Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  On the swing, Franco had broken his bat, and the sound of splintering wood had fooled Williams, who suspected a bloop fly to shallow center field. But as Williams raced forward, Franco’s drive instead carried over his head. As the ball rolled to the wall with Williams chasing after it, the tying and winning runs came across the plate in a 5–4 Texas victory.

  It was the second consecutive Yankees loss. When reporters entered the visiting clubhouse after the game, they saw George Steinbrenner consoling Williams at his locker.

  “He’s a young player and he’s got a lot ahead of him,” Steinbrenner said. “If we’re going to be there, he’s going to be there with us.”

  The endorsement was appreciated; the Yankees still lost their next two games as well.

  The team made a brief rally with two wins in the next three games, but a disastrous Abbott outing led to a 15–5 drubbing that stifled whatever momentum the Yankees had been building. It was only eleven days since Abbott’s no-hitter, a blissful, sunny day in the Bronx. On the road in Milwaukee and playing in a spitting rain, the Yankees had fallen three games behind Toronto.

  Then came a four-game losing streak. Starting pitchers Mélido Pérez and Scott Kamieniecki were also forced to miss starts because of injuries. Their rookie replacements were not up to the pressure of a pennant chase. O’Neill had badly bruised his left elbow after crashing into an outfield wall in pursuit of a line drive and would miss several games. Mattingly was batting .221 since August, and the bullpen had blown three saves.

  In mid-September, a story surfaced in the New York Post that Steinbrenner had been badgering Showalter with second-guessing phone calls throughout the Yankees’ recent slide in the standings. The next day, other New York newspapers confirmed Steinbrenner’s meddling and added another thunderbolt to fuel the news cycle: Showalter was so annoyed by the owner’s harangues he might resign at the end of the season.

  “I don’t know where these things come from,” Showalter said, “but they are totally untrue and unfounded.”

  Nonetheless, the Yankees kept sinking in the standings. By late September, they could only catch the Blue Jays if they won their last nine games. It didn’t happen.

  When the Yankees were eliminated from the pennant chase on September 27—Toronto won its third successive AL East—Showalter refused to discuss whether the season had been a success overall, despite the fact that the team was on its way to a second-place finish. “I know what the goals are in this organization,” he said. “Success? I’m not going to use that word.”

  But others were doing it for him. With an 88-74 record, the Yankees had their best results in six seasons. If baseball’s wild-card playoff system, established in 1994, had been in place that year, the Yankees would have been the first wild-card qualifier.

  The 1993 Yankees had also drawn more than 2.4 million spectators, which was an increase of about 700,000 fans from the previous year. The team’s television ratings had risen to heights not seen since 1985, a jump that had the MSG Network and New York’s WPIX battling bitterly over broadcast rights for the 1994 season.

  The Yankees, seemingly in a death spiral just two years earlier, were relevant again, even if they had fallen short of a division title.

  Mike Stanley made note of the difference from year to year. “In September last year, there were foul balls into the upper deck and they would clatter and bounce around and set off a mad scramble for the baseball,” he said. “This year, people were catching the ball on the fly because the upper deck was filled.

  “There was a buzz in the stadium again. There was a buzz in the city about the Yankees when you walked the streets.”

  Stanley was one of the big surprises, batting .305 with a .389 on-base percentage, an impressive number for a slow-footed catcher. Stanley led all the starters with a .923 OPS. An even bigger surprise was left-handed outfielder Dion James, whom Michael signed on the cheap as a free agent for less than $400,000. James was meant to be a steady reserve and insurance against injury, but he ended up playing in 115 games and batted .332 with a .390 on-base percentage.

  Boggs proved that 1992 was the fluke he said it was and again batted over .300 while driving in 59 runs. O’Neill, playing every day by season’s end, hit .311 and had 75 RBI.

  Other Michael and Showalter experiments with the lineup paid dividends, too. Danny Tartabull complained about being relegated to the role of everyday designated hitter, but he thrived at the plate with 31 homers and 102 RBI. Mostly as a backup, Mike Gallego batted .283 with 10 home runs and 54 runs batted in. Another bench player, the longtime Yankees farmhand Jim Leyritz, hit .309 with 14 homers and 53 RBI.

