Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Showalter got a one-year contract worth $225,000—or $700,000 less than Piniella would have cost the Yankees. “And most veteran managers wouldn’t have come for a one-year deal,” Showalter said. “But I didn’t care. I had already had fifteen one-year contracts with the Yankees.”

  On October 29, at a news conference inside Yankee Stadium’s lavish Diamond Club, Showalter, alongside Angela and his daughter Allie, was introduced as the new manager.

  “There were so many cameras and spotlights pointed at us and a roomful of reporters shouting questions,” Angela Showalter recalled. “We had never been in the limelight like that. I remember leaning over and whispering in Allie’s ear, ‘Now you know what Mickey Mouse feels like.’

  “Then Buck got up and started speaking and handled the throng like he had done it twenty times before. And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did this come from?’ I knew that Buck and all of his family were well educated, but he was so eloquent. So poised. I also remember thinking how many ups and downs and twists and turns our lives had taken in just a few years.”

  Angela paused, then added, “I should have known it was only the beginning.”

  The floundering Yankees, who had not been to the playoffs in a decade, and whose record in the last three seasons was 212-273, had a new, altogether different leader. Showalter was the youngest manager in the major leagues and the youngest for the Yankees since 1914, when twenty-three-year-old Roger Peckinpaugh was a player-manager for 20 meaningless games at the end of a dreadful season.

  But for Yankees fans, Showalter’s hiring was met with a collective yawn. Here was another guy they had barely heard of.

  Stump, Buck . . . Who are these guys?

  And everyone knew that Showalter wasn’t on the team’s original list of candidates.

  At the news conference announcing Showalter’s ascension to one of the most prominent jobs in sports, Gene Michael was asked if Showalter was his first choice. He chirped, “He is now.”

  Part Two

  Planting the Seeds

  13

  Band of Brothers

  SINCE THE END of the 1991 season, Buck Showalter had been fired, rehired, witnessed the birth of his second child and lost his father, who died while undergoing open-heart surgery nineteen days after Showalter was handed the Yankees managerial job.

  Continuing family tradition, Buck named his son William Nathaniel Showalter IV.

  Two months later, sitting in his office the day before the Yankees would open their 1992 spring training camp, Showalter vowed to carry on the teachings of his father. “My dad was determined. He studied so that he was always prepared, and he paid attention to every detail,” Showalter, forever the principal’s son, said. “He also thought it was imperative to believe in people.”

  Showalter paused, then said: “It helps, however, if they are the right people. You have to trust who you’re going into battle with.”

  If it sounded like a summary of his plans to rebuild the Yankees, that’s because it was.

  Showalter, thirty-five, was almost a generation younger than his dugout peers (the average age of a major league manager in 1992 was forty-seven). Perhaps not surprisingly, he immediately introduced to major league baseball some of the unconventional methods he had been contemplating for years. They were the tactics, ideas and procedures he had been jotting in his journal for decades. In many ways, he had been prepping for the Yankees job since his father took him as a boy to Alabama football games to scrutinize Bear Bryant. It was the reason he had been an ever-inquisitive minor league player. It was why he tested out his own theories on certain canons of baseball ideology, like the notion that things “even out” during the course of a baseball season.

  Nothing the new Yankees manager did occurred without considered forethought. Absolutely nothing.

  Take, for example, filling out a lineup card, a daily duty for a manager, who must make out a batting order, listing the starting hitters and their positions from 1 to 9. The manager also had to name the starting pitcher. Then, after that, the other 15 eligible reserve players and pitchers on the team had to be listed on the same sheet of paper, below the starters.

  Managers customarily wrote down the nonstarting players in no particular order. But Showalter would not do something so haphazard. He always insisted on listing the remaining 15 names in alphabetical order. If a new player was acquired or called up from the minors, one of the first things Showalter would do is figure out where the player fit alphabetically on the roster.

  Why go to all that trouble? And what did it have to do with helping a team win?

  “Every player looks at the lineup card closely,” Showalter explained. “When I was playing, if I wasn’t starting, I’d look at the list of reserves. If my name was listed at the bottom, I’d say to myself, ‘I’m the last person on the manager’s mind. He’s writing down names as they come to him, and my name pops into his head last.’ That was demoralizing.”

  So Buck Showalter made a note to himself that when he was a manager, he would never dishearten any player if he could avoid it. He would list every reserve player alphabetically so no one would feel slighted.

  “And believe me, the players notice,” he said. “Even big leaguers who have been in the majors for ten years notice. They don’t perceive an obvious pecking order, which is good for camaraderie. They also now realize that everything is done for a reason—nothing happens by happenstance.

  “It’s a small thing, but getting a team of 25 guys to strive together for a long season sometimes is about small things.”

  In the end, to Showalter, it was about changing the culture of the Yankees’ clubhouse, which was his foremost and most meaningful goal. And he had a multifaceted plan for that, too.

  “When Showalter took over there was definitely a transformation and we all saw it,” said Brian Cashman, who had been promoted to assistant general manager in 1992. “I think there was a period of time in the 1980s and early 1990s when there was constant change in the organization. We lacked cohesion.

