Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  Slowly, the majority of the Yankees marched back to their clubhouse. The Kingdome was louder than ever as Griffey, who had been tackled at home plate by a mob of celebrating teammates, leaped to his feet and began an abbreviated victory lap around the stadium. He was trailed by dozens of teammates. The Mariners, in their first postseason series, didn’t want to leave the field.

  Randolph noticed that Jeter, Pettitte and Posada did not leave the Yankees’ dugout. “Those guys were sitting there watching the other team jumping up and down,” he said. “That showed me something. They weren’t lost in the moment. They were soaking it in.

  “They hadn’t really played much, but you could see they were thinking, ‘OK, this is what it feels like to win and what it feels like to lose.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

  When reporters were admitted into the Yankee locker room after the game, the scene was disquieting, uncomfortable and poignant.

  In the visiting manager’s office, Showalter was sobbing face-down at his desk, his head buried in folded arms.

  Mattingly, who had batted .417 and had six RBI in the series by swinging with abandon despite the stabbing pain it elicited in his ailing lower back, repeatedly choked back tears as he spoke. But he remained at his locker for nearly half an hour. “I want to remember it all,” he said. “Every second.”

  McDowell recalled that he avoided glancing at Mattingly. “I was in tears and it was just too hard to look over at him,” he said. “It was killing me. It took me a long time to compose myself.”

  The equipment staff was hastily packing bags and lugging them out the door into a waiting truck. A winning locker room is a place of warmth and joy where people want to linger. A losing locker room is stony and cold, a setting that instinctively leads everyone to flee.

  Less than an hour after Griffey had blazed around the bases, the Yankees began to file out of the clubhouse. After the second game of the series, as a perk, the Yankees had flown the players’ wives from New York to Seattle on the team’s chartered jet.

  Outside the locker room in Seattle, players and their families were reunited, and in groups of two, four and six, the assembly began walking across the turf field of the now empty Kingdome toward a loading dock beyond the left-field wall. It was there that they would board a bus to the airport.

  “Quietest bus I had ever been on,” said Sherlock, the bullpen coach.

  The flight back to New York was no better.

  “It was a flying funeral—people crying, so sad,” said Michael Kay, the longtime Yankees broadcaster. “And like a funeral for Mattingly’s career. People were overcome with emotion.”

  McDowell walked to the front of the plane and talked briefly with Showalter. “He told me, ‘Jack, I’d do the same thing all over again,’” McDowell said.

  Angela Showalter had not flown on the team’s chartered flight often, and the scene made a lasting impression. “It was just heartbreaking,” she said. “There were so many hopes, so much hard work and so many plans for the future all wrapped up in that one game. I think a lot of the guys knew things would never be the same again.”

  Gene Michael sat near the front of the plane, a few rows behind George Steinbrenner. The two had not talked much since Martínez’s double and Griffey’s dash.

  Michael, the crafty card player who always liked to be two moves ahead of everyone else and a baseball lifer who saw himself as a farsighted architect, was filled with troubling uncertainty. “As I sat there,” Michael remembered years later, “I knew that if we had beat Seattle, everything would have been all right. All of us would come back the next year. But now I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  30

  Purge

  GENE MICHAEL LASTED eleven days before he was removed as the Yankees’ general manager. Technically, he was reassigned and named the team’s director of major league scouting.

  But it was not as simple as that, and not the whole truth either. None of the persistent, chaotic upheaval that transpired in the month after the Yankees lost the 1995 division playoff series was simple. And it was almost always shrouded in misinformation and half-truths.

  Not long after the charter flight from Seattle landed in New York, Steinbrenner informed Michael that he would have no role in deciding whether Showalter would be retained as manager.

  “He told me, ‘You stay out of this,’” Michael recalled years later, describing his first weighty conversation with Steinbrenner after the playoff defeat. “He wouldn’t listen to me. He didn’t want my opinion, although I had already strongly backed Buck’s return.”

