Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Mattingly had seen the best Yankees teams of the eighties and the worst ones of the nineties. Looking back, 1994 still stands out. “That was one of my favorite teams because we had guys in sync and pulling together,” he said. “Buck and Gene had done a great job with their plan. It had worked. That was probably the most fun team I played on.”

  Mattingly remained the cynosure of the team, but he had morphed into something more. He was now both a chief motivator and the team’s principal motivation. Mattingly had been the Yankees’ foremost star for 11 successive seasons, all of them without a single playoff game. At the start of the 1994 season, no other active player had been in as many games as Mattingly (1,560) without a postseason appearance.

  Getting the popular Mattingly into the playoffs drove his teammates, especially since he was so dedicated to the cause himself.

  “I’ve never seen anyone push his teammates the way he does,” said Polonia, who was an eight-year veteran in 1994. “He spends nine innings doing it. It’s amazing how he never lets up. He wasn’t that way when I was here the last time. Now he constantly gets everyone going. I know guys say, ‘God, look at this guy. Let’s do it for him.’ He wants this team to win more than anybody.”

  O’Neill, who to this day still calls Mattingly “Cap,” in a reference to Mattingly’s five years as the team captain, believes the overarching theme of the 1994 season was a quest to get Mattingly into the postseason. “He commanded such respect in the clubhouse,” O’Neill said. “You didn’t want to let him down. You knew that he wouldn’t fail you, so you didn’t want to fail him. It was like our duty to help him get to the playoffs. Because you knew how much he wanted it.”

  O’Neill was certainly doing his part—in his own manic way. In one Yankee win, when O’Neill hit his twelfth home run and had three hits, he was almost despondent afterward.

  Why? “I struck out with the bases loaded today and had no hits in last night’s game,” he said. “I’m making too many outs.”

  O’Neill’s drive, and even his temper, endeared him to Yankees fans, and they rallied around him. O’Neill was left off the 1994 All-Star Game ballot because the Yankees had four primary outfielders and were permitted to list only three on the ballot. (In the preseason, Showalter had his outfield quartet draw straws to see who the odd man out would be.)

  So O’Neill was not among the 42 outfielders on the ballot, but when the first wave of voting results was announced in June, O’Neill had received the second-most votes of any American Leaguer—all of them from fans who had written his name on the ballot.

  Like a write-in candidate making the All-Star Game, nothing seemed impossible for the 1994 Yankees. At the end of June, they won eight straight games to increase their AL East lead to five games. They were 20 games over .500.

  It had already been an enchanted year for New York sports fans. The Rangers ended a 54-year drought, winning their first Stanley Cup since 1940. Their cohabitants in Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, had played a thrilling seven-game series in the NBA Finals, ultimately losing to the Houston Rockets. Soccer’s World Cup came to the United States for the first time, with nearby Giants Stadium in New Jersey hosting seven games in June and July, including several played by the Irish and Italian national teams, which had fanatical followings in the area.

  Around the country, as in New York, the news was most often positive and uplifting. It was almost the midpoint of the nineties, the longest sustained period of economic growth in American history. The internet was slowly beginning to change the nation. In 1994, Amazon.com made its debut. So did three distinct but unforgettably influential films: Forrest Gump, The Lion King, and Speed.

  There was much to smile about, especially if you were a long-suffering Yankees fan.

  Only one disquieting issue loomed, a blight threatening to ruin the best Yankees season in a dozen years or more. The tone of the negotiations between baseball’s owners and the players’ union had gotten thorny and vindictive. Neither side had yielded an inch. If anything, the owners had grown more entrenched and combative.

  There was a feeling on the players’ side that ownership’s true goal was to smash the union rather than come to a new collective bargaining agreement. It was a perilous tactic. The baseball players’ union was the strongest in American sports, and had survived—indeed had won—a string of showdowns with the owners dating back to 1972.

