Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  At least not yet. His tabloid prime time was coming.

  But McDowell’s clean-shaven face soon went 0-2, dropping his record to 1-4. McDowell had not won a game since his Yankee debut in late April—eight successive starts without a victory.

  In the midst of the persistent losing—the Yankees had one victory in their last 13 games—there was a career milestone to mark. Showalter surpassed Billy Martin’s record for most consecutive games managed under Steinbrenner’s Yankees. From 1975 to 1978, Martin had survived for 470 days.

  As reporters quizzed Showalter about the signal achievement for a Yankees manager in the Steinbrenner era, he all but squirmed in his office desk chair. Perhaps it was because Martin’s framed 1976 jersey hung on the wall behind his desk. Or maybe it was the painting of Martin that graced another wall in the office. Showalter knew how tenuous praise for longevity under Steinbrenner could be. He had personally witnessed the 1988 season, when Steinbrenner dismissed Martin even though the Yankees were 12 games over .500 and had been in first place for most of the season. It turned out to be Martin’s last season as a manager.

  “I knew Billy had been fired five times,” Showalter said, recalling the moment many years later. “It felt a little weird to be talking about how long I had lasted in the job, especially with Billy as the reference point. I knew the history.”

  He was also practical, a trait he highly valued.

  Showalter, for example, had rented an apartment or home since he had begun working in New York. Once, Steinbrenner asked him why he didn’t buy a house.

  “Because I work for you,” Showalter answered.

  Still, Steinbrenner used the occasion of Showalter’s consecutive-games-managed record to offer praise for his manager’s detailed pregame preparation. Steinbrenner added that it was “something more like what a football coach does.”

  It was the ultimate compliment from the former assistant on the Northwestern and Purdue University football staffs.

  Showalter remained cautious. “It’s flattering, but at the same time it doesn’t change anything. There’s a boss and we’re employees working under him, and you have to understand that arrangement. I had respect for the ground rules from the first day I took the job, and I’ll have it until the day I leave.”

  Murray Chass, the New York Times’s national baseball writer, called Lou Piniella on the occasion of Showalter’s milestone. Piniella, twice fired by Steinbrenner, congratulated Showalter on his record. Then Piniella, who is more of a serious baseball scholar than his regular-guy demeanor lets on, chuckled and said, “It’s certainly not going to be a threat to Connie Mack’s record.”

  Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 7,396 successive games from 1901 to 1950.

  But Showalter had far bigger problems than trailing Connie Mack’s record by nearly 7,000 games. His team continued to flag, sinking deeper in the cellar of the AL East. The Yankees seemed to be more than sleepwalking. It was as if there remained a mental barrier to the team’s success.

  “It was a team that wanted to have the mentality of a defending champion after 1994,” he said in 2017. “But everywhere we went, we were told that 1994 didn’t matter. We were told that we hadn’t won anything. Or we were reminded that we hadn’t won anything.

  “So it was like we were asking ourselves: What was it that happened in 1994, then? It left everyone out of sorts. It took a long time to get the right feel back. We were just kind of wandering in limbo.”

  Since so many Yankees still had a foot in the 1994 season, the 1995 Yankees needed a jolt from someone unconnected to the previous season. And on June 7, Andy Pettitte successfully stanched some of the bleeding by winning his first major league game. He gave up just four hits and one run in seven innings.

  But the boost that Pettitte provided was short-lived. Some of his rookie brethren were not making contributions of equal value.

  Four days after Pettitte’s debut victory, Mariano Rivera gave up seven hits and five runs in a little more than two innings against Seattle. In his previous start, he had been bashed for two homers and seven runs, including a monstrous grand slam.

  Most disturbing to the Yankees brain trust, Rivera’s velocity was down. He had not struck out a single batter in the outing against the Mariners, who had also rocketed several Rivera pitches deep into the vast expanse of left-center field at Yankee Stadium. Rivera’s ERA was 10.20.

