WHEN HE WAS fired as Yankees manager, Stump Merrill loved being home for the length and breadth of a beautiful Maine summer, something he had not been able to enjoy since he was in college. But as much as he loved his native state, after about ten months he needed to get out.
“I wanted a job,” he said. “Not just a check.”
Merrill returned to the Yankees as a special adviser in the minor leagues, and by 1994, Merrill was back as the manager of the Columbus Clippers, the franchise’s flagship minor league team. His roster included all of the farm systems’ jewels: Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and Rivera. But he did not coddle the most prized prospects, especially Posada, now the organization’s top farm system catcher.
“I can remember we flew back from Ottawa after a game and then we had to fly to Rochester, and after that, we would bus back to Columbus,” Merrill said. “So near the end of that long trip I posted the lineup, and Jorge, who was in the lineup, comes into my office and says he can’t play that night.
“I asked why, and he said, ‘I’m tired.’”
Merrill stood up from behind his office desk and bellowed: “What the fuck do you mean? I’m fucking fifty years old and I have to memorize every fucking pitch in every game. I have to worry about twenty-five guys every day and every night. You’ve got nine innings and four at-bats to worry about and you’re telling me you’re tired? Let me ask you something: Are we training a front-line major league catcher or are we training a backup?”
Posada said he wanted to be a major league starter.
Merrill roared, “Then get your fucking ass out there and play, and I’ll tell you when you’re tired. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Posada never asked for another day off.
“He never bitched about it again—to his credit,” Merrill said. “He wasn’t a soft player, but I think he wanted that discipline. The good ones realize they’re going to be challenged and pushed. And after that, it’s how they respond.
“I played Jorge on days when I could see he was tired. But I wanted him to understand what would be expected of him. If he was a big league starter, his teammates would want that of him.”
Posada’s defensive work as a catcher continued to improve, thanks to another perk of the bountiful Yankees minor league system. The franchise employed a coach, Gary Tuck, whose specific assignment was to tutor the team’s minor league catchers in all the intricacies of baseball’s most demanding field position.
“Gary Tuck just kept instructing me on all the things you need to do to be a top catcher,” Posada said in 2017. “You have to learn and understand all the personalities on your pitching staff. You had to memorize the scouting reports of the opposing hitters. You had to work on your mechanics constantly. You had to develop your relationships with the umpires in the league and learn their tendencies as home plate umpires, like who favored the low strike or who favored the high strike. Everything mattered.
“I was overwhelmed at times but I kept at it, and Gary stayed with me. I was polished, but he kept getting a little shine out of me day after day.”
Posada took the weight of his responsibilities seriously—and took them home with him after games. He would rehash pitch sequences, even in bed. His future wife, Laura, recounted years later that her husband, while sound asleep, would sometimes shout, “Why didn’t I call a fastball there?”
“After a Yankees loss, that might go on all night,” Laura said.
In 1994, Posada’s determination and resolve were being rewarded. By midseason, he was second on the Clippers in home runs and RBI. A year earlier, his 38 passed balls had led the Carolina League, but now he had just eight passed balls. He was throwing out almost 30 percent of base runners who attempted to steal, which was far above the Class AAA average.
In the pages of the organization’s bible, the Yankee Way, a catcher’s defense mattered far more than his offense. The Yankees, from the big league club to the lowest minors, wanted durability and dependability when it came to blocking pitches and calling a good game.
Merrill saw Posada evolving into a Yankees prototype for the position. “On the few days when we sat him down, that’s when I knew what we had with Jorge,” Merrill said. “Because that’s when the pitchers would come to me and complain that Jorge wasn’t behind the plate. His teammates knew he made them better. He had become that kind of leader on the field.
“And he was smart. We had to do very little with him in terms of setting up hitters and the scouting reports before the game. He knew all the stats and strategies. And if we had a pitcher carrying good stuff into the game, Jorge made sure that pitcher went seven or eight innings.
