A DAY BEFORE the 1994 season was to begin, George Steinbrenner praised Buck Showalter: “He’s done the finest job I’ve seen in my twenty years in baseball.”
Then Steinbrenner added an important caveat: “Of course, now Showalter has a team with the highest payroll in baseball, and there’s more pressure on the manager than before. He’s done a great job but he can’t fall back.
“He’s in a tough spot. It’s harder to do something well two seasons in a row.”
Twelve games into the season, the Yankees had won only half of their games. Some of the team’s biggest hitting threats, like Mattingly, Bernie Williams and Mike Stanley, were batting about .200 or less. The eight beat writers traveling with the team, representing newspapers from Newark to Hartford, began leaving daily messages with Steinbrenner’s Tampa office. The writers were waiting for the Yankees’ mercurial owner to return their calls, fuming with concerns and condemnations.
It was a newspaper writer’s ploy that had worked since 1976. Among the writers, it was likened to putting quarters into a jukebox, where once you push the buttons, a voice will likely sing. In this case, the voice would be that of George M. Steinbrenner, whom the Yankees writers in the 1980s began calling “Mr. Tunes.”
But this time Steinbrenner did not take the bait. Since his return from baseball exile, Gene Michael had been begging him to only make his complaints directly to the general manager. “The more he left the press out of it, the better,” Michael said.
He added with a snicker: “It certainly wasn’t better for me. But it was better for the team.”
In 1994, Steinbrenner was not playing Mr. Tunes.
Michael, who earlier that year had received a new contract that doubled his salary, had succeeded—for the most part—in diffusing a dangerous triangle of power and influence that had distracted many of the Yankees teams since the 1970s. It worked like this:
There was Steinbrenner, there were the newspaper reporters, and there were the team’s players, manager and/or general manager.
If Steinbrenner was unhappy with a player’s performance, or if he was flummoxed by a game strategy or a managerial decision—he was particularly obsessed with the batting order—he was more than proficient at letting the manager and general manager know of his displeasure. But he was so persistent in making his views known that virtually every Yankees manager or general manager would regularly ignore Steinbrenner’s rants. It was the only way to maintain any equilibrium.
But when Steinbrenner’s complaints to his manager or general manager did not effect the change he sought, eventually Steinbrenner would grow frustrated enough to go to the press, speaking either on or off the record, so long as his message still got into print. Steinbrenner seemed to enjoy these phone calls to reporters, because they never argued or disagreed with him. They only took notes.
And those calls would produce a story or stories, which would mean that the manager, general manager or a player—or all three—would end up being grilled before a game about the stinging criticism levied by the Yankees’ owner. Sometimes the player, manager or general manager—or all three—would fire back at the noisy owner. And then Steinbrenner might return the fire, usually through the press (although by 1994, New York had a 24-hour sports-talk radio station as well).
Obviously, it was a destructive cycle. Hence Steinbrenner’s 19 managerial changes before the hiring of Showalter.
But by 1994, things had changed. Showalter, for instance, was closing in on the record for most consecutive days as a Yankees manager under Steinbrenner. It helped that Steinbrenner had been banished, but after his return, Showalter gave Gene Michael most of the credit for keeping a semblance of normalcy.
“Stick took a lot of the heat and he was great about that,” Showalter said. “Most of the time, he’d never even tell me about it. George would say this or that and Stick would just listen. When he was in New York, George also liked to have meetings in his stadium office hours before a home game. He’d tell Stick he wanted me up there, and Stick would say I wasn’t available. Actually, I’d never even know George wanted a meeting.
“Sometimes Stick would call me and say, ‘OK, George wants a meeting with you and the coaches. So this time you have to come up here to his office. But don’t bring the coaches.’ And I would do that, keeping the coaches out of the fire. And then, rarely, he’d say, ‘OK, this time you do have to bring the coaches.’ But for the most part, he tried to shield as many people as he could.”
