YANKEES-hating, long dormant as the team’s fortunes sagged, was finally returning to fashion on the eve of the 1977 season. In Cleveland, plans were already being hatched for a September “Yankee Hanky” day. Every fan would be given an “I hate the Yankees” handkerchief in which to blow his or her nose.
The Yankees were the only one of baseball’s ten best teams that had gone shopping for free agents, and they had signed not one but two. A new Yankees’ dynasty was in the offing, just like the one Martin himself had played for two decades earlier. Only the ’77 team was going to start five blacks. Center field, where DiMaggio, Mantle, and Murcer had once roamed, was the province of a young man from the Miami ghetto, Mickey Rivers. Second base belonged to rookie Willie Randolph, who had grown up in the Samuel J. Tilden housing project
in Brownsville, Brooklyn. And the new right fielder was of course Reggie Jackson.
During spring training, someone had asked Mickey Mantle if he had any advice for the team’s newest slugger. Mantle suggested that he live outside the city, just as Mantle had done during his most productive years with the Yankees. Fewer distractions.
Reggie had other plans. One of Steinbrenner’s real estate mogul friends set him up with a $1,466 corner apartment on the nineteenth floor at 985 Fifth Avenue, a white-brick building just down the block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wasn’t Reggie’s first choice—the boards of several other Upper East Side co-ops had turned him away on the dubious grounds that they didn’t rent to athletes—but it was magnificent all the same, a spacious two-bedroom with a twenty-four-hour doorman and a balcony overlooking Central Park. He was the only Yankee who lived in Manhattan, and his neighbors included the divorce lawyer Raul Felder; actress Cicely Tyson; writer/producer Mel Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft; and Mohan Murjani, owner of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.
Reggie outfitted his place with crushed velvet sofas, Persian rugs, stainless steel bookcases, and lots of plants. (A more tasteful job than that of Namath, who had decorated his penthouse at First Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street with snow leopard throw pillows, a cheetahskin bench, a black leather bar, and a wall-to-wall white llama rug.) He filled his refrigerator with Dr. Brown’s cream soda, and hung two paintings in the living room, both Leroy Neimans, one a portrait of Reggie himself.
Reggie also rented two spaces at the garage around the corner, one for his burgundy Rolls—the silver and blue Corniche was still on order—and one for the blue Volkswagen Rabbit, a perk of spokesmanship. (“REGGIE JACKSON DRIVES A RABBIT??” the ad copy asked. “The only one I have to impress is me,” Reggie answered.) No vanity plates; he was told they wouldn’t last five minutes on the streets of New York. The rest of his fleet, including three
more Rolls-Royces, which he called “a hedge against inflation,” stayed behind in California.
The Yankees held their final preseason practice at the stadium in the hand-stinging cold on April 6. After a light workout, Martin kicked all the reporters and photographers out of the clubhouse and spoke to his men as they dressed. “All that crap in spring training is done. Now we are a team, helping each other, pulling for each other,” he said. “Whatever happens in this clubhouse stays in this clubhouse. Don’t hang your dirty laundry out in public. Hang it in my office, and we’ll clean it up, just you and me.”
The writers filed back in and had soon gathered around Reggie, who told them it was the best pregame pep talk he’d ever heard. “Billy was a different guy. He was all business, which was the opposite of spring training, when he let guys do their own thing,” he said. “The way he put his foot down was good. He said, ‘Damn it, c’mon, we’re gonna be a unit.’” Reggie even put a positive spin on the disappointing news that he was going to be hitting fifth rather than cleanup. “It’s the ideal RBI position,” he told the writers.
The next morning, a clear and crisp one in the city, Reggie drove his burgundy Rolls up Madison Avenue to the ballpark. At Ninety-sixth Street, the town houses, white-gloved doormen, boutiques, and cafés of the Upper East Side gave way to the bodegas, squeegee men, hubcap hustlers, and cinder-block projects of East Harlem. Madison dead-ended at the Madison Avenue Bridge, which fed right into the South Bronx. He’d been assigned the second of five lockers immediately to the left of the clubhouse entrance—easy access for the writers (“Left face” would soon be the joke among the press corps) and plenty of elbow room for Reggie. The locker to his left was empty; the one on his right belonged to Ron Blomberg, a second-string first baseman who was out for at least a month with a knee injury. Next to Blomberg was Elrod Hendricks, a veteran bullpen catcher who’d be bound for the minors soon enough. Next to Hendricks was the quiet Willie Randolph. Munson was in the opposite corner of the
room, adjacent to the trainer’s room and near the rest of the clique of players who were especially close to Martin: Nettles, Piniella, and Catfish Hunter.
It was Reggie’s first locker with a built-in mirror. As was his custom, he dressed slowly. “I have to put on my cosmetic touch,” he liked to say. This time the pants fit perfectly, and his shirt was a size too small, just the way he liked it. He fastened the buttons, leaving the top one undone—a fashion statement, or, as The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell once speculated, to give his considerable muscles room to breathe. “Reggie in pinstripes was dazzling,” Roger Angell rhapsodized in The New Yorker. “The change of costume from his Baltimore colors and his old green-and-gold Oakland frontier getup reminded me of Clark Gable no longer in the Klondike or on the China seas but entering a drawing room in a dinner jacket.” Ray Negron, a Yankees’ clubhouse attendant at the time, puts it more succinctly: “That uniform fit him like a fucking Superman costume.”
Interviewing Billy Martin before the game, Yankees’ broadcaster Frank Messer approached the inevitable issue gingerly. “Billy, a word I don’t like to hear, but it’s been passed around so much—dissension. Do you feel that there will be any dissension on the ball club this year?”
“There’s no dissension,” Martin answered. “As far as this thing about who doesn’t like who, that was something the newspapermen wrote about in the first couple days of spring training because they didn’t have a game to talk about so right away they started looking for problems that aren’t there.”
“And there are no problems then as far as you’re concerned?”
“None whatsoever.”
Reggie’s first at bat came with two on and two out in the bottom half of the first. Digging in, Reggie heard a roar in the upper deck. He stepped out of the box and looked up to see two men swapping punches. Reggie smiled, dug back in, fouled off a couple of pitches, and then hit a towering fly pulled down in the vastness of center field.
The show started in the fourth. Reggie hit a 3-2 pitch the opposite way for a single to open the inning, then raced around to third on a bloop from Nettles, bellyflopping headfirst into the bag for good measure. From there he scored on a suicide squeeze in a cloud of dust, narrowly eluding the mitt of the lunging catcher with a fade-away hook slide. In the sixth, Reggie lashed another base hit, was nudged around to third, and then busted home on a wild pitch. As he approached the plate for the fourth and final time in the eighth inning, the Yankees now leading 3–0, the baying started in the seats behind third base: Reg-gie … Reg-gie … Reg-gie. Reggie inhaled the cheers, then sent the first pitch, a waist-high fastball, sailing toward the right field bleachers. The unkempt crowd of 43,785, drunk from beer and anticipation, stoned from first- and secondhand smoke, roared. The ball hooked foul. The chanting resumed. Reggie took a couple of balls, waved at a breaking ball, then grounded out to first.
“You hear that sound, Reggie-Reggie-Reggie, and it turns on your adrenaline,” he told the mob of reporters surrounding his locker after the game. “It makes you feel liked. It makes you feel loved.”
It was a sound he didn’t hear much over the course of the next month.
There were some isolated highlights. Take Reggie’s first home run as a Yankee, which came during the season premiere of ABC’s Monday Night Baseball, an eagerly anticipated event made all the more so by the Machiavellian machinations of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who was trying to persuade ABC’s Roone Arledge to ban Howard Cosell from the broadcast booth. And the mammoth blast over the bunting on the upper deck of the newly opened Seattle Kingdome, the American League’s first indoor ballbark.
Sweetest of all was Reggie’s triumphant return to Baltimore on a misty night in late April. Orioles’ fans welcomed Reggie back to
Memorial Stadium much as they had sent him off: with a barrage of frankfurters, lusty boos, and a banner that read REGGIE IS A BOZO. When he came to the plate in the top half of the first, Reggie kicked a few hot dog scraps out of the batter’s box and spanked the first pitch he saw through the right side of the infield. The ball slowed to a crawl as it breached the soggy outfield, and Reggie got on his horse, stretching a routine single into a dramatic double, complete with a headfirst slide that sent his helmet skidding across the soggy infield. In the fifth, with a runner on first and the Yankees down 5–4, Reggie deposited a fastball into the Orioles’ bullpen in right-center. Halfway between third and home, his familiar home run trot—head down, torso bent slightly forward—turned into a home run walk. When he finally arrived at the plate, he doffed his helmet to the hissing crowd. In the eighth Reggie doubled and scored again for good measure, giving the Yankees a 9-6 win.
For the most part, though, it was a shaky start for the best-paid man in baseball. As of mid-May, Reggie Jackson was hitting .250, with a mere five home runs. After dropping eight of their first ten, then winning fourteen of their next sixteen, the Yankees were hanging around first place, but their new superstar hadn’t contributed much to the effort. And he was struggling mightily in the outfield. When Standard Brands announced its plans to unveil a new candy bar tentatively called Reggie, Reggie, Reggie at a press conference at “21” in early May, the joke went that Reggie already had a candy bar, Butterfingers.
Reggie was doing what he could to keep his perspective. After one Sunday morning clubhouse chapel service on the road, he stuck around for a private session with the minister. Emerging half an hour later, the red and gold Bible that he never traveled without tucked under his arm, Reggie told the writers that he felt much better: “I was reminded that when we lose and I strike out a billion people in China don’t care.”
But millions of New Yorkers did, and they were letting Reggie
know it every time he waved at a bad pitch, grounded out, or bobbled a pop fly. Nor was he getting much in the way of support from his manager, who appeared to be gaslighting his right fielder. For Martin, when it came to Reggie no insult was too petty. As often as not, the slights didn’t show up in the box scores. One night in Milwaukee, Reggie came to the plate in the top of the fifth of a tight game. With two outs and the speedy Mickey Rivers on second, it was a perfect opportunity for Reggie to drive in a run, which was, after all, what he did best. Instead, Martin had Rivers steal third, where he was cut down. Reggie returned to the dugout, glowering in disgust.
In the middle of May the Yankees flew to Oakland, Reggie’s crucible, for a two-game set. The old A’s dynasty had been all but dismantled by Finley’s pre–free agency fire sale. Even in the best of times, attendance had been a problem at the Oakland Mausoleum; thus far this year the A’s had been lucky to draw in the five digits. But on May 16, an unseasonably raw and windy night for Northern California, 32,409 fans came out to hector Reggie. They booed long and loud when his name was announced and longer and louder when he booted a ball in the bottom of the first. They booed just about every time he touched the ball and every time he didn’t—in the event, a more common occurrence: Reggie whiffed three times, twice in a row against a pitcher who was making his major-league debut.
The following afternoon Reggie arranged to have a block of tickets set aside for some old friends. He was desperate to leave Oakland with some dignity. Vida Blue, the A’s ace and the only member of the old Oakland team whose star could be found in the same galaxy as Reggie’s, was slated to pitch against a virtually unknown twenty-seven-year-old rookie named Ron Guidry.
It was a doozy of a game, a 2-2 tie after nine. By the top of the tenth it was already the next day in New York, where Yankees’ fans were watching the action on WPTX. For his part, Reggie was watching
the action from the dugout. They played five more innings, it was still tied, and Jackson was still riding pine.
In the top of the fifteenth Martin needed a left-handed pinch hitter to face Oakland’s right-handed reliever. Looking down the bench past Reggie, Martin’s eyes lit on Dell Alston, who had never before been to bat in a big-league game. Alston doubled, igniting a game-winning rally.
“Yeah,” Reggie told reporters in the locker room after the game. “I’m a mediocre ballplayer and I’m overpaid.”