“He had improved in all phases. I think he had a chance to make the 1995 big league team, until that one play at the plate.”
In the summer of 1994, in a game against the Norfolk Tides, which was the Mets top minor league affiliate, a journeyman but speedy outfielder named Pat Howell raced around third base, trying to score on a slow-rolling infield ground ball. Posada saw Howell coming and used his left foot to block home plate as he awaited the throw from first base. The ball and Howell arrived at the same time, with Howell sliding into Posada’s lower leg.
“I can still hear his leg bone snapping,” Merrill said. “I heard it from the dugout. Just awful.”
Posada’s fibula was broken and his left ankle was dislocated. Several tendons were torn.
Carried by stretcher into the Clippers’ locker room, Posada was placed on a table where athletic trainers took off his chest protector and shin guards and dropped them to the floor.
Posada looked down at the gear and said: “I’m not ever putting that stuff on again. Never. I’m done.”
Said Stump Merrill, who was standing over the table: “You’re going to be OK. Relax.”
As Posada wrote in his 2015 autobiography: “I think Stump thought I was talking about the injury ending my career. I was trying to say I didn’t want to catch again. I’d gone along with everything everyone had told me to do. I had improved, and this was how the baseball gods rewarded me? Work your ass off for what?”
Posada was not permitted to put weight on his left leg for the next six weeks. A lengthy rehab would follow. But he did return to catch again.
“The injury didn’t change the organization’s position about Jorge,” said Brian Cashman. “We were still very high on him. And we weren’t the only ones. A bunch of teams brought up his name in trade talks. It was right about that time that all of the guys who came to be known as the Core Four were regularly coming up in trade talks.
“Gene Michael was still wearing himself out saying no to every team. That was especially true when it came to Jeter. The answer was always an emphatic no when the topic was Jeter.”
Derek Jeter made the rarest of developmental leaps in 1994. Coming off his left-wrist injury at the end of 1993—and Brian Butterfield’s expert tutelage—Jeter began the season with Tampa of the Class A Florida State League. Then he went to Class AA Albany of the Eastern League and finished the season with Columbus in the International League, the highest level of minor league baseball in the eastern United States. It was a meteoric ascent.
“We had never had a position player do that,” Livesey said.
On his 1994 journey, Jeter hit .329 in Tampa, .377 in Albany and .349 in Columbus. For the year, he hit .344 with 43 extra-base hits and 50 stolen bases in 58 attempts.
Gene Michael surely smiled when he noticed Jeter’s on-base percentage for the year. Despite jumping from league to league—and having to adapt to new and different pitchers at each stop—Jeter had a .410 on-base percentage and an OPS of .873.
Somewhere, Butterfield must have been beaming, too. Jeter made 25 errors in 138 games in 1994, even as he adjusted to about twenty new infields in the Eastern and International leagues. He still needed to improve, but the internal organizational argument about whether he should be a center fielder had come to an end. In 1993, he had made an error once in every 2.25 games. In 1994, he averaged an error every 5.52 games. He had 506 fielding chances in 1993, which equates to one error every 9.03 chances. The next year, Jeter had 616 fielding chances for an average of one error every 24.64 chances.
“That gangly ugly duckling had become a swan,” said Livesey.
Added Mitch Lukevics: “And he still had that incredible range. He was getting to everything.”
Jeter’s fielding assists rose from 292 in 126 games in 1993 to 402 in 138 games in 1994. Butterfield’s double-play drills worked as well. Jeter turned 16 more double plays in ’94 than he had in ’93.
“The Derek Jeter I saw in 1994 was a man compared to the boy I had seen the year before,” Mariano Rivera said. “He always had confidence, but now he had acquired the skills to turn that confidence into success on the field.”
It was a potent, heady mix: talent, confidence and know-how.
“A natural progression,” he said with almost a shrug in an interview more than twenty years later. “I was growing into things and I had a lot of help.”
