My Life in Pinstripes

It was April 27, 1982, and to tell you the truth, I didn't feel much like Mr. October. After five years with the New York Yankees, after all the home runs and the fighting with George and the fighting with Billy, after the whole crazy story with me right in the middle of it all the time, I was coming back to Yankee Stadium and number 44 was on the back of a California Angels uniform. The problem was, I needed a home run, and I didn't know if I could hit one. After all the nights when I had come to the stadium carrying my black bat like it was a .44 Magnum, it felt like a cap pistol now. All in all, I figured it was a hell of a situation for Reginald Martinez Jackson to be in.

There was always one thing I was supposed to be able to do: rise to the occasion. Rise to it and rise above it. And I've always done that, maybe better than anyone, at least during my generation in the big leagues. I'll admit that I've always had trouble in meaningless situations. But if you put the meat in the seats and made the game count, then I wanted to play.

People knocked me down, and I got up and hit home runs. That's who I always thought Reggie was.

But now it was April of 1982. I had signed with the Angels as a free agent when George Steinbrenner didn't think I could play anymore. After the first month or so of the season, I was making Steinbrenner look pretty smart. I was hitting .173 when I came into the stadium. I had no home runs.

It had been an April of cap pistols.

I was coming back to the stadium where, for five years, we had put on the greatest baseball show on earth--perhaps the greatest sports show, period. There had been two world championships, three pennants, four divisional titles. Some of it had been good, some of it had been bad, a lot had been just plain ludicrous. There had never been a show quite like it, and I had been the lightning rod somehow, the center of the storms. Now I was coming back, and one more time, I had a lot to prove. I figured that if I couldn't hit one out in this situation--a Reggie Situation if there ever was one--then maybe I couldn't do it anymore.

On top of everything else about this night, Ron Guidry was pitching against us. I'd always been proud to play with Guidry. I used to call him the truest Yankee, because he seemed to belong in pinstripes. Guidry never bitched. He just said, "Gimme the ball." Now he was on the other side. I had never faced him before in a game. I knew he'd come after me with left-handed sliders and fast balls, and I wanted to take him deep.

I thought, It would have to be Guidry.

By the time I came to bat in the seventh, with the Angels winning 2-1, I felt ready. I was comfortable, and the fans were making me feel more welcome every time I came to the plate. I could feel them rooting for me. Rooting for a dinger (that's what I call a home run). Guidry hung a slider. I just exploded all over it. I mean, it was kissed. I hadn't hit the ball good in a month. I felt like a dam at Niagara Falls had burst: for me, for the fans, even for the Yankees. I knew the Yankees felt good for me. (After the game, Guidry got in trouble with Steinbrenner for saying, "It was the only fun I had all night.") They had seen me do it before. Now they were seeing me do it at a time when they knew I needed to do it, and the chant really went up.

"Reg-gie! Reg-gie!"

I got back into the dugout, and the Angels mobbed me, and then it happened. All the fans in the lower part of the stands turned and looked up at Steinbrenner's private box near the press box, and they all started pointing. And chanting.

"Steinbrenner sucks! Steinbrenner sucks!"

They were telling him, finally, what they thought about his letting me get away. There were 35,000 of them.

"Steinbrenner sucks! Steinbrenner sucks!" It was like a celebration for me, a funeral dirge for him.

After the game, I was one of the last people to leave our clubhouse. I really wasn't in too big a hurry to let the night end. When I'd showered and dressed, I walked through the tunnel toward the front gate. The lobby was full of people waiting for me, and through the door I could see fans still lined up against the police barricades, waiting in the rain, chanting my name.

Something odd happened then. Something I would think was sad when I thought about it afterward. I was still in the lobby, talking to some of the security cops. Behind me, the elevator door opened, and there was Steinbrenner. Only he wouldn't come out of the elevator. He just let the door shut and let the elevator go back up.

I didn't think anything of it. I mean, he could have forgotten something and gone back to get it. I was still in no hurry, so I kept chatting, shaking hands. After a few minutes, the elevator door opened again. Steinbrenner saw that I was still there. He let it close again. Amazing.

After all we'd been through, whether we were together or at odds, he couldn't come over and say, "Hey, big guy, I figured you'd do something like this--hit a home run on me tonight." He couldn't come over and shake my hand. I would've respected him more if he just walked by me with his head up and ignored me.

I'd done all that crashing and bashing for the man, given him all that publicity. I might add right here that George and I also made a whole lot of money in the process. And on a night when the process seemed to come full circle, the last chapter for the two of us was an elevator door opening and George not being able to say a word to me.

The show was really something while it lasted, though, even when it wasn't all fun and games. It has been some ride from Wyncote, Pennsylvania, where it all started for me. Celebrity has embraced me most of my life, but I have never returned the embrace with quite the same feeling. I can be completely comfortable in front of 50,000 screaming people when a ball game needs to be won, but I've never been at ease in any crowd away from a stadium.

They call me Mr. October, but I've got to tell you something: The other months have not exactly been uneventful.

•

When Dave Winfield signed with the Yankees, he said, "I'm no country bumpkin." I was.

I know, I know. I'd said that if I ever played in New York, they'd name a candy bar after me. I had played on three championship teams in Oakland. I'd hit my home runs. What I'm trying to get across is this: By the time I signed with the Yankees, I'd already put some numbers in the books, already made a name for myself.

When I became a free agent after the 1976 season, Montreal offered me the best deal by far. Gary Walker, my agent, had begged me to sign with the Expos. I wanted to play in New York, though, and I thought I'd be welcome there. The Yankees had made the world series in '76, but then they'd gotten blown away by Cincinnati in four straight. I thought I might be the extra something that would make the difference for them. I didn't think they were going to give me the key to the city or anything, but I did think the prevailing attitude would be "Nice to have you aboard, big guy."

Didn't work out that way.

I wasn't ready for New York. And New York wasn't ready for me.

There's this big electric fence surrounding the city of New York, you see, and they want it to be tough for you to get over that fence. When someone who's good in a particular field says he's moving to New York, New Yorkers say, "Great choice. Great decision. Take your best shot." But as soon as you walk away, they grin, shake their heads and say, "He's got no idea. That poor s.o.b. has got no idea what it's going to be like trying to make it here."

I had no idea.

I found out that the city was a close-knit fraternity, same as the Yankees. Before I came to the Yankees, I'd always thought of myself as a fun-loving guy. I could coin a phrase. I could bullshit with you. I could raise some hell. That all changed in New York. I couldn't say things off the cuff. I couldn't put you on. Every sentence, every paragraph was looked on as the potential Big Headline. Where people had always thought of me as being smart, now it was different. Now I was a smart ass.

