Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  But no major trades were made, and the Yankees instead began the season trying to prove they were no longer one of the worst teams in the major leagues. It was a tough sell.

  Twelve games into the season, the Yankees had rapidly eased back into last place with a 4-8 record. The pitching rotation was erratic and flimsy. Andy Hawkins had been pounded in his first three starts. His tortured Yankees odyssey was about the end. He was released on May 9 with a 0-2 record and a 9.95 ERA. The Yankees still owed him more than $1 million, which was a lot of money in 1991 dollars.

  The rest of the rotation was only marginally better. Scott Sanderson, acquired from the Athletics, was the ace and pitched like one. But he had no backup: Tim Leary, whose 19 losses in 1990 led the major leagues, was on his way to a 4-10 season; Wade Taylor and Jeff Johnson would be a combined 13-23; and Pascual Pérez’s season ended in injury again after six decisions. He would never return to pitch in the major leagues.

  The batting order mostly lacked consistent punch. The best hitter was the new catcher Matt Nokes, who had 24 homers. Mattingly, whose balky back continued to sap his power, hit a humbling nine homers. Outfielder Mel Hall contributed 19 homers and 80 RBI but made few friends in the clubhouse, most especially Bernie Williams, who was called up to the big league club for 85 games. Hall, several Yankees said, believed in rookie hazing. Williams did not respond well, batting .238.

  Although Steinbrenner was not seen around the club, there continued to be distractions from his misbegotten personal feud with Winfield. Howie Spira’s extortion trial was playing out in Manhattan, and on April 23, Steinbrenner took the stand. He was asked to read the names of family members targeted for harassment on telephone lists confiscated from Spira’s apartment. The list included Steinbrenner’s eighty-four-year-old mother, Rita.

  Steinbrenner, in tears, broke down on the witness stand, his voice quivering. It was a scene, in retrospect, that probably helped to soften Steinbrenner’s image. It humanized the Yankees’ boss-in-exile, who was left weeping on a witness stand because his misguided actions had brought some measure of threat to his widowed mother. Already there had been talk among other baseball owners that Steinbrenner’s punishment had been too harsh. Fay Vincent, of course, had never intended to impose a lifetime ban.

  Spira was convicted of five counts of extortion and would serve 22 months in prison.

  By early May, the Yankees once again had the worst record in baseball. Merrill’s job seemed threatened, at least in the newspapers. Attendance at Yankee Stadium was spiraling downward.

  But far from the Bronx, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in San Juan, Puerto Rico, there was considerable good news for the Yankees. It went unnoticed, because the transactions executed in those two distant locales generated not a single story or news item from any media outlet at the time. But on the business transactions wire that connected every major league club, it was recorded that on May 24 and May 25, the Yankees completed two player deals that would reshape the history of the franchise. A team of Yankees scouts and Bill Livesey, the personnel director, successfully negotiated—with deft, experienced skill—the signing of Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte. Both players had been Yankees picks from a year before, but had the team waited even a few hours or a day longer, it would have lost the rights to the two of them.

  And especially in the case of Pettitte, the Yankees very nearly did lose a pitcher they had been watching faithfully for a year.

  From the summer of 1990 until the spring of 1991, Pettitte had indeed flourished at San Jacinto Junior College, as the Yankees hoped. His coach, Wayne Graham, had put him on a diet of mostly tuna sandwiches and orange juice, which trimmed the pitcher’s lumpy physique by sixteen pounds. Graham started Pettitte on a weight-training regimen at the San Jacinto gym. He also helped hone Pettitte’s pickoff move to first base, which became a prized weapon. Finally, the coach put Pettitte’s famed competitiveness and temper to good use by teaching him to channel fiery emotions into a cool but fierce comportment in pressure situations.

  The remade Pettitte went 8-2 for Graham’s 1991 team, and his fastball had jumped from the 87–89-mile-an-hour range to the 91–93-mile-an-hour range.

  “Joe Robison calls me and says, ‘Pettitte has grown into a man—some games, I’ve had his fastball at 94,’” Livesey said. “Robison was now insisting that we have to sign him.”

