Sometimes it’s painful, and balancing what’s best for the future and now isn’t easy. People are patient to an extent, but it’s not going to last very long. You have to stay strong in your convictions and believe in what you’re doing.—DAVE DOMBROWSKI, baseball executive
When New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died in 2010, having presided over the franchise for thirty-seven years and seven championships, his obituary in the New York Times credited him for taking over a “declining Yankees team” and building it into a powerhouse.1 In the Washington Post, it was said that he “transformed a team failing at the box office and on the field,” while the Wall Street Journal suggested that he turned “a moribund franchise” into the most powerful team in sports.2 Although there is no denying the accomplishments of the Yankees on Steinbrenner’s watch, the degree of disarray he inherited has been exaggerated. The man who inherited a Yankee team in disarray was Mike Burke, who had been team president for six years when Steinbrenner took charge and who had begun the process of turning the ship around.
Unlike the other teams we explore in this book, the Yankees during the reign of Burke and general manager Lee MacPhail never reached the postseason. Nevertheless, their story is interesting because it illustrates the difficulty even competent baseball men, even in baseball’s largest and most prestigious market, had in rebuilding a franchise under the unique circumstances of the era.
Before 1965 the Yankees could use their money and prestige to land the best Minor Leaguers and later the top amateur talent, helping them stay on top for decades. After 1976, with the advent of baseball free agency, a team with deep pockets had the advantage of being able to afford the best veteran Major Leaguers on the market. In the intervening years rich teams like the Yankees had neither advantage. In order to get the best amateur players, a team had to outscout and outdevelop the competition. The top black players were by this time all in organized baseball. There were no poor teams forced to sell their stars. To acquire the best Major League talent took astute scouting and trading. Building a team, even a team like the Yankees, would take brains and a fair bit of patience.
As we have seen, by 1960 the New York Yankees had been owned for thirteen years by the partnership of Del Webb and Dan Topping, with Topping serving as president, George Weiss as general manager, and Casey Stengel (since 1949) as manager. Under the direction of Weiss, a superb cadre of scouts, and a great development system, the team kept churning out star after star, hardly missing a beat as Joe DiMaggio, Tommy Henrich, Allie Reynolds, and Phil Rizzuto made way for Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Gil McDougald, Elston Howard, and plenty more. Weiss also made a number of shrewd acquisitions, adding the likes of Eddie Lopat, Johnny Mize, Clete Boyer, and Roger Maris, all of whom helped win multiple titles. The team won ten pennants and seven World Series in twelve years under the Weiss and Stengel regime.
After losing the 1960 World Series Topping forced out Weiss and Stengel, replacing them with Roy Hamey and Ralph Houk. After three more pennants and two world championships, in 1964 Houk moved upstairs to replace Hamey and hired Berra as manager. The club captured another pennant, its fourteenth in sixteen years. Like all Yankee teams of the previous four decades, this club was an effective blend of experience and youth. Mantle and Ford, two of the league’s best players, were thirty-two and thirty-three, respectively, but still playing well. Maris, Tony Kubek, and Bobby Richardson were in their late twenties. In just the past few years the Yankees farm system had produced shortstop-outfielder Tom Tresh (now twenty-five), already a two-time all-star; pitcher Jim Bouton (twenty-five), the winner of thirty-nine games in the previous two years; pitcher Mel Stottlemyre (twenty-two), who was called up in mid-1964 and finished 9-3 in twelve starts; pitcher Al Downing (twenty-three), winner of thirteen games each of the past two seasons; and first baseman Joe Pepitone (twenty-three), who had just hit thirty-one home runs. The only key old player was Howard (thirty-five), though he was coming off his best two seasons. The Yankees had stayed on top for decades by continually producing young talent, and the latest crop looked typically promising.
In November 1964 Webb and Topping sold 80 percent of the Yankees to the Columbia Broadcasting System for fourteen million dollars. Although the sale caused worry in some quarters, and near panic in the media and around baseball, CBS claimed no intention of influencing the running of the team, and there is no record that they did so. The purchase was part of a concerted diversification effort for the company—in this period they also purchased magazine publishers, toy companies, and the electric guitar company Fender. The Yankees were a famous and successful enterprise, and their continued success would only further enhance CBS’s brand. To run the Yankees, Topping and Houk remained as president and GM, respectively, though Houk fired Berra after the 1964 World Series in favor of Johnny Keane.