Let me put it to you this way: I didn't know I was such a raging egomaniac until they told me in New York.

I found out very, very quickly that my teammates hated the fact that I had a good rapport with the press, for example. They got offended that the media people were always around me. Behind my back, they made snide comments about how I was always seeking out the attention. Graig Nettles used to say that if a reporter tried to get past my locker without talking to me, I'd trip him to get his attention.

And that was all bullshit. But it was never perceived that way, not from my first day with the Yankees, even before the team came north to New York.

To this day, I can't figure why my coming to the Yankees was laced with such blatant bitterness. But it was. I don't know why the clubhouse atmosphere was so strained. The Oakland clubhouse had been a frat house. No cliques. No racism. Blacks and whites together. Boys being boys, not taking anything personally. But I noticed right away in Fort Lauderdale that first spring with the Yankees that the blacks all lockered in one section of the room. Willie Randolph. Roy White. (continued on page 122)Life in Pinstripes(continued from page 80) Carlos May. Mickey Rivers. Now me.

I remember one March day in 1977 when Ken Holtzman was running his laps in the outfield. I was at the bat rack in the dugout. Martin, Thurman Munson, Nettles, Sparky Lyle and Dick Tidrow were in a giggly group at the other end, pointing at Holtzman. I sidled down to listen.

They were making Jewish jokes about Holtzman. Crude, juvenile stuff. I shook my head and walked away.

I wasn't one of them.

The year 1977 would turn out to be the worst of my life. When I tell you this, I tell you the truth: If I'd had any idea what it was going to be like in New York, I never would have signed with the Yankees. Not a living chance.

•

The writer's name was Robert Ward. He had dark hair and was sort of nondescript, harmless-looking. He showed up in Fort Lauderdale the first week of spring training, smiled at me, put out his hand and told me he wanted to do a nice, upbeat story about my coming to the Yankees. Said the story was for Sport magazine.

I smiled right back and told him I really didn't want to cooperate with Sport, because I felt I'd been burned by them in the past. I had only been in the Yankee clubhouse for a couple of days, but I already sensed enough trouble with my new teammates. I didn't need any help from Sport. He persisted for several days and, after a while, I actually started to feel sorry for the guy. He kept telling me it wasn't going to look very good for him if he went back without anything. So when he showed up at the Banana Boat bar late one afternoon, I basically said, "What the hell." I told him to sit down and have a beer.

What I should have done was run for my car.

Because, of all the damaging things that happened to me in 1977--particularly in the way I related to the Yankees and they related to me--the most damaging of all turned out to be the Sport story. I'd been worried about them sensationalizing, and that is exactly what I got.

This particular day, Ward and I just started talking about baseball, shooting the bull. It was something I'd enjoyed doing in the past, and I thought I'd made myself clear about not wanting to do a story. So we talked. Naïvely, I assumed we were just talking. Ward seemed to understand that. He never asked a leading question. He never took a note.

After we'd been chatting for a couple of hours, he asked me what I thought I could mean to the Yankees in the '77 season.

I said, "Well, everywhere I've been, I've been lucky enough to be the center of influence on the club offensively. I'm the kind of power hitter who fits the last piece into the puzzle. I can be the kind of guy who puts a team over the top."

Then I held up a glass and compared the Yankees to one of those complicated drinks a bartender can mix--a planter's punch, something like that. I talked about all my teammates and about what they all could contribute. And I said, "Maybe I've got the kind of personality that can jump into a drink like that and stir things up and get it all going."

It didn't come out quite that way in the story. Maybe you heard. It was in all the papers. Here is the fateful--or fatal--quote from the story in Sport:

You know, this team ... it all flows from me. I've got to keep it all going. I'm the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson ... but he doesn't enter into it. He's being so damned insecure about the whole thing.

Later, there was this quote: "Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad."

The story came out on May 23. We were playing the Red Sox at home. The season was just six weeks old, and still I felt no less an outcast, an intruder, than I had the first day of spring training. I didn't know how bad it was until I got to the clubhouse late that afternoon.

All around the room there were players in groups of threes and fours, reading, muttering, occasionally glaring at me. Very pleasant. Like a picnic--with sharks. Thurman walked by with the magazine sticking out of his back pocket. No one, not even the players with lockers next to mine, came anywhere near me.

A little later, something happened in another part of the clubhouse that I wasn't aware of at the time. Fran Healy, a backup catcher and my closest ally on the team, was standing at his locker when he got word that Thurman wanted to see him in the doctor's room. When Fran got there, Thurman began to read the Sport piece aloud for his benefit. He paused for a moment to catch his breath.

"Maybe he was quoted out of context," Fran said.

Thurman snapped back, "Quoted out of context for three fuckin' pages?"

It was official now. It was in black and white, everything they'd wanted to believe about me since the first day of spring training, and there wasn't going to be any court of appeals. I thought I was better than they were.

I was the straw that stirred the drink, at least in my own mind.

The next day, Carlos May and Mickey Rivers moved their lockers away from mine. The day after that, I showed up for a doubleheader and I found a note left in the back pocket of my uniform by one of my teammates that said, "Suck my ass."

It was in the open now. I was the alien. After the Sport story came out, Chris Chambliss, for instance, never really loosened up around me again but spoke to me only when necessary. I could never tell how it affected my relationship with Billy Martin, whether or not it had anything to do with things that happened later on, because Billy and I didn't have a good relationship from the start.

I've gone over and over this in my mind, wondering if I could have made things smoother, and it reminds me of an old joke about poor, pitiful Pearl. She's a bag lady, and she's walking down the street, carrying all her belongings in a shopping bag and screaming to the heavens. "Why me?" Pearl screams. "My house has burned down, my kids have forgotten I'm alive. Why did this happen? Why to me?"

Suddenly, there is a thunderclap and Pearl hears the voice of God.

"I don't know, Pearl," He says. "There's just something about you that has always pissed me off."

There was something about me that always pissed Billy Martin off.

Martin is one of the most complex people I've ever met. He's nice, he's mean. He's good and he's bad. He's kind and he's cruel. He would be a fascinating character study for someone who knows a lot more about psychology than I do. There were times when he was as sweet to me as a man could be, and there were times when he went as far out of his way as possible to hurt me as a ballplayer and as a man.

But one thing was always obvious. He did not want Reggie Jackson to be a Yankee in 1977. That part I do understand. I think it always bothered him that he wasn't consulted about my signing with the Yankees. In Billy's eyes, I was always "George's boy." That was his pet expression for Yankee free agents: George's boys. When it was announced that I was signing with New York instead of Montreal, Billy said, "I'm going to show him who's boss around here. One of George's boys isn't going to come in and run the show."

