Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “I would hear Stick on the phone saying no to trades hundreds of times after that. Over and over, he’d say, ‘He’s not available; we’re not trading him.’ So we became more of a pure baseball operation with an established strategy rather than a constant assembly line of short-term-interest decisions and quick fixes at the expense of the future.”

  Michael saw 1990 in much of the same way. Except he also knew he had to clean house. “There were guys in that big league clubhouse that had to go, and there were guys we had to make room for who were down in the minors,” he said.

  It was vital to the Yankees that they promote some of their young talent to the team’s 40-man roster. While big league teams carry only 25 players on their active roster, everyone listed on the 40-man roster is protected from being poached by other organizations.

  Late in 1990, the Yankees swiftly put two of their coveted prospects on the 40-man list: outfielders Bernie and Gerald Williams.

  The two players were not related, but the Yankees were convinced that one of the two would be a starting outfielder for many years to come. More than that, everyone in the Yankees high command was certain that one of the Williams outfielders would be a linchpin in the team’s success in the nineties.

  But the argument was just beginning about which Williams it would be.

  10

  Finding One Williams, Hiding the Other

  GERALD WILLIAMS WAS drafted by the Yankees in 1987 from Grambling State in Louisiana, where he had exhibited extraordinary speed on the basepaths, a cannon for an arm in the outfield and a slashing, powerful stroke in the batter’s box.

  He also showed up at the first Yankees workout after he was drafted with an ever-evolving batting grip that confounded his new employers. Sometimes Williams’s hands were inches apart. Once in a while they were upside down, at least from the traditional way players grasped a bat. Williams, who batted right-handed, seemed to be experimenting with having his hands reversed, with his left hand higher on the bat than his right hand.

  “He was the rawest of raw prospects,” said Mitch Lukevics, the Yankees’ director of minor league operations.

  Williams was sent to the team’s Class A Oneonta farm team that year and promptly hit .365, leading the team in on-base percentage (.447) and slugging percentage (.504), and he had 29 RBI in 29 games played. What to do about the changing batting grip now?

  It was neither the first time nor the last that the Yankees were happily surprised, but nonetheless perplexed, by the gifted Gerald Williams.

  Gerald played at Oneonta alongside eighteen-year-old Bernie Williams, who hit .344. Bernie, born and raised in Puerto Rico, was one of the Yankee scouting department’s greatest, stealthiest free-agent coups—a gifted gem covertly signed to a Yankees contract while other major league teams, who wanted Bernie as well, futilely hunted after him as if he were a ghost.

  Bernie was considered a blue-chip prospect, a crown jewel. And yet, by 1987, when he teamed with Gerald Williams, he had already bounced around three minor league teams and been demoted.

  The Yankees often wondered what ever would become of the übertalented Bernie Williams.

  The two were linked for years, despite their many differences. Gerald was gregarious, playful and bursting with pride. His nickname was “Ice.” Bernie was shy, reticent and sensitive. An appropriate nickname might have been “Nice.” Eventually, his teammates came up with another moniker for him, “Bambi.”

  Gerald always expected to be a professional athlete. Bernie had made plans to study medicine; athletics were a hobby. Gerald played loud hip-hop music that blared from his locker. Bernie sat facing into his locker, quietly strumming jazz riffs on a guitar.

  At one time, the Yankees thought that maybe the two Williamses would one day be a center-field and right-field tandem at Yankee Stadium. But it took many years to sort that out. The debate about the merits of the duo would consume countless hours in team personnel meetings and continued until 1993. And throughout, two overarching questions remained the same: What to do with Bernie? What to do with Gerald?

  The choices made about the two outfielders, and the choice made between the two, ultimately helped shaped the course of the last baseball dynasty of the twentieth century.

  Bernie Williams arrived first, a wide-eyed, tall teen. When brought to Yankee Stadium not long after he signed a free-agent contract on September 13, 1985—his seventeenth birthday—he confessed that just months earlier he had no intention of ever being a big league ballplayer. “It all happened very fast,” said Williams, looking a reporter directly in the eye as he had been taught to do by his mother, a high school principal and college professor. “I’m still not sure how this happened.”