Michael adopted this approach after decades as a player, scout, adviser, general manager and manager for Steinbrenner. “Most of all, I had been a manager for many years, for George and elsewhere,” said Michael, who was the Chicago Cubs’ skipper in 1986–87. “You’re pretty damned busy. You’re trying to win games and trying to juggle a lineup. You’re worrying about your starting rotation and the scouting reports on the opposing teams. You’ve got to talk to the press before the game.
“You don’t have time to defend every move you make to the owner. And even if you do have to do that, it causes so much stress the players see it in your eyes or in your mood around them. And that affects team morale—it puts everyone on edge. It can ruin the flow of a season. So I worked as hard as I could to be the buffer. And frankly, George trusted me on baseball matters.”
Michael also believed that Steinbrenner’s time away from the game, and the gains the franchise made in his absence, had altered the dynamic between the owner and his chief baseball executives. “We had credibility by 1994,” Michael said. “We had rebuilt things. I remember, after he came back from his sabbatical, he said to me, ‘While I was away, you guys have messed things up.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really, so things were going well when you left in 1990?’
“And he said, ‘Yeah, for the most part.’ And I said, ‘Let me ask you something, George. If things were going so well in 1990, how come we had the number one pick in the amateur draft the next year? Because that goes to the team with the worst record in all of baseball.’
“He laughed and said, ‘Oh, you’re a wise guy.’ But he got the point. He backed off.”
Showalter and Michael had developed a close partnership, a tandem of astute, incisive baseball minds. Both had been good, productive players but not stars, and both had been studying the game faithfully since they were teenagers.
“Stick was not only smart, he was as good an ally as a manager could have,” Showalter said. “I would be stewing in my office ninety minutes after a tough loss, rewatching a tape of the game, and Stick would come down and try to push me out of the building. He’d say, ‘Get in the car and drive home.’”
The Showalter family was then living in the leafy suburb of Rye, New York, north of the Bronx.
“So then I’d be driving up I-95, and he’d call again and say, ‘How’s the traffic?’” Showalter said. “And we’d talk about traffic or something to get my mind off the game. And finally he’d say, ‘You can’t win every game, Buck. If you win 60 percent in baseball you’re considered a fucking genius. Now go home and kiss your wife and kids goodnight.’”
Angela Showalter saw the pressure building on her husband—it was in his eyes, she said—although she insisted he spent the hours at their home happily playing with the couple’s children. “Buck was always totally devoted to his job—that was a given,” she said. “But he could see the big picture. And in 1994, I really think he knew the Yankees were about to get pretty good.”
After a 6-6 start to the 1994 season, the Yankees won 27 of their next 37 games. They moved into first place on May 7 and never left. By mid-June, they had the best record in the American League, which was newly realigned into three divisions. Their record was 38-25, a winning percentage of more than 60 percent. Managerial-genius territory.
The new third-base coach, Willie Randolph, had been skeptical in spring training of what the 1994 team could accomplish. He was largely an outsider to the coaching staff and wasn’t versed in their methods.
“I figured we’d be competitive, but I didn’t really get a feel for the team until the season started and we started to jell,” Randolph said. “Then I said to myself, ‘Wow, we’ve got an actual squad here, man.’ We’ve got some guys that are stepping up and doing some nice things. Everyone seemed to have a nice feel for each other. The young players on the team seemed to understand the Yankee Way. It was the way we played. And they were tough enough to understand their responsibilities.”
There was little going wrong for the Yankees. Paul O’Neill was batting an astounding .462. Boggs was hovering around .350 and had shown surprising power, having clubbed eight home runs. Mattingly, who was hitting .184 in mid-April, had raised his batting average to .323. Backup catcher and sometime outfielder/designated hitter Jim Leyritz already had 30 RBI and 10 homers.
In the starting rotation, Jimmy Key was 9-1, Scott Kamieniecki was 5-1 and Jim Abbott was 6-2. The trio of Bob Wickman, Steve Howe and Xavier Hernandez, an off-season acquisition, handled the late-inning bullpen situations.
