Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Showalter considers the O’Neill trade, and the decision to make Williams the everyday center fielder, one of the pivotal moments in the somewhat silent resurrection of the Yankees that was taking place in the winter of 1992–93.

  “Sometimes you have to force yourself to have faith in a guy,” Showalter said at his Dallas home in 2017. “And with Bernie we talked about that in 1992: Hey, we’ve got to stop wondering whether he’s our center fielder and make a decision whether he is or isn’t. Because it was time.

  “It meant that the franchise had to accept that there will be growing pains. And while some people, especially ownership, might continue to question our faith in the player, the rest of us had to keep the faith. Although I’ll admit, even for me, there were some nights when if someone had told me that this guy was going to be a batting champion, a postseason MVP, an All-Star five or six times, I’m not sure I would have believed it. But there were many other nights—many more nights back then—when I saw all those attributes in Bernie and did actually see the future.”

  But Showalter knew that twenty-four-year-old Bernie Williams could not shoulder the Yankees spotlight alone. O’Neill was one way to deflect attention from the new center fielder. “And we needed some more vets, a surrounding cast that put the right kind of peer pressure on the young guys,” Showalter said. “It wasn’t Mel Hall’s kind of peer pressure. It was confident guys like Mattingly, O’Neill and Mike Stanley. We called them clubhouse culture creators.”

  The Yankees had also recently re-signed Stanley as a free agent.

  “And there were more to come,” Showalter said. “That was a very busy winter. Culture creators. You know, you can talk all about stats and analytics, and I get that. But you can’t measure how to build the most productive team culture. And that gets lost. Or it can. We tried to make sure it didn’t.”

  But before the Yankees could resume reshaping their roster, they were going to lose some players in the expansion draft on November 17, 1992.

  For weeks preceding the draft to stock the lineups of the embryonic Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, the Yankee leaders had been in countless meetings to try to figure out which players to protect from the draft.

  The Yankees could list only 15 players from their major league or minor league rosters as unavailable in the first round of the draft. They could protect four more players after the first of three rounds. Not everyone in the Yankees organization was eligible to be drafted—players selected in the 1991 or 1992 drafts and players signed in those years could not be drafted. That meant that Jeter, Pettitte and Posada were safe. Nonetheless, another 109 Yankees players were available, including Mariano Rivera—unless the team chose to make him one of the 15 untouchable players.

  Michael and Showalter agreed not to put Rivera on that list.

  “It was a gamble—all of that draft was a gamble,” Michael said. “And I was worried about Mariano, but I also knew that everybody thought he was coming off Tommy John surgery.”

  The Yankees protected Bernie and Gerald Williams, Sterling Hitchcock, second baseman Pat Kelly, Wickman and some other jewels of the system. They did not protect Danny Tartabull, hoping he and his $5 million contract would be scooped up by either the Rockies or the Marlins.

  But with the third pick of the expansion draft, the Rockies instead chose Yankees third baseman Charlie Hayes, who had hit 18 home runs with 66 RBI for Showalter’s 1992 Yankees, when he earned about $850,000.

  “We thought the Rockies and Marlins would mostly take prospects in the first round, so we were trying to sneak Charlie through and then protect him after the first round,” Michael said. “It didn’t work, and that hurt.”

  The Yankees also lost Carl Everett, their first-round pick in the 1990 amateur draft, and in a surprise, the Rockies took minor league catcher Brad Ausmus. Everett became a two-time All-Star, but he had a turbulent career, frequently clashing with umpires, teammates, managers, reporters and opponents. He played on eight teams in 14 major league seasons. Ausmus, a former shortstop, would play nearly 2,000 major league games at catcher, drive in 607 runs and eventually become a major league manager.

  “The day of that draft, we felt like maybe we had made only one mistake,” Michael said. “We weren’t sure what we’d do without Charlie Hayes at third base. Yes, Everett and Ausmus were prospects that you hated to lose, but we were going to lose somebody. Carl was an outfielder and we thought we had enough young outfielders. Brad turned out to have a long career but we had some other catchers.

