CHAPTER 8

Going, Going, Gone

AS RESPECTFUL AS Billy had been with me, I knew I had no future with the Yankees. And, as if confirming why it was such an ordeal for all of us to deal with the constant storm of criticism and threats from George, even winning ninety-seven games couldn’t save Billy from another unceremonious firing right after the season, this time replaced by Lou Piniella, who himself would go the route of Dad and Billy—after winning ninety and eighty-nine games, but not the division. When the team struggled in ’88, he’d get the gate midway through the season; two years later, managing the Reds, he’d win the World Series.

I wouldn’t play much for Lou, either. I wasn’t in his plans for the team, which was his right. He kept me on the roster in ’86 but with the same staleness and splinters from sitting so much, I managed to hit .231 with two homers and thirteen RBIs. Still, I felt Lou wasn’t being fair with me. I could play great for a week, then do one thing wrong and not play the next week. And George would criticize you, not to your face but in the papers, like with Dad. That’s very unhealthy for a team, because the manager can’t have any patience with players on the bubble like me. It was Lou’s first managing job, and he had to do what Dad had refused to, pull guys he wanted to play. Even Dave Winfield didn’t start every game. It looked to me that they were giving away the pennant. The Yankees did a lot of that in the ’80s when they had championship-level teams. It wasn’t until George finally drew back in the ’90s and delegated more authority to his sons that they achieved what our teams never could.

Of course, I wasn’t in the same category of Winfield, so I was expendable. On July 27, I was released, making me a free agent. Lou basically told me the same thing Billy and George always had: they would have loved to keep me, but they had a winning hand, or so they thought, and it would be better for me to go to a team that could really use me. Ed Keating, after calling around to gauge interest in me, decided the best shot would be with the Astros. John McMullen was willing to sign and unite me again with Dad in 1987. My contract still had three years to run, and my salary was $657,000 in ’86 and would be $757,000 in ’87, so it benefited George to have another team pick up a portion of it, even though John, a very smart businessman, paid nothing the first year and less than $100,000 of it the second.

It would be hard to rival the off-season of ’84–’85, but ’86–’87 was close. The day after Christmas, my first child, a daughter named Whitney, was born. That was as life-changing as anything a man can ever experience, far bigger than stepping into a batter’s box in the big leagues. Fatherhood had entered the picture, requiring me to be more responsible, and I was ready for it. I loved her, she was Daddy’s little girl, and I did everything a stay-at-home dad could do, feeding, bathing, changing. I’d read to her, sing to her. Dad and Mom, who already had grandkids, would look after them all the time; they loved when my brothers and I brought all our kids over. His family was his great pride, the glue of his life. And, after raising three rambunctious boys, it was like a whole new life to look after girls. I’m sure if he’d had daughters, he wouldn’t have let them out of the house until they were thirty-five. And maybe he was right about that.

And yet, I’m ashamed to say, as good as I felt, I still needed to feel better. I’d been clean and sober the entire ’86 season and believed I could just do some coke over the winter. And so I did. Of course, I was again conning myself, being stupid. How stupid? I might have even used it the night before or the night after one of my community service talks at area schools about drugs. It may seem like I was being a hypocrite, a dick, purposely blowing smoke in the faces of those kids. But that’s not how I felt. I took it seriously, put a lot of thought into what I said. Those kids knew I’d had a problem, so they listened. In my mind, it didn’t matter that I still did some, because the con was that I controlled it, that I didn’t have a problem.

The message was good and sincere. It’s not like I wanted kids to think I was just going through the motions of fulfilling community service. I was honest, at least up to a point. I wasn’t going to tell them, “You know what, kids? I just did a gram of coke. You can do that, too!” But I wanted the overall message of controlling your own lives to get through to them, because it’s good, sound advice. Drugs were part of that control—stay away, I told them, don’t ruin your life, it’s just starting. I remember telling them the biggest regret of my life was using drugs, even though I still hadn’t learned that fully. I told them drugs were like playing Russian roulette. Don’t ever take the chance; it’s not worth it. And I never thought I was being dishonest, because my rationalization was that I hadn’t ruined my life. Yet.

It turned out that I didn’t get to see Dad much in ’87. When I got to spring training at the Astros’ camp in Kissimmee, Florida, I could see that Dad was much more relaxed there. John McMullen paid him his manager’s salary, which was far more than any coach in the game, and I think out of respect for Dad John gave me another shot to make it. John obviously was very, very good to the Berra family.

