During spring training of ’93, one of our coaches, Mark Connor, came up to me and said he’d like me to take a look at one of the team’s young pitchers. Every February since I had retired, I had made the eleven-or-so-hour drive from Lafayette to Florida to participate in spring training. George’s offer to serve as a guest instructor was a generous one. I enjoyed being around the game, putting on the Yankees uniform, and getting to watch the young players. The team, I think, benefited too from having somebody around who’d had a lot of success in the major leagues, as the players got ready for the season.
I headed to one of the back fields that day to watch this young pitcher throw. He was just coming off surgery, so I didn’t know what to expect. But I was curious because Mark told me the pitcher reminded him of someone, except he didn’t tell me who. So I settled in to watch him throw. Zip. Swoosh. Despite recovering from surgery and being a skinny guy, the pitcher, Mariano Rivera, had incredible speed and movement on his ball.
“Who does he remind you of?” Mark asked after I had seen the kid throw his bullpen session.
“Well, if he was left-handed, he’d be me.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody said.”
I walked over to George with a message. The Yankees had left Mo unprotected in the 1992 expansion draft and were lucky that no team had claimed him. After seeing him pitch, I couldn’t let them make the same mistake. “If you ever trade that kid right there,” I said to George, pointing to Mo, “you’ll never win any more championships.”
The first couple years of spring training weren’t that fun for me. Not because I was too close to my playing days but because I was one of the only steady guest instructors down there. I enjoyed leading the drills, getting to know the younger players, but there were fewer and fewer people I actually knew. This was at the height of the feud between Yogi and George. Whitey Ford would come, but he wasn’t there every day. I just felt a little out of place.
When George called me during the winter before ’92 spring training, he was a little surprised at our conversation.
“Gator, you planning on coming down again?”
“I’m not so sure, Mr. G.”
“What?” he rasped. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m having a great time, but I’m by myself,” I told him. “Would you entertain the thought of asking somebody else to come?”
“Well, of course. But who?”
“Cat.”
His voice boomed over the phone with excitement. “You think Catfish would come?” He was almost incredulous, and honored by the idea. I told him to give me a moment, that I’d call him back. I called Cat; his wife, Helen, answered the phone and put him on. I asked him if he’d be interested in being an instructor at spring training, and he laughed.
“Maybe,” he said. “Tell George to call me.” Half an hour later I got a call from Cat saying I’d see him in February.
It was Buck Showalter’s first year as manager, and I think he was a little worried about me and Cat being there, maybe because we might overshadow him or because he feared we’d act as pipelines to George, giving reports about him. So on the first day he told me and Cat to go work with guys on the back fields, out of sight of the action. We did some drills with the players, worked on fundamentals, and so forth. Next day, we were in the back fields again. And every day afterward for the rest of the spring. About halfway through, we looked at each other and realized we hadn’t been to the main field the entire time. It was as if we were intentionally being given nothing to do.
We weren’t there to spy on or upstage Buck. But he didn’t know that. It’s nothing against Buck. He went on to have an incredible managerial career in New York, Arizona, Texas, and Baltimore. He has won AL Manager of the Year three times. But I took it personally, because I had recruited Catfish, a guy who’s in the Hall of Fame and doesn’t deserve to be treated like that. Of course, Cat being a class act, he didn’t say shit about it. We just minded our own business and did our best to have a good time.
George got to doing some old-fashioned ass-chewing when he found out about it. He had asked if I’d be coming back again, and I told him it didn’t go so well and that he shouldn’t bother Cat by asking again. I can still hear his voice through the phone after I told him why. “What?” The following spring I don’t think we went to the back fields once. And we all got along well with the other coaches, because it was clear we weren’t there to spy on anybody. We were there to be a set of helping hands, a resource for the players. I was especially glad Cat became part of the fold, because in just a couple of years, he would be diagnosed with ALS. He passed away in 1999. I lost a great friend and kindred spirit, and the Yankees lost a great player and instructor.
Over the years, that coaches’ room grew more and more crowded every spring with familiar faces. Goose retired after ’94 and became a regular. The current players would walk by us and think we were having way too much fun. We enjoyed wearing the uniform and being around baseball for a month. And beyond the instructional aspects of our job, I think it was good for the current players to see that. The perceptive guys picked up on it.
