GEORGE STEINBRENNER ACCOMPANIED the Yankees during parts of their disastrous West Coast road trip. He was a regular presence in the clubhouse, where he routinely spoke with reporters.
The message was always the same, or nearly so. “I’ve given my full support to the manager and the players,” Steinbrenner said. “We also have the highest payroll in baseball. I hate to keep saying that, but for that kind of money, an owner should expect excellence. Is this excellence?
“But I’m not running things. The manager, the coaches and the players—they’re the ones who will decide the team’s fate right now.”
Steinbrenner’s public stance was an admirable improvement on his destructive, bombastic public outbursts whenever his Yankees were struggling in the 1970s and 1980s.
But anyone who had spent even a few days in Steinbrenner’s presence knew that, behind the scenes, he was not being as hands-off as he made it sound. His banishment from the game had indeed taught him a modicum of forbearance. He had not aggressively thrust himself into the on-field management of the team for most of the season. But with a place in the playoffs still a remote possibility for his Yankees, and a month left in the season, a switch was flipped and Steinbrenner returned to his roots.
“When the playoffs were right around the corner, when he could almost see and feel the postseason, that’s when George became the most worked up,” Lou Piniella, who played, coached or managed for Steinbrenner for 15 seasons, said in a 2017 interview. “He always wanted to win so much. He just had trouble containing all that emotion.”
And so, as summer turned to fall in 1995, Steinbrenner’s phone calls to his general manager and manager took on new urgency. They had a frantic quality that veteran members of the staff, like Piniella’s former Yankees ally Gene Michael, recognized immediately. There was no discernible pattern to the calls—Steinbrenner might not reach out for a few days, or he might call several times in one day.
But he would keep calling. Everyone who had been in Steinbrenner’s employ knew how persistent and unrelenting the owner could be.
Harvey Greene was the team’s media chief in the mid- to late eighties, before the advent of cell phones. “On the road in those days,” he said, “if you got back to your hotel room late at night and the hotel phone message light was blinking, you knew either there had been a death in the family or George was looking for you.”
Greene added: “After a while, you started to hope that there had been a death in the family.”
Greene’s successor with the Yankees, Jeff Idelson, who went on to become the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, was making one of his first trips with the Yankees in 1989. He noticed that his hotel room in Minneapolis had a phone in the bathroom, something Idelson had never seen before.
He was taking a shower before heading to the ballpark one afternoon when the bathroom phone rang. Idelson knew that Steinbrenner had ordered him to always answer his phone.
“I picked up the telephone, and of course it was Mr. Steinbrenner, and he immediately started dictating a press release that he wanted to issue,” Idelson said. “I couldn’t say, ‘Let me wash off the soap and go get a pencil.’ I knew this was a guy with not a lot of patience.
“I stepped out of the shower and started writing with my finger on the steamed mirror, taking dictation furiously with my index finger. He was going on and on, and the steam was starting to evaporate. I turned the hot water on full blast to make more steam for the mirror. Mr. Steinbrenner said, ‘Now read that back to me.’
“Luckily, I was still able to make it out. But once he hung up, I had to run to get my glasses so I could get it on paper before it disappeared.”
In September 1995, this was the world Buck Showalter now inhabited.
Yes, Steinbrenner had been personally involved with the many details of the Yankees’ on-the-field operation in past years. But the pressure had been muted. The 1993 team, which produced the first winning Yankees season in five years, had been a pleasant surprise. The 1994 Yankees were a juggernaut. What could Steinbrenner have complained about?
But the 1995 team was a consensus favorite for the American League pennant and was supposed to hit the ground running and coast to the postseason. Instead, several chaotic months of fits and spurts had followed. And yet, the Yankees still had a whiff of a playoff chance and Steinbrenner could certainly smell it. It put his dictatorial tendencies into overdrive. He also had complete control of Showalter’s Yankees future. The manager still had no contract for next season.
“Back then with the boss, any Yankees manager in that situation was basically under siege,” Brian Cashman, then the assistant general manager, said. “That changed later, but in 1995, with our playoff chances seeming to slip away, that was a tough environment.” Or as Gene Michael put it, “George smothered the manager when it got close to the end like that.”
Showalter has no trouble recalling Steinbrenner’s meddling, mostly in a playful way. Decades later, some of it seems funny. At the time, though, it was more serious, with a host of suggested lineup changes raining down on the manager’s office. Among them was Steinbrenner’s urging that Showalter make more use of Darryl Strawberry, a free agent whom the Yankees signed that summer when Steinbrenner made it an imperative. The thirty-three-year-old Strawberry, who had played only 61 games in the two previous seasons and was suspended at the start of the 1995 season for cocaine use, had no suitors other than the Yankees.
