Steinbrenner Read online

  STEINBRENNER

  The Last Lion of Baseball

  • • •

  Bill Madden

  For Lil, my “first read,” who provided insight,

  inspiration, total support and unconditional love

  For Steven and Thomas, a father’s pride

  And for all the New York Yankees newspaper reporters

  from the ’70s through the ’90s, who can feel entirely

  justified in multiplying their years on the beat by seven

  to take into account the “Steinbrenner factor”

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 – The Coming Storm

  Chapter 2 – Cleveland

  Chapter 3 – “Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way”

  Chapter 4 – Watergate and Catfish

  Chapter 5 – Three for the Tabloids

  Chapter 6 – Turmoil and Triumph

  Chapter 7 – Days of Whine and Rosen

  Chapter 8 – From Here to Eternity

  Chapter 9 – Howser and Horses

  Chapter 10 – Passages

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter 11 – Chaos: Reggie’s Revenge, Umpire Wars and Pine Tar Follies

  Chapter 12 – An Icon Scorned

  Chapter 13 – A “Favorite Son” Exiled

  Chapter 14 – Tale of the Tapes

  Chapter 15 – Banished!

  Chapter 16 – The Comeback

  Chapter 17 – The Buck Stops Here

  Chapter 18 – Torre Glory

  Chapter 19 – Billionaire George

  Chapter 20 – The Lion in Winter

  Index

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  ON A COOL, OVERCAST afternoon in early March 1992, I had just finished having lunch in the dining room of George Steinbrenner’s Bay Harbor Hotel, in Tampa, where I was staying for a few days while touring the spring training camps of those major league baseball teams based on Florida’s Gulf Coast. I had not seen Steinbrenner since he’d been banished from baseball by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990, and had not spoken to him since he’d fired Lou Piniella as Yankees manager for the second time, after the 1988 season.

  Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, I’d enjoyed a mostly pleasant working relationship with Steinbrenner in my capacity as a baseball writer for United Press International and then the New York Daily News, perhaps in no small part because my bosses and mentors at both places, Milton Richman at UPI and Dick Young at the News, were both legendary baseball writers and particular favorites of the forceful New York Yankees owner. During that time he had often solicited my opinion on player deals or manager firings he was pondering (which put me in good company with a lot of the bartenders and cabdrivers in Manhattan), and while his bullying of players, other baseball execs and writers usually left me no choice but to spank him in print, we’d managed to remain friends.

  That ended when he fired Piniella after the 1988 season and, in an attempt to justify this, fed me a cockamamie story about how Lou had stolen furniture from the Yankees. That he would use me to discredit Piniella was, in my opinion, a new low, and I determined from that point on to have nothing more to do with him on a personal level other than report and comment in the Daily News on his activities as Yankees owner.

  Two years later, I had little sympathy for Steinbrenner when he was tossed out of the game by Vincent for having paid a two-bit gambler for dirt on the Dave Winfield Foundation. It wasn’t until months afterward that I learned from other baseball owners and attorneys who had worked on the case that Vincent’s methods of getting rid of Steinbrenner had been just as underhanded as any of the shenanigans the Yankees owner had been guilty of over the years. I subsequently wrote a series of columns critical of the commissioner and the imperial manner with which he was governing the game.

  By the spring of ’92, it was starting to seem likely that Vincent was going to lift Steinbrenner’s ban, and I remember feeling ambivalent about that. Left to his own means, general manager Gene Michael had been doing a commendable job of rebuilding the Yankees in Steinbrenner’s absence, and everyone, fans and media alike, could remember what an absolute menace Steinbrenner had been in the ’80s.

  After lunch, I was walking up the long corridor that connects the Bay Harbor dining room to the main lobby when I suddenly saw him approaching from the other end. All I could think of was the opening scene in Gunsmoke, in which Matt Dillon stares down an outlaw off in the distance, getting ready to draw.

  “Is that you, Madden?” he hollered.