I never ruled out the possibility of coaching. I never wanted to be a manager, but I thought in the right situation, I might enjoy the opportunity to coach the pitchers. I never angled for it, though, because the kids were still growing up and I wanted to spend as much time as I could back home. I would also only do it for the Yankees.
In the mid-2000s, Joe Torre felt me out. There were signs his longtime pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, might retire; Torre wanted to know if I’d consider replacing him. So for about a month, I shadowed Mel to see what the job entailed. I saw how he worked with certain guys. Who he would baby and who he would chew out. Who was serious and who was always cracking jokes. So much of the game had become about coaching by the numbers, using computerized charts and whatnot, and I knew I couldn’t coach that way.
When Joe was looking for a new pitching coach after the 2005 season, I made that abundantly clear to him. I was eager to work with the pitchers and coach, but computerized baseball wasn’t me. The Yankees front office wanted somebody who had those skills. But Joe loved the way I interacted with the guys during the spring and how they responded to me. He told me I wouldn’t have to mess with the computers. He talked to George, and the old man was eager to have me back on board.
I knew going into it that I didn’t want to be a long-termer. A few years at most. More than anything, I didn’t want to grow old and never have tried coaching the newer players, to wonder “what if?” Bonnie agreed.
I’m not sure I would have done it if I weren’t working for Joe Torre. Joe was an outstanding manager and an absolute pleasure to work for. We didn’t win the World Series the two years I coached, 2006 and 2007, but we had some fun in the dugout. Don Mattingly, Lee Mazzilli, and I knew the balance between taking the game seriously and having fun. That’s the thing about former players: We could be fiery as hell, but we never treated the game like a business, as is so often the case today. The clubhouse, the dugout, it shouldn’t be stoic and 100 percent serious. And if you saw Joe Torre’s face on television, you would see that he was quite a serious man. But we also made him laugh a lot.
During one game Joe made me go out to talk to Randy Johnson in the first inning. Now, Randy is one of the greatest pitchers to ever step onto a baseball field. He won 303 games and five Cy Young Awards and struck out 4,875 batters with a 3.29 career ERA. “The Big Unit,” as he was known, threw hard as hell, and he was six foot ten. But RJ was hard to talk to. He didn’t want much advice on his pitching and more generally wasn’t perfectly cut out to handle the twenty-four-hour, in-your-face pressure of New York. Before playing a game for us, he got into some heat when he shoved a cameraman on the street.
During that game, I went out to talk to RJ in the first inning. The second inning didn’t go much better, so Joe sent me out there to talk to him again. It wasn’t fun, because I didn’t have much to say to Randy, who was never in the mood to listen too much. So later in the game when Joe asked me to go out there a third time, I just exploded. “I don’t wanna go out there and talk to that guy. If you want to, then just go do it.”
So Joe went and did just that. He chatted with RJ on the mound, and when he came back he had this glazed, faraway look in his eyes. He turned to me and Mattingly on the bench and said, “He just doesn’t get it, does he?” Joe always said he would’ve loved to have me pitch for him. I told him there was no way in hell I could’ve pitched for him.
“Why’s that?”
“You come out to the mound too damn often.”
“But if it had been you out there,” Joe replied, “I wouldn’t have to.”
Even in the heat of battle, we could laugh at the little things. As I said before, catchers often make the best managers, and Joe was another example of that. He’d won four World Series and two more pennants with the Yankees.
What made Joe so great was his ability to keep the peace. He was the perfect manager at the perfect time. He had the innate ability to be calm when things got out of hand. It made him the opposite of Billy in many respects. Joe could balance everything, from the front office to the players to the day-to-day turmoil the team faces in the tabloids whenever the Yankees lose a game. He could compartmentalize extremely well.
He was also able to keep George in check better than any other manager I knew. George had mellowed over the years—by the time I was the pitching coach, he was in his mid-seventies—but the players in Joe Torre’s clubhouse never had to face George the way we did. The way, when I was playing, George would come into the clubhouse screaming and hollering—that was mostly a thing of the past. Joe’s calm demeanor put George at ease, and that put the guys on the team at ease. And that fit the personality of the players in those years. Joe’s teams had some all-time Yankees greats, such as Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte, but they also weren’t the types who would have told George to screw off if he got in their faces.
