ON MAY 23, 1995, against the California Angels, the inaugural day of the Yankees’ first major road trip of the season, Mariano Rivera walked to the pitcher’s mound of a big league park for the first time. It was only his second time inside any major league stadium. The first was two days earlier, when he sat on the bench at Yankee Stadium.
Rivera had been having a good year at Columbus, although his right shoulder had been aching for more than a month. It was diagnosed as normal soreness, the kind of thing that pitchers must endure. But Rivera felt the discomfort was inhibiting his fastball and cutter and limiting the velocity on those pitches to 87 or 88 miles an hour when he had been used to throwing about two or three miles an hour faster.
Rivera had been given Yankees jersey number 42, something he considered a step up, since he had worn 58 in spring training. Rivera started the game with a largely uneventful first two innings. He did give up two hits but managed to escape without the Angels scoring a run.
In the third inning, California scratched out two runs on three hits, and in the bottom of the fourth, Rivera quickly gave up back-to-back singles. California center fielder Jim Edmonds then swatted at a so-so fastball that hung over the middle of the plate, launching it over the right-field fence.
Rivera exited with an ignominious pitching line: 3⅓ innings pitched, 8 hits, 5 earned runs, 3 walks and 5 strikeouts. His record fell to 0-1 when the Yankees lost, 10–0. California starter Chuck Finley didn’t give up a hit until the sixth inning and yielded just one single and a triple in nine innings. “I wished I had done better,” Rivera said when asked to recall his first outing years later. “But I felt like I got some batters out with good pitches. I wasn’t overly discouraged.”
The next night, the Yankees’ Jack McDowell took a no-hitter and a 1–0 lead into the eighth inning. California’s Chili Davis broke up the no-hitter and soon after scored to tie the game. Another hit put the Angels ahead, and an error by Bernie Williams helped make the game 3–1, which became the final score.
“Yeah, I pitched well for most of the game but that’s not what I’m paid for, am I?” McDowell said afterward. “I’m paid to win games.”
The Angels completed the three-game sweep with a 15–2 thrashing the next day. The Yankees moved up the coast to Oakland, where their losing streak continued when Sterling Hitchcock lost a 3–2 lead in the seventh inning on a two-run homer by Athletics catcher Terry Steinbach.
The next game was Andy Pettitte’s chance to show, for the first time in the big leagues, what he could do as a starter.
Pettitte had good command of all his pitches but trailed 2–0 after two innings, with both runs unearned because of an error by shortstop Randy Velarde. When Oakland’s Rubén Sierra, who would be a Yankee in another few weeks, homered in the sixth inning for a 3–0 lead, Pettitte’s night was over.
Meanwhile, the Yankees were being held hitless again. Finally, in the sixth inning, there was a solitary single for the visiting team, and the Athletics starter Steve Ontiveros closed a one-hit, 3–0 shutout. Pettitte’s line was reasonable if uneven: 5⅓ innings pitched, 7 hits, 1 earned run, 2 walks and 3 strikeouts.
“Not bad, not good enough” is how Pettitte evaluated the start more than twenty years later.
Rivera earned his first victory the next afternoon, on Memorial Day, protecting a 4–1 lead into the sixth inning after home runs by O’Neill and Williams.
Earlier that day, the Columbus manager, Bill Evers, woke Derek Jeter with a 6 a.m. phone call. Evers told Jeter to get out of bed, because he would be at Jeter’s hotel room in ten minutes.
Gene Michael might have spent the last few years insisting that the Yankees would keep their homegrown talent in the team’s system, but the Yankees’ long-standing reputation for impatient and impulsive moves lingered. It still had legs. The evidence?
Jeter was scared. He figured he had been traded.
“I thought I was done,” he said.
Evers instead told him that Tony Fernández had pulled a muscle in his rib cage. Fernández’s replacement, Kevin Elster, was hitting just .118, and the team’s executives knew that Jeter was batting .354 at Columbus.
Jeter was ordered to meet the Yankees in Seattle, where they would begin a three-game series the next night.
The news spread to 2415 Cumberland Street in Kalamazoo, where Jeter’s father, Charles, left his home the next morning at 3 a.m. and arrived in Seattle in time to see his twenty-year-old son go 0-for-5. With two outs in the eleventh inning, Jeter struck out with his former minor league buddy Gerald Williams on third base as the go-ahead run. Seattle’s Rich Amaral led off the twelfth inning with a walk-off homer.
In his second at-bat of the next night’s game, Jeter rapped a single to left for his first major league hit in yet another Yankees defeat.
The Yankees couldn’t wait to get home and end their nightmare along the Pacific Ocean. But there was still one game left.