We kind of went from there.

And on a Saturday afternoon in 1977 at Fenway Park--on national television--Billy and I became about as famous as a (continued on page 150)Life in Pinstripes(continued from page 122) player and his manager can be.

We had been on the road for a while, and we had finally started to play, and I had started to hit. We were in first place when we went into Boston on the 17th of June to play a three-game series--one of those summer weekends when you can't imagine a more perfect setting for baseball than the little emerald on Lansdowne Street near Kenmore Square.

Things had eased up slightly between Thurman and me. We weren't going to the movies or anything, but we were at least shaking hands after one of us hit a home run. Things had not improved at all between Mr. Martin and Mr. Jackson, however. There was still no open hostility, no face-to-face confrontations, but the tension was always there. The least little incident would set Billy off. He's lived his whole life that way, I gather, smiling one minute, cocking his fist the next.

The explosion between Billy and me was ignited by a little Texas-league double by Jim Rice that dropped in front of me during a game we would end up losing 10-4. I could have played the ball better, no doubt about it. To this day, I'm sure Billy thinks I just didn't hustle. To this day, he's wrong.

The show started then.

Billy came out to the mound, ready to replace Mike Torrez with Sparky Lyle. When he took the ball from Torrez, he said, "I'm going to get that son of a bitch for not hustling."

I found that out later. He meant me.

I didn't know any of that was going on. Waiting for Sparky to come in from the bullpen, I walked back to the outfield wall and chatted with Fran Healy. When I turned around, I saw Paul Blair, one of our backup outfielders, running out to take my position.

It's funny now, looking back on it, because as I ran toward the dugout, I must have been the only person in Fenway Park who didn't see what Billy was trying to do. I've played baseball all my life, and to this day, I've never seen a player get yanked defensively in the middle of an inning quite that way. This was Billy the Kid doing his macho routine to the extreme, showing me up to my team, the fans, even a national television audience. He wanted me to take a big fall. Maybe he'd wanted that from the start.

When I got to the top step of the dugout, I could see there was a fury about him, and it was all directed toward me. When Billy starts to lose it, the veins in his neck become very prominent. Now they were standing at attention.

I headed for the corner of the dugout opposite where he was. He screamed over to me, "What the fuck do you think you're doing out there?"

I looked at him. I said, "What do you mean? What are you talking about?"

He started coming toward me.

"You know what the fuck I'm talking about!" he said. "You want to show me up by loafing on me? Fine. But then I'm going to show your ass up. Nobody who doesn't hustle plays for me."

Considering the fact that Billy was in the process of going around the bend at this point, I was relatively calm.

"I wasn't loafing, Bill," I said. "But I'm sure that doesn't matter to you. Nothing I could ever do would please you. You never wanted me on this team in the first place." The distance between us had shortened considerably. Elston Howard was trying to get between us. Yogi Berra was there, and Jimmy Wynn. Billy was still screaming.

"I ought to kick your fucking ass!" was the next thing I heard.

And then I'd had enough. I'd been holding myself back all season, and now this 49-year-old man was telling me he was going to whip me in a fistfight.

I stopped being placid then.

"Who the fuck do you think you're talking to, old man?" I snapped, just about spitting out the words.

"What?" Billy yelled. "Who's an old man? Who are you calling an old man?"

I guess in Billy's mind, he's still 25 years old and the toughest kid on the block. He came for me. Elston and Yogi grabbed him. Wynn grabbed me. I'd find this out later, but by now, NBC was having some show. They had one camera trained on us from the end of the dugout and another from across the field.

Yogi still had Billy in a bear hug, which was lucky for Billy. I was livid. I walked past everybody and headed for the clubhouse. I could still hear Billy screaming behind me. I just shook my head and thought, The man has totally lost it.

I also thought this: When the game is over, I'll give him a chance to fight.

Torrez was in the training room, icing his arm. Healy had come running down from the bullpen. My locker was right next to Billy's office. I took my uniform jersey off but left my T-shirt on, and my spikes. I wanted good footing on the carpet, because when Billy got back, I was going to fight him.

Healy was having none of that. It's not Fran's style, which was always a lucky thing for me. He sometimes had to have enough common sense for the two of us.

"Listen," he said. "I knew something like this was going to happen. You should know something like this was bound to happen." I was pacing around in front of my locker. "The best thing for you to do is get a shower and get the hell out of here. If you stay, the only thing that can happen is that you'll make things worse than they are already."

Fran just kept telling me over and over, in different ways, to leave. He always did have a lot of Henry Kissinger in him. So I showered and dressed, then I left the clubhouse and made the long walk back to the Sheraton-Boston.

Of course, the war wasn't over yet.

•

From March until October, a ballplayer spends more of his waking hours around the clubhouse than he does around his own home. You get there three, four hours before a game, you stick around for a couple of hours afterward. You're supposed to feel safe there. The clubhouse is one of those seductive charms of baseball, a place where you don't have to grow up. It's like a college frat house. You're not supposed to dread walking in there. You're supposed to be part of the fraternity.

That house was never my home.

Every day I would walk in, and it was like there were imaginary arrows showing me the way to my locker. Walk to the middle of the room, stop before I got to the buffet table, take a military-sharp left turn, sit down, get dressed. Keep the mouth shut. Get ready to go out and try to take it all out on a pitcher.

As they say in show business, it was a tough room to work.

I would be drawn into clubhouse banter only indirectly, and then in a mean-spirited way. I would always be hearing from the writers about some new remark that Nettles had made that was getting a big play in the papers. Nettles has been a great third baseman for the Yankees, one of the most elegant fielders ever to play that position. He's spent a career in New York turning doubles into double plays. And he has the justified reputation of being baseball's master of the one-liner.

I always felt that Graig Nettles was uncomfortable with himself. He was certainly uncomfortable with me. For reasons I could never fathom, there is something that eats at Nettles. I never got to know him well enough to discover what that thing is or why it's there. One thing that may have eaten at him over the years is that he never really got the credit he should have as a ballplayer. He was always in the shadow of either Brooks Robinson or one of the higher-paid Yankees. Come to think of it, money may have been the cause of some of his bitterness, too. He was never paid what he deserved as a key member of those championship teams.

One day in the spring of 1979, Nettles took off after Henry Hecht, a gifted baseball writer for the New York Post who happens to be Jewish. Some of the (continued on page 154)Life In Pinstripes(continued from page 150) Yankees had been caught breaking curfew a couple of nights before, and Hecht had put their names in the paper. Nettles apparently thought that was some breach of newspaper etiquette. Hecht came to the visitors' clubhouse at Al Lang Field that day, and Nettles was waiting for him.

