Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “I told Buck it would be fine,” Mattingly said. “We now had a bunch of guys who would set the tone. I figured Wade would be a pro about it and go along. And he did.”

  Michael was happy to hear about Mattingly’s acquiescence. Privately, Michael knew there was much to like about Boggs. He thought the Chicken Man might have been dragged down by a horrific 1992 season in Boston when the Red Sox finished in last place. Boggs had also lobbied for a new contract during spring training and complained when he did not get one. The response of Fenway Park fans was to boo him after every out he made.

  “And, let’s face it, if we wanted guys who had high on-base percentages, you couldn’t do better than Boggs in his prime,” Michael said. Boggs had led the major leagues in on-base percentage six times. In 1988, his OBP was 24 points shy of .500.

  “Boggs may not have been my idea from the start, but when we did get him I was thinking that if we got Boggs at 85 or 90 percent of what he was in his prime, he would still help us,” Michael said in 2017.

  During the first week of January 1993, the Yankees held a news conference to introduce all their new players. As if schooled earlier—the players did have dinner with Showalter the night before—Key, O’Neill and Boggs each used the words “attitude, intensity and character,” attributes important for both a player and the team as a whole.

  Showalter used the occasion to unveil a new word for what he wanted in a player. “I’ve been saying I want integrity, but it’s really sincerity that I want,” he said. “A player has to be sincere about wanting to win and wanting to be a good teammate. And other players know who the sincere players are.”

  The setting for the news conference was the same Yankee Stadium luxury ballroom where a host of Yankees managers had been hired and fired. Whether it was Billy Martin, Dick Howser, Bucky Dent or Stump Merrill, it sometimes felt as if their pinstriped ghosts haunted the room. But in 1993, the ballroom had been renovated. Walls had been removed, the lighting had been redone, and new windows brightened the space.

  On that day, the facelift seemed symbolic. There was a sense that the franchise’s dark days were in the rearview mirror. The roster had been gutted. Just four players—and only one starter—on the 1993 roster had been with the team in 1990.

  At Showalter’s request—remember, every little detail had a themed message in Showalter’s world—the aging black-and-white photos of Yankees stars from the 1950s and 1970s had been replaced by vibrant color photos of the team’s current players: Mattingly, Stanley, Wickman.

  Showalter loved tradition, but he wanted to turn the page, too. Scores of photographs from around the stadium had been updated similarly. Out went the fading shots of the old Yankee Stadium, the one of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. In their place were photos of a refurbished, sold-out Yankee Stadium (captured on the rare recent occasion when that occurred).

  The embarrassing memories of the 1990 and 1991 seasons were being whitewashed. George Steinbrenner’s humiliating exile was soon to end. Reinforcements for the beleaguered Mattingly, still by far the team’s most popular player, were on the way.

  “I felt rejuvenated,” Mattingly said in an interview twenty-five years later.

  Showalter told Angela that he felt a new Yankee spirit imbuing the team.

  “Buck really thought the franchise was getting a transfusion,” Angela Showalter said in 2017. “Life was being breathed into the place.

  “Buck almost always tried to go to work with a smile, but he has always said that the beginning of the 1993 season was when he finally felt confident he might come home from work with a smile.”

  16

  An Ugly Duckling No More

  THE ORIGINAL PLAN for George Steinbrenner’s triumphant return to the Yankees on March 1, 1993, was richly choreographed and full of twists and turns.

  A helicopter was supposed to land in the outfield of the team’s main spring training diamond in Fort Lauderdale, and then a Marilyn Monroe look-alike was supposed to hop out waving a Welcome Back, George sign.

  Then the plan called for a line of long black limousines with a police escort to arrive at the field. From the back of the motorcade, a President George H. W. Bush look-alike would leap onto the field, asking reporters: “Where’s the man of the hour? Where’s George?”

  There were other distractions planned—skydivers and trained dogs jumping through hoops—each one aimed at turning the field into a circuslike spectacle. Hundreds of media members had been credentialed for the event, including dozens of TV camera crews and photographers.