Showalter decided to alter his personal routine in hopes of shaking his team out of its torpor. Instead of taking a taxi to the Kingdome, he walked the two miles from the team’s hotel to the stadium. Along the way, Showalter, though not impetuous by nature, unexpectedly walked into a barbershop. He had not planned to get a haircut. “I walked past it and after about ten yards decided to go back and open the door,” he said. “It looked like a nice place.”
He struck up a conversation with the barber, who wanted to know if Showalter was in town for business.
“Yeah, and it’s not going too well,” Showalter answered. “It’s driving me crazy, in fact.”
The barber changed the subject to talk about the weather.
His haircut finished, Showalter was leaving a tip on the way out the door when the barber said he hoped to see him on his next business trip to Seattle.
Showalter chirped, “By the time I come back, I might not have any hair.”
Seattle’s pitcher for that night’s game was Randy Johnson. It was the first start for the six-foot-ten Johnson against the 1995 Yankees, to whom he’d lost two of three games he started in 1994. His last appearance against the Yankees was a 9–3 thrashing inside the Seattle Kingdome.
In addition to Johnson’s pursuit of redemption—as if the game needed any more weight for the Yankees—there was recent bad blood between the teams. The Yankees’ Steve Howe, a brash, trash-talking reliever who was unpopular with many opponents, had nailed Mariners shortstop Felix Fermin with a fastball in the elbow the previous night. The Yankees were so sure there would be retaliation, Paul O’Neill went to the plate the next inning of the game and told Seattle catcher Chad Kreuter, “Get it over with now; hit me in the leg and let’s be done with it.”
But no Yankee was plunked. Some in the visiting clubhouse afterward thought the Mariners were taking it easy on an opponent they had already beaten twice. But Showalter was convinced otherwise. He predicted that Johnson, who had already led the major leagues in hit batsmen in two previous seasons, would throw at some Yankee in the series finale.
With two outs in the sixth inning and the Yankees leading 5–3, Johnson came inside with a high fastball against Leyritz, whose batting stance had him leaning toward home plate as he began his swing.
Leyritz threw up his left arm to deflect the thunderbolt hurtling toward him. The pitch ricocheted off his elbow and careened into his left cheek, just below the eye.
As Leyritz lay on the ground, with trainers trying to get him to recite the alphabet or spell his name, the Yankees’ dugout emptied. Seattle manager Lou Piniella and his reserves charged from their bench to keep it an even fight. There were no punches thrown, but for several minutes there was plenty of pushing, shoving and cursing.
Showalter was livid with home plate umpire Tim Tschida, whom he had warned about Johnson before the game. He forecast a high, inside pitch to a Yankee, and now that it had happened, he wanted Johnson ejected. Showalter stuck a finger in Tschida’s face to emphasize that point of view. Tschida didn’t throw Johnson out of the game, but he did give Showalter the thumb.
That brought on a new level of histrionics by a slew of Yankees. When order was finally restored, Leyritz stayed in the game. Hitchcock, the Yankees’ starter, quickly gave up a host of hits, and suddenly Seattle was leading 7–5. The Yankees charged back in the seventh inning to take a 9–7 lead, but gave up that advantage as well on a long home run by Seattle first baseman Tino Martinez, who was becoming something of a Yankee killer.
After the game, yet another heartbreaking loss, the Yankees vowed that their dispute with Randy Johnson was not over. “He better hope he doesn’t see me out anywhere,” Leyritz, sporting a golf-ball-size welt under his left eye, said as he packed for the red-eye flight home.
Piniella, the former Yankees player and manager who was a veteran of many years of open feuding and fisticuffs between the Yankees and Boston Red Sox, seemed to relish the budding, hostile rivalry between his old team and the up-and-coming Mariners. “You can tell the Yankees that we’re not going anywhere,” he said.
Piniella, whose team was beginning to take on his pugnacious approach to the game, added, “We’ve got some feisty guys, too.”
The Yankees took their browbeaten, wounded team back east. And the hits to their psyche and lineup kept coming. After the game, the team announced that second baseman Pat Kelly would need arthroscopic surgery to repair torn ligaments in his left wrist. Kelly would become the sixth Yankee on the disabled list in a season that was not much more than a month old.
Said Wade Boggs: “It’s MRI heaven around this place. MRI, surgery, rehab, ice, rehab—that’s us.”
If the Yankees were physically ailing, when they returned home there was news that jabbed at their psyches as well. It was, in a way, the resurrection of the 1991 Mattingly haircut flap. Except this time it was about facial hair. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. The Yankees responded by losing the first two games of their ten-game homestand to fall into last place, nine games behind first-place Boston.
George Steinbrenner’s policy about longish hair and facial hair had been in place since the mid-seventies. Hair could only tickle the collar, not obscure it, and the Yankees were expected to be clean-shaven (or close to it) except for mustaches.
