The old-timers would also take informal batting and fielding practice before their exhibition game. On this sunny day in 1992 they were doing just that, with Showalter watching from the dugout, when left fielder Mel Hall walked up the ramp to the field.
Hall, who that year was leading the team in home runs and RBI, looked onto the field and said, “Who are these old fucking guys?”
Showalter did not react. But he had a thought.
“I knew right then we had to get rid of Mel Hall,” Showalter said years later. “That was it.”
Hall had a career high 81 RBI in 1992, but when he became a free agent after the season, the Yankees ignored him. So did every other major league team. He spent the next three years playing in Japan and retired in 1996. In 2009, he was sentenced to forty-five years in prison after being convicted of two counts of sexual assault with minors.
As the 1992 season wound from spring to summer, the Yankees had become Showalter’s team, and a sense of stability emanated from the manager’s office. In July, he agreed to a $1 million, three-year contract extension, a deal that did not expire until after the 1995 season.
That same month, a tremor shook the measured equilibrium Showalter and Michael had sought to instill. Fay Vincent announced that Steinbrenner’s lifetime ban had been commuted to roughly a two-year suspension. Steinbrenner could return to run the Yankees on March 1, 1993.
“It gave everyone a little pause, but it was still off in the distance,” Showalter said.
Or, as Michael said: “We knew we still had time to make some more big moves. We couldn’t finish what we started, but we could take a few more steps. And who knew what George would say or do when he did return. I didn’t know if I’d even still have a job.”
Years later, Vincent explained his reasoning for reinstating Steinbrenner. “Two years of suspension was what I wanted to impose in the first place,” he said. “Some people told me I wimped out. I didn’t look at it that way. He was the one that chose to go on the permanently ineligible list.
“But he didn’t understand the terms or the fairly ruthless contract that he signed in 1990. And since then, he had called me several times to talk about how he could get back into baseball. He missed it. He admitted he made a mistake. I waited two years and let him back in.”
Until March 1, 1993, Steinbrenner was still prohibited from engaging in day-to-day activities with the team, and that included participating in the decisions about trades or free-agent transactions. Steinbrenner did not overtly breach those prohibitions, although over the next several months he would skirt around them from time to time.
The Yankees fan base reacted to the news of Steinbrenner’s impending return with a mix of wariness and forgiveness. That was something of a substantive turnaround from the response when he was banished. Back then, there was cheering in the Yankee Stadium grandstands. But by 1992, the fans were well aware that the team had been penny pinchers during the past two years, at least when it came to prominent big league acquisitions. There was hope that with Steinbrenner’s return, the Yankees could once again chase the highest-profile free agents. And there was a feeling Steinbrenner might now appreciate the steadiness and consistency that had grown up around the team’s management in his absence.
Or, as Fran Shipley, a Yankees fan from Ridgewood, New Jersey, told the New York Daily News: “I hope George has learned his lesson. I hope he has the smarts to realize he doesn’t have to run everything. He has to figure that out sooner or later. Now is a good time.”
Mattingly had a similar warning from the players’ locker room. “George should leave the manager and general manager alone,” he said. “In some ways, maybe we do need him back as the owner. But not in all the old ways. Some of the things he did in the past hurt the team, year after year. Some of that stuff should stay banned.”
In a sign that he may have been listening, at least on some level, Steinbrenner said almost nothing about his reinstatement. He would wait for March 1, 1993, when he would be four months shy of his sixty-third birthday.
At lunch in Manhattan that summer, Steinbrenner did say that Yankees fans had once again begun to stop him on the street for pictures. “It’s a warmer greeting,” he said, adding with a smile, “I guess they’ve never been around a man who was thrown out of baseball before.”
But Steinbrenner was also pensive and contemplative. In the previous eighteen months or so, he said, he had spent many hours alone, playing the piano, a little-known pastime of his. He had reflected on the purpose or meaning of his exile. At one point in the conversation, he mentioned a favorite painting by Monet.
The painting was cleverly composed so that different elements of the image became apparent only as a viewer stepped farther back from the canvas.
In a soft voice, which was extremely rare for him, Steinbrenner said, “I’ve had a chance to step back.”
He had also taken his lumps outside of baseball. His company—his father’s once proud company, American Ship Building—was sinking and would soon file for bankruptcy. Steinbrenner would sell the company in 1995. The Steinbrenner family’s net worth would be wrapped mostly around the Yankees, who were valued at more than $400 million.
Meanwhile, the Yankees had sunk to last place by early August. In another sign of how much things had changed in Yankeeland, Steinbrenner remained silent. But Gene Michael’s response was telling.
First the Yankees recalled Bernie Williams from AAA Columbus and installed him as the starting center fielder. In doing so, they shifted the gifted, lissome Roberto Kelly, who many believed was the team’s center fielder of the future, to left field. Mel Hall went to right field, and then, a week later, was benched for Gerald Williams, who was also promoted from Columbus.
Hall was not happy and said so. Neither was Kelly, an All-Star in 1992, who also expressed his dismay at the switch. Showalter declined to comment.