  It was the first of several steps taken in the next few days that stripped Michael of his central duties as general manager. Steinbrenner was also pursuing a few free agents without consulting Michael. He was entertaining trade requests. And while Steinbrenner had yet to speak with Showalter about his contract, which would expire on October 31, it had not stopped him from compiling a list of managerial replacements for Showalter, without Michael’s input.

  Finally, on October 18, Steinbrenner met with Michael and said he could remain as general manager so long as he took a pay cut from $600,000 annually to $400,000, and if he also agreed to cede overarching authority over various baseball matters. As Steinbrenner previously stated, Michael would not pick the next manager.

  Michael refused the offer. Steinbrenner and Michael, who was fifty-seven years old at the time, instead agreed on a scouting job at $150,000. “Under those circumstances, I was ready to go back to scouting,” Michael said many years later.

  But what of the last five years he’d spent restoring the franchise to prominence? He had been named general manager during the team’s darkest days, just hours before Steinbrenner was banished from baseball. Surely Michael knew that his shrewd, patient stewardship and the cluster of prized minor league prospects he had helped carefully cultivate had the Yankees on the cusp of a prosperous run?

  “Yeah, I expected some of the success that might come to pass,” Michael answered. “I knew we were an awful lot better than we had been. And in ’95, it was thrilling to see us back in the playoffs with a sold-out stadium and the organization energized again.”

  Relaxing in the sun and warmth of the Yankees’ central Florida spring training complex, Michael took off the baseball cap he was wearing and ran his hand through his gray hair. He smiled. “That was a long time ago—do we have to go back there? It’s such a nice day.”

  But Michael wasn’t one to duck a question. Chuckling, he leaned forward in his seat. “OK, look, there was a lot of other stuff going on at the time—changes all around, you know?” he said.

  The leadership of the minor league operations had already been gutted.

  “It wasn’t going to be the same,” he said. “That much was obvious.”

  Michael settled back in his chair and propped his cap on the back of his head with the bill tilted up so the sun bathed his face. He stared at an empty practice infield. “If we had just won in Seattle, I would have stayed as the GM and there would have been no questions about Buck as manager,” he said. “But we didn’t win that series. George didn’t want me to be the GM. He wanted me as an adviser. George liked that.”

  David Sussman, the Yankees’ chief operating officer in 1995, was not involved in the decision to demote Michael. But he had an opinion about what transpired. “My sense was Gene was tired; he was worn down,” Sussman said. “He had worked for George for many years. They would scream and curse at each other and slam doors or slam down phones. Regardless, there was a real affection between them. But this time, Gene wanted to step back. He wanted to still be involved but not in the hot seat.”

  Michael’s exit set in motion a series of other departures. Don Mattingly, who was leaning toward retirement, saw Michael’s exodus as a sign that a new—or old and familiar—turmoil might soon envelop the team’s front office.

  Mattingly began to solidify his retirement plans, although he also checked in with his agent, Jim Krivacs, who was Sh
owalter’s agent, too. Mattingly wanted to know: Is Buck going to be back?

  The removal of Showalter, his former minor league teammate in 1981, would definitely accelerate Mattingly’s plans to end his baseball career.

  But Krivacs did not know Showalter’s fate. No one did, although Steinbrenner’s misgivings about Showalter were public knowledge since they had been leaked to the local newspapers.

  Most expected a classic Steinbrenner response to the situation: He would offer Showalter a small raise but demand that he fire at least some of his coaches. It was a maneuver Steinbrenner had employed many times before with managers as diverse as Billy Martin and Yogi Berra. As a tactic, Steinbrenner felt it gave him a measure of control. He got to pick some of the voices influencing the manager, who would be knocked down a peg as well. Sometimes Steinbrenner did it as a way to force his manager to quit.