  The Yankees brain trust also guessed right about which of the “Williams brothers” to promote to a starter in 1993. Gerald Williams hit just .149 in 42 games. Bernie Williams slumped badly in the last month of the season when he hit under .240, but for the season overall he was a .268 hitter with 12 homers and 68 RBI.

  “My stats were OK but they didn’t reveal how much growth there had been as a player,” Williams said, looking back at 1993 more than twenty years later. “That was my first full season in the majors, and that’s a big adjustment—at least it was for me. It’s the moment when you stop wondering if you belong at that level and become convinced you belong at that level. But there’s still a long progression. It takes time. I improved in incremental steps.”

  Mattingly had a reasonably healthy season, driving in 84 runs with 17 homers and a .291 batting average. “But the biggest thing was, it was fun to come to the ballpark every day,” he recalled. “We had reversed so many of the things that had brought us down in 1990 or 1991. Yeah, we fell short in ’93. But so what? We were getting better and better and we knew it.

  “Most of all, other teams knew it.”

  On the mound in 1993, Abbott’s record was disappointing (11-14), but he remained injury-free and started 32 games, two fewer than the Yankees ace, Jimmy Key, who had a sparkling 18-6 record with an ERA of 3.00. As both a starter and a reliever, Bob Wickman appeared in 41 games and won 14 of 18 decisions. The thirty-six-year-old closer Steve Farr saved 25 games despite a series of arm troubles.

  “What I liked about the 1993 team was how gritty and defiant they were,” Showalter remembered many years later. “We were neck and neck with the Blue Jays for about two months and they would win their second straight World Series that year. People kept expecting us to collapse because we didn’t have the deepest pitching and we were playing plenty of inexperienced kids. But we hung in there. And you know why? Because we had guys who stuck together and fought for each other. It was a different feel—different than even one year earlier. I felt like the plan was working.”

  Michael, too, was convinced it was working. “Just look up the 1993 team’s on-base percentage,” he said with a grin in 2017. “I won’t tell you; just go look it up. And when you do, remember how important I said on-base percentage would be to our production.”

  As a team, the on-base percentage that year was .353, the second best in the majors. Just three years earlier, when Michael was named the new general manager, the team’s on-base percentage had been .300, the worst in the major leagues.

  After the 1993 season, Showalter narrowly missed winning the American League Manager of the Year award, which went to Gene Lamont of the White Sox, who won the AL West. Steinbrenner said his manager—“Bucky,” he called him—should have won the award. He also agreed to sign Gene Michael to a new general manager’s contract.

  “We knew we had more work to do, but we knew things had turned around and everyone could see that,” Michael said. “The big league club was a good team. And the minor leagues were still stocked.” Baseball America ranked the Yankees’ farm system fourth.

  “People throughout our organization felt pretty good,” said Bill Livesey. “Things were looking up.”

  In early October, Livesey and Lukevics made another plea to Brien Taylor, trying to convince him that he would benefit from one more off-season instruc
tional camp in Tampa. “We said, ‘Brien, you don’t even have to pitch, just go there to work on fielding fundamentals and your pickoff move to first base,’” Livesey said. “And frankly, all our minor league guys usually benefited from staying a little busy in the off-season. Although Brien was not someone we ever worried about off the field. Quiet as a mouse. But young. Still young.”

  Taylor once again refused to visit the instructional camp. “I want to rest and take it easy,” he told the Yankees.

  19

  Lost Promise

  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS reporter called Bill Livesey at his Florida home on Sunday, December 19. “The guy from the AP wanted my reaction to Brien Taylor’s shoulder injury,” Livesey said. “My first reaction was that this is a gag, because guys in the business would do that—make gag phone calls to be funny. To make a joke.”

  When Livesey recalled the moment nearly twenty-five years later, his voice grew quiet and melancholy. “But it wasn’t a gag. It was a tragedy.”

