Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “So it wasn’t very complicated. It was about the coaches and the bigger picture. To this day, when I see a manager give up on his trusted lieutenants just to save his butt, I think, ‘It’s gonna cost you in the long run.’ And it does.”

  While Showalter may not have seen the decision as convoluted, he knew it was life-altering. “Absolutely, I knew right then I was changing the course of my life,” he said. “I knew that, and shit, it broke my heart. I didn’t want any part of leaving. There were times I’d be saying, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’”

  As he contemplated what to do, he relied on advice from his late father. “He used to tell me that at some point in your life you’re going to have to plant your feet and make a stand,” Showalter said. “He said, ‘You’ll know when it’s time. That’s when you plant your feet, even if it might be tough and uncomfortable.’”

  Two minutes after the contract of the thirtieth manager in Yankees history expired on November 1, 1995, Jerry Colangelo, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, called Showalter’s home phone. He wanted Showalter to fly out to Phoenix, where the Diamondbacks had already sold 44,000 season tickets for a 48,000-seat domed stadium that as yet existed only on an architectural drawing. “You can have the chance to help shape an entire major league team from the roots up,” Colangelo told him.

  Shortly after he hung up with Colangelo, Showalter answered his phone again when a reporter called.

  Showalter was struggling to gather his thoughts. He’d just lost his dream job with the Yankees and then suddenly had been offered an opportunity to build a franchise from the ground up.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing—I’m still a Yankee,” Showalter said, talking softly in his kitchen because he didn’t want to wake his daughter, Allie, or his son, Nathan, who had finally fallen asleep after a busy night of Halloween trick-or-treating. “I’ve got all kinds of Yankee stuff in my house. I’ve got coffee mugs, pictures of my minor league teams, hell, I even have Yankees pajamas on my two kids. What am I supposed to do with all this stuff?

  “I’ll tell you what: I’m not getting rid of it. I’ll always be a Yankee. I just don’t work for them anymore.”

  31

  The Living Room Summit

  A FEW DAYS later, George Steinbrenner sat in the living room of the Showalters’ ranch-style house alongside Escambia Bay in the Florida panhandle, about ten miles from the Alabama border. Steinbrenner had flown there in a private jet from Tampa.

  Except Buck was not home to greet Steinbrenner. He was returning from Arizona, where he had spent a few days with Jerry Colangelo.

  “I had to go get them at the airport,” Angela Showalter said of Steinbrenner and her husband’s Tampa-based agent, Jim Krivacs, who accompanied the Yankees’ owner on the trip.

  That morning, unable to reach Buck, Krivacs surprised Angela with a phone call detailing Steinbrenner’s plans to come to Pensacola. Shocked, Angela tried summoning Buck using a beeper, but he was on a flight and unavailable. Thirty minutes later, while he was changing planes in Texas, Buck returned Angela’s call.

  She posed a question: “Guess who’s going to be here at the house in a couple hours?”

  Angela answered her own question. Showalter was thunderstruck. “What? What’s he want?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. “I just know he’s coming here.”

  Together, they figured Angela would have to entertain Steinbrenner for about an hour before Buck arrived in Pensacola.

  “Buck told me to go buy some food to give them,” Angela said. “And I said, ‘I love to cook, but I’m not making something that might kill him.’”

  The compromise choice was a store-made shrimp tray with party dip, which Angela bought on the way to the airport. She located Steinbrenner and Krivacs, then drove the fifteen minutes to her home at 4801 Rosemont Place, where she parked in the small circular driveway.

  Both Showalter children were excited by their unexpected guests, especially the toddler Nathan, who climbed onto Steinbrenner’s lap. Plates of shrimp were distributed.

  “Well, Nathan tried some shrimp, which he had never eaten before,” Angela said. “He made a face, said it was too chewy and spit it out onto George’s plate. I’m sitting there staring at George and this half-eaten, gooey pile of shrimp on his plate. I wanted to die.”

  The group eventually moved to the living room, which is where Buck found them when he walked in the front door.