And, just like that, the 1965 Yankees collapsed to sixth place, their worst showing since 1925.
The team declined principally for the same reasons most teams decline: injuries (to Mantle, Maris, Kubek, and Bouton, among others) and aging (especially Elston Howard, who suddenly played like the thirty-six-year-old catcher that he was). They were also somewhat unlucky (they outscored their opponents but still finished 77-85). In reality, the collapse was “shocking” only because they were the Yankees, who had finished over .500 for thirty-nine consecutive seasons. Several other pennant winners from the period dropped to the second division the following year, including the 1960 Pirates and the 1966 Dodgers and Orioles. But such a result was not supposed to happen to the Yankees, who had survived the losses of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio without missing a beat. Many observers, including perhaps the people running the Yankees, believed that they would “replace” Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford the same way. The early 1960s Yankees were a fairly top-heavy team, with much of their talent tied up in a handful of stars. When Maris, Howard, Ford, and Mantle got hurt or old (or both) at the same time, no farm system could have realistically filled such huge holes.
One might reasonably wonder why some of the promising young Yankee players from the early 1960s did not have better careers than they did. Jerry Coleman, a former Yankee infielder and a team broadcaster by the 1960s, offered one explanation: “They slid into a degenerate-type thing. That’s why they went downhill.”3 Jim Bouton’s classic book Ball Four,4 released in 1970, detailed stories of the Yankees’ off-field drinking and women chasing and his admiration for how Mickey Mantle could drink all night and play the next day. Mantle later owned up to this behavior that likely shortened his own great career (and life).
“Don’t do what I do,” Mantle once told Pepitone. Unfortunately, as Jane Leavy detailed in her biography of Mantle, the young players revered Mantle and wanted to do nothing so much as hang out late at night with the Mick. “I didn’t care if I slept at all in New York,” outfielder Steve Whitaker, a once-promising prospect, later said. “It’s open 24/7, and, trust me, I closed it.” Unfortunately, the fun came at a price. “In fact,” he says, “it was probably the end of my career.” Bouton pointed out to Leavy that the team drank and caroused just as much when they were winning as when they were losing, but admitted, “We weren’t as good at it in 1965. We didn’t have the energy for it.”5
In the years after Weiss left the organization the club made very few player transactions, apparently confident that they could keep winning with their own players. “We’ll get the edge again, the way we always have,” farm director Johnny Johnson said in 1965. “With superior scouting.”6 Houk made no material deals either prior to or during the 1965 season. That fall he acquired thirty-year-old shortstop Ruben Amaro from the Phillies to try to replace Kubek, whose injuries had forced his retirement. Otherwise, the Yankee strategy seemed to be to wait for their players to return to their previous levels. After the 1966 team started 4-16, Topping convinced Houk to return to the dugout as manager. Keane was fired, and Topping’s son Dan Jr. was anointed as the interim GM. The Yankees played better briefly (winning thirteen of Houk’s first seventeen) before sinking to finish 70-89, in tenth (last) place. It was not a terrible team—their run differential was 611–612—but the Yankees had not finished last since 1912. More important, the team did not have anyone who looked likely to get any better and many players who appeared finished. Their future looked bleaker than their present.
One of the reasons for the Yankees’ decline was their lack of African American talent. They had developed just one quality black player, Elston Howard, in an era when these men were making huge inroads in the game. In the two decades after Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut, there were seventeen black Hall of Famers who debuted in the Major Leagues. For the most part, the teams who actively signed and developed these players became the strong teams, and the teams that did not struggled to compete. The Yankees were the exception, as they rode stars like Mantle, Berra, and Ford to pennant after pennant. Now, perhaps, the problem was catching up with them.
In September 1966 Topping Sr. sold his remaining 10 percent stake to CBS (Webb had sold out the year before) and resigned as president after nineteen years, most likely with the encouragement of his employer. Though Topping had enjoyed tremendous success with the Yankees, the task ahead was unlike any he had faced in his wildly successful tenure. “My family lives permanently in Florida, and I have many other outside activities,” he said at the time. “I think it is in the best interests of the Yankees as well as for myself to leave at this time.”7 To replace Topping Sr., CBS appointed Mike Burke, who had been an executive at CBS for several years and on the Yankee board for the past two.
