When George Steinbrenner was suspended in the early 1990’s for paying two-bit gambler Howie Spira to give him derogatory information on Dave Winfield, one of the Yankees’ star players, with whom Steinbrenner was feuding, Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered the Yankees’ owner to have no contact with the Yankees. Steinbrenner, of course, could not abide by such an order. Not have any input into the operation of his team? Not tell his general manager what he could or should do? Ridiculous…outrageous.
So Steinbrenner regularly communicated with General Manager Gene Michael, and Michael regularly recorded in a little black book the dates and topics of their forbidden conversations.
Michael was no dummy. Intelligent, always thinking, he figured some day he might need the records of his conversations with Steinbrenner, if only to protect himself. Michael could have seriously damaged, if not destroyed, Steinbrenner’s post-suspension future in baseball.
Michael, however, let the book lie in a desk drawer, unused and never disclosed to Vincent or anyone else. Steinbrenner had been too good to Michael in his post-playing career, and he wasn’t going to do anything that would hurt his benefactor.
Vincent said last week he had heard mention of a book but added, “We were never able to get it.”
“Stick,” as he was known for his slim frame, not his bat (he was a .229 hitter with 15 home runs in his 10-year career) spent the next 15 years working for the Yankees and being well paid for his duties, continuing to work for them until he died last week at the age of 79.
Player, coach, scout, adviser, minor league manager, major league manager, general manager, Michael did it all for the Yankees in nearly half a century with them. In making a contribution more critical than most people have made to their teams, Michael changed the culture that Steinbrenner had established, and the change led to five World Series championships and two other World Series appearances.
Steinbrenner, who thought he knew more about baseball than he did, made a habit of trading young players for high-priced veterans. During his suspension, Michael held onto young players who, he felt, had promise. Had Steinbrenner been on the scene, he might have traded Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada.
In fact, Steinbrenner once talked to Bob Watson, Michael’s successor as general manager, about trading Jeter for a veteran shortstop, Felix Fermin, who, as it turned out, played 11 games for the Cubs in his last season, the same season Jeter began his Hall-of-Fame career.
“George talked to Watson about Fermin,” Michael told me, “but he never would have gotten to that.”
That is, Michael wouldn’t have let him, just as he insisted over the owner’s strenuous objection in 1995 that he had to trade for David Cone, reversing the new approach and giving up young players. Three days before the non-waiver trading deadline, Steinbrenner relented and agreed to make the trade.
For Cone, a veteran pitcher, the Yankees gave the Blue Jays three young players – pitcher Marty Janzen, who went on to have a 6-7 record in two years for the Blue Jays, and two players who never played in the majors. It was an example of Michael’s baseball intelligence and instincts.
Cone, meanwhile, compiled a 9-2 record in 13 starts for the Yankees, helping them get to the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, and won a post-season game. In 1998 Cone led the league with 20 wins.
A shrewd poker player who in his post-playing days was always ready for a game on the road, Michael also learned how to play Steinbrenner.
“I remember there were times I played it down to George,” Michael related, referring to his desire to keep young players, “saying we should keep these guys and give them a chance to fail for us. I think I taught George patience. It wasn’t easy, but he learned.”
“He was tough,” Michael added, “but I learned if you went at him twice, three times for sure you had him.” He meant that was the way to dissuade Steinbrenner from wanting to trade a player.
A pivotal moment occurred, Michael said, when Steinbrenner returned from his suspension at the start of spring training in 1993.
“He came back and he knew the team had improved,” Michael said. “We added players along the way who were important. We made some moves. As it went on, George became more appreciative. He wasn’t as stubborn as he had been earlier in his career. When Joe Torre came along he had it easy.”
To his credit, Michael didn’t claim credit for the arrival of the core four.
“I didn’t sign any of those guys,” he said but conceded, “I think I had something to do with keeping them. We traded some young players, but we kept the right ones.”
Michael wasn’t always in a position of command with the Yankees. When he was a shortstop with the team in the first half of the 1970s, he was supposed to be the starting shortstop, but the Yankees kept giving his job away to a younger player.
One year Frank Baker arrived in the Yankees’ spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was told he would be the starting shortstop. When the exhibition schedule started, it seemed that Baker booted or threw away every grounder that opposing batters hit to him. When the season began, Michael was back at the position.
Michael was very good at the position and added a touch that other shortstops didn’t have in their repertoire. He occasionally pulled the hidden-ball trick on unsuspecting runners at second base.
