Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “Joe Molloy went with us to those meetings, and we flew out there first class, which was highly unusual to say the least,” Lukevics said, recalling the 1995 trip. Molloy, who had run the Yankees during George Steinbrenner’s suspension, was still a general partner with the team.

  “But it was very strange that Joe was even there,” Lukevics said. “And then he suggested that the four of us meet in his hotel room the next morning, before we headed over to the meetings.

  “You had a sense something was going on. We got in Joe’s hotel room the next morning and he says, ‘Your services are no longer needed.’

  “There was no explanation. He didn’t say, ‘You screwed up this,’ or ‘You guys did this thing wrong.’ No one ever said that to us. It was never clear why. It’s still not clear.

  “We booked a flight back to Tampa that afternoon. We sat there looking at each other and said, ‘What just happened?’”

  Livesey, who had been with the Yankees since 1979 as a minor league manager, scout or player development chief, did not have an answer to the question then, nor did he have one decades later. “None of us knows the whole story,” Livesey, whose tenure with the Yankees was one of the longest of any employee in the Steinbrenner era, said. “I went back and worked for the Yankees in 2008 and never really found out.

  “I was told by some really veteran guys at the time that George does this kind of thing every five or six years. And if you study his history, he gives the minor league system guys everything for a while and then he cuts back. He did it in 1982–83 and again in 1987–88. I guess we were caught in a trend.”

  Asked about the firing of Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering in 2017, Brian Cashman looked down and shook his head. “The boss had some bad advice from people that weren’t really baseball people,” he said. “And he decided to take a leap of faith and he made some changes and we lost some really high-end baseball people who had contributed very successfully to the franchise.”

  Asked to elaborate on whom Steinbrenner was consulting at the time, Cashman declined to say more.

  There may have been unspoken factors. The Yankees top minor league team in Columbus had missed the playoffs the last three seasons. Only one Yankee minor league team had made the playoffs in 1995. Part of the Yankee Way, the unofficial five-hundred-page manual Livesey helped devise, stressed winning minor league teams.

  Joe Molloy, who is still based in the Tampa area, did not respond to multiple attempts to be interviewed for this book.

  David Sussman, who was the team’s chief operating officer from 1992 to 1996, had no recollection of the firings of Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering twenty-three years later, adding that he would not have been brought into the loop on many baseball-specific decisions.

  Gene Michael, meanwhile, did not want to talk in depth about the purge of the three top minor league officials, but he insisted the dismissals weren’t his idea. “No way—those guys had helped produce so many players for us,” he said. “How much of the 1995 roster was homegrown talent?”

  Besides Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and both Rubén and Mariano Rivera, other former Yankee farmhands on the team in September 1995 included Bernie Williams, Don Mattingly, Sterling Hitchcock, Jim Leyritz, Gerald Williams, Pat Kelly, Russ Davis and pitcher Scott Kamieniecki. Many more Yankee farmhands were on the way in succeeding seasons.

  In addition, prospects in the Yankee farm system had been used to trade for O’Neill, Cone, McDowell and Wetteland. Importantly, because the Yankees farm system had been rich with high-level talent, those trades could be executed without having to include the most prized prospects, like Jeter, Pettitte, Rivera or Posada.

  Less than a week after they were discharged by the Yankees, Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering were hired by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who promptly put the trio at or near the top of their minor league and scouting operations.

  “It was a shame because we knew the cupboard was stocked for the Yankees,” Lukevics said. “We knew the caliber of talent that had been developed and the caliber of the people in that group. Some of them are now headed to the Hall of Fame. They were dependable, reliable guys who had been set up to succeed. And to this day, it’s not clear why we didn’t get to stick around to see some of that happen.”

  The sweeping turnover at the top of the Yankees minor league operations did not make much news in the New York press. The team was in the midst of a taut wild-card playoff race with Seattle and the Angels, who were also battling for the AL West title.

  The Yankees continued to win at a furious pace, led by Bernie Williams, who was now twenty-seven years old and a feared switch-hitter. Williams was not only on his way to career highs in home runs, RBI and batting average; he was saving his best for the Yankees’ surge through September. At one point, Williams, who had also developed into a defensive force in center field, reached base in 20 of 27 plate appearances. A constant of the lineup, he started 195 of the last 196 Yankees games.