But after the spring games, I didn’t make the big club and was sent to the Astros’ Tucson Triple-A team in the Pacific Coast League. That was like old times, only I wasn’t on the way up; I was on the way down, and I wasn’t even thirty. It was all I could do to get my head into that old minor league mind-set of clawing competition. There were a couple of older guys on the team, like Danny Driessen, a valuable member of the Big Red Machine in the ’70s, who had started playing five years before me but just couldn’t quit; at that age, the memories of fame and fortune are as much an addiction as anything else. At the other end of the spectrum, Duane Walker, who was my age, had played only three seasons outside the bushes.

I wasn’t the oldest, but I definitely was the highest paid. And I was in a kind of no-man’s-land, splitting time between shortstop, second base, third base, and even the outfield. That’s what you do when your options are down to almost nothing. It was a long way from Houston, where Dad had the year before helped the Astros run away with their first division title. I would have loved to have been in Houston with Dad, playing behind Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott, the ’86 Cy Young winner who almost got them to the World Series only to see the team lose in that unbelievable game 6 to the Mets. Dad was sure Scott would have won a game 7. He was the best pitcher in the league for a couple years, many say partly because he learned how to scuff the ball.

A few pitchers did it, guys who knew how to do it and not get caught. They’d glue a tiny piece of sandpaper on the tip of a finger on their glove hand, just a speck, and if an ump came out to search them they’d flick it off. No one would even see it. Don Sutton went to the Hall of Fame scuffing the ball. Rick Rhoden did it. I also played with Joe Niekro, who was famously caught when he used a nail file and tried to throw it away. And Scott could make a ball do whatever he wanted and still throw it ninety miles per hour. The bottom would drop out, three or four inches. You can’t hit that.

It was easier to hit in the minors. I had a decent enough season in Tucson. I had gotten my stroke back and was playing good defense. I was in 116 games, mostly at third and short. I hit .270, with nine homers and fifty-nine RBIs, and even stole eleven bases. I also pitched, or rather, mopped up, getting the final out of one lopsided game. (We won’t talk about the twenty-five errors I made at third.) I felt sort of young again—it helped that one of the guys on that team was Davey Lopes, the former Dodgers speedster who was forty-two and doing anything he could to hang on.

In fact, both of us were called up because the Astros were in the thick of the race and, just like Chuck Tanner had done years before, the manager, Hal Lanier, believed I could help win him a pennant by stepping in for a regular who was injured, in this case shortstop Craig Reynolds. My manager at Tucson, Bob Didier, who they called “Diddy Ball,” a former big-league catcher, called Hal to specifically recommend that I be called up. He said I was tearing it up, playing a very good shortstop, and I could do the job. And so Hal, like Chuck, put me right in when I got to Houston.

I was raring to go, too, but my body didn’t cooperate. I was all right, no more. I started sixteen games at short, made just two errors, but couldn’t compensate for big-league pitching, hitting only .178 with two RBIs. Dad knew I was frustrated. He was his usual optimistic self, encouraging me, telling me to hang in. We’d go to dinner and go over the next day’s pitcher, but mostly he’d keep my mind off the game talking about Whitney and fatherhood. I never loved that man more than I did then, seeing how much he was hurting for me. And I never felt as ashamed as I did then, keeping from him the major cause of my falling from the guy who’d played such a crucial role in the pennant drive for the “We Are Family” Pirates and been so dependable for 161 games in 1983.

My skills had eroded, to the point where I couldn’t be successful on the big-league level, and not coincidentally, my cocaine use was escalating. I was learning one thing through painful experience: cocaine was killing me in more ways than physical. It was killing my bond with my family, my parents, my wife, my daughter. And yet I still couldn’t muster up the courage to end it and finally act like a grown-up—like Yogi Berra’s son. Instead, I began making exceptions to my in-season rule. I’d get some coke to do on off days, or on the day after a night game. Just a little, here and there. Just to feel a little better. Using the whole inventory of excuses, I was okay. After all, I just wanted to have fun, not to make myself feel better.

By now, there was a real stigma to having been unmasked as a cocaine user. Despite the kid-glove treatment given the Pittsburgh 11, we all wore a scarlet letter. And more and more, news would break about some tragic consequence of using the drug. Long before Ken Caminiti’s shocking demise—after battling booze and coke in his fine career, mainly with the Astros, and doing time in jail for possession, he died in 2004 after injecting a speedball of coke and heroin, the same concoction that killed John Belushi—there was Rod Scurry. I didn’t have much contact with him in New York, but he seemed okay, no talk about snakes crawling all over him. He played on the Giants’ Triple-A team in ’87, then signed with the Seattle Mariners. Released again in December 1988, he was busted for coke possession in a Las Vegas crack house. Four years later, out of the game, he was arrested after acting strangely outside his home, screaming about his old bugaboo—the snakes, which he said were eating him. When cops were cuffing him, he collapsed. After a week on life support, he died at thirty-six.

