THE MAN ENTRUSTED with rebuilding the Yankees, as the disastrous, tumultuous 1990 season wound to a humiliating close, never planned on a career in baseball. He expected to be a basketball player. Or maybe an architect.
Eugene Richard Michael, in 1955, attended his hometown university in Ohio, Kent State, on a basketball scholarship. Baseball was a second sport. Astute, thoughtful, perceptive and wily—he almost never lost money at a card table—Michael also considered opening his own business. He took college classes in architecture. Why?
“Because I liked to design and create things,” he said.
He was six-foot-two and a rail-thin 175 pounds, and had an upright, ostrichlike running style, so teammates in both sports started calling Michael “Stick” early in his career. It was a time when a majority of sportsmen, and sportswomen, had nicknames, and many of them outlasted the athletes’ playing careers. So it was for Stick Michael.
A basketball star at Kent State, he then played professionally for the Columbus Comets of the North American Basketball Association and was approached by several teams for the nascent National Basketball Association. But baseball was America’s pastime, and for all his basketball prowess, Michael switched sports in 1959 when the Pittsburgh Pirates offered him far more money than any basketball team could.
It was the beginning of a ten-year major league career, with occasional winter sojourns on the semipro basketball circuit.
Michael was a slick-fielding, weak-hitting shortstop—a common combination of skills for a professional shortstop in the 1960s and 1970s—and he spent seven years in the minor leagues before Pittsburgh called him up in 1966. That first season, in 30 games, he hit just .152 and was summarily traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who kept him just one season (.202 batting average) before shipping him off to the Yankees in 1968.
Stick, as he was known to everyone in baseball from the 1960s to the 2000s, managed to raise his batting average to about .240 in his seven years with the Yankees. But he knew he was no prized batsman. As he once joked, “The bat really jumps off my ball.”
And he was forever overshadowed in the American League by the luminous Baltimore shortstop Mark Belanger, another rangy, reedy fielding maestro who won eight Gold Gloves and was a defensive standard-bearer of the Orioles’ meticulous championship teams. Belanger’s batting average was even lower than Michael’s, but Belanger was fortunate to be playing for the equivalent of baseball royalty in the sixties and seventies.
Stick Michael’s timing was not as providential. When he joined the Yankees they were in the throes of a stormy restructuring on the field and an upheaval of the ownership group. The CBS Corporation, which had never ventured into professional sports, had bought the Yankees in 1964, just as all the team’s aging stars, like Mantle, Berra and Whitey Ford, were on their way out of baseball.
It was a turbulent, humbling time for the once great Yankees, who were suddenly a second-division team. Still, Michael did not have to wait long to witness a Yankees revival, one fueled by the promotion of young minor league talent and shrewd trade acquisitions. By 1970, when the team finished in second place, the attentive, insightful thirty-two-year-old Michael was the team’s elder statesman. He had been in New York City long enough to become something of a man-about-town, welcomed in the best restaurants and a jocular, familiar presence in the most important Manhattan saloons, which always treated Yankees like royalty.
Michael became a big brother to the Yankees’ biggest homegrown star, twenty-three-year-old Thurman Munson, who had also attended Kent State. He also developed lasting, lifelong relationships with a number of players who made up the core of the late-1970s Yankees championship teams, including Munson, Lou Piniella, Graig Nettles, Chris Chambliss and Sparky Lyle. Moreover, Michael was a close witness to how those superlative Yankees teams were built after several losing seasons. (The late sixties and early seventies were the second-darkest period in the team’s modern history—only the teams from 1989 to 1992 were worse, and for longer.)
In contrast, they were vastly different periods in big league baseball, but some of the principles of recasting a roster were similar nonetheless, and Michael, who did not retire until after the 1975 season, observed with keen personal interest how the Yankees’ pennant-winning teams of 1976–78 were reconstructed. It was another way to learn how to create and produce a successful product.