  But Pettitte, who did not have an agent, was beginning to think he might do better waiting for the 1991 amateur draft in June. He might be a first-round pick. “I was torn and coach Graham told me that another pitcher in the Houston area was likely to be picked in the first round,” Pettitte recalled many years later. “Coach Graham thought I was throwing as hard as that pitcher. Back then, a first-round pick was going to get at least $100,000.”

  In 1990, the Yankees had dangled a contract worth $40,000.

  “So, as I said, I was of two minds,” Pettitte said. “But I also knew that Mr. Robison had been the first to scout me, and he had stayed with me. He had gone to dozens of my games.”

  With the May 25 signing deadline approaching, Pettitte and his father, Tom, decided to go to his grandmother’s house in Baton Rouge. As it happened, Robison was already in the area, scouting a tournament at Louisiana State in Baton Rouge.

  “We had upped our contract offer to Andy from $40,000 to $55,000, and Joe Robison was trying to convince Andy to take it,” Livesey said.

  It was early in the afternoon of May 25. Pettitte was holding out for at least $80,000, close to first-round money.

  Said Livesey: “Joe calls me again and says, ‘Boy, this kid is stubborn.’ And I said, ‘Isn’t that what you want? When he has to pitch in front of fifty thousand people at Yankee Stadium, don’t you want somebody who is stubborn and won’t give in?’”

  Pettitte got his $80,000 contract and signed it. It turned out to be a steal. Pettitte, like many others in baseball, spent years wondering if he might have gotten three times as much if he had waited for June and become a first-round pick.

  “You never know,” said Livesey. “But I’d rather think of it as a great scouting story. Here was a scout who saw something in a raw kid and stuck with him when no other scout was even looking at him. Joe Robison saw the moth that would turn into a butterfly.”

  The negotiations in Puerto Rico for Jorge Posada took place one day before Pettitte’s meeting in Louisiana. They were not as tense, although it was not a certainty that Posada would sign either.

  As a scout, Jorge Sr. knew the reputation of the Yankees organization under Steinbrenner. Throughout the eighties, so many minor league prospects had been traded away for big league talent. Even if Steinbrenner was banished, Jorge Sr. did not want a similar fate for his son, and he counseled Jorge Jr. to be wary of the Yankees’ contract offers.

  Jorge Sr. also knew that baseball prospects from Spanish-speaking countries, perhaps because few had been away from home before, tended to develop later than American prospects, who had often played for youth travel teams or major colleges. Jorge Sr. wanted the Yankees to guarantee in writing that his son could not be traded for at least three years.

  Leon Wurth, the Yankees’ scout who had first discovered Jorge at Calhoun Community College in Alabama, had been handling the contact with the Posadas. In his 2015 autobiography, Posada wrote that he and his father liked dealing with Wurth because they could discuss their negotiating strategies in front of him in Spanish, which Wurth did not speak.

  But in late May of 1991, the Yankees sent several representatives to the Posada home, including Roberto Rivera, the scout who had found and signed seventeen-year-old Bernie Williams six years earlier. “Seeing that group of Yankees employees proved to me that the Yankees were serious—they were here to talk to me directly,” Posada said in a 2017 interview.

  Still, the Yankees had been offering just $20,000, in part because they were not sold on Posada’s middle-infielder skills. Muddling the negotiations, in the spring of 1991 Posada had agreed to accept a full athletic
scholarship to play baseball for the University of Alabama. He could develop at a high-level college program and probably at some point be drafted in the top ten rounds, although the contract amount for a future tenth-round pick was hard to predict. And Posada, who was only nineteen years old that May, would be older as well.

  He also knew that teams liked to get their prospects into the minor league system as soon as possible, especially if they came from Spanish-speaking countries.

  Because Posada came from a family with ties to professional baseball, the Yankees did not think Posada truly preferred to attend the University of Alabama. And, as Wurth and Rivera had suggested, Posada might someday be converted to catcher. The Yankees raised their offer to $30,000 but declined to offer any no-trade guarantees. Posada would be Yankees property, just like the other three hundred minor leaguers in the organization.