  Derek Jeter had played shortstop in the Seattle game on June 11, going 1-for-4. As Tony Fernández’s replacement for 13 games, Jeter had hit .234. But Jeter was never meant to be the everyday shortstop in 1995, and Gene Michael had little interest in exposing the franchise’s best prospect to the rocky tumult of an uneven, confounding season. Especially since George Steinbrenner was already grousing about Michael having wasted far too much money on an underachieving, last-place team. Michael wanted Jeter out of the spotlight for now. That is why he had paid Fernández, a thirteen-year veteran and four-time All-Star, $1.6 million to come to the Yankees. Let him take the heat. Let the thirty-three-year-old Fernández weather the pennant chase pressure and ever-increasing scrutiny of an exasperated Steinbrenner. Fernández could handle it. It was time to let Jeter, who would turn twenty-one in a couple of weeks, return to the shadows just outside the New York spotlight.

  The Yankees were about to begin a road trip with four games in Detroit. Before departing Yankee Stadium, Rivera and Jeter, one by one, were summoned into Showalter’s office, where they learned that they would not be on the team’s charter flight to Detroit. The two players were instead handed tickets for their flight the following day from Newark to Charlotte, where the Columbus Clippers were continuing their road trip.

  “Maybe, in the back of my head, I didn’t expect to stay in the majors,” Jeter said. “But it didn’t make me feel any better at the time.”

  The Yankees’ traveling secretary had arranged for a cab to take Rivera and Jeter to a hotel that the team had reserved for the players in New Jersey. They would fly out first thing in the morning so they could resume their Class AAA minor league careers in a game the next night.

  Rivera recalled that the cab ride to New Jersey was silent. He and Jeter walked across the street from their hotel to a Bennigan’s, an Irish pub–themed casual-dining chain that was popular in the New York area in the mid-nineties. It was the kind of place that would have likely been filled with Yankees fans in the summer of 1995. But no one recognized the two players who had just been dispatched from the big league club. They sat in a booth facing each other.

  Rivera apologized to Jeter, suggesting that had he pitched better, maybe the two of them wouldn’t have been sent down.

  Jeter dismissed that idea. “I just said that we would have to prove ourselves again,” he recalled. “It was the only way to get back up there. And I said so—once or twice.” Jeter smiled, adding, “Maybe I said it more than that.”

  Rivera quietly nodded in agreement. He also said he was going to confess to the Columbus coaches how much his shoulder was bothering him, something he was reluctant to do during his past two starts with the Yankees.

  Arriving in Charlotte the next day, Jeter started at shortstop.

  “Derek had a walk and two hits that night—a double and a triple,” said Stump Merrill, who was a Yankees roving minor league adviser in 1995. “I think he stole two bases, too. I thought to myself, ‘So much for the kid reacting badly to the letdown of a demotion.’”

  Rivera, meanwhile, was placed on the 15-day disabled list. The hope was that some rest would do Rivera’s usually resilient arm some good. If that didn’t work, the Yankees front office was already discussing another plan. They would trade Rivera while he still had some worth. They would do it, as Michael liked to say, before the rest of baseball discovered what the Yankees already knew about the struggling pitching prospect, who had cost the team $2,000 in 1990.

  26

  Jedi Powers

  IN 2013, A study of fossil remains by Harvard University scientists de
termined that humans acquired the ability to throw an object overhand at high speed about two million years ago. Some humans, the scientists said, probably threw an object harder than others.

  But understanding why some people throw harder than others—and the shadowy steps to developing that skill—has, for the two million years since, largely remained a mystery.

  Harvard’s scientists revealed new evidence proving that the act of a powerful overhand throw was an evolutionary anatomical adaptation that humans developed to hunt big game. It was necessary because the best hunting method in earlier ages was throwing sharp objects at great speed. But over time, the structural makeup of humans had to change to allow for the cocked arm technique that is the key to a modern, high-speed throw by humans.

