By July 17, most of us had gotten used to how much of a circus the team had become. Heck, it was a year and a half old by then, and in that first year we proved we could persevere through it and win the World Series. And it was reasonable to think the situation would have improved over time. With more time, Reggie fit in more with the clubhouse. Even if we hadn’t all become best friends with him, his most inflammatory comments were largely a thing of the past. He and Thurman had said their piece the year before. They’d high-five after one of them hit a homer; each was committed to bringing another World Series trophy to the Bronx. And beyond all of that, in sports, winning tends to solve a cartful of problems. And we had won it all.
But instead, our three-ring-circus act was only getting worse. Because despite our being the reigning World Series champions, and most of our struggles winning ball games having to do with injuries plaguing our team since the beginning of the season, we weren’t winning enough for Billy and George. For a brief moment in the middle of July, we trailed Boston by fourteen and a half games in the American League East. As a result, the tension between manager and management was as bad as it had ever been. Oddly enough, though, it never once dawned on us that we couldn’t catch the Red Sox. Yeah, we knew they were good. But we knew we were good too. Just as good as them. Still, we knew something had to change. The situation had to get worse for us to get better.
The wheels spun into motion during the tenth inning of a series finale against the Royals. Kansas City remained a measuring stick for us as one of the top teams in the AL, and we were coming up short. They took the first two games of the series by a combined score of 11–3. We had lost six of our last seven, and seven of our last nine, straddling the All-Star break.
Throughout all of this, Billy and George fought over who to play and where to bat ’em. There was a logjam in the outfield, and a lot of guys were unhappy one way or another. Either they were left out of the lineup, or there was unease because they were in the lineup at the expense of Reggie or somebody else. All the while, rumors swirled that Billy might get fired—as ridiculous as that might sound, considering he had just managed us to the world championship.
In this one game, all of our problems seemed to reach a boiling point. Sparky, unhappy all season about his role being usurped by Goose, expressed displeasure when Billy tried to use him as a long reliever. Goose, as a result, had to pitch the final three innings and gave up a couple of runs that tied the game in the ninth. That might’ve been enough problems for the day. But they got overshadowed by a dustup that infuriated Billy to his very core and brought our hellish situation to a point of no return.
Reggie stepped to the plate in the bottom of the tenth inning with nobody out and Thurman on first. Billy thought he could catch the Royals napping, so he called for a bunt. We didn’t need a homer, we just needed one run to win the game, and nobody would expect a power hitter like Reggie to lay down a bunt. In fact, hitters like Reggie sometimes get insulted if they’re asked to bunt. Regardless, he obliged. He fouled off the first attempt, after which Billy signaled to call the bunt off. But Reggie ignored the change. He squared up to bunt again—another foul ball for strike two. Billy seethed. To clear up any chance of a miscommunication, our third-base coach met with Reggie before the third pitch to reiterate that the bunt had been called off. Especially with two strikes, bunting made no sense because a foul bunt is strike three. Nonetheless Reggie bunted again, popping it into foul territory for strike three. We lost the game 9–7 in the eleventh.
Like the play against Boston last year when Billy pulled Reggie for dogging the ball in right field, this cut to the core of what offended Billy Martin’s sensibilities. One of his players wasn’t playing baseball the right way. The chain of command was being disrespected. Which was the whole problem in all the squabbles between Billy and George. Billy hated George’s meddling in the day-to-day affairs, because Billy was the field manager. Now Billy’s orders were being directly ignored by the one player who had already been the source of so much consternation.
After the game, Billy was understandably livid. He demanded that Reggie be suspended for the rest of the season. That was probably an overreaction, but he had reached the point where he just couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s him or me, he essentially told George. But not only did George have a particular affinity for Reggie, but like any owner, he felt he had to side with his high-paid slugger. Reggie was ultimately suspended for just five games. A week later Billy delivered his famous last line: “One’s a born liar,” he said, referring to Reggie, and “the other’s convicted,” turning to George.
The next day Billy resigned. But his “resignation” was a technicality. George was about to fire his ass. I had grown close with Billy, so it’s difficult to admit, but it was necessary for the good of the team. I’d pitch the same no matter who was managing. But we needed to escape the craziness. We needed to put everything else aside and just play ball. And that’s what we did. We needed for the next few months to right the ship. I’m not sure we would’ve been able to do that if Billy had stayed on.