  “The farm system was deep. You had to trust it.”

  The real news was that neither the Rockies nor the Marlins even considered taking a chance on Rivera, who would set the record for career saves.

  With the expansion draft behind them, the Yankees went to the winter meetings in Louisville knowing they had to bolster their starting pitching. The record of Yankees starters in 1992 had been 47-60. They were in hot pursuit of several top pitchers, all of whom would be signed or traded for in a span of a few days. Tensions were high.

  Twenty-five years later, Showalter still vividly recalled the charged winter meetings atmosphere: “We had been in Joe Molloy’s suite for something like two days straight—visiting with other teams and having these tense meetings amongst ourselves to consider all the options.”

  At baseball’s winter meetings, which take place at a large hotel, each team books a phalanx of rooms for its front-office employees and manager. And the team rents one large suite with a bedroom and something akin to a conference room for the general manager or chief executive where the bulk of the negotiations with other teams or players’ agents occur. In the Yankees’ case, the gathering spot was the suite assigned to Molloy, the team’s general partner and the son-in-law of the principal owner.

  “So it’s getting late one night and everyone wants to go out to dinner,” Showalter said. “I volunteered to stay in Joe Molloy’s suite to man the phone in case there was an important call, because we were weighing a couple of big moves. This was before cell phones. I had the phone number of the restaurant where everyone was eating.

  “So I’m sitting there in the suite all by myself and back in Joe Molloy’s bedroom the phone rings. Well, it’s not the conference room phone we had been using, but I am there to answer the phone, so I go into the bedroom to get it. I figured it was his wife or something.”

  Buck picked up the receiver and said hello.

  “And all I hear is ‘Who the fuck is this?’” Showalter said. “And, you know, I’m sitting there by myself not getting to eat dinner. So I yelled back, ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  “And the voice at the other end says, ‘This is Mr. Steinbrenner.’ And I said, ‘Oh, hi, Mr. Steinbrenner, this is Buck Showalter.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m not supposed to be answering this phone because he’s on probation or whatever.’

  “And he just said, ‘Tell Joe to call me when he gets back.’”

  There was nothing in Fay Vincent’s banishment of Steinbrenner that prohibited the Yankees’ owner from talking to his son-in-law. And it was probably a coincidence that the phone call came during winter meetings as the franchise—Steinbrenner’s principal investment—pondered whether to make a crucial trade or to pay tens of millions of dollars for several free agents.

  Truth be told, Steinbrenner’s occasional, covert involvement in team activities, which probably violated the terms of his exile, had been a not-so-hidden secret around the Yankees for months. And that was sometimes a problem, since Vincent’s office—before he resigned—not only made team employees sign affidavits vowing they had no contact with Steinbrenner, but also made employees submit to random lie detector tests. But those could be a bit of a ruse, too.

  Showalter recalled the one time he took the lie detector test. “The guy giving the test considered it a pain in the ass as much as I considered it a pain in the ass,” he said in 2017. “I told the guy giving me the test, ‘I’m not going to lie.’ And he said, ‘You won’t have to lie
. Just trust me.’

  “So I get hooked up to the thing and he asks me, ‘Have you had face-to-face contact with Mr. Steinbrenner?’ And I say, ‘No.’ And he asks if Mr. Steinbrenner has visited my house at any point and talked to me. I say, ‘No.’ He never asked me a single question like, ‘Has he called you on the phone or anything?’ And then after a few questions, he said, ‘OK, that’s it.’”

  After he was fired in 1991, Stump Merrill had been subjected to questioning by Vincent’s office as well. He was required to fly from Maine to New York City, where he insisted he’d had no face-to-face contact with Steinbrenner. “I was interrogated for four hours by four different people,” Merrill recalled. “And I must have said twenty-five times, ‘What part of fucking NO don’t you understand?’”

  Merrill was then asked if he knew which Yankees employees had been in touch with Steinbrenner. “And I told them, ‘I have no idea, but if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. That’s your job, not mine.’ It was a waste of my time, the whole fucking nine yards.”