  The Yankees, winners of 22 of their last 29 games, headed to Toronto for the final three games of the 1995 season with a one-game lead in the chase for the AL wild-card berth. A sweep of the series would clinch a playoff berth.

  But there had been much drama behind the scenes before the trip to Toronto. Steinbrenner and Showalter had been arguing for days, a dispute that centered around which pitchers Showalter should start during the final weekend. Steinbrenner insisted that he wanted David Cone, the Yankees ace, to pitch the final game in Toronto.

  Showalter wanted to use Cone only if the Yankees faced elimination in the final regular-season game. He was trying to keep Cone as rested as possible in case he was needed for a one-game playoff, should the Yankees end up tied with the Angels or Mariners at the end of the regular season. In the best-case scenario, if the Yankees earned the wild-card spot without a playoff, then Cone would also be ready to pitch the first game of the ensuing AL division series. In the worst case, if the Yankees faltered early in the Toronto series and desperately needed one last regular-season victory to extend their season, he would pitch on three days rest on the final day of the regular season.

  “My biggest hope was that we’d have David available to pitch two games in that division series because he was so experienced in the playoffs,” Showalter said. “I wasn’t sure we could compete in that kind of series without pitching him twice.”

  There was some risk to Showalter’s strategy, especially since he was also giving McDowell ten days off to nurse what was now a torn rib cage muscle, but he thought it was wise to be looking ahead and not just at the three games in Toronto.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner thought my strategy was stupid and told me I was going to blow it,” Showalter said. “He yelled and called me a stubborn German so-and-so, except he used a stronger word.”

  Showalter laughed heartily. “I don’t even think I’m German,” he said. “But, you know, right after that he left the room.”

  Showalter instead trusted his younger pitchers. Pettitte and Kamieniecki started and won the first two games in Toronto. Sterling Hitchcock won the third and last game, clinching the wild-card berth.

  When the final out was registered in the Yankees regular-season finale on October 1, Mattingly dropped to one knee and pounded the turf inside the Toronto SkyDome. After 1,785 regular-season games, he was headed to the postseason.

  “Of course, afterward, George didn’t tell me, ‘Nice going, Buck, our pitching is really set up now,’” Showalter said. “He just moved on.”

  In fact, several of the Yankees coaches recall that they assembled in Showalter’s office after the final game to celebrate when Steinbrenner barged in and shocked the group with a bellowing admonition: “You assholes better get to the World Series.”

  Outside the locker room, Steinbrenner was far more ebullient. He compared Showalter to Billy Martin, the ultimate compliment in Steinbrenner’s world.

  Showalter was, the Yankees’ owner said, “a genius—every move he made worked out.” That prompted a reporter to ask Stei
nbrenner if he was now ready to extend the expiring contract of his manager.

  Steinbrenner, with a look of surprise, smiled and frowned at the same time, then waved off the question.

  In the division series, the Yankees would face the Seattle Mariners, who finished the season by winning 25 of their last 36 games. Seattle claimed the AL West title with a one-game playoff victory over the Angels, as Randy Johnson, who won 13 of his last 14 decisions, pitched a complete-game three-hitter and gave up no earned runs.

  The Yankees, who would host the first two games of a best-of-five series, had a brief practice at Yankee Stadium while the Mariners were flying to New York.

  Mattingly, who hit .321 in September and had been in tears after the playoff-clinching victory in Toronto, was all smiles in the home clubhouse after the Yankees’ workout. “We’ve come back from a lot,” he said, opening letters from a knee-high stack of fan mail in his locker. “I mean, we’ve come back from dark times. That’s the big point. It’s been a long comeback that was years in the making.

  “Now we have a chance to go to the next level.”

  29

  “Did That Just Happen?”

  THE FIRST POSTSEASON game at Yankee Stadium in fourteen years was played before a frenzied crowd that was in full throat as soon as the home team’s first baseman was introduced in a ceremony before the game.