In 1994, Jeter was named the Minor League Player of the Year by Baseball America, Baseball Weekly, and the Sporting News.
In a meeting of the Yankees front-office executives that summer, Merrill was asked if twenty-year-old Jeter was ready for the big leagues. “I said he was by far the best shortstop I ever had,” Merrill said. “Bring him up and see what happens.” The consensus was that Jeter would be called up to New York in late August, or September at the latest.
Buck Showalter did not need to be convinced. He had been watching and dissecting videotape of Jeter since 1992, which was Showalter’s first season as Yankees manager and the year Jeter was drafted.
Showalter, in fact, had saved the tapes. The collection went all the way back to Jeter’s senior year in high school. At his home in Dallas during the winter of 2017, Showalter quickly summoned the Jeter high school tape on his office laptop. He watched the skinny kid in high-top shoes chase down ground balls behind second base at Kalamazoo Central High School and then toggled on his laptop to another tape of Jeter, at Columbus in 1994.
“Do you see that?” Showalter asked, his eyes wide. “You know what he has in both tapes?”
Showalter answered his own question. “He has a grace,” he said. “There’s a grace to his game that goes with the obvious flow of athleticism.”
As manager of the Orioles, Showalter routinely shows the tape to young, developing scouts in the Baltimore organization. “People think someone like Derek Jeter must have been an obvious first-round pick,” he said. “And I show them this tape, where Derek is only 165 pounds and is bouncing all over the infield—he’s all arms and legs. And I ask these young guys: Would you have projected this kid to be a major league All-Star over and over?”
But when analyzed properly, Showalter emphatically believes Jeter’s high school tape has all the answers. “You have to perceive the tempo and rhythm to Derek’s game,” he said. “A common attribute of quality major league players is that they have a great internal clock. Those players know when to hurry and when to slow down, which is a really important thing to know.
“In our instructional league every winter, we had a lot of Latin shortstops who tended to rush every ground ball. I was trying to figure out how to slow them down, and one day I was flipping through the TV channels and I ended up watching a water polo game for a few minutes. And they had a shot clock at the top of the goal net.
“So, long story short, I got one of those clocks and put it behind first base. The average major leaguer runs to first base between 4.2 and 4.4 seconds. So I set the clock for 4.35 seconds and started hitting ground balls to the shortstops. And they’re charging the ball and gunning it over at like 3.1 seconds. I’d stop the clock and say, ‘Look how much more time you have. What are you rushing for? Learn to sense how much time you have.’
“But here’s the thing about Derek. He came with that clock. He had it in high school. And that’s very unusual. That was the thing about evaluating him. He had that ‘it’ factor. What is ‘it’? Well, it is hard to define. But Derek had it.”
The former Yankees second baseman Willie Randolph had left the team’s front office to become Showalter’s third-base coach in 1994. A six-time All-Star, he was also a fielding instructor during spring training that year, when Jeter was in the big league camp. “I worked with all the infielders and Derek was still a little raw, but had a certain swagger,” Randolph said. “You could see he wasn’t scared. Don Mattingly had that. There are certain players that are comfortable in their skin around veterans.
“Derek knew he belonged. The moment was not too big. It was in his posture. Yeah, he played the rookie role respectfully, but he wasn’t intimidated. I remember saying to myself, ‘This kid’s gonna be all right.’ So I wasn’t real surprised when I heard he might be joining us later in the year.”
There was less certainty about the future of Rivera.
In 1994, Rivera had also made the jump from Class A Tampa to AA Albany and then to the Columbus Clippers. It was a climb that was a little more common for a pitcher, and since Rivera was twenty-four years old, the Yankees were under pressure to more quickly figure out whether he was going to be a major league contributor.
Rivera, still a starter, was dominant in Tampa and Albany, with a combined 6-0 record in those two stops, an ERA under 3.00 and a WHIP (walks and hits per inning) below 1.1, which is stellar.
