I don’t know if I understand the term they use to describe a good clubhouse. What’s chemistry? A good clubhouse is good people. People of quality. When you put good people together with good people, you’ve got something.
Chemistry, as they call it, is important, but it isn’t about everybody being chummy and agreeing with each other. It’s about good people—and a lot of talented players who win. That’s chemistry.
You never hear about some bozo being a team leader. It’s always somebody who can flat-out play.
It’s somebody who shows the way by example. Since I’ve been around the Yankees, for almost twenty-five years, we’ve had great examples in the clubhouse—all the way back to Catfish Hunter, Ron Guidry, Goose Gossage, Thurman Munson, and Dick Howser. They were guys who made positive impacts.
There’s not a standard profile for a team leader. Different types can affect people in different ways. Players like Derek Jeter and Henry Aaron go about their jobs in a very professional fashion. They discuss problems in private, not in the press. Andy Pettitte talks things over behind closed doors. Munson was a strong personality. Mariano Rivera exudes a quiet strength. George Steinbrenner demands excellence.
Pete Rose left everything on the field. George Brett was like that. Jorge Posada wears his heart on his sleeve. Bernie Williams went about his business. Frank Robinson would do whatever was necessary to win a ballgame. When Bob Gibson takes the mound, or if it’s Catfish Hunter’s turn, you know there is no dilly-dallying around today. There’s a seriousness and a focus that rubs off on everybody. Michael Jordan was that kind of leader.
And if Michael Jordan hadn’t been a great player, nobody’d know that.
The press tends to have its own ideas about who the leaders are and who sets the example in the clubhouse. Most good ballplayers are pretty smart guys. Most. There are some who aren’t. But if somebody speaks well and knows pretty much what he’s talking about and will stand there and answer questions without being snippy or rude, the press thinks, wow, what a great guy and wonderful role model. The writers automatically assume that this is the type who’s a team leader. Maybe, maybe not.
It doesn’t matter what the media thinks. Regardless of what writers would write about me, I’d still go about my job the only way I knew how to go about it. Regardless of what my teammates thought about me, same thing. I got along with most of them, but I was outspoken and blunt and I’m sure a lot of guys didn’t like me. I didn’t care. I’m sure they still don’t like me, and I still don’t care.
I’ll grab on to that, because I know all about teammates not liking you.
I was in a tumultuous situation with the Yankees, in terms of personalities and the sociology of the clubhouse. I found my freedom when I was on the field. I was the judge and jury as long as I took a turn in the batter’s box. Those are some of the concepts I’ve tried to pass along to Alex Rodriguez when he’s had his struggles. When you come to bat, you have control. You’re not being tried in court anymore; you’re judge and jury.
Anyway, there’s no such thing as a perfectly harmonious clubhouse. I was in Oakland for nine years, I was in New York for five, I was in Anaheim for five, and there were fracases in each place. Guys get chippy when they’re not doing well or the team’s not playing well. Most of the fights start from kidding, and then they escalate. A lot depends on who’s doing the kidding. It’s sort of like family. If it’s somebody you know well, somebody you’re close to, that’s one thing. But if an outsider starts up with it, he’ll get filleted.
Most of my problems in New York occurred when I was the new guy. I grew up with my teammates in Oakland, and the players in New York grew up without me. It was like that for A-Rod, too, coming up with the Mariners and then signing a record-breaking contract with a team that had won 101 games without him the year before. Alex has a totally different personality than I, but the dynamics were basically the same.
For most of the 1977 season, I couldn’t get into the rhythm of the clubhouse. It was so uncomfortable for a while that a couple guys even moved their lockers away from me. Ouch!
A little friction is to be expected when you get that many high-spirited people in the same room every day. You’ll have conflicts. But it shouldn’t reach the point where you fight about it.
Our Oakland teams were famous for that. We were mad all the time because Charlie Finley was so cheap and we didn’t have the amenities that most teams did, even though we were winning championships. We couldn’t slug Charlie, so we took it out on each other. I had little tiffs with Mike Epstein and John (Blue Moon) Odom, and a bigger one with Billy North. Vida Blue and Bert Campaneris got into it one day. Blue Moon threw a Coke bottle at one of our guys.
We were young and full of testosterone. Fights were so common in that clubhouse that we’d just deal the cards and keep on playing, unless it was your turn to break it up. But everybody always made up afterwards. I don’t think it ever undermined what we were trying to do on the field. If anything, we were united in our anger toward Finley.
It’s far more important to respect one another than like each other. It’d be nice if everybody was everybody’s pal, but for whatever reason—jealousy or what have you—that just doesn’t happen.
There’s always going to be some jealousy of the superstars. That’s life. The sociology of what goes on inside a baseball team is very similar to what goes on inside society. There are good people and there are bad people. There are agreeable people and disagreeable people. There are people who are admirers and people who are jealous. It’s not extraordinary to have jealousy and resentment within a group of twenty-five competitive men who are all compensated differently.
That said, I do think it’s rare to see real animosity inside a clubhouse. If there is some, you still have a job that you’re paid to do. There’s still a responsibility to be professional about your work.
You earn respect by the way you play. You have to play hard. That’s something I thought was easy to do. I wasn’t really concerned about whether you liked me or disliked me, but you were going to respect me. You were going to respect the way I played the game.
Too much is made of camaraderie and chemistry and all that stuff. I don’t need a teammate that I love. Give me one who can play.
But you know, I found that I attracted more respect toward the end of my career, when I couldn’t play the way I could in 1969 or 1977. My second time around in Oakland, when I batted .220 with fifteen home runs, I was viewed by my teammates as a leader. I called a team meeting after a long, bad road trip, and the players responded. During the season, I broke the hamate bone in my right hand and was thinking about retiring early until the other guys stepped forward and persuaded me not to.
Your attitude toward the game, and toward your teammates, tends to evolve as you go along. I know mine did. Late in your career, when you can’t do the things you could before, you’re a little humbler. And the people around you pick up on that.
But in a case like Reggie’s, there’s something else that comes into play. It wasn’t any ordinary ballplayer they were talking to. It was Mr. October. They were dealing with a guy who was headed to the Hall of Fame, who was all over the magazine covers, who they all watched hit three straight home runs to close out a World Series.
Johnnie LeMaster retired from the A’s that year, too. Did they try to talk him out of it?
I would have liked to go to the World Series with that team. We had a hell of a roster: Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Carney Lansford, Terry Steinbach, Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, with Tony La Russa calling the shots …
Offhand, I’d guess there was a shortage of starting pitchers.
If I’m putting together a team, I don’t start with leadership qualities. I start with three really good starting pitchers. The Braves didn’t do so well when they had Aaron, Darrell Evans, and Davey Johnson all mashing forty home runs, but they won the division every year with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in the rotation. After three pitchers, the next thing I want is a good center fielder.
It doesn’t hurt to have somebody on the team who can make you laugh, but if he can’t play ball I couldn’t care less how funny the guy is. Aaron was no comedian. Give me him.
You take Uecker.
In my era, as well as Bob’s—particularly early in my era—camaraderie and relationships weren’t even thought of. On my Birmingham team, I was the only “colored” player (that was the term of the period). Had it not been for Joe Rudi, Dave Duncan, Rollie Fingers, and others, I would have really struggled socially. John McNamara was our manager, and he looked after me, as well. He cared about my feelings. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, he wouldn’t let the team stay there. If I couldn’t eat in a restaurant, he had somebody bring out the food for everyone. John McNamara was ahead of the curve, but the fact remains that blacks and whites just didn’t mix very much in those days. It wasn’t normal. When I roomed with Rudi and Chuck Dobson on different occasions in 1968 and 1969, it was a big deal.
The bigger deal to me, though—as it was for most African-American players—was the opportunity to take care of myself and my family. Those situations didn’t present themselves very often in the real world. We had a chance to make some serious money and pull our mothers and fathers out of debt. We could get something to eat and turn on the heat at night. That was my focus—not the relationships. Not the camaraderie. I can count on one hand the guys whose houses I went to for dinner.
The Cardinals were different. A group of us would go out to eat after a game on the road, and there’d be a dozen guys or so, black and white. Some of the white players—Stan Musial and Ken Boyer, to start with—were as adamant against segregation as the black players were.
The tone for all of that was set in St. Petersburg, where we trained. Bill White made some public statements about the Jim Crow customs down there—what ticked him off was that only the white players were invited for breakfast at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club—and several of the black players, including me and Curt Flood, took up the cause with him. We went to August Busch, the owner, and expressed our dissatisfaction with various discriminations and inconveniences, including the fact that we couldn’t stay in the Bainbridge Hotel with the rest of the team. Right away, Busch arranged for a businessman he knew to buy a motel, and all the players moved into it. Musial and Boyer were living in beachfront bungalows, but they gave them up to come stay with the rest of us. People would drive by just to see all these black and white guys swimming and grilling steaks together.
Before long, practically the whole ball club was on guard against bigotry. The wives were our intelligence officers. If they picked up on some racial slur, they’d pass the information along to me or White and we’d confront the perpetrator and straighten it out. Of course, all of this wasn’t easy, at first, for some of the Southerners on the team, but the atmosphere of mutual respect was so strong that in time just about everybody bought in. We enjoyed each other’s company. We didn’t all see eye-to-eye on every social issue—there were plenty of opinions represented in our clubhouse—but we agreed not to let the differences drive us apart. Boyer had some strict thoughts on interracial marriage, for example, and yet he and I could sit down calmly and exchange our views on the subject.
When I was a kid in Philadelphia, everything about baseball seemed like it was divided between black and white. We’d go to Shibe Park and sit in left field—the “colored” section—for fifty cents. That’s where all the blacks sat—not because we had to, but because it was what we could afford. Your favorite team was the Dodgers because they had Jackie Robinson. You didn’t root for anybody else. You didn’t even pay attention to the American League. I didn’t know anything about the Red Sox or the Washington Senators, because they didn’t have black players. You didn’t root for the Yankees. You rooted for the Dodgers.
Later, when I played, I made a point of looking for black people in the ballpark. Friendly faces. I wanted to see who was coming and who could come; who could come and enjoy me hitting a home run. There weren’t many.
Even then, there was no mistaking that we were playing a white man’s game.
Yep, you looked around for black faces, just to see. It was the same when we barnstormed in the off-season.
After my rookie year, I toured with the Willie Mays All-Stars, and we were all black. We played the all-white Harmon Killebrew All-Stars, with Mickey Mantle. That’s how blatant the separation was between the races, and how taken for granted it was, just fifty years ago. The teams traveled in their own caravans and would meet up at ballparks in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico. It was an education just being with those guys and listening to their stories. Everybody had essentially the same story, with different names and places. Reggie has the same stories I have, except that he was too young to experience the Willie Mays All-Stars.
Barnstorming was good fun and good money, but it was a challenge just getting something to eat in those towns. Most of the time we’d have to find the black neighborhood and hope we got there before everything closed. Or we’d send somebody into the restaurant with a chauffeur’s cap and have him carry out the food for us. Or Sam Jones, who was light-skinned, would pull a stocking cap down over his head, pass as white, and pretend he was a deaf-mute.
When we played against the Killebrew guys, there was no ill will. But we did beat the hell out of them.
What I wouldn’t have given to be along for that …
Latin players have always been separated, somewhat, by language, but it hasn’t stopped them from taking a big part in the clubhouse atmosphere. I’m thinking way back to guys like Tony Perez and Orlando Cepeda. Perez meant so much to the morale of the Big Red Machine that its demise is attributed to Cincinnati trading him. And Cepeda, in 1967, was the Cardinals’ unofficial spirit captain. After every game, whether we won or lost, he’d jump up on the trunk where we kept our valuables and lead us in a round of cheers for something or other. Because of Cha-Cha, they called us El Birdos.
As cynical as I am about that sort of thing, I have to acknowledge that the camaraderie on that team made it special. The ’67 Cardinals probably banded together more than any club I ever played on. We were so team-oriented, to a man, that we’d fine anybody who was caught looking at the stat sheet.
Now, that’s a team. That was a team that overcame a broken leg by its Hall of Fame pitcher, dominated the National League, and won the World Series.
If you didn’t know better, it might make you believe in chemistry.
A manager sets a tone. The best example of that, from what I’ve seen, was Joe Torre with the Yankees.
He had a calmness about himself that permeated that team. We had a lot of high-profile personnel there, with Jeter, A-Rod, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Randy Johnson, Mariano Rivera, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Jorge Posada … That’s quite a collection of stars, and still, Joe’s even temperament created a low-key atmosphere in that clubhouse—a controlled atmosphere, where no one got out of kilter, no one was too big for his britches. It was about the team.
Torre’s personality rubbed off on that ball club, in a good way. A team reflects that calmness in qualities like confidence and poise.
A bad manager can affect a team more than a good manager. Good managers know when they have a good ball club, and they let good ballplayers play. They don’t overmanage. A bad manager wants to be in control at all times. It’s impossible to maintain a really good team when one man controls every thought.
There comes a time when a player has to make his mind up, when he has to make a decision without looking into the dugout to get instructions from the manager. When a manager controls the game to the point that guys are looking for him before they make a move, that’s counterproductive. You can’t play smart baseball that way, because players aren’t thinking on their own.
When Torre took over the Yankees, he was the same person he’d been with the Mets, Braves, or Cardinals. But he had different players—great players almost everywhere—and The Boss’s wallet. That helped him become a better manager.
But that doesn’t mean every manager can achieve the same results with good players. A manager must understand his personnel. He has to know when guys need days off. How to keep them out of situations where they won’t succeed. How to stay out of the way when a guy is going well. He and the players have to fit.
What makes a good manager—at least one of the things—is that everybody he manages knows what his job is; everyone knows what’s expected of him. It’s a lousy deal to go to work and not know when you’re expected to play or what you’re expected to do, period. Players don’t want to guess about their status. How can you perform your role to the best of your ability when you don’t even know what it is? The skipper needs to tell his guys what’s up, and tell ’em in advance. That’s really important. You may not like it when you hear that you’re not playing and some other guy is, but at least you know where you stand.
Evidently, another thing that makes a good manager is being a fan. All fans are great managers. Just listen to the call-in shows and you can tell that.
I don’t know that there have ever been two managers more different than Joe Torre and Billy Martin. And I can’t believe I just said that, because I didn’t think I’d ever put Joe Torre and Billy Martin in the same sentence.
You really can’t compare Billy to anybody. When he didn’t drink he was a much different person than he was when he was drinking; it’s just that he drank a lot. He’d come to the ballpark sometimes and have to sleep on the couch. He wouldn’t even go out for batting practice.
I didn’t drink much, but I suppose Billy and I were alike in some ways—probably too alike. We were both proud. We were both proud to be Yankees. And we both liked to be in the thick of things. For me, that applied to the ballfield. I wanted to do something in the game to be in the middle of the action, the center of attention. In his case, I didn’t quite get it. It’s kind of hard for a manager to bring the crowd to its feet.
When a player and a manager find themselves in competition with each other, the player suffers; and when the player suffers, the ball club suffers; and when the ball club suffers, the manager suffers. It stinks for everybody.
It eventually got me suspended in 1978, and it eventually cost Billy his job—for a while, anyway. The suspension was over me bunting after they’d taken off the bunt sign. It was pride and stubbornness on my part; I didn’t like being told to bunt in the first place. Billy was so mad that I thought he might come after me in the dugout, like he’d done the year before in Boston. My suspension was five games, and the Yankees won them all. When I came back, Billy talked to the press in the airport lounge in Chicago and said that I should shut up because they were winning without me. That was when he made the comment about me and Steinbrenner: “One’s a born liar and the other’s convicted.” The next day, he resigned.
We were ten games behind Boston at the time. After Bob Lemon took over we caught the Red Sox, beat them in the one-game playoff, and took care of the Dodgers in the World Series. Billy came back halfway through the 1979 season. I thought I’d die when they announced that! We didn’t win the division that year. Then Dick Howser managed in 1980, and we did.
Dick Howser gave me a pretty good idea of what it would have been like to play for Torre. Howser was a manager I could talk to. He was a manager who let his players play. Under Dick, there was a lot less turmoil on the ball club. Guys were free to go about their business without all the baggage on their backs. That didn’t get us into the World Series, but we did win 103 games during the regular season, which was more than we ever won under Martin. It’s probably no coincidence that my one season playing for Howser was the only time I hit forty homers (forty-one, actually) for the Yankees. It was also the only time in my career that I batted .300. I could have used a few more seasons under Dick Howser.
It’s just good business when a boss handles his personnel with respect and consideration.
Joe’s the only manager who ever hired me as a coach. He did it three times. With the Mets, he gave me the title of “attitude coach,” which was interesting. There had never been one of those before, so I kind of made it up as I went along. Then, with the Braves and Cardinals, he hired me to work with the pitchers.
So obviously he’s a smart guy.
It helps to be smart, but managing is more an art than a science. Strategic moves are important, but the great majority of them are predictable and don’t vary much from manager to manager.
Fans, writers, and broadcasters love to second-guess managers on their batting orders, when they take pitchers out, whether they bunt or swing away—all the stuff that’s easy to see and criticize. They judge the manager by what’s in the book. But there’s a lot more to it than that. You could sit there with the book in your lap to tell you what the percentages call for. That doesn’t take much skill. A good manager knows the book, but he relies on his head and his gut.
Needless to say, that’s not enough unless he has a load of talent. Talented players make managers smart and great.
If you’re looking for something to criticize a manager for, you can always find it. Always. There’s a lot of failure in baseball.
A manager’s value is in the intangibles. Does he create an environment in which everybody can do his job at peak capacity? What kind of comfort level does he bring to the club? How does he maintain morale and confidence? How does he communicate? Does he understand his opponents? Does he understand his personnel? Does he motivate his personnel? Does he teach? Does he treat everybody fairly? Does he command respect? Does he surround himself with good coaches? How does he handle the front office, ownership, and the media? It all plays a part.
The position is about managing people. A manager can’t come barging in with a bunch of rules and expect them to work for every team and every player and every situation. Everybody can’t be treated the same way. One set of rules just doesn’t do the trick.
This isn’t the Army. It would be an ideal situation if everything was that black and white, but it’s not. If a veteran player has been getting the job done for seven years and he has to tend to a personal matter and miss two days of spring training, he’s probably earned that privilege. You know what you’re going to get from that guy, and a couple days of spring training won’t make a difference. But a young player coming out of Triple-A, trying to make the ball club—he can’t afford to miss those two days. He’s in a position where he has to prove not only his talent but his work ethic and makeup. It’s a different situation.
Managing isn’t about bed checks or putting on the hit-and-run. It’s about understanding twenty-five personalities and twenty-five skill sets and turning them all in the same direction.
As far as actually managing the game on the field, the most intricate part of it is handling the pitching staff. A manager needs to know who can pitch back-to-back, who can’t, who gets this guy out, who gets that guy out. The right people for the right job.
There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. People watching at home don’t know that you can’t get Mariano Rivera warmed up unless he’s going to pitch. If Mariano gets up, he’s coming in. You can’t use this other guy tonight because he warmed up twice last night. This guy pitches really well two days in a row, but this other guy can’t pitch two days in a row. It may look like there’s a spot for a certain left-hander tonight, but the skipper knows that the guy would run the risk of getting hurt if he pitched again, because his arm probably wouldn’t stand it.
If the manager doesn’t have a good sense of his ball club, the players feel it. Something’s not right. Guys lose their rhythm. Jobs don’t get done. People start to fail and get fired.
Fans complain about a manager taking a pitcher out after seven innings of shutout ball. Well, maybe the catcher told him—or the pitcher himself—that the slider’s not biting or the fastball’s not sailing like it was. Or maybe he can see something that nobody else sees. He might recognize a subtle change in the pitcher’s motion, and that tells him the guy’s getting tired. He might notice that the foot’s not landing in the same spot or the arm angle has dropped a couple ticks. If you let the guy go another inning, it could lead to bad habits. It could lead to an injury. It could blow his confidence.
There’s not a fan or journalist out there who knows what Dick Williams knows when he’s running a team or running a ballgame, or what Tony La Russa knows. I had the privilege of playing for both of those guys, and both of them will be in the Hall of Fame when Tony gets in. They were completely different as personalities, but completely the same in their devotion to winning and their grasp of the game.
Dick was combative and feisty, a colorful character—not unlike Billy Martin in that respect—and our A’s took on that personality. La Russa’s just as strong, but in a subtler, more cerebral way. Neither one of them would ever be undermined or outman-aged.
People view Tony as cold and calculating, but he showed me plenty of emotion when I was grinding through my final season, my Oakland encore. He once said that I was the only player he ever managed who brought tears to his eyes. (I hope he wasn’t talking about the way I ran after fly balls.)
On the other hand, I doubt that anybody ever brought tears to Dick Williams’s eyes. He could be fearsome, he could be intimidating, and he could be too heavy-handed for my taste—we clashed over that—but he was a great manager who earned my loyalty and the whole team’s. First off, we understood that managing for Charlie Finley couldn’t be easy. We respected Williams for standing up to Finley. I played for a manager who didn’t do that. We won a World Series under Alvin Dark, but Charlie put some dents in his authority.
Dick Williams was another matter. As bizarre as Finley was, and as domineering as he tried to be, Dick was strong enough to keep everybody on track and focused on winning. He ran a unique team. Took it to two straight world championships. Unfortunately, after the second one, in 1973, he’d had enough. That was the Series in which Mike Andrews, a utility infielder who’d come to us late in the season, made a couple errors in the twelfth inning of Game Two. Finley then forced him to sign a statement saying he was injured, which enabled Charlie to drop him off the roster. At least, that was his scheme. The players and Williams both made a fuss about it, and Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, intervened to put Andrews back on the active list. After we’d beaten the Mets in seven games, Williams up and quit.
Personally, I know that Dick Williams made me a better player. I can’t say that about Billy Martin.
Gene Mauch, who managed the Angels when I went to Anaheim after New York, was somebody I loved playing for. Mauch was as good and dedicated a baseball man as there ever was. He and Dick Williams were each as old-school and hard-boiled as the other. But I was more impressionable when I played for Dick. In terms of developing my fundamentals and team mentality, he took over what Bobby Winkles had started at Arizona State and Frank Robinson continued when he managed me one winter in Puerto Rico.
I was young and a long way from home when I arrived in Oakland, and Dick, as gruff as he was, was sort of a father figure to me. His toughness was what I needed.
I don’t know if I’d call any of my managers a father figure, but Johnny Keane—who, in fact, had studied to be a priest—certainly nurtured me as a pitcher. He was actually my first minor-league manager in Omaha. In my professional debut, I had a terrible time getting the ball over the plate and was letting up to throw strikes. Of course, that led to getting pounded. I remember Keane coming out to the mound and taking the ball and saying, “That’s pretty good for the first time. We’ll get back to you later.”
My first three years in St. Louis, the manager was Solly Hemus, and I’m pretty sure I’d have been traded if the Cardinals hadn’t fired him halfway through the 1961 season. Keane took over, with Howard Pollet as his pitching coach, and it was a different world. That was the year when Sandy Koufax broke through and became an all-star. Keane pointed out to me that Koufax had started out just like I had—wild and depending too much on the fastball. My manager was building up my belief in myself. And the next year, I was an all-star.
Johnny Keane telling me that, and putting his faith in me, meant more than a hundred successful hit-and-runs.
There are always exceptions—the Yankees, obviously—but on most teams, players aren’t that familiar with the owner of the ball club. We don’t see them much and don’t hear from them much and they don’t have much to do with the identity of the team. If you’ve got good ballplayers, the owner can do his thing, whatever it is, and it won’t make much of a difference.
Of course, he has to do his part in getting those good ballplayers. The owner has to give the general manager the latitude—the money, basically—to go out and put together a championship team. If he’s willing to do that, it shows the players that the organization is serious about winning and will come up with whatever it takes, at least to a reasonable extent.
George Steinbrenner messed with that Yankee clubhouse all the time, but he always signed the best ballplayers available. He did it to a more than reasonable extent. Nothing else matters as much as that.
I played for the exceptions. Steinbrenner and Finley had a hell of a lot to do with the personalities of their teams. It all started with them.
Both of them were controversial, critical, loud, stubborn, and very successful. And so were we. Their tough-mindedness was reflected in their ball clubs.
In my opinion, they both deserve Hall of Fame recognition. Both were ahead of the times. Finley, in addition to putting championship teams on the field, was a tremendous innovator—he pushed for the night World Series, the night All-Star Game, and the designated hitter—and a master promoter (among other things, he was the first to hire ball girls). George should get credit for raising the value of major-league franchises. Under him, the Yankees became the big draw for every team they played on the road, not to mention the TV networks.
Gussie Busch didn’t have a lot in common with those guys except success. And certainly stubbornness. He was rigid in his defense of the reserve clause and his opposition to collective bargaining for the players.
As far as putting a team on the field, I never really understood whether or not he cared if we won. I know that Bill DeWitt does. The Cardinals have great ownership these days. When they’re short on something, he makes sure they have the means to get it. With Busch, I never had that sense one way or the other.
But he deserves some credit. He shelled out the money to pick up a big hitter from time to time—Cepeda, Dick Allen, and Torre. And he made an effort to accommodate the players. The motel situation in St. Petersburg was the most dramatic example, but it says something that we had four Hall of Famers during my time, and only one of them—Steve Carlton—ever left the Cardinals. Musial and I spent our entire careers in St. Louis, and Lou Brock was there for his last sixteen seasons. If you add it up for the three of us, the total is fifty-five straight seasons in the organization. On top of that, guys like Red Schoendienst, George Kissell, and Bing Devine were fixtures in the dugout and front office. That’s a lot of continuity and stability.
I won’t attempt to associate those words with Charlie Finley.
We heard more of Charlie than we saw of him. He was usually back home in Indiana, but he listened to the games over the phone line and thought he always knew exactly what we needed. Of course, he wasn’t interested in paying much for it. Once, he was about to send Phil Garner to the minors so he wouldn’t have to give him a major-league contract. I had to get him on the phone to explain that all Garner wanted was $800 a month. When he heard it laid out that way, Charlie okayed the contract.
I could talk to Finley, but most of the talking seemed to be about money. After I hit forty-seven home runs in 1969, I had to fight him tooth and nail to get $50,000 for 1970. Charlie was so furious about the contract that he ordered me to the bench. A couple weeks later, I came through with a pinch-hit grand slam and raised my fist toward his box when I crossed home plate. He called me to his office and told me I’d be sent to the minors unless I signed a public apology. He was a proud man and I’d openly challenged his authority. Well, I’m a proud man, too, and he’d openly humiliated me. I never did sign that apology.
Charlie O was so stingy he wouldn’t even supply stamps for the fan mail we answered. We wore the same uniforms for two years. We were given two hats to last us the season. We also had a limited number of bats, and if we broke them all we didn’t get new ones. We borrowed from other players.
Maybe the most generous thing Charlie ever did was offer all the players $300 to grow mustaches for Mustache Day. I already had one, and Rollie Fingers and Darold Knowles had started to grow their own just to make me shave mine. That gave Finley the idea for a cheap promotion. Naturally, a bunch of us took it further and grew out our hair and beards. It gave us the look of a rebellious, free-spirited team, and frankly, we were.
Mostly, we rebelled against Charlie.
Of course, he could also be a sweetheart. He showed me a lot of compassion when I tore my hamstring in the 1972 playoffs and couldn’t play in the World Series.
All things considered, Finley was great practice for The Boss.
Whatever opinion people might have of Steinbrenner, he was good for the Yankees and good for New York and probably good for baseball, because he raised the bar.
A lot of owners talk about winning, but it’d be hard to find another one who ever went after it like Steinbrenner.
That’s the bottom line. George never spared any expense when it came to putting a team on the field. A lot of people have complained about other teams having to compete with the salaries he paid, but that’s on baseball. He was just playing by the rules of the game, and playing hard. Losing was a disgrace to him, and that set the tone for the franchise. He created an atmosphere that was all about winning, no matter the cost. He wanted to win every game.
As a player, I had my share of problems with Steinbrenner. Okay, more than my share. We had our shouting matches and our times when we didn’t talk to each other. I thought he blamed me for every little incident—like the fight with Nettles. I also thought he should have kept Billy Martin off my back a little more than he did. At the same time, though, Billy was upset because he thought I had George’s ear. And I suppose I did. George and I were friends. We respected each other. He gave me the biggest contract in baseball history, and that put the two of us in it together. We discussed things. We met for dinner every once in a while. He got to know my family. He thought I should be hitting cleanup and told Billy. But it certainly wasn’t all peaches and cream between us. I don’t think it was all peaches and cream between George and anybody—at least, until the last ten years or so.
People thought I was the reason that George and Billy had problems and George was the reason that Billy and I had problems and Billy was the reason that George and I had problems. Maybe. That’s a lot of ego for one building. In general, though, the biggest problems I had with Steinbrenner came when I wasn’t playing well.
Most of the 1981 season falls under that category. I was hurt for part of the year and struggled through the rest of it. At one point, George ordered me to get a physical. I didn’t care for that. I wasn’t crazy about it when he failed to re-sign me after the season, either. (His advisors convinced him he should rebuild the team around speed. George has since said that it was the biggest mistake he ever made as an owner.)
I led the league in home runs the next year, with California, and number one came against Ron Guidry in New York. It was my first game against the Yankees since I’d left. I hit it well, and the fans chanted abuse at George as I jogged around the bases. He deserved better than that. He had given them a hell of a ball club. (Of course, I won’t mention that after the Yankees let me go they weren’t in the playoffs again for another fifteen years … I had to get that in.)
George sent me a silver Cartier plate in 1984, when I was with the Angels and hit my five hundredth home run. He also hired me as a special advisor. In the big picture, George Steinbrenner was great for me. We will always be family, a pair of friends and proud Yankees.
A player wants an owner who will compete. Steinbrenner was the epitome of that. Under him, the Yankees became the team to beat.
They became the team that everybody loved to beat, if they could. Nothing wrong with that.
George was about winning.
And he won. He won championships.
Amen!
My feelings now about The Boss are that we’re bound together as part of the history of the “Steinbrenner Yankees.” The same way that it’s Bill Russell and Red Auerbach, Roger Staubach and Tom Landry, Bart Starr and Vince Lombardi, I feel it should always be Reggie Jax and George Steinbrenner.