Chumps to Champs
Page 30
But on this day, the Yankees’ starter struck out 11 batters in eight shutout innings. Rivera gave up just two hits in a victory that moved the Yankees into third place. More importantly, the team was within four games of something new in baseball that season: a wild-card playoff berth.
For most of the rest of his nineteen-year career, Rivera threw fastballs in the mid-90s. Accentuating that ability, he also learned to throw a distinctive and sometimes virtually unhittable breaking ball, a cut fastball—or cutter for short. But the success of each of those pitches was dependent on the existence of the other. Neither works without the threat of a baseball arriving at home plate around 95 miles an hour.
But how does a twenty-five-year-old in his sixth year of pitching professionally suddenly increase his velocity from a norm of 90 miles an hour to 95 or higher? And how does he do it in two weeks?
The deeply religious Rivera has always called the transformation an act of God. Michael and Showalter, much less inclined to ascribe developmental baseball skills to spiritual intervention, were dumbfounded at the time. “I questioned if he had somehow been throwing harder before but I never noticed,” Showalter said. “But we had radar-gun readings from hundreds of days. The fact is, it didn’t really make sense. And it still doesn’t make sense.”
Said Michael: “I’ve never seen it happen to anyone else. I’ve seen it happen to a really young pitcher over the course of a couple years. But that wasn’t the case here.”
Fleisig, the sports-medicine researcher who has been studying biomechanics in athletics since he was an engineering major at MIT in the early 1980s, has no explanation for Rivera’s jump in velocity. “I don’t know of any situation where a pitcher went from 90 to 95 in two weeks,” he said. “I have no idea how that could happen. There have been pitchers who change their mechanics and then also undergo a vigorous strength and conditioning program. After six weeks, although probably more, they’ll have some gain in velocity, which over time and with more work, they can continue to build on.”
But Rivera did not change his pitching mechanics. He did not alter his diet or anything else about his routine. He rarely lifted weights throughout his life, unless you count the arduous labor of six days a week at sea as a fisherman.
“But to go from 90 to 95 in two weeks?” Fleisig said. “Two weeks? That’s phenomenal. That’s extraordinary. Maybe Rivera’s right. Maybe God did something.”
There were other unconventional theories. Jorge Posada, who along with Jeter was one of the first to witness Rivera’s sudden jump in velocity, offered an uncommon hypothesis: “Jeter always used to say that Mariano had Jedi powers.”
Seated in a lounge at the Yankees’ spring training complex in 2017, Gene Michael stifled a giggle when he remembered how close he came to trading the greatest relief pitcher of all time. “As they say, sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make,” he said.
Then Michael laughed heartily. “Who knows how Mariano found that extra five miles an hour.” He shifted in his chair and added: “But I’ll tell you what. At the time, we didn’t give a shit about how it happened. We were just going to get him out on that mound as often as we could.”
27
Yankee Flipper
IT TOOK A month for Michael, Showalter and the franchise’s many pitching gurus to realize that the best way to get Rivera on the mound as often as possible was to turn him into a reliever. When his velocity was topping out at 90, the Yankees didn’t think Rivera could be counted on to enter a game with runners in scoring position and get a big strikeout.
But if he was throwing 95? That sounds like a reliever. And in retrospect, it might seem like converting Rivera into a reliever was a no-brainer. Yet it did not immediately occur to the Yankees.
History is a good editor, and over time the established narrative of Rivera’s career has him transferred to the bullpen as soon as his velocity jumped. But those aren’t the facts. The Yankees brain trust was indecisive about what to do with Rivera. Throughout July 1995 and into August, he was still a fixture in the starting rotation, where he had good but not overpowering results.
One reason Rivera was starting was the ongoing spate of injuries to Yankee starters that season. But there were other factors.
“Hey, we didn’t know what we had with Mariano—not yet,” Showalter said. “Nobody knew what was to come. At least no one that was in our dugout, bullpen or front office at the time.”