From 2008 to 2010, Joe went on to manage the Dodgers for three season. I’m not sure he would’ve asked me to join him as his pitching coach, though he might have. That never happened. I think I made it clear in previous conversations with him why. I stated it pretty simply: I could never wear Dodger blue. We had too many big games against them when I was a player, and I had worn only Yankees pinstripes my entire life. It wouldn’t have been right.
The game was evolving quickly, too. The shift, more than anything, is one of the ways the game had changed between my time playing and coaching. It felt more like a business. Granted, there’s a middle ground between the craziness I experienced as a player and the stoic, businesslike atmosphere today, but over the years the players had become far more clean-cut. As a coach, I’d walk onto the bus during a road trip and the first thing I noticed is that everybody had whipped out their phones or put their headphones on. Nobody talked to anybody. The magic of our Yankees teams was built on rowdy bus rides where there was no telling what would happen. Whatever shit went down, we had built a brotherhood on the buses, and if often felt like we were going to war together.
It built character. We tested one another. You could insult a man’s dog, his house, his family, his accent, his schooling, his shoes, his hometown, his clothes, and none of it was taken personally. Nobody was overly sensitive about it, because it was all about whether or not you were quick enough and tough enough to dish it right back. It’s why Lou Piniella was so beloved—nobody could talk shit like him.
Another thing that’s different: Now when you see any team celebrate, with the champagne and whatnot, it’s all so structured. They put these Visqueen plastic sheets all over the lockers and the floor, they have goggles for the players to protect their eyes from the spraying champagne, and it’s this big to-do. We just soaked each other. It was all pure heat-of-the-moment stuff.
This shows just how informal it was: The first time my wife, Bonnie, met Yogi Berra, he was stark naked. Her words were he was “naked as a jaybird.” We had just won the ’77 World Series and we were all celebrating, going crazy, of course. He didn’t have a care in the world. Why would he? We had just won the World frickin’ Series.
So Yogi sauntered out, naked, to bring a bottle of champagne to his wife, Carmen. She just looked at Bonnie afterward and said, “Yep, that’s Yogi.” Naked as a jaybird.
Coaching, I learned, was a never-ending job. Mentally, it is much more taxing than playing. The only free time you’ve got is when you’re home sleeping. There was a supermarket around the corner from where I lived in Manhattan where I could get a bite to eat, some coffee, and the paper. Other than that, I’d have to ask my son Brandon, who was living with us in the city, where anything was. As a player I had never lived in the city. And it’s not like I had any time to explore. I was always doing something coaching-related. I’d drive to Yankee Stadium, get there by noon, and wouldn’t leave for another twelve hours. That gets you back home after midnight, just in time to repeat the same thing the next day. It took a lot of organization, because before a game you’re working with pitchers and going over things with Joe. After the game, you’re assessing what happened in that night’s game to get the reports ready for the following day.
I had two strengths as a pitching coach. The first was that as a pitcher, I always had a keen sense of the proper mechanics. People always told me that if you were to choose a soundtrack for my delivery, you’d choose ballet music. I always liked that. I didn’t look like I was working hard, but everything had to be in perfect sync in order for a guy like me to throw as hard as I did. Take a guy like Goose. He threw in the upper nineties, but he was six foot three and weighed upward of two hundred pounds. He looked like he was throwing the ball hard. Same for Nolan Ryan. For me to throw ninety-five miles per hour, at just 150 pounds, my delivery had to be smooth and waste no motion, to generate as much power as my body would allow.
In an era that has turned the game into spray charts and spreadsheets, the ballet has gotten lost. Oftentimes the numbers are just descriptive. They tell you how someone has played or performed on the field, and in greater depth than they ever did in my day. But sometimes to really understand why a pitcher is throwing well, or poorly, you need a keen eye for what he’s doing physically. When I was playing, that was a skill we honed every day. I’d watch everybody, throwing for and against us, to study their mechanics. Now it seems like people watch the mechanics of the game less and miss picking up some of the nuances along the way.
Knowing the mechanics helped me as a pitching coach because I felt the most important thing was having a mental image of each pitcher and what he should look like. There’s no such thing as perfect mechanics. No two of the best pitchers of all time wound up and threw the ball exactly alike. There are better practices than others, for sure, but what’s most important is consistency. When things aren’t working, it’s usually because those mechanics are slipping and changing from pitch to pitch.
