CHAPTER 7

A Bronx Jeer and a Snowstorm in Pittsburgh

THERE WERE SOME protocols we had to get straight. I thought all winter about how to keep a professional distance from Dad, how direct I should be, what I should call him. Skip? Mr. Berra? Yogi? The first day of spring training, when Dad called a team meeting, I had a question for him. I’d decided I would address him the same way I would any other manager, the way I had Chuck. So I began, “Skip”—and before I could get another word out of my mouth, Ron Guidry stood up and interrupted.

“Let’s get something straight here now,” he drawled in his Cajun accent. “That’s your dad; he ain’t Skip to you. Don’t ever call that man Skip again. You call him Dad, ’cause that’s who he is to you.”

Just like that, the awkwardness of having your father be your manager evaporated. Gator settled the issue, as he always did, emphatically. He wasn’t just a fabulous pitcher; he was the team leader, and nobody would mess with him. From then on, I called him Dad. I don’t know if Earle Mack did that with Connie, but I did, and it was perfectly natural. No one thought that by doing so, I’d get special treatment. Dad wouldn’t have allowed that, in any case. To him, I was “kid,” same as at home.

It was plenty good enough for me that Dad wanted me to platoon at third with Mike Pagliarulo, playing him against righties, me against lefties, setting up an “Italian hot corner.” Pags looked a lot like me with his mustache and dark features, and we were both similar hitters, not high average guys but who could drive in the big run and hit for power on occasion. Pags had more wattage than I did—later in his career he’d hit thirty-two homers in ’87, but not more than nine in any season after that. He also had the sort of erratic arm that plagued me from time to time. So we were close and rooted for each other.

We weren’t at full strength when the season began. Mattingly, Henderson, and Winfield had nagging injuries that would keep them out of the lineup much of April. When we began against the Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park, Pags played because they started a right-hander. We lost 9-2, Phil Niekro giving up two early homers. I started the second game, jogging to third base, the number 2 on my back (later worn, of course, by none other than Derek Jeter, and in days of yore, Frank Crosetti, the “Old Cro,” as Scooter called him, who had played and coached the team for like thirty years, patting guys on the rump when they hit a homer and came around third base). I hit seventh and went two-for-four, though Ed Whitson was also roughed up early, we were behind 9-1 after two innings, and lost 14-5. Then, with Pags back in, we were swept, losing 6-4. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go, and we promptly straightened out, sweeping a two-game series in Cleveland. Gator won the first, and I started both games, going one-for-four in each. We then had our home opener against the Chicago White Sox, before a noisy crowd of over 53,000 fans at Yankee Stadium. I got the nod in that one, too, going zero-for-four, but we won our third in a row, 5-4 on Don Baylor’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth.

No use of cocaine can produce a rush like that, and the next game was almost as good. Again I started and, in my first at-bat, drove in the first run on a bloop single off Floyd Bannister. But in the fourth, I made not one but two errors on one play, bobbling a grounder and then throwing wildly past first to let two runs score. It was 2-2 in the bottom of the seventh when Ken Griffey drove in Mattingly with the lead run on a bad-hop single. Dave Righetti, trying for a five-out save, had two runners on, one out, in the ninth. The White Sox tried a double steal. Our catcher, Butch Wynegar, pegged it to me, but Carlton Fisk, the lead runner, had stopped in his tracks and raced back to second. That left the runner at first, Ron Kittle, hung out to dry, halfway to second. Seeing him, I quickly threw to first and we got him out in a rundown. Rags then got the last out.

That put our record at 4-3. And I went two-for-three the next game against the Indians. But in baseball things can go south quick. We lost that one, 2-1, and then Pags got two hits and three RBIs in a 5-2 win. He and I then continued to platoon against righties and lefties, and both of us were hitting well, but the team went into a funk, losing four out of five games—three of them by a single run, one of those in eleven innings, and another by two runs. A hit here, a break there, and we could have been 7-4. And in the final game of the home stand, we beat the Red Sox 5-1. So it’s April 25 and we’re 6-7, two games out. No, we weren’t playing up to our level of talent; we also had nineteen errors. But no one’s panicking. I’m hitting .367. And off we flew to Chicago.

Dad was his usual Alfred E. Neuman self: What, me worry? He’d been in the game long enough to know that thirteen games is not a fair barometer of a season—hell, he had come back from much further behind in August to win the pennant, twice. He knew we were a good team. He knew that, over the long season, patience isn’t a choice; it’s a requirement. Needless to say, though, nobody ever called George Steinbrenner a patient man, or an honest one. George was getting all worked up, setting up in his mind justifications to go back on his promise to leave Dad alone. As long as Dad won, he had George over a barrel. Now, George had an opening to make a move, which would close when the team would likely recover.

Not by coincidence, the papers were full of rumors fueled by George that Dad was “in trouble.” For the public, George blustered about a “lack of discipline” among the players and a “lack of control of the team” by Dad, both of which were a load of bull. The reality, however, went deeper. I’m sure he’d been steaming for a year about Dad’s tongue-lashing, matchbook-throwing episode overruling his orders to play the veterans. There was also the reality that, across town, the Mets had rebuilt into a contender, acquiring Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, and Ray Knight to go along with Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden. They had a holler guy manager, Davey Johnson, and were playing with a lot of hustle and excitement.

We could be just as exciting; we had Rickey, Mattingly, Winfield, and Gator. Maybe Dad wasn’t a cheerleader, but we had plenty of pride. And time. As Donnie said, “Geez, I thought maybe we were ten games back. What’s the magic number, anyway? Let us alone and let us play.” Butch Wynegar, who had signed with us as a free agent in ’83 because he dreamed of being coached by Dad, was grim. “You don’t see [George] coming out and saying something good. It seems he is always looking for something negative to talk about. It’s sad.” Said Winfield: “All the guys respect [Yogi], all the guys like him. He’s done his job. But you know how they play games around here. And they’re playing another one.” By “they,” he meant only one person.

It also didn’t go over well that George was dropping hints about bringing back Billy Martin. An anonymous veteran Yankee was quoted as saying, “We’re fed up. Everybody likes and respects Yogi. The other guy… well, when we lose, Yogi doesn’t hide in his office. He stays at the door of the clubhouse and pats us on the back.”

You could feel the angst building. One reporter wrote that, inside our clubhouse, “there is an air of sadness mixed with some anger and bewilderment.” Righetti, hopefully, wondered if George was floating the rumors to create “some extra spark to keep Yogi around.” But it felt like George was creating a self-fulfilling prophesy, part of which was to condition the team to expect the ax would fall at any minute.

When we landed in Chicago to begin a road trip on Friday night, April 26, there was anything but a spark in our play. Tom Seaver—who made me wince seeing him in his White Sox uniform, it being my belief that the Mets trading him was the crime of the century—won his 290th career game, beating us 4-2. We didn’t help ourselves any leaving fourteen runners on base. (Rickey, back in the lineup for two games, stranded eleven all by himself.) The next two days were worse—the Lost Weekend, to borrow from a famous old movie.

On Saturday, we led 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth. The Sox put two men on against Rags, who struck out the next hitter but then allowed a single and a double that drove in the tying runs. In the top of the eleventh, Rickey worked out a two-out, bases-loaded walk, putting us up 4-3. Bob Shirley came in to save it but, incredibly, he gave up five consecutive singles, the last bringing home the winning run for Chicago. Those were just brutal losses, two of the worst I’ve ever been in. If we’d been blown out, it might have been better. And then on Sunday, it was—I’ll say it—déjà vu all over again. This time, we led 3-1 in the seventh, but Oscar Gamble hit a two-run homer off Joe Cowley to tie it. Then in the bottom of the ninth, with Rags on a rest day, Dad stayed with Cowley, who loaded the bases with two outs. Ozzie Guillén stepped up, and Joe walked him, forcing in the winning run. Three straight one-run defeats, two straight walk-off defeats. It put us into last place, but still only four and a half games out.

We were down and frustrated, but the difference between winning and losing was so small. Plus, the guys who started injured, like Rickey and Winfield, were back and healthy. We all felt bad for Dad, that we let him down. None of it was his fault. But we would have run through walls for him just like Rusty Staub had tried to in ’73. What nobody knew, though, was that Dad became a lame duck during that game. During the middle innings, George, who like most bullies couldn’t fire people face-to-face, called Clyde King—who had once been fired as the manager and replaced by Billy—and ordered him to do the dirty work, right after the game ended.

That wasn’t a great day for me in any case. I’d just been told by the doctor that I had a broken finger and would be out for a while. We were in the clubhouse, angry about the loss, and few even noticed that Clyde had gone into Dad’s office. A few minutes later, PR director Joe Safety came to each locker with a four-paragraph statement confirming that, promise aside, George had given Dad—Mr. Yankee—exactly the same treatment he did Billy Martin. He decided “in the best interests of the club” to fire him and rehire… Billy Martin, who obviously had no problem swallowing his pride and suffering more indignity being George’s favorite whipping boy. Trying to soften the sting for Dad, George offered the lame cliché that he “would rather fire twenty-five players than to fire Yogi, but we all know that would be impossible.” Of course, the question was, why fire anyone?

When guys read the statement, the papers were thrown on the floor and the dank air was stabbed with cursing and screaming, most loudly by Donnie and Don Baylor, who was another team leader. Baylor got up and kicked over a heavy metal garbage can while yelling, “Bullshit!” over and over, then stormed off into the shower room, blood in his eyes. Donnie, unable to keep himself from making a similar scene, went into the trainer’s room. There, he threw another garbage can against the wall with a crash that reverberated all around the locker room. All around guys were just affixed to their stools, not knowing what to say or do. Rickey kept muttering, “Shame… shame… shame.”

My first reaction was to be with Dad. I made my way into his office while the other guys waited for me to come out, so that I could see him before anyone else did. Dad was in his uniform underwear, shoes off, calm and dignified—the classic yogi, in all situations. It was the complete opposite of Howard Schnellenberger stomping out of the locker room when Timmy’s Colts fired him. I asked him if he was okay.

“I’m fine,” he said quietly. “You have your future ahead of you. Mine is behind me. I’ve had my career. Now I want you to go have a great career.”

It hit me that he was thinking about me, not himself. After all the happy moments we shared in spring training, the hugs, the smiles, he wanted me not to let personal emotions interfere with playing for Billy. “Billy’s like an uncle to you; he’ll be fair. Go out and play hard for him. I’ll be watching you.” At that moment, I knew one thing: my father was a great man, and he didn’t deserve any of this. “But what about you, Dad? You gonna be all right?”

Another grin. “Why not? Tomorrow I’ll be on the golf course.”

He was the only one in that clubhouse who wasn’t mad. I came out of there crying. So were some other guys. And if it hadn’t been for Yogi telling them what he told me, calming everyone, I don’t know how Billy could have managed the team. Willie Randolph, who had seen ten managers fired in ten years with the team, came to see him right after me, followed by Winfield, who gave Dad a big hug, and Donnie, who was the most upset of all. I looked up and saw him leave the office with tears in his eyes. Butch Wynegar, a high-strung guy, was also extremely upset.

We all dressed in silence, like zombies. Then, we left to catch the team bus for the ride to the airport. And that’s when something amazing happened. Dad actually got on the bus and sat in the manager’s seat. He didn’t say a word, but he wanted to take a last ride with us, before we would go our own ways at the airport, where he’d catch a flight to Newark, we to Texas. On the ride, guys shook his hand, told him how much they appreciated him and how bad they felt about letting him down. He wouldn’t hear of it. He said we’d be a winning team, to go kick some ass. We got to his gate first, and as he stood up to get off, everyone spontaneously stood and applauded him. He stepped down, took his bag from the rack, and began to walk away, a solitary figure carrying his own bag. We were still continuing our ovation for him, and hearing it, he stopped and looked back at us. As we pulled away from the curb, he stood there waving. It’s hard to put into words what I felt watching him wave to us, getting smaller in the distance as the bus pulled away. All I could do was stare out the window, tears rolling down my cheek. It was like a scene from a tearjerker movie, the plot for me being that my dream of playing for my father, and his dream of managing the Yankees to a title, ended as if with a kick in the gut. And while he didn’t show it, I knew that under the surface, he was hurting as much as I was.

The media had a frenzy with the firing and the story of Billy’s fourth go-around. But what had been done to Dad felt to many writers like a crime had taken place. Sports Illustrated’s story was titled OH NO, NOT AGAIN. The brash Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica penned a column headlined LYING BOSS, THY NAME IS DIRT, writing that Steinbrenner had “the soul of a used-car salesman,” was “a smirking loudmouth from Cleveland” who “came to town 12 years ago and… contaminated a tradition,” and that if “a man’s word is everything, then this person who is the principal owner of the Yankees is nothing.” There was also a line that went around that baseball needed Steinbrenner the way Jesus needed Judas.

Dad may well have shared those feelings, but he never would have used words like that. He had always taken George for what he was, good and bad—he had been convicted in 1974 for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and later, in 1990, would be suspended from baseball for life after paying a gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield during a feud over money (he was reinstated three years later). But with it all, Dad would say, “You know what? Steinbrenner wants to win,” and for that, he could cut him slack. But he had no intention of ever going back to Yankee Stadium. He made that promise to himself, and, unlike George, he intended to keep it.

LARRY: When George fired him, Dad was very quiet. He never had a bad thing to say about George. All he ever said was all he has to do is personally apologize to me and I’ll forget all about it. That’s it. He never insulted Steinbrenner, never called him names. You could tell he was hurt, but Dad was well beyond sulking. He was the better man, and he showed it. He wasn’t naïve. He knew what he was getting into with George. It took a lot to piss him off. But George found that way, by lying to him.

He was calm. But Mom wasn’t. It was déjà vu all over again for her, too. She’d never forgiven Ralph Houk for firing him in 1964, never spoke to him, and was still mad at him long after his death. She was even madder at George, because Dad was no novice manager; he’d led two teams to the World Series. You don’t treat a man like that like he was yesterday’s trash. She told Dad, “Yogi, don’t you ever go to that ballpark or step foot in that stadium again.” He had that fatalistic attitude that you can’t change things, so you just move ahead. But she wouldn’t let go of it, and because he worshiped her, he would begin to feel that way more and more, to the point it was set in stone. So it became personal, which was very rare for him.

He was also influenced by John McMullen, his best friend, who owned the Houston Astros and New Jersey Devils. John was the perfect example of the kind of person who loved Dad. John was seven years older than Dad, a Jersey guy, lived in Montclair his whole life. He got degrees from MIT in naval architecture and engineering, became a multimillionaire, and, with his love of sports, owned those two professional franchises. But before that, he’d been a minority owner of the Yankees. And when Dad was fired, he commiserated, saying, “Nothing was so limited as being one of George’s limited partners.” He went further with Dad, slamming George as a son of a bitch, saying that he had a lot of balls to fire him and that Dad should never go back to that stadium again. When people Dad admired put a bee in his bonnet, he would say, “You know, you’re right.”

John also gave Dad a job as a coach in Houston in ’86. And wasn’t it just like Dad to bring the Astros luck. That year, they would win ninety-six games and get to the National League Championship Series before losing to the Mets in a six-game war. Dad may have looked a bit out of place in that old Astros orange and yellow sunburst uniform, but then again, it was always sunny when Dad was around. And, thanks to John, his son would soon enough be wearing that same uniform.

Billy, of course, had a very difficult task when the dust settled. He knew he’d be seen by many fans, writers, and players as having betrayed Dad, maybe even conspired to get him fired so he could have the job again. His first remarks didn’t help. Trying to walk that fine line, he said, “Guys were upset about Yogi and that’s O.K. Yogi was their friend. Well, I’ve been Yogi’s friend for 35 years, and the reason he had to leave was that they put him in last place. I don’t want any friends like that. I want winners.” That was his way of not calling Dad a loser. But it’s not the greatest thing for players to be called losers by their own manager.

One of the first things Billy did was take me aside. And, as Dad had said, there was no reason for me to hold a grudge. Billy couldn’t have been kinder to me. He said, “Dale, you know how much I love your dad and how much I love your mom and your family. You’re all special to me. All you have to do is go out and play the same way you did for your dad. We need you to play that way.” So we got off to a good start, and that helped calm the waters with the other guys. And George, to his credit, also made sure to come to me and tell me I was a valued member of the team. “Dale,” he said, “you just keep on playing like you’ve been playing.” How much of that was guilt about Dad I don’t know.

Billy continued to support me. The pressure to win, personal ambition, and the emotions of very strong-willed men can make even the sanest people lose their heads and say dumb things. But while I rode the bench, Billy would come over to me a lot and start telling me stories about Dad. A pitcher would strike out a lot of guys and he’d say, “For Chrissake, I wish your old man was here. If he ever threw those pitches to your old man, he’d hit them so far, they couldn’t find them. No one could throw a fastball by your dad. Nobody.”

Billy made his own changes, mostly cosmetic. Dad had no dress code, as long as we were presentable. Billy said he had to wear coats and ties on the road. We had to be in our hotel rooms three hours after a night game or by midnight after a day game. No golf or public appearances on game days. No radios without headsets. Mandatory attendance at off-day workouts—Dad had left that up to each player. There’d be a $500 fine for a first offense, $1,000 for a second, $1,000 and a suspension for a third. He also said he would have rules on drug abuse, though he never did. It didn’t matter, anyway. I had resolved when I signed with the Yankees not to do any coke during the season, and I didn’t. I didn’t want any possible complications for Dad, and I treated being with the Yankees as a new beginning, to wipe the slate clean. Not that I was going clean and sober in general. I was just going to wait until after the season when I got home, safe in my own little refuge.

That was another rationalization, another justification. Before, my thinking was You don’t see me doing it on a game day, during a game, or before a game. I’ll do it all winter long, but who cares? I’m not playing, so that’s fine, that’s okay. Now, I just cut out all the in-season use. I was incredibly anal-retentive about what I did, always on time, always where I should be. So I wouldn’t allow myself to ease up. I didn’t care who was doing it or not. I’m sure there were guys on the Yankees who smoked pot every day, and I’m sure there were guys who did a lot of coke, too. I just didn’t pay attention to it.

We really didn’t need boot camp rules, just warmer weather. After Dad’s firing, we lost two more in a row in Texas, but then when the calendar turned to May, we did what we would have done anyway for Dad. We stopped making dumb mistakes, made big plays, hit in the clutch, and had great starting pitching and Rags as the closer. The down side for me was that, after my hot start, I couldn’t add much. It wasn’t from the effects of cocaine. It was my bat. It just died on me. After my finger healed, Billy gave me every chance to stay in the lineup. He dropped me from the seventh hole to the eighth, my old accustomed spot, and I had my good days. I had two hits and two RBIs in a 6-5 walk-off win over the Texas Rangers on May 15, the first of two straight walk-off wins, but otherwise I kept sinking.

On that roller-coaster ride down, I just seemed to be skunked. In mid-May, while we were in Kansas City, Donnie and I went over to eat in a restaurant Lou Piniella owned in Country Club Plaza. While walking back to the hotel, nature called, and since there was no bathroom nearby, we both took a leak behind a Dumpster. Hey, when you gotta go, right? When I finished, I felt a hand pulling me backward. Not knowing who it was, I instinctively tried to get free, yanking my arm in the air. Next thing I knew, both Donnie and I were being handcuffed, and I was pushed down to the street, my head pushed against the concrete. Both of us were arrested and charged with indecent conduct and me with assaulting a cop! All for taking a leak behind a Dumpster. Later, after we were released, we learned that the area was notorious for cops making arrests for public urination. Just our luck.

Naturally, the incident was all over the papers the next day. But the whole thing was a joke. We had been wrong to take a leak in public, yes, but the cops were wrong not identifying themselves and overreacting like we were criminals. The assault charge was dropped, and George told Donnie and me to pay the fine and just be done with it. It was a minor thing, almost comic relief. But then, a much more serious development arose when the other shoe dropped in the Pittsburgh drug investigation.

Word had broken that indictments were about to be handed down and that, as one report read, it could include “the biggest name in Pittsburgh sports.” Whoever that was supposed to be, and it could only be Willie Stargell, it was a load of bullshit. No player was in danger, since we all had been given immunity, and Pops wasn’t even called. But it was a taste of the hysteria that was to come. By the end of May, seven people were indicted on charges of dealing drugs, including Curtis Strong, who was fired by the Pirates days before, and Shelby Greer.

The trial of Curtis Strong would be in September, and the same players who testified the previous winter would be called again for the trial, with reporters allowed in this time. Anything we said about our drug usage would be magnified. If anyone had missed the sordid story over the winter, they got a face full of it now that it was all out in the open. That included my family.

LARRY: Even at that time we didn’t know how heavily involved Dale was, if at all. If he was caught on the outside; was he on the inside, we didn’t know. We tried to put it out of our minds. He said I’m fine, don’t worry about it. And he just went right on playing, so we believed him. We just assumed he’d learned his lesson and all that shit was in the past. As long as he was okay, healthy, that was all we cared about.

But with Dad’s firing and not seeing a lot of action, my mind wasn’t totally focused. I pretty much wasted away all summer as I sat in the dugout game after game. By July, my average was down to .235 and the lack of regular action left me progressively stale. Billy was as disappointed as me. He would sit with me on the airplane or see me sitting on the bench, sit next to me, and say, “Goddamn it, kid, I wish I could play you, but I can’t.”

“I understand, Billy,” I would say, thinking of Pags. “That kid’s playing his ass off. He plays a great third base.”

He’d repeat, “You know I love you, right?” And I’d say yeah, Billy, I know, I understand. Then he’d walk down the bench, and every time he’d pass me he’d grab my knee and say, “You all right, kid?” He loved me, yet he couldn’t play me, and it was killing him.

One game I did play, it figures I was involved in one of the most bizarre plays ever. I was on first and Meacham on second when Rickey hit a ball that bounced against the left center field wall. I knew it was over the center fielder’s head, so I was off and running. But Bobby thought it was going to be caught, so he went back to second to tag up. I didn’t even look at him. I just ran like hell, and when I got to second I was shocked to be literally on top of him. If he’d read it right, we both would have scored standing up. But I had to stop until he saw the ball rolling around and belatedly started running. As we came around third, I was just feet behind Bobby. The relay throw came in to Carlton Fisk, who was blocking the plate. Fisk tagged Bobby out, then turned around and saw me as I tried to crash into him. We both went down in a heap and he came up holding the ball. Double play. Right out of The Twilight Zone. That whole season was.

When the trial in Pittsburgh got under way in September, I got my subpoena and on the ninth, I was back on the stand. It came out right away that I testified I’d purchased cocaine from Curtis Strong and got greenies from Willie Stargell. That led to some ridiculously irresponsible headlines such as DID STARGELL DISPENSE DRUGS? I fully understand why Pops denied what I said. But when you’re subpoenaed, you tell the truth. I’m sure Pops understood what I had to do.

As a footnote, I got to be Rod Scurry’s teammate once more. After the bad publicity of the trial, the Pirates didn’t wait to get rid of him, trading him on September 14 to the Yankees, who, to their credit, had no objection to having two of the “Pittsburgh 11” on the roster. Rod did okay as a middle reliever. But his worst days were ahead of him.

In the end, Strong and six other dealers, all guys I’d bought from, were convicted, most serving a year or two in prison, though Strong got four years. While the players weren’t on trial, baseball had to take a stand. By 1986, it had come to light that twenty-one players in all were involved in some way with cocaine use. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth chose to suspend the original eleven for a year, requiring us to go to drug rehab program. But when all was said and done, we never served a day of suspension or attended a single rehab session; instead, we wound up paying 10 percent of our salaries to drug programs and did community service, mainly lecturing at schools on the evils of drugs. We never had to take any blood or urine tests to see if we were clean, because of pressure by the players’ union. Looking back, that was wrong.

We got off too lightly. But the fans really didn’t care, anyway. Keith Hernandez was given a brief suspension by the Mets, and when he returned to the lineup the fans gave him a standing ovation. Nobody held it against us. If they had, it might have slapped some sense into me. Instead, it didn’t even leave a mark. I still was convinced I wasn’t so big of a coke user that I needed to stop permanently, and I didn’t believe I was being a hypocrite lecturing about drugs because, in my mind, if not in my words to kids, I wasn’t hooked. I was responsible. I could handle it. I just having some fun when I did it. The rationalizations continued.

But, unfortunately, so did my seeming hibernation inside the Yankee dugout as they continued their surge, getting into the race over the summer of ’85, going 38-18 over July and August and entering the last month in second place, five games back. It was still the Yankees and Billy Martin, so there was drama and craziness. Some guys never did get over the trauma of Dad’s firing. And others just couldn’t get along with Billy.

Exhibit A was Ed Whitson. He was an emotional guy, and it affected his pitching. When he had some rough outings at Yankee Stadium, Billy tried to relieve the pressure by pitching him only on the road, which Eddie thought was insulting. And then when we went to Baltimore in late September, Billy took him out of a scheduled start on the road, too. Two days later, on a Saturday night, several of us went to the bar in the Cross Keys Hotel. Billy was there, too, where only the day before he’d gotten into a shouting and shoving match with some guy. I was with Leigh, who’d made the trip with me, and when Billy saw us he called, “Hey, buddy, come on over here.” And as we were talking, we heard noise from the other side of the room, where Ed was at a table with someone, and they were yelling at each other.

Billy didn’t want any of his players to get into an altercation in a bar—hell, he’d been in enough of those and gotten into trouble because of it. So he went over trying to be a peacemaker, calm things down. He asked me to go with him, and as soon as we got to the table, Ed turned his fire on Billy. “You son of a bitch, you’re fucking trying to ruin me,” he said. Billy, tensing up like an animal sensing a predator, said, “What are you talking about, Hillbilly?”—using the nickname he had for Ed, who was from Tennessee.

Ed repeated what he’d said, then without warning leaped from his seat. Again, Billy didn’t want to fight. He wanted to be supportive, save Ed from trouble. But, let’s face it, as nice as Billy was, especially to me, anyone could see how crazy he could get when provoked, how volatile. And he proved it right there. They exchanged a few more insults, tensions escalated, and before you knew it, the two of them were fighting. Billy had his famous fists flying, but Whitson, a big, tough kid who towered over him, was kicking Billy with his pointy-toed cowboy boots, aiming at Billy’s junk and other parts.

Now I tried to be a peacemaker, although my first reaction was to side with Billy. So I grabbed Eddie by the shoulders, but it was like riding a bucking bronc. I couldn’t do anything but watch as they kept brawling in slow motion across the room, knocking chairs over and sending bottles and glasses crashing, and people were ducking. It spread to the lobby, into the elevator, and up to other floors. Every time they were separated, they broke free and started up again. It finally broke up before the National Guard had to be called in. Billy and Ed went to the hospital and got stitched up, all the while being kept apart.

The next morning, both looked like they’d been through a meat grinder. Billy had a broken bone in his arm, a punctured lung, and bruises all over. Whitson had a cracked rib and a split lip, the usual souvenir of fighting with Billy. It was page one news in the papers, and Billy was worried that George would fire him if he thought he’d started a fight with one of his own players. His arm was in a sling and he looked awful—he joked that he would have won the fight but didn’t know he’d be fighting a mule—but the first thing he did was come to me for help.

“Dale,” he said, “you have to tell these people what you saw.”

And that’s what I did. I told the press Billy was trying to defuse a bad situation, and Ed clocked him. I don’t know if George believed that. It probably wasn’t coincidental that Ed would be with the Yankees and Billy wouldn’t after the season ended. Neither did Billy suspend Ed “for the rest of his life,” as he promised to do, though he did for the rest of the season. After all, you can’t be using your manager as a kickboxing opponent.

I suppose at this point I should answer an obvious question. Yes, Billy drank. More than a little. He came from a time when Mickey eased all his anxieties and killed time by getting sloshed. Billy had a drinking problem like Mickey, and I don’t think he ever had it under control. It was sort of like me and cocaine. I thought I could do it because I never let it affect my dedication and focus on the game. And never did I see Billy in the dugout during a game drunk, or anything less than mentally sharp.

However, I’ll admit, we never saw Billy until moments before the game. Dad used to be there all the time, behind the cage during batting practice, walking in the outfield, hitting fungoes. He’d encourage guys, pat them on the butt, and say, “We’re gonna get ’em today.” That wasn’t Billy’s style. He didn’t care about anything but the nine innings that counted. He mostly stayed inside his office, the door locked. He had a private bodyguard—none other than Willie Horton, the beefy former Tigers outfielder who’d played for Billy in Detroit and had 325 lifetime homers (and today is special assistant to the Tigers’ president). If any of us wanted to talk to Billy before the game, we’d be stopped dead in our tracks by Willie. “Not now,” he’d say, in his deep voice, his arms crossed, guarding the door. “You ain’t goin’ any farther than right here.”

What Billy may have been doing in there, only he knew. We didn’t think it was our business. And we sure as hell weren’t going to try to go through Willie Horton to find out.

The funny thing is, the blowout in Baltimore didn’t affect the team in the slightest. We kept rolling. We won the Sunday game 5-4, helped by back-to-back homers by Rickey and Ken, completing the season series with the Orioles winning twelve of thirteen. Then, after a loss in Detroit, we won six in a row, two on walk-offs, Gator and Phil Niekro a great one-two punch, Gator throwing fire, Phil dancing knucklers. That put us three games back of the Blue Jays with three to go, and we closed the season with three in Toronto, so we had our own destiny in our hands. In the opener, we trailed 3-2 in the top of the ninth. Butch homered to tie, then an error put us ahead and we won 4-3, getting us a game closer. We needed another two wins to tie the race, but the Jays won 5-1 on Saturday to clinch. We ended in second place, two games behind, winning ninety-seven games, six more than the Western Division–winning Kansas City Royals, who went on to win the World Series. That was the second time a team of mine had won close to 100 games and finished out of the money.

It was a hell of a ride. Gator went 22-6. Mattingly hit .324 with a league-high 145 RBIs and won the MVP. Rickey hit .314 and stole eighty bases. I still don’t know how that team could have won the way it did with Steinbrenner. Every day was a new quake. And, who knows, maybe Dad could have gotten us over the finish line. If so, maybe I wouldn’t have been an afterthought at the end, my rear end glued to the bench, my final average .229, one homer, eight RBIs. For the Berras, it was a season to forget. What began as a storybook fantasy ended as a slap in the face. But, within that year, the fleeting days I had wearing Yankee pinstripes with my father were the best days of my life.