Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  That made Stanley a good fit in Showalter’s clubhouse. “We needed guys like Nokes and Stanley because they were dirt-tough, hard-nosed guys who would hold teammates accountable,” Showalter said. “It’s all about being accountable, and I was going to hold our team to standards when it came to playing hard and being prepared.

  “But you need the players to hold each other accountable, too. Someone like Nokes or Stanley would do that and finally give Don Mattingly some backup in that way. Now there were a few guys of stature who had Donnie’s back. And Nokes and Stanley wouldn’t let any of the bullshit hazing of the young guys continue either. If you’re trying to promote a youth movement, you can’t have some veteran guys jumping all over the rookies.”

  Outfielder Mel Hall was a case in point. He had relentlessly badgered the reserved Bernie Williams in 1991, making fun of his thick eyeglasses and his guitar playing and nicknaming him “Zero” for his lack of production.

  “We had to do something about that,” Showalter said.

  The Yankees hadn’t given up on Williams. Michael had once again rebuffed multiple trade offers for him. The Milwaukee Brewers dangled starting pitcher Chris Bosio, who had won 14 games in 1991. Stick Michael demurred.

  Off the field, the operation of the Yankees was less tumultuous. Robert Nederlander had resigned, saying that running the team took up too much of his time. He also intimated that answering to George Steinbrenner, even though he was in exile, was another full-time job.

  Joe Molloy, the husband of George’s daughter Jessica, was named the new managing general partner. It wasn’t hard for Steinbrenner to make his wishes known to his son-in-law, but years later, Molloy, who divorced Jessica in 1998, said Steinbrenner had not imposed his will in 1992. “He was too busy trying to get Fay Vincent to reinstate him—that was his focus then,” Molloy said evenly.

  Increasingly, Vincent gave indications he was willing to amend his lifetime ban at some point. Steinbrenner, to no one’s surprise, was doing everything he could to lobby for a reprieve.

  On March 22, he bought a $7 ticket to watch a Yankees exhibition game in Clearwater, Florida, against the Phillies. It was the first game he had attended since his banishment. Seated behind the first-base dugout, Steinbrenner was asked to name the one thing the 1992 Yankees needed most.

  George answered, “Me.”

  Three days later, Steinbrenner dispatched a strangely emotional letter to the other 25 major league owners in which he begged for their help in his crusade to be reinstated.

  A handful did petition the commissioner on Steinbrenner’s behalf. It was the first signal that Vincent did not have the unanimous support of baseball’s owners. It was a trickle in the tidal wave to come.

  The Yankees’ 1992 regular season almost started without the team’s new manager. The Showalters’ five-month-old son, whom the family called Nathan, was rushed to a New Jersey hospital with spinal meningitis thirty-six hours before opening day at Yankee Stadium.

  Nathan’s fever broke and he improved in time for his father to make his managerial debut in the season’s first game, which the Yankees won, defeating Roger Clemens and the Red Sox, 4–3.

  The Yankees also won their next five games and were alone in first place in the American League East. By May 17, they were only one game over .500, but the day was symbolically important because the Yankees, a laughingstock for three years, gained a measure of respect.

  The opponent that day at Yankee Stadium was the Oakland Athletics, who were still a powerhouse and just two seasons removed from their three consecutive World Series appearances. Oakland had also won 31 of their previous 42 games against the Yankees, including 16 in a row at one point. More conspicuous, the Athletics and their manager, Tony La Russa, often seemed to delight in tormenting the Yankees. Oakland had a big and intimidating team, with brawny sluggers like Mark McGwire and José Canseco and a growling ace pitcher, Dave Stewart, who wasn’t averse to throwing at hitters (nine hit batsmen in 1991).

  In the fourth inning of the May 17 game, Mélido Pérez threw an inside pitch to Oakland’s Scott Brosius. La Russa and Athletics outfielder Willie Wilson began shouting at Pérez.

  There was some recent bad blood between the teams. The previous week, the Yankees’ rookie second baseman Pat Kelly had been hit twice by pitches in a three-game series in Oakland. It would be like the Athletics to try to unsettle or frighten a first-year phenom.