Most notably, the Yankees enjoyed playing with each other. The culture creators had infused the team with a harmony of effort, purpose, fun and accomplishment. The clubhouse was alive and exuberant.
Luis Polonia, the disgraced outfielder discarded by the 1990 Yankees, returned to the team in 1994 as a pesky leadoff hitter (and was hitting .310 in mid-June). Polonia saw stark differences from his last time in Yankee pinstripes. “There’s no comparison to what it was like when I was here before,” he said. “That wasn’t even a team then. It was a bunch of guys worried about numbers and trying to get their money. Guys rooted for their teammates to screw up so they’d get a chance to play.”
Mattingly had seen the best Yankees teams of the eighties and the worst ones of the nineties. Looking back, 1994 still stands out. “That was one of my favorite teams because we had guys in sync and pulling together,” he said. “Buck and Gene had done a great job with their plan. It had worked. That was probably the most fun team I played on.”
Mattingly remained the cynosure of the team, but he had morphed into something more. He was now both a chief motivator and the team’s principal motivation. Mattingly had been the Yankees’ foremost star for 11 successive seasons, all of them without a single playoff game. At the start of the 1994 season, no other active player had been in as many games as Mattingly (1,560) without a postseason appearance.
Getting the popular Mattingly into the playoffs drove his teammates, especially since he was so dedicated to the cause himself.
“I’ve never seen anyone push his teammates the way he does,” said Polonia, who was an eight-year veteran in 1994. “He spends nine innings doing it. It’s amazing how he never lets up. He wasn’t that way when I was here the last time. Now he constantly gets everyone going. I know guys say, ‘God, look at this guy. Let’s do it for him.’ He wants this team to win more than anybody.”
O’Neill, who to this day still calls Mattingly “Cap,” in a reference to Mattingly’s five years as the team captain, believes the overarching theme of the 1994 season was a quest to get Mattingly into the postseason. “He commanded such respect in the clubhouse,” O’Neill said. “You didn’t want to let him down. You knew that he wouldn’t fail you, so you didn’t want to fail him. It was like our duty to help him get to the playoffs. Because you knew how much he wanted it.”
O’Neill was certainly doing his part—in his own manic way. In one Yankee win, when O’Neill hit his twelfth home run and had three hits, he was almost despondent afterward.
Why? “I struck out with the bases loaded today and had no hits in last night’s game,” he said. “I’m making too many outs.”
O’Neill’s drive, and even his temper, endeared him to Yankees fans, and they rallied around him. O’Neill was left off the 1994 All-Star Game ballot because the Yankees had four primary outfielders and were permitted to list only three on the ballot. (In the preseason, Showalter had his outfield quartet draw straws to see who the odd man out would be.)
So O’Neill was not among the 42 outfielders on the ballot, but when the first wave of voting results was announced in June, O’Neill had received the second-most votes of any American Leaguer—all of them from fans who had written his name on the ballot.
Like a write-in candidate making the All-Star Game, nothing seemed impossible for the 1994 Yankees. At the end of June, they won eight straight games to increase their AL East lead to five games. They were 20 games over .500.
It had already been an enchanted year for New York sports fans. The Rangers ended a 54-year drought, winning their first Stanley Cup since 1940. Their cohabitants in Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, had played a thrilling seven-game series in the NBA Finals, ultimately losing to the Houston Rockets. Soccer’s World Cup came to the United States for the first time, with nearby Giants Stadium in New Jersey hosting seven games in June and July, including several played by the Irish and Italian national teams, which had fanatical followings in the area.
Around the country, as in New York, the news was most often positive and uplifting. It was almost the midpoint of the nineties, the longest sustained period of economic growth in American history. The internet was slowly beginning to change the nation. In 1994, Amazon.com made its debut. So did three distinct but unforgettably influential films: Forrest Gump, The Lion King, and Speed.
There was much to smile about, especially if you were a long-suffering Yankees fan.