In his first game, Bernie Williams made a spectacular over-the-shoulder catch against the Milwaukee Brewers. And he also continued to display the quizzical decision-making that still made him something of an enigma.
In a crucial situation with a teammate on second base, Williams was instructed to swing away if the Brewers’ infielders charged to defend a bunt just before the pitch. He was told to bunt if they did not shift and remained back on the infield dirt.
On the first two pitches, the Brewers charged and Williams squared to bunt. On the next pitch, when the Brewers stayed back, he swung away.
When Williams was told after the game that he had made the wrong choice three straight times, he seemed surprised. “I thought I did what I was supposed to do,” he said.
Showalter, in his office, remained calm. “There’s a learning curve at work here,” he said.
Many years later, Showalter said of Williams: “What can you say? Bernie is a unique guy and we all had to accept that. You can teach him something, but that doesn’t mean he has learned it. He was on his own timetable in terms of learning. But I know Stick and I were not planning on giving up on him. Athletically, there were times when he could just overpower the game. Everyone knew that. You had to just give him time.”
As for Kelly, he continued to seem demoralized by playing left field. Showalter made another mental note one day when Kelly seemed to jog after a double in the left-center-field gap, which allowed a runner on first base to score.
Michael, meanwhile, made other moves to double down on the youth movement. From Columbus, he recalled Bob Wickman, the pitcher with the mangled index finger whom he acquired in the trade for Steve Sax. The Yankees would win Wickman’s first three starts, and he finished the season with a 7-1 record. Sterling Hitchcock, the crafty lefty, was also promoted to the big team, and although he lost his two starts, it was a valuable experience for a twenty-one-year-old who in 83 minor league starts at three levels had compiled an ERA of 2.56.
The Yankees surged dramatically in September to climb into fifth place. Their final record (76-86) was only a five-victory improveme
nt over 1991, but playing the final month with a .500 record seemed important to many on the team.
“At the end of this season, we showed the exact opposite of what happened last year when we were a team going nowhere with no hope and no future,” Mattingly said. “This year, we’ve kept playing hard. Hopefully, we can make another move next year.”
There was other major news late in the 1992 season. A faction of baseball owners, convinced that Vincent was too amenable to the demands of the players’ union, united to oust the commissioner. Eighteen owners endorsed a vote of no confidence in Vincent, who soon after resigned.
With their eyes on another divisive labor fight looming in 1993–94, the owners decided to reduce the powers of Vincent’s replacement. The owners would operate more like a board of directors, and the commissioner would act mostly as a chairman of that board. But he would be one of their own in every way, which proved to be manifestly true when Bud Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, became the next commissioner.
While the Blue Jays were on their way to a World Series victory in October, Gene Michael was busy negotiating with several big-time free agents. Over and over, he was rebuffed. Some of the big-name players only talked to the Yankees to be courteous. Steinbrenner might have loosened the purse strings, and the Yankees might have seemed on the cusp of a turnaround, but they were still a team coming off four consecutive losing seasons. They had not been to the postseason in eleven years. The team’s reputation was still besmirched. “It was an uphill battle—really uphill—when it came to the really spotlighted, premier free agents,” Michael conceded.
The Yankees offered Barry Bonds several contracts to come play left field in Yankee Stadium, where he could swing for an inviting, short right-field porch. They dangled a deal that would have made Bonds the highest-paid player in baseball by several million dollars.
“He said no thanks,” Michael said.
Bonds instead signed a six-year deal, worth $44 million, with San Francisco.
The Yankees also whiffed on signing top free-agent pitchers like Greg Maddux, David Cone and Doug Drabek, their former farmhand. That trio went to Atlanta, Kansas City and Houston, respectively. Maddux took $6 million less than the Yankees offered to play for the Braves.
“I started to think we had to do something more basic like a trade,” Michael said. “At least for a big first move.”
Michael, a scout at heart, had not stopped scouring the major leagues in search of talent. Throughout the 1992 season, he had attended the games of nearly every other team, looking for players who might resolve some of the Yankees’ deficiencies and who were a good fit with the home ballpark and the strengths of their minor league talent.
He needed starting pitching and he needed a left-swinging outfielder, because the Yankees lineup had only one middle-of-the-order left-handed hitter—and that was Mattingly, who was no longer driving in 100-plus runs per season. Michael also wanted to add a veteran who might help Mattingly set the tone of personal accountability that Showalter was seeking for the clubhouse.
“I started thinking about the Yankees championship teams in the 1970s and what made them successful,” Michael said. “It was a bunch of guys who hated to fail. I wanted the fire and tenacity of Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Lou Piniella and guys like that.
“When you make a trade, it’s not all about the stats—home runs, runs produced, runs scored. Sometimes you’re trading for an attitude.”
But the trade Michael engineered on November 3 had Yankees fans scratching their heads. Throughout the baseball community, most thought the Yankees had been fleeced. A recent search of newspaper stories written about the trade did not turn up a single article from November 1993 in which the author wrote that the deal would make the Yankees better.
“Was it a ballsy trade?” Showalter said. “You bet. Shit, people thought we were panicking. But Stick had done his homework.”