  But on May 17, after the inside pitch to Brosius, La Russa turned his ire toward catcher Matt Nokes, yelling, “We’ll show you what an inside pitch is.”

  At that moment, Showalter stomped to the top step of the dugout and bellowed at La Russa, tapping his chest with a finger. Said Showalter: “If you’ve got a problem, you can come to me.”

  La Russa, a future Hall of Famer, was considered the game’s genius manager at the time. He responded to a rookie manager’s insolence by charging at him from the Oakland dugout.

  Showalter met the challenge with a sprint from his dugout as well. The two managers looked willing to fight and were hastily separated by home plate umpire Al Clark. But Clark was outnumbered and the tussle continued. At one point, Showalter and La Russa each cocked their fists. Neither actually threw a punch, but they kept jabbering and had to be restrained by several players. The benches and bullpens emptied. It took a few minutes to get La Russa and Showalter apart.

  Showalter was particularly enraged. Mattingly was jawing at La Russa as well. When the game resumed, the Yankees won, 11–2.

  Afterward, Showalter, who kept a picture of Billy Martin on his office wall, said the incident was payback for years of Oakland’s bullying. “We’re not going to back off from anybody,” Showalter said. “We’re not going to let people do some of the things that were done here. I’m not going to sit there and allow anyone from another team to yell at our players.”

  In the clubhouse, the Yankees were energized. “I like what Buck did,” said reliever Steve Farr. “We needed that.”

  The 1992 Yankees had something that had not been seen at Yankee Stadium for some time: a fire in their eyes. At the same time, there was a newfound sense that the franchise could see the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. “Throughout the organization, there was relief, even an optimism—like maybe some good things are going to fall our way for a change,” Cashman said.

  At roughly the time that Buck Showalter was challenging Tony La Russa to a fistfight, Bill Livesey, the Yankees’ director of scouting, called his top Midwest scout, Dick Groch. Livesey knew that Groch was planning a trip to watch a prospect in Ohio.

  “Don’t you know that Jeter’s team is playing?” Livesey asked Groch.

  Jeter had recently sprained his ankle, and Groch said he wasn’t expected to play for another week.

  “Well, that’s our kid, so you’d better go over and sit on him anyway,” said Livesey, who had recently become Jeter’s biggest fan.

  Livesey had made the protracted trek to Kalamazoo, weaving through the tractor-trailers barreling toward Chicago on Interstate 94, then pulling off the highway and driving the ten miles to Jeter’s high school. He watched Jeter play in the rain and cold, a day when it was hard to assess any player’s talents, and then, two days later, after a trip to watch a prospect at Michigan State, Livesey circled back to watch Jeter in better weather.

  “That’s when I saw why Dick Groch’s reports were so glowing,” he said.

  Still, Livesey knew that Jeter had also agreed to play for the University of Michigan. The commitment was not binding, but still, he wondered.

  “Isn’t this kid going to Michigan?” Livesey asked Groch.

  “The only place this kid is going is Cooperstown,” Groch shot back.

  As directed by his boss in mid-May, Groch went back to Kalamazoo to watch another game, “even though none of us ever thought we’d get our chance to draft him,” Groch said, cognizant that the Yankees had the sixth overall pick on June 1. “But the draft is a funny thing. You never give up, especially on
that kind of prospect.”

  Groch stood in the trees beyond the outfield fence again, the only scout at the game and out of sight, too. He wanted to see if Jeter played hard even when he was not being watched by scouts.

  He did, despite his aching ankle. He batted .508 as a senior. Those were not the only numbers that impressed the Yankees. Although Jeter was clearly on his way to college or professional baseball and could have shirked his schoolwork in the final months of his senior year, he instead finished with a 3.8 grade point average.

  “We spent the week before the draft tearing up our board of prospects, with all the scouts and personnel people in a conference room at Mr. Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel,” Livesey said.

  No matter how they shook the board, no matter how much they argued, Jeter was everyone’s top pick.