When asked whether he wanted to be a starter or a reliever, the affable, incisive Rivera answered that he “wanted to be a big leaguer.” To him, it didn’t matter when he got to pitch as long as it was in the major leagues, and as he wisely added, “On a winning team.”
Meanwhile, as June ended, Andy Pettitte won consecutive starts, and the second of those victories was a harbinger. In seven innings pitched against Detroit, Pettitte gave up five hits and walked two, but with runners on base, he found a resolve to shut down every scoring threat. No runs scored. Since he was still relatively new to the major leagues, opposing teams also had not yet learned of another Pettitte weapon—the nasty pick-off move he learned from Wayne Graham, his coach at San Jacinto.
In the late-June game against Detroit, two Tigers were embarrassingly caught off first base because of Pettitte’s deception. “I’ve always felt like I could win up here,” Pettitte said after the game. “I’ve got a lot of confidence.”
The Yankees had won five straight games, although they were still six and one-half games behind division-leading Boston and five games back in the chase for the single AL wild-card berth. “A little energy from the young guys might be good for us,” Showalter said. “It gives you a little boost.”
If the Yankees’ spirits had been lifted, they were dampened yet again when Jimmy Key walked off what was supposed to be a three-inning rehabilitation assignment in Tampa after throwing only 10 pitches. The left-shoulder inflammation hobbling Key since May was not recovering sufficiently. Key, who had a 35-10 record for the Yankees in 1993 and 1994, was done for the season with a 1-2 record.
The day after Key’s setback, another Yankees starter, Mélido Pérez, was routed by the Milwaukee Brewers. He complained of stiffness in his right shoulder. He would take the next six weeks off, and when he returned, he threw one inning before walking off the field holding his right arm. Pérez never pitched in the major leagues again.
“We were in trouble at that point, no doubt,” said Willie Randolph. “When people look back at the ’95 season, they don’t necessarily remember how bad things were at times. Most of the news wasn’t good at all.”
The bad tidings spread throughout baseball. The poststrike malaise was real. “Attendance was down, merchandise was down, and fans were still mad,” said Hal Steinbrenner. “And I understood that. But it was amazing; it took a long time—maybe longer than other sports—to gain the fans’ trust back. They were still pissed, and in our case, that anger extended to how we were playing.”
Hal said his father talked about it in the team offices. To George Steinbrenner’s mind, the summer of 1995 was the worst possible time for the Yankees to be an unreliable baseball team. The fans had had enough of unreliable baseball teams.
Nonetheless, the fourth-place Yankees entered the midseason All-Star break reeling. O’Neill, who was hitting .344 with 11 homers, and bullpen closer John Wetteland, who had 12 saves and a 2.51 earned-run average, were the only players having superior seasons. Mattingly had one home run and just 22 RBI and was batting .207 with runners in scoring position. The weakened, tattered pitching staff was particularly unproductive.
When the team returned from the All-Star break, it had a new pitching coach. At the time, it did not seem like a big change, but ultimately many saw the move as significant. The displaced pitching coach was Billy Connors, who had been recruited to the job by Steinbrenner himself in 1993. Connors, the Yankees’ pitching coach in 1989 and 1990, had also been a good friend of Showalter’s since their days as coaches under Stump Merrill.
A month earlier, Showalter had vehemently resisted Steinbrenner’s order to replace two of his hand-picked assistants, first-base coach Brian Butterfield and hitting instructor Rick Down. But Showalter could not—or would not—spare Connors.
Speaking with reporters, Showalter endorsed the change, which installed minor league pitching coach Nardi Contreras as the new Yankees pitching coach. Connors never forgot Showalter’s reaction. “Buck said he’d stand behind his coaches—that he’d quit for them,” Connors told the New York Daily News.“He didn’t quit for me.”
In another typical Steinbrenner maneuver, Connors remained with the Yankees. In fact, he would be working out of the Tampa minor league complex, a reassignment that kept him in regular contact with the owner.