So the key was keeping a close eye on guys to let them know if something was off. For some guys, like Mariano Rivera, that might never be the case. He could throw four straight balls and then fire twenty straight strikes. Other guys, like Mike Mussina, were so good because they had a strong internal sense of when their mechanics were askew. Within one or two pitches, Mike could feel something was off and fix it. You see guys like Mussina who do that, and it’s no wonder they had such incredible careers. Same goes for Roger Clemens, who at forty-four years of age pitched for us in the second half of 2007. He was one of the greatest pitchers ever, but what made him so inspiring to work with was that he was still obsessed over the little things, always trying to get better. “Gator, watch for this and make sure I do that,” he’d tell me. To me, that was a sign of respect; even at his age, and with his illustrious career, he valued my insights.
The other thing I tried to do as a pitching coach was to learn the personalities of my pitchers. In many cases, figuring things out on the mound doesn’t take a genius. The best advice I ever got from a pitching coach was from Art Fowler. When I first became a starter in 1977 he told me something amazingly simple: “If you can’t throw strikes, you can’t throw in the big leagues.” That’s it. It was so simple it was stupid. “What kind of pitching coach is this?” I said to myself. But then I sat down and thought about it. And it encapsulated everything I needed to know. Batters would never swing at my balls if I couldn’t get them to swing and miss at my strikes. I could worry about throwing it this way or that way, on the corners and at their knees, but you can’t beat yourself up out there. Other pitching coaches tried to give me more complicated advice that was never going to help me. I told them the best spot for them was in the corner; I’d figure things out on my own.
I’d study each of the pitchers to learn what worked best with him. Some responded better to going over film so they could see their delivery from several different angles. You compare what they’re doing in the moment with what their form looked like when they were throwing their best. Others you could tweak right there on the mound in the middle of an inning. Some needed to go over stuff during bullpen sessions between starts. Some, like Randy Johnson, were best served by letting them deal with things by themselves.
I also had to learn what kind of attitude the pitchers responded to. I never had to chew anybody out while I was a pitching coach, but some of the guys needed a different tone or approach. I could be stern, joking, philosophical—whatever they needed. Chien-Ming Wang, who had back-to-back nineteen-win seasons for us in ’06 and ’07, just needed to lighten up on the mound. So I could mess around with him. Same with Jaret Wright, who was so intense and would get so mad at himself, I had to struggle to keep him loose. I’d go out there, rub my mustache, and say, “So you’ve decided to make this damn game interesting, huh.”
During moments like that I could hear a little bit of Thurman in myself, what I learned from him. He’d say things exactly like that to everybody on staff. If I helped my pitchers a fraction as much as Thurman helped me, I think I did my job.
In the years since that stint as pitching coach, I’ve come back to spring training every year and done the same thing: helped out, hung out, and observed. That annual trip to Florida is something I still look forward to—putting on the uniform, sitting in a clubhouse, and being near the game that gave so much to me. Some of the faces are still familiar. More seems to change every year. But it’s such a darn interesting time in baseball—both specifically for the Yankees and across the entire league. A number of things have become completely different, both strategically and in the game’s fundamentals.
The style of the game, from the way it’s taught to the way it’s managed and played, has completely changed over these last few decades. I don’t care to lecture and say if it’s better or worse. But the simple fact is that it’s different. Let’s start with the pitching. The starters today are nothing like they were in past eras. I don’t mean that in terms of talent. Some of these guys are out of this world. But think about this: In 1978 I threw sixteen complete games. And another fifteen in ’79. Then in ’83 I threw twenty-one. Now, not a single pitcher in the last five years has reached even ten in a season. These days, some of the very best pitchers in the game go an entire season without pitching a game from beginning to end.
The reasons for this could fill a book. There’s more science out there about pitch counts and not burning out a guy’s arm. (Although it seems more and more pitchers need surgery anyway.) The main thing I want to get into, from my perspective as a player and a coach, is how this has stemmed from the increased specialization of players.
When I first got to the major leagues, and even the few years before that, is when the closer started to be a real specialized guy. Sparky was that guy for us. Then Goose. Oakland had Rollie Fingers. Mike Marshall won the Cy Young for the Dodgers in ’74. But there wasn’t really a setup guy. We had ten to eleven pitchers on the staff. Five starters, then five or six guys in the pen. One guy in there was deemed the closer. The rest were guys who couldn’t start, so they were in the bullpen too.
