Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “And I remember that Bernie got three hits that night. Then two hits in the next game and three hits in the one after that. He kinda took off from there.”

  By August, the Yankees were in a tie for first place and Williams had a 21-game hitting streak. O’Neill, who had been playing against most left-handed starters since the All-Star break, had at least one hit in 25 of his last 26 games. His .324 batting average was fourth in the American League. Boggs and Stanley were both over .300, too. Stanley was on his way to a career-high 84 RBI. Jimmy Key was having an All-Star season and would win 18 games, the most of his 15 years in the majors.

  Nearly all of the Yankees’ recent transactions were paying dividends.

  In one series with the Chicago White Sox, the trade that had sent second baseman Steve Sax to Chicago could not have looked more lopsided in the Yankees’ favor. Mélido Pérez, acquired from the White Sox for Sax, won the opening game of the series. Domingo Jean, also part of the trade, won the second game with relief help from Bob Wickman, who was the third player picked up from Chicago.

  “We got lucky on some trades,” Michael said of the deal many years later. “We got the right guys and got rid of the right guys.”

  And some trades were sort of a win-win, as both teams benefited. Well, almost. Roberto Kelly hit .319 for the Reds in 1993, although injuries limited him to 78 games. The following May, the Reds traded him to Atlanta for the former Yankees farmhand Deion Sanders, who soon became more of a full-time NFL football player.

  But O’Neill proved to be just what the Yankees needed. He was productive, and perhaps just as important, he brought with him an unbridled passion during games that heightened the focus of his teammates and kept them giggling, too.

  Everyone knew about O’Neill’s tantrums in Cincinnati, but in New York, the media capital of the world, they were appreciated as a form of performance art. An O’Neill strikeout could mean a helmet would go flying across the diamond. A ground out might send a shin guard skittering across the dugout, with O’Neill stomping his feet and shouting at himself. Most of all, the Yankees got used to the sight of O’Neill sitting in the dugout mumbling to himself after some at-bat did not go exactly as planned.

  “It’s really pretty funny and we kid him about it,” Pat Kelly said. “Although we don’t do it right in the moment. But what makes it funny is that Paul will smack a line drive single and later he’ll end up muttering his disgust about the hit because he didn’t hit the ball out of the park.

  “The pursuit of a kind of perfection is so all-consuming to him. It inspires the other guys on the team for sure. But still, sometimes it’s a little light comedy for us.”

  Or as Showalter said: “One day, he hit a homer into the upper deck and it bounced onto the field. He was mad because it didn’t stay in the seats. Now that’s being demanding of yourself.”

  When asked about his high standards, O’Neill answered, “There’s no reason to not expect to go up to the plate and hit the ball hard every time.”

  He knew his teammates sometimes snickered behind his back. “There is some fun and games to it,” he conceded. “But this is my job. The problem is that baseball is more frustrating than most jobs, more frustrating than being an accountant or a banker. We fail all the time and frankly it can get to you. Some people keep it locked inside. I guess I don’t.”

  Mattingly, who had bonded with O’Neill as Showalter and Michael had hoped, felt O’Neill was imbuing the Yankees with much-needed intensity. “I always liked that he cared that much,” Mattingly said years later. “And it wasn’t about his personal goals, which is an important thing to recognize. He would get upset because he hadn’t done something to help the team.

  “The truth is, we hadn’t had enough of that attitude in the past. We needed more people like him.”

  Culture creators.

  “You can’t be a sustained winner in baseball unless you have a lot of guys on your team who care about pleasing their teammates,” Showalter said in 2017. “It can’t be about pleasing the manager. Or pleasing themselves. They have to be playing for each other.

  “And the opposite is true. You can have a lot of talent on the roster, but if you’ve got a bunch of guys who don’t give a shit about what their teammates think, then you’re dead. But we had found guys who did not want to let their teammates down. And it showed.”

  On July 30, Mike Stanley’s three-run, game-tying home run led to the Yankees’ 23rd win in their last 28 home games. The victory lifted the Yankees into a tie for first place with Toronto. The team had not been in first place in July since 1987.