  Steinbrenner had come with a message: He wanted Buck back as manager, and he wanted to announce it the next day in New York. Joe Torre had already been named as Showalter’s replacement a few days earlier at a Yankee Stadium news conference (which Steinbrenner did not attend).

  What exactly did Steinbrenner say that day in the living room?

  “He told me, ‘I’ve thought about this—come on back and manage,’” Showalter said, recounting the scene as he sat in his spring training office with the Baltimore Orioles in 2017.

  Asked if Steinbrenner wanted him to resume managing the Yankees immediately, Showalter nodded and answered, “Uh-huh.”

  Dumbfounded, Showalter told Steinbrenner he had already shaken hands with Colangelo and agreed to take over the Diamondbacks.

  “Did you sign anything?” Steinbrenner asked.

  When Showalter said he had not, Steinbrenner was elated.

  “Because I hadn’t signed anything, he thought that was good enough, and he said we’d work it all out for me to come back to the Yankees,” Showalter said.

  Steinbrenner had the same response when asked what would become of Torre: Something would be worked out, with Torre becoming the team president or some other, similar post.

  Steinbrenner’s attitude was one of acquiescence and compromise. In essence, he wanted to turn back the clock and fix a messy rift. Steinbrenner had gone all the way to the Florida panhandle to make amends.

  And what had motivated him to do such a thing?

  “He was getting crucified publicly for the Showalter situation,” Gene Michael said. “He was getting killed in the press and the fans were going crazy—just incensed. It was a disaster.

  “It really shook George up. It changed him forever.”

  Brian Cashman, in the days before email, remembered the fax machine in the team’s office spitting out page after page of angry missives from fans. “The fax machine was constantly running out of paper, and the phone kept ringing nonstop with angry callers,” he said. “We were under siege. I think George was caught off guard by the fallout. He was getting destroyed when Buck wasn’t brought back as manager.

  “George was definitely impacted by the assault that the franchise was under at that time.”

  In definable ways, Showalter’s exit became more controversial when Joe Torre was named the new manager two days after Showalter was not retained. Torre had been a glaring failure as the New York Mets’ manager, and in 14 seasons managing in New York, Atlanta and St. Louis, his teams had just five winning seasons. His overall managerial record was 894-1,003.

  The back-page headline in the New York Daily News the day after Torre was hired read, “Clueless Joe.” A cavalcade of newspaper columnists harangued Steinbrenner for his treatment of the popular Showalter.

  But Steinbrenner might have been affected most by the belligerent rebuke he felt from a legion of resurrected but now enraged fans. While scores of Yankees employees—from scouts to minor league directors to the players on the major league roster—contributed to the recent revival of the team, Showalter, who had taken the managerial reins after the franchise’s demoralizing season in 1991, was the face of the renaissance. Yankees fans were furious to see him unceremoniously spurned, and the reaction was more heated than it was in the wake of almost any past managerial firing in the Steinbrenner era.

  Yes, in the previous twenty years, several respected baseball men under Steinbrenner had been callously terminated as manager, sometimes after only a dozen or so games to start a season. Some of those dismi
ssals provoked spirited protests, but they tended to dissipate in a day or so.

  The lone exception was the emotional, forced resignation of Billy Martin in 1978, which was the first time the charismatic Martin was removed as Yankees manager. The outcry then was fierce and impassioned. Steinbrenner received threatening phone calls, and fans burned their Yankees tickets in the plaza outside the team’s offices.

  How did Steinbrenner respond then? By rehiring Martin six days later. During the announcement of Martin’s return at Yankee Stadium, fans cheered and cried tears of joy.

  In late 1995, Steinbrenner was going back to a familiar script. It had worked before. Billy Martin had been an influential mentor to Showalter. But the two men were more dissimilar than alike.

  In the Showalters’ living room, with the shrimp plate all but gone, there was a certain stunned silence after Steinbrenner laid out his plan for Buck’s triumphant return to lead the Yankees yet again. Then Buck and Krivacs went into another room to discuss what they had just heard, as well as what had been discussed in Arizona. The Diamondbacks’ contract offer was for seven years and $7 million.