  The previous night, eight days before his twenty-second birthday, Taylor got in a fight defending his older brother, Brenden. The initial details were hazy, but something had happened to Brien’s shoulder.

  His agent, Scott Boras, told the Yankees it was a bruise. “Boras called me and said Brien would be fine—he’d come back 100 percent,” Gene Michael said. “I didn’t believe him.”

  The Yankees immediately called the Carteret County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina, because several men had been charged, including Brien, who was unquestionably the area’s most prominent citizen at the time. Police had not witnessed the altercation, but a sheriff told the Yankees that Brien left the scene in an ambulance and in great pain, his right hand grasping his $1.55 million left shoulder.

  “No one knew what was certain,” said Lukevics. “But the first report was that it was probably really bad. And your heart just sank. Yes, I felt bad for the organization, but I felt worse for the human being.”

  Even after a quarter century, facts about the fight are hard to come by. The criminal charges were eventually dropped or pled down to minor misdemeanors, so there was never any court testimony or depositions taken about the incident.

  Taylor has never given an interview about the precise details of what happened. He answered phone calls to his Beaufort home in 2017, but hung up whenever he learned that it was a reporter calling to ask about his days as the greatest pitching prospect in Yankees history. Others involved in the fracas gave interviews in 1993 and for years afterward, but their versions have always differed in small but meaningful ways.

  Everyone agreed that on December 18, 1993, Brien was at home in the brick and frame house he had built for himself and his parents on the plot of land where the family trailer had been when he was drafted by the Yankees. It was Saturday night and after 11 p.m. Although many reports later described the incident as a bar fight, Brien had been at home for several hours, perhaps even all night.

  But earlier that evening, in a town twelve miles away, one of Brien’s friends, Ron Wilson, had been in a heated argument with Brenden Taylor. The dispute escalated to pushing and shoving and then Wilson twice punched Brenden, knocking him down.

  Brenden called Brien about the confrontation. Over the years, Brien’s friends revealed to reporters that Brenden told his brother that he had been jumped from behind. Incensed, Brien drove to Wilson’s home with a cousin, Donnell Johnson. It was past 11:30 p.m.

  In an interview with Wayne Coffey of the New York Daily News in 2004, Wilson said he was shocked when Brien began pounding on the door of his trailer home demanding that Wilson come out and fight. Wilson, who considered Brien “practically family,” told his friend that they had no beef to settle. “I don’t want to fight you, Brien,” Wilson shouted through the door. “But it was like he couldn’t even think.”

  Another man, Jamie Morris, who was Wilson’s cousin, appeared on the scene and started grappling with Johnson. Brien leaped into the struggle. He later told friends that he fell hard on his left shoulder. But Wilson said Brien threw a wild haymaker of a punch at Morris, and when he missed, Brien yelped in pain and reached for his shoulder.

  “I asked everyone I could, but I never got a full story about what happened,” said Gene Michael. “You know how late-night fights are—everyone has a story.”

  Livesey said Brien had told him he was just trying to help his brother.

  “But if you don’t want to slip,” Livesey added, “don’t go into slippery places.”

  The Yankees soon sent Taylor to Dr. Frank Jobe, the California orthopedic surgeon who had operated on the arms of several major league pitchers, most notably Tommy John.

  As Brien was flying across the country with his left arm in a sling, his mother, Bettie, told Jack Curry of the New York Times: “Brien hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what all the hoopla is about. I know he’s a ballplayer with the New York Yankees, but he was reacting to what happened to his brother. I think any family member would have done the same thing.

  “Maybe the only thing he did was act quickly. Brien reacted with his heart, not his head.”

  On December 27, the day after Brien Taylor turned twenty-two, the Yankees announced that Dr. Jobe would operate on Taylor’s pitching shoulder, where both the capsule and the labrum were torn.

  Dr. Jobe, who years later called Taylor’s injury one of the worst he had seen, recommended that Taylor not pitch again until 1995.

