Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden

Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden

Author:Bill Madden
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780061690327
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2010-05-11T04:00:00+00:00


Chapter 12

An Icon Scorned

YOGI BERRA HAD EVERY reason to feel apprehensive about becoming George Steinbrenner’s latest manager. His ascension to the job, on December 16, 1983, marked the tenth managerial change by the impulsive and demanding Yankees owner in just eight years. At 58, Berra’s legacy as a Yankee icon was secure. He had won three Most Valuable Player awards, played on 14 World Series teams and been a 14-time All-Star, and he was arguably the most beloved and respected Yankee of all time. Yet he elected to risk all of the goodwill he had earned from the fans and media by agreeing to work for the man who’d just fired his friend and former teammate, Billy Martin, for the third time.

In a column in the New York Post (where he’d moved from the Daily News), Dick Young seized on how Berra had gone from venerable to vulnerable: “The reason George Steinbrenner is naming Yogi Berra manager is that George wants to be the manager,” Young wrote. “George realizes he made a bad deal with Billy, agreeing to stay away from the clubhouse, away from the phone, away from the players. With Yogi in the manager’s office, George can be manager again. He can enjoy life. He can tell Yogi who should lead off and who should catch. George can re-connect the phone to the dugout too. That was the fun George missed last season.”

Steinbrenner reacted to Young’s column (which was headlined GEORGE WILL USE YOGI AS PUPPET IN DUGOUT) by writing a humorously indignant letter to the editor of the Post defending Berra’s honor: “I really think Dick Young owes Yogi Berra an apology because in picking on Yogi Berra, you’re picking on one of the finest men in baseball. As far as I’m concerned personally, I still like Dick Young even after the article. I’m not sure I’m going to invite him to Christmas dinner this year, but then again I may have to have him over for dinner if he keeps picking Marvis Frazier to knock out Larry Holmes.”

It was a mostly tongue-in-cheek poke at Young, not nearly as stinging as the verbal barbs Steinbrenner so frequently leveled at baseball officials, other owners or umpires, probably because the owner knew deep down that Young was right. Even Berra’s wife, Carmen, voiced reservations over his giving up the easy life of a bench coach and thrusting himself squarely into Steinbrenner’s line of fire. At the December 17 press conference at Yankee Stadium, Berra explained: “My age had something to do with it. I’ve achieved just about everything a man can achieve in this game. I’ve won the Most Valuable Player award, I’ve made the Hall of Fame and I’ve won two pennants as a manager [with the Yankees in 1964 and the Mets in 1973]. But I’ve never won a world championship as a manager, and I felt that this club is capable of winning one.”

Otherwise, Berra echoed much of the same familiar rhetoric of the three previous press conferences at which Steinbrenner had named Billy Martin manager.



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