At the start of the season, the personnel issues seemed small. Reggie wasn’t Billy’s favorite player, but he had become a better soldier. And there was no way to imagine things could get worse than the previous year. Billy pushing Sparky aside when Goose came on wasn’t so much a teamwide issue—it had nothing to do with Goose as a person, or his abilities, or his effort. It just made me feel bad for Sparky, as a friend. The other was a short-lived rumbling that Thurman wanted to be traded to the Cleveland Indians, close to his home in Ohio. But nobody wanted to see Thurman go—not George, who had named him captain; not Billy, who respected his abilities and the way he played the game; not anybody in the clubhouse, who looked up to Thurman and valued his leadership. And Thurman was a class act who cared deeply about winning. He wasn’t a problem.
Our struggles in the early months of the season had nothing to do with this. And it’s not like we were playing terribly. We had a mediocre April (10-9), a very good May (19-8), and a poor June (14-15). That adds up to a 43-32 record to start the season. But there were two factors that combined to make our record feel worse. First, since we had won it all the year before, the expectations for this season were sky-high. And second, Boston scorched its way through the early months. They were 52-23, or nine games up on us, by the end of June.
In ’77 the Red Sox were already a good team. They won ninety-seven games, which is no surprise given a lineup that included Carlton Fisk, Butch Hobson, Fred Lynn, George Scott, Jim Rice, and Carl Yastrzemski. That lineup could stand toe-to-toe with any lineup in the majors. Their 5.3 runs per game that season trailed only the Minnesota Twins. The problem for them, though, was they lacked the pitching. We had a 3.61 ERA in ’77, while theirs was a half run per game higher, at 4.11. That really was the difference in us winning one hundred games and taking the division.
So before the start of the 1978 season, Boston went out to address that. They signed one of our key starters, Mike Torrez, to a big deal to become one of the anchors of their rotation. Then, right before the season, they traded for Dennis Eckersley, a twenty-three-year-old All-Star from Cleveland. He was already making a name for himself and would go on to be not just an incredible starting pitcher but later one of the best closers in baseball history, which is how fans mostly remember him today.
Add Torrez and Eckersley to that already formidable lineup and they had quite a ball club. And all was going according to design for the Red Sox early on. They were hitting. They were pitching. They had depth. Their success was easily understandable.
We had the potential to be just as good, but there was a key difference. From the start of the season, we just weren’t healthy. Even coming back from the flu and fighting through some minor arm troubles, I was the healthiest member of our pitching staff. Andy Messersmith, who we bought from the Braves and was meant to replace Torrez, separated his shoulder. Don Gullett had shoulder issues too. They made a combined thirteen starts all season.
The other issue was Catfish Hunter. He had hurt his back and shoulder, pretty much from the start of the season. But Catfish was a pro. I had learned a great deal from him—he was somebody I could relate to in a lot of ways. While he had become famous as one of the first of the high-priced free agents in Major League Baseball history—George signed him away from Oakland before the ’75 season—he was at heart a good-natured country boy, who transformed himself into a menace on the mound. Like me, he liked to hunt. He didn’t fancy himself at the center of a drama, nor did I. And he was a tremendous teammate.
Catfish was thirty-two years old by 1978, so on the field he didn’t have the velocity or stuff he once did. There was a time nobody could match his pitching arsenal. He won twenty-five games for Oakland in 1974, earning him the Cy Young. In ’75 he won twenty-three games for us with a 2.58 ERA. He won at least twenty games for five straight seasons. Even in his later years, with diminishing stuff, he could get guys out because he was so dang smart on the mound and knew how to work hitters. Pitchers like me could learn a lot just by watching him pitch.
But no amount of guts, heart, and smarts can overcome fairly serious physical ailments. And that’s what he was dealing with. He tried to pitch through it at first, but it was hard to watch. His first start of the season he gave up six runs, including two homers, in just two innings. He went on and off the disabled list that season, making just nine appearances in the first four months, with an ERA of 6.51.
When you add in Goose’s early-season struggles and Sparky’s banishment to middle relief, you’re left with very little stability on the mound. It was really just me and Ed Figueroa. And while my performances started to command attention because of my winning streak and strikeouts, Figueroa’s success, too, deserves a lot of praise. He was just so consistent, it was easy for some folks to miss. When I say the core of our team was built not on the backs of superstars but on steady performers who didn’t need glamor, I’m thinking of guys like him. He came to us in ’76 from the Angels and won nineteen games with a 3.02 ERA that year. He won another sixteen games in ’77 and had a Cy Young–caliber campaign for us in ’78 with twenty wins and a 2.99 ERA. He was a rock for the team, taking the ball every fifth day and pitching well, throwing around 250 innings a year. He and I both made thirty-five starts in ’78. Nobody else made more than twenty-five.