  But it was those defeats to the players in past years that caused the owners to dig in their heels and fight so stubbornly in 1994. At seemingly any cost, they wanted a salary cap that they hoped would curb the free spending of bigger-market teams in free agency. And there was no longer a baseball commissioner to intercede or try to soften the owners’ stance. Bud Selig, the acting commissioner, was the Milwaukee Brewers’ owner and in lockstep with his brethren. Besides, the owners had recently voted to dramatically limit the baseball commissioner’s powers.

  In June, the owners grew more bold, withholding $7.8 million that they were expected to pay, according to the collective bargaining agreement, to the players’ pension and benefit plans.

  Steinbrenner read the handwriting on the wall—he had his best team in nearly a generation but knew it could all be taken away—and he was desperate to change his fellow owners’ hard-line negotiating strategy. “I didn’t fear a salary cap or the free-agency status quo,” he said years later. “I thought we as owners were playing with fire. The union was not going to cave or disintegrate. I did my best to barter, cajole or be diplomatic with the other owners.”

  But Steinbrenner, owner of the richest baseball franchise, had few allies in ownership. He had friends but little power. The owners were preparing to stand their ground. The tension mounted, along with the anxiety of Yankees fans and others in certain cities, like Montreal, where the Expos were having their best season ever.

  Frustrated but powerless, Steinbrenner instead turned his attention to a new Yankee Stadium. New Jersey still courted the Yankees and would for a couple more years, but the state now had a fierce opponent across the Hudson River. He was Rudy Giuliani, the newly elected mayor of New York City.

  Giuliani was a die-hard Yankees fan, and he vowed that the team would never leave the city on his watch. Steinbrenner suddenly had several sites to choose from for his new stadium—from Staten Island to the North Bronx to midtown and uptown Manhattan.

  Funding the new Yankee Stadium would be no problem, Giuliani said. The city owned the current stadium and would likely own, or finance, its replacement. Giuliani made that implicit. In his mind, it’s possible that all he wanted in return was a front-row seat to any and all Yankees games. He got that and more: his own set of box seats next to the Yankees’ dugout for his family and friends for many years to come.

  While the wrangling over a new stadium took more than a decade to resolve completely, in 1994 Steinbrenner knew that he would eventually get his new palace with all the revenue-boosting luxury suites, pricey restaurants, team stores and elite, private clubs he sought. It was just a matter of bargaining. In time, the city did subsidize the construction of the new stadium with $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds, an outlay that would have been unthinkable and immensely controversial in 1990. But that was when the Yankees were a laughingstock, not a team with the best record in the American League.

  So it was evident in every way that the Yankees had not just been revived on the field. The Yankees empire—fresh, flourishing and trendy—had been restored as well. Yankees caps once again were omnipresent on New York’s streets and in its bars and subway cars. (It did not hurt that the 1994 Mets were again a flop.)

  “In 1994 around the Yankees, without question, there was a spirit and a new young spark just taking over the team—the whole franchise really,” said Hal Steinbrenner, who earned his graduate degree from the University of Florida that spring and immediately began working in an office adjacent to his father’s.

  “Having the office right next to George’s office wasn’t always the best place to be,�
� Hal said with a laugh in 2017. “You’re right in the line of fire. And years later, I was happy when I got my office moved down to the other end of the hall.

  “But I recall the energy of ’94. You couldn’t help but feel it. Everything was just clicking on all cylinders. It was July and people were already talking about the World Series. Nothing seemed farfetched. My father was ebullient.”

  21

  The Jewels

  WHEN HE WAS fired as Yankees manager, Stump Merrill loved being home for the length and breadth of a beautiful Maine summer, something he had not been able to enjoy since he was in college. But as much as he loved his native state, after about ten months he needed to get out.

  “I wanted a job,” he said. “Not just a check.”

  Merrill returned to the Yankees as a special adviser in the minor leagues, and by 1994, Merrill was back as the manager of the Columbus Clippers, the franchise’s flagship minor league team. His roster included all of the farm systems’ jewels: Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and Rivera. But he did not coddle the most prized prospects, especially Posada, now the organization’s top farm system catcher.