Compare that with what they have today. There’s the closer; a setup guy who pitches the eighth inning; a setup guy who sets up the setup guy and pitches the seventh. There’s a long man; another short man; a guy who only gets out lefties. Managers can mix and match more effectively with those relievers than they ever could. When I was pitching, managers never had that luxury because, in general, the starters were so much better than the relievers. Heck, if I were pitching in today’s game, I might only end up going six innings on most nights. Though, knowing me, I wouldn’t be so happy with the manager if he came out to me that early asking for the ball.
You can see this specialization make its way down from the majors to baseball at all ages. When I went to college, you were a starter or you pitched in the bullpen because you couldn’t crack it. Today in high school you might have a closer and a fully stocked bullpen. Even in Little League. Because people aren’t stupid. They see what’s out there, how the game is changing, and what’s valued. It’s something the Yankees have prioritized in recent years, building deep bullpens with the likes of Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances.
The other big emphasis in the game these days ties well into the modern Yankees team too. More guys are trying to hit the ball out of the park than ever before. Most of the best batters I faced had a measured approach to hitting that they took pride in. They would take one big swing early in the at-bat to hit it out. If that didn’t work, their approach changed. They’d try to get a hit up the middle or to the opposite field. Or they’d try to hit the ball behind a runner.
Now these guys take three swings for the fences. I’m not faulting anybody or even saying it’s a problem. But it has noticeably changed the game. Home runs are way up—2017 set the major-league record. And the consequence of that is that strikeouts are way up too. If batters aren’t shortening up their swings, they get more chances to hit it out, but they also swing and miss more. Also, you can’t tell me the ball ain’t changed with the way it’s flying off bats.
The thing is, you’ll hear people gripe that all this is a problem and that it’s making games take longer and ripping some of the nuance out of the sport. But I’m not too sure a lot of people in the stands, who pay a great deal of money for their seats these days, want to see a quick 1–0 game. They may want it to last, and to see five or six home runs in one sitting. Or one of Aaron Judge’s mammoth home runs.
Which brings it back to this modern Yankees team with guys like Judge, the giant outfielder sensation, and Gary Sanchez, a catcher and another powerful young hitter. They have both been so successful early in their careers that it’s natural for people to ask if they can form a core like Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and some of the others. Only time will answer that. But I think the key thing to remember about Jeter and Posada is that it wasn’t just about their talent. It was their personalities and how they played the game.
The most remarkable aspect of that duo was how polished they were. Both off the field and in their approach to baseball. They showed up every day and took immense pride in their work. They did every little thing, from practice to warm-ups to the final out. At the plate, Jeter wouldn’t just get hits. He’d move runners over. When he made outs, they were often productive outs. They had style, grace. More than anything else, from the first day they stepped onto a major-league diamond, they played like fifteen-year veterans.
Take Posada. He was a lot like Munson, in that sense of pride about mastering his job, which for a catcher is more important than any field position. The catcher calls the game for the pitcher and sets the tone. And Jorge was a great hitter, Munson was too, don’t get me wrong. But both of them loved catching, then they loved hitting. Posada loved catching because that was his number one job.
So what’s exciting for the Yankees now is that they have the potential to build the same type of young, exciting, talented team that brought all those World Series trophies to the Bronx. Sanchez and Judge, they have incredible talent. While they have work to do to refine their games, they’ve already showed star power. And it’s not just them. It wouldn’t shock me if Greg Bird, the first baseman, turned out to be just as good or better than the rest of them. His approach at the plate is like a fifteen-year veteran’s. He can make great contact and pick the right pitch. And there are more in the minors who can get there soon.
There are also the pitchers: Luis Severino showed he has the potential to be a real ace in 2017. I’ve always been real high on Jordan Montgomery, too, another pitcher, even though he didn’t come into the season with all that much hype. There are more on the way.
All of this sets up for a future Yankees fans should be thrilled about. For years our minor-league system wasn’t very good. It clearly has been these last few years. The outlook is great, so much better than it was in the mid-2000s. But just because these guys have talent and the potential to be that great doesn’t mean anything yet. There’s a lot these guys can learn in the coming years about transitioning from great players to polished ones. When they do that, the sky is the limit. It’ll be fun to watch.