  The unbridled roar that greeted Don Mattingly as he stood beside the other starters along the first-base line seemed like something from another era of Yankees baseball. It was an ovation that shook the franchise from a decade of stagnation, a cheer that both drowned out the painful memories of the early nineties and shouted the franchise’s rebirth.

  The usually reserved Buck Showalter, the first Yankee to be introduced, had fueled the crowd’s passion by waving his cap over his head and pumping a fist as he ran onto the field. Like the nearly 58,000 fans in the grandstand—the largest crowd in the history of the refurbished stadium—Showalter, a Yankee minor leaguer when the team last appeared in the American League playoffs, had been waiting a long time to feel good about something in the Yankee universe.

  As fervid as the pregame response was, it was nothing compared to the stadium-shaking, thunderous explosion of noise that filled the building when Mattingly ripped a two-out single in the sixth inning to give the Yankees a 3-2 lead over Seattle. “It was like the whole stadium came to see that moment,” David Cone, the winning pitcher in the Yankees 9–6 victory, later said. “I’ve never heard an outdoor baseball stadium sound that loud.”

  There were Yankees heroes all over the diamond, as Wade Boggs and Rubén Sierra, who had suffered through a mediocre year as a part-time right fielder, hit home runs.

  But the Mariners headliners did not shrink from the spotlight, and it foreshadowed the titanic struggle to come. Ken Griffey Jr. smashed two homers off Cone. Worse for the Yankees, bullpen closer John Wetteland, who had been rocked by Seattle’s hitters in the regular season, came in to protect a five-run lead in the ninth and gave up three singles, a walk and two runs.

  But the energy and intensity inside Yankee Stadium had been the highlight of the night. The Yankees were more than relevant again. On a crisp, iridescent night in October, they hosted a prescient scene, a window into the franchise’s gleaming future.

  “It reminded me of why every major leaguer used to want to play here,” Mattingly said in the locker room after the series-opening victory. “On a night like this, if you’re a ballplayer, I can’t imagine a better place in the world to be.”

  If the crowd for Game 1 of the division series reached rock-concert-like decibel levels, the clamor during the second game, one night later, was a near equivalent, especially in its climactic moment.

  Andy Pettitte, who had a 6-1 record and a 3.00 ERA in his final seven regular-season starts, pitched a solid seven innings but left the game with Seattle ahead, 4–3. A solo home run by O’Neill in the bottom of the seventh evened the score, and the game remained tied until the twelfth inning.

  That’s when Griffey, who ended a dramatic game in Seattle with a ninth-inning homer off Wetteland on August 24, drove another two-out Wetteland fastball into the seats to put the Mariners up by a run. Showalter pulled Wetteland from the game and turned to Rivera, who ended the inning by striking out the dangerous slugger and ex–Yankees farmhand Jay Buhner.

  The Yankees tied the game again when Sierra’s double brought home pinch runner Jorge Posada from second base. Rivera then pitched the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth innings without yielding a run.

  At a little past 1:10 a.m. New York time, the Yankees’ Jim Leyritz trudged to the right-handed batter’s box in the bottom of the fifteenth.

  Five years earlier, in left field on a windy day in Chicago, Leyritz had staggered under a routine fly ball and failed to catch it, a moment in Yankees history that may never be forgotten. It was a three-run error, a misplay that preserved Andy Hawkins’s no-hitter, even if it led to an ignominious, humiliating defeat.

  Since then, Leyritz had endured a bumpy Yankees career. He became one of the many infielders or outfielders that the team converted into a catcher. In the big leagues, Leyritz played for two of his former minor league managers, Stump Merrill and Showalter, and frustrated each with his quirky and self-aggrandizing ways. He was often benched, reprimanded, or both.

  Among his offenses, Leyritz liked to showboat, twirling his bat at the plate like it was a majorette’s baton. He talked brashly in the clubhouse and on the field, too, rubbing colleagues the wrong way in each setting. But he also developed a reputation as a dependable clutch hitter, and his teammates came to view him with a certain wonder. He was unfailingly fearless, someone for whom no moment was too big.