  “The idea that the devil was in the details stopped mattering until Gene Michael hired Buck Showalter and put him in play. And then, next thing you know, Buck went out of his way to find little things that added up to big things.”

  Cashman recalled that Showalter was “obsessed” with making every part of the team’s facility first rate. “And not for show or vanity,” Cashman said. “He was testing a theory of his.”

  Showalter believed it would lead to a closer, more connected team. A team that was better than the sum of its parts.

  “So Buck had us completely renovate the Yankee Stadium home clubhouse—new sound system, new TVs and couches,” Cashman said. “We fixed up the players’ lounge. We upgraded the batting cage under the grandstand. We improved the players’ parking lot. We focused on the best food for the players.”

  Showalter’s goal was to have the players eager to come to work. “Buck wanted to create an atmosphere where the players would come to the ballpark earlier than normal,” Cashman said. “He said, ‘Instead of having lunch away from the park and eating before they get here, maybe they’ll get here, have lunch in the clubhouse and eventually get here even earlier.’

  “Buck thought that having the guys spend more time together would improve team chemistry. Everyone always says that winning teams have great chemistry. Well, how does that happen? Buck had developed philosophies on how to build team chemistry, and we tried them all.”

  Another Showalter initiative, one spawned by a conversation with Angela: “Buck said that if you make each player’s wife, significant other or family members happy, you will make the player happy,” Cashman said. “He wanted to have a deluxe family room so that the wives were taken care of, and therefore the kids were taken care of. And he thought that would be a huge attraction.

  “Some managers think the families are a distraction. Buck wanted them here at the ballpark. He’d say, ‘Let’s make the families welcome.’ I don’t recall, u
ntil then, any other manager caring about stuff like that.

  “And it wasn’t just about making the current players happy. It was about attracting free agents. Buck would talk about how free agents are making decisions about where to sign—to choose us over somebody else. Buck would say, ‘How can we differentiate ourselves? Let’s pay more attention to the off-the-field things.’”

  Showalter’s push for a greater sense of camaraderie on his team was in lockstep with an overarching philosophy of his about the importance of a baseball roster being a tight band of brothers. (And Showalter had read Band of Brothers, the book about an especially unified World War II infantry company, when it came out in 1992. Years later, the book became a popular HBO television series.)

  In Showalter’s perfect baseball world, his players would not choose to fraternize on the field with opposing players before games—something that was becoming more common in baseball in the early nineties. “I don’t like to see it,” Showalter said at the time. “There are 24 other guys on your team. Something is wrong with you if you have to go to the other side of the field to find a friend to talk to before the game.”

  Glenn Sherlock, the Yankees’ major league catching instructor in 1992, recalled that Showalter believed a team was only as strong as the relationships developed across a season. “Buck spent a lot of time with the players, and he encouraged the coaches to as well,” said Sherlock, who, like Showalter, was young enough to be a player. “Trying to have a tight-knit group was Buck’s goal.”

  Showalter found myriad ways to build the bond. To keep his players from feeling singled out for a miscue or embarrassed, he forbade the operators of Yankee Stadium’s video scoreboard to show replays of Yankee errors or bad plays during home games. “It should be about the team,” Showalter said, “not about any one player’s missteps. All teams make missteps.”

  Cashman was the general manager who presided over four of the five Yankees world championships from 1998 to 2009 and a total of 18 postseason appearances. Interviewed in 2018, he was asked if Showalter’s methods in 1992 were successful. “Culturally, it was a turning point,” he answered. “We’re still doing them to this day.”

  Looking back with the perspective of more than twenty-five years, Showalter said he felt the Yankees had been so browbeaten and cowed, making changes wasn’t much of a gamble. “I felt like I was playing house money, you know what I mean?” he said. “I wasn’t going to be timid about it. I felt just the opposite—I’m going to bring everything I’ve got. I’d been thinking about this stuff for years—why wouldn’t I do what I wanted?”

  He also felt he owed it to the organization, which was the only employer he had known in his adult life. “Yes, I was getting this window of opportunity personally,” Showalter said. “But the window of opportunity was not just for me, it was for the organization. I was tired of getting our ass beat, too.”

  Gene Michael was Showalter’s willing partner in the minor revolution taking place behind the scenes. “Buck and I had a lot of meetings and conversations in early 1992 and I started to see how his mind worked,” Michael said. “I understood how he had thought about all these things for years. And I knew we could make it work.”

  Said Showalter: “I had my input at the clubhouse and field level, but let’s not underestimate Stick’s impact, which was, in my opinion, bigger than my impact. He had to find the players and navigate all those changes with the owners.”

  Told of Showalter’s comment in 2017, Michael guffawed. “The owner was in exile!” he said. “That’s why we could do whatever we wanted. That’s what made it work.”

  But changing the clubhouse culture also meant changing the players in that clubhouse, and that’s where Stick Michael did some of his best work for the next four years.

  In 1992, the Yankees were not overhauled in one fell swoop, but there were significant roster changes between the 1991 and 1992 seasons. Michael, for example, worked quickly to acquire a quality cleanup hitter to give some needed muscle to the lineup, and he cleverly upgraded the team in other ways—without trading away the best prospects on the farm.