He was already used to winning at most things. His card-playing skills were legend. When Stick joined the Yankees in 1968, Mantle had already privately told the Yankees it would be his last season as a player. By the end of it, Mantle said he owed Stick so much money that he could no longer afford to retire.
It was—mostly—a joke. And yet, when Manhattan’s St. Moritz Hotel, where Mantle lived, sent him its bill from April to October, he told the hotel manager: “Call Gene Michael. He’s got all my cash. He can write a check.”
Michael was more than a polished fielder; he may have been the best practitioner of baseball’s hidden-ball trick in the history of the game. With a runner on second base, Michael would often visit the pitcher on the mound and furtively take the baseball from him. Or he would take a throw from the outfield with a runner at second base and casually pretend to throw it back to the pitcher. Except that he palmed the ball like someone doing a magic trick, then surreptitiously slipped the ball into his glove. When the runner took his lead off second base, Michael would wait and then pounce, tagging him out. He did it nearly a dozen times as a minor leaguer and another five times in the majors, once tagging a runner at second base for the final out of a one-run Yankees victory.
“I could have done it another thirty times, but the guys who got tagged out were so embarrassed and furious it was almost dangerous for me,” Michael said. “Later, they would come sliding into second base on double plays trying to kill me.
“The other problem sometimes was the second-base umpire. I’d have to tell him in advance so he’d be watching, but once in a while, the umpire would start laughing and give it away.
“And at least another ten times, I was in place to do it, but the manager happened to come to the mound to take the pitcher out. He would ask where the ball was and blow the whole thing.”
By the time Michael’s playing career quietly ended, he had already become a confidant and favorite of fellow Ohioan George Steinbrenner, who had bought the Yankees in 1973.
One of Steinbrenner’s first acts as owner was to order certain players—Piniella, Munson and Michael—to get haircuts.
Michael approached Steinbrenner and said he would gladly trim his locks. “Are you going to pay for the haircut?” Michael asked.
Steinbrenner said he would.
Stick added: “Well, the least you could do is buy us all new suits, too. I mean, if the goal is for us to look more presentable.”
Steinbrenner was incensed, until Michael broke into a wide grin. For decades thereafter, the Yankees’ owner privately relished Michael’s cheekiness and never-ending desire to poke fun at his boss.
The two men built a close bond, not quite like father and son but maybe something like an uncle and his favorite nephew. They also gravitated toward each other because they had mutual friends, most notably a former Heisman Trophy winner from Ohio State named Howard “Hop-along” Cassady, who had been Steinbrenner’s idol growing up and who had introduced Steinbrenner to his wife, Joan.
Steinbrenner was not especially close to many of the 1973 Yankees. He kept his distance. But Michael was different, a well-spoken, dapper and studious presence who at first blush looked and acted more like a bank president than a professional athlete.
Michael had diverse interests outside baseball. He devoted many hours to charities and read extensively, especially history. Once, after Steinbrenner’s death in 2010, he was asked whom he would invite to dinner if he could host any three figures from the past. Michael named three Georges: George Herman “Babe” Ruth, George Patton and George Steinbrenner.
Asked why he included Steinbrenner, Stick, ever the scamp to the haughty Steinbrenner, laughed and said, “I’d want him there just so I could tell him off one more time.”
But in truth, the two were exceedingly close, and Michael often called Steinbrenner one of the most important, influential people in his life. “I taught him a lot of baseball, and there was no one he listened to more than me when the topic was baseball,” Stick said in one of several 2017 interviews, not long before he died of a heart attack at seventy-nine. “But at the same time, he taught me a lot about hard work and how to use your strengths. He was impatient, difficult and a pain in the butt, but he was a teacher and a mentor, too.”
In Michael, Steinbrenner saw a baseball savant who was in many ways more useful away from the field. Michael did his best work sitting quietly in the stands, where like a crafty poker player he silently observed and noted tendencies, trends and subtle, small movements that added up to big things.
“My father knew that Stick had one of the best sets of eyes in baseball—he saw it all,” said Hal Steinbrenner. “We’re all indebted to Stick. He has vision, and not just in the obvious sense of the word.”
Said Buck Showalter of Michael: “He was the best at evaluating and understanding the inner, less seen qualities of a player. He could read the person and the player, which is a gift. And he could discern opponents’ weaknesses. It was almost like reading minds. That’s why no one liked to play cards with him.”
One example: Stick was an advance scout for the Yankees in the fall of 1977, traveling with the Yankees’ likely postseason opponents to compile reports for use by manager Billy Martin and the team’s players. On October 18, before the sixth game of the World Series between the Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, Reggie Jackson put on a prodigious display of power hitting during batting practice.
Then he went inside the clubhouse and called Michael in the Yankees’ executive offices. “What should I look for tonight?” Jackson asked Stick.
“Fastballs in—you should back up in the batter’s box a little bit,” Michael answered.
The first pitch to Jackson, who was dug in at the back of the batter’s box, was an inside fastball that Reggie belted deep into the right-field stands. The next pitch he saw, an inning later, was also inside and ended up in the right-field seats as well. By the eighth inning, when Jackson came to the plate again, the Dodgers had inserted knuckleball pitcher Charlie Hough. The catcher set up inside, but Hough’s first knuckleball floated over the middle of the plate and became Jackson’s third home run.
But Reggie had not forgotten the scouting report. When he saw Stick in the clubhouse after the Yankees’ 8–4 victory, he pointed and yelled: “Right on! It was just like you said.”
By 1979, Steinbrenner had installed Michael as manager of the team’s top minor league club. As a rookie manager, Michael proceeded to win nearly 62 percent of his games and the league championship.
Michael took over the big league club in 1981, won a division title and 59 percent of his games and was still fired by Steinbrenner. Michael came back to manage the Yankees in 1982, only to be fired again (with a winning record). After that, whenever Steinbrenner tried to persuade Michael to manage his Yankees—as he did in ’84 and ’86—Michael refused.
“We didn’t get along when I managed,” Stick said. “He knew me too well. He was constantly in my office, talking and arguing about things. Other managers he didn’t know quite as well and he wouldn’t bug them quite as much. But he thought nothing of calling me ten or fifteen times in a day. As I said, he knew me too well. Finally, I said, ‘I’ll work for you, but I’m not ever going to be your manager again.’”
Besides, Michael preferred being involved with the off-the-field-personnel side of the organization. He liked finding talent, nurturing it and molding a group that was greater than the sum of its parts. The former school kid who liked to create things would happily sit in the bleachers during a high school or college baseball game and watch players he envisioned as the pillars and interlocking parts of a great edifice he would build in New York: a World Series winner.
Better than that, a team that won multiple World Series.
So rather than manage, Michael stayed in the organization in various roles, mostly as Steinbrenner’s counsel. He disdained Steinbrenner’s outbursts and off-the-record media machinations. But he also noticed that George routinely worked twelve-hour days. He knew he himself would have to work similar hours if he was going to get the Yankees out of the abyss they had descended into by the final days of the 1990 season.
When George was banished from baseball, Stick knew it was a blemish on the franchise he had come to think of as home. But privately, even secretly, he was relieved. He knew how it devastated George, his benefactor and biggest supporter. But he finally saw the opportunity he had been longing for.
“The Yankee organization needed a break from George at that time,” Michael said. “Sometimes you need an abrupt change. It was like a timeout. It was a time to rethink things.”
Stick did not have a specific strategy, but he did have a set of overarching tenets and various baseball principles he valued. He knew the kinds of hitters and pitchers he wanted, and he would assiduously look for certain obscure but identifiable attributes in those players, whom he would draft, promote from the minors and trade for in the big leagues. Many of the abilities he sought were skills later associated with what became known as Moneyball. They were the doctrines of modern baseball’s analytics era.
“Gene Michael was Moneyball; they just didn’t have a title for it yet,” said the Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay, a beat writer and radio or TV commentator with the team since 1987.
It was thirteen years before Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball would be published, but Gene Michael had developed his own evidence-based, sabermetrics approach to assembling a baseball team. The high priest of that movement, the Red Sox and Cubs wunderkind Theo Epstein, learned the fundamentals on a laptop. Stick Michael, born in 1938, learned them as a kid at Kent, playing a version of the Strat-O-Matic board game, which became popular in the 1960s.
“It all goes back to that baseball board game in my childhood,” he said, recalling summer afternoons sixty years earlier as he sat in the grandstand behind home plate at the Yankees’ Tampa minor league complex, where he continued to work as a special adviser in his final years. “There used to be a game where you had these disks and a spinner you used to get a number, and together with the disks you’d land on a base hit, walk, error, fly out, pop out, home run, double, etc.
“It was all about percentages based on the real statistics of actual players, who would have individual cards with their percentages on getting a hit or walk. I would always pick the guys who got a lot of walks, guys with high on-base percentages. I’d get Ted Williams every time if I could. And I won a lot at that game with that approach.
“We also kept our own stats on how certain teams did, and I studied what kinds of hitters were on those teams. It was all about on-base percentage—walks and runs and extending innings—never mind pure batting average.
“This was in high school. I’m still friends with my buddies who played that game with me. We joke about it now. They say: ‘Gene, you were accumulating those pesky little guys who got on base in 1952. And now they say it’s a modern baseball invention. It’s sabermetrics.’”
Michael laughed. “I was just a kid trying to beat my friends at a card game,” he said. “But my theories stuck with me.”
Stick understood that there’s a difference between board games and modern algorithms. “Obviously, it is more advanced now because they can break the numbers down to identify every advantage,” he said. “But back in 1990, and even before when I was managing in the minors, I was always explaining to our scouting people that we need guys with high on-base percentages.
“Not only that, but I’d say, ‘Get me guys who take a lot of pitches and foul off a lot of pitches.’ Because I want to wear out their starting pitchers and get to the middle-relief pitchers, the weakest part of any team.
“I used to call it the vulnerable underbelly. Every team has five starting pitchers and maybe three late-inning bullpen guys. But get the starter out early and you’re facing that team’s ninth-best pitcher and maybe their weakest pitcher. Do that and you can pull away in a game. A 6–2 lead in the sixth or seventh inning leads to a lot of victories.” On the flip side, Michael championed a new pitching stat: innings per start. He instructed his staff and scouts to look for pitchers with the highest innings-per-start numbers. He did not want opposing teams attacking the Yankees’ vulnerable underbelly.
But Michael’s approach was more complex than simply finding guys who got on base often and took a lot of pitches. Or starters who worked into the seventh inning. He also scouted personalities and not just athletes. As someone with a career batting average below .240, he knew that baseball was a game of failure. Even the best hitters would fail seven out of ten times at the plate. The best pitchers gave up three or four runs every nine innings. He wanted players who knew how to handle disappointment or adversity, and who found ways to rebound. Scouting players, even ones who had already made it to the major leagues, Michael asked about family backgrounds and obstacles the player had overcome in his life or career—or both. He needed not only dependable players, but players who, under the harsh scrutiny of George Steinbrenner or the glare of an unblinking, unforgiving New York media machine, would not cower or fold.
He needed to find sparkling gems where others saw rough-cut stones, and he knew the first place to look was in baseball’s bushes—the least examined reaches of amateur baseball as well as the Yankees’ multitiered minor league system.
“It was a total rebuild, but I knew that down the ladder, down on the farm, we already had some good players because we had good scouts who for years had found players,” Stick said many years later. “The problem was that we just kept trading them all away. It was time to go find those guys and figure out which ones to keep.”