The first time we went to Boston that season was in the middle of June. Our starters were Ken Clay, Don Gullett, and Jim Beattie. We lost the first and third games when Clay and Beattie went a combined five innings and got shelled. Beattie would step up and come through in some big starts that year, but he was a rookie. Nobody expected him to be starting those types of games when the season began. Clay mostly came out of the bullpen. Meanwhile, the Red Sox started Luis Tiant, Torrez, and Eckersley. At this point in the season, the tables were reversed from a year earlier. They had the health and the pitching depth. We didn’t.
But our injuries weren’t confined to the pitching staff. Willie Randolph, our second baseman, had a cartilage tear in his knee. He came to us in ’76 after a cup of coffee in the bigs with Pittsburgh in ’75; he and I were two of the young guys together. Willie was quiet, levelheaded, and unlike me found success immediately. He was an All-Star in both ’76, his first full season in the majors, and ’77. Although he didn’t hit for power, he did all the little things exceptionally well. He played strong defense, could hit to all fields, and advanced runners. He also drew some of the most walks in the league in those years, which was so impressive because he wasn’t a power hitter, so it’s not like pitchers were deliberately pitching around him. He just had a great eye, taking walks when he could, long before on-base percentage was a statistic people looked at closely. And he turned those walks and singles into extra bases because he had a fair bit of speed, stealing more than thirty bases for us most of those years.
Thurman’s knees had been deteriorating over the years. Not that he bitched and moaned about it. You had to fight Thurman to take him out of the lineup. He played 154 games, which would be a lot for any catcher—not to mention one who was constantly ailing. Sure more than any catcher plays these days. Naturally it was Thurman behind the plate during my eighteen-strikeout game—I wouldn’t have had half as many with someone else calling the game, setting up the hitters. He made some of his starts as designated hitter to give his knees a break. And we started to play him in the outfield some.
All of these injuries added up to a very different team from the one we thought we had leaving spring training camp. And even though we were above .500, we were behind Boston by quite a bit. One of the biggest issues was in the outfield, where we started to have quite a logjam, as I mentioned earlier. We already had Lou Piniella, Mickey Rivers, Roy White, and Reggie. Plus Thurman was getting some games out there. Then on June 15 we traded for Gary Thomasson. Gary hit well for us, but with so many outfielders for only three spots, it created tension. When the lineup was posted, guys were uneasy, not knowing whether they were playing or not. Reggie, our best hitter and one of the best in all of baseball, all of a sudden found himself not playing every day. And he’d be pissed. Which made whoever was playing in his spot uncomfortable.
All of this—the injuries, the infighting, the unease around the clubhouse—kept building as we slipped further and further behind Boston. They kept winning, and we continued to play okay. And it felt like every couple of days, they’d gain another game on us. That’s what triggered more radical moves with the lineup and added to the discord.
It was in this atmosphere that we hit the middle of July. We needed the All-Star break. The guys with bumps and bruises got a few days off to heal. That included me—the start against the Angels had taken a lot out of me, and I wasn’t myself for a few outings. I probably shouldn’t have pitched my last time out before the break in Milwaukee, but it’s not like we had healthy arms ready to replace me. We lost that game 6–0, and I struck out only three, my fewest since April.
But within a few weeks everything started to change. We healed over the break. Within a couple of weeks, the fireworks finally exploded in the wake of the Reggie bunt incident. Billy was now gone. And finally, we could look at the standings and just think about baseball. We had a couple of months to pull off a comeback—and there was no doubt in our minds we could do it.
I never established quite the same relationship with Bob Lemon that I had with Billy. We didn’t have as much time together and hadn’t been through as much. He was our pitching coach in ’76, but I was such a minor factor on that team, he didn’t focus on me. Billy and I, for better or worse, had experienced a lot together and grown close.
As a player, Lemon had had a distinguished career pitching for the Cleveland Indians. He went to seven All-Star Games, won the 1948 World Series, and was one of the best pitchers of his generation. He led the major leagues in wins three times, struck out the most batters in baseball in 1950, and went to the Hall of Fame. He first managed in Kansas City, and then later for the White Sox. Before he left Chicago and before Billy “resigned,” there were rumors that we’d just trade managers with the White Sox—Billy for Lemon. It didn’t quite play out that way, but when Lemon got fired, George snapped him up quickly.
Lemon was an entirely different type of manager than Billy was. And as great a manager as Billy was, at this moment Lemon was a blessing in disguise. Billy was emotional and unsettling. Often that was good. This year it had become a problem. Lemon was a calming force. Everything about his demeanor was calm. He wasn’t going to fight with the players or fight with George. He was levelheaded in everything. That attitude changed the entire clubhouse. Before, guys had to tiptoe by the board to check out the lineup card to find out if they were playing or not.