He tore into Hecht, real verbal abuse. And in the middle of his outburst, he screamed, "You know what you are, Hecht? You're nothing but a backstabbing Jew cocksucker!" I was dumfounded, not because Nettles said it--I was used to that; it was the way he thought. I had heard it that day in Fort Lauderdale in 1977 when he stood around with the others and told Jewish jokes about Ken Holtzman. I had heard it at various times in the clubhouse when Nettles would have an outburst about one of the writers covering the team. It would be "Jew" this or "Jew" that. But I was shocked that he would blow his cover that way in front of an outsider. It was as if he were saying, "Just in case you have any doubts, this is where I'm coming from."

Nettles and I played together for five years, and I always worried about turning my back on him. I always had the feeling he was behind me, ready to turn the knife with an eminently quotable remark:

"The best thing about being a Yankee is getting to watch Reggie Jackson play every day. The worst thing about being a Yankee? Getting to watch Reggie Jackson play every day."

Ah, yes. It was definitely a diverse group, the Yankees of '77. You had Nettles, who was close to Munson, who was close to Lyle. That was the strongest clique on the team, one that Billy was very fond of. I never tried to break that clique. Couldn't have done it if I wanted to. I did get close to Thurman before his death. That just happened naturally.

I would never have wanted to be close to Sparky Lyle. Lyle is a crude, self-serving son of a bitch. I had no respect for him. It bothered me that he went out of his way to make me the villain in his book, The Bronx Zoo. I barely knew Sparky, had very little contact with him, but he really slammed me. It always seemed like just a sensationalistic way to sell his book.

Lou Piniella was different. He was the master politician of the team. He's dark and good-looking and can be extremely affable. Piniella adapted and adjusted to New York better than anyone else on the team. He could handle the city and the pressure and the media. He could handle Steinbrenner. He took care of himself, made sure he preserved Lou Piniella. But, hell, that was the only way to cope with being a Yankee. Now he clearly seems to be one of Steinbrenner's fair-haired boys. My guess is he'll be in the Yankee organization for many years to come.

We had quiet men, too, like Roy White, who was getting toward the end of his playing days and didn't want to ruffle any feathers (it didn't help; he would end his career playing in Japan anyway). Besides, he was an old-fashioned Yankee, and old-fashioned Yankee black guys were taught to be seen and not heard.

But every so often, after I'd gotten up on my soapbox about not being accepted because I was black, White would sidle up to me at the batting cage and quietly say, "It's about time somebody said something like that around here." Roy had just been conditioned differently. He didn't want to say things publicly that needed to be said.

Willie Randolph was the same way when he came up. Didn't say boo. In my later New York years, I would come to like Randolph enormously. But even at the beginning, you could see it bothered him that he never got enough credit for being an integral part of the ball club. You could see it eating at him, because Randolph could play the game.

Bucky Dent could play, too. He was the perfect shortstop for that Yankee team. Bucky wasn't flashy the way Nettles was, but he could make the routine plays all the time and the great plays often enough. He never missed a ball right at him. If there was a double-play ball, we would get the double play. He got his bunts down. He drove in 40 to 50 runs a year. He was outstanding at doing a necessary, if unappreciated, job.

Curious team. Crazy chemistry. Ship of fools one day, sleek luxury liner the next. Perhaps the most interesting character of all was Mickey Rivers. He was a comic figure on the field, full of nerves and twitches, twirling his bat like a baton when he took a big swing and missed. But Mickey could play. He was difficult to understand a lot of the time, because he spoke in a sort of frantic mumble. Some players made fun of him and delighted in telling Rivers stories to the press, and he got a reputation as a Fetchitlike character.

But he wasn't dumb. He was a street-smart kid from Miami with a terrific sense of humor and a distinctive way with words. It was almost as if he reveled in having everybody play him for the fool.

There was a very subtle form of racism at work here, another way for people to deal with a talented black star. OK, Rivers has a lot of talent. OK, he makes good money. OK, he dresses well. OK, no one on this team can do what he does physically. But let's not forget that he's not real bright and that he's black. That was Mickey Rivers' image, and it bothered the hell out of me that he didn't fight it at all. He let his problems with money and race tracks make him into something of a caricature for the newspaper guys. This kind of thing happens in sports sometimes. I'm not saying it's always deliberate; often it's subconscious. But it's something blacks have to be aware of.

With me, the rap was never ignorance. It was arrogance. It's just another form of prejudice. I've always been aware of it. I saw it even more clearly when I came to the Yankees. They dealt with me one way, with Rivers another. We just didn't fit the mold, at least not in that clubhouse.

But, then, George had smashed the mold all to hell when he put the team together. He wasn't really interested in sociology lessons or human relationships.

Just the all-important loss column, as we say in baseball.

•

There were really two world series in 1977 against the Dodgers. First there was the one played over the first five games. We led 3-2 after that one. It was the series, but there was nothing dramatic or startling about those games.

Who could have known that the second world series, the one played in game six, was going to be mine? Don Larsen had his perfect game in 1956. I had mine in '77. Three swings. Three dingers.

I should have known in batting practice. I cannot ever remember having one like it. I hit maybe 40 balls during my time in the cage. I must have hit 25 into the seats. By the time the game started, I hadn't spilled any of my adrenaline. Even when Burt Hooton walked me on four straight pitches my first time up, I wasn't deflated. I still felt good. I was going to be ready when he threw me a strike.

He threw me one in the fourth. Nobody out. Thurman on first. I figured Hooton would try to pitch me up and in. That's always been the book on me. Well, he got it up, but not far enough in. I got it all. We were ahead 4-3.

One.

When I came up in the fifth, Hooton was out of the game and Elias Sosa was in. He threw me a fast ball right through the front door. I call them mattress pitches, because if you're feeling right, you can lay all over them. That was the hardest ball I hit that night, a screaming line drive into the right-field seats.

Two.

The crowd really started to come to me then. We were winning the game that could give the Yankees their first championship since 1962. I had swung the bat just twice, and I already had two dingers. The people in the stadium knew there was a chance to be part of some history.

"Reg-gie! Reg-gie!"

Finally, it was the bottom of the eighth. We were ahead 7-4. Tommy Lasorda, the Dodger manager, had brought in Charlie Hough, a knuckle-baller, to pitch. I stood watching him warm up and I wanted to yell over to Lasorda, "Tommy, don't you know how I love to hit knucklers?"

I just wanted Hough to throw me one damn knuckle ball. I had nothing to lose, even if I struck out.

He threw me a knuckler. It didn't knuckle. I crushed it nearly 500 feet into the black, those beautiful empty sections of the bleachers in center field.