  Using motion-capture video to analyze throwing motions of top baseball pitchers, Harvard’s scientists determined that it was a human’s ability to store energy in the shoulder and elbow as the arm is raised behind the head—much like an elastic band—that resulted in 90- or 100-mile-an-hour fastballs. It was not simply musculature; it was the slingshot action of a pitcher’s windup, something made possible by highly supple shoulder and elbow ligaments.

  Also, humans, over time, evolved in a way that they could twist their waist to increase the rotational forces that amplified the stored energy. A pliable shoulder joint helped considerably, too.

  The first species with some of these capabilities, Homo erectus, used objects like rocks in hunting small game. Homo sapiens, who appeared on earth about 200,000 years ago, used sharp projectiles, like spears, which they could throw for greater distances and at higher speeds that felled larger prey.

  It was this same motion—the cocked arm behind the head, the twisted waist that builds torque and an elastic shoulder capable of storing and then unleashing the energy at precisely the right time—that eventually led to fastballs hurled at eye-popping speeds approaching 100 miles an hour.

  It was a function of one’s arm anatomy, not one’s size. A beefy, powerful 230-pound man or woman did not necessarily throw a baseball harder than a rail-thin, wiry 180-pound man or woman. What mattered was a hard-to-define combination of genetics, mechanics and practice.

  “Some people throw harder than others not because of their muscles or how strong they are, but because of things like fast-twitch or slow-twitch fibers in their physiology,” Dr. Glenn Fleisig, a foremost expert in baseball biomechanics and the research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute, explained in a 2018 interview. “So the first step to throwing a baseball very fast is that you must pick your parents carefully. The maximum window for how hard you might throw is set by the anatomy you were born with.

  “But you can maximize whether you will throw to the top or the bottom of that maximum window by learning good pitching mechanics, by working out and by following the right nutritional diet.

  “So it is a combination of things,” concluded Fleisig, who is also the chairman of USA Baseball’s medical and safety committee. “Not one magical thing.”

  As Mariano Rivera rested his shoulder on the bench of the Columbus Clippers in June 1995, Gene Michael was in New York preparing to trade him to the Detroit Tigers for left-handed starter David Wells.

  Joe Klein, the Detroit general manager, had an extensive background as a minor league scout and manager. Though he had also been the general manager of the Cleveland Indians and the Texas Rangers, Klein happily continued to roam the back roads of the rookie-level leagues in Florida and the Carolinas. He was a fixture at Class AA Eastern League games, where he had once been a player and manager.

  Klein had seen Rivera pitch dozens of times, as early as 1990, when he first made notes about Rivera’s fluid delivery and mound poise for the Gulf Coast League Yankees. He saw Rivera the next season in Greensboro, and again in 1994 with the Albany Yankees.

  “It’s easy to say this now, but back in the mid-nineties I believed he was miscast as a starter and would make a better reliever,” Klein said in 2017. “I’m not saying I knew he would be as good as he became—I’m pretty confident that no one did. But I thought he had a big upside as a guy who pitched in limited outings rather than someone who a batting order saw two or three times in one start.”

  Wells, who was thirty-two at the time, was having a good year for the Tigers. In late June, he had a 5-3 record with a 3.11 ERA. But Wells was making more than $2.3 million, then a princely sum, and the Tigers were a .500 team gasping to keep up with the surging Boston Red Sox in the AL East.

  Wells was going to be traded that summer to some team and for some prospect, and Klein’s first choice of compensation was Rivera. Klein, like every general manager, watched the waiver wire and saw that Rivera had been sent back to the minors. And like all baseball executives at the time, Klein also knew that Gene Michael was under unending pressure from his owner to make a move that might turn around the waning Yankees.

  At that moment, Klein ramped up his pleas for a Wells-for-Rivera trade.

  “You’re often discussing various trades, but I think Gene and I both thought that Wells might thrive in New York,” Klein said. “And that proved to be true eventually, when David went there later. But in ’95, it was about whether they were willing to part with Rivera. The way he had been pitching, I was very sure they were going to make that trade.”