By the late 1960s many of the most successful franchises, such as Detroit, Cincinnati, and Boston, were overseen by a strong general manager. As the off-field business became more complex and baseball ownerships became more corporate, teams began installing a nonbaseball man, often with little or no equity in the franchise, as the senior executive. Not surprisingly, a large conglomerate like CBS, with vast business holdings in a variety of industries, turned to a versatile business executive like Burke to run the Yankees.
Burke, who wore tailored suits made in Rome, cut a dashing figure, especially compared with the staid and conservative Yankees. He had been a football star at Penn, a war hero, a drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway, an agent with the Office of Strategic Services, and an executive with Ringling Brothers circus, before joining CBS. His job now was to restore a legendary baseball team to its proper place of glory. “I won’t be satisfied,” he said, “until the Yankees are once again the champions of the world.”8
His first public act, on September 27, was to fire beloved broadcaster Red Barber. Burke said that the decision predated his tenure (Topping had described the broadcasting crew as “horrible” in a May memo),9 but the public and press reacted harshly and considered this a poor beginning. Red Smith, satirically praising the Yankees for their foresight in firing “the best reporter that ever covered baseball on the air,” wrote, “A guy that honest had to get canned. The chump was telling the truth about the Yankees.”10
Burke did better in his second act, hiring Lee MacPhail as general manager on October 13, replacing Dan Topping Jr. MacPhail’s father, Larry, had run the Yankees in the 1940s, but Lee had more than bloodlines on his résumé. He had started working for his father in Brooklyn and New York and later served George Weiss’s Yankees as farm director from 1948 to 1958, highly productive years for the organization. He left the Yankees to become general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, helping build the team that won the 1966 World Series. MacPhail left the Orioles in late 1965 when he was asked to serve as the assistant to new baseball commissioner William Eckert. After just a single year in the job, MacPhail wanted to get back to running a team, and he answered Burke’s plea. “This is not a tenth place club, but we’ve got a long row to hoe,” admitted MacPhail.11 Soon after MacPhail took the Yankee job, the Sporting News named him Executive of the Year for his work building the Orioles and hand-holding Eckert.
One person who did not approve of Lee MacPhail’s new job was Larry MacPhail, retired to his Maryland farm but never one to shy away from a story. “I advised Lee several times not to take the job,” said Larry. “CBS doesn’t know anything about baseball. Certainly Burke doesn’t. I’ve got great confidence in Lee’s ability, but someone’s got to call the shots. I doubt [the Yankees] can win a pennant in five years. The damned club was allowed to deteriorate.” Twenty years earlier Larry MacPhail had had a free hand running the Yankees, but the new management team was a triumvirate: Burke, MacPhail, and Houk. “Larry is a free man living in a free world and a very lively spirit,” Burke said. “At the same time he has nothing whatsoever to do with the Yankees. We recognize we have problems, but there’s an enormous opportunity here for the Yankees.”12
In an interview with sportswriter Joe Falls soon after taking over, Lee MacPhail was asked why he thought the Yankees had fallen. “There have been problems in the organization, like George Weiss leaving and a general turnover at the top . . . and frankly, I think their scouting staff got a little old,” he said. “The farm system stopped producing the kind of players they needed to stay on top and down they went.”13 During the years MacPhail ran the Yankees’ farm system, it had produced not only several stars but enough surplus talent to allow the team to acquire the likes of Lopat and Maris. By 1965 there was no surplus—whatever talent the system produced needed to play.
In December MacPhail negotiated a deal to acquire Maury Wills, the Dodgers’ star shortstop. National League president Warren Giles, however, was so upset at the outcome of the Frank Robinson trade, one year earlier, that he “used the weight of his office and also his personal powers of persuasion” to block trades of National League stars to the American League. “I heard the Yankees and the White Sox were especially eager to get Wills,” Giles said. “This was during the winter meetings. So I went to Buzzie [Bavasi] and asked him not to rush into such a deal, because he had until December 15 [the trading deadline]. . . . As a matter of fact, Mike Burke and Lee MacPhail could have killed me when they lost out on Wills. Burke told me, ‘Thanks for sabotaging our deal.’”14 Bavasi instead swapped Wills to the Pirates.