  “I can remember we flew back from Ottawa after a game and then we had to fly to Rochester, and after that, we would bus back to Columbus,” Merrill said. “So near the end of that long trip I posted the lineup, and Jorge, who was in the lineup, comes into my office and says he can’t play that night.

  “I asked why, and he said, ‘I’m tired.’”

  Merrill stood up from behind his office desk and bellowed: “What the fuck do you mean? I’m fucking fifty years old and I have to memorize every fucking pitch in every game. I have to worry about twenty-five guys every day and every night. You’ve got nine innings and four at-bats to worry about and you’re telling me you’re tired? Let me ask you something: Are we training a front-line major league catcher or are we training a backup?”

  Posada said he wanted to be a major league starter.

  Merrill roared, “Then get your fucking ass out there and play, and I’ll tell you when you’re tired. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Posada never asked for another day off.

  “He never bitched about it again—to his credit,” Merrill said. “He wasn’t a soft player, but I think he wanted that discipline. The good ones realize they’re going to be challenged and pushed. And after that, it’s how they respond.

  “I played Jorge on days when I could see he was tired. But I wanted him to understand what would be expected of him. If he was a big league starter, his teammates would want that of him.”

  Posada’s defensive work as a catcher continued to improve, thanks to another perk of the bountiful Yankees minor league system. The franchise employed a coach, Gary Tuck, whose specific assignment was to tutor the team’s minor league catchers in all the intricacies of baseball’s most demanding field position.

  “Gary Tuck just kept instructing me on all the things you need to do to be a top catcher,” Posada said in 2017. “You have to learn and understand all the personalities on your pitching staff. You had to memorize the scouting reports of the opposing hitters. You had to work on your mechanics constantly. You had to develop your relationships with the umpires in the league and learn their tendencies as home plate umpires, like who favored the low strike or who favored the high strike. Everything mattered.

  “I was overwhelmed at times but I kept at it, and Gary stayed with me. I was polished, but he kept getting a little shine out of me day after day.”

  Posada took the weight of his responsibilities seriously—and took them home with him after games. He would rehash pitch sequences, even in bed. His future wife, Laura, recounted years later that her husband, while sound asleep, would sometimes shout, “Why didn’t I call a fastball there?”

  “After a Yankees loss, that might go on all night,” Laura said.

  In 1994, Posada’s determination and resolve were being rewarded. By midseason, he was second on the Clippers in home runs and RBI. A year earlier, his 38 passed balls had led the Carolina League, but now he had just eight passed balls. He was throwing out almost 30 percent of base runners who attempted to steal, which was far above the Class AAA average.

  In the pages of the organization’s bible, the Yankee Way, a catcher’s defense mattered far more than his offense. The Yankees, from the big league club to the lowest minors, wanted durability and dependability when it came to blocking pitches and calling a good game.

  Merrill saw Posada evolving into a Yankees prototype for the position. “On the few days when we sat him down, that’s when I knew what we had with Jorge,” Merrill said. “Because that’s when the pitchers would come to me and complain that Jorge wasn’t behind the plate. His teammates knew he made them better. He had become that kind of leader on the field.

  “And he was smart. We had to do very little with him in terms of setting up hitters and the scouting reports before the game. He knew all the stats and strategies. And if we had a pitcher carrying good stuff into the game, Jorge made sure that pitcher went seven or eight innings.

  “He had improved in all phases. I think he had a chance to make the 1995 big league team, until that one play at the plate.”

  In the summer of 1994, in a game against the Norfolk Tides, which was the Mets top minor league affiliate, a journeyman but speedy outfielder named Pat Howell raced around third base, trying to score on a slow-rolling infield ground ball. Posada saw Howell coming and used his left foot to block home plate as he awaited the throw from first base. The ball and Howell arrived at the same time, with Howell sliding into Posada’s lower leg.