But Steinbrenner loved giving celebrated players second chances (he also thought it was good marketing and sold tickets). And in retrospect, given Strawberry’s impressive postseason record before he became a Yankee and in the years to come, Showalter may have underused Strawberry.
But Showalter, like his mentor Billy Martin, was resolutely loyal. He valued the core of the team; he would stick with his culture creators. “If you believe that certain guys were brought here to be your leaders,” he said, “how can you deprive them the chance to lead late in the year when you need it most?”
On August 29, Cone gave up only five hits in a 12–4 Yankees win at home. The next day, Pettitte pitched a complete-game five-hitter in another victory. On August 31, O’Neill hit three home runs in a third successive Yankees win.
“We had gone into emergency mode,” O’Neill said in a 2018 interview. “It had become like a last stand. We had squandered enough of the season assuming we’d refind our old selves. There was no more time left. Were we good enough to recover right then?”
On the same day that O’Neill smacked three home runs, Posada and Jeter were recalled from Columbus. It was the first time the quartet that came to be known as the Core Four were together on the Yankees’ active roster. They would remain fixtures with the team until 2004 when Pettitte left as a free agent (only to return in 2007 for six more years). The Yankees that day also promoted outfielder Rubén Rivera, a slugging outfielder the team had signed as an amateur free agent in 1990 along with his cousin Mariano.
One day later, with Rubén on the bench, a brilliant middle-relief performance by Mariano contributed significantly to a fourth consecutive Yankees win. Rivera trotted into the game in the fifth inning after the Oakland Athletics had rallied for four runs to erase a three-run Yankees lead. Rivera shut down Oakland without a hit for the next three and two-thirds innings. He was credited with the win when the Yankees came back for an 8–7 victory.
It was Rivera’s second straight exceptional relief appearance. Four days later, Rivera started a game against Seattle and lost badly. At the time, that appearance was not recorded as a milestone, but it most certainly was. Rivera went to the pitcher’s mound 1,102 more times in his nineteen-year career, all of them in relief.
The 1995 Yankees had finally agreed on what Rivera’s role should be. He became the bullpen setup man for closer John Wetteland, and he showed promise when he gave up just one hit in six relief stints to close out the regular season. But Rivera was not yet the dominating pitcher he became in subsequent seasons.
In the six innings of those six relief appearances, Rivera gave up three earned runs, with three walks and only one strikeout. Not overpowering numbers. The Yankees had found the right spot for the quiet, poised son of a Panamanian fisherman, but at the time, no one was surprised when Showalter and his staff continued to guardedly nurture the twenty-five-year-old Rivera.
“I was still learning,” conceded Rivera, who finished 1995 with a 5-3 record and 5.51 ERA.
On September 11, the Yankees won for the twelfth time in their last 15 games behind a complete-game shutout by McDowell in Cleveland. “Jack is a warrior, and that’s what you need at this time of the season,” Showalter said of McDowell, who had given up just three runs combined in his last three starts.
The Yankees also surged into a half-game lead in the wild-card race. In the next game, O’Neill hit his twentieth homer of the season in a 9–2 rout of the Indians, who were winning nearly 70 percent of their games and had an almost unfathomable 25-game lead in the American League Central Division.
“Once we got on a roll, everything clicked because the team morale was so much better,” O’Neill recalled. “The playoffs came into view, and getting there for Donnie was the overriding goal of everyone. Even Mr. Steinbrenner was talking about getting into the postseason for Donnie.”
Steinbrenner was also still agitated. With roughly a week left in September, the Yankees were a game behind in the wild-card race. “George was just all over me—all over everyone,” Showalter said.
The Yankees had not played in baseball’s postseason since 1981, had last won a World Series in 1978 and hadn’t been in serious playoff contention in late September for ten seasons.
“George was a relatively young man when we won those 1970s championships,” Michael said. “In 1995, he was really wondering if it was ever going to happen again. I would tell him to be calm. But he had seen so many teams fall short for so many years. It had gotten to him.”
Steinbrenner appeared irked on several fronts. He had begun to implement cost-cutting measures in various sectors of the franchise. He was exasperated with the City of New York because plans for a new Yankee Stadium continued to drag—the Yankees had recently rejected the city’s twelfth proposal for newly improved parking and traffic solutions in the neighborhood near the stadium.
