MIDWAY THROUGH 1992, the Yankees’ fast start to the season, halcyon days for a franchise desperate for something uplifting, became a distant memory.
“We don’t win as much as we used to, do we, Daddy?” Allie Showalter, the manager’s five-year-old, asked.
“No, honey, we don’t,” her father replied.
“When do you think that will change?” Allie inquired.
“Go brush your teeth,” Buck Showalter said.
But Showalter was not as downtrodden as he might have seemed (for starters, with a laugh, he told the story to reporters the day it happened). The Yankees had descended to the middle of the pack in the American League East, but Showalter knew that his Yankees, one game under .500 at the time, were still a work in progress.
While the Yankees minor league operation was shaping the future of the franchise in outposts far from New York, the renovation of the big league club continued in the Bronx. Showalter and Michael were tinkering with the team, though not necessarily making more immediate roster changes. What they were doing was watching, assessing and scheming about significant alterations in the off-season. Showalter was definitely making mental notes.
On July 11, the Yankees hosted their annual Old-Timers’ Day, a tradition dating back to the 1940s. Showalter, a baseball historian, revered the Yankee elders and considered Old-Timers’ Day one of the most valuable days on the calendar. He wanted his players to soak up all the wisdom from the Yankees who had played for the franchise’s many championship teams. With a wide smile, he would walk around the clubhouse, where for a day the old-timers dressed in the same stalls as the current players—all the while hoping the gilded touch of the elders would, like osmosis, pervade his young charges.
The old-timers would also take informal batting and fielding practice before their exhibition game. On this sunny day in 1992 they were doing just that, with Showalter watching from the dugout, when left fielder Mel Hall walked up the ramp to the field.
Hall, who that year was leading the team in home runs and RBI, looked onto the field and said, “Who are these old fucking guys?”
Showalter did not react. But he had a thought.
“I knew right then we had to get rid of Mel Hall,” Showalter said years later. “That was it.”
Hall had a career high 81 RBI in 1992, but when he became a free agent after the season, the Yankees ignored him. So did every other major league team. He spent the next three years playing in Japan and retired in 1996. In 2009, he was sentenced to forty-five years in prison after being convicted of two counts of sexual assault with minors.
As the 1992 season wound from spring to summer, the Yankees had become Showalter’s team, and a sense of stability emanated from the manager’s office. In July, he agreed to a $1 million, three-year contract extension, a deal that did not expire until after the 1995 season.
That same month, a tremor shook the measured equilibrium Showalter and Michael had sought to instill. Fay Vincent announced that Steinbrenner’s lifetime ban had been commuted to roughly a two-year suspension. Steinbrenner could return to run the Yankees on March 1, 1993.
“It gave everyone a little pause, but it was still off in the distance,” Showalter said.
Or, as Michael said: “We knew we still had time to make some more big moves. We couldn’t finish what we started, but we could take a few more steps. And who knew what George would say or do when he did return. I didn’t know if I’d even still have a job.”
Years later, Vincent explained his reasoning for reinstating Steinbrenner. “Two years of suspension was what I wanted to impose in the first place,” he said. “Some people told me I wimped out. I didn’t look at it that way. He was the one that chose to go on the permanently ineligible list.
“But he didn’t understand the terms or the fairly ruthless contract that he signed in 1990. And since then, he had called me several times to talk about how he could get back into baseball. He missed it. He admitted he made a mistake. I waited two years and let him back in.”
Until March 1, 1993, Steinbrenner was still prohibited from engaging in day-to-day activities with the team, and that included participating in the decisions about trades or free-agent transactions. Steinbrenner did not overtly breach those prohibitions, although over the next several months he would skirt around them from time to time.
The Yankees fan base reacted to the news of Steinbrenner’s impending return with a mix of wariness and forgiveness. That was something of a substantive turnaround from the response when he was banished. Back then, there was cheering in the Yankee Stadium grandstands. But by 1992, the fans were well aware that the team had been penny pinchers during the past two years, at least when it came to prominent big league acquisitions. There was hope that with Steinbrenner’s return, the Yankees could once again chase the highest-profile free agents. And there was a feeling Steinbrenner might now appreciate the steadiness and consistency that had grown up around the team’s management in his absence.
Or, as Fran Shipley, a Yankees fan from Ridgewood, New Jersey, told the New York Daily News: “I hope George has learned his lesson. I hope he has the smarts to realize he doesn’t have to run everything. He has to figure that out sooner or later. Now is a good time.”