  Williams grew up in an upper-middle-class family and graduated from a private music school, where he studied classical guitar and had a 3.8 grade point average. He was a track star, winning international junior races in the 200 and 400 meters. He played baseball, but never at the highest levels, in Puerto Rico, where the best All-Star teams of teenagers toured the country. Instead, Williams was on a champion regional team near his hometown of Vega Alta.

  A Yankees scout, Roberto Rivera, was at the regional championship. He saw two outfielders who intrigued him. The first was the younger of the two, just fifteen years old. Between innings he would dance in the outfield, which Rivera found off-putting. The scout crossed that outfielder off his list—he would recommend only serious players to the Yankees.

  But Rivera liked the older boy, sixteen-year-old outfielder Bernabe Figueroa Williams, who had an elegant manner on the field, gliding after fly balls with the long, smooth strides of a sprinter. He had a silky swing at the plate, and when Rivera spoke with him afterward, Williams, in braces and eyeglasses, was respectful, polite and humble.

  He did not talk that day to Bernie’s friend the outfield dancer, Juan González, who would eventually sign with the Texas Rangers and hit 434 home runs in a seventeen-year major league career.

  But Rivera did watch Williams play several more times and then called the Yankees’ scouting director at the time, Doug Melvin. Rivera told Melvin that if Williams filled out and developed, he could one day become a multidimensional talent like the Yankees’ current outfielder Dave Winfield. Melvin did not have to be told that information twice. He wanted such a player.

  But there were two important considerations to weigh. The rules governing international players at the time forbade any major league team from signing a player younger than seventeen. And Rivera told Melvin that other teams, especially the Rangers and the San Diego Padres, had seen Bernie play as well. Their interest was intensifying.

  The Yankees, with Rivera’s urging, hatched a plan that took both factors into consideration. They would hide Williams in the United States until his seventeenth birthday. In the summer of 1985, the Yankees whisked Williams to a baseball camp in Connecticut.

  Why Connecticut?

  It happened to be not far from Melvin’s home, which made it convenient for Bernie to have occasional dinners with the Melvin family and made it easy for Melvin to keep tabs on his prospect, who was in the baseball equivalent of a witness protection program.

  “We talked to Bernie’s parents and told them a few things,” Melvin, who would leave the Yankees in 1987 to become a top executive with the Baltimore Orioles, Texas Rangers and Milwaukee Brewers, said years later. “It would be good for their son from a developmental baseball standpoint; it would be good for him to get a little bit acclimated to life in the continental US; and it would be a chance for him to improve his English, although truthfully that was already pretty good.”

  Bernie’s parents agreed with the plan, and Williams prepared to fly to New York for the short drive to Connecticut. Unsure and a little frightened about leaving home, Bernie asked Roberto Rivera if he could bring a teammate along to the baseball camp. It was González. Again, Rivera declined to bring González into the Yankees fold.

  Williams was tutored in baseball drills on weekd
ays and played with an informal team of former professionals on the weekends. He watched Yankees games on television, made visits to the Melvin home and took a rare trip to Yankee Stadium, which was kept something of a secret.

  Back in Puerto Rico, the island’s many baseball scouts were wondering what had happened to Bernie Williams. Manny Batista, a Rangers scout, had been looking forward to watching Bernie’s development that summer. But Batista could not find him.

  Just before his birthday, Williams returned to Puerto Rico. The day he turned seventeen, he signed the contract that made him a Yankee for a bonus of about $16,000.

  “It was kind of a whirlwind and I had to commit to baseball and make music or medicine a secondary thing—at least for a while,” Williams said. “Still, my adjustment to a full-time baseball player—a professional baseball player—was not entirely smooth.”

  That is a monumental understatement.

  As a seventeen-year-old, Williams had a respectable professional debut in the late-season Gulf Coast League, but the next year, playing for Buck Showalter’s Fort Lauderdale Yankees, Williams looked lost. It did not help that the Yankees were turning him into a full-time switch-hitter, something Williams had done only occasionally in Puerto Rico. He was primarily a right-handed hitter.

  In 25 games in Fort Lauderdale in 1987, Williams batted .155 with four runs batted in. On average, he was striking out once every three at-bats, and he sometimes looked listless chasing after line drives in the outfield. On the bases, he made mental errors.

  At that point, Williams stormed into Showalter’s office.

  “He charged in and said he wanted to go home,” Showalter said. “He was mad at me for continuing to insist that he switch-hit. ‘I can’t hit left-handed,’ he said. He was unhappy with how everything was going.”

  Telling the story more than thirty years later, Showalter said he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a small piece of paper with writing on it. At the start of 1987, Williams’s parents had given Showalter their phone number in Puerto Rico.

  “They had said to me, ‘Bernie hasn’t been away from home very much, and if he ever gets homesick or wants to quit, call us,’” Showalter said.

  When Williams told Showalter he wanted to go home, Showalter responded, “That’s fine, Bernie, but I’ve got to make a phone call first.”

  Showalter had the piece of paper in his hand as he reached for the phone on his desk.

  “Who you calling?” Bernie asked.

  “I’m calling your mom and dad because they told me you might want to go home,” Showalter said. “And they gave me their phone number and asked me to call them if that happened.”

  Said Bernie: “You don’t need to call them.”

  “Yes, I do, Bernie. I promised them I’d take good care of you, and I’m going to call and let him know you’re quitting and coming home.”

  Williams stood. “Just wait,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

  Williams’s play improved. He continued to switch-hit.

  “I told him, ‘Bernie, one day you will thank me for forcing you to switch-hit,’” Showalter said. “When you’re seeing all these breaking balls and you can just go to the opposite side of the plate and handle them easier from the other side—you’re going to love that. Trust me, it’s a process. Just stay with it. We know what we’re doing.”

  Williams put his faith in the Yankees. Although their faith in him wavered considerably. In some quarters, he was a constant source of consternation. He was a good teammate and well liked, but his inconsistency befuddled the Yankees executives. His progress followed no predictable track.

  After hitting over .300 twice in Class A, he was promoted to Class AA but hit just .252 with little power. When he played 50 games at AAA Columbus, he was overmatched, batting .216 with nearly four times as many strikeouts as extra-base hits. In 1990, he was still at Class AA Albany, doing well (.281, 8 homers, 54 RBI) but not necessarily spectacular for someone in his fifth minor league season. His bosses wondered about his devotion to the craft, especially when they would look in the outfield between pitches and see him strumming an air guitar.

  Williams had entered the Yankees organization to much fanfare. Now some thought he was going to be a bust. “We were in a meeting that year and someone from the big league side of the organization said Bernie was a disappointment,” Livesey said. “And I asked him who he liked better in our minors. He mentioned an outfielder at Oneonta.

  “I said, ‘That guy is twenty-two years old trying to make it in rookie ball. Bernie is twenty years old trying to make it in the Eastern League, the best AA league in baseball. Give him some time.’”

  That earned Bernie Williams a reprieve, but it was a conversation Livesey would have time and again in personnel meetings. The doubts ran deep. Williams would remain potential trade bait in seemingly every deal the Yankees considered as late as 1993.

  And if Bernie wasn’t the one in the middle of those trade talks, it was Gerald Williams instead.

  Gerald was the ninth of Dorothy Williams’s thirteen children in LaPlace, Louisiana, a dreary Mississippi River town 25 miles west of New Orleans. Williams’s father left the family home when he was an infant. His mother was the sole means of financial support. “It was hard at times, just like any other life,” Williams said. “We struggled, but she always was able to make ends meet. Basically, my mother was everything I needed. I never actually missed my father.

  “But I did have to grow up quicker. I didn’t have any time to make young, bad decisions. I wasn’t going to get many second chances.”

  Gerald, like Bernie, was six-foot-two and 190 pounds. Gifted athletically, he starred at Grambling, a historically black college. He was raw but widely known to scouts, and the Yankees selected him in the fourteenth round.

  “Gerald had a lot of tools but so little high-level experience,” said Mitch Lukevics, the Yankees’ minor league director. “He came from a backwoods Louisiana town. He had a lot to acclimate to once he turned pro.”

  After his successful first minor league season in Oneonta, Williams found himself playing for Showalter in Fort Lauderdale in 1988. He had settled on a traditional grip of the bat, with the left hand near the knob, but there were many other unusual habits to break. And new, beneficial habits to learn.

  “I remember writing up a report on all the players for Bill Livesey, and when I got to Gerald I pointed out all the things that Gerald still couldn’t do—he swung at too many bad pitches, didn’t understand the various outfield relays and choices to make in the field, didn’t hit the ball the other way—stuff like that,” Showalter said. “So a couple days later my phone rings and it’s Livesey.

  “He says to me: ‘Listen, Buck, we don’t need your scouting reports. We scouted all these guys for years. We know what they can’t do. But let me ask you something. This Gerald Williams, can he run fast?”

  Showalter answered, “Like the wind.”

  “Does he have a good arm?”

  “Yes, sir, one of the best.”

  “Is his bat alive? Does he have power?”

  “Yes, the ball explodes off his bat when he makes contact.”

  “Is he aggressive? Is he a competitor?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Livesey paused, then roared: “Those are the reasons he’s on your team! It’s your job to teach him all the other stuff. It’s not your job to tell us what he can’t do.”

  Showalter heard a click on the other end of the line, but not a goodbye. “I’m glad Livesey hung up, because I was speechless and about to shit my pants.”

  Showalter rethought his approach. But he still had his hands full. Williams hit just .189 that season and not much better the next. By the end of the 1990 baseball season, he was still a prized, highly rated prospect. But he was stuck in Class AA Albany, playing alongside Bernie Williams.

  Both players would make spectacular plays one night and then butcher a routine fly ball the next night. They might hit a long home run in
an opening at-bat of a game and then strike out, and look bad doing so, in every other plate appearance.

  The Yankees didn’t know what to do with either man. The one thing they knew was that it seemed like each of the other 25 major league teams had keen, fervent interest in acquiring one of what had become known, inaccurately, as the Williams brothers.

  Privately, Gene Michael believed that sooner or later he would probably have to trade one or the other. But trading the wrong one might cost him his job and permanently derail any recovery the Yankees’ future might hold.

  “I knew we could be a little patient with Bernie and Gerald,” Michael said, grateful—not for the last time—that in late 1990 George Steinbrenner was no longer calling the shots directly. “We were just getting started with the rebuild. I wanted to believe that things were looking up—at least in the minors, where not many people were actually paying attention.”

  Some were taking notice, though. The minor league publication of record, Baseball America, ranked the Yankees farm system as the ninth best in baseball, up from twenty-second one year earlier. Bernie Williams was rated the eleventh-best prospect in baseball. Gerald Williams would not crack the top-100-prospects list for two seasons.

  11

  Scouting and Hope

  IT WAS NOT of any real consequence, but just to prove that not much had changed by the time the Yankees opened their spring training camp in 1991, Bernie and Gerald Williams were involved in trade talks for four different players in the span of two weeks. Both were almost sent to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Barry Bonds, which would have likely put in motion an intriguing twist to baseball history.

  Then, either Bernie or Gerald was nearly dealt for Baltimore third baseman Craig Worthington, who would end up hitting 729 fewer home runs than Bonds. Next, the Yankees considered sending a Williams to Toronto for catcher Pat Borders (693 few career home runs than Bonds). And finally, both Williamses, plus a couple of other young prospects, were almost packaged for California Angels pitcher Chuck Finley (200 more career victories than Bonds).