I felt terrible when I heard that. I liked Rod. He was a friend of mine, a good teammate. He had a real problem, one that cost him his life. But, to be honest, I didn’t feel it was a lesson for me. I didn’t have the same problem. My problem cost me a career, not my life. So it would have taken a lot more than what happened to Rod to scare me. Not even seeing my career flushed down the john could do that. Because even when that was happening, I still conned myself that I was okay, just a good-time guy. Not in a million years would I have done what Scurry had. I would never have smoked crack or, God knows, stick a damn needle in my arm. I never had a monkey on my back, didn’t need Valium to come down, didn’t vacuum the rug at three a.m. because I couldn’t sleep. You would never know I was hooked on anything but baseball. That was my secret victory. But there was nothing victorious about it.

Neither was there anything victorious about the Astros when all was said and done. They went from being contenders in August to falling out of the race in September. I think Hal appreciated the fact that I didn’t quit. I always was juiced to get out there and play hard. It was just that my body didn’t cooperate. Even so, when the Astros released me after the season, I believed it could be a good break. Maybe I needed to be away from the umbrella of my father, perhaps become a designated hitter in the American League. That could be a fresh start. And I wasn’t the only one in the game who thought that way. Over the winter, the Baltimore Orioles came to Ed Keating with an offer to become a player-coach with their Triple-A team in Rochester, New York. That was flattering that a team could still see something in me, and that it I could salvage my career, give me a foot in the door of coaching and maybe, down the road, managing.

If I could do that, I would get further than the other guys who were caught up in the drug scandal. Most of them were winding down their careers by then, but they were older than me. I was still only thirty and should have had another five, six years, maybe good years. But now it was beyond doubt that coke had eaten into my reflexes. Just a tiny, split-second drop-off in your reaction time in swinging at a pitch or picking up the angle of a ball hit off the bat—which looks like a blur in any case—is fatal to a baseball player.

But coke had a hold on me. If I knew it on a subconscious level, I still refused to admit it. I hid behind the external circumstances, judging my descent as the result of playing so little. But it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t save my career. That Rochester team was really good, managed by Johnny Oates, a pretty good catcher who’d begun his managing career in the Yankees chain and would win the Western Division of the International League that season, preceding what would be a successful eleven-year run managing in the majors. Johnny gave me every chance. I played sixty-nine games, and he put me in at every infield position and to mop up four games on the mound. But my bat was certifiably dead, capable of hitting only .181 with three homers and thirteen RBIs, in sixty-nine games.

That, sadly, would be my swan song. Before I reached my thirty-second birthday, I retired. In retrospect, it hadn’t been a bad run. I’d come up when I was almost as young as Dad was when he did, and I played four years less than he had. I had no bitterness, but I did have regrets, knowing I should have been a lot better. Unfortunately, the regrets didn’t yet include the damaging effects cocaine had on me, which I knew deep down but couldn’t admit to myself. When I came home for the winter, I again cranked up my cocaine use. And it landed me in a lot more trouble and embarrassment.

When you do drugs, you naturally fall in with the wrong people. It’s not by choice, only convenience. I had more time on my hands now. I wouldn’t have to gear up for another season right after the New Year. I had no real plans. I could have gone deeper into coaching, but I needed time to think about it. The thought of being away from home, and not being able to play, to put on a uniform that never got dirty or sweaty, seemed as exciting as watching paint dry. When Dad was a coach, he said the best part of the job was working with players between games, and the worst part was basically doing nothing on game days. He would even grab a bat and hit fungoes during infield practice, just to do something active. I couldn’t see myself doing that. He was in his forties when he took the Mets coaching job. I was in my early thirties. How many years might I have to put in before maybe getting a chance to manage? I had better things to do with my life, by just living it.

Then, too, while I still loved the game, I wanted to decompress from the grind of two decades concentrating all of my energy on baseball. And as I looked down the horizon, cocaine should not have been part of that process. But it was.

I worked at a few things, but then I decided to just kick back. I had enough money from baseball, so my life was a cycle of partying and watching sports at bars with a gram of coke. In the summertime we’d be at the Jersey shore, constantly partying. And it didn’t take long before I found myself in trouble for the second time, for buying some coke from a guy who was being watched by the police. I suppose that’s an occupational hazard when you use illegal drugs. I was terribly naïve to think that there weren’t a thousand guys just like Curtis Strong, guys who could get me into trouble. This one’s name was John Bailey. Someone told me about him and gave me his number. All I knew about him was he sold grams to people from his apartment in Morristown, and I became another customer. The stuff was good, and so I called him—big mistake—and asked, “Can I call you when I need to?” Later, I heard myself ask that on a police wiretap of Bailey’s phone.