Mattingly had a similar warning from the players’ locker room. “George should leave the manager and general manager alone,” he said. “In some ways, maybe we do need him back as the owner. But not in all the old ways. Some of the things he did in the past hurt the team, year after year. Some of that stuff should stay banned.”
In a sign that he may have been listening, at least on some level, Steinbrenner said almost nothing about his reinstatement. He would wait for March 1, 1993, when he would be four months shy of his sixty-third birthday.
At lunch in Manhattan that summer, Steinbrenner did say that Yankees fans had once again begun to stop him on the street for pictures. “It’s a warmer greeting,” he said, adding with a smile, “I guess they’ve never been around a man who was thrown out of baseball before.”
But Steinbrenner was also pensive and contemplative. In the previous eighteen months or so, he said, he had spent many hours alone, playing the piano, a little-known pastime of his. He had reflected on the purpose or meaning of his exile. At one point in the conversation, he mentioned a favorite painting by Monet.
The painting was cleverly composed so that different elements of the image became apparent only as a viewer stepped farther back from the canvas.
In a soft voice, which was extremely rare for him, Steinbrenner said, “I’ve had a chance to step back.”
He had also taken his lumps outside of baseball. His company—his father’s once proud company, American Ship Building—was sinking and would soon file for bankruptcy. Steinbrenner would sell the company in 1995. The Steinbrenner family’s net worth would be wrapped mostly around the Yankees, who were valued at more than $400 million.
Meanwhile, the Yankees had sunk to last place by early August. In another sign of how much things had changed in Yankeeland, Steinbrenner remained silent. But Gene Michael’s response was telling.
First the Yankees recalled Bernie Williams from AAA Columbus and installed him as the starting center fielder. In doing so, they shifted the gifted, lissome Roberto Kelly, who many believed was the team’s center fielder of the future, to left field. Mel Hall went to right field, and then, a week later, was benched for Gerald Williams, who was also promoted from Columbus.
Hall was not happy and said so. Neither was Kelly, an All-Star in 1992, who also expressed his dismay at the switch. Showalter declined to comment.
In his first game, Bernie Williams made a spectacular over-the-shoulder catch against the Milwaukee Brewers. And he also continued to display the quizzical decision-making that still made him something of an enigma.
In a crucial situation with a teammate on second base, Williams was instructed to swing away if the Brewers’ infielders charged to defend a bunt just before the pitch. He was told to bunt if they did not shift and remained back on the infield dirt.
On the first two pitches, the Brewers charged and Williams squared to bunt. On the next pitch, when the Brewers stayed back, he swung away.
When Williams was told after the game that he had made the wrong choice three straight times, he seemed surprised. “I thought I did what I was supposed to do,” he said.
Showalter, in his office, remained calm. “There’s a learning curve at work here,” he said.
Many years later, Showalter said of Williams: “What can you say? Bernie is a unique guy and we all had to accept that. You can teach him something, but that doesn’t mean he has learned it. He was on his own timetable in terms of learning. But I know Stick and I were not planning on giving up on him. Athletically, there were times when he could just overpower the game. Everyone knew that. You had to just give him time.”
As for Kelly, he continued to seem demoralized by playing left field. Showalter made another mental note one day when Kelly seemed to jog after a double in the left-center-field gap, which allowed a runner on first base to score.
Michael, meanwhile, made other moves to double down on the youth movement. From Columbus, he recalled Bob Wickman, the pitcher with the mangled index finger whom he acquired in the trade for Steve Sax. The Yankees would win Wickman’s first three starts, and he finished the season with a 7-1 record. Sterling Hitchcock, the crafty lefty, was also promoted to the big team, and although he lost his two starts, it was a valuable experience for a twenty-one-year-old who in 83 minor league starts at three levels had compiled an ERA of 2.56.
The Yankees surged dramatically in September to climb into fifth place. Their final record (76-86) was only a five-victory improvement over 1991, but playing the final month with a .500 record seemed important to many on the team.
“At the end of this season, we showed the exact opposite of what happened last year when we were a team going nowhere with no hope and no future,” Mattingly said. “This year, we’ve kept playing hard. Hopefully, we can make another move next year.”
There was other major news late in the 1992 season. A faction of baseball owners, convinced that Vincent was too amenable to the demands of the players’ union, united to oust the commissioner. Eighteen owners endorsed a vote of no confidence in Vincent, who soon after resigned.