  Six days later, the largest crowd since opening day came out to Yankee Stadium. More than 52,000 fans watched the Yankees remain in first place with another victory.

  Steinbrenner was pleased with the crowd, but he was still negotiating with New York State and New York City for a new stadium. The latest proposal had the Yankees moving to a site on the West Side of midtown Manhattan. Steinbrenner’s talks with officials from New Jersey, where the biggest bloc of Yankees fans lived, had not abated either.

  Other off-the-field issues posed possible distractions to the first-place Yankees. The collective bargaining agreement between the players’ union and baseball’s owners was set to expire at the end of 1993. There had been no substantive talks between the two sides, just perfunctory meetings.

  Fearful that the owners would lock them out of spring training camps next year or impose new rules on salary arbitration over the winter, the players had been weighing a strike in late August or September. They felt it was the only leverage they had.

  The owners, who were seeking a salary cap system, pledged not to lock out the players in the spring. Nor would they alter the salary arbitration guidelines. Those assurances caused the players to call off their plans for a strike.

  But it was still understood that the two sides were far apart. Compromise was not being valued either. Since the ouster of Fay Vincent as commissioner in 1992, a powerful, antagonistic cadre of owners—a group that excluded George Steinbrenner—had taken control of the labor negotiations. They seemed determined to teach the players’ union, which had gotten its way in previous negotiations, a brutal lesson at any cost.

  Steinbrenner did not appear engrossed by the labor strife. When he attended an owners’ meeting in Wisconsin on August 12, he emerged afterward and was quickly surrounded by reporters. Steinbrenner’s first words were “What was the final score?”

  The still-in-first-place Yankees were playing an afternoon game in Boston. While some businessmen carried cell phones in 1993, it was many years before the smartphone era of texting, web surfing and news alerts. (The Yankees won again.)

  In ways that were different from the past, Steinbrenner was captivated by his surprisingly competitive 1993 squad. Aside from his brief fixation with trading Bernie Williams earlier in the season, Steinbrenner was more of a hands-off owner in 1993.

  To be sure, Showalter’s cell phone still rang.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner would never start a conversation by saying ‘Hello’ or by identifying himself in any way,” Showalter said. “I would say ‘Hello,’ and then he would just start barking questions.”

  But at least they were questions instead of orders. Or mostly questions. As his son Hal said, Steinbrenner was never a touchy-feely person. But when Steinbrenner returned from his banishment, those around him noticed changes.

  “When George came back from the sabbatical,” Gene Michael said, smiling at his choice of words—sabbatical, not suspension or exile—“a funny thing happened. He was actually pretty good to work for. He was the same pushy guy but he was different in other ways. I had convinced him that we had to stay with the young players and not trade them away. And he listened. That might have been the biggest thing. You could get him to listen. He would consider opinions other than his own.”

  Cashman, then Michael’s assistant, saw the same changes. He believed that Steinbrenner’s time away from baseball had made the man d
eeply reflective. “After his banishment, when he came back, my own personal opinion is that he had started assessing his legacy,” Cashman said. “And he thought about how he could change the narrative.

  “He wasn’t the same. He was still fire and brimstone, but he did kind of allow a lot of baseball decisions to be made instead of making them himself. Not all of them. But a lot more than he did previously. He came back with more patience.

  “He was more apt to rely on his baseball people. In the past, it was more his decision-making. He’d say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

  It was that kind of management style that had once held the Yankees back. Cashman was doubtful, for example, that the team’s later successes would have occurred had Steinbrenner not been exiled. “I don’t believe that we would have been able to accomplish some of the stuff that we did,” he said in 2017.

  And, just as important, Steinbrenner’s absence gave him a chance to gain an appreciation for the good work being done without his input. In most cases, he continued to let others have robust roles in the Yankees’ rebuild.

  “There was no question that after George’s time away there was more consensus-building,” Cashman said. “He would gather his knights of the round table and be convinced of the right direction or decision.”

