Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  As the trade talks continued, privately, the Yankees’ minor league chiefs raised one stat of significance about Janzen. It was a small sample size—just three games—but it was Janzen’s pitching line in his first three games at Class AA Norwich that summer: 20 innings pitched, 17 hits, 11 earned runs and a 1-2 record. It was the first time that Janzen had pitched at the AA level, two notches below the big leagues.

  “We stayed firm that Janzen would be the guy, not Pettitte,” Michael said. “Pettitte came off the table.”

  The Yankees included two other pitchers with Janzen when the trade for Cone was consummated. One was Mike Gordon, who had compiled middling minor league statistics since he was selected in the eleventh round of the amateur draft in 1992. The other pitcher was Jason Jarvis, a thirteenth-round choice in 1994 with a 13-9 minor league record.

  Gordon and Jarvis never made it out of the minor leagues. Janzen won five of his six starts in the Class AA Blue Jays minors after the Cone trade. That promising record got Janzen promoted directly to the Toronto roster during spring training in 1996, but in the two seasons that followed, he had a 6-7 record, mostly as a starter for the Blue Jays. Janzen then drifted off the Toronto roster. He spent the next eight years playing for minor league teams in the United States and around the world—from Korea to Mexico to Canada—but Janzen never returned to the majors.

  Cone, meanwhile, had an immediate impact on the Yankees. He brought a crafty repertoire of pitches—forkball, fastball, slider and curve—that he threw from various arm angles, confounding hitters. As important, Cone had the calm and poise of a seasoned veteran, something the Yankees missed with Jimmy Key sidelined. Cone had been through multiple pennant races and had pitched in seven postseason games. He won a World Series with the Blue Jays in 1992.

  Cone won his first four starts for the Yankees, giving up a total of eight earned runs in those games. The rudderless Yankees seemed to have found a new on-the-field helmsman. But their erratic 1995 season would not be fixed that easily. Another fork in the road lay ahead.

  The last of Cone’s four consecutive victories came on Sunday, August 13, in the midst of a bright, sunny afternoon at Yankee Stadium. Cone’s six-hit, complete-game shutout—he threw 130 pitches—pushed the Yankees three games over .500, and pulled them within a game of Texas in the wild-card race. More than 45,000 fans cheered on the home team, but the mood was bittersweet.

  On that Sunday, Yankee Stadium, the hulking gray edifice at the crossroads of 161st Street and River Avenue that had been the South Bronx home to the Yankees since 1923, was turned into more than a baseball cathedral. At two o’clock that morning, Mickey Mantle had died of liver cancer in a Texas hospital.

  Cone did not know of Mantle’s death until he arrived at the stadium and saw the marquee atop the building, which read, Mickey Mantle, No. 7, A Yankee Forever.

  When Cone left his car, he went directly onto the field, walking across the grass and beyond the outfield wall into the stadium’s Monument Park, a shrinelike oasis near the bullpens. Cone found the plaque dedicated to Mantle’s storied Yankees career. “I just read about everything Mickey Mantle meant to this franchise—to all of baseball,” Cone, who was raised in the Kansas City area, said after the game. “It wasn’t new to me, but it made me realize what a privilege it was to pitch here today.

  “Baseball as we know it today in America might not be the same without Mickey Mantle.”

  In the stands during the game, hundreds of fans held up homemade placards and signs saluting Mantle. The scoreboard in center field played a three-minute video tribute to Mantle’s career. Standing on the top step of the dugout, Mattingly, several of his teammates and a handful of coaches wiped away tears as they watched.

  Showalter grew up idolizing Mantle, like so many other sixties-era Little Leaguers. “Everyone always wanted the jersey with number 7,” he said. “We won the game today, but it’s still a very sad day. Many a kid played this game because he wanted to be like Mickey Mantle.”

  Days later, another legend was gone from the team. Phil Rizzuto, the former Yankees shortstop and Baseball Hall of Fame inductee who became a quirky, charismatic and beloved Yankees broadcaster, announced he was retiring and would no longer work the team’s games.