  Angela remained in the living room with Steinbrenner. “He had a little giddyup—he thought he was going to get Buck back,” she said of Steinbrenner. “But I knew Buck had been impressed by his trip to Arizona and by what he had heard there, because he had been calling me to talk about it.”

  A short while later, Showalter emerged from his conference with Krivacs. Standing inside a house filled with Yankee paraphernalia, Showalter told Steinbrenner he was not returning to the only professional baseball home he had known. He had given Colangelo his word; he was going to honor that commitment.

  Steinbrenner, Showalter said, was incredulous. “He couldn’t understand what the big deal was—he didn’t understand why there was anything to stop me.”

  As for Showalter’s coaches, who were the apparent impetus for the impasse, they had come up briefly. What would be their fate? That, too, was something to be worked out after Showalter agreed to return to the Yankees, Steinbrenner said.

  “But I wouldn’t consider that anyway, after promising Arizona to come there,” Showalter said in 2017. “We had a deal. I had shaken hands. I’m not going to make that phone call.”

  Showalter had already worked it out to bring his coaches with him to Arizona. Butterfield, Sherlock and one of his former pitching coaches, Mark Connor, would end up with the Diamondbacks for many years. Showalter said that Rick Down, who was about six years older than most of his other coaches, did not want to wait until 1998, when the Diamondbacks debuted, to resume his coaching career. He was instead hired by the Baltimore Orioles and was a finalist for the inaugural Tampa Bay managerial job in 1998.

  Steinbrenner remained in the Showalters’ home for roughly another half hour. He continued to be surprised at the turn of events.

  “But we tried to make some peace,” Showalter said. “And I think we did. The man had done a tremendous amount of good for my family, supported us for nineteen years, and I told him that. He recognized that I worked hard for the franchise for all those years.

  “I wished him and the Yankees well, and I certainly meant that. Those were still my guys.”

  Although some of his guys were not with the Yankees for long. A few days later, Mattingly announced that he was “trying retirement.” Catcher Mike Stanley, a free agent, signed with the Red Sox not long afterward, a move predicated on the Yankees trade for Colorado Rockies catcher Joe Girardi—a deal Torre pushed Bob Watson to make. Infielder Randy Velarde left for the California Angels.

  Jack McDowell, another free agent, was not re-signed, making way for Andy Pettitte to be the number three starter behind David Cone and a rejuvenated Jimmy Key. Mariano Rivera would be the primary, late-inning setup reliever in the bullpen.

  The Yankees were turning the page. Day by day, the furor over Showalter’s exit was diminishing—a seething rage fading into a resigned disgruntlement. There was some chance that Mattingly, the team’s most popular player for a decade, might return. But Yankees fans who had watched Mattingly struggle with an ailing back for six years knew in their hearts that he was not coming back.

  That became a certainty when Gene Michael was recruited to make one final blockbuster trade, because Watson didn’t have much knowledge of the Yankees’ personnel in the minor or major leagues. Michael acquired Seattle first baseman Tino Martinez, a left-handed batter who in 1995 had clobbered 31 homers and driven in 111 runs.

  Martinez had a hefty contract, and he was available because Seattle was slashing its payroll. But the Mariners nearly quashed the deal several times anyway because Michael refused to include Rivera or Pettitte in the trade. The Yankees were willing to part with Sterling Hitchcock and highly touted third baseman Russ Davis, who had hit 25 home runs for the Yankees’ Class AAA team the previous season.

  Pushed by Piniella, the Mariners dropped their interest in Rivera, but Piniella had heard about Posada, and he loved the idea of a switch-hitting catcher in his lineup. Would the Yankees include Posada in the deal for Martinez?

  Absolutely not, Michael said.

  And so the Mariners returned to their demand for Pettitte.

  “That trade was touch-and-go for a while, and it came down to the same argument we had been having internally for years,” Michael said. “Who do we keep, Pettitte or Hitchcock? I had been on Pettitte’s side of the argument all along.”

  Seattle eventually accepted Hitchcock and Davis for Martinez. Michael also got the Mariners to include reliever Jeff Nelson. Hitchcock pitched only one season in Seattle, then bounced around the National League, finishing his career with a 74-76 record. Davis had three productive years in Seattle but never hit more than 21 home runs in any season. Martinez, meanwhile, would end up hitting 192 homers with 739 RBI in a seven-year Yankee career. Nelson became a key cog in the bullpen for the next five seasons.

  “Yeah, that one turned out pretty well,” Michael said with a smile twenty years later. “My last trade. A good one.”

  Showalter was announced as the Arizona Diamondbacks’ new manager on November 15. A Phoenix news conference was his first chance to reflect on the previous three weeks, and one of the New York–area reporters in attendance asked the obvious question: Have you had time to figure out what went wrong with the Yankees?

  “I’m not going to dwell on that,” Showalter replied. “They’ve made an excellent choice in Joe Torre and Bob Watson. They’re in capable hands. I’m moving on to another situation. I’m not going into why and what if. It’s not fair to this organization and the one I’m no longer part of.”

  Notably, throughout his news conference Showalter did not, and would not, say “Yankees.” In several subsequent interviews in more private settings, he again did not use the word “Yankees.”

  Angela Showalter said that at first it was hard for her and Buck to put the Yankees in their past. “You’re punched in the gut,” she said in 2018. “It hurt.”

  Her husband did not disagree. “I woke up some days still thinking about the Yankees batting order or some Yankees minor leaguer I wanted to watch film on,” Showalter recalled. “I’d have to catch myself. Nineteen years with one team doesn’t go away overnight. There were things I wanted to finish.” He paused and fiddled with the pens and pencils on his desk. “Life isn’t always fair.”

  He rearranged the pens and pencils some more. “But I do believe things happen for a reason,” he continued. “You come to understand that.”

  Said Angela: “We were in a new place—a really good place. We had far greater stability. Life was pretty good.”

  In time, Buck said his children got used to drinking their morning orange juice from glasses adorned with the Diamondbacks logo instead of the ones with a Yankees insignia that they had used all of their lives. Slowly, the Yankees trinkets around the house were packed away, replaced by mementos with an Arizona theme.

  “I threw myself into my responsibilities with the Diamondbacks,
which was easy because we were doing everything from scratch,” he said. “There was so much to do. I was very busy—and happy.”

  But Showalter kept a close eye on the Yankees and always would. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m not going to lie to you—I did grow up with them,” he said. “Do you ever forget where you went to elementary school or high school? Do you ever want to?”

  32

  The Pieces All Come Together

  DURING THE WINTER leading up to the 1996 season, George Steinbrenner all but went into hiding. But his disappearing act was not, in fact, a magic act. Behind the scenes, he largely left his new manager, Joe Torre, alone.

  The unimaginable happened: Steinbrenner changed his meddling ways.

  “It was all due to the Showalter thing,” Gene Michael said. “He was really stung by the personal attacks he received after Buck didn’t come back. The truth is, he never went after anybody in public after that again.”

  Michael was speaking seven years after Steinbrenner’s death in 2010, when the Yankees’ inimitable owner died of a heart attack after several years of declining health. Yet Michael still seemed surprised by the turn of events that transpired in early 1996.

  “Remember how George used to fire at people in the press?” Michael asked, his eyebrows rising. “And he did it in private, too. He went after all the big honchos. Remember what he would do to Reggie and Billy in the seventies and eighties? He was merciless with every manager. But after 1995, never again. He finally learned.

  “That’s maybe the last favor Buck Showalter did for the franchise. He helped save George from George.”

  Cashman saw similar change. “After Showalter, Torre had a honeymoon compared to what the guys before him went through in that job,” Cashman said. “Things were different in 1996.”

  With one exception. And it wasn’t new. Steinbrenner wanted to trade young talent for a major league veteran. In this case, he was toying with two crown jewels of the Yankees’ meticulous, painstaking early-nineties restoration.