  Of course, Steinbrenner still had his unreasonable moments. During one game, the Yankees’ owner called the dugout to complain about the opposing pitcher. “Their pitcher is cheating,” Steinbrenner bellowed. “He’s scuffing the ball. Go tell the umpire.”

  Answered Showalter: “I know that, but our pitcher is scuffing the ball, too. And he’s cheating better than their guy.”

  Another time, Steinbrenner was upset that Showalter had altered the pitching rotation by moving Jimmy Key’s start back a day. Steinbrenner thought Jimmy Key was being unnecessarily delayed.

  Showalter explained that he always studied the rotating umpires’ schedule, as he had since he was in the minors. He wanted Key to pitch one day later to match him up with a certain umpire who would be working behind home plate that day. That umpire called a lot of low strikes, which was usually a good thing for Key’s devastating sinker/slider/low fastball combination of pitches.

  Steinbrenner acceded. “OK, just checking,” he told his manager.

  In general, there wasn’t much for Steinbrenner to criticize about any of the recent decision-making by his executives and field staff. Mike Stanley, the bargain-basement acquisition in the off-season, was a glaringly obvious case in point.

  By early August, Stanley, the thirty-year-old who had never been a starter, had wrestled the full-time catcher’s job away from Matt Nokes. He had done it with timely hitting and surprisingly resourceful catching acumen. “One of the biggest things going right for us in 1993 was Mike Stanley’s contribution,” Gene Michael said years later. “He really took charge of the pitching staff and we needed that. He had a lot of big hits, but you need an on-field leader of the pitchers.”

  The ace of the staff recognized Stanley’s value early in 1993, and typical of the resurgent Yankees, it was a little thing that made a big difference. “What I like about throwing to Mike,” Key said in the midst of the season, “is that he doesn’t move too early for a pitch. Some guys move too soon when they set up to catch the pitch, and a base runner can signal the batter with a hand or body motion about where the pitch is going to be, inside or outside. Mike sets up at the last possible moment. He doesn’t give the pitch away.”

  Stanley had learned the technique during his years sitting on the bench. “You see base runners tipping batters off and you see the results,” he said. “For most batters, location is more important to know than the pitch itself. Why give the batter that information?”

  Stanley also boosted his pitchers’ confidence in their breaking pitches, encouraging them to throw them regardless of whether there were runners on base. “Mike would say, ‘Throw that curve as deep and as nasty as you want, because I’m going to block it,’” said Jim Abbott.

  Stanley again credited his apprenticeship in Texas. “I came to realize that the key to blocking a pitch was anticipating that it might be in the dirt,” he said. “Some guys call a breaking pitch and think it will be over the plate, because most of the time it is. Then they’re almost shocked when it isn’t.

  “I would expect a pitch in the dirt. I’d be a half second faster to get down that way. And a half second is a lot on that play.”

  Stanley was also on his way to slugging 26 home runs—two more than he had in his seven-year career before 1993—and hitting .305 with a .389 on-base percentage, which was startlingly high for a catcher.

  But like Michael, Showalter appreciated that Stanley still knew his first job was managing the pitching staff and being dependable behind the plate. “What you want in a catcher,” Showalter said, “is a guy who, even if he’s gone 0-for-4 as a hitter, he’s still a part of a winning game. And he understands the value of that.”

  Years later, Showalter still recalled a situation when Stanley was catching a game with Abbott on the mound. “Abbott threw a curve ball that fooled Chili Davis,” Showalter said of the former Angels cleanup hitter. “So on the next pitch, Mike puts down one finger for a fastball. But Abbott shook it off.

  “Mike put one finger down again. Abbott shook it off because he wanted to throw another curve like the one that had just worked. In the end, the pitcher has to throw what he wants to throw. So Abbott threw another curveball and Davis whistled a single right past Boggs at third base. It almost took Wade’s ear off.

  “After the inning, Mike came back to the dugout and he was steaming mad. He was mad at the lack of communication. But a lot of catchers just wouldn’t have cared. They’d say they tried and got shook off. Not their problem. But to Mike, he becomes like a part of the pitcher. He felt like they failed together.