  “I plead guilty,” I shouted back.

  “What are you doing here, Madden?” he said as he kept walking toward me.

  “I don’t know, George,” I said. “Other than I happen to like your hotel. Why? Am I on the banned list here?”

  Then we were standing face-to-face. He smiled, extending his hand, and said, “Whatever happened to us, Billy?”

  The way he said this momentarily caught me by surprise.

  “What happened, George, was I never could understand why you fired Lou the way you did,” I finally said, “and then, on top of that, you tried to tell me he was stealing from you.”

  “Oh, that was all a big mistake,” he said. “I know I was wrong. The biggest mistake I ever made was letting Lou go. He knows how much I think of him.”

  After that chance meeting at his hotel, we gradually began to repair our relationship. On March 1, 1993, he was reinstated to baseball. I would like to say that his 29 months of exile had made him a more humble, softer person, but that wasn’t exactly the case. Even as the Yankees, with the additions of Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez, Jimmy Key, David Cone, and Wade Boggs and the development of players such as Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera, evolved into another championship team for him, he continued to butt heads with his underlings and fellow owners, and I was most often right in the middle of it.

  It was not until July 2005, when I wrote a story titled “Life with George” for a special section in the Daily News commemorating Steinbrenner’s 75th birthday, that I first began thinking about doing a book on him. For years there had been periodic reports in the New York gossip columns that Steinbrenner was preparing to write his autobiography. But it never came to pass, and now, midway through his eighth decade, his health had begun to fail and it had become apparent that he was no longer capable of writing his own life story.

  Over the years, Steinbrenner had successfully thwarted the attempts of freelance writers to write his biography simply by telling friends, associates and Yankee employees, past and present, that to cooperate would be at their own peril. But one night in 2005, over dinner at Elaine’s, Steinbrenner’s daughter Jennifer and her then-husband, Steve Swindal, broached the idea of doing her father’s book.

  “My father’s getting up there now,” Jennifer said, “and his book has never been written. Somebody needs to tell his story, and you’re the person who should do it. No reporter has known him better than you.”

  At the time, she was talking about a collaboration—which I knew would be impossible. Nevertheless, I took her encouragement as tacit approval from the family to go ahead and pursue the project on my own. In late 2006, I began seeking out former Yankee employees and other close associates of Steinbrenner’s, many of whom I hadn’t seen or talked to in 20 years. On a few occasions, I was asked if Steinbrenner was cooperating with me on the book, to which I would invariably reply: “It’s not really necessary. I was there.”

  Unfortunately, I’d joined the Daily News in 1978 and had not been around the Yankees on an everyday basis during the period when Gabe Paul was ru
nning the team for Steinbrenner. This posed a problem for me. As the baseball man who helped broker the sale of the Yankees from CBS to Steinbrenner in 1973 and became the architect of the 1976–78 championship teams with his trades for Chris Chambliss, Mickey Rivers, Ed Figueroa and Willie Randolph, along with his historic signing of Catfish Hunter, Paul was an integral character in the book. But engaging as I’d found him to be in the years after he left the Yankees to go back to Cleveland as general manager of the Indians, Paul was never very forthcoming about his relationship with Steinbrenner and his trials as president of the “Bronx Zoo” Yankees from 1973 to ’77. He died in 1998 without ever having written his memoirs, and that was a great loss, because he was an important figure in baseball for over half a century and knew Steinbrenner better than anyone.

  In an attempt to learn more about Paul’s relationship with Steinbrenner, I contacted his son, Gabe Paul Jr., who, by 2006, had himself just ended a long executive career in baseball, as the point man for the northern Virginia group vying to relocate the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C. Over lunch in Manhattan, Gabe Jr. confessed to having had little contact with his dad during Gabe Sr.’s Yankee years. However, he had kept many of his father’s files, including Gabe Sr.’s handwritten diary of the entire proceedings—meetings, phone conversations, negotiations—of the CBS sale of the Yankees to Steinbrenner. “I’ll be happy to provide you copies,” he said.