As I began to move around the bases, I felt so ... vindicated. Completely vindicated. When I passed first, I smiled at Steve Garvey and he smiled back; he'd tell me later he was so excited for me he was pounding a fist inside his mitt, so no one would see. I felt so light on my feet, floating on the noise. It was the happiest moment of my career. It is the happiest moment of my career. I had been on a ball and chain all year--at least in my mind--and now, suddenly, I didn't care.

I had three.

•

I went into the '78 season like a sophomore in college. I had grown up a lot my freshman year. I had survived all the hazing. I ended up with good grades. On the last day of school, I made dean's list. I figured sophomore year would be a breeze.

Unfortunately, when the season began, I got off to a slow start. So did almost everyone else. Now, I generally don't worry about slow starts, because I always seem to have them. I've always assumed that when the weather got warm, so would I. I also think a slow start is a natural by-product of a championship season for a team. You go into opening day with this thought: One hundred and sixty-two games is a marathon; there's no need to break any records the first mile.

Problem was, these were the Yankees, and in George Steinbrenner's view of the Yankees, there is only one way for them to go: George wants to win all 162.

So he got mad about the slow start and, of course, didn't keep it to himself. He began showing up in the clubhouse, screaming that we were embarrassing him and embarrassing New York and that he would clean house and bring kids up from the minors if we didn't start producing; it was a familiar theme. And it became obvious that he was putting a lot of pressure on Billy, who when under pressure in those years usually did three things:

1. Got mad.

2. Went to the bar.

3. Went after me.

With Billy, the players didn't get to see a lot of the actual drinking, only the results, meaning hangovers. By July of '78, he was showing up later and later at the ball park, looking shakier and shakier when he did, wearing his sunglasses more and more often for the afternoon games. Billy has always had atrocious work habits, especially in areas like preparation and being on time. Most managers will show up four or five hours before a game for meetings, to go over statistics about tendencies of various hitters against the opposing team's pitcher. Not Billy. Most managers have the batting order posted long before batting practice. Not Billy. As Boston began to pull away from us, it was nothing for Billy to show up at 12:30 for a two-o'clock game. When he did show up, he wouldn't go near anybody.

Once again, he and I had no relationship at all unless we showed up in the same newspaper story. The only time Billy and I spoke was if we happened to be walking through the clubhouse door at the same time. I thought winning would give us at least some mutual respect and grounds for being civil to each other. But winning had changed nothing. As far as Billy and Reggie were concerned, it was the same old nightmare.

I began to read that Fred Stanley, our backup shortstop, was more of a Yankee than I was. Or so Billy said.

Billy began to attack my fielding.

Billy began to D.H. me again. Sometimes he would D.H. me only against lefthanders, which made no sense.

Billy began to sit me down when the spirit moved him. And it moved him with no real rhyme or reason.

Now, understand: I was proud of what I had done the season before. I came back not expecting things to be perfect, but I sure expected them to be better. I had made myself one promise during the off season: I wasn't going to go through anything like 1977 ever again. So now, as the bullshit got to high tide again, I decided I really was going to get out.

It was on July 18, when we were 14 games out of first place, that I got the official word: The Yankees suspended me after I'd set off World War Three with Billy by flagrantly ignoring his order not to bunt in a game against Kansas City. The sentence was five days without pay. I was hoping for 30. I was really hoping that they'd kick me out for the rest of the year, because I couldn't stomach the thought of being back in the same atmosphere with Martin. I was just never going to win with Billy around. I would always be the uppity one; he would always be the darling of the fans, gutty little number one, the feisty street fighter.

But George said, "Just get him back in uniform." He wanted to be Mr. Fixit; it's another one of George's favorite roles. I sometimes think that when he shaves in the morning, he looks in the mirror and sees five or six faces staring back at him. George the patriarch. George the sportsman. George the tycoon. Tough George. Fair George. And you can take it from me, there are a lot of Georges.

I was to rejoin the team in Chicago on the 23rd of July. I decided to take a cab to the ball park, trying to avoid the media. While traveling the abandoned streets of Chicago, I realized I was a beaten man. I was melancholy, depressed. The silence in the cab was interrupted by the clicking of the meter measuring miles and money. My thoughts shifted to how I was going to deal with my teammates, who probably couldn't have cared less whether or not I showed up. I knew I owed them an apology and decided I would give it to them as soon as I got to the park.

I got there late, and because I was behind schedule, my teammates were already drifting out to the field, to batting practice. So my apology would have to wait until the next night in Kansas City. Of course, I had no idea that it would be pre-empted by an earth-shaking episode starring Billy Martin.

The Yanks had won four in a row without me, so no one could lay a hand on Billy for not playing me in Chicago that night. In the dugout, he never spoke to me, never looked at me. After the game, I showered, dressed, answered some questions, got onto the team bus and went to the airport. I bought a couple of papers and magazines, then went to an airport refreshment stand with Fran to get a milk shake. While we were talking, Yankee G.M. Cedric Tallis came by in a frenzy. He paused momentarily to tell us--and anyone else who would listen--about something that Billy had just said.

Cedric was gone as quickly as he'd arrived. Then came Henry Hecht of the New York Post. He explained to me exactly what had happened. He and Murray Chass of The New York Times had run into Billy, who was apparently enraged that I hadn't apologized to him. When the two reporters asked him about the situation, Billy had said, "One's a born liar and the other's convicted." He was talking about me and George. I was the born liar; George was the convict (a reference to his 1974 felony conviction for making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon).

Hecht then said that they'd asked Billy if he wanted that statement printed. Billy said to go ahead and put it in the story.

At that moment, I was still so depressed that the full impact of Billy's statement hadn't yet sunk in. But as I began to walk toward the plane, it started to become clear. I realized the fatal potential of Billy's rash comments. I made an immediate decision to stay as quiet as possible on the subject. I wouldn't say anything, wouldn't step back into the storm. I didn't need it, couldn't handle it. For the first time in my career, I'd bit my tongue and shut up.

I wasn't on the plane two minutes when Chass, who was sitting across the aisle from me, said he wanted to get my comments. I switched seats to move closer to him. In my mind, I heard the words echo: "No comment." And that's exactly what came out of my mouth.

The next day in Kansas City, Billy held a press conference and tearfully told the world he was resigning. Every writer, every coach, every player knew differently. George Steinbrenner had fired him.

Hot damn. I felt like I'd won the lottery. I'd get to feel that way for almost a week, until I lost my lottery ticket on Old-Timers' Day the following Saturday.

I should have seen it coming in Kansas City as I watched Billy's press conference on television before we went to the ball park that night. It was such a great act, such a brilliant demonstration of public relations. It was almost sickening schmaltz, but it worked. There were the tears. There was Billy's speech about the Yankee pinstripes. There was his statement about how he wouldn't answer any questions about his resignation. It was about as much a resignation as a man being pushed out of a speeding car.