Connors had been a Steinbrenner confidant before. Now he was free to rekindle that relationship, which would not benefit Showalter. Connors’s anger with Showalter would not dissipate as the season continued. Reporters who called him in Tampa would get an earful about the shortcomings of Showalter, whom Connors demeaned as someone the media had made into “the boy wonder Yankee manager.” Connors also believed that Showalter thought he had been a spy for Steinbrenner, something Connors, who died in 2018, denied. (Steinbrenner almost always had someone on the clubhouse level of Yankee Stadium who acted as his ears and eyes.)
But Connors’s ire at Showalter overflowed. In the Daily News, he called Showalter “paranoid and insecure.” He said that the atmosphere around the manager had become too tense, serious and ultrafocused on painstaking details. No one smiles anymore, Connors lamented.
Whatever the truth, Connors was unquestionably in a position to influence Steinbrenner’s opinion of Showalter’s handling of the team’s struggling pitching staff—not just in the short term but for the rest of the season, and after it ended.
In the meantime, the pitching wasn’t getting any better, and the Yankees’ record fell to seven games under .500. Jack McDowell said he was called into Showalter’s office. “Buck talked about Jimmy Key and Pérez being out, and he said, ‘Jack, we’re going to have to ride you to soak up innings because we don’t have anyone else we can count on to do that,’” McDowell said in 2018. “It may not be fair, but I was just going to have to stay out there. And I was all good with that.
“That ’95 team was full of gamers. We all knew that Donnie was playing in pain and so was Wade Boggs, and they were two of the best players of that generation. I had never played with so many guys giving up themselves for the team. So I would do the same—I didn’t care about my ERA.”
On July 18, with the Yankees seven and one-half games back in both the division and wild-card races, McDowell took the mound for the second game of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium with the Chicago White Sox, his employer for the previous eight years. The home team had already been blown out in a 9–4 loss in the opening game.
By the third inning of the nightcap, the Yankees were trailing 7–0. McDowell had given up ten hits and three home runs. “I didn’t have it that night,” McDowell said two decades later. “But I couldn’t come out.”
By the fifth inning, the Yankees were losing 9–4 when Showalter called for a new pitcher. When he was pulled from the game, the crowd of 21,118 rose to its feet to jeer McDowell, the highest-paid Yankee, whose record was about to slump to 7-6.
The booing was loud and sustained. About five steps after he left the mound, the six-foot-five McDowell raised his right middle finger over his head in an unmistakable reply to the crowd. If his message was not clear at first, McDowell also waved his middle finger in the air in a circular motion.
The picture of McDowell’s salute to the crowd filled the back pages of the New York tabloids. One had the headline “Jack Ass!” But the best one belonged to the New York Post: “Yankee Flipper!”
In better times, McDowell was an amiable and popular teammate and media favorite. In college, he had led Stanford to the 1987 College World Series championship. The same year, he made his debut with the Chicago White Sox and soon became an All-Star. He won the Cy Young Award in 1993.
McDowell, twenty-nine years old in 1995, played guitar in a rock band and hung out with famous musicians from the alternative music/grunge band scene. His band was good enough to be the opening act for some of those top performers, and he was a drinking buddy of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. He lived in Manhattan, was often seen on the streets with his wife and young child and had been treated well by Yankees fans and the local gossip press.
That was before the night of July 18. No one could recall any other Yankee who had given the bird to a booing Yankee Stadium crowd.
Gene Michael met McDowell in the Yankee clubhouse minutes after he left the game and yelled in his face, “You’ve embarrassed the Yankee franchise, which is not just any franchise.” Michael also fined McDowell $5,000. Major League Baseball did the same a day later.
McDowell almost immediately tried to take back his gesture, although he did not apologize. He never apologized; he only offered explanations. “You’re supposed to be stoic in a moment like that and hold your emotions in—but it’s tough sometimes,” he said. “It was something where right away I knew it and said to myself: ‘Stupid.’”
