Pinstripe Empire (57 page)

Mantle had rebounded from his injury-riddled ’63 with a .303/35/111 season, his last big year and his fourth 100-RBI campaign. Pepitone hit 28 homers and drove in 100. But the winds were shifting. Brooks Robinson of the Orioles won the MVP Award. The Yanks were starting to play “old.”

The Cardinals, managed by Johnny Keane, won on the last day in the National League, when the Phillies collapsed. The Cardinals were a terrific team, though, and Berra was going to get to manage in his hometown against the team he grew up rooting for.

The Yanks didn’t have Ramos, who sat in the stands in his cowboy gear. Ford, ailing, lost game one 9–5. Kubek, out with a sprained wrist, was replaced by Linz at short. Stottlemyre beat Bob Gibson in game two with Linz homering. The Series moved to New York.

In game three, the score was tied 1–1 going to the last of the ninth. Knuckleballer Barney Schultz came in to pitch, with Mantle leading off.

“I’m gonna hit one outta here,” Mickey said to no one in particular. He was mostly talking to himself, although Bouton, who had tossed a six-hitter, heard it clearly.

And he did. He sent the first pitch into the upper right-field seats for a walk-off Yankee victory. He had 13 walk-off homers in his career, including this one: They were rare because he tended to get walked a lot in such situations. The drama of this, winning a World Series game, would become his “greatest moment” whenever asked (although Mick sometimes playfully recounted a few ribald non-baseball stories as his “greatest moment.”)

The homer was his 16th in World Series play, breaking Ruth’s record. Mantle would hit two more in that Series to finish with 18, a record unlikely to be broken. (It became common to lump “postseason home runs” together on television graphics once playoff baseball began in 1969.)

Another win by Bouton in game six tied it up and set up a game seven at Busch Stadium, the rookie Stottlemyre against the great Gibson. Linz got another homer off Gibby, as did Clete Boyer, but Gibson was able to tough it out and hold on to a 7–5 win and a Cardinals championship. For the second year in a row, the Yanks had lost the World Series, although this one was no blowout. The last time they had lost back-to-back World Series was 1921–22, their final years in the Polo Grounds.

IN THE SUMMER of ’64, Lehman Brothers told Topping and Webb that this was not a good time to consider a public sale. “Baseball is in a down period,” they were told, according to Dan Topping Jr., who was working as Houk’s assistant. “If you can find a private buyer, you should do that.”

Topping, being a man about town, knew William S. Paley, the chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and began discussing a sale of the team with him. CBS was expanding beyond television and radio. They had purchased a toy company. They owned Columbia Records. They owned guitar-maker Fender. They invested in the Broadway show
My Fair Lady.

In truth, CBS actually tried to buy the Yankees’ tenants, the football Giants. They already had broadcast rights to the NFL. The Giants had been playing at Yankee Stadium since 1956, and with CBS televising their games, they had a close relationship. But the NFL did not permit corporate ownership, and Paley turned to the Yankees.

News broke on August 13 that Topping and Webb were selling 80 percent of the team to CBS for $11.2 million. The deal would become effective
on November 2. CBS had an option to buy the remaining 20 percent for $2.8 million, making the total value of the team $14 million. Topping would remain president until such time as he sold off his shares. Webb would sell off his 10 percent by February of ’65.

No one knew for certain what this corporate ownership would mean for the Yankees. The first thought was that games would be shown on WCBS-TV, