Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “A fountain of knowledge because he had done it all—player, coach, manager, general manager, scout,” said Randolph.

  Michael, who had moved to the Tampa area, was still assessing talent and advising the Yankees on September 7, 2017, when he died of a heart attack. He was seventy-nine.

  Buck Showalter, who was managing the Orioles, was driving to Baltimore’s Camden Yards for a game against the Yankees when his wife, Angela, called with the news of Michael’s death. “There are moments in your life when you hear something and you just have to stop whatever you’re doing to gather yourself,” Showalter said. “And that was one of them. I had to pull the car over and just cry right there.

  “So many memories. So many things I would have thanked him for one more time.”

  Michael’s funeral was held three days later at the Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida, and a host of players attended, including Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams.

  Brian Cashman, who spoke at the funeral, told the congregation: “Gene was someone who saw something in everybody that was good. He wanted to help everyone somehow.”

  And Cashman recalled Michael’s self-assurance during the most adverse times. “When I think back to the darkest days in the early 1990s,” he said, “I can still hear Stick saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get this fixed up.’ He had a plan.

  “There weren’t a lot of believers at the time. But he convinced those of us working with him. We followed him and he turned out to be right.”

  Michael had remained close with Showalter, whose nomadic baseball journey took him to managerial jobs in Arizona, Texas and Baltimore. “Whenever I came to New York or Tampa, Stick would always arrange to get together, or he’d poke his head into my office for twenty minutes,” Showalter said. “And if things were going bad, that’s when I could really count on him to reach out to me.”

  As an example, Showalter remembered the day he was fired by the Diamondbacks in 2000. The team had an 85-77 record, and one year earlier, in the expansion franchise’s second year of existence, the Diamondbacks had won 100 games and the National League West championship.

  Michael was among the first to call. “What a bunch of horseshit,” he said into the phone. “They should be kissing your ass for having any chance to win after only two or three years. Nobody’s done that.” Michael also told Showalter he could have his pick of another two or three major league managerial jobs if he wanted them.

  But Showalter wanted a break from the dugout to ponder his next move. He took a job as a postgame analyst with ESPN.

  And that’s how Showalter happened to be perched in a makeshift television studio just beyond the outfield walls of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix on November 4, 2001, as the Yankees and the Diamondbacks prepared to play the seventh game of the World Series.

  By the end of the night, one team would be celebrating. It would be either the team Showalter helped build into a perennial World Series contender in the early to mid-1990s in New York or the franchise he helped create in the Arizona desert from 1996 to 2000.

  Or as Showalter quipped to reporters before the game, “Somebody told me I’m going to watch someone else walk my daughter down the aisle again.”

  That game would later be chosen by Sports Illustrated as the best postseason game of the decade, with starters Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling pitching into the late innings of a 1–1 game.

  Randy Johnson, ever the Yankee killer, made a crucial relief appearance for Arizona despite having pitched the night before. In the end, in the bottom of the ninth, Luis Gonzalez of the Diamondbacks lofted a bloop single over a drawn-in Yankees infield to drive in the series-clinching run against Mariano Rivera.

  Showalter talked on the air for ESPN for about forty-five minutes, then left to walk back to his hotel, which was about four blocks from the ballpark. “I was walking through all these fans celebrating in the streets,” he said. “Arizona had never won a professional championship in any sport. It was like Mardi Gras out there.”

  He passed through the crowds unnoticed.

  The next day, one of his colleagues on the ESPN broadcast, the former major league infielder Harold Reynolds, called with a question: “Do you think anybody got what you were going through last night? After the game, that had to be pretty intense.”

  Replied Showalter: “It’s OK. I’ve had practice at this.”

  But years later, Showalter believed it helped him. “It made it a lot more natural,” he said, sitting in his Dallas home office. “I could see firsthand how much it meant to everybody—the Yankees fans, the Arizona fans—all the people that had embraced me in those places. I was part of the process, not separate from it.”

  Sitting in the stands of the Yankees’ spring training complex in 2017, Gene Michael said he knew how Showalter felt. “You’re left with the positives,” he said. “Some people work just as hard and get nowhere. You have to see the whole picture. Look where we ended up.”

  On Saturday, June 22, 2014, the Yankees held their sixty-eighth annual Old-Timers’ Day. Before a benevolent, appreciative crowd, scores of retired Yankees were introduced in a grand on-field ceremony. A brief old-timers’ exhibition game preceded a regular-season game. It was always a hot ticket and 2014 was no different, with 47,493 fans flocking to Yankee Stadium.

  On that day, the Yankees’ regular-season opponent was Showalter’s Baltimore Orioles.

  Showalter had not been in uniform at Yankee Stadium for Old-Timers’ Day since he was the Yankees’ manager in 1995.

  During the pregame festivities, Gene Michael, wearing jersey number 17 as he had as a player, emerged from the home dugout to join all the other Yankee old-timers already congregated on the field.

  But before joining the other honorees, Michael jogged over to the visiting dugout. Showalter stood to meet him on the top step. Michael and Showalter hugged, as several generations of Yankees and Yankees fans watched, and applauded.

  Acknowledgments

  One of my mentors, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times sports columnist and author Dave Anderson, told me years ago that writing a book was like scaling a distant mountain peak. “A long, step-by-step climb,” Dave said. “But, when you’re done, the view from the top is great.”

  I would add that step by step you have to rely on so many others for a boost in the journey to the top.

  In recognition of that, my first thank-you goes to the dozens upon dozens of players, coaches, managers and team executives in baseball who consented to be interviewed for this book across nearly two years. Baseball is a community, and there is a reason why baseball locker rooms are called clubhouses. The term reflects the usually sociable atmosphere of those quarters, especially before games and during spring training, which is when I did all of my interviews.

  Over and over, I asked people to recall their times from 1990 to 1995, at home and on the road, in clubhouses, hotels and dugouts around the country in an attempt to retrace the story of those Yankees teams. I was fortunate that so many were happy to be transported back in time.

  Buck Showalter sat for several long interviews and was always thoughtful, perceptive and funny in his recollections. His wife, Angela, did the same, offering her own valuable, off-the-field perspective.

  Gene “Stick” Michael, one of the wisest, wittiest and most popular men in baseball, was gracious with his time, taking me back to his childhood and on into the twenty-first century of major league baseball, too. In the more than thirty years I knew Stick, every conversation was illuminating, entertaining and somehow made you walk away feeling a little more cheerful. Stick died unexpectedly in September 2017. In one of our final conversations, he told me he was looking forward to reading this book.

  “So don’t screw it up,” he said with a laugh.

  I’m going to miss hearing his critique.

  I am in debt to many lifelong baseball men who willingly recounted their memories, sometimes in multiple interviews, including Bill Livesey, Mitch Lukevics and Brian Ca
shman.

  Hal Steinbrenner, George’s son and now the Yankees’ chief executive, does not accede to many prolonged interviews, but he amiably agreed to a lengthy, revealing talk about the early nineties and the impact of those days on his father and the team—then and now.

  Susan Canavan, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, enthusiastically threw her support behind the book’s premise from the very beginning, a boost like no other. She also helped develop some of the dominant narrative themes: revival, ingenuity, perseverance in adversity. That is one of the reasons that so many authors love working with Susan. Also at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I had the benefit of scrupulous, deft editing by Larry Cooper and the dedicated assistance of Jenny Xu and Mary Cait Milliff. My longtime friend and New York Times colleague Patty LaDuca pored over the manuscript to check facts and offer insight on improvements.

  My agent, Scott Waxman, once again did what he does best: listened, gave sage advice, then quietly and efficiently made sure a prospective book became a reality.

  Jeff Idelson, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and others at the hall, especially communications director Craig Muder, and John Horne and Cassidy Lent in the research library, leaped through various hoops to help me access their vast files of research and photos.

  The Yankees’ Jason Zillo, though ceaselessly on the move, still managed to line up interviews for me or find someone’s phone number whenever I asked. Kristen Hudak with the Baltimore Orioles offered similar assistance, as did Peter Chase of the Chicago Cubs.

  As an aside, I just want to say that I don’t know how anyone wrote baseball nonfiction before the advent of baseballreference.com. It is a research tool so instantly valuable, it almost seems like a magician’s trick.

  My editors at the New York Times have always helped guide my career. I’m very fortunate to have been recruited to the paper in the mid-1990s by the one and only Neil Amdur. His successors as sports editor, Tom Jolly and Jason Stallman, helped make me a better reporter and writer, as has one of their colleagues, Randy Archibold. Jeff Roth, the Times’s photo morgue maven, was of great help when I begged for his wisdom.

  Covering baseball in the 1990s, I was surrounded by scribes who went on to become some of the best-known baseball faces, voices and writers in the country, including Jack Curry, Michael Kay, Bill Madden, Ian O’Connor, Joel Sherman, Claire Smith and Tom Verducci. In my research for this book, it’s been edifying and a pleasure to go back and read how intrepid and clear-sighted their work was even when the Yankees were going bad. Like the team they were covering, perhaps we all should have seen the greatness coming.

  On a separate note, Michael Kay’s thoughtful CenterStage interview show, where scores of Yankees have appeared, became must-see television.

  As she has done for my previous books, my wife, Joyce, took over as chief researcher without being asked. She produced and cataloged a treasure trove of material—thousands of newspaper stories, correspondence, videotapes and photos. I start with the idea for a book, and Joyce’s research makes the words come alive on every single page.

  My children, Anne D., Elise and Jack, were frequently enlisted into the project, contributing in myriad ways, including brainstorming a book title. As the youngest and the only one still in college and (sort of) living at home, Jack was put to work assembling a detailed, methodical timeline of every major event or substantial occurrence in baseball from 1990 to 1995. I bet he’s now the rare fan his age who truly grasps how much wild-card playoff teams changed the face of baseball.

  Most of all, I am forever grateful for a family that willingly treats any major project within the household as a project for all of us.

  That’s how you get to the mountaintop.

  Notes on Research and Sources

  It would make a terrific story if I said I knew, while covering the 1990 New York Yankees, that they would someday ascend from a woeful, last-place team to World Series champions. That wouldn’t be true.

  Even in the fall of 1996, standing on a platform truck with other reporters as we cruised through the ticker tape parade celebrating the Yankees’ first World Series victory in fifteen years, it did not dawn on me that the last great baseball dynasty of the twentieth century was about to materialize.

  So I did not recognize the fodder for this book as it was happening. But that’s the point, isn’t it? No one truly saw it coming.

  What I can say is that day by day, I was around those 1990s Yankees, first as a traveling newspaper beat writer assigned to the team and then as a sports columnist. As early as the mid-eighties, it was my job to develop close professional relationships with many of the principals in this book, like Gene Michael and Buck Showalter, whom I met days into his first managerial job on a dusty upstate New York diamond in 1985. As for George Steinbrenner, covering him was almost a beat unto itself, and like many writers covering the Yankees in that period, for me it was almost a daily ritual to leave a message at Steinbrenner’s Tampa office requesting a return call.

  This was especially true for someone based at a newspaper syndicate in northern New Jersey, where Steinbrenner was threatening to build the new Yankee Stadium. From 1985 to 1996, I conducted hundreds of interviews with Steinbrenner, including visits to his Tampa hotel during his baseball exile and in his private plane as he reviewed construction sites for a New Jersey stadium.

  I explain these many decades-long relationships to make the point that much of the reporting for this book I did personally in the early 1990s and later as a reporter at the New York Times, even if I did not know it would someday lead to a book. Whether it was recounting the toxic atmosphere of the 1990 Yankees’ clubhouse or the buoyant electricity of the team’s 1994 revival or the palpable despair in the Yankees’ losing locker room after their fateful playoff loss in Seattle, as an author, I had the benefit of having been there.

  At the same time, those experiences and observations were only a starting point. When I began my research in 2016, I went back and interviewed all the principals for days at a time. I was not surprised that their memories of those days were crisp, potent and edifying. But I’ll add that twenty to twenty-five years of hindsight also informed them with new perspectives. Moreover, people sometimes tell stories about a certain episode or an individual more fully, or without inhibition, when they are removed from the situation by two decades or more. The book was made better in countless ways by those added nuggets and new details.

  Luckily, I discovered that virtually everyone I approached for an interview was eager to revisit the subject, as if they had come to recognize what a unique period of baseball history it represented. Dozens of former players, coaches, managers, team executives, scouts—as well as associates of Steinbrenner and members of his family—happily reconstructed meetings, deliberations and hot-tempered, red-faced arguments about how the daunting 1990 rebuild would have to take place. I would ask for a twenty-minute interview and end up with a ninety-minute tape recording.

  In time, I spoke with about 140 people, a diverse group that included sports agents, trainers, clubhouse managers, television and advertising executives, security workers, broadcasters, athletic trainers and fans.

  These conversations fleshed out what I learned, or relearned, by scouring the voluminous archives of New York–area newspapers, which published thousands of articles about the 1990–95 Yankees. Back then, eight daily papers assigned traveling beat writers and columnists to the Yankees. I am indebted to the vast, meticulous digitized archives of those papers, particularly the New York Times, and to the New York Public Library for keeping a deep record of the content of various periodicals that published articles about the Yankees.

  The research into those seasons informed countless interviews and were the lifeblood of dozens of rich reporting threads found in other places, from Sherman Oaks, California (where Jack McDowell went to high school), to Kalamazoo, Michigan (where a tour of Derek Jeter’s high school and childhood neighborhood proved fruitful).

  The Baseball H
all of Fame Library was also a nearly boundless resource, with thick files about players, managers and owners. The library is also a unique research opportunity, because visiting players will often sit at a library desk and in their own handwriting jot down accounts of their careers or fill out Q and As. That kind of authenticity is hard to find elsewhere.

  The following is a list of people interviewed once or multiple times for this book. The list excludes some team officials, baseball executives and players who asked to remain anonymous because they were relating scenes they did not feel comfortable speaking about on the record while they were still employed by the Yankees or another major league team.

  David Abate, Jim Abbott, Jesse Barfield, Brian Boehringer, Wade Boggs, Bobby Brown, Brian Butterfield, Brian Cashman, Chris Chambliss, Mike Christopher, Royal Clayton, Tony Cloninger, Wayne Coffey, David Cone, Billy Connors, Mark Curran, Russ Davis, Dennis Delvecchio, Bucky Dent, Lou D’Ermilio, Mariano Duncan, Kevin Elfering, Troy Evers, Todd Ezold, Tony Fernández, Mike Gallego, Bob Geren, Joe Girardi, Dwight Gooden, Dallas Green, Harvey Greene, Tom Grieve, Dick Groch, John Habyan, Ron Hassey, Andy Hawkins, Charlie Hayes, Rickey Henderson, Sterling Hitchcock, Steve Howe, Jeff Idelson, Dion James, Derek Jeter, Tommy John, Jimmy Jones, Scott Kamieniecki, Bill Kane, Michael Kay, Pat Kelly, Jimmy Key, Joe Klein, Dave LaPoint, Tim Layana, Jim Leyritz, Bill Livesey, Graeme Lloyd, Chris Lombardozzi, Mitch Lukevics, Jason Maas, Billy Martin Jr., Tino Martinez, Don Mattingly, Jack McDowell, Doug Melvin, Stump Merrill, Hensley Meulens, Monk Meyer, Gene Michael, Gene Monahan, Bobby Murcer, Sam Nader, Jeff Nelson, Paul O’Neill, Paul Pearson, Tom Pedula, Pascual Pérez, Andy Pettitte, Lou Piniella, Luis Polonia, Jorge Posada, Nick Priore, Tim Raines, Ed Randall, Willie Randolph, Dody Rather, Harold Reynolds, Rick Rhoden, Dave Righetti, Mariano Rivera, Rubén Rivera, Phil Rizzuto, Deion Sanders, Scott Sanderson, Steve Sax, Glenn Sherlock, Angela Showalter, Buck Showalter, Russ Springer, Andy Stankiewicz, Mike Stanley, George Steinbrenner, Hal Steinbrenner, Hank Steinbrenner, John Sterling, Darryl Strawberry, David Sussman, Bettie Taylor, Brien Taylor, Wayne Tolleson, Joe Torre, Kevin Trudeau, Shane Turner, Bobby Valentine, Randy Velarde, Fay Vincent, Suzyn Waldman, Bob Watson, David Weathers, Earl Weaver, John Wetteland, Roy White, Bernie Williams, Gerald Williams, Ron Wilson, Dave Winfield.