With their eyes on another divisive labor fight looming in 1993–94, the owners decided to reduce the powers of Vincent’s replacement. The owners would operate more like a board of directors, and the commissioner would act mostly as a chairman of that board. But he would be one of their own in every way, which proved to be manifestly true when Bud Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, became the next commissioner.
While the Blue Jays were on their way to a World Series victory in October, Gene Michael was busy negotiating with several big-time free agents. Over and over, he was rebuffed. Some of the big-name players only talked to the Yankees to be courteous. Steinbrenner might have loosened the purse strings, and the Yankees might have seemed on the cusp of a turnaround, but they were still a team coming off four consecutive losing seasons. They had not been to the postseason in eleven years. The team’s reputation was still besmirched. “It was an uphill battle—really uphill—when it came to the really spotlighted, premier free agents,” Michael conceded.
The Yankees offered Barry Bonds several contracts to come play left field in Yankee Stadium, where he could swing for an inviting, short right-field porch. They dangled a deal that would have made Bonds the highest-paid player in baseball by several million dollars.
“He said no thanks,” Michael said.
Bonds instead signed a six-year deal, worth $44 million, with San Francisco.
The Yankees also whiffed on signing top free-agent pitchers like Greg Maddux, David Cone and Doug Drabek, their former farmhand. That trio went to Atlanta, Kansas City and Houston, respectively. Maddux took $6 million less than the Yankees offered to play for the Braves.
“I started to think we had to do something more basic like a trade,” Michael said. “At least for a big first move.”
Michael, a scout at heart, had not stopped scouring the major leagues in search of talent. Throughout the 1992 season, he had attended the games of nearly every other team, looking for players who might resolve some of the Yankees’ deficiencies and who were a good fit with the home ballpark and the strengths of their minor league talent.
He needed starting pitching and he needed a left-swinging outfielder, because the Yankees lineup had only one middle-of-the-order left-handed hitter—and that was Mattingly, who was no longer driving in 100-plus runs per season. Michael also wanted to add a veteran who might help Mattingly set the tone of personal accountability that Showalter was seeking for the clubhouse.
“I started thinking about the Yankees championship teams in the 1970s and what made them successful,” Michael said. “It was a bunch of guys who hated to fail. I wanted the fire and tenacity of Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Lou Piniella and guys like that.
“When you make a trade, it’s not all about the stats—home runs, runs produced, runs scored. Sometimes you’re trading for an attitude.”
But the trade Michael engineered on November 3 had Yankees fans scratching their heads. Throughout the baseball community, most thought the Yankees had been fleeced. A recent search of newspaper stories written about the trade did not turn up a single article from November 1993 in which the author wrote that the deal would make the Yankees better.
“Was it a ballsy trade?” Showalter said. “You bet. Shit, people thought we were panicking. But Stick had done his homework.”
The trade sent twenty-seven-year-old, right-hand-hitting Roberto Kelly, who was considered the Yankees’ number one big league commodity, to Cincinnati for thirty-year-old lefty Paul O’Neill, a player perhaps better known for his temper than for his hitting or fielding.
Kelly, even if he had been switched to left field, was coming off an All-Star season. When he signed with the Yankees as a seventeen-year-old in 1982, the team thought so much of him he was called “a Panamanian Mickey Mantle.”
O’Neill had slumped in 1992, when he had bristled under his demanding manager, Lou Piniella. At that point, O’Neill was a lifetime .191 hitter against left-handed pitchers. He was a right fielder, and the Yankees were already paying Danny Tartabull $5 million a year to play right field. And even if they were going to move Tartabull to designated hitter, wasn’t that to make room in right field for Gerald Williams?
If the Yankees’ primary need was starting pitching, why would Michael instead choose to crowd the outfield? As best as anyone could figure, O’Neill would platoon in right field with Williams or Tartabull.
And, more perplexing, the Yankees had given up one of their best young players for a part-time player prone to tantrums.
“I had watched O’Neill play a lot, and to me, I felt sure he was coming into his prime,” Michael said. “I liked that he got riled up about making outs. I liked the passion. It could have been a mistake, but I was no longer sure that Roberto was going to blossom the way we had envisioned.”
It was a deal in lockstep with one of Michael’s oft-stated tenets: Trade a talented young player whom others value before everyone else finds out what you already know—that the player may be overrated.
“It’s often a key to a good trade,” Showalter said. “I’m not disparaging Roberto; he had a good career. But we saw some faults that others didn’t because they were viewing him from afar. But in the end, it was more about what we received. As it turned out, getting Paul O’Neill was hugely instrumental to our success going forward.