  On June 1, the Houston Astros had the first overall pick. They had narrowed their choices to Jeter and Phil Nevin, a power-hitting corner infielder and outfielder at Cal State–Fullerton. Houston had drafted two shortstops with their first-round draft picks in 1990 and 1991. So they took Nevin.

  “We thought Nevin was a solid third baseman, nothing more,” Livesey said. Nevin would play twelve years in the major leagues and have a worthy career (.270 batting average, 208 homers), but he was a vagabond. And he played only 18 games for the Astros.

  The Midwest scout for Houston was Hal Newhouser, a Hall of Fame pitcher in the 1940s for his hometown Detroit Tigers. When he had retired as a player in 1955, Newhouser had gone into scouting. He strongly advised the Astros to take Jeter, saying Jeter was as good a player as he had ever seen. When the Astros took Nevin instead, a disgusted Newhouser quit and never worked in baseball again.

  The Cleveland Indians had the next pick. They wanted pitching and selected Paul Shuey, a right-hander from the University of North Carolina. “Shuey had a really big leg kick. He was going to have trouble holding runners on,” Livesey said. “We liked him, but not at that pick.” Shuey became a middle reliever and pitched 11 seasons, most of them for Cleveland, retiring with a 45-28 record and 3.87 ERA.

  Up next was the Montreal Expos. They also sought pitching, taking B. J. Wallace, a lefty from Mississippi State.

  Livesey: “Wallace? We didn’t like him up that high.”

  Wallace never got out of the minors, cresting at the AA level.

  Baltimore had the fourth pick. Jeter did not fit the Orioles’ plans, since they had Cal Ripken Jr. at shortstop. They went with Jeffrey Hammonds, an outfielder from Stanford. “Hammonds was a good outfielder, but we already had a bunch of outfielders: Bernie and Gerald Williams, Roberto Kelly and Carl Everett,” Livesey said. Hammonds had a solid thirteen-year career (.272 average, 110 homers, 423 RBI), although he made the All-Star team only once, in 2000, with the Colorado Rockies.

  The fifth choice belonged to the Cincinnati Reds, who had a history of drafting high schoolers. Most everyone figured the Reds would snatch Jeter, though they already had Barry Larkin, who at twenty-eight years old was coming off his fourth successive season as an All-Star shortstop.

  At home in Kalamazoo, Jeter was lamenting an ominous, and increasingly obvious, fate. “I was thinking I’d be sitting behind Larkin for years,” he said in a 2017 interview.

  But the Reds did not have the deepest pockets. Thinking that Jeter would not last until the fifth pick, they had been in contact with Chad Mottola, a six-foot-three, 215-pound outfielder from central Florida who hit such towering homers even the Astros considered him with the first pick.

  Mottola had told the Reds that he was looking for a contract of about $400,000. The Reds convinced themselves that Jeter, who would not turn eighteen until June 26, would enroll at Michigan. Plus, Mottola might come at half the price that Jeter would fetch.

  The Yankees’ scouting and player personnel executives were assembled in a large meeting room at Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel as the draft played out. The picks were being delivered via conference call, with each team announcing its pick into a speakerphone connected to 25 other speakerphones around the country.

  There was silence in the Yankees’ meeting room as the Reds deliberated. But when Cincinnati announced Mottola’s name, someone in the room hit the mute button so the rest of major league baseball did not hear the cheering that had erupted in Tampa. “We were going pretty crazy—we couldn’t believe what had happened,” Lukevics, the farm director, said. “I mean, we would have taken Jeter if we had the first pick.”

  The Yankees’ view of Mottola?

  “Not to degrade any of these guys, but we didn’t have Chad up that high,” Livesey said. Mottola became a terrific minor league hitter—he played 16 minor league seasons—but in the majors he would play a total of 59 games and hit four homers and bat .200.

  Once Cincinnati had made their selection, there was no hesitation in Tampa. Kevin Elfering, the assistant scouting director, unmuted the phone and spoke into it. “Derek Jeter of Kalamazoo Central,” he said. “Maybe the most famous words I’ve ever spoken.”