The fans’ lingering resentment after the baseball strike was still palpable, and attendance remained down despite the Yankees’ presence in a pennant race, which further vexed the owner. The atmosphere in the team’s offices in New York, always overwrought because of Steinbrenner’s demanding managerial style, was especially tense. So much was at stake on the field, including the substantially added revenue that a long run through the playoffs might provide. In this setting, every facet of the organization was under intense scrutiny—with shocking results in at least one case.
On September 19, in a move that remains something of a confounding mystery more than twenty years later, Steinbrenner abruptly fired three of his most trusted minor league executives. It was a respected trio who had drafted Derek Jeter; signed Pettitte, Rivera and Posada; and helped build the Yankees minor league system into one of the most admired organizations in baseball.
Bill Livesey, the vice president for player development and scouting, Mitch Lukevics, the director of minor league operations, and scouting coordinator Kevin Elfering were unceremoniously dismissed at the annual meetings of Major League Baseball’s farm system and scouting directors in Arizona.
“Joe Molloy went with us to those meetings, and we flew out there first class, which was highly unusual to say the least,” Lukevics said, recalling the 1995 trip. Molloy, who had run the Yankees during George Steinbrenner’s suspension, was still a general partner with the team.
“But it was very strange that Joe was even there,” Lukevics said. “And then he suggested that the four of us meet in his hotel room the next morning, before we headed over to the meetings.
“You had a sense something was going on. We got in Joe’s hotel room the next morning and he says, ‘Your services are no longer needed.’
“There was no explanation. He didn’t say, ‘You screwed up this,’ or ‘You guys did this thing wrong.’ No one ever said that to us. It was never clear why. It’s still not clear.
“We booked a flight back to Tampa that afternoon. We sat there looking at each other and said, ‘What just happened?’”
Livesey, who had been with the Yankees since 1979 as a minor league manager, scout or player development chief, did not have an answer to the question then, nor did he have one decades later. “None of us knows the whole story,” Livesey, whose tenure with the Yankees was one of the longest of any employee in the Steinbrenner era, said. “I went back and worked for the Yankees in 2008 and never really found out.
“I was told by some really veteran guys at the time that George does this kind of thing every five or six years. And if you study his history, he gives the minor league system guys everything for a while and then he cuts back. He did it in 1982–83 and again in 1987–88. I guess we were caught in a trend.”
Asked about the firing of Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering in 2017, Brian Cashman looked down and shook his head. “The boss had some bad advice from people that weren’t really baseball people,” he said. “And he decided to take a leap of faith and he made some changes and we lost some really high-end baseball people who had contributed very successfully to the franchise.”
Asked to elaborate on whom Steinbrenner was consulting at the time, Cashman declined to say more.
There may have been unspoken factors. The Yankees top minor league team in Columbus had missed the playoffs the last three seasons. Only one Yankee minor league team had made the playoffs in 1995. Part of the Yankee Way, the unofficial five-hundred-page manual Livesey helped devise, stressed winning minor league teams.
Joe Molloy, who is still based in the Tampa area, did not respond to multiple attempts to be interviewed for this book.
David Sussman, who was the team’s chief operating officer from 1992 to 1996, had no recollection of the firings of Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering twenty-three years later, adding that he would not have been brought into the loop on many baseball-specific decisions.
Gene Michael, meanwhile, did not want to talk in depth about the purge of the three top minor league officials, but he insisted the dismissals weren’t his idea. “No way—those guys had helped produce so many players for us,” he said. “How much of the 1995 roster was homegrown talent?”
Besides Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and both Rubén and Mariano Rivera, other former Yankee farmhands on the team in September 1995 included Bernie Williams, Don Mattingly, Sterling Hitchcock, Jim Leyritz, Gerald Williams, Pat Kelly, Russ Davis and pitcher Scott Kamieniecki. Many more Yankee farmhands were on the way in succeeding seasons.
In addition, prospects in the Yankee farm system had been used to trade for O’Neill, Cone, McDowell and Wetteland. Importantly, because the Yankees farm system had been rich with high-level talent, those trades could be executed without having to include the most prized prospects, like Jeter, Pettitte, Rivera or Posada.
Less than a week after they were discharged by the Yankees, Livesey, Lukevics and Elfering were hired by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who promptly put the trio at or near the top of their minor league and scouting operations.