  It wasn’t until a year later that I learned Paul had done much more than just keep a diary to preserve his place in baseball history. Gabe Jr. told me that, while cleaning out the garage of the family house in Tampa, he and his brother Henry had come across a large box full of reels of audiotapes. God bless him, ole Gabe made tapes, too—nearly a hundred hours of them—but only about his Yankee years with Steinbrenner.

  After painstakingly transferring them onto CDs, Gabe Jr. invited me to listen to selected portions of them for use in the book. The tapes in their entirety are a whole separate book in themselves, detailing the love-hate dynamic between two iconic baseball figures, Steinbrenner and Paul, who, together, restored the Yankee dynasty. But for my purposes, the passages I was allowed to transcribe provided never-before-told detail of Steinbrenner’s continued active involvement in the Yankees during his first suspension, the behind-the-scenes pursuit of Catfish Hunter, and the hiring of Billy Martin for the first time—all of which would be crucial to the book.

  From there, it was a sentimental journey for me, revisiting the triumphs and trials of the most controversial owner in baseball history through more than 150 interviews of his friends, associates, employees and enemies. Throughout the process, I was frequently asked if I thought Steinbrenner should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I guess it depends on your perspective: his peers on the Hall of Fame Board of Directors saw to it that he wasn’t even included on the executives ballot voted on by the Veterans Committee in 2007 and 2009. It is not my intention here to make the case for him one way or the other, but rather to faithfully tell his story with the cooperation and insight of all those who were there.

  Chapter 1

  The Coming Storm

  GEORGE STEINBRENNER’S KNEES WERE trembling. He had never felt so anxious, not even before all those obligatory phone calls to his father after the track meets, calls that often ended in rebuke and humiliation.

  It was shortly before 3 P.M. on December 19, 1972, and he was waiting in the foyer on the 35th floor of the Columbia Broadcasting System building in Midtown Manhattan. He looked at the door leading to the office of CBS chairman William S. Paley, anticipating what he hoped would be the seminal meeting of his life. Steinbrenner was accompanied by Mike Burke, president of the CBS-owned New York Yankees, who had just briefed him over lunch on how to deal with Paley. The 72-year-old CBS chairman was a broadcasting and business icon, having assumed leadership of the company from his father in 1928, when it was a struggling Philadelphia-based radio network, and transformed it into the preeminent news-gathering and entertainment corporation in the postwar world.

  Under Paley, CBS had launched the careers of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood and Eric Sevareid in the news division and George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason in the entertainment division. At the same time, Columbia Records, a division of CBS, had introduced the 331⁄3 RPM long-playing vinyl disc and signed artists like Johnny Cash, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, and Barbra Streisand. Indeed, almost every decision Paley made at CBS was inspired—with one notable exception: the deal he made in 1964 to purchase the Yankees from sportsman Dan Topping and real estate/hotel magnate Del Webb for $13.2 million.

  When CBS purchased the team on November 2, 1964, the Yankees had won their fifth-straight American League pennant, and taken the St. Louis Cardinals to seven games in the World Series. But the team’s stars were past their prime, and the once-fertile farm system was critically exhausted of talent. The team’s legendary scouts, who for half a century had discovered and signed the Lou Gehrigs, Joe DiMaggios, Yogi Berras, Mickey Mantles and Whitey Fords, had all retired or died, and the amateur draft had evened the playing field for less affluent teams. Two years after CBS bought the team, the Yankees finished dead last in the 10-team American League, and by 1972 attendance at the Stadium had fallen to under one million for the first time since World War II.

  By 1972, Paley concluded that CBS had failed in the baseball business—more embarrassingly, it had failed in New York—and in July he had discreetly put out the word that the Yankees were for sale.