But when Rivera got to Columbus, he seemed overmatched. He had a 4-2 record in six starts but gave up 20 earned runs, 34 hits and 10 walks in 31 innings pitched. His ERA was 5.81, and he was still throwing his fastball at about 91 miles an hour—pedestrian for a Class AAA pitcher without a superior breaking ball that kept hitters off-balance.
“Mariano could be impressive, and he was an ice man on the mound,” Merrill said. “Terrific poise, great control, and he threw so effortlessly. But you had to ask yourself: Is that going to be enough?
“The biggest leap in professional sports is from AAA ball to the major leagues. There is nothing like it in any other sport. There are guys who will light it up—just crush it—at the AAA level for two or three years straight. And yet, when you send them to the majors, they get their ass handed to them. It happens all the time. So it’s hard to tell sometimes.
“At that point, we weren’t sure what would happen when Mariano made the leap. But he was only in Columbus for a little while in ’94. It was a small sample. You wanted to see more the next year.”
If Rivera made it to 1995 as a Yankee.
Rivera was a frequently mentioned name in trade talks in 1994, and for a year thereafter. And unlike Jeter, Michael did not immediately take Rivera off the table during trade negotiations. “We were trying to be patient with him, but you know you can’t keep them all,” he said. “You’re going to have to give up some prospects. And at the time, there’s no question Mariano was not projected as high as other minor league pitchers we had. That’s just a fact.
“But I held off with dealing Mariano.”
As for Andy Pettitte, he continued to impress despite being overlooked in favor of the other top left-handed pitching prospect, Sterling Hitchcock, who in 1994 was pitching in the Bronx for a third successive season (with some success).
Pettitte, then twenty-two years old, began 1994 in Albany, where he won seven of his 11 starts with a sparkling 2.71 ERA. He was promoted to Columbus and became the Clippers’ best starter, winning another seven games with a 2.98 ERA and a WHIP of 1.262.
“That year, I felt I showed at Columbus that I was ready for the big leagues,” Pettitte said when asked to recall his 1994 season two decades later. “I think I expected a call-up later that year. In retrospect, I probably needed another off-season of development, of weight training and conditioning. But I was pretty pleased with my growth as a pitcher.”
Pettitte’s fastball still was no more than 91 miles an hour, but his breaking pitches had become sharper and more reliable. “Andy had total command of a game even at that age,” said Brian Cashman. “He was very assured on the mound. He was six-foot-five and getting pretty muscular. He just stared down hitters. The will to succeed was evident.”
And still, Pettitte had not overcome the comparisons to Hitchcock, who had compiled a 4-1 record in 23 games as a starter and reliever for Showalter’s Yankees in 1994. But Hitchcock was more erratic and walked a lot of batters, which elevated his pitch count and got him into long innings.
The Pettitte-Hitchcock debate raged on in countless front-office meetings, especially since most everyone felt one of the two would eventually be traded. But which one?
Merrill was often asked his opinion, since he had managed both in the minors. “The thing is, neither Pettitte or Hitchcock were flamethrowers,” he said. “And baseball people always say the most important pitch is the fastball. And it is. But only if that fastball is well located. Speed is not the only factor. So, to me, Pettitte had better command. And that mattered.
“Which one would I have traded? It wouldn’t have been Pettitte. The secret to good major league pitching is screwing up the hitter’s timing. And that’s what Pettitte was able to do.
“But you had to see him over and over to appreciate all his attributes. He had intense concentration, the ability to locate the baseball, and he could change speeds. And he hated to get beat—his dark eyes would narrow like he was going to explode. It was almost scary.
“Looking back, in 1994 I didn’t know he was going to be as good as he was, and anybody who says they did is probably misremembering—or full of shit. But Andy did have a look. And the look was a mix of ‘Don’t count me out’ and ‘Don’t mess with me.’”