With Lemon filling out the lineup, it was simple. You’d be in the lineup or you wouldn’t—but it wasn’t part of some long-standing feud or gamesmanship with George. If you were starting, you were starting. If you weren’t, you were ready on the bench. “I ain’t telling you how to play,” Lemon would say. “I’m just gonna make the lineup. Read it. If your name’s on it, give me your best.” That’s it.
For us, everything came together all at once. Finally, we were focused on just playing baseball. Even though we had a lot of ground to make up—fourteen and a half games with two and a half months left in the season—we had a team that was just as good as Boston’s, if not better. We could catch them, and the situation in the clubhouse was finally stable. Even more important, we were getting healthier. The biggest difference in that regard might have been Catfish, who had hardly pitched in the first few months, and when he did, got hit hard. Starting with eight innings of no-run, three-hit ball on August 1, he was back to being the dominant pitcher who fooled hitters every which way. Over the final two months, he went 9-2 with a 2.23 ERA.
At the same time, everything that seemed to hamper us at the beginning of the year now started to hurt Boston. Over the course of the 162-game season, an entire team will never stay healthy the entire time. It just so happens that our injuries were stacked at the beginning of the season, while theirs clustered toward the end. Those injuries played a big part in their fall from grace. Rick Burleson, their shortstop, injured his ankle in the middle of July. They went 6-12 while he was out. Third baseman Butch Hobson missed a couple of weeks around then too, and played through an elbow injury for the rest of the year, which made him a major liability in the field. He finished the season with forty-three errors. Fred Lynn had an ailing back, Carlton Fisk’s ribs got dinged up, and Jerry Remy had something wrong with his wrist. That’s more than half of their lineup right there, going down the stretch. Some of them missed time, but even when they were on the field it was like what Cat was going through at the start of the year. They were just less effective.
Between us getting on the right track and their injuries, our results were reversed. The way they gained a game on us in the standings every few days at the start of the season, we started gaining those games back. By the end of August, we had made up more than half their lead. They finished the month at 84-48. We were 77-54. We still had to catch up six and a half games in September, but that was doable—and we had the chance to pull it off in one fell swoop because we played the Red Sox seven times.
Most of our strong play wasn’t the result of anything extraordinary. We were just playing up to our potential, and doing so steadily. From the middle of July to the middle of August, I went nine innings in six of seven starts. Four were complete-game shutouts. Figueroa was going good, too; so was Cat. And Goose was well past the early-season hiccups and into prime form, which meant he was as good as anybody who has ever closed a baseball game. By early August, his ERA was below 2.00. We had a 3.55 ERA before the All-Star break. Afterward, it was 2.79.
Our charge set up what would turn out to be perhaps the most famous series in New York Yankees regular-season history. It became known as the Boston Massacre. Four games in four days at Fenway Park. Without our comeback in the division, though, those games wouldn’t have meant much. Instead, they meant everything. At the start of the series, on September 7, we trailed by exactly four games. A four-game sweep—an idea that was ludicrous to even fantasize about, at Fenway Park—would leave us tied.
In games one and two of the series we didn’t just beat them—we demolished them. We kicked the absolute crap out of them. Both games were over after just a few innings. The first game: 15–3; we had scored twelve runs before they collected their third hit. Torrez didn’t even get an out in the second inning of that game before getting pulled. Second game, same story. We had eight runs before most of their lineup took an at-bat. They were thorough beatings in every facet of the game. We killed their pitching. They made mistakes in the field. Their bats were quiet, even though they were facing Clay and Beattie, who they hit around earlier in the season.
That left us with incredible momentum, a giant mental edge, and our two most consistent pitchers, me and Figueroa, going in the third and fourth games of the series. I was completely at ease on the mound, knowing how well our guys were hitting. Figueroa and I both won, with the offense scoring another seven runs in each game. The eighteen-strikeout game in June may have been my most famous game of the season. But that day in Boston I allowed only two hits—the fewest I had allowed all year. That is, until my next start, September 15, at home against the Red Sox, when I allowed only two hits again. By the middle of September, we had a three-and-a-half-game lead. Then they stormed back, winning their final eight. When we lost on the last day, we were both at 99-63.
