Encountering the Yankees

By Roger Kahn

The Yankees were going to play two games against the Boston Red Sox, good teams, old rivals, jousting in the freshness of another baseball season. That was the main event, and it was going to be a good one, but the sideshows made more noise.

Dick Young, gifted, didactic and the senior baseball writer in Manhattan, forecast the imminent firing of Billy Martin, the Yankee manager. "Billy had the world by the fine hair, and he has loused it up," Young wrote with consistent, if unappealing imagery.

Sitting in his office under the triple tiers of the stadium, Martin rehearsed the speech he intended to mouth as a response. "I'm not barring you from the clubhouse, Young, because I don't want to stop you from making a living. But don't expect me to speak to you again." Martin looked up at his audience--me --as perhaps Cicero had looked up, practicing a peroration.

Reggie Jackson, the great slugger, who is a new Yankee, pounded a home run and then avoided teammates who wanted to shake his hand. "It's not good here," Jackson said.

Fading Patriarch. In his office, George Steinbrenner, a volatile, charming hustler, who is principal owner of the Yankees, looked as pained as if someone had punched him in the wallet. "I buy advertising in the New York papers," he said, "and I know how expensive that is. One way to look at the newspapermen's stories is that they're free space. So the question is: How do we use the free space?--and the answer is not well lately."

Conceivably, the American League championship will be settled by the five games the Yankees and the Red Sox play against each other come September. Conceivably, the Yankees will win easily. Conceivably, Baltimore will sneak home first. (My own prediction is for the Yankees to clinch the division championship in Toronto on Sept. 24. The temperature will be 34.7DEG F.)

Old-fashioned baseball writing concentrated on such issues. Was the manager a sour drunk? Was the superslugger a tightwad? No matter. Write only about the games. Emotion, indeed humanity, was irrelevant. You can read a season of sports pages from 1951 without learning anything of the interplay between the fading patriarch (DiMaggio) and the bucolic Wunderkind (Mantle).

Contemporary sports reporting offers dramatis personae, dialogue, sex and sometimes even baseball. People who care now know all there is to know about the situation between the reigning Yankee captain, Thurman Munson, and intense, sensitive Reggie Jackson. (The situation is spiky.)

Steinbrenner leads a syndicate of 19, which purchased a wreckage of a Yankee franchise from CBS in 1973. He eased out Manager Ralph Houk, hired and fired Bill Virdon, purchased perhaps $7.5 million worth of baseball talent and brought in Billy Martin, who had been a nonconforming battler on the conformist Yankees of the '50s.

Since 1969, Martin has managed at Minnesota, Detroit and Texas. He has had winning seasons everywhere and been fired everywhere. His approach is classic: Us Against the Rotten World. Us is the team and the coaches. The Rotten World includes other teams, the press and even the front office.

This season Martin arbitrarily barred reporters from the players' lounge. When Young challenged the rule, Martin physically removed him. "Not with a punch," Young says, "but a shove." Martin also questioned the front-office handling of personnel and said critical things about Steinbrenner. For that, Young noted cheerfully, the manager has been fined $2,500.

Jackson told a magazine reporter in March that other Yankee players seemed insecure and petty. That comment surfaced last week too. Now, with the Red Sox gone and Texas new in town, Jackson's fresh uniform was brought to him. Someone had taped an obscenity to the hanger.

"You know," Reggie said, "whatever I said to the fellow from the magazine was off-record. I think I'm going to ask for a team meeting to apologize." He gritted his teeth, a 31-year-old superstar swallowing hubris.

Afterward Steinbrenner said, "There will be no special meeting. There will be no speech to Dick Young. Just offering to apologize, Reggie showed class. I pointed up positive aspects in Young's story to Martin. I regard Billy as a brilliant manager. Print that. But three firings make him a three-time loser. That's off the record."

"George, how can you put what's on the record off the record?"

"Well, the important thing is that he's brilliant."

I had meant to mention that beyond the psychodrama, the Red Sox won an exciting game, 4 to 3. Then the Yankees won an exciting game, 6 to 5. The baseball was marvelous to behold.

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