  Rizzuto had missed Mantle’s funeral on August 15 to be in the broadcast booth for that day’s Yankees game. Later, Rizzuto said he felt so guilty about that decision, it made him rethink how much of his life he still spent at ballparks. Rizzuto, seventy-eight, now wanted more time with his family. He had been a player or broadcaster for the Yankees for fifty-four years.

  “Missing Mickey’s funeral just made me understand how much else I was missing,” said Rizzuto, a fixture around the stadium who traveled with the team and was popular with players. “I just have to walk away.”

  Mattingly summed up the Yankees’ reaction. “It’s been a tough week around here,” the team captain said. “I think everyone is a little out of sorts, frankly.”

  It was not an idle notion. Embarking on a lengthy road trip to Boston and then the West Coast, the Yankees promptly lost eight of their next ten games. On the final stop, in Seattle, Yankees closer John Wetteland gave up three ninth-inning runs to squander a Yankees lead. The game ended on a soaring two-run, two-out home run by Ken Griffey Jr.

  Griffey would not have come to the plate if Yankees shortstop Tony Fernández had caught a soft liner hit directly at him one batter earlier. “It’s a ball even my eight-year-old son could catch,” Fernández said of his misplay after the Mariners’ 9–7 victory.

  The Yankees lost the next two games inside Seattle’s cavernous Kingdome, which was fast becoming the team’s house of horrors. The final, ignominious defeat of the Yankees’ long late-August journey saw Mariners starter Randy Johnson yield just three singles while his teammates knocked three visiting pitchers around for 12 hits in a 7–0 thrashing. It was the Yankees’ eighth successive loss, the longest losing streak for the team since the dismal, humiliating 1991 season.

  The Yankees, now four games under .500, were 15½ games behind Boston in the AL East. Five games separated them from the top of the standings for the league’s lone wild-card berth—and they would have to climb over four teams to earn that last playoff spot.

  As the Yankees flew home from Seattle, it was only twelve months since the magical, dominant 1994 season, when a trip to the World Series seemed assured. That was now a faraway, almost mocking memory.

  There was roughly one month left in the 1995 season.

  28

  Last Stand

  GEORGE STEINBRENNER ACCOMPANIED the Yankees during parts of their disastrous West Coast road trip. He was a regular presence in the clubhouse, where he routinely spoke with reporters.

  The message was always the same, or nearly so. “I’ve given my full support to the manager and the players,” Steinbrenner said. “We also have the highest payroll in baseball. I hate to keep saying that, but for that kind of money, an owner should expect excellence. Is this excellence?

  “But I’m not running things. The manager, the coaches and the players—they’re the ones who will decide the team’s fate right now.”

  Steinbrenner’s public stance was an admirable improvement on his destructive, bombastic public outbursts whenever his Yankees were struggling in the 1970s and 1980s.

  But anyone who had spent even a few days in Steinbrenner’s presence knew that, behind the scenes, he was not being as hands-off as he made it sound. His banishment from the game had indeed taught him a modicum of forbearance. He had not aggressively thrust himself into the on-field management of the team for most of the season. But with a place in the playoffs still a remote possibility for his Yankees, and a month left in the season, a switch was flipped and Steinbrenner returned to his roots.

  “When the playoffs were right around the corner, when he could almost see and feel the postseason, that’s when George became the most worked up,” Lou Piniella, who played, coached or managed for Steinbrenner f
or 15 seasons, said in a 2017 interview. “He always wanted to win so much. He just had trouble containing all that emotion.”

  And so, as summer turned to fall in 1995, Steinbrenner’s phone calls to his general manager and manager took on new urgency. They had a frantic quality that veteran members of the staff, like Piniella’s former Yankees ally Gene Michael, recognized immediately. There was no discernible pattern to the calls—Steinbrenner might not reach out for a few days, or he might call several times in one day.

  But he would keep calling. Everyone who had been in Steinbrenner’s employ knew how persistent and unrelenting the owner could be.

  Harvey Greene was the team’s media chief in the mid- to late eighties, before the advent of cell phones. “On the road in those days,” he said, “if you got back to your hotel room late at night and the hotel phone message light was blinking, you knew either there had been a death in the family or George was looking for you.”