The trade sent twenty-seven-year-old, right-hand-hitting Roberto Kelly, who was considered the Yankees’ number one big league commodity, to Cincinnati for thirty-year-old lefty Paul O’Neill, a player perhaps better known for his temper than for his hitting or fielding.
Kelly, even if he had been switched to left field, was coming off an All-Star season. When he signed with the Yankees as a seventeen-year-old in 1982, the team thought so much of him he was called “a Panamanian Mickey Mantle.”
O’Neill had slumped in 1992, when he had bristled under his demanding manager, Lou Piniella. At that point, O’Neill was a lifetime .191 hitter against left-handed pitchers. He was a right fielder, and the Yankees were already paying Danny Tartabull $5 million a year to play right field. And even if they were going to move Tartabull to designated hitter, wasn’t that to make room in right field for Gerald Williams?
If the Yankees’ primary need was starting pitching, why would Michael instead choose to crowd the outfield? As best as anyone could figure, O’Neill would platoon in right field with Williams or Tartabull.
And, more perplexing, the Yankees had given up one of their best young players for a part-time player prone to tantrums.
“I had watched O’Neill play a lot, and to me, I felt sure he was coming into his prime,” Michael said. “I liked that he got riled up about making outs. I liked the passion. It could have been a mistake, but I was no longer sure that Roberto was going to blossom the way we had envisioned.”
It was a deal in lockstep with one of Michael’s oft-stated tenets: Trade a talented young player whom others value before everyone else finds out what you already know—that the player may be overrated.
“It’s often a key to a good trade,” Showalter said. “I’m not disparaging Roberto; he had a good career. But we saw some faults that others didn’t because they were viewing him from afar. But in the end, it was more about what we received. As it turned out, getting Paul O’Neill was hugely instrumental to our success going forward.
“We had to get more left-handed, and Paul was that piece. He was a good defender and had a good arm. He would get along with Donnie and the other veterans, which was important. And he understood the New York media—that wouldn’t be a problem.”
O’Neill’s older sister, Molly, was a writer for the New York Times. He knew the landscape.
At the time, a case could be made that both Kelly and O’Neill were coming off poor years. Although Kelly had surged at the beginning of the year to make his first All-Star team, his offensive numbers lagged as the season went on, and he finished with only 10 home runs after hitting 20 in 1991. His batting average was .272. Worse, as Michael noticed, Kelly’s on-base percentage was a paltry .322. Kelly was explosive but impatient at the plate. And Gene Michael knew he already had enough speed in the outfield. What he needed was prudence in the batter’s box.
O’Neill had indeed had a lousy year in 1992. Piniella had badgered him about pulling the ball more often in an effort to make him more of a power hitter. But that approach failed, and O’Neill’s power numbers actually went down, from 28 homers and 91 RBI in 1991 to 14 home runs and 66 RBI.
That falloff grated on O’Neill, especially since he grew up a Reds fan in Columbus, Ohio. Of course, all failure grated on O’Neill, whose temper was already legendary. He had destroyed dugout water coolers and batting helmets with his bat in outbursts after strikeouts. Any kind of failure might cause O’Neill to erupt, even failing to advance a runner on the basepaths with a well-placed out.
“He tormented himself,” said Piniella, who had a similar reputation for hotheadedness. “I know how he felt. It’s a good thing, because it means you have high standards. But it’s sometimes a bad thing. And you can look pretty foolish.”
O’Neill had famously bobbled a ground ball in the outfield and then drop-kicked it into the infield.
“None of that bothered me,” said Michael, who saw O’Neill’s reasonably good .346 on-base percentage and thought it could be closer to .400 with the right tutelage. “He tried so hard at everything, but that made him
a little overaggressive at the plate. He lunged a lot. We corrected that.”
Brian Cashman recalled that the Yankees brain trust was meeting at Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel on the eve of the O’Neill trade. “It was far from unanimous about what to do, because there were people who still thought of Roberto as the All-Star center fielder he had been,” Cashman said. “Gene Michael made his arguments for the trade and then he asked for everyone else’s opinions. And Gene wanted to hear them.
“But he was also his own man. Gene would do what he thought, regardless. Even if everybody said no, he was going to do that deal, regardless. He believed in it.”
But trading Kelly meant the Yankees were committing to Bernie Williams as their center fielder of the future. They had no one else to play the position. It had been seven years since Williams was hidden away in Connecticut, then signed as a seventeen-year-old. In that time, no top prospect had flummoxed the Yankees as routinely as Bernie had.
Although he had almost been traded multiple times, the Yankees had stuck with Williams as he grew from a teenager in braces to a twenty-four-year-old about to be handed one of the most celebrated jobs in baseball: center fielder for the Yankees.
“It takes a leap of faith to think that Bernie Williams is going to be the guy,” Cashman, Michael’s assistant in 1992, said. “For several years before that, there was a certain amount of indecision about exactly what he was going to become. It took him a while, and some guys will take longer. But his physical attributes were not in question—a switch-hitter who was tremendous defensively. A power hitter.
“Yes, he was quiet and you wondered how he would do in the pressure cooker of New York. But he deserved the chance to succeed, and Gene was going to give him the chance to succeed.”
Chumps to Champs Page 17