He would have the baseball snugly tucked in his glove and say something to the runner like, “Excuse me, but the base isn’t right.” The runner would oblige Michael and step off the base, and Michael would tag him. The umpire, alerted beforehand to the scheme, would call the runner out.
This is not a trick an infielder could pull too often. Word gets around. Michael estimated he did it five times.
Michael himself was the victim of a trick, or to be more precise, a prank. This happened in 1973, Steinbrenner’s first year of ownership.
The game at Yankee Stadium was about to begin, and the Yankees emerged from the dugout. As the players ran onto the field, Michael put his glove on his left hand. Instantly, though, he threw the glove off and into the air. Steinbrenner was in his seat next to the dugout and, unfortunately for Michael, had an eyewitness view of the unusual and outrageous display.
Michael, it seemed, had a phobia about slimy and creepy creatures. When he slipped his hand into his glove, he felt what he thought was one of those creatures and panicked. He had to get rid of it fast.
As it turned out, the offending object in his glove was not a slimy or creepy creature but an uncooked hot dog put there by a teammate who knew of his phobia. Steinbrenner, not knowing who the player was, wrote down his uniform number on an envelope and later gave it to Manager Ralph Houk with orders to discipline the offender.
Some years later Hal Lanier, an infield teammate of Michael’s, confessed to having committed the slimy deed.
That incident might have been the funniest incident in Michael’s career. The worst was probably his defense of Steve Howe in 1992 when he joined Buck Showalter, then the manager, and Jack Lawn, the team’s vice president, to support the relief pitcher’s grievance against his record seventh drug-and-alcohol suspension.
Richard Moss, Howe’s agent, came up with a brilliantly clever defense for Howe and he won the grievance and was reinstated, but the only reason the Yankees’ officials supported Howe was he was having an especially good season for them and they didn’t want to lose him.
He was a seven-time loser and didn’t deserve another chance. He had already had more chances than any other suspended player has ever had. But that didn’t stop Michael and the others from fighting for him. Steinbrenner was serving his suspension but told Vincent he should do whatever he wanted with Howe.
Despite his close relationship with Steinbrenner, Michael wasn’t immune from the owner’s ax. Although the Yankees finished in first place in the first half of the strike-split 1981 season, assuring them of a place in the playoffs, the team was having a poor second half and Steinbrenner was constantly badgering Michael.
Fed up, Michael said publicly in the last week of August Steinbrenner should get off his back or fire him. Ten days later Steinbrenner fired him.
However, as he often did in these situations, Steinbrenner was prepared to offer Michael another job, only Michael wouldn’t take or return the owner’s calls.
When they finally talked, Michael said Steinbrenner said to him, “Why do you want to be down on the field (as manager) being second-guessed when you can come sit upstairs with the second-guessers?”
Michael loved telling that story. At the same time, the baseball people who came in contact with Michael had great respect and admiration for him.
Omar Minaya for one.
“We always talked about talent,” said Minaya, a former general manager, who is now with the Players Association. “He was always about the athletes. He grew up in the Pirates system. Stick had the Pirates’ mentality.We talked about talent and the value of talent and the separation of talent.”
Sandy Johnson is retired but worked for various organizations, including the Mets.
“Stick and I broke in with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in 1959,” Johnson said from his home in Maryland. “We were both infielders. Stick was a great defensive shortstop. We never played on the same team, but we spent a lot of springs together and we got to know each other pretty good.
“You might not see Stick for three, four, five years, but when you would see Stick he was the same guy as he was in 1959 when we were young minor leaguers together. He was always that same guy, whether he was the manager, general manager or whatever. He reverted back to the time when we were young minor leaguers together. He loved to talk about the guys we played with. He remembered everybody. He was a helluva guy, always the same.
“He was a great baseball guy, always wanted to talk baseball, talk strategy, talk theory.”
Johnson recalled something else about Michael. “He drove the bus one year in the minors,” he said. “It was in Hobbs, New Mexico. He got extra money by driving the bus. I think he was pitching in Hobbs one year because he had a great arm and then he went back to playing shortstop. He had a great arm. He had a quick release and really had great carry on the ball. That’s one thing that stood out about Stick.”
Something entirely different stuck out in Lee MacPhail’s mind about Michael, who played for the Yankees when MacPhail was Steinbrenner’s first general manager: the creative contract negotiations he used to conduct for himself.
“If I ever needed a contract,” MacPhail once said, “I would hire Michael to negotiate it.”