  Greene added: “After a while, you started to hope that there had been a death in the family.”

  Greene’s successor with the Yankees, Jeff Idelson, who went on to become the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, was making one of his first trips with the Yankees in 1989. He noticed that his hotel room in Minneapolis had a phone in the bathroom, something Idelson had never seen before.

  He was taking a shower before heading to the ballpark one afternoon when the bathroom phone rang. Idelson knew that Steinbrenner had ordered him to always answer his phone.

  “I picked up the telephone, and of course it was Mr. Steinbrenner, and he immediately started dictating a press release that he wanted to issue,” Idelson said. “I couldn’t say, ‘Let me wash off the soap and go get a pencil.’ I knew this was a guy with not a lot of patience.

  “I stepped out of the shower and started writing with my finger on the steamed mirror, taking dictation furiously with my index finger. He was going on and on, and the steam was starting to evaporate. I turned the hot water on full blast to make more steam for the mirror. Mr. Steinbrenner said, ‘Now read that back to me.’

  “Luckily, I was still able to make it out. But once he hung up, I had to run to get my glasses so I could get it on paper before it disappeared.”

  In September 1995, this was the world Buck Showalter now inhabited.

  Yes, Steinbrenner had been personally involved with the many details of the Yankees’ on-the-field operation in past years. But the pressure had been muted. The 1993 team, which produced the first winning Yankees season in five years, had been a pleasant surprise. The 1994 Yankees were a juggernaut. What could Steinbrenner have complained about?

  But the 1995 team was a consensus favorite for the American League pennant and was supposed to hit the ground running and coast to the postseason. Instead, several chaotic months of fits and spurts had followed. And yet, the Yankees still had a whiff of a playoff chance and Steinbrenner could certainly smell it. It put his dictatorial tendencies into overdrive. He also had complete control of Showalter’s Yankees future. The manager still had no contract for next season.

  “Back then with the boss, any Yankees manager in that situation was basically under siege,” Brian Cashman, then the assistant general manager, said. “That changed later, but in 1995, with our playoff chances seeming to slip away, that was a tough environment.” Or as Gene Michael put it, “George smothered the manager when it got close to the end like that.”

  Showalter has no trouble recalling Steinbrenner’s meddling, mostly in a playful way. Decades later, some of it seems funny. At the time, though, it was more serious, with a host of suggested lineup changes raining down on the manager’s office. Among them was Steinbrenner’s urging that Showalter make more use of Darryl Strawberry, a free agent whom the Yankees signed that summer when Steinbrenner made it an imperative. The thirty-three-year-old Strawberry, who had played only 61 games in the two previous seasons and was suspended at the start of the 1995 season for cocaine use, had no suitors other than the Yankees.

  But Steinbrenner loved giving celebrated players second chances (he also thought it was good marketing and sold tickets). And in retrospect, given Strawberry’s impressive postseason record before he became a Yankee and in the years to come, Showalter may have underused Strawberry.

  But Showalter, like his mentor Billy Martin, was resolutely loyal. He valued the core of the team; he would stick with his culture creators. “If you believe that certain guys were brought here to be your leaders,” he said, “how can you deprive them the chance to lead late in the year when you need it most?”

  On August 29, Cone gave up only five hits in a 12–4 Yankees win at home. The next day, Pettitte pitched a complete-game five-hitter in another victory. On August 31, O’Neill hit three home runs in a third successive Yankees win.

  “We had gone into emergency mode,” O’Neill said in a 2018 interview. “It had become like a last stand. We had squandered enough of the season assuming we’d refind our old selves. There was no more time left. Were we good enough to recover right then?”

  On the same day that O’Neill smacked three home runs, Posada and Jeter were recalled from Columbus. It was the first time the quartet that came to be known as the Core Four were together on the Yankees’ active roster. They would remain fixtures with the team until 2004 when Pettitte left as a free agent (only to return in 2007 for six more years). The Yankees that day also promoted outfielder Rubén Rivera, a slugging outfielder the team had signed as an amateur free agent in 1990 along with his cousin Mariano.