  Posada signed on May 24. “It seemed like a lot of money to me,” he said. “I mean, I was nineteen. Yeah, I could have waited and maybe gotten twice as much, but I always wanted to be a major league player. The best way to do that was to start playing professionally.

  “I’d be in the minor leagues competing with other guys trying to get to the majors. And on those teams, how much we had signed for wouldn’t matter as much as what we did as batters and fielders for that team in that season. I figured that those numbers would count more than the salary numbers. And I wanted to get started.”

  In his autobiography, The Journey Home, Posada said there was no household celebration of his 1991 contract. “We were a baseball family,” he wrote. “Think about it this way: If you were raised in a family where everyone had advanced degrees and worked as doctors, lawyers and professors, no one would go nuts when you graduated from high school.”

  But in the Yankees’ minor league and scouting operations offices in Tampa, there was a new, cheery bounce in everyone’s step.

  “You very rarely think you’ve signed a sure-fire major league star-to-be,” Lukevics said. “But you know potential when you see it. So when it came to Pettitte and Posada, we were very high on their potential. And that’s all you can seek—great potential.

  “I can tell you this—we felt like we were building toward something.”

  But there was no time to rest on the scouting or negotiating accomplishments of late May. The 1991 amateur draft was approaching on June 3, and within the Yankees organization it was being treated as one of the most pivotal days in the team’s recent history. With Steinbrenner holding tightly to the purse strings, free-agent acquisitions had been restricted, and with an inferior major league roster, trades to upgrade the talent level had been a daunting challenge. But the amateur player draft was the one golden opportunity where the woebegone Yankees finally had a substantial edge.

  There was going to be some benefit to the disastrous 1990 season. The first overall pick of the upcoming amateur player draft was awarded to the team with the worst record in the major leagues. Unyielding failure had delivered the Yankees their first overall choice since 1973.

  Throughout the spring of 1991, deciding whom to pick had been the all-consuming task of Livesey, Michael and a host of scouts. They had narrowed their choices to two players: Mike Kelly, a junior center fielder for Arizona State, and Brien Taylor, a nineteen-year-old high schooler from North Carolina whose fastball had been clocked at 100 miles an hour. At the time, there may not have been anyone in the major leagues who threw that hard.

  Kelly was a six-foot-four power hitter (46 home runs and 194 RBI in three college seasons). Taylor was an inch shorter, with a long, sinewy left arm that seemed almost magically blessed. With little outward effort, Taylor hurled blazing fastballs that jumped and dived. The dozens of scouts who flocked to his games began referring to him as a left-handed Dwight Gooden.

  Taylor, a soft-spoken wunderkind from the tiny coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina (population 3,707), lived in a double-wide trailer with no air conditioning. The dwelling’s sole source of electricity was a plug in the living room ceiling, from which lightbulbs dangled on a cord strung throughout the trailer. Taylor’s father was a bricklayer, and his mother, Bettie, worked six days a week picking and sorting crabmeat at a nearby seafood processing plant.

  Taylor threw the baseball so hard that occasionally his high school catcher would miss the ball completely. It would whiz past him to the backstop. The umpire often still called the pitch a strike, because it had passed through the strike zone, even if the catcher wasn’t quick enough to get his glove on it.

  “Brien’s arm slot was the same as Randy Johnson’s—not over the top and not sidearm but at three-quarters,” Gene Michael said. “And that arm slot made the ball move late, just before it reached home plate. And one other thing I’ll tell you about Brien: He threw harder than Randy. Even at nineteen years old, he threw harder.”

  Livesey, now retired, said that the best amateur position player he had ever scouted was Alex Rodriguez and the best amateur pitcher he ever saw was Brien Taylor. “I don’t know that there was anyone else who was even all that close to Brien,” Livesey said. “Brien had size, strength, a live, loose arm, athleticism, and he had a pretty good curve ball, too.”

  But drafting a high school pitcher with the number one pick was exceedingly risky. It had happened only once before, in 1973, when the Texas Rangers selected Texas high schooler David Clyde, whose career proved to be underwhelming. Still, the Yankees’ scouts were unanimous in their opinion that Taylor was the best amateur player in the nation, despite his modest roots in a small town where the level of baseball played was not especially high.