  The idea was for the media to be so focused on the show they would not notice a solitary bearded figure sitting in the front row of the stands, a man wearing a denim jacket and a floppy hat that barely covered long, flowing shoulder-length hair.

  At just the right moment, George Steinbrenner would jump onto the top of the home dugout roof and pull off his disguise, throwing down the floppy hat, wig and fake beard. He’d shout, “The Boss is back!”

  That was the plan. Steinbrenner had already been on the cover of Sports Illustrated dressed as Napoleon as he sat on a white horse. He had made appearances on The Larry King Show and the Today show and taken calls from fans for two hours on WFAN, the influential sports-talk radio station in New York.

  But on February 28, the day before Steinbrenner’s exile from the day-to-day operation of the Yankees was to conclude, there was a deadly shootout between federal agents and an extremist religious sect in Waco, Texas. Two days before that, a truck bomb had exploded beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The terrorist attack was meant to topple the north tower into the south tower. The structures remained intact, but six people died.

  The tragedies saddened Steinbrenner, who for all his bluster and exasperating excesses was staunchly patriotic.

  “I decided it wasn’t the right time to make a big, frivolous display calling attention to my return to baseball,” he said. “It would be selfish and it wouldn’t be respectful to the rest of America.”

  So George, wearing a white-collared shirt, tan slacks and a blue V-neck sweater with GMS inscribed on the left breast, toned down the act and walked onto the Fort Lauderdale field instead.

  There were still plenty of The Boss Is Back signs and placards. Steinbrenner also met with reporters and did not make any news.

  “I will be different,” he vowed. “You’ll see. Wait and see . . . a different George Steinbrenner.”

  Few reporters were convinced. The newspaper columnists in the group mocked the notion that Steinbrenner could turn over a new leaf.

  But he was not seen much that spring. And he granted no more prominent interviews for months.

  Three days later, there was another unveiling on the main spring training field when Brien Taylor pitched two shutout innings during an intrasquad game against big league hitters. The stands were packed, as were both dugouts. Everyone in camp wanted a glimpse of the Yankees’ most famous minor leaguer.

  Before the game, Showalter asked Taylor if he was nervous.

  Replied Taylor: “Why should I be? They should be nervous.”

  Showalter liked that reaction. “If I had that fastball,” the manager said, “I’d probably feel the same way.”

  Taylor gave up one single and routinely threw his fastball in the mid-90s (again, in the early nineties maybe two or three major league pitchers in total threw that hard). He showed command of a two-seam slider or cutter that catcher Mike Stanley struggled to catch cleanly because it broke so much at high speed. Taylor also displayed his newly learned pickoff move at first base.

  Bernie Williams faced Taylor in the game and hit a fly ball to left field for an out. “Dominant fastball,” Williams said later. “Impressive stuff. I was struck by how poised he was. Very calm on the mound.”

  Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte were in the big league camp that spring and made sure to witness Taylor’s outing. They had been Taylor’s teammates in the minors the previous
year. “Brien was a good dude,” Jeter said years later. “Everyone liked Brien.”

  On March 14, Taylor, Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and Rivera were all demoted to the Yankees’ minor league camp in Tampa. About a month later, they would be sent to their minor league outposts—Taylor to Class AA Albany, Jeter and Rivera to Class A Greensboro, and Pettitte and Posada to a team in Prince William, Virginia, which played in a higher-level Class A.

  Each of the players improved his standing with the franchise that season, although in Jeter’s case, his play in 1993 launched a considerable debate about whether he was playing out of position. “There were factions that wondered if he shouldn’t be switched to center field,” Michael said.

  The jumping-off point for the discussion was simple: Jeter made 56 errors in 126 games for the Greensboro Hornets. It was a record for the South Atlantic League, which had been founded in 1904.

  “He was the ugly duckling out there,” said Mitch Lukevics, the team’s minor league director. “He had the long legs and arms, but little of him was centered. He’d bobble a ball for an error, grab it and hurry an off-balance throw for another error.”