  At home in Pensacola, Florida, Showalter was hardly disconnected from what was going on in New York. After nineteen years, he had his confederates in the franchise and he was good at developing sources of information. Always a good student, Showalter grasped the inner workings and politics of an organization that was by its competitive nature partisan and Machiavellian. He was far from a neophyte in that world. He could play the game within the game in major league baseball.

  Most of all, he knew that when it came to the Yankees, what mattered most was who had Steinbrenner’s ear.

  To that end, Showalter understood that Michael’s reassignment would have seismic ramifications for him. He and Michael had been close allies, discussing personnel, trades and minor league call-ups sometimes many times a day. Theirs was a unique bond, and they often teamed up to work around Steinbrenner. Most of all, Michael had been the pivotal buffer between the owner’s office and the manager’s office.

  “Stick leaving as general manager was a blow, no doubt,” said Showalter, who worried about having to acclimate to a new general manager. When he finally talked with Steinbrenner in late October, he let the owner know that he did not want to discuss a new contract until he knew who Michael’s successor would be.

  Steinbrenner quickly hired Bob Watson, the Houston Astros’ general manager and a 1980s Yankee first baseman, to replace Michael. There hadn’t been a lot of competition for the job. A slew of top executives from other teams declined to even interview with the Yankees. They knew the crucible that working under Steinbrenner had become for any general manager.

  Showalter did not know Watson well, but he did not view him as an obstacle. Amiable and gentlemanly, Watson was hard to dislike.

  But soon there was a major complication. Steinbrenner’s initial contract offer was for two years and $850,000, a total that was later raised to slightly more than $1 million. The money, however, wasn’t the problem. As expected, Steinbrenner wanted to dismiss Showalter’s most trusted coaches: Sherlock, first-base coach Brian Butterfield, hitting coach Rick Down and pitching guru Tony Cloninger. Showalter had worked with the four coaches for at least five seasons. Some considered the quartet a kind of private council crafted in Showalter’s image: Only Cloninger had a big league pedigree; the rest, like their boss, had been career minor leaguers.

  Showalter rejected Steinbrenner’s contract offer during a ten-minute phone call, insisting that he had to have the authority to pick his own coaches. One week remained before Showalter officially left the Yankees’ employ.

  “I expected a counteroffer,” Showalter said in 2017. “It was a negotiation. I had been with the Yankees pretty much my entire working life and I didn’t want to leave. I thought we’d talk a little more about what I wanted and what ownership wanted.

  “That didn’t happen.”

  For weeks, Steinbrenner had been stewing about what to do with Showalter. The Seattle series had seriously soured him on his young manager. There were also voices in Steinbrenner’s inner circle who were anything but complimentary of Showalter, including Billy Connors, whose firing as pitching coach in 1995 Showalter had supported. Another Steinbrenner confidant, Arthur Richman, a former public relations executive who was now a senior adviser, had developed a distaste for Showalter’s businesslike approach to his job. Richman, a sportswriter in the 1940s, often traveled with the team and preferred the nightlife habits of old-school managers who regularly took the coaches and team employees out for long, elaborate dinners at pricey restaurants and saloons.

  Showalter didn’t spend his nights that way and generally distanced himself from Richman, which Richman took personally. In October 1995, Showalter needed allies whispering commendations to Steinbrenner, but few were doing so. Michael had already been pushed aside. Cashman did tell Steinbrenner not to make a change at manager.

  “Unfortunately, to no avail,” Cashman said.

  Richman, meanwhile, went on WFAN, a sports-talk radio station in New York, and disparaged Showalter’s record, suggesting that others in the Yankees chain of command deserved more credit for the team’s recent turnaround.

  Mattingly, reached that day at his Indiana home by Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News, stood up for Showalter. “We had lost for five straight years, then we got better and better and this year we went to the playoffs,” Mattingly said. “Buck was proud to be a Yankee. He honored the organization. That’s the record I’m talking about. That’s a record he won’t ever have to defend to anybody.”