Interviewed in 2018, McDowell, who was then a college coach in North Carolina, offered a new perspective. “Under normal circumstances, I’m out of that game, but they needed a couple more innings for the long-term good of the team,” he said. “So I’m walking off the mound getting booed and I’m thinking, ‘You should be cheering me for what I’m doing for the Yankees.’
“And let’s face it, I was pretty frustrated to have pitched so miserable against my old team who had traded me. It was just a two-second reaction. But it was kind of a big thing for a day or two.”
Years later, Showalter said that he wondered what else was going to go wrong to sabotage the season. He had few healthy starting pitchers left. And now his best remaining starter appeared to have made himself public enemy number one for an already annoyed Yankees fan base.
But looking back, Showalter could not stifle a laugh. He said, “‘The Yankee Flipper’ has to be an all-time headline, don’t you think?”
McDowell, who said he has autographed a picture of that moment hundreds of times, now feels the same way about what he called his “incident.” “The fans got over it; in a weird way, I think it put me on their good side,” said McDowell, who, when given the chance in 1995, declined to postpone his normal place in the starting rotation so that his next start would be on the road instead of at Yankee Stadium. “I was ready to go out there and be amongst the fans. I think they knew I was as unhappy as they were. I don’t think I had to do anything to win them back other than pitch better. And I did.”
Indeed, the Yankee Flipper may have sparked something in the dormant Yankees. McDowell pitched well in his next six outings, winning four of them. He would make four starts in September and win each one. Three of those victories happened at home, where he often received a standing ovation when he left the game. In the end, McDowell, whose record had improved to 15-10, led the Yankees pitchers in victories, shutouts (2), complete games (8), strikeouts (157) and innings pitched (217).
“A lot of people think I didn’t like New York or it was too tough because of that one incident, which didn’t go over too well,” he said. “But that’s not true. It was one of the most fun years I ever had. I loved that team.”
McDowell also praised Steinbrenner, because he would never stop trying to reinvent the roster. McDowell’s chief case in point: the acquisition of David Cone, the savior who seemed to have rescued the 1995 season when he arrived in New York, ten days after the Yankee Flipper episode.
Since June, the Yankees ha
d been pursuing Cone, who was having another excellent season in Toronto, where he had won the 1994 Cy Young Award. But Cone was in the last year of his Toronto contract, and the Blue Jays, who were on their way to a fifth-place finish, had decided not to re-sign their pitching ace over the winter. Toronto had already paid Cone, who was months away from his thirty-third birthday, $3 million of his $5 million 1995 salary.
Before the trading deadline in August, the Blue Jays were trying to find a team willing to pay the remainder of Cone’s salary. They also hoped to receive several young pitchers in return for Cone. Many contending teams were in the Cone sweepstakes, including the division-leading Los Angeles Dodgers, the Boston Red Sox and the team the Yankees were chasing for the AL wild-card berth, the Texas Rangers.
Toronto had their eyes on Andy Pettitte or Rivera for Cone. They also wanted two other Yankees minor league pitchers.
“It was touch-and-go for a while with Pettitte,” Michael said, recalling the Blue Jays negotiations. “But we were lucky to have a lot of highly ranked prospects, and I was pretty determined to entice the Blue Jays with other players in our minors. We had already been through the trade talk about Rivera, so we didn’t let them bring up Rivera for too long.”
Instead, Toronto zeroed in on Pettitte. Michael countered with other names, most especially Marty Janzen, a six-foot-three right-handed pitcher the Yankees had signed as an eighteen-year-old undrafted free agent in 1991. Since then, Janzen had compiled a 21-15 record for four Yankee minor league teams. He had a lustrous 2.70 ERA. Best of all, Janzen was 11-5 while pitching for two Yankee minor league teams in 1995. He was seen as one of the team’s best pitching prospects.
“Janzen was a good strikeout pitcher who had good control,” Michael said. “But he wasn’t left-handed and he didn’t, in my mind or in the opinion of our scouts, have Pettitte’s upside. Pettitte was winning games in the major leagues at that point.”