Only one disquieting issue loomed, a blight threatening to ruin the best Yankees season in a dozen years or more. The tone of the negotiations between baseball’s owners and the players’ union had gotten thorny and vindictive. Neither side had yielded an inch. If anything, the owners had grown more entrenched and combative.
There was a feeling on the players’ side that ownership’s true goal was to smash the union rather than come to a new collective bargaining agreement. It was a perilous tactic. The baseball players’ union was the strongest in American sports, and had survived—indeed had won—a string of showdowns with the owners dating back to 1972.
But it was those defeats to the players in past years that caused the owners to dig in their heels and fight so stubbornly in 1994. At seemingly any cost, they wanted a salary cap that they hoped would curb the free spending of bigger-market teams in free agency. And there was no longer a baseball commissioner to intercede or try to soften the owners’ stance. Bud Selig, the acting commissioner, was the Milwaukee Brewers’ owner and in lockstep with his brethren. Besides, the owners had recently voted to dramatically limit the baseball commissioner’s powers.
In June, the owners grew more bold, withholding $7.8 million that they were expected to pay, according to the collective bargaining agreement, to the players’ pension and benefit plans.
Steinbrenner read the handwriting on the wall—he had his best team in nearly a generation but knew it could all be taken away—and he was desperate to change his fellow owners’ hard-line negotiating strategy. “I didn’t fear a salary cap or the free-agency status quo,” he said years later. “I thought we as owners were playing with fire. The union was not going to cave or disintegrate. I did my best to barter, cajole or be diplomatic with the other owners.”
But Steinbrenner, owner of the richest baseball franchise, had few allies in ownership. He had friends but little power. The owners were preparing to stand their ground. The tension mounted, along with the anxiety of Yankees fans and others in certain cities, like Montreal, where the Expos were having their best season ever.
Frustrated but powerless, Steinbrenner instead turned his attention to a new Yankee Stadium. New Jersey still courted the Yankees and would for a couple more years, but the state now had a fierce opponent across the Hudson River. He was Rudy Giuliani, the newly elected mayor of New York City.
Giuliani was a die-hard Yankees fan, and he vowed that the team would never leave the city on his watch. Steinbrenner suddenly had several sites to choose from for his new stadium—from Staten Island to the North Bronx to midtown and uptown Manhattan.
Funding the new Yankee Stadium would be no problem, Giuliani said. The city owned the current stadium and would likely own, or finance, its replacement. Giuliani made that implicit. In his mind, it’s possible that all he wanted in return was a front-row seat to any and all Yankees games. He got that and more: his own set of box seats next to the Yankees’ dugout for his family and friends for many years to come.
While the wrangling over a new stadium took more than a decade to resolve completely, in 1994 Steinbrenner knew that he would eventually get his new palace with all the revenue-boosting luxury suites, pricey restaurants, team stores and elite, private clubs he sought. It was just a matter of bargaining. In time, the city did subsidize the construction of the new stadium with $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds, an outlay that would have been unthinkable and immensely controversial in 1990. But that was when the Yankees were a laughingstock, not a team with the best record in the American League.
So it was evident in every way that the Yankees had not just been revived on the field. The Yankees empire—fresh, flourishing and trendy—had been restored as well. Yankees caps once again were omnipresent on New York’s streets and in its bars and subway cars. (It did not hurt that the 1994 Mets were again a flop.)
“In 1994 around the Yankees, without question, there was a spirit and a new young spark just taking over the team—the whole franchise really,” said Hal Steinbrenner, who earned his graduate degree from the University of Florida that spring and immediately began working in an office adjacent to his father’s.
“Having the office right next to George’s office wasn’t always the best place to be,” Hal said with a laugh in 2017. “You’re right in the line of fire. And years later, I was happy when I got my office moved down to the other end of the hall.
“But I recall the energy of ’94. You couldn’t help but feel it. Everything was just clicking on all cylinders. It was July and people were already talking about the World Series. Nothing seemed farfetched. My father was ebullient.”