Which set up the one-game playoff I told you about earlier. New York at Boston. Yankees versus Red Sox. Fenway Park. The most intense rivalry in baseball, and a playoff spot, all coming down to a winner-take-all finale on October 2. I was on the mound, on short rest. Yet given the fervor around the game, the wild fans, we weren’t nervous. We had been through everything a team could go through that season. We’d just smacked the stuffing out of them at Fenway less than a month earlier. We had nothing to be afraid of. And the rest I told you. Lou’s catch. Bucky’s homer. Reggie’s homer. We were going to the playoffs once again.
It’s difficult to totally comprehend what you just went through in the moment. With time, you can sit back in your chair and reflect on how we came back and how crazy the season was. In the same way, I knew I’d had an excellent season, but it didn’t hit me until afterward. I had a 1.74 ERA, a 25-3 record—there have been only a few pitching years like that in baseball history. Especially in the American League, after they instituted the designated hitter. It takes everything breaking perfectly. Same goes for understanding the historical context of that one-game playoff. We knew it was big, but only afterward did its place in time really resonate. We were happy, tired, and relieved all at once. But it’s not like we had time to really process it. As soon as it was done, we were off to play Kansas City in the ACLS.
It was no coincidence that this was our third straight year playing the Royals in the playoffs. They had a strong team. But the confidence we had going into the Boston series we carried with us into the ALCS. We had proven that when we were healthy, we were the best team in the league. We resembled, in many ways, the Yankees team that had won it all the year before. It wasn’t about any single person. On any given day, somebody would win us a game. We had a very deep, talented team. And Lemon was the calming element we needed to put it all together. With Billy, we might not have pulled off the comeback. Instead of explosive and contentious comments, we had a quiet swagger built on something simple: our abilities as baseball players to compete in every facet of the game. We could hit. We could pitch. We could play defense. We had mastered the fundamentals.
Beyond that, we felt like we had just beaten the only team as good as us in the American League. If Kansas City played in the AL East, they wouldn’t have even finished in third. Milwaukee won ninety-three games to Kansas City’s ninety-two. The fact that the Red Sox and the Yankees both had such good records in such a tough division—especially when you factor in the Orioles, another ninety-game winner—is a testament to how good we were in ’78. If Boston had beat us in that tiebreaker, they very well could have been the team to win it all.
Because I had just pitched in the tiebreaker, I wasn’t able to pitch early in the Kansas City series. Beattie, the rookie, got the call in game one. He combined with Clay to throw nine innings of one-run ball for a 7–1 win. They were prime examples of unsung heroes who played a critical role for us. Nobody was counting on them going into the year—they got pressed into duty because of injuries and ineffectiveness. But they both got better as the season wore on and had lower ERAs in the second half versus the first. We lost game two 10–4 with Figueroa on the mound, but we were well positioned with the series tied 1–1, heading back to Yankee Stadium.
Game three was a battle between two of baseball’s greats: George Brett and Reggie Jackson. Brett led off the game with a homer in the top of the first. Reggie tied it 1–1 with a homer to lead off the second. Brett homered again in the top of the third. Reggie tied it again with a single in the fourth. Then, you guessed it, Brett homered again in the fifth. Three at-bats, three home runs. We had so many big games against these Royals, and more to come in the future. But that performance was amazing.
The thing with our team, though, is we never let those things overwhelm us. Reggie, true to form, gave us the lead back with a sac fly in the sixth. We went down again in the eighth when Goose gave up a couple of runs, but again the Royals’ lead didn’t last long. Thurman stepped up with a two-run shot that ultimately gave us the 6–5 win and a 2–1 series lead. Battling through pain, Thurman had hit only six homers during the entire regular season. In big spots, though, he did what winners do, and what no cranky knees could stop him from doing.
That left game four to me, and I was feeling good after getting a full turn of rest. The one-game playoff against Boston was on short rest, as were some of my other September starts. With four days off, I owed my hitters a strong performance after they scored so much early in the series. And I preferred facing the Royals at Yankee Stadium. As I explained earlier, their team thrived in the fast conditions in Kansas City. I had more control of the game at home. They scored in the first after Brett tripled, followed by a single from Hal McRae, but that’s all I yielded. I went the next eight innings allowing only four more hits. Graig Nettles and Roy White both hit solo homers—different day, a new hero. Meanwhile, Goose pitched a scoreless ninth to seal the win.
For the third straight year, we were going to the World Series. We wanted to make it two straight years with a trophy. A year before, we had been a circus, but we persevered. The circus was, if anything, wilder in 1978. It cost us our manager this time around. So we wanted to send another message: All of the craziness didn’t matter. Once again, we were facing the Los Angeles Dodgers. We knew we were the best team in baseball. But proving it wouldn’t be easy.