  To make a final judgment on their scouts’ recommendation, Michael, Livesey and Lukevics went to North Carolina to watch the final two starts of Taylor’s high school career. It was about two weeks before the draft.

  “I’m sitting there with a radar gun, and the first pitch Taylor throws is 94 miles an hour,” Lukevics said. “The next pitch was 96, and the next one was 98.”

  In the early 1990s, the radar guns used by baseball scouts were not always reliable. On the next pitch, when Lukevics’s radar gun once again registered 98, he turned to a scout from another team who was seated nearby. “What’d you get on your gun?” Lukevics asked.

  Answered the scout: “I’ve had him at 100 for each of the last two pitches.”

  In his final high school start, Taylor struck out 17 of the 21 batters he faced in a seven-inning game.

  The Yankees were sold. They took Taylor with the first pick. It would be twenty-three years before another high school pitcher went first in the amateur draft. (Mike Kelly, in 1991, was selected by the Atlanta Braves with the second overall pick. He would end up playing six seasons for the team, hitting .241 with 22 homers and 86 career RBI.)

  Taylor’s agent was Scott Boras, known for contract stalemates and big-money victories. And almost from the beginning, the two sides were at loggerheads. The Yankees were offering $750,000, a total Boras and the Taylors deemed unacceptable. Boras had arranged for Taylor to enroll at a local community college. He made it plain that if Taylor didn’t sign with the Yankees, he would play college baseball and reenter the draft in 1992, which was his prerogative.

  As the Taylor contract deadlock continued into the summer, Steinbrenner was contacted by a New York reporter. George was not only lonely, he was disgusted. If the people running his Yankees couldn’t sign Taylor, Steinbrenner said, “someone should be shot.”

  Said Michael: “That someone was me. That’s what George meant. But all that did was make our negotiating position impossible. It hurt the club.”

  Boras and Taylor rebuffed the Yankees’ contract offers for two months, an acrimonious eight weeks during which Bettie Taylor accused Michael of lowballing her son because he was poor and black. Boras, meanwhile, had his client fully registered at Louisburg Junior College and had told the baseball coach there to expect him at his team’s late-summer practices.

  On August 26, Boras and Taylor accepted a Yankees offer of
$1.55 million. The year before, a college pitcher with considerably more experience, Todd Van Poppel, had been drafted by Oakland and signed for $1.25 million.

  At a Yankees press conference to introduce Taylor, broadcaster and former Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek asked Boras how much Steinbrenner’s “someone should be shot” statement cost the Yankees.

  “Boras said, ‘Probably about $750,000,’” according to Michael, who recounted the exchange in 2017. “And Boras was right.”

  At the next quarterly Yankees ownership meetings, Steinbrenner lambasted Michael, yelling at him for giving Taylor so much money.

  “You’re the one who jacked up the price by saying I should be shot if I didn’t sign him,” Michael shouted back.

  Some of the other Yankees part owners were impressed. “Gene Michael won over some people that day,” said Marvin Goldklang, a longtime minority owner. “He made some allies by standing up for himself.”

  Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ current general manager, was an assistant to Lukevics at the time and soon to be hired as Michael’s assistant. “It was classic George,” Cashman said in 2017. “He had basically said that we better sign this guy. Then he ripped Stick for signing the guy. It was vintage Boss. He took both sides.”

  Brien Taylor instantly became Baseball America’s number one–rated prospect, something that noticeably improved morale in the team’s front office. It was only two years earlier that the Yankees did not have anyone in the top 45.

  “I felt sure we were going to be very proud of the Taylor pick,” Michael said. “It gave us some hope.”

  12

  Yankee Clipper

  HOPE WAS IN short supply for the big league team in the summer of 1991. A couple of weeks before Brien Taylor signed, the Yankees were 51-62 and 10½ games behind the first-place Toronto Blue Jays. A month earlier, they had been at .500. But two losing streaks—of six games and seven games—dropped them back into an irrelevant fifth place.