  The 42-year-old Steinbrenner, waiting outside Paley’s office, had a résumé of business accomplishments in his own right. In 1963 he had bought control of his father’s Great Lakes shipping company, Kinsman Marine Transit, and expanded its fleet. In 1967 he purchased a controlling interest in the larger American Shipbuilding Co., then based in Lorain, Ohio, and merged it with Kinsman. The company became the dominant grain carrier in the Great Lakes and, with the acquisition of the Great Lakes Towing tugboat company, quickly expanded into shipyards in Chicago and Toledo. In just five years, Steinbrenner had increased American Shipbuilding’s revenues from $46.9 million, in 1967, to $73.7 million.

  Through his shipbuilding enterprise, Steinbrenner had become a big player in Washington, beginning in 1968, when he lobbied Congress to amend the Maritime Act in order to get the Great Lakes more favorable tax benefits for its shipping industry. The Steinbrenners traditionally voted Republican, but the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, so he happily accepted the job of chairman of the 1969 Democratic Congressional Dinner, one of the principal fundraising events in Washington, where he raised a record sum of $803,000 and developed close relationships with powerful Democrats, most notably Senator Edward Kennedy and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. The next year, Kennedy nominated Steinbrenner for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but he declined, citing “personal and business obligations,” and the post eventually went to former U.S. Postmaster General Larry O’Brien, who later became commissioner of the National Basketball Association.

  Steinbrenner had decided he just couldn’t divert the amount of time and energy away from his shipping business that the Democratic national chairmanship would have required. In addition, Steinbrenner, who was always careful to say that he was not registered with any political party, didn’t want to limit his influence-seeking to the Democrats—not with a Republican, Richard Nixon, in the White House.

  So Steinbrenner was no Cleveland bumpkin come to New York for an audience with one of the world’s most powerful titans of business. It had been four years since Fortune had named him one of the country’s 12 young “Movers and Shakers.” As such, he had no reason to feel intimidated in Paley’s presence. Or so he kept telling himself as he waited nervously to be summoned into the great man’s office.

  THEY CALLED THEMSELVES “Group 66,” a name bestowed on them by their leader, George M. Steinbrenner, for no other reason than that was t
he year they first began gathering for lunch every Tuesday around table 14 at Al Bernstein’s Pewter Mug, on 207 Frankfort Street. They were the young business dynamos and bright legal minds of Cleveland who, collectively, injected an energy and vibrant civic spirit into a city that had become economically, aesthetically and philanthropically stagnant.

  Other members included: Thomas H. Roulston, president of Roulston & Co. brokerage firm, who’d assembled the group of investors that enabled Steinbrenner to purchase 470,000 of the outstanding 1,197,250 shares in AmShip in 1967 and take control of the company; Robert D. Storey, a prominent black attorney who was director of the Cleveland Aid Society; Ted Bonda, one of the founders of APCOA parking; Sheldon Guren and Ed Ginsberg, partners in a Cleveland law firm; and Al Rosen, the former Cleveland Indians third baseman and American League Most Valuable Player in 1953 who was now an executive with the Bache & Co. brokerage firm.

  Together, during the late ’60s and early ’70s, the group sponsored a number of charities and civic projects in Cleveland. Steinbrenner was the driving force behind a program for impoverished high school students that provided them with guidance counseling and scholarships and introduced them to the city’s business leaders.

  “Basically, we were just trying to get Cleveland out of the doldrums,” said Rosen.

  Symbolic of those doldrums was the mammoth and deteriorating 78,382-seat double-tiered, bowl-shaped Cleveland Municipal Stadium, on the shoreline of Lake Erie, along Cleveland’s northern boundary. Originally constructed in 1928 in an attempt to lure the 1932 Olympics (which ultimately went to Los Angeles), the stadium became home to the Indians in 1932. In 1948, the year they won the world championship, the Indians set a major league attendance record of 2,620,027 at Municipal Stadium and continued to draw over a million fans every year through 1955.