“We had to get more left-handed, and Paul was that piece. He was a good defender and had a good arm. He would get along with Donnie and the other veterans, which was important. And he understood the New York media—that wouldn’t be a problem.”
O’Neill’s older sister, Molly, was a writer for the New York Times. He knew the landscape.
At the time, a case could be made that both Kelly and O’Neill were coming off poor years. Although Kelly had surged at the beginning of the year to make his first All-Star team, his offensive numbers lagged as the season went on, and he finished with only 10 home runs after hitting 20 in 1991. His batting average was .272. Worse, as Michael noticed, Kelly’s on-base percentage was a paltry .322. Kelly was explosive but impatient at the plate. And Gene Michael knew he already had enough speed in the outfield. What he needed was prudence in the batter’s box.
O’Neill had indeed had a lousy year in 1992. Piniella had badgered him about pulling the ball more often in an effort to make him more of a power hitter. But that approach failed, and O’Neill’s power numbers actually went down, from 28 homers and 91 RBI in 1991 to 14 home runs and 66 RBI.
That falloff grated on O’Neill, especially since he grew up a Reds fan in Columbus, Ohio. Of course, all failure grated on O’Neill, whose temper was already legendary. He had destroyed dugout water coolers and batting helmets with his bat in outbursts after strikeouts. Any kind of failure might cause O’Neill to erupt, even failing to advance a runner on the basepaths with a well-placed out.
“He tormented himself,” said Piniella, who had a similar reputation for hotheadedness. “I know how he felt. It’s a good thing, because it means you have high standards. But it’s sometimes a bad thing. And you can look pretty foolish.”
O’Neill had famously bobbled a ground ball in the outfield and then drop-kicked it into the infield.
“None of that bothered me,” said Michael, who saw O’Neill’s reasonably good .346 on-base percentage and thought it could be closer to .400 with the right tutelage. “He tried so hard at everything, but that made him a little overaggressive at the plate. He lunged a lot. We corrected that.”
Brian Cashman recalled that the Yankees brain trust was meeting at Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel on the eve of the O’Neill trade. “It was far from unanimous about what to do, because there were people who still thought of Roberto as the All-Star center fielder he had been,” Cashman said. “Gene Michael made his arguments for the trade and then he asked for everyone else’s opinions. And Gene wanted to hear them.
“But he was also his own man. Gene would do what he thought, regardless. Even if everybody said no, he was going to do that deal, regardless. He believed in it.”
But trading Kelly meant the Yankees were committing to Bernie Williams as their center fielder of the future. They had no one else to play the position. It had been seven years since Williams was hidden away in Connecticut, then signed as a seventeen-year-old. In that time, no top prospect had flummoxed the Yankees as routinely as Bernie had.
Although he had almost been traded multiple times, the Yankees had stuck with Williams as he grew from a teenager in braces to a twenty-four-year-old about to be handed one of the most celebrated jobs in baseball: center fielder for the Yankees.
“It takes a leap of faith to think that Bernie Williams is going to be the guy,” Cashman, Michael’s assistant in 1992, said. “For several years before that, there was a certain amount of indecision about exactly what he was going to become. It took him a while, and some guys will take longer. But his physical attributes were not in question—a switch-hitter who was tremendous defensively. A power hitter.
“Yes, he was quiet and you wondered how he would do in the pressure cooker of New York. But he deserved the chance to succeed, and Gene was going to give him the chance to succeed.”
Showalter considers the O’Neill trade, and the decision to make Williams the everyday center fielder, one of the pivotal moments in the somewhat silent resurrection of the Yankees that was taking place in the winter of 1992–93.
“Sometimes you have to force yourself to have faith in a guy,” Showalter said at his Dallas home in 2017. “And with Bernie we talked about that in 1992: Hey, we’ve got to stop wondering whether he’s our center fielder and make a decision whether he is or isn’t. Because it was time.
“It meant that the franchise had to accept that there will be growing pains. And while some people, especially ownership, might continue to question our faith in the player, the rest of us had to keep the faith. Although I’ll admit, even for me, there were some nights when if someone had told me that this guy was going to be a batting champion, a postseason MVP, an All-Star five or six times, I’m not sure I would have believed it. But there were many other nights—many more nights back then—when I saw all those attributes in Bernie and did actually see the future.”
But Showalter knew that twenty-four-year-old Bernie Williams could not shoulder the Yankees spotlight alone. O’Neill was one way to deflect attention from the new center fielder. “And we needed some more vets, a surrounding cast that put the right kind of peer pressure on the young guys,” Showalter said. “It wasn’t Mel Hall’s kind of peer pressure. It was confident guys like Mattingly, O’Neill and Mike Stanley. We called them clubhouse culture creators.”
The Yankees had also recently re-signed Stanley as a free agent.
“And there were more to come,” Showalter said. “That was a very busy winter. Culture creators. You know, you can talk all about stats and analytics, and I get that. But you can’t measure how to build the most productive team culture. And that gets lost. Or it can. We tried to make sure it didn’t.”
But before the Yankees could resume reshaping their roster, they were going to lose some players in the expansion draft on November 17, 1992.
For weeks preceding the draft to stock the lineups of the embryonic Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, the Yankee leaders had been in countless meetings to try to figure out which players to protect from the draft.
The Yankees could list only 15 players from their major league or minor league rosters as unavailable in the first round of the draft. They could protect four more players after the first of three rounds. Not everyone in the Yankees organization was eligible to be drafted—players selected in the 1991 or 1992 drafts and players signed in those years could not be drafted. That meant that Jeter, Pettitte and Posada were safe. Nonetheless, another 109 Yankees players were available, including Mariano Rivera—unless the team chose to make him one of the 15 untouchable players.
Michael and Showalter agreed not to put Rivera on that list.
“It was a gamble—all of that draft was a gamble,” Michael said. “And I was worried about Mariano, but I also knew that everybody thought he was coming off Tommy John surgery.”
The Yankees protected Bernie and Gerald Williams, Sterling Hitchcock, second baseman Pat Kelly, Wickman and some other jewels of the system. They did not protect Danny Tartabull, hoping he and his $5 million contract would be scooped up by either the Rockies or the Marlins.
But with the third pick of the expansion draft, the Rockies instead chose Yankees third baseman Charlie Hayes, who had hit 18 home runs with 66 RBI for Showalter’s 1992 Yankees, when he earned about $850,000.
“We thought the Rockies and Marlins would mostly take prospects in the first round, so we were trying to sneak Charlie through and then protect him after the first round,” Michael said. “It didn’t work, and that hurt.”
The Yankees also lost Carl Everett, their first-round pick in the 1990 amateur draft, and in a surprise, the Rockies took minor league catcher Brad Ausmus. Everett became a two-time All-Star, but he had a turbulent career, frequently clashing with umpires, teammates, managers, reporters and opponents. He played on eight teams in 14 major league seasons. Ausmus, a former shortstop, would play nearly 2,000 major league games at catcher, drive in 607 runs and eventually become a major league manager.
“The day of that draft, we felt like maybe we had made only one mistake,” Michael said. “We weren’t sure what we’d do without Charlie Hayes at third base. Yes, Everett and Ausmus were prospects that you hated to lose, but we were going to lose somebody. Carl was an outfielder and we thought we had enough young outfielders. Brad turned out to have a long career but we had some other catchers.
“The farm system was deep. You had to trust it.”
The real news was that neither the Rockies nor the Marlins even considered taking a chance on Rivera, who would set the record for career saves.
With the expansion draft behind them, the Yankees went to the winter meetings in Louisville knowing they had to bolster their starting pitching. The record of Yankees starters in 1992 had been 47-60. They were in hot pursuit of several top pitchers, all of whom would be signed or traded for in a span of a few days. Tensions were high.
Twenty-five years later, Showalter still vividly recalled the charged winter meetings atmosphere: “We had been in Joe Molloy’s suite for something like two days straight—visiting with other teams and having these tense meetings amongst ourselves to consider all the options.”
At baseball’s winter meetings, which take place at a large hotel, each team books a phalanx of rooms for its front-office employees and manager. And the team rents one large suite with a bedroom and something akin to a conference room for the general manager or chief executive where the bulk of the negotiations with other teams or players’ agents occur. In the Yankees’ case, the gathering spot was the suite assigned to Molloy, the team’s general partner and the son-in-law of the principal owner.
“So it’s getting late one night and everyone wants to go out to dinner,” Showalter said. “I volunteered to stay in Joe Molloy’s suite to man the phone in case there was an important call, because we were weighing a couple of big moves. This was before cell phones. I had the phone number of the restaurant where everyone was eating.
“So I’m sitting there in the suite all by myself and back in Joe Molloy’s bedroom the phone rings. Well, it’s not the conference room phone we had been using, but I am there to answer the phone, so I go into the bedroom to get it. I figured it was his wife or something.”
Buck picked up the receiver and said hello.