One of the problems Burke faced right away was how unpopular the Yankees had become. In the George Weiss years the Yankees made no effort to promote the team or involve fans in the game. They did not need to sell anything other than a championship ball club, which they delivered regularly. In 1964 the two-year-old New York Mets began playing in brand-new Shea Stadium in Queens, and the cellar-dwelling club beat the league champion Yankees in attendance by five hundred thousand. The Mets went out of their way to cater to young people and families, while the Yankees were seen as a dull corporate team of an earlier generation. Now that a corporation actually owned the team, and now that the team was losing, the long-neglected press and fans saw no reason for loyalty. Burke set out to change this image, inviting the press to call him anytime, staging days at the park for various city groups, and inviting local citizens (not just dignitaries) to throw out the first pitch.
The Mets had long allowed fans to bring banners to the game to show their support for their lovable heroes, a practice the Yankees had once haughtily disallowed. In early 1967 a Yankee loyalist unfurled a banner at the stadium that said “MIKE BURKE IS THE GREATEST,” as much to get on television as anything else.15 “Whether the Yankees were really cold or not,” thought Burke, “or cared about the fans or not, was not material. What was important was that fans felt the Yankees were cold.”16 Burke distributed pamphlets to all employees to spell out how they needed to behave with the fans.17
Burke was once asked whether previous Yankee administrations had taken the game and the team too seriously. “In my measure, yes,” said Burke. “I cannot knock the successful approach of another man in his time, but in this time I believe we need to inculcate a sense of humor. How? By example, not by ukase. You have to communicate your own philosophy, and humor is part of my philosophy.”18 No, these were not the old Yankees.
The new Yankee management team agreed that recovery would not come without action. The old stars were not going to return to their past glory, and the young prospects were not going to “replace” them. Pepitone had stalled as a one-dimensional slugger, Tresh had not built on his early success, and Bouton’s sore arm was not going to heal. MacPhail, with his experience in player development, got to work cleaning house. A week into the job he released Hector Lopez. By the end of the year he had traded Clete Boyer, Roger Maris, and Pedro Ramos, receiving untried youngsters in return. Like most untried youngsters, this group did not help much, let alone replace Mickey Mantle. There would be no quick fix.
Whitey Ford, still pitching well when his sore arm allowed him to take the mound, quit early in the 1967 season. MacPhail dealt Howard to the Red Sox in August, promising Elston a job with the Yankees as soon as he finished his career. Houk moved Mantle to first base in 1967, and the Mick provided two seasons of productive offense, though nothing like the all-around game he once boasted. He retired after the 1968 season. Pepitone, Downing, and Tresh were discarded in 1969.
Slowly, the Yankees began developing talented players. Mel Stottlemyre was the one youngster from the 1964 team who lasted into the 1970s, providing the team a decade of solid pitching. Outfielder Roy White debuted in 1965 and took a couple of years to hit, but by 1968 he was an underrated star. Left-handed pitcher Fritz Peterson came up in 1966 and won 109 games over the next eight seasons. Righty Stan Bahnsen won 17 games and the Rookie of the Year Award in 1968. Bobby Murcer was expected to win the shortstop job in 1967 but was instead drafted into the army. When he came out two years later, the Yankees shifted him to center field, the hallowed turf of DiMaggio and Mantle, and he became one of the league’s best players. All of these players would have fitted in on the great 1950s teams just fine. The 1968 club finished 83-79 and in fifth place; two years later they finished second at 93-69.
Along the way they almost lost Mike Burke, who was a candidate to become baseball commissioner in late 1968. “Only Mike Burke,” wrote Jimmy Cannon, “has the kind of personality which suggests an eccentric fairness and also a contempt for the protocol of selfishness maintained by the franchise owners.”19 Burke nearly got the job, which eventually went to Bowie Kuhn.
One of the positive side effects of the Yankees’ dropoff was that it led to relatively high positions in the annual amateur draft. In 1965 the Yankees nabbed Bahnsen in round 4 but had less luck the following year. In his first year in charge MacPhail had the number-one overall pick in 1967. “It wasn’t simple to determine your pick with different area scouts strongly plugging for the best player in their territory,” MacPhail recalled. In the old days the Yankees would have been free to sign all of these players, rather than just one. “We narrowed our choice down to Greg Luzinski, Ted Simmons, and Ron Blomberg,” he said. [Luzinski wasn’t actually eligible for the draft until the following year.] “Unfortunately, we picked Blomberg. . . . He could run and had outstanding power; moreover he was a left-handed pull hitter with the ideal Yankee Stadium stroke. He seemed to have a good temperament, showed great hustle, and really should have been a star. But it turned out he was not willing to fully dedicate himself to his work.” Blomberg had a few functional seasons with the Yankees before succumbing to injuries.20
The Yankees struck gold in 1968, taking catcher Thurman Munson with the fourth pick in the draft. MacPhail and scout Gene Woodling traveled to Ohio to convince Munson to give up a college scholarship and start his baseball career.21 The Yankees also drafted outfielder Charlie Spikes in 1969, pitcher George “Doc” Medich in 1970, pitcher Ron Guidry in 1971, and pitcher Scott McGregor in 1972. By the early 1970s the Yankees’ farm system had gone from a weakness to a strength.
In 1970 the Yankees offense featured three stars from the system: White (twenty-two home runs, .293), Murcer (twenty-three homers), and Rookie of the Year Munson (.302), destined to be their cocky leader. The club also featured three very good starters—Stottlemyre, Peterson, and Bahnsen (all homegrown)—and a great bullpen of Lindy McDaniel, Jack Aker, and Ron Klimkowski (all acquired in MacPhail trades). Before the 1971 season MacPhail acquired veteran Felipe Alou from Oakland, a sign that he felt the team was ready to compete. But the 1970 season turned out to be a mirage: the offense was not deep and would need more reinforcement.
After falling to 82-80 in 1971, MacPhail made his worst trade with the Yankees, dealing Bahnsen to the White Sox for infielder Rich McKinney. The Yankees intended to move McKinney from second to third base, which had been a trouble spot, and MacPhail felt that he could afford to surrender a starting pitcher from their deep stable. Bahnsen remained a valuable league-average workhorse and won twenty-one games his first year in Chicago. McKinney did not take well to his new position, hitting just .215 in thirty-seven games before being demoted to the Minors and then traded after the season.
The improvement in the Yankees during this period occurred in the shadow of a much larger story on the other side of the East River. When the Miracle Mets broke through in 1969, winning the World Series, they drew more than twice the attendance of the Yankees. “While the new, lightweight Yankees were being built,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1970, “New York fans slipped away in hordes to watch the Mets, and the loss has begun to show significantly at places other than just the gate, where it has been plenty noticeable.” The Mets were winning the battle for television and radio contracts as well.22
But although MacPhail’s conservative approach to rebuilding the team required time and patience, he thought it was close to paying off. “I don’t believe it is possible to build a winning team by trades,” he said in 1972. “It is a must to develop your own players for the key spots, then possibly fill in here and there by trading. I feel our program of development is coming along and will eventually pay off.”23 Nonetheless, MacPhail made his best two trades in 1972, one just before the season and one just after. In March the club swapped singles-hitting first baseman Danny Cater and Minor League infielder Mario Guerrero to the Red Sox for left-handed relief pitcher Sparky Lyle. The Yankees’ depth at the position (they had both Blomberg and Alou available to play first) gave them no need for Cater, and Lyle became a sensation, finishing 9-5 with 35 saves and a 1.92 ERA. By August he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated (“Damn Yankees Again,” said the headline),24 and the Yankees were in the pennant race. “You know,” MacPhail said late in the season, responding to his disgruntled fan base, “the Yankees are in a strange spot. They are not competing against the Tigers, Orioles and the rest of the league. They are competing against ghosts and that’s a battle you can’t win.”25
In November MacPhail again took advantage of the team’s rebuilt organizational depth in two deals. First he traded McKinney and pitcher Rob Gardner to the Athletics for thirty-three-year-old outfielder Matty Alou, Felipe’s brother. A few days later MacPhail dealt four of the farm system’s recently developed players—Charlie Spikes, John Ellis, Rusty Torres, and Jerry Kenney—to the Indians for third baseman Graig Nettles and reserve catcher Gerry Moses.
Nettles was a perfect fit for the club: a defensive star who hit with power from the left side, a skill particularly valued in Yankee Stadium with its short right-field porch. Spikes was the big prize for Cleveland, a twenty-one-year-old slugger (26 homers, .309 at Double-A West Haven) and the jewel of the Yankees’ revamped system. “We’ve been talking to Cleveland since last season,” admitted MacPhail, “but the answer was always the same—they wanted Spikes. We finally decided there was no way to get Nettles without giving him up, even though he was the best prospect we’ve had in years. Now we have as good a club as anybody in baseball.” Ralph Houk was excited. “I’m not worrying about youth,” he said. “It’s time to go out and win it. Our lineup should be the best since our winning teams of 10 years ago.”26 Burke rewarded both Houk and MacPhail with new three-year contracts.
Meanwhile, Burke made his most lasting contribution to the future of New York and the Yankees when he came to a deal with Mayor John Lindsay for the city to thoroughly remodel Yankee Stadium. The fifty-year-old ballpark had been deteriorating without significant upkeep for many years until Burke had the interior and exterior painted in 1967. Five years later he talked Lindsay into backing a twenty-four-million-dollar renovation, the same cost the city had borne to build Shea Stadium for the Mets in 1964. Burke had been aggressively pursued by the officials building new facilities right across the Hudson River in New Jersey and smartly used this leverage with the city. The football Giants, the Yankees cotenants in Yankee Stadium, ultimately decided to abandon New York and move to New Jersey, but Burke had no desire to do so. “Yankee Stadium is the most famous arena since the Roman Coliseum,” he said.27
The renovation ended up costing the city more than a hundred million dollars (largely due to major road redesign), but Burke can be said to have saved the Yankees for New York. He worked out a deal to play both the 1974 and the 1975 seasons in Shea Stadium, allowing the contractors nearly two and a half years for construction. Ultimately, the renovation removed the 105 columns that reinforced the three-tiered grandstand (which had obstructed many views) and replaced the roof and all the seats. The stadium reopened on time in 1976, but by then another man was in charge to reap the benefits. The additional revenues from the revamped ballpark would be critical in helping underwrite the team’s aggressive approach to the coming free agency.
As the calendar flipped to 1973, many observers believed that the Yankees were the best team in the AL East and in position to regain some of their former glory. The club had added Nettles and Matty Alou to an attack that featured Murcer, White, Munson, and Felipe Alou. Stottlemyre, Peterson, and Steve Kline formed an excellent front three starters, and Lyle and McDaniel headed one of the game’s best bullpens. Burke and MacPhail were finally poised to take the last step on their journey, in their sixth year in charge. Oddsmakers in Las Vegas made the Yankees the 9–5 favorite to win the AL East.28
Notwithstanding all of the progress on and off the field, the Yankees’ parent company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, decided to sell the team. Having purchased the most famous franchise in sports just eight years earlier, CBS was reportedly losing money on the Yankees, though that was not the primary motivation for selling. CBS had bought the team for its famous brand, in order to bring additional prestige to their hugely successful media company. Instead, the team fell from glory, and many fans tended to blame the largely unseen corporate managers for the change in fortune. “CBS came to the conclusion,” said a spokesman, “that perhaps it was not as viable for the network to own the Yankees as for some people. Fans get worked up over great men, not great corporations. We came to the realization, I think, that sports franchises really flourish better with people owning them.”29
In mid-1972 CBS chairman William S. Paley asked Burke to put together a group to buy the club, and Burke looked for a purchaser that would allow him to continue running the team. Cleveland Indians general manager Gabe Paul introduced Burke to George M. Steinbrenner, the forty-two-year-old CEO of the American Shipbuilding Company who had recently come very close to purchasing his hometown Indians. A decade earlier Steinbrenner had taken over the small Great Lakes shipping company from his father, bought out most of his competitors, and built an empire.