  Said Livesey: “It was a choppy, bad field with poor lighting, and his first baseman (the team’s top slugger, Nick Delvecchio) didn’t help either—he could have saved Derek from a lot of errors.”

  But the Yankees top minor league executives never lost faith. “First of all, he had such great range, he continued to get to all these balls that no one else would have gotten to,” Lukevics said. “He was hitting well and with power.”

  Jeter finished the year with a .295 batting average, with 11 triples and five home runs. He was fourth on the Hornets in RBI with 71. But he was the team’s best hitter with runners on base. Those in the organization who preached the Yankee Way also noticed that when Greensboro made the postseason, it was Jeter who led the Hornets in RBI and had a late-inning, run-scoring double that nearly won the final game of the South Atlantic League championship series.

  Jeter, once homesick and trying to find himself, had begun to settle into a role as a team leader. He fostered unity whenever he could, whether it was inviting teammates over to his apartment to watch and compete in Jeopardy! or organizing brief, competitive baseball skills contests hours before games.

  And once every other day or so, Jeter would do something in a game that stunned his teammates. Like the time he charged past his third baseman to backhand a slow-rolling ground ball next to the pitcher’s mound. As he was gloving the ball he yelled for the pitcher to duck, then flung the ball in an underhand motion across his body on a line to first base, to get the runner by a step.

  In the dugout, R. D. Long, Jeter’s friend and roommate, turned to the coaches and other players and said, “This dude is no joke, yo.”

  Yankees executives felt similarly. “He made unbelievably acrobatic plays in the field and hit rockets into the outfield,” Lukevics said. “And he was the fastest guy on that team when we timed the players from the batter’s box to first base—and that was from the right-handed batter’s box.

  “You have to keep reminding people that the minor leagues is all about potential, not necessarily performance in every facet of the game. That will come.”

  Still, while everyone loved Jeter’s overall upside, some people in the Yankees brain trust saw the airmailed throws on routine grounders and the dribblers that scooted through Jeter’s legs and wondered aloud if the franchise’s prized number one pick wouldn’t cause less damage in the outfield. Perhaps the gangly, six-foot-three, long-striding Jeter would be more comfortable where he had more space to roam.

  “It came up a lot in 1993,” said Michael, who as a rail-thin, lanky shortstop had made 56 errors in his first full minor league season in 1959. “Derek in the outfield was a frequent discussion. George had people talking in his ear, and George would bring it up to me. And I said, ‘George, he’s a shortstop. He’s our shortstop. Get used to it.”

  Livesey and Lukevics never wavered in defending Jeter. “The talk about moving him to center field was always from people outside of the player development department,” Lukevics said. “I assure you that no one in player development thought he should go to center field.

  “Now, could he have played center field? Yes, of course. Derek could have done it stone drunk in a snowstorm. But that wasn’t his best position. He was a shortstop, and finding a shortstop with major league ability in the minor leagues is hard. We were lucky to have the best one. He just hadn’t found himself yet.”

  Said Livesey: “I’m sure it bothered Derek to make all those errors. He was a number one pick with a bull’s-eye on his back. But externally, he never showed that the pressure was getting to him.”

  Looking back more than a decade later, Jeter had a different perspective on what was going on with his career at that time. He had never considered playing anywhere other than shortstop.

  Why? He was too busy absorbing every facet and feature of the Yankee Way. “In the Yankee minors, certain principles were instilled in us—just drilled into us—and the most important thing was accountability and responsibility,” Jeter said in a 2017 interview, just weeks after he headed a group that purchased the Florida Marlins.

  “I wasn’t worried about making errors or anything else,” he said. “I wasn’t worried about what position I would play. I was just going to be accountable for those mistakes, take responsibility for them and seek the help I needed to eradicate them. I would simply work harder and overcome it.”

  So it’s as simple as that?

  Jeter did not smile. If anything, he glared his response. “There was nothing simple about it,” he said. “It’s just what I was going to do, and the Yankees were going to help me.”