“It was a shame because we knew the cupboard was stocked for the Yankees,” Lukevics said. “We knew the caliber of talent that had been developed and the caliber of the people in that group. Some of them are now headed to the Hall of Fame. They were dependable, reliable guys who had been set up to succeed. And to this day, it’s not clear why we didn’t get to stick around to see some of that happen.”
The sweeping turnover at the top of the Yankees minor league operations did not make much news in the New York press. The team was in the midst of a taut wild-card playoff race with Seattle and the Angels, who were also battling for the AL West title.
The Yankees continued to win at a furious pace, led by Bernie Williams, who was now twenty-seven years old and a feared switch-hitter. Williams was not only on his way to career highs in home runs, RBI and batting average; he was saving his best for the Yankees’ surge through September. At one point, Williams, who had also developed into a defensive force in center field, reached base in 20 of 27 plate appearances. A constant of the lineup, he started 195 of the last 196 Yankees games.
The Yankees, winners of 22 of their last 29 games, headed to Toronto for the final three games of the 1995 season with a one-game lead in the chase for the AL wild-card berth. A sweep of the series would clinch a playoff berth.
But there had been much drama behind the scenes before the trip to Toronto. Steinbrenner and Showalter had been arguing for days, a dispute that centered around which pitchers Showalter should start during the final weekend. Steinbrenner insisted that he wanted David Cone, the Yankees ace, to pitch the final game in Toronto.
Showalter wanted to use Cone only if the Yankees faced elimination in the final regular-season game. He was trying to keep Cone as rested as possible in case he was needed for a one-game playoff, should the Yankees end up tied with the Angels or Mariners at the end of the regular season. In the best-case scenario, if the Yankees earned the wild-card spot without a playoff, then Cone would also be ready to pitch the first game of the ensuing AL division series. In the worst case, if the Yankees faltered early in the Toronto series and desperately needed one last regular-season victory to extend their season, he would pitch on three days rest on the final day of the regular season.
“My biggest hope was that we’d have David available to pitch two games in that division series because he was so experienced in the playoffs,” Showalter said. “I wasn’t sure we could compete in that kind of series without pitching him twice.”
There was some risk to Showalter’s strategy, especially since he was also giving McDowell ten days off to nurse what was now a torn rib cage muscle, but he thought it was wise to be looking ahead and not just at the three games in Toronto.
“Mr. Steinbrenner thought my strategy was stupid and told me I was going to blow it,” Showalter said. “He yelled and called me a stubborn German so-and-so, except he used a stronger word.”
Showalter laughed heartily. “I don’t even think I’m German,” he said. “But, you know, right after that he left the room.”
Showalter instead trusted his younger pitchers. Pettitte and Kamieniecki started and won the first two games in Toronto. Sterling Hitchcock won the third and last game, clinching the wild-card berth.
When the final out was registered in the Yankees regular-season finale on October 1, Mattingly dropped to one knee and pounded the turf inside the Toronto SkyDome. After 1,785 regular-season games, he was headed to the postseason.
“Of course, afterward, George didn’t tell me, ‘Nice going, Buck, our pitching is really set up now,’” Showalter said. “He just moved on.”
In fact, several of the Yankees coaches recall that they assembled in Showalter’s office after the final game to celebrate when Steinbrenner barged in and shocked the group with a bellowing admonition: “You assholes better get to the World Series.”
Outside the locker room, Steinbrenner was far more ebullient. He compared Showalter to Billy Martin, the ultimate compliment in Steinbrenner’s world.
Showalter was, the Yankees’ owner said, “a genius—every move he made worked out.” That prompted a reporter to ask Steinbrenner if he was now ready to extend the expiring contract of his manager.
Steinbrenner, with a look of surprise, smiled and frowned at the same time, then waved off the question.
In the division series, the Yankees would face the Seattle Mariners, who finished the season by winning 25 of their last 36 games. Seattle claimed the AL West title with a one-game playoff victory over the Angels, as Randy Johnson, who won 13 of his last 14 decisions, pitched a complete-game three-hitter and gave up no earned runs.
The Yankees, who would host the first two games of a best-of-five series, had a brief practice at Yankee Stadium while the Mariners were flying to New York.
Mattingly, who hit .321 in September and had been in tears after the playoff-clinching victory in Toronto, was all smiles in the home clubhouse after the Yankees’ workout. “We’ve come back from a lot,” he said, opening letters from a knee-high stack of fan mail in his locker. “I mean, we’ve come back from dark times. That’s the big point. It’s been a long comeback that was years in the making.
“Now we have a chance to go to the next level.”