But then Jack McDowell came to the Yankees. Nicknamed “Black Jack,” McDowell was a six-foot-five, intimidating presence on the mound. Throughout his seven years with the White Sox, when he won a Cy Young and more than 61 percent of his decisions, he sported a full goatee that was almost like a Fu Manchu mustache.
During one of his earliest days as a Yankee in spring training, McDowell asked to meet with Steinbrenner, and when he was summoned to the owner’s office, McDowell explained that part of the “Black Jack McDowell” persona was his goatee. He told Steinbrenner that he thought it added to his aura as a tall, hard-throwing pitcher. It was a psychological advantage he held over hitters and part of why he had averaged almost seven strikeouts per nine innings for most of his career.
“I’m a better pitcher with the goatee,” McDowell said.
And Steinbrenner, softened by his banishment, agreed to let McDowell wear a goatee. “I figured that everyone would know it was just a one-time thing,” Steinbrenner later said.
Except it wasn’t.
By June and the Yankees’ disastrous West Coast road trip, Mattingly, Pat Kelly and John Wetteland had grown goatees. When the Yankees got back to New York, Showalter and Michael—who were close witnesses to the calamitous 1991 Mattingly haircut dustup—informed the players that the old facial hair policy had been reinstated.
McDowell, Mattingly, Wetteland and anyone else halfway to a goatee or Fu Manchu had to shave.
Times had changed. Steinbrenner’s dictum did not fracture the clubhouse or prompt the insubordination it did previously. Back in 1991, significantly, the order had not come directly from Steinbrenner, because officially he was forbidden from communicating with his players and manager. In 1995, there was no mistaking the origin of the newly reenforced facial hair policy.
The players shaved. But they weren’t happy about it. “Slap-on-the-wrist bullshit,” Mattingly said. “They shouldn’t have relaxed it in the first place if they were going to take it away.”
Steinbrenner, meanwhile, sounded like a school principal who had finally put his foot down after he realized the bad kids were leading the good kids astray. “I didn’t figure it would be player see, player do,” he said. “I thought they would understand what I was doing for Jack and realize it was a way to make him feel at home as a Yankee. But pretty soon all of them had one. I just got tired of it.
“They’re all such good-looking guys, and the beards were making them start to look like not such good-looking guys.”
McDowell was annoyed but sardonic. “I guess I wouldn’t get the full flavor of what the New York Yankees are without something like this coming up during the summer,” he said. “It’s great for the New York tabloids.”
McDowell’s goatee was not as big a deal as Mattingly’s clipped locks four years earlier. It did not make for screaming headlines because McDowell simply didn’t move the needle that much.
At least not yet. His tabloid prime time was coming.
But McDowell’s clean-shaven face soon went 0-2, dropping his record to 1-4. McDowell had not won a game since his Yankee debut in late April—eight successive starts without a victory.
In the midst of the persistent losing—the Yankees had one victory in their last 13 games—there was a career milestone to mark. Showalter surpassed Billy Martin’s record for most consecutive games managed under Steinbrenner’s Yankees. From 1975 to 1978, Martin had survived for 470 days.
As reporters quizzed Showalter about the signal achievement for a Yankees manager in the Steinbrenner era, he all but squirmed in his office desk chair. Perhaps it was because Martin’s framed 1976 jersey hung on the wall behind his desk. Or maybe it was the painting of Martin that graced another wall in the office. Showalter knew how tenuous praise for longevity under Steinbrenner could be. He had personally witnessed the 1988 season, when Steinbrenner dismissed Martin even though the Yankees were 12 games over .500 and had been in first place for most of the season. It turned out to be Martin’s last season as a manager.
“I knew Billy had been fired five times,” Showalter said, recalling the moment many years later. “It felt a little weird to be talking about how long I had lasted in the job, especially with Billy as the reference point. I knew the history.”
He was also practical, a trait he highly valued.
Showalter, for example, had rented an apartment or home since he had begun working in New York. Once, Steinbrenner asked him why he didn’t buy a house.
“Because I work for you,” Showalter answered.
Still, Steinbrenner used the occasion of Showalter’s consecutive-games-managed record to offer praise for his manager’s detailed pregame preparation. Steinbrenner added that it was “something more like what a football coach does.”
It was the ultimate compliment from the former assistant on the Northwestern and Purdue University football staffs.
Showalter remained cautious. “It’s flattering, but at the same time it doesn’t change anything. There’s a boss and we’re employees working under him, and you have to understand that arrangement. I had respect for the ground rules from the first day I took the job, and I’ll have it until the day I leave.”
Murray Chass, the New York Times’s national baseball writer, called Lou Piniella on the occasion of Showalter’s milestone. Piniella, twice fired by Steinbrenner, congratulated Showalter on his record. Then Piniella, who is more of a serious baseball scholar than his regular-guy demeanor lets on, chuckled and said, “It’s certainly not going to be a threat to Connie Mack’s record.”
Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 7,396 successive games from 1901 to 1950.
But Showalter had far bigger problems than trailing Connie Mack’s record by nearly 7,000 games. His team continued to flag, sinking deeper in the cellar of the AL East. The Yankees seemed to be more than sleepwalking. It was as if there remained a mental barrier to the team’s success.
“It was a team that wanted to have the mentality of a defending champion after 1994,” he said in 2017. “But everywhere we went, we were told that 1994 didn’t matter. We were told that we hadn’t won anything. Or we were reminded that we hadn’t won anything.
“So it was like we were asking ourselves: What was it that happened in 1994, then? It left everyone out of sorts. It took a long time to get the right feel back. We were just kind of wandering in limbo.”
Since so many Yankees still had a foot in the 1994 season, the 1995 Yankees needed a jolt from someone unconnected to the previous season. And on June 7, Andy Pettitte successfully stanched some of the bleeding by winning his first major league game. He gave up just four hits and one run in seven innings.
But the boost that Pettitte provided was short-lived. Some of his rookie brethren were not making contributions of equal value.
Four days after Pettitte’s debut victory, Mariano Rivera gave up seven hits and five runs in a little more than two innings against Seattle. In his previous start, he had been bashed for two homers and seven runs, including a monstrous grand slam.
Most disturbing to the Yankees brain trust, Rivera’s velocity was down. He had not struck out a single batter in the outing against the Mariners, who had also rocketed several Rivera pitches deep into the vast expanse of left-center field at Yankee Stadium. Rivera’s ERA was 10.20.
Derek Jeter had played shortstop in the Seattle game on June 11, going 1-for-4. As Tony Fernández’s replacement for 13 games, Jeter had hit .234. But Jeter was never meant to be the everyday shortstop in 1995, and Gene Michael had little interest in exposing the franchise’s best prospect to the rocky tumult of an uneven, confounding season. Especially since George Steinbrenner was already grousing about Michael having wasted far too much money on an underachieving, last-place team. Michael wanted Jeter out of the spotlight for now. That is why he had paid Fernández, a thirteen-year veteran and four-time All-Star, $1.6 million to come to the Yankees. Let him take the heat. Let the thirty-three-year-old Fernández weather the pennant chase pressure and ever-increasing scrutiny of an exasperated Steinbrenner. Fernández could handle it. It was time to let Jeter, who would turn twenty-one in a couple of weeks, return to the shadows just outside the New York spotlight.
The Yankees were about to begin a road trip with four games in Detroit. Before departing Yankee Stadium, Rivera and Jeter, one by one, were summoned into Showalter’s office, where they learned that they would not be on the team’s charter flight to Detroit. The two players were instead handed tickets for their flight the following day from Newark to Charlotte, where the Columbus Clippers were continuing their road trip.
“Maybe, in the back of my head, I didn’t expect to stay in the majors,” Jeter said. “But it didn’t make me feel any better at the time.”
The Yankees’ traveling secretary had arranged for a cab to take Rivera and Jeter to a hotel that the team had reserved for the players in New Jersey. They would fly out first thing in the morning so they could resume their Class AAA minor league careers in a game the next night.
Rivera recalled that the cab ride to New Jersey was silent. He and Jeter walked across the street from their hotel to a Bennigan’s, an Irish pub–themed casual-dining chain that was popular in the New York area in the mid-nineties. It was the kind of place that would have likely been filled with Yankees fans in the summer of 1995. But no one recognized the two players who had just been dispatched from the big league club. They sat in a booth facing each other.
Rivera apologized to Jeter, suggesting that had he pitched better, maybe the two of them wouldn’t have been sent down.
Jeter dismissed that idea. “I just said that we would have to prove ourselves again,” he recalled. “It was the only way to get back up there. And I said so—once or twice.” Jeter smiled, adding, “Maybe I said it more than that.”
Rivera quietly nodded in agreement. He also said he was going to confess to the Columbus coaches how much his shoulder was bothering him, something he was reluctant to do during his past two starts with the Yankees.
Arriving in Charlotte the next day, Jeter started at shortstop.
“Derek had a walk and two hits that night—a double and a triple,” said Stump Merrill, who was a Yankees roving minor league adviser in 1995. “I think he stole two bases, too. I thought to myself, ‘So much for the kid reacting badly to the letdown of a demotion.’”
Rivera, meanwhile, was placed on the 15-day disabled list. The hope was that some rest would do Rivera’s usually resilient arm some good. If that didn’t work, the Yankees front office was already discussing another plan. They would trade Rivera while he still had some worth. They would do it, as Michael liked to say, before the rest of baseball discovered what the Yankees already knew about the struggling pitching prospect, who had cost the team $2,000 in 1990.