  It was this resolve that had Livesey telling his Yankees front-office colleagues to calm down when it came to Jeter. Livesey reprised one of his favorite maxims about the then young Derek Jeter: “I’ll stop thinking of him as a shortstop when he stops thinking of himself as a shortstop.”

  And Jeter had been saying he was going to be the shortstop of the New York Yankees since he was a child.

  Jeter, at age nineteen, had also adjusted to life away from Michigan. He had bulked up a bit with an off-season lifting regimen, and he had friends on the Hornets, including Rivera.

  In fact, it was Jeter, aware that Rivera was coming off elbow surgery, who helped Rivera count his pitches during his 1993 starts. Jeter would visit the mound and the two would talk about his pitch count. “It’d be something encouraging but helpful,” Rivera said. “He’d say, ‘Hey, forty pitches, time to sit this batter down, Mo. This is probably your last inning. Let’s get out of here.’”

  The Yankees had been cautious with Rivera. He made only 12 starts in 1993, and usually those appearances lasted no more than three or four innings. And the surgery had not much changed Rivera’s strengths: precise control, a decent fastball with movement.

  Rivera’s ERA was 2.08, and he had 38 strikeouts and only 16 walks in 43⅓ innings pitched.

  “We still didn’t know exactly where Mariano was going to fit in,” said Livesey. “But we knew he was healthy. We knew he still had that loose, live arm. You never give up on guys with a fluid motion like that.”

  In Prince William, Pettitte was padding his already impressive minor league résumé, winning 11 of 20 decisions. His ERA was 3.04 with a WHIP (walks and hits per inning) of 1.209. Pettitte was working on a cutter, a hard breaking ball that would eventually confound major league hitters.

  “He wasn’t there yet with the cutter,” Posada said. “But he was on his way.”

  Pettitte’s favorite two-strike pitch had once been a knuckleball that he threw as hard as he could. It approached the plate like a dancing fastball. But like most knuckleballs, the pitch was hard to predict. Catchers, including Posada, who was still new to the position, tended to miss it.

  The Yankee coaches told Pettitte to abandon his knuckleball. It struck out some batters but it led to many walks. Pet
titte was told he could resurrect the pitch if he was an established major league pitcher. But by the time that happened, he couldn’t remember how he threw the knuckleball.

  Pettitte made one 1993 start at Class AA in Albany and won the game. He was delighted to hear that Albany would be his destination in 1994. But it grated on him that Sterling Hitchcock, the other promising lefty starter in the organization who had already made his debut in New York, was still ranked ahead of him on the franchise’s depth chart. Pettitte was a year younger than Hitchcock and seemed to have the backing of more Yankees coaches and scouts than any other left-handed pitcher in the team’s minor league system. And that bugged Pettitte to no end.

  “Andy took the competition with Hitchcock very personally,” Gene Michael said. “He really wanted to prove to everyone that he was the better pitcher. Or would be. I didn’t have a problem with that. I took it as an indication of how competitive he was and how much drive he had.

  “But it was a different kind of thing. They eventually were teammates, but man, Andy always wanted to do better than Sterling.”

  Unbeknownst to Pettitte, when the Yankees executives gathered they were constantly comparing the notes of scouts and coaches about both pitchers. Because they knew that at some point they might have to include one or the other in a trade to upgrade the team in some manner.

  “There might have been five hundred conversations about who was going to be better, Pettitte or Hitchcock,” said Lukevics. “It was like the Bernie and Gerald Williams debate. By 1993, everyone had pretty much elevated Bernie to number one. But the Pettitte-Hitchcock conversations continued all the way until the end of 1995.”

  Posada, meanwhile, was still struggling to adjust to his new position. Two stints in the winter instructional league had made Posada a full-time catcher, but it didn’t make him a good catcher. In 107 games at Prince William in 1993, he led the Carolina League in passed balls with 38, and he made 15 errors, but he also slugged 17 homers and drove in 61 runs—good production from a position that the Yankees organization normally did not rely on for offense.