“And all I hear is ‘Who the fuck is this?’” Showalter said. “And, you know, I’m sitting there by myself not getting to eat dinner. So I yelled back, ‘Who the fuck is this?’
“And the voice at the other end says, ‘This is Mr. Steinbrenner.’ And I said, ‘Oh, hi, Mr. Steinbrenner, this is Buck Showalter.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m not supposed to be answering this phone because he’s on probation or whatever.’
“And he just said, ‘Tell Joe to call me when he gets back.’”
There was nothing in Fay Vincent’s banishment of Steinbrenner that prohibited the Yankees’ owner from talking to his son-in-law. And it was probably a coincidence that the phone call came during winter meetings as the franchise—Steinbrenner’s principal investment—pondered whether to make a crucial trade or to pay tens of millions of dollars for several free agents.
Truth be told, Steinbrenner’s occasional, covert involvement in team activities, which probably violated the terms of his exile, had been a not-so-hidden secret around the Yankees for months. And that was sometimes a problem, since Vincent’s office—before he resigned—not only made team employees sign affidavits vowing they had no contact with Steinbrenner, but also made employees submit to random lie detector tests. But those could be a bit of a ruse, too.
Showalter recalled the one time he took the lie detector test. “The guy giving the test considered it a pain in the ass as much as I considered it a pain in the ass,” he said in 2017. “I told the guy giving me the test, ‘I’m not going to lie.’ And he said, ‘You won’t have to lie. Just trust me.’
“So I get hooked up to the thing and he asks me, ‘Have you had face-to-face contact with Mr. Steinbrenner?’ And I say, ‘No.’ And he asks if Mr. Steinbrenner has visited my house at any point and talked to me. I say, ‘No.’ He never asked me a single question like, ‘Has he called you on the phone or anything?’ And then after a few questions, he said, ‘OK, that’s it.’”
After he was fired in 1991, Stump Merrill had been subjected to questioning by Vincent’s office as well. He was required to fly from Maine to New York City, where he insisted he’d had no face-to-face contact with Steinbrenner. “I was interrogated for four hours by four different people,” Merrill recalled. “And I must have said twenty-five times, ‘What part of fucking NO don’t you understand?’”
Merrill was then asked if he knew which Yankees employees had been in touch with Steinbrenner. “And I told them, ‘I have no idea, but if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. That’s your job, not mine.’ It was a waste of my time, the whole fucking nine yards.”
The Steinbrenner banishment, even while his family still ran the team, caused a variety of peculiar, even comical, situations for team employees. Once, Molloy and Showalter decided to meet at the Steinbrenner horse farm in Ocala, Florida. As they gathered in a small cottage on the property, they looked out the window and saw Steinbrenner walking the grounds. The duo spent the rest of the day hiding from him—then left early.
The Yankees were soon very busy at the 1992 Louisville winter meetings. On December 5, they acquired starting pitcher Jim Abbott for three prospects, including first baseman J. T. Snow, who would end up playing 16 major league seasons and drive in 877 runs.
Since Abbott pitched only two Yankees seasons and compiled a 20-22 record, it could be argued that the trade was a bust, given Snow’s production, which included four seasons when he drove in 95 or more runs.
But to the Yankees, Abbott was another “culture creator.”
Born without a right hand, Abbott was one of the most admired athletes in the country from 1988 to the early 1990s, because he had learned to pitch with his left hand and arm while resting his glove on the end of his right forearm. After delivering a pitch, he would switch the glove to his left hand. Abbott was tall, blond and always seemed to be smiling, and he became one of the feel-good stories of the era. Raised in Flint, Michigan, he pitched three years for the University of Michigan and led the victorious US baseball team at the 1988 Summer Olympics.
The California Angels made Abbott the eighth overall pick in the 1988 draft, and he moved into the Angels’ starting rotation the next season without having to pitch a single game in the minor leagues. He won 40 games in his first three seasons, including an 18-11 season in 1991, when he finished third in the Cy Young Award balloting. But his record slumped to 7-15 in 1992, although he did have a sparkling ERA of 2.77.
The Yankees liked that they were getting a quietly confident twenty-five-year-old who already had four years of major league experience, and they believed Abbott would be another good fit with Mattingly. They were correct about that assumption, as the two became close friends who frequently socialized off the field.
“Jim was another guy who hated to lose, and he cared about all the things that mattered,” Mattingly said of his friend. “He wanted things done the right way.”
Five days after the Abbott trade, the Yankees acquired another dynamic left-handed starter with a venerable track record who was known for his understated leadership.