  “That’s the kind of bonds we were developing in 1993. In a lot of ways, it exemplified the kind of team we were becoming. We had a bunch of gamers out there.”

  But in late August that season, the Yankees began to fade in the AL East standings. On Saturday, September 4, with the Yankees now behind Toronto by two games, Abbott took the mound at Yankee Stadium. He had lost four of his previous six starts. His last start might have been his worst, when he gave up ten hits, three walks and seven earned runs in only 3⅔ innings.

  Abbott began that Saturday game against the Cleveland Indians by walking the first batter he faced. But he induced the next batter to bounce into a double play. The third hitter, Carlos Baerga, flied out.

  Abbott walked another batter in the second inning but struck out Cleveland’s cleanup hitter, Albert Belle, and got the equally dangerous Manny Ramirez to fly out.

  By the end of the fifth inning, Abbott had gotten ten outs on ground balls and not given up a hit. The Yankees led, 4–0. Jim Thome, another Indians power hitter, smashed a hard liner in the sixth inning, but Yankees shortstop Randy Velarde moved to his right and stabbed it for another out.

  Abbott got six more ground outs and took a no-hitter into the ninth inning. Cleveland’s first batter in the inning was the speedy Kenny Lofton, who slapped a hard ground ball up the middle. Yankees second baseman Mike Gallego covered a lot of ground to get to the ball, planted his right foot and made a strong throw to get Lofton at first base by a half step.

  The Indians’ shortstop Felix Fermin was next, and after two hard foul balls, he laced a long drive into the left-center-field gap. Bernie Williams gave chase, using the long strides that had made him a champion sprinter, to pull even with the fly ball as it descended. Williams stuck out his glove about head high and made the catch, two steps from the outfield wall in front of the Yankee bullpen.

  With Abbott one out from a no-hitter, Mattingly began jumping up and down on his toes at first base, a gesture that was a mix of anxiety and amped-up preparation. Gallego was doing the same. At shortstop, Velarde later said he saw his teammates bopping up and down. He tried to imitate them but said
he was too nervous to feel his feet.

  Gene Michael, who had acquired Abbott, was pacing in a private team box. Normally dapper, at this moment Michael had disheveled hair and his tie was loosened and crooked.

  Carlos Baerga rapped a slow roller at Velarde, who scooped the ball and fired to Mattingly for the final out. Abbott was quickly engulfed by teammates at the center of the diamond. Michael smiled, watched the scene for a minute, then walked up a short flight of stairs, out of sight on the way to his mezzanine-level office.

  Showalter, as he always did after Yankees victories, kept his seat in the dugout.

  “That is the players’ moment,” he said. “They played the game.”

  Abbott high-fived each teammate. When it was Williams’s turn, Abbott instead hugged his center fielder.

  As Showalter and Michael both noted after the game, it was nice to see another Yankee pitch a no-hitter.

  “And win,” Showalter added.

  It was the first Yankees no-hitter since July 1, 1990, when the ill-fated Andy Hawkins was immortalized by three ninth-inning errors and lost the game.

  The last Yankees no-hitter in a victory was on July 4, 1983—Steinbrenner’s fifty-third birthday—when Dave Righetti held the Red Sox hitless. Righetti struck out Wade Boggs for the final out that day. For Abbott, Boggs had made a diving stop at third base on a blistering ground ball off the bat of Belle in Cleveland’s seventh inning.

  “I liked the end of this game a lot better than the end of the other no-hitter I’ve played at Yankee Stadium,” Boggs said. “This is going to give us a big lift.”

  The next day, with Wickman improving his record to 11-4 and Stanley hitting his twenty-fifth homer, the Yankees were back in a tie for first place.

  18

  A Buzz

  TWO DAYS AFTER the Yankees had climbed back into a tie for first place with the Toronto Blue Jays, they traveled Texas to face the Rangers. With the Yankees leading by a run in the seventh inning, Bernie Williams broke in quickly on a fly ball hit by Julio Franco.