Not long after, two plainclothes cops from Glen Ridge came to my home at eight in the morning—shades of the FBI coming to Dad’s door four years before. They had a warrant for my arrest. I said, “For what?” They said cocaine possession. I let them in, and they searched me and the house. Leigh and Whitney were home. Fortunately, Whitney was asleep, but Leigh was terrified. She stood there speechless as the search went on. As it turned out, I had nothing, just an empty cellophane bag in my pants with remnants of cocaine. Then they said, “We have to take you,” so I got into the cruiser outside and they took me to the Morristown Police Department stationhouse to process me, and that’s when I found out about being caught up in a phone call with John Bailey. They had gotten me on tape two or three times and had pictures of me in the parking lot of his place. Again, I was just a guy who walked into this thing along with twenty-four other people Bailey sold coke to. I was probably the one he sold the least to, no more than a gram at a time. I never sold cocaine, never sold a drug in my life, so I knew my role was limited, although it didn’t seem that way as I was fingerprinted, my mug shot was taken, and I was ushered into a holding cell.

The other twenty-four people in the ring were there, too, all of them put into the same cell. It was like the state room scene in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. One more person and the door would break open. In a few hours, we were herded out to see a judge, who told us what the charges were: conspiracy to violate state narcotic laws, which was a broad, catchall category that could have meant anything, really. The dealers would face stiffer charges. And that was it. I was released on $5,000 bail. I was home by three in the afternoon.

Just as with the Pittsburgh grand jury, things stagnated after that, to the point where I had no idea what was happening. There wouldn’t be a court proceeding for another year. The parallel with Pittsburgh was striking. Most of those people who were busted were just pawns, witnesses, not the big fish. Still, it was more serious this time because there was no immunity and there was a possibility any of us could be charged eventually with intent to sell. And I immediately hired a lawyer who began talking with the authorities about working out a deal. The worst of it was subjecting my family to this kind of nonsense again and seeing them go through the same stages of worry and bewilderment.

LARRY: I said, damn, again? That’s where we all found out that he was deeper into it than we thought. But then it seemed like it was a big mistake. We just held our breath and hoped to ride it through.

Like Pittsburgh, the headlines of my arrest were like kicks in the gut—DALE BERRA ARRESTED FOR DRUG CONSPIRACY was a common one, with the lead paragraphs of every article giving the mandatory fact that the guy arrested was the son of Yogi Berra. That pained him, and me, as it was exactly what he had meant when he said do anything you want but don’t drag the family name into something ugly. Still, he, Mom, and my brothers were completely supportive and cared only that I was all right and that I get help. And I leaned on them to get me through, lucky as a man could be that his family was willing to overlook his stupidity and recklessness. I was distraught over what I’d done to them, and my wife and daughter. That guilt will follow me to my grave. But had they not been there for me, I don’t know if I’d be here writing these words today.

Although I was an easy target, Phil Pepe, the longtime sports columnist of the Daily News, wrote poignantly that I wasn’t a bad guy, only one who, because of “whatever demons were at work inside him… apparently turned to drugs.” That hurt, but it was fair, and it echoed Chuck Tanner, who said of me, “I feel sorry for him.… He was a nice young man. I don’t know how he got sidetracked in his life.”

I didn’t blame Chuck for that; I didn’t fully understand myself why I did it. Sometimes, there are only questions, not easy answers. And there are never easy solutions.

In August 1989, a Morris County grand jury delivered the indictments. The charge against me was simple drug possession and conspiracy to purchase cocaine. I was not in any drug ring. My crime was really simple stupidity. But having made such a high-visibility bust, they had to indict me for something. My lawyer had already plea-bargained, and when I stood before New Jersey Superior Court judge Peter Conforti, it was a done deal. Judge Conforti set me free, to go right into what was called a pretrial intervention program. I was fined $1,000, placed on probation, and agreed to drug testing. I’d speak at schools again about the dangers of drugs. Then, after a year, the entire case would be expunged from the record. And so that’s what I did. The very next day, I was at rehab. For a year, I was clean and sober. John Bailey was indicted on serious charges. I never found out exactly what happened to Bailey after that. What I do know is that I never had anything to do with him again.

LARRY: We were relieved he was in rehab. He was getting himself together, and he spent a lot of time with Whitney being a good father. At that point, I thought he had grown up, finally become the man he needed to be. If he thought about being a coach, that wasn’t going to be possible because of this crap. But he had enough money from baseball to just get himself prepared to face the rest of his life. He was enjoying living clean. That’s what we thought. But we all felt like he’d had more of a problem than we thought, and that it might not be so easy.