Billy is not an intellectual, but there is a cunning level to him that is something to behold. I watched and thought, Shit, he's turned the whole thing around. He's become the victim!

George apparently saw it that way. During the following week, he held secret meetings with Billy and rehired him to manage the team again beginning in 1980. George would play the news for all it was worth, announcing it melodramatically before the old-timers game in New York on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Bob Lemon arrived in Kansas City to replace Billy. Lem was exactly what we needed at the time, a tough old baseball veteran with an even disposition who immediately seemed to throw a blanket of calm over all the smoldering fires Billy had left behind. The day Lem showed up, we were ten and a half games behind the Red Sox. We won that night and cut it to nine and a half.

I didn't know at the time that we were starting out on the road to a miracle.

Lem wasn't one for making speeches or having meetings. He was a Californian who was laid back before anyone invented laid back. One day in August, after we'd ripped off another four in a row, he said to me, "This is the way I like it. You guys play, and I sit in the dugout and enjoy."

We played. He enjoyed. And suddenly we had the Red Sox in our sights.

It was, well, just one of those things. The way the Miracle Braves of 1914 were one of those things. The way the Giants' catching the Dodgers in 1951 after being 13 games back was one of those things.

From the time Lem showed up in Kansas City, we went 48-20 down the stretch. We won 12 of 15 in one streak and 12 of 14 in another, and once we got our nose in front of the Red Sox at the top of the stretch, we kept it there until the last day of the regular season, when we lost to the Indians while the Sox won up in Boston, forcing a one-game play-off for the American League East title.

Game number 163 for the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1978 was something kind of special. Afterward, some people would call it the greatest game ever played. That was for the writers and the fans. Ballplayers don't think that way. But it did all come down to that beautiful Indian-summer day in Boston, with Guidry doing his thing.

By the seventh, we were losing 2-0. Mike Torrez, who'd been traded to Boston that year and who had one win in the past six weeks, was making us look bad. There were two out and two on in the seventh when Bucky Dent came up. On the second pitch Torrez threw him, Bucky fouled one off his foot and went down. No one was saying much in the dugout while the trainer went out to spray some painkiller on Bucky's foot. We were all watching Bucky. Except for Mickey Rivers. He was staring out at Bucky's bat.

"He cracked his bat," Mickey said.

Someone, I forget who, said, "What?"

Rivers repeated, "Cracked his bat." Then he went down to the rack, got one of his own--Bucky had been using Mickey's bats--and handed it to the bat boy.

It was sort of significant.

Because on the next pitch, Torrez threw a fast ball down the middle and Bucky hit this fly ball to left that just happened to stay in the air long enough to land in the screen over the Green Monster--that just happened to become one of the most famous home runs in baseball history.

The play-offs and the world series could have been anticlimactic after that. It was the Royals again in the play-offs, after all, followed by the Dodgers again in the series--a replay of '77. But after the comeback, we weren't about to leave the season with anything less than the big trophy. We took care of the Royals in four games in the play-offs, then the Dodgers in six in the series.

As for myself, I didn't feel the same sense of relief and redemption that I'd felt at the end of the '77 season. As bizarre as the early and middle parts of '78 were, as much as we all felt like we'd landed in the cuckoo's nest, nothing was ever going to compare with my first Yankee season, if we're talking about ordeals. But I did walk away from the '78 season with my credentials as Mr. October intact.

In the 1977 post-season, I'd been in 11 games and hit .306, with five homers and nine R.B.I.s. In the world series, I'd broken nine batting records and tied a bunch of others. In the 1978 post-season, I was better. No brag. Fact. In 10 games, I hit .416, with four dingers. I drove in 14 runs.

Coming on the heels of 1977, it was like getting a 20-minute coffee break between world wars, both of which you won.

•

The first tragedy of the '79 season came just ten days after we won the '78 series. While the rest of us were sitting back and smiling a lot and letting the scope of what we'd accomplished sink in, Bob Lemon's youngest son, Jerry, was killed in a jeep accident. It was said afterward that Jerry was particularly close to Lem, a chip off the old block. I don't know about that. I just know that when I called Lem with my condolences, he sounded like a man who'd had his heart cut out.

It was obvious in spring training that Lem was a changed man. He had been such a happy-go-lucky guy the year before. But in Fort Lauderdale, there was such a sadness about him. It should have been a good time for everyone as we tried to go for three in a row. Except that Jerry Lemon was dead, and something had died in his father.

I remember sitting with Lem in his office one day and hearing him say, "Meat"--he called all his players Meat--"I just wonder if it's worth it anymore."

What do you say? I told him to hang with us; maybe we could give him something back for the way he'd saved us the previous summer. I hoped that I would never have to go through what he was going through as we stumbled along, crippled by injuries, in the early stages of the 1979 season.

Steinbrenner, of course, was already getting antsy, as only he could. No one knew at the time--early June--that George was having phone conversations and secret meetings with Billy about him coming back to manage ahead of schedule. Even with all that had happened, with key injuries to people like Goose Gossage and me, none of the players were ready to hit the panic button. But George was.

It was in mid-June, during a three-city trip, that the phone in my hotel room started ringing after midnight. Writers calling. "Billy's coming back early, Reggie, and what do you think about that?"

I called Lem's room and told him I wanted to talk to him. In a tired voice, he said, "Come ahead, Meat. I think I know what you want to talk about."

He was wearing his pajamas and holding a healthy-looking drink when he opened the door. He didn't look defeated. He just looked like Lem.

I sat down and said, "Is it true?"

Lem just smiled at me. "It's true, Meat. They're kicking me upstairs. Except they're really sending me home. Maybe it's best for everyone."

Here was this big, proud man, one of the most admired pitchers of his time, a manager whose skills were never really appreciated by George or anyone else, sitting in his pajamas in the middle of the night in a Texas hotel room, drinking his drink and talking about going home to California, where the memories would, unfortunately, be more bad than good.

"Every whore has his price, Meat," he said quietly. "I guess I found mine. They're going to keep paying me, so I take it like a man and keep my mouth shut."

Every whore has his price. Lem said he had his. I was starting to think that if I stuck around the Yankees and kept watching George write this crazy script again and again, maybe I had mine, too.

•

I woke up with an oxygen mask slapping me in the face, like my father telling me it was time for school. It wasn't a dream, though. I was in one of the passenger seats in Thurman Munson's baby, his twin-engine Cessna Citation.