  The Steinbrenner banishment, even while his family still ran the team, caused a variety of peculiar, even comical, situations for team employees. Once, Molloy and Showalter decided to meet at the Steinbrenner horse farm in Ocala, Florida. As they gathered in a small cottage on the property, they looked out the window and saw Steinbrenner walking the grounds. The duo spent the rest of the day hiding from him—then left early.

  The Yankees were soon very busy at the 1992 Louisville winter meetings. On December 5, they acquired starting pitcher Jim Abbott for three prospects, including first baseman J. T. Snow, who would end up playing 16 major league seasons and drive in 877 runs.

  Since Abbott pitched only two Yankees seasons and compiled a 20-22 record, it could be argued that the trade was a bust, given Snow’s production, which included four seasons when he drove in 95 or more runs.

  But to the Yankees, Abbott was another “culture creator.”

  Born without a right hand, Abbott was one of the most admired athletes in the country from 1988 to the early 1990s, because he had learned to pitch with his left hand and arm while resting his glove on the end of his right forearm. After delivering a pitch, he would switch the glove to his left hand. Abbott was tall, blond and always seemed to be smiling, and he became one of the feel-good stories of the era. Raised in Flint, Michigan, he pitched three years for the University of Michigan and led the victorious US baseball team at the 1988 Summer Olympics.

  The California Angels made Abbott the eighth overall pick in the 1988 draft, and he moved into the Angels’ starting rotation the next season without having to pitch a single game in the minor leagues. He won 40 games in his first three seasons, including an 18-11 season in 1991, when he finished third in the Cy Young Award balloting. But his record slumped to 7-15 in 1992, although he did have a sparkling ERA of 2.77.

  The Yankees liked that they were getting a quietly confident twenty-five-year-old who already had four years of major league experience, and they believed Abbott would be another good fit with Mattingly. They were correct about that assumption, as the two became close friends who frequently socialized off the field.

  “Jim was another guy who hated to lose, and he cared about all the things that mattered,” Mattingly said of his friend. “He wanted things done the right way.”

  Five days after the Abbott trade, the Yankees acquired another dynamic left-handed starter with a venerable track record who was known for his understated leadership.

  Jimmy Key, who in nine seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays had a 116-81 record, signed a four-year, $17 million free-agent contract with the Yankees. Key, who had just won two games in the 1992 World Series for the world champion Blue Jays, was known as a soft-spoken assassin, and he pitched that way. He did not throw especially hard, but he had precise control of his pitches and could pinpoint a fastball that nonetheless overpowered many a hitter. He had cunning and an array of breaking pitches, most notably a backdoor slider. He was the only pitcher in the major leagues at the time who had won at least 12 games in each of the last eight seasons. He had a career record of 8-1 in Yankee Stadium and was 3-1 in five postseason starts.

  Key was raised in Alabama but expressed no reservations about playing in New York. He even gave the city a backhanded compliment of sorts. “My wife says I’m lifeless inside on game days—things don’t bother me,” said the thirty-two-year-old Key, who was considered a no-nonsense leader on a Toronto team that had won its division in four of the previous five seasons. With a quizzical smile, Key added, “I guess that means I’m a good fit for New York.”

  The Yankees had found themselves another culture creator.

  In another coincidence (there would continue to be a series of them involving the Yankees’ owner and his son-in-law), George Steinbrenner had publicly lobbied for Key to be signed. Joe Molloy, by himself, had been dispatched to negotiate with Key’s wife, Cindy, who acted as her husband’s agent. Molloy, it turned out, somehow knew exactly how much money his father-in-law was willing to spend on Key.

  “He’s the guy we wanted as much as anybody,” Steinbrenner told reporters in telephone interviews from Tampa.

  The Yankees roster was undeniably improving, even if Barry Bonds, Greg Maddux and other top stars wanted no part of the Bronx, where the last World Series championship trophy was raised fourteen years earlier. “We’re not dwelling on who doesn’t want to come here,” Showalter said at the time. “If one part of the equation doesn’t work out, then you move on to the next part. And we’re not through yet.”

  Since the expansion draft, the Yankees had been without a third baseman. The onetime blue-chip prospect at the position, Hensley Meulens, who was signed alongside Bernie Williams in 1985, was trying to sign a contract to play in Japan, and the Yankees were not yet standing in his way. Meulens was not in the team’s plans. Not all Yankees prospects blossomed.

  “You have to give up on some young players, too,” Michael said. “It’s painful, but you have to be able to admit you were wrong.”

  That winter, the most prominent free-agent third baseman available was Wade Boggs, the eight-time Boston All-Star. But Boggs’s batting average in 1992 had plummeted to .259, the first time in his career he had not batted over .300. He had endured back spasms and blamed blurry vision for his hitting woes since he was adjusting to new contact lenses.

  Gene Michael and Buck Showalter each had reservations about signing Boggs, at least initially. Again, it was all about the clubhouse culture.

  Boggs was an odd personality. He was perceived as egocentric, which made him fit in perfectly with the Red Sox of the late eighties, a team slapped with the enduring label “25 players, 25 cabs.” The term summed up a complete lack of unity, based on an anecdotal scene outside a Red Sox hotel after a road game when players going out to dinner each called separate cabs.

  Whether Boggs deserved to be denigrated by association, he was undisputedly a bit of a mysterious loner with quirky superstitions. Most important to Showalter, Boggs and Mattingly were far from friendly. The two had vied for the American League batting title several times between 1983 and 1988. Boggs had won every year except 1984, when Mattingly did instead. But famously, in 1986, Boggs had sat out the final four games of the season, coasting to the title over Mattingly with a .357 batting average.

  The Red Sox hosted the Yankees in those final four games that year. With Boggs resting in the dugout, Mattingly hit .422 in the series and fell five points short of catching Boggs. In the visiting clubhouse afterward, Mattingly, who had played 162 games that season, barely concealed his ire toward Boggs, who under baseball’s unwritten rules of conduct had committed an act of cowardice.

  Boggs’s nickname was “Chicken Man,” because one of his superstitions was that he had to eat chicken before every game.

  “Chickenshit Man,” many Yankees grumbled that weekend at Fenway.

  Six years later, things may have calmed down, but Showalter was worried nonetheless. Besides, Boggs was th
irty-four years old and coming off his worst season. And he was a Red Sox, Yankees archrivals since the middle of the century. What would that do to the clubhouse culture?

  But George Steinbrenner was having none of it. Once again, Molloy was put in charge of wooing Boggs and his agent, Alan Nero. Molloy had lunch with Nero to begin the negotiations at Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel. Seated across the lunchroom, in plain sight of Nero, was George Steinbrenner. He was joined by New York Daily News sportswriter Bill Madden, a mainstay on the Yankees beat since the 1970s.

  Madden said Steinbrenner was endorsing the Boggs deal throughout lunch, predicting it would get done. In his 2010 book, Steinbrenner, Madden wrote that George called Nero in his hotel room after Nero’s lunch with Molloy ended.

  “I just want to tell you—be patient,” Steinbrenner said.

  Madden wrote that Steinbrenner added, “You’ll get what you want.”

  The Yankees were the only team to offer Boggs a three-year contract. Nero and Boggs leaped at the offer.

  At breakfast the next morning in his Tampa hotel, not long after Boggs’s signing had been announced, Steinbrenner insisted he had not known about the negotiations: “I swear my daughter called me and said, ‘We just traded for that Red Sox third baseman.’ That’s the way she phrased it. Of course, we signed him, not traded for him.”

  He was asked, “Which of your daughters called you?”

  “Jessica.”

  “So, Joe’s wife, then?”

  “Yeah,” George said. “I mean, I’m allowed to call my daughter’s house.”

  Steinbrenner paused and stammered. “I mean, ah, I can take calls from her,” he said.

  By then, in northern Florida near the Alabama line, where Showalter lived in the off-season, there was not much alarm about the Boggs signing. Showalter had already consulted Mattingly, his former minor league teammate.