  “I can still hear his leg bone snapping,” Merrill said. “I heard it from the dugout. Just awful.”

  Posada’s fibula was broken and his left ankle was dislocated. Several tendons were torn.

  Carried by stretcher into the Clippers’ locker room, Posada was placed on a table where athletic trainers took off his chest protector and shin guards and dropped them to the floor.

  Posada looked down at the gear and said: “I’m not ever putting that stuff on again. Never. I’m done.”

  Said Stump Merrill, who was standing over the table: “You’re going to be OK. Relax.”

  As Posada wrote in his 2015 autobiography: “I think Stump thought I was talking about the injury ending my career. I was trying to say I didn’t want to catch again. I’d gone along with everything everyone had told me to do. I had improved, and this was how the baseball gods rewarded me? Work your ass off for what?”

  Posada was not permitted to put weight on his left leg for the next six weeks. A lengthy rehab would follow. But he did return to catch again.

  “The injury didn’t change the organization’s position about Jorge,” said Brian Cashman. “We were still very high on him. And we weren’t the only ones. A bunch of teams brought up his name in trade talks. It was right about that time that all of the guys who came to be known as the Core Four were regularly coming up in trade talks.

  “Gene Michael was still wearing himself out saying no to every team. That was especially true when it came to Jeter. The answer was always an emphatic no when the topic was Jeter.”

  Derek Jeter made the rarest of developmental leaps in 1994. Coming off his left-wrist injury at the end of 1993—and Brian Butterfield’s expert tutelage—Jeter began the season with Tampa of the Class A Florida State League. Then he went to Class AA Albany of the Eastern League and finished the season with Columbus in the International League, the highest level of minor league baseball in the eastern United States. It was a meteoric ascent.

  “We had never had a position player do that,” Livesey said.

  On his 1994 journey, Jeter hit .329 in Tampa, .377 in Albany and .349 in Columbus. For the year, he hit .344 with 43 extra-base hits and 50 stolen bases in 58 attempts.

  Gene Michael surely smiled when he noticed Jeter’s on-base percentage for the year. Despite jumping from league to league—and having to adapt to new and different pi
tchers at each stop—Jeter had a .410 on-base percentage and an OPS of .873.

  Somewhere, Butterfield must have been beaming, too. Jeter made 25 errors in 138 games in 1994, even as he adjusted to about twenty new infields in the Eastern and International leagues. He still needed to improve, but the internal organizational argument about whether he should be a center fielder had come to an end. In 1993, he had made an error once in every 2.25 games. In 1994, he averaged an error every 5.52 games. He had 506 fielding chances in 1993, which equates to one error every 9.03 chances. The next year, Jeter had 616 fielding chances for an average of one error every 24.64 chances.

  “That gangly ugly duckling had become a swan,” said Livesey.

  Added Mitch Lukevics: “And he still had that incredible range. He was getting to everything.”

  Jeter’s fielding assists rose from 292 in 126 games in 1993 to 402 in 138 games in 1994. Butterfield’s double-play drills worked as well. Jeter turned 16 more double plays in ’94 than he had in ’93.

  “The Derek Jeter I saw in 1994 was a man compared to the boy I had seen the year before,” Mariano Rivera said. “He always had confidence, but now he had acquired the skills to turn that confidence into success on the field.”

  It was a potent, heady mix: talent, confidence and know-how.

  “A natural progression,” he said with almost a shrug in an interview more than twenty years later. “I was growing into things and I had a lot of help.”

  In 1994, Jeter was named the Minor League Player of the Year by Baseball America, Baseball Weekly, and the Sporting News.

  In a meeting of the Yankees front-office executives that summer, Merrill was asked if twenty-year-old Jeter was ready for the big leagues. “I said he was by far the best shortstop I ever had,” Merrill said. “Bring him up and see what happens.” The consensus was that Jeter would be called up to New York in late August, or September at the latest.