  But Michael stalled. And Klein, understandably, wanted to wait until Rivera returned from the disabled list. He had to know that any injury was not serious. Wells had a 68-56 record in nine major league seasons, and the Tigers weren’t going to trade him for a sore-armed minor leaguer, no matter how good Klein’s scouting report might have been.

  “I had not agreed to trade Mariano,” Michael recalled. “But we were certainly leaning that way. At that juncture of the season, we certainly needed a proven starter.”

  On June 26, Jeter’s birthday, Rivera returned to the mound against the Rochester Red Wings. He was pain-free, and his shoulder felt strong and loose.

  In the second game of a twilight doubleheader at Columbus, Rivera mowed down the Red Wings in the first inning, striking out two of three batters. The third batter was retired on a weak grounder to Rivera.

  Behind the plate for the Clippers, Jorge Posada was stunned by the velocity of Rivera’s pitches. “His fastball was exploding out of his hand,” Posada said many years later. “He was hitting my glove with that loud smacking sound. The hitters had no chance.”

  Posada approached Rivera in the dugout and jokingly asked him if he had eaten something different that day.

  “He told me to just keep doing whatever I was doing,” Rivera said.

  A rainstorm shortened the game after five innings. Rivera had not given up a hit and faced only 15 batters, the minimum for five innings.

  The next morning, in his Yankee Stadium office, Michael received the minor league reports from the day before, as he always did. He saw that Rivera’s pitching line had zero hits, but the numbers that jumped off the page were the radar-gun readings on Rivera’s fastball. Most were at 95 and 96 miles an hour.

  Rivera had never consistently thrown that hard in any start. Michael doubted that Rivera had ever been clocked at more than 91 miles an hour.

  He called Columbus to verify that the report wasn’t a mistake and was assured that everyone in Columbus was as flabbergasted as Michael by Rivera’s newfound velocity. “They said the ball was flying out of Mariano’s hands,” Michael said, retelling the story. “But, you know, this was 1995. The radar guns weren’t as sophisticated. They could be wrong. Or something odd might have happened. I said to myself, ‘It’s one reading. I need another reading from that game.’”

  Michael had the phone numbers of a vast network of scouts and player personnel directors who worked for a variety of major league teams. As a group, they were a close-knit tribe, a collection of baseball lifers united by their nomadic lifestyles and the tedium of sitting in the creaky seats of broken-down minor league parks night after night. Since they tended to stay in
the same midlevel hotels and eat and drink in the same sports bars on the road, they became friends and communicated regularly, not to give away team secrets or fess up about a top prospect they might have uncovered, but to kibitz and convey basic, relevant data—like the news that a new, pristine Holiday Inn had opened in Wheeling, West Virginia.

  Since he had been a scout for decades, Michael was treated like a charter member of the group, and within it he had a friend, Jerry Walker, the St. Louis Cardinals’ director of player personnel. Michael had known Walker since the 1960s, when each played in the American League. Walker became a pitching coach when his playing career ended, then moved into a series of front-office jobs. Two years earlier, Walker had been the Detroit Tigers’ general manager.

  Michael knew that Walker was likely a witness to Rivera’s June 26 five-inning no-hitter, because St. Louis was interested in Rivera as well. The Cardinals were hoping the Yankees-Tigers trade fell through.

  Michael dialed Walker’s phone number and confirmed that Walker had been in Columbus the evening before. As he usually did, Michael asked Walker generally about a variety of players. It was all a pretense, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Everyone did the same kind of casual nosing around. Then, in an off-the-cuff sort of way, Michael asked Walker if he had gotten a radar-gun reading on Rivera.

  Walker gave him the number.

  Michael engaged in small talk for a few minutes longer, then hung up.

  “The next person I called was Showalter,” Michael said. “I told him, ‘We’re recalling Rivera to New York right now. I don’t know how he did it, but he’s throwing 95 in Columbus.’ Then I called Joe Klein and told him the deal was off.”

  Returned to Showalter’s Yankees, who had been on a mini–winning streak, Rivera started a game on July 4 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, where five years and three days earlier Andy Hawkins had pitched his fateful no-hitter in a loss.