What makes a comment memorable? “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” is filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of quotations, but not all of them are memorable. I have my own personal version of Bartlett’s, and I include only quotes that are memorable, not only to me because they were said to me but also because they have met the test of time and will live on in baseball notoriety.
Billy Martin, John McMullen and Larry Lucchino uttered three of the memorable remarks, all involving the New York Yankees and their owner, George Steinbrenner, who was responsible for the fourth. It is the Steinbrenner comment that is especially relevant this weekend.
The Toronto Blue Jays have been in New York playing a four-games series against the Yankees in their fight for the American League East championship, and it was this very same weekend 30 years ago that they were doing the exact same thing.
In their 1985 confrontation, the Blue Jays won three of the four games and went on to win the division title. This time the Blue Jays have won the first three games (the fourth to be played Sunday) and increased their division lead to 4 ½ games, the same lead the Blue Jays had after the ‘85 series.
The results of this year’s series have put the Yankees in additional jeopardy besides not winning the division title. While it might be a shocking development, the Yankees could conceivably fail to win a wild-card spot in the playoffs.
There is, however, another major difference in the 1985 and 2015 series. The series three decades ago was punctuated by an observation Steinbrenner made to me in the press box at Yankee Stadium after the Saturday night game, the third game of the series. It was there and then that Mr. May was born – 30 years ago last night.
The anniversary of the event was not celebrated at the stadium. Steinbrenner died in 2010, and his successor son, Hal, has no interest in recalling productions of his father’s questionable practices.
In 1985, the Yankees had just lost their second successive game to the Blue Jays, falling 3 ½ games behind them with 21 games to play, and the owner wasn‘t happy, to put it mildly.
Plopping into an empty seat next to me in the press box, Steinbrenner criticized Dave Winfield, Ken Griffey and Don Baylor for their lack of production in the series, then said: ”We have been out-ownered, we have been out-front-officed, we have been outmanaged, we have been outplayed. I blame myself as much as anybody.”
Steinbrenner came prepared. He had a sheet of statistics for the first three games of the series: Griffey 0 for 8, Baylor 0 for 7, Winfield 3 for 11 with only two runs batted in, one of them on a ground out.
”Where is Reggie Jackson?” he exclaimed. “We need a Mr. October or a Mr. September. Winfield is Mr. May. My big guys are not coming through. The guys who are supposed to carry the team are not carrying the team. They aren’t producing. If I don’t get big performances out of Winfield, Griffey and Baylor, we can’t win. If I don’t get pitching from Cowley, Whitson and Bystrom, we’re not going to win.”
The Yankees didn’t win. Doyle Alexander beat Ed Whitson the next day, Sept. 15, increasing the Blue Jays’ lead to 4 ½ games, and the Yankees tumbled as far as seven games behind.
A late Yankees’ spurt cut the margin back to two games with two to play, but Alexander beat Joe Cowley, 5-1, on the next-to-last day, ending the race.
The Yankees didn’t reach the post-season for 10 more years, but Mr. May lived on. As years passed, some peoples’ memories blurred. They think Steinbrenner gave birth to Mr. May when Winfield had a poor performance in the 1981 World Series (1 for 22).
Steinbrenner, of course, was infamous for his epithets aimed primarily at pitchers, though he was an equal opportunity vilifier:
- Ken Clay “spit the bit.”
- “Columbus, here I come (Dennis Rasmussen).”
- “We’ve seen enough of Tucker Ashford.”
- Hideki Irabu was a “fat pussy toad.”
- Jim Beattie “looked scared stiff.”
- “He’s fooled us long enough (Mike Griffin).”
- ‘We found out about Dale Murray today.”
None of Steinbrenner’s comments, including “Mr. May,” has gained inclusion in Bartlett’s, whose 18th edition was published in 2012. Nor have any of my favorite comments that were made about Steinbrenner.
Taking the earliest first, the owner’s favorite manager, the five-time hired Martin, was irate the afternoon of July 23, 1978, over Reggie Jackson’s comments upon his return from a five-game suspension.
Just inside the entrance to the terminal at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Martin vented his rage at Reggie. Later, as he walked to the gate to board the Yankees’ charter to Kansas City, he resumed his rant, this time bringing Steinbrenner into it.
“The two of them deserve each other,” he said. “One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted.”
The born liar, in Martin’s mind, was Jackson. The convicted one was Steinbrenner, who had pled guilty to having made illegal contributions to the re-election campaign of President Nixon.
Knowing he would be fired for saying what he did about his boss, Martin resigned – tearfully –
the next day before Al Rosen, the Yankees’ president, could take action.
Later that week, in a scheme only Steinbrenner could concoct, Martin was announced as the Yankees’ next manager, but that’s another story.
The following year, in a May 14 interview upon his purchase of the Houston Astros, John McMullen sat in his office on the 30th floor of the World Trade Center and talked about his minority share in the Yankees.
McMullen, like Steinbrenner, owned shipbuilding companies. In fact, he had a greater share of Steinbrenner’s primary company, American Shipbuilding. Steinbrenner bristled whenever anyone mentioned that fact and would quickly say that combined, members of his family owned more than McMullen.
In his office that day in 1979, McMullen, my favorite owner despite our disagreement on just about every baseball issue, made two comments that I have always remembered.
His 9-year-old son Johnny, he said, told him that two points in the Yankees were worth 100 percent of the Astros. But this was the comment that has long been repeated – often incorrectly:
“There’s nothing more limited than a limited partner in the Yankees.”
Finally, there was the Dec. 24, 2002 comment by Lucchino, president and CEO of the Red Sox. The Yankees and the Red Sox were among three finalists competing for a Cuban pitcher, Jose Contreras. Only a few days earlier the Yankees signed a Japanese outfielder, Hideki Matsui.
With an offer of $32 million for four years, the Yankees won Contreras’ signature.
”The Evil Empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America,’’ Lucchino said to me when I called him for his reaction to losing Contreras to the Yankees.
Lucchino’s Evil Empire spread and stuck. It just didn’t make it into Bartlett’s.