  “Jimmy is scared of nothing, man,” third-base coach Willie Randolph once said of Leyritz, who wore jersey number 13. “Even when he should probably be scared, he isn’t.”

  As Leyritz approached the batter’s box in the fifteenth inning, he was 0-for-5 and had been hit by a pitch. It was a warm October night, with temperatures in the high 60s, and Leyritz’s Yankee pinstripes were soaked in sweat from a game that was more than five hours old. Teammate Pat Kelly was at first base after a walk.

  Leyritz did not swing at the first four pitches from the Mariners’ Tim Belcher, three of which were called balls. Leyritz twirled his bat as a light rain began to fall.

  Belcher’s 3-1 pitch was outside and thigh high, and the right-handed Leyritz rapped it toward the right-center-field alley. But Leyritz had deceptive power, and the drive kept carrying until it sailed over the outfield wall and fell at the feet of a handful of New York policemen stationed in the Yankees’ bullpen. Circling the bases, Leyritz was met between second and third base by a middle-aged fan who had dashed onto the field and hastily embraced Leyritz before being apprehended by stadium security.

  At home plate, the entire team awaited, and Leyritz leaped into the middle of the celebration. As the jumping pile of players rejoiced mosh-pit style, several Yankees, including Jeter and Posada, toppled to the ground and were nearly trampled before quickly regaining their feet.

  In the dugout, Showalter remained seated with one leg crossed over the other. “That’s their moment,” he later said. “Not mine.”

  In the seats, fans hugged and cheered. Few retreated to the tunnels and concourses as the rain began to fall more heavily. Since the early eighties, the Yankees had made it a tradition to blare Frank Sinatra’s recording of “New York, New York” at the end of every game. But until that night, no Yankee Stadium crowd had ever so enthusiastically sang along to the song as did the fans who remained into the wee hours to watch Jim Leyritz’s walk-off home run give the Yankees a 2-0 lead in their first playoff series since 1981.

  “That there is a game I’ll never forget—Yankee Stadium was crazy,” Paul O’Neill said minutes later. “I’m still shaking.”

  When O’Neill’s postgame quote was read back to him twenty-three years later, he laughed. By then, he had
won four World Series with the Yankees. “Yeah, I was a little excited, but you know what?” he said. “That was the first big October moment for us. The first one.”

  Hours after Leyritz’s drive cleared the right-field fence, the Yankees took a chartered jet to Seattle, where they would need only one more victory to advance to the American League Championship Series. Three games were scheduled at the Seattle Kingdome, where in 1995 the Yankees had already lost six times in seven tries, including two games that ended with Seattle’s final swing of the bat. “By the time that plane touched down in Seattle, no one was celebrating anymore,” Randolph recalled. “We were feeling good, but everyone knew what we were going to be up against. No one was fooled.”

  If any Yankee had dreams of a series sweep, they were soon dashed by Randy Johnson, who turned over a 7–2 lead to the Seattle bullpen in the eighth inning of the third game in the series. Led by Bernie Williams’s two home runs, the Yankees cut the deficit, but the Mariners had clearly regained their footing with a solid 7–4 victory. McDowell, pitching for the first time in 17 days, gave up three hits and five runs to the resuscitated Mariners.

  It did not hurt the home team that a sold-out crowd of 57,944 was supporting the locals with a cacophony that reverberated around the mostly concrete, barren, unadorned Kingdome. As loud as Yankee Stadium had been, the Kingdome was louder, something the Seattle fans were eager to prove. It was like a competition within the competition, and the Seattle fans had a major advantage: Their passionate cheers were contained by the Kingdome’s clamshell-shaped roof.

  The domed ballpark was also doomed. Although only nineteen years old, the Kingdome had proved to be a boondoggle. An indoor stadium had seemed a good idea for Seattle’s rainy fall and winter seasons, and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks played in the building before sold-out crowds—eight times a year. But in the spring and summer, the weather was usually splendid, even magnificent, and after a winter shuttered indoors, the citizens of the Great Northwest had little desire to spend three hours in a dark, sterile and barnlike atmosphere. Attendance at games was abysmal, abetted by years of inferior Mariners baseball.