  Taylor had been slated to be in the starting rotation for the Yankees’ top farm team in Columbus in 1994—one phone call away from the major leagues. Instead, he would spend that season slowly and carefully rehabilitating his shoulder at the Tampa minor league complex, where he had been asked to attend the 1993–94 off-season instructional camp.

  He would have plenty of time to work on his fielding.

  “We remained hopeful of Brien’s future,” Michael said in 2017. “But frankly, it made me sick to my stomach to think about it.”

  The rest of the Brien Taylor story was no more uplifting.

  He did spend almost all of 1994 at Tampa, with occasional visits to Dr. Jobe for checkups and a week at Columbus to familiarize himself with his expected place of business in 1995. Except when Taylor was finally allowed to pitch during spring training in 1995, Yankees officials were aghast at what they saw.

  “He was a shell of what he had been,” Michael said. “His entire pitching motion was different.”

  Standing beneath the grandstand at the Yankees’ spring training complex in 2017, Michael imitated where Taylor’s arm was positioned as he delivered the baseball before his injury. “He had that high arm slot, a little more than three-quarters, with his hand high above his head, exactly like Randy Johnson,” Michael said. “After he got hurt, it was here.” Michael held his arm almost sidearm, no more than a couple of inches above his shoulder. “It was real low. Because of the injury or the surgery or both, Brien couldn’t extend his arm. He just couldn’t get his arm back to the same arm slot position. And that made all the difference.”

  At the start of 1995, his fastball did not break 90 miles an hour. His curveball was so erratic it was a nonfactor.

  There was no way that Taylor could take that pitching arsenal to Class AAA Columbus. Instead, the Yankees sent him back to the rookie Gulf Coast League and winced as he gave up 37 runs in 40 innings pitched and lost five of seven decisions against kids fresh out of high school and college.

  The Yankees thought that maybe Taylor’s arm just needed a year to heal. He was sent back to North Carolina, made four visits a week to a physical therapist and told not to pick up a baseball.

  In 1996, at Class A Greensboro, Taylor made only nine starts and gave up 40 runs. When his record fell to 0-5 with an 18.73 ERA, he was shut down again. More rest followed, along with a stay in the instructional league, where pitching coaches tried to reteach twenty-four-year-old Brien Taylor how to hurl a baseball like the nineteen-year-old Brien Taylor had.

  The goal, alon
g with more intense physical therapy, was to get him back to his original arm angle. He did get his fastball up to 91 or 92 miles an hour. But he had no command on the mound, averaging more than two walks per inning.

  In spring training in 1997, Taylor was hoping to get back to Class AA Albany, where in 1993 he had been an Eastern League All-Star and had struck out nearly one batter per inning.

  In an interview that March in the home dugout, a reporter asked him a question that began, “Do you dwell on—”

  And Taylor interrupted to complete the thought: “What I could have been?”

  He continued: “Sure, I think, barring injuries, you have to think back to what kind of numbers I could have put up. How devastating I could have been. How dominant I could have been. What could have happened.”

  Taylor stared out at the empty diamond of the Yankees’ spring training complex. “For a year, I felt real terrible,” he said. “But after a while, I decided I really had to put it behind me. It’s happened, and it’s done. I can’t live like that: ‘I should have done this or I could have done this.’ Or, ‘I might have been the man. I would have been a twenty-game winner.’

  “Because it didn’t happen. It’s over with.”

  Taylor looked at his questioner. “I know it’s not the story everyone wanted, me included,” he said. “I can only look at it as something that was meant to be. It’s too bad, but there are guys out there who every day do things worse than I did.”

  Taylor did not go to Albany that year. He went back to Greensboro. In 1998, he was there again when the Yankees tried to convert him to a reliever. The experiment failed; he gave up 76 runs in a little more than 52 innings pitched.

  At the end of the 1998 season, the Yankees released their former number one pick. He had at least earned all of his $1.55 million.

  In the four seasons after that chaotic fray outside Ron Wilson’s trailer late on a Saturday night, Taylor struck out just 66 batters and walked 175 batters in 108⅔ innings. His ERA in that period was 10.85.