  One day later, with Rubén on the bench, a brilliant middle-relief performance by Mariano contributed significantly to a fourth consecutive Yankees win. Rivera trotted into the game in the fifth inning after the Oakland Athletics had rallied for four runs to erase a three-run Yankees lead. Rivera shut down Oakland without a hit for the next three and two-thirds innings. He was credited with the win when the Yankees came back for an 8–7 victory.

  It was Rivera’s second straight exceptional relief appearance. Four days later, Rivera started a game against Seattle and lost badly. At the time, that appearance was not recorded as a milestone, but it most certainly was. Rivera went to the pitcher’s mound 1,102 more times in his nineteen-year career, all of them in relief.

  The 1995 Yankees had finally agreed on what Rivera’s role should be. He became the bullpen setup man for closer John Wetteland, and he showed promise when he gave up just one hit in six relief stints to close out the regular season. But Rivera was not yet the dominating pitcher he became in subsequent seasons.

  In the six innings of those six relief appearances, Rivera gave up three earned runs, with three walks and only one strikeout. Not overpowering numbers. The Yankees had found the right spot for the quiet, poised son of a Panamanian fisherman, but at the time, no one was surprised when Showalter and his staff continued to guardedly nurture the twenty-five-year-old Rivera.

  “I was still learning,” conceded Rivera, who finished 1995 with a 5-3 record and 5.51 ERA.

  On September 11, the Yankees won for the twelfth time in their last 15 games behind a complete-game shutout by McDowell in Cleveland. “Jack is a warrior, and that’s what you need at this time of the season,” Showalter said of McDowell, who had given up just three runs combined in his last three starts.

  The Yankees also surged into a half-game lead in the wild-card race. In the next game, O’Neill hit his twentieth homer of the season in a 9–2 rout of the Indians, who were winning nearly 70 percent of their games and had an almost unfathomable 25-game lead in the American League Central Division.

  “Once we got on a roll, everything clicked because the team morale was so much better,” O’Neill recalled. “The playoffs came into view, and getting there for Donnie was the overriding goal of everyone. Even Mr. Steinbrenner was talking about getting into the postseason for Donnie.”

  Steinbrenner was also still agitated. With roughly a week left in September, the Yankees were a game behind in the wild-card race. “George was just
all over me—all over everyone,” Showalter said.

  The Yankees had not played in baseball’s postseason since 1981, had last won a World Series in 1978 and hadn’t been in serious playoff contention in late September for ten seasons.

  “George was a relatively young man when we won those 1970s championships,” Michael said. “In 1995, he was really wondering if it was ever going to happen again. I would tell him to be calm. But he had seen so many teams fall short for so many years. It had gotten to him.”

  Steinbrenner appeared irked on several fronts. He had begun to implement cost-cutting measures in various sectors of the franchise. He was exasperated with the City of New York because plans for a new Yankee Stadium continued to drag—the Yankees had recently rejected the city’s twelfth proposal for newly improved parking and traffic solutions in the neighborhood near the stadium.

  The fans’ lingering resentment after the baseball strike was still palpable, and attendance remained down despite the Yankees’ presence in a pennant race, which further vexed the owner. The atmosphere in the team’s offices in New York, always overwrought because of Steinbrenner’s demanding managerial style, was especially tense. So much was at stake on the field, including the substantially added revenue that a long run through the playoffs might provide. In this setting, every facet of the organization was under intense scrutiny—with shocking results in at least one case.

  On September 19, in a move that remains something of a confounding mystery more than twenty years later, Steinbrenner abruptly fired three of his most trusted minor league executives. It was a respected trio who had drafted Derek Jeter; signed Pettitte, Rivera and Posada; and helped build the Yankees minor league system into one of the most admired organizations in baseball.

  Bill Livesey, the vice president for player development and scouting, Mitch Lukevics, the director of minor league operations, and scouting coordinator Kevin Elfering were unceremoniously dismissed at the annual meetings of Major League Baseball’s farm system and scouting directors in Arizona.