  Jack Curry, an intrepid sports reporter for the New York Times, reached Jeter by telephone from Texas, where the Yankees defeated the Rangers, 7–1, to go five games over .500. They were within four games of first-place Toronto. Curry, who would be writing a book with Jeter in a few years, was struck by the poise of the teenager on the other end of the line. Jeter said it was “50-50” whether he would go to college or sign with the Yankees. “We’ll make a decision as a family,” Jeter told Curry.

  But Gene Michael knew the Jeter contract negotiations would be nothing like what he went through a year earlier with Brien Taylor. “Derek grew up a Yankee fan in New Jersey,” he said, smiling. “We knew he had been telling people he was going to play for the Yankees since he was a little boy. We were going to give him a good contract, and we did—$800,000—and he was going to begin his lifelong dream.”

  Standing in a corridor beneath the grandstand at the Yankees’ spring training complex twenty-five years later, Michael laughed. “When Jeter fell to us with the sixth pick,” he said with a wide smile, “we felt like maybe, as a franchise, we were on a little roll. I mean, that was a good day.

  “It worked out pretty well, right?”

  14

  The Yankee Way

  THE MINOR LEAGUE system that Derek Jeter would be joining was different from any other in professional baseball. By design, the Yankees farm clubs stood apart because of the amount of money invested, because of what was emphasized and because of a meticulous, ultraorganized structure.

  The leaders of the Yankees minor league system were outliers. While other teams considered the catcher to be the most important position player, the Yankees put catcher at the bottom of their priorities in the amateur draft. They would find other skilled position players and turn them into catchers.

  While other teams shied away from players from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico because they typically took longer to develop, the Yankees doubled the scouting staff in those countries and encouraged them to find younger players, to leave more time for development.

  And most prominently, while other clubs looked at their farm teams primarily as incubators of individual talent and did not put a premium on developing winning teams, the Yankees stressed that the goal of each of the minor league teams was to win a championship. “Winning is a teaching tool,” said Bill Livesey, the scouting director.

  It was more than a theoretical goal. It was pragmatic, too.

  “In the minors, you’re trying to see your guys play as much as possible, to evaluate them and to help them develop,” said Brian Sabean, a Yankees scouting and player personnel vice president in the late eighties and early nineties who would go on to mold three World Series winners as general manager of the San Francisco Giants. “If they’re in the postseason, contending for a championship every year, they’re going to have to play another 15 or 20 playoff games—that’s another month of baseball, which is good for them and good for us as evaluators. Plus, we get to watch how they
perform under the pressure of the postseason. Why would you want to wait until they get to the major leagues to find out whether they can perform under pressure?”

  Everything that was done in the Yankees minor leagues was part of a master plan, for which there was even a written manual, penned by Livesey and Mark Newman, the coordinator of minor league instruction, who also had a law degree. Officially, it was called “The Yankee System Developmental Manual,” but to players, coaches and executives, the tome of more than five hundred pages was “the Yankee Way.”

  It included things as simple as how the home and road uniforms were supposed to be worn—the famed home pinstripes had to align vertically from the jersey top to the pants, for example, and four inches of the blue stirrup sock was supposed to be visible between the bottom of the pant leg and the top of the shoes. But the Yankee Way was complex, too. There was a chart for the model height and weight of players by position, and scouts memorized it. First basemen and third basemen were ideally expected to be six-foot-one or taller and at least 190 pounds. Outfielders could be smaller if their time in a 30-yard dash (the distance between the bases) was fast enough.

  The chart was extremely detailed and it prioritized by position the five elemental baseball skills of hitting, power hitting, fielding, running ability and arm strength. For example, in the Yankee Way, the most important skill listed for a center fielder was fielding ability, followed by running ability, then hitting, arm strength and power hitting. At third base, it was hitting ability, power hitting, fielding, arm strength and then running ability. For first basemen and right fielders, it was primarily about power hitting. Running ability came last.

  “The Yankee Way manual was an unbelievably meticulous, valuable tool,” said Glenn Sherlock, who before joining Showalter’s staff in 1992 was a Yankees minor league manager and coach. Sherlock went on to spend more than twenty years as a major league coach in Arizona and with the New York Mets.