Although hardly a household name, Steinbrenner had been involved with sports teams for many years. Once a track star at Williams College, he was later a football graduate assistant to Coach Woody Hayes at Ohio State and had held football coaching positions at Northwestern and Purdue. In the early 1960s he bought the Cleveland Pipers, a team in the short-lived American Basketball League, and made an immediate splash by signing the most coveted college player in the country, Ohio State’s Jerry Lucas. The league soon folded, but a few years later Steinbrenner bought a stake in the Chicago Bulls and began acquiring racehorses.
Burke and Steinbrenner came to a deal quickly, and the formal announcement was made on January 4, 1973. Steinbrenner and several other general partners put up a total of ten million dollars in cash, four million less than CBS had paid eight years earlier. With the stadium about to be substantially renovated, a team coming into contention, decades of tradition to fall back on, and sitting in the biggest marketplace in the country, it was an extraordinary deal. Burke reportedly could have received more money from other bidders, but with Steinbrenner’s group he would be a general partner. More important, Burke was led to believe he would continue to run the club as chief executive. MacPhail and Houk also remained in their posts.
Just six days after the deal was announced, Steinbrenner held a press conference to introduce the other limited partners, including Gabe Paul, who had been running the Cleveland Indians. The news stunned Burke, who realized that Paul, with more than three decades’ experience running baseball teams, would be no mere adviser. Steinbrenner had withheld the news of Paul’s inclusion from Burke, without whom he would not have secured the team. Burke resigned a few months later, after it had become clear that his control would be much more limited than he had anticipated. He would not be the last person to underestimate George Steinbrenner.
Within a few months of leaving the Yankees, Burke was named chairman of Madison Square Garden and soon the president of the New York Knicks (basketball) and New York Rangers (hockey) teams that played there. He later retired to Ireland, and when he died in 1987 he was championed by his many friends in the press as the savior of the Yankees. “I remember the early ’70s and the [football] Giants’ desertion of New York,” wrote one. “Mike Burke would have none of it, none of the attempts to lure the Yankees across the river.”30
The 1973 Yankees led the AL East for several weeks, as late as July 31. With a pennant in sight, MacPhail acquired pitchers Pat Dobson and Sam McDowell, giving Houk four recent twenty-game winners. But it was the hitting of Murcer, Munson, Nettles, and the rest that made the manager smile. “Just about the entire difference between our team now and in the last couple of seasons,” he said, “is the hitting. It’s fun to sit back and see our hitters do their job.” Murcer, who been through much of the rebuilding, was thrilled. “I have a feeling about this team,” he said, “a feeling that all the bad things are in the past, that we can win just like the Yankees are supposed to.”31
They could not, collapsing in August and finishing seventeen games behind the streaking Orioles. At the end of the season, a frustrated Houk resigned and soon took the managerial post with the Tigers. MacPhail served the year out but resigned in October, becoming AL president. Both men were highly respected around baseball and in New York and had many years ahead of them in baseball, but neither would be able to work with the constant interference of the new majority owner.
“The general impression of people today,” wrote MacPhail years later, “is that CBS did not provide good ownership—that it would not spend money to improve the team. Actually CBS did everything in its power—under the baseball rules in force at the time—to improve the club. Scouting and player development budgets were increased and it gladly would have purchased players had there been good players available for purchase. And actually, the team did improve. Nor was CBS any problem with respect to broadcast matters.”32
Shortly after the conclusion of Yankees’ final game on September 30, construction crews began removing the famous girders and frieze of Yankee Stadium. When the Yankees next played a game on the site, thirty months later, both the stadium and the team had been considerably revamped.
As Burke and MacPhail learned, from the introduction of the draft until modern free agency may have been the most difficult period in baseball history to build a championship team. The paths available for talent acquisition were as limited as they were at any time in memory, putting pressure on the team’s skill in scouting, drafting, and player development and the GM’s expertise trading. The Burke-MacPhail-Houk triumvirate ran the Yankees for nearly seven years and failed in their goal to bring the Yankees back to their glory years. The organization they left behind, however, was immeasurably improved from its state in 1966.
In the next few years the Yankees would reap the benefit of two huge off-the-field events: the opening of the remodeled Yankee Stadium and the beginning of player free agency.