Jimmy Key, who in nine seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays had a 116-81 record, signed a four-year, $17 million free-agent contract with the Yankees. Key, who had just won two games in the 1992 World Series for the world champion Blue Jays, was known as a soft-spoken assassin, and he pitched that way. He did not throw especially hard, but he had precise control of his pitches and could pinpoint a fastball that nonetheless overpowered many a hitter. He had cunning and an array of breaking pitches, most notably a backdoor slider. He was the only pitcher in the major leagues at the time who had won at least 12 games in each of the last eight seasons. He had a career record of 8-1 in Yankee Stadium and was 3-1 in five postseason starts.
Key was raised in Alabama but expressed no reservations about playing in New York. He even gave the city a backhanded compliment of sorts. “My wife says I’m lifeless inside on game days—things don’t bother me,” said the thirty-two-year-old Key, who was considered a no-nonsense leader on a Toronto team that had won its division in four of the previous five seasons. With a quizzical smile, Key added, “I guess that means I’m a good fit for New York.”
The Yankees had found themselves another culture creator.
In another coincidence (there would continue to be a series of them involving the Yankees’ owner and his son-in-law), George Steinbrenner had publicly lobbied for Key to be signed. Joe Molloy, by himself, had been dispatched to negotiate with Key’s wife, Cindy, who acted as her husband’s agent. Molloy, it turned out, somehow knew exactly how much money his father-in-law was willing to spend on Key.
“He’s the guy we wanted as much as anybody,” Steinbrenner told reporters in telephone interviews from Tampa.
The Yankees roster was undeniably improving, even if Barry Bonds, Greg Maddux and other top stars wanted no part of the Bronx, where the last World Series championship trophy was raised fourteen years earlier. “We’re not dwelling on who doesn’t want to come here,” Showalter said at the time. “If one part of the equation doesn’t work out, then you move on to the next part. And we’re not through yet.”
Since the expansion draft, the Yankees had been without a third baseman. The onetime blue-chip prospect at the position, Hensley Meulens, who was signed alongside Bernie Williams in 1985, was trying to sign a contract to play in Japan, and the Yankees were not yet standing in his way. Meulens was not in the team’s plans. Not all Yankees prospects blossomed.
“You have to give up on some young players, too,” Michael said. “It’s painful, but you have to be able to admit you were wrong.”
That winter, the most prominent free-agent third baseman available was Wade Boggs, the eight-time Boston All-Star. But Boggs’s batting average in 1992 had plummeted to .259, the first time in his career he had not batted over .300. He had endured back spasms and blamed blurry vision for his hitting woes since he was adjusting to new contact lenses.
Gene Michael and Buck Showalter each had reservations about signing Boggs, at least initially. Again, it was all about the clubhouse culture.
Boggs was an odd personality. He was perceived as egocentric, which made him fit in perfectly with the Red Sox of the late eighties, a team slapped with the enduring label “25 players, 25 cabs.” The term summed up a complete lack of unity, based on an anecdotal scene outside a Red Sox hotel after a road game when players going out to dinner each called separate cabs.
Whether Boggs deserved to be denigrated by association, he was undisputedly a bit of a mysterious loner with quirky superstitions. Most important to Showalter, Boggs and Mattingly were far from friendly. The two had vied for the American League batting title several times between 1983 and 1988. Boggs had won every year except 1984, when Mattingly did instead. But famously, in 1986, Boggs had sat out the final four games of the season, coasting to the title over Mattingly with a .357 batting average.
The Red Sox hosted the Yankees in those final four games that year. With Boggs resting in the dugout, Mattingly hit .422 in the series and fell five points short of catching Boggs. In the visiting clubhouse afterward, Mattingly, who had played 162 games that season, barely concealed his ire toward Boggs, who under baseball’s unwritten rules of conduct had committed an act of cowardice.
Boggs’s nickname was “Chicken Man,” because one of his superstitions was that he had to eat chicken before every game.
“Chickenshit Man,” many Yankees grumbled that weekend at Fenway.
Six years later, things may have calmed down, but Showalter was worried nonetheless. Besides, Boggs was thirty-four years old and coming off his worst season. And he was a Red Sox, Yankees archrivals since the middle of the century. What would that do to the clubhouse culture?
But George Steinbrenner was having none of it. Once again, Molloy was put in charge of wooing Boggs and his agent, Alan Nero. Molloy had lunch with Nero to begin the negotiations at Steinbrenner’s Tampa hotel. Seated across the lunchroom, in plain sight of Nero, was George Steinbrenner. He was joined by New York Daily News sportswriter Bill Madden, a mainstay on the Yankees beat since the 1970s.