Thurman had convinced Graig Nettles and me to fly with him from Seattle to Anaheim in the middle of our West Coast swing. Our wars were behind us by then, and if we weren't best friends, I at least thought of us as battle-scarred comrades who'd finally achieved a warm measure of respect. It was July 12, 1979, five days before the All-Star break.

There were four of us: Thurman at the controls, a copilot, Nettles, me. Thurman made a big production out of telling me where to sit. He told me later that the joke was supposed to be on me. One of the oxygen masks wasn't working too well, and during the flight he'd planned on telling me to put it on.

Problem was, when the mask came down, it was for real. While I was dozing, its release mechanism was triggered automatically. Still a little groggy, I heard Thurman say, "Nothing in this damn thing ever works completely right." I straightened up in my seat, the grogginess a thing of the past, and noticed that the instrument panel was lit up like a Christmas tree. There was a lot of blinking going on. I am no aeronautical expert, but I used to own a twin-engine, and I was pretty sure that what I was seeing in Thurman's Cessna was a definite excess of blinking.

I said, "Is anything the matter, captain?"

He said, "The altimeter seems to be off. I think that's why the masks came down. I've got to get this whole thing checked out during the All-Star break."

Thurman and I had a running debate about his flying. I always told him that it was terrific to have a plane of his own, but he didn't have to fly it. Thurman would grin his crooked grin and shake his head from side to side. "I like to fly myself," he'd say.

Our debate always ended the same way. I wish to hell now I'd been a better debater. You think about that kind of thing afterward. When it's too late.

So there we were. Nettles and I were watching the blinking, and Thurman told us that we were just a few miles from the Orange County Airport. He said that the fog had come in and visibility wasn't too good, so we might have to make one pass at the airport before landing. I refastened the oxygen mask to the ceiling and told him to wake me when it was over.

He couldn't take it down first pass. The fog really was thick. I asked Thurman how low we'd gone.

"About six hundred feet," he said. "No problem."

A few minutes later, we landed. I was dating a stewardess who lived down in Orange County at the time, and I'd arranged for her to pick me up. When we got to the car, she was white as a sheet.

"Who was flying that thing?" she asked.

I said, "Thurman. You knew that."

"Well, why did he buzz the field?"

"What are you talking about?" I said. "We were six hundred feet up."

She said, "Like hell you were. Try a hundred. When he took it down that first time, he scared the daylights out of us."

Three weeks later, on August first, we played a night game in Chicago. Thurman had the plane at Midway Airport; he was leaving for his home in Canton, Ohio, right after the game to be with his wife, Diane, and the kids. He wanted me to spend the day with him in Canton, then fly to New York. He tried to get Piniella and Bobby Murcer to go with him, too. He was excited about getting his captain's license.

Said he'd be practicing touch-and-go landings.

Said he wanted me to come watch.

Bobby and Lou and I all passed. Bobby said that maybe if we all kept after him, we could get him to give up the flying thing once and for all. "It doesn't make any sense," Murcer said.

After my own experience in Anaheim, I figured he had that right.

While practicing touch-and-go landings in Canton the next afternoon, Thurman crashed his Cessna and died.

In the clubhouse the next night, it was as if we were all in suspended animation, locked in time, forced to be a part of a nightmare. Thurman's mask was in his locker. His uniform. Everything. And no one wanted to look at any of it. You didn't want to be in the room. This was a baseball place. A place for games. People got hurt in baseball. They had slumps. They lost pennants. They yelled at each other and got into fights. But there was always another day to play. Another game. People didn't die.

It was so freaky to be in the room that night. I can't remember a silence like it in my life, not before or since. We all moved around in a trance. Then we were on the field and the game was starting. A message that George had written about Thurman appeared on the scoreboard. Then the people in the stadium began an ovation that went on and on, an eerie ovation that just would not stop. I was standing at my position in right field, and I just broke down. The message was about "our captain" and about how he would always be with us.

Thurman: smiling the crooked grin and talking about flying and that damned million-dollar airplane.

Thurman: the one who gave me the nickname Mr. October, even if he did it sarcastically at the time. It was right at the start of the '77 world series and I'd had a terrible play-off against the Royals. Someone asked Thurman about the latest turmoil and he said, "I guess Billy isn't aware that Reggie is Mr. October." Then I finished with the three dingers and he came up afterward and, putting an arm around my shoulder, said, "See, I knew what I was doing when I gave you the nickname, you big coon." Maybe things started to turn around for us right then.

Seasons can go wrong for so many different reasons, especially when a team is coming off two world championships and what people were calling the best comeback ever. A season can go wrong because guys get hurt or get old or because the big guns just don't produce. Sometimes another team comes along and is just plain better. Sometimes there is complacency. Sometimes it's a combination.

In 1979, there was this awful combination: Jerry Lemon died. George decided to replace Lem with Billy ahead of the 1980 timetable. Thurman crashed his plane.

In retrospect, we were lucky to finish fourth. The final standings were the least important aspect of the season. With all the craziness off the field the two previous years, we had always had baseball--the game--to bail us out. In a strange kind of way, it was the game itself that was our reality, certainly our haven of sanity.

With Thurman's death, though, it seemed like there was no sanity left. Anywhere.

•

You've heard of that movie The Big Chill? In 1980, I really felt like I was getting The Big Stroke from just about everyone except George. And with that kind of support from the town and the team, I knew I could handle him. Plus, I had Dick Howser, who'd been named manager after Billy was fired during the off season for punching a marshmallow salesman. Howser was simply one of the best men I ever played for. No fuss. No big heart-to-heart chats. No nonsense. Howser treated me with respect, the way Earl Weaver had in Baltimore. He just put my name into the fourth slot in the batting order and left it there from April until October. The result was that I had my best regular season since 1969, when I'd hit the 47 dingers in Oakland. We won 103 games and I hit 41 dingers, had 111 R.B.I.s. And I hit .300 for the first time in my major-league career, a milestone of which I was very proud.

The season would be marred at the end, when we didn't make the world series. I really wanted to go all the way for Howser. But maybe it was inevitable that the Royals would finally get us in the playoffs. Maybe it was just their time.

And maybe we all finally got so sick and tired of George Steinbrenner's badgering that we died on the man. The Royals would sweep us three straight in the 1980 play-offs, and never in my professional life have I seen a team that was so relieved to get a season over with.

The league championship series opened in Kansas City. We lost two in a row and Steinbrenner snapped. We'd barely got into the clubhouse when he came storming in. He must have broken his own seat-to-clubhouse record getting there, and as soon as I took a look at him, I knew it was trouble. Face red, screwed into this painful grimace. Big chest heaving. I've always thought that George, being as overweight as he is, doesn't fit the image he wants to project. He wants to exude power. He wants to look like a military man, all spit and polish.