  But Mattingly was on his way out of the Yankees sphere of influence. As time passed, Sussman said that most front-office employees who had been in Steinbrenner’s presence during and after the Seattle playoff series fully expected Showalter to be dismissed as manager. “In hindsight,” Sussman said, “maybe the most shocking thing is that Buck survived that season with George.”

  Hal Steinbrenner agreed that the team’s executives believed Showalter would not be retained. More than twenty years later, he had no trouble remembering how his father’s thought process usually worked in such situations. “I mean, that’s the way George was,” Hal said. “If you failed, somebody was accountable.”

  On October 26, two days after his last conversation with Showalter and an hour before the fifth game of the 1995 World Series, Steinbrenner issued a statement that Showalter had told the Yankees he would not return to manage in 1996.

  That was news to Showalter when a reporter reached him on his way to his Pensacola home after a round of golf. “What I said was that I couldn’t accept the stipulations connected to the contract offered,” Showalter said, referring to the dismissal of his coaches. “I still hope we can work something out.”

  But Steinbrenner was steadfast. “I am very upset Buck is leaving and I wish Buck and his fine little family nothing but the best,” he said in the team statement.

  The next five days were bizarre, even by the wacky standards set by Steinbrenner’s 1980s Yankees, when there were 13 managerial changes in 10 seasons.

  Showalter’s contract would expire at midnight on Halloween. In the meantime, there was a standoff. Showalter could return to the only adult employer he had known if he let Steinbrenner select the coaches. Or Showalter could take his chances on the open market, where the Oakland Athletics and the Detroit Tigers, two lousy teams, were looking for a new manager.

  There were a couple of other remote landing spots for Showalter. In 1998, two expansion teams would join the major leagues: the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the American League. With two and a half years to wait, neither expansion team had named a manager.

  A certain amount of back-channel negotiating transpired for a few days. Brian Butterfield ran into Steinbrenner almost by accident at the Tampa instructional league, and after an amiable conversation, Steinbrenner was impressed enough that he removed Butterfield from the list of coaches he wanted to replace. Various newspapers reported that two other coaches, Sherlock and Cloninger, might have been, in effect, pardoned as well. But hitting coach Rick Down remained in Steinbrenner’s crosshairs.

  Sherlock said the coaches had heard nothi
ng officially. “We were in the dark,” he said.

  Showalter received unofficial overtures from other major league teams. Contacted at home, he said, “I want to come back. I want to remain a Yankee.”

  He had rebuffed Steinbrenner’s demand to pick at least some of the coaches. Now he waited by the telephone, which did not ring by the midnight deadline on Halloween.

  At the time, and in the more than two decades since, much intrigue has grown up around what actually occurred in the final day or days.

  In multiple interviews at his Tampa hotel in the late nineties, Steinbrenner refused to go into the details of Showalter’s exit. He talked in generalities and occasionally seemed torn by the turn of events.

  In late 1996, sitting at a luncheon table, he held both hands about chest high with his palms turned upward. He raised his left hand and said, “On the one hand, let’s just say it was unfortunate and might have been averted.” He lowered his left hand and raised his right hand. “But on the other hand, it worked out well, maybe for everyone.”

  Showalter, however, does not understand why there is any mystery about what unfolded. “There is no intrigue at all—it’s comical to me when someone tries to say there was,” he said in 2017, getting to his feet from behind his home-office desk to enforce the point. “Maybe I didn’t say enough at the time to clarify things, but it’s really very simple.

  “I had two contracts offered to me: In the first one, I would have no say over the coaching staff, and in the second one, I got to bring back Butterfield. But I knew that the continuity of the coaching staff was instrumental to our success. And I also knew that if I gave up my coaches, it would send a clear message to the rest of the clubhouse. It would affect the culture, because everyone would be thinking that as soon as we hit a bump in the road I’m going to give up on them and cover my ass like I did when I gave up on my coaches.