  “Stick used to call it bottom-feeding,” Showalter said. “He’d want to snatch away some players from other teams he considered underrated and trade away some of our guys in the minors that he thought were overrated.”

  Michael’s first major purchase was free agent Danny Tartabull, who was coming off an All-Star season when he had driven in 100 runs for the Kansas City Royals and led the majors in slugging percentage.

  Tartabull, twenty-nine, was an outfielder who had already produced three 100-RBI seasons. Mercurial and moody, Tartabull had squabbled with management in Kansas City, but with Mattingly’s declining power-hitting numbers, the Yankees desperately needed a bona fide home run threat.

  Next, Michael traded second baseman Steve Sax to the Chicago White Sox for talented starting pitcher Mélido Pérez—brother of Pascual but with a much better off-the-field reputation—and two White Sox minor league pitchers, Bob Wickman and Domingo Jean.

  The acquisition of Pérez, who had a 45-46 record, got most of the media attention, but Michael knew the jewels of the deal were the two pitchers who came with him. Wickman had compiled a 20-14 record with a 2.64 ERA in two minor league seasons, but Michael was most intrigued by a quirk buried in a Yankee scout’s report on Wickman. “Lost half his right index finger in a farm accident when he was young, which might explain why hitters have so much trouble with his sinker/slider,” the scout wrote. “The pitch dips and dives near the plate. Probably the four and one-half finger grip . . .”

  Michael called the scout himself.

  “He said that Wickman didn’t look special, but he was special,” Michael said.

  And while Pérez would give the Yankees valuable innings in 1992, it was Wickman who would prove invaluable for many seasons to come. As proof that all prospects don’t pan out, Jean also was highly regarded but never blossomed at the major league level.

  As for Sax, 1992 was his last full season in the majors. He hit .237 with only five home runs for the rest of his career. To replace Sax at second base, Michael planned to use touted rookie Pat Kelly, along with Mike Gallego, another free agent the Yankees signed from Oakland. With the Athletics, Gallego had hardly been a feared hitter, batting in the .230s with only 11 home runs and 111 RBI in his first six major league seasons.

  But in 1991, Michael noticed that Gallego’s power statistics had suddenly jumped: 12 homers and 49 RBI. His OPS (a combination of on-base percentage and slugging percentage) had risen to .712, a leap of 163 points from the previous season. The OPS statistic had not been officially or regularly tabulated in 1992, but Michael had already begun to use the rubric.

  Showalter was skeptical that the five-foot-eight Gallego could play shortstop and second base, since the Yankees might need him at both positions. Michael, once a Gold Glove–level shortstop, assured his manager that he would come to love Gallego’s infield skills.

  “Stick was right,” Showalter said of Gallego, who would go on to belt 19 home runs, drive in 109 runs and bat .262 with the Yankees from 1992 to 1994.

  Next, Michael turned his attention to the gaping hole at third base. The Yankees had a revolving door at the position in 1991, with third basemen producing just six home runs and 38 RBI in 162 games, by far the worst production at the position of any major league team.

  Michael had his eye on the Philadelphia Phillies’ third baseman Charlie Hayes, a four-year veteran with power whom the Phillies were planning to bench for Dave Hollins, a rising, switch-hitting prospect with substantial upside.

  Michael acquired Hayes by sending Darrin Chapin, a minor league starting pitcher who was 10-3 with 1.95 ERA at Columbus in 1991, to Philadelphia. The Yankees had taken Chapin in the sixth round of the 1986 amateur draft, and the team knew him well. He had pitched for five Yankees minor league clubs. But the scouting department believed that Chapin’s standout 1991 season at Columbus was something of an illusion.

/>   Chapin ended up pitching just one game for the Phillies in 1992, then spent the rest of his career in the minors.

  The remake of the Yankees was taking shape bit by bit. The team re-signed free-agent catcher Matt Nokes, a lefty hitter who had led the team in home runs in 1991. But it was another free-agent catcher, twenty-eight-year-old Mike Stanley, who was the Yankees’ biggest steal of the free-agent market.

  Michael had been watching Stanley closely in his six previous seasons with the Texas Rangers, even though Stanley averaged only about 160 at-bats a year and rarely hit higher than .249. Michael signed Stanley, who had 16 career home runs, to a meager contract worth $175,000 annually and told him he would be the right-handed-hitting part of a platoon at catcher with Nokes.

  But secretly, Michael thought Stanley could be the full-time catcher, and maybe even an All-Star. “Whenever I watched Stanley hit, he almost always had a quality at-bat,” Michael later said. “He would take the measure of the pitcher and battled him mentally, pitch for pitch. He was clearly studying the pitchers.”

  Stanley, in fact, was making the most of all the time he spent on the bench. He sidled up to the pitching coach and listened as the coach assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each opposing pitcher and hitter.

  “Early in my career, there were times I played so little, I thought about going home to Florida and opening a tackle shop because I love to fish,” Stanley recalled decades later. “But while I was there in Texas, I was determined to learn as much about being a major league catcher and a bona fide major league hitter as I could. I took every day seriously.”