So now he walked to the middle of the clubhouse, ready to explode, and he went ahead and did it.

And no one cared.

No one was listening to him. We didn't want any more of his silly psychological games. We were tired of all his front running, of having him tell us we were fabulous when we won and lousy when we lost. The guys just wanted to go home. We were tired of George's hot air, just tired of it all. It was like something had died in the room, like you could actually hear the balloon deflating.

That isn't supposed to happen in October, not to the Yankees, not to me. But there it was. If George hadn't broken everybody's spirit, he sure had put a dent in it.

The next night in New York, George Brett hit a home run ten miles off Goose Gossage and that was that. No pennant. No world series. It was over for everybody except Dick Howser.

George waited about a month before firing him.

•

I was 35 years old and was about to become a two-time free agent when the 1981 baseball strike began. We were out for 52 games. When we came back, we found we'd already won the A.L. East, because the powers that be had decided to split the season. The Yankees were in first place when the strike began. The Yankees were in the play-offs. Simple.

So there was no big incentive for us in the second half, and the result was that we played listless, .500 ball. I won all the listless awards. I could not get out of the funk, no matter how hard I tried. My average remained around .200. I went three weeks without a dinger.

During the depths of my slump, I showed up at the park early one day and found a typewritten message from Cedric Tallis informing me that the team was invoking its contractual right to demand that I take a full physical.

I read it. I reread it. I went upstairs to talk to Cedric. I was so angry I couldn't see straight (which was sort of ironic, since one of the tests they wanted me to undergo the next day was an ophthalmological exam). It wasn't enough that Steinbrenner had jerked me around during the winter with the phony tease of a new long-term contract, a contract that never came. Now, in a free-agent season that had already gone so wrong for me, he wanted to plant seeds of doubt around the league about my physical well-being. His game had gotten even dirtier than usual.

After I passed the obligatory medical exam, I called George, who'd wanted me to fly to Tampa to see him. When he got on the line, he wanted to know what had happened with the physical.

"Fuck the physical, George." I spit the words into the phone. "I've got a plane to catch, so I don't have a lot of time. Maybe I had given up on the season before yesterday and today. Maybe the way I've been playing is my own fault. Maybe you don't think I can play anymore. Well, I am going to play my ass off the rest of the season, and I'm going to show you and everybody else that there isn't a player in the world further from being washed up than me. I'm not comin' to Tampa, 'cause we don't have anything to talk about. I'm goin' to Chicago to play some ball and do my job. Then it's goodbye. 'Cause I'm gone!"

The conversation was over. I had a plane to catch.

I started playing my ass off the next night against the White Sox. I went into Chicago hitting .217. From that point until the end of the regular season, I hit .265 with nine dingers and 26 R.B.I.s, which was right there with any September I'd had as a Yankee. For about the 900th time in New York, I was answering with the best weapon I've ever had: my bat.

•

It was not a dull post-season.

They never were.

We won the first two games of the A.L. East miniseries against Milwaukee. And I began to think, Damn, we're going to pull ourselves together and win again. And I began to think that there was a special survival instinct in the Yankee clubhouse that came from playing for someone like George. Then a funny thing happened.

We lost the third game, on Friday night at the stadium.

We lost the fourth game on Saturday afternoon, and George began another series of clubhouse tantrums and public pronouncements that now seemed like reruns of an old sitcom I'd already seen too many times.

Suddenly, it was 1978 all over again. Yankee Stadium, a Sunday night this time, instead of a Monday afternoon in Boston. But the stakes were the same: One game to decide the championship of the American League East.

And the game? We won it, of course. The score was 7-3. I hit a big dinger, in the middle of a 3-for-4 night.

After that, we beat the Oakland A's three straight for the pennant. Even though it was Yankees vs. Billyball, Reggie vs. Billy, the series turned out to be anticlimactic after that fifth game against the Brewers. Billyball had been all the rage when the A's got off to a great start, but the team hadn't been much during the second half. You could see that Billy had "Martinized" another pitching staff. He'd worn his kid starters out during the season--teaching them all to throw spitters, never going to the bullpen--and by the time they got to October, they were done. We pounded them pretty good.

We opened the world series in New York, winning two in a row. It became a blur of comedy after that. We went to Los Angeles and lost three straight games, with George bitching and meddling all the way. The Dodgers beat Guidry on Sunday afternoon with a couple of late home runs. George showed up with his hand in a cast--and a very fat lip--Monday morning, saying he'd gotten into an elevator brawl with a couple of drunk Dodger fans. He said they'd been bad-mouthing New York and the Yankees. Said he had to uphold our honor by busting them up.

We all thought it was hilarious.

If this was a frantic effort to motivate us after the way he'd gone about screwing the series, it wasn't going to work; the series had gotten away from us. Los Angeles blew us out in game six. The Dodgers, who'd lost the last four games to us in '78, finally had their revenge.

The crowning irony had to do with Steinbrenner. Always he had screamed at us about embarrassing New York. Always he had screamed at me about embarrassing the Yankees. In five October days in 1981, he had become the biggest embarrassment of all. Before we even left the clubhouse after the game, he had issued his infamous statement apologizing to the city of New York for the Yankee loss.

George Steinbrenner should have apologized for himself. No one else. I had watched him play the fool for the last time, on my dime, anyway.

I rode to Yankee Stadium the next day to clear out my locker. I knew it was the last time I would go there as a Yankee.

It was a gray October day as I made the ride up Madison Avenue, the same ride I had made so often over the years, in good times and bad, sometimes driving faster than I should have because I couldn't wait to get to the park and get a bat in my hands, sometimes crying, as I had one terrible day in 1977. I remembered all the summer afternoons when there'd been groups of black kids on the corner as I got farther and farther uptown, recognizing the Rolls, yelling out my name, coming over and slapping me five through an open window when I stopped at a light on my way to the Madison Avenue Bridge. I remembered driving the same drive the night I hit the three dingers against the Dodgers and hearing on the radio that Steinbrenner had sweetened Billy's contract with a bonus.

Lots of rides. To the big ball park.

I thought that day about having been a Yankee, and how even though we'd been the greatest show on earth, we'd made the image of the Yankees go wrong somehow. The Yankees are the most famous team in the world. Hell, the nickname for Americans is Yankees. I was grateful to have been a Yankee, will always feel that a part of me is a Yankee. But as I rode up Madison Avenue that day, I wished we all could have done it better.

"If I'd had any idea what it was going to be like in New York, I never would have signed with the Yankees."

"I wanted good footing on the carpet, because when Billy got back, I was going to fight him."

"Sparky Lyle is a crude, self-serving son of a bitch. I had no respect for him."