Madden said Steinbrenner was endorsing the Boggs deal throughout lunch, predicting it would get done. In his 2010 book, Steinbrenner, Madden wrote that George called Nero in his hotel room after Nero’s lunch with Molloy ended.
“I just want to tell you—be patient,” Steinbrenner said.
Madden wrote that Steinbrenner added, “You’ll get what you want.”
The Yankees were the only team to offer Boggs a three-year contract. Nero and Boggs leaped at the offer.
At breakfast the next morning in his Tampa hotel, not long after Boggs’s signing had been announced, Steinbrenner insisted he had not known about the negotiations: “I swear my daughter called me and said, ‘We just traded for that Red Sox third baseman.’ That’s the way she phrased it. Of course, we signed him, not traded for him.”
He was asked, “Which of your daughters called you?”
“Jessica.”
“So, Joe’s wife, then?”
“Yeah,” George said. “I mean, I’m allowed to call my daughter’s house.”
Steinbrenner paused and stammered. “I mean, ah, I can take calls from her,” he said.
By then, in northern Florida near the Alabama line, where Showalter lived in the off-season, there was not much alarm about the Boggs signing. Showalter had already consulted Mattingly, his former minor league teammate.
“I told Buck it would be fine,” Mattingly said. “We now had a bunch of guys who would set the tone. I figured Wade would be a pro about it and go along. And he did.”
Michael was happy to hear about Mattingly’s acquiescence. Privately, Michael knew there was much to like about Boggs. He thought the Chicken Man might have been dragged down by a horrific 1992 season in Boston when the Red Sox finished in last place. Boggs had also lobbied for a new contract during spring training and complained when he did not get one. The response of Fenway Park fans was to boo him after every out he made.
“And, let’s face it, if we wanted guys who had high on-base percentages, you couldn’t do better than Boggs in his prime,” Michael said. Boggs had led the major leagues in on-base percentage six times. In 1988, his OBP was 24 points shy of .500.
“Boggs may not have been my idea from the start, but when we did get him I was thinking that if we got Boggs at 85 or 90 percent of what he was in his prime, he would still help us,” Michael said in 2017.
During the first week of January 1993, the Yankees held a news conference to introduce all their new players. As if schooled earlier—the players did have dinner with Showalter the night before—Key, O’Neill and Boggs each used the words “attitude, intensity and character,” attributes important for both a player and the team as a whole.
Showalter used the occasion to unveil a new word for what he wanted in a player. “I’ve been saying I want integrity, but it’s really sincerity that I want,” he said. “A player has to be sincere about wanting to win and wanting to be a good teammate. And other players know who the sincere players are.”
The setting for the news conference was the same Yankee Stadium luxury ballroom where a host of Yankees managers had been hired and fired. Whether it was Billy Martin, Dick Howser, Bucky Dent or Stump Merrill, it sometimes felt as if their pinstriped ghosts haunted the room. But in 1993, the ballroom had been renovated. Walls had been removed, the lighting had been redone, and new windows brightened the space.
On that day, the facelift seemed symbolic. There was a sense that the franchise’s dark days were in the rearview mirror. The roster had been gutted. Just four players—and only one starter—on the 1993 roster had been with the team in 1990.
At Showalter’s request—remember, every little detail had a themed message in Showalter’s world—the aging black-and-white photos of Yankees stars from the 1950s and 1970s had been replaced by vibrant color photos of the team’s current players: Mattingly, Stanley, Wickman.
Showalter loved tradition, but he wanted to turn the page, too. Scores of photographs from around the stadium had been updated similarly. Out went the fading shots of the old Yankee Stadium, the one of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. In their place were photos of a refurbished, sold-out Yankee Stadium (captured on the rare recent occasion when that occurred).
The embarrassing memories of the 1990 and 1991 seasons were being whitewashed. George Steinbrenner’s humiliating exile was soon to end. Reinforcements for the beleaguered Mattingly, still by far the team’s most popular player, were on the way.
“I felt rejuvenated,” Mattingly said in an interview twenty-five years later.
Showalter told Angela that he felt a new Yankee spirit imbuing the team.
“Buck really thought the franchise was getting a transfusion,” Angela Showalter said in 2017. “Life was being breathed into the place.
“Buck almost always tried to go to work with a smile, but he has always said that the beginning of the 1993 season was when he finally felt confident he might come home from work with a smile.”