. And he had a major league team that had become a daily embarrassment.

  The 1990 Yankees not only finished with the most defeats of any team since the franchise changed its name to the Yankees, they also had the worst record in the American League and finished 21 games out of first place. The defending world champion Oakland Athletics went 12-0 against the Yankees, the first time in franchise history that an opponent had been undefeated throughout a season against the Yankees. The Yankees had a winning record in just one month, and that was August. But it did not portend an uplifting end-of-season rally. In September and October, they lost 19 of 30 games.

  Statistically, the Yankees were harrowingly bad. They were 30-51 on the road, and the team’s batting average of .241 was the lowest in the major leagues. They had a team earned run average of 4.21, the fifth worst in baseball, and only four other teams gave up more runs. The Yankees led all of big league baseball in just one statistical category, and even that hurt: They had 53 batters hit with a pitch.

  The stat that Stick Michael noticed more than any other was the Yankees’ on-base percentage. It was only .300, the worst in the American League in nine years. The AL East champion Boston Red Sox had an on-base percentage of .344. “I knew we had to do something about the on-base percentage as fast as possible,” Michael said. “That stat jumped off the page. No wonder we lost 95 games.”

  Individually, there were some troubling story lines. Mattingly’s bad back limited him to 102 games, and he hit .256 with five home runs and 42 RBI. It was a precipitous drop-off. In the previous six seasons, Mattingly had hit .327 and averaged 27 homers and 114 RBI.

  Steve Sax, the onetime All-Star at second base, hit .260 and slugged just four home runs in 1990. The team’s top four starting pitchers were a combined 27-53.

  “That season just petered out and you left with a little dread,” Buck Showalter said. “It was a little frightening, like a cliffhanger movie where you’re waiting for the last scary thing to happen.

  “I was happy to be on the field and I enjoyed coaching at third base, but when I went home for the off-season I really had no feel for what we were going to be next year.

  “George was gone and no one knew what that was going to mean. Fortunately, I think Stick was a little scared about the future, too. And he was absolutely defiant that he was going to start doing things to make us better. But George’s absence was still weird.”

  It would get weirder. On October 20, minutes after Lou Piniella’s Cincinnati Reds swept the Oakland Athletics to win the World Series, Steinbrenner walked onto a sound stage in Rockefeller Center as the host of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

  The SNL writers, who included future US senator Al Franken, lampooned Steinbrenner at every turn. In the first sketch, George appeared in a lineup of famous men who had lost weight by following an Ultra SlimFast regimen. It was set up as a spoof of diet television commercials that had come into vogue, but the real ruse was that George was giving his diet testimonial alongside SNL actors playing African tyrant Idi Amin, Cambodian despot Pol Pot and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

  As the skit played out, George finally got the inference of his so-called peers and interrupted the sketch to complain to the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels. “Why am I with these guys?” he protested. “I mean, they’re ruthless dictators. I’m a baseball owner. Is that the joke, linking me with these guys? I’m getting the feeling that this whole bit is just to humiliate me.”

  Said Michaels: “Why would we do that? We’re all Yankees fans.”

  That was intended as joke number one.

  Franken was called from backstage to explain the skit, but what he really did was con George, which was joke number two. He said that the skit was a parody of the obsession with losing weight, especially since there were so many other grave problems in the world, as represented by Pol Pot, Amin and Saddam.

  “So what am I doing up there?” George asked.

  Franken said: “You’re here as the everyman, someone who our audience identifies with. You’re an average Joe American. The joke is that you’re the antithesis of a dictator like Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein.”

  Added Michaels: “The very opposite.”

  George smiled and went along. “Funny bit, Al,” George said as Franken turned to the camera to smirk and wink at the viewers and the live audience. Laughter filled the studio.

  To finish off the sketch, and to further prove its intended point, Michaels asked George to wear a spiked Prussian helmet during a closing statement.

  More laughs.

  Steinbrenner’s appearance, however, was generally praised.

  Asked if he thought SNL’s writers had been too hard on him, George answered, “No, come on, if you can’t laugh at yourself there’s something wrong with you.”

  Without question, everyone in America noticed that George was not exactly hiding in Tampa during his exile. He was yukking it up on late-night television.

  He might not be in baseball. But he was not going away.

  Others in the Yankees family, meanwhile, were most definitely trying to get away.

  The day after the team’s final 1990 game, Stump Merrill went back to Maine and started running eight miles a day in an effort to lose the twenty pounds he had gained during the season. Postgame light beers, imbibed to dull the pain of a 95-loss season, had certainly been a contributing factor. By early November, Merrill had dropped twenty-five pounds.

  He organized a Sunday-morning 10-kilometer road race in his hometown that was called “Stump’s Revenge.” The name referred to a similar race a year earlier, when Stump had been beaten by almost every contestant.

  The 1990 race was run on a bitter-cold day. Stump addressed the entrants at the start, with snow flurries floating from the sky. “We’ve put water out at the halfway mark,” he said, “unless it’s frozen.”

  In the afternoon, Stump tailgated before a Bowdoin College football game and stood near the end zone with family and friends, including some he had known since childhood. Former Yankees pitcher Tommy John drove from New Jersey to Maine in a van with his wife and four children to run in the race.

  In the evening, Stump ate fish s
tew with more friends at a tiny lobster shack on the coast of Bailey Island, just south of his home.

  “I’m living the dream,” he said as he drove himself home in his Mercedes.

  Twenty-seven years later, Stump amended that sentiment.

  “I was living the dream,” he said. “But I also knew our team wasn’t very good. And with the old man banished, I wasn’t sure we would be able to get good enough fast enough. The one thing you always knew about George—you knew that he hated to lose. And if you were losing, he would spend money to try to get better. But shit, now he was gone. It kept me up some nights. What’s going to happen?”

  Michael did not wait long to show that he wasn’t sitting still. Many things happened in the immediate aftermath of the worst Yankees season in seventy-seven years.

  Michael promptly cut Claudell Washington and veteran infielder Wayne Tolleson. They were the first two of 14 Yankees that Michael released, traded, demoted or declined to re-sign between the end of the 1990 season and the beginning of the 1991 season.

  It was only the beginning of the purge. By 1992, 25 players from the misbegotten 1990 Yankees were no longer with the team.

  Brian Cashman, who in 1998 would take over as Yankees general manager, was a newly hired assistant farm director in 1990. And within a year, he would become Michael’s assistant general manager.

  But in 1990, Cashman was convinced that with Steinbrenner no longer involved in day-to-day operations, the Yankees were about to entirely overhaul the organizational philosophy.

  “Look, we were embarrassed, no doubt about it—the big league club couldn’t compete,” Cashman said in 2017. “We were not something to be proud of. But George gets thrown out of the game for that period of time. Everything changed. When the boss left, he took his money with him. At the same time, Gene Michael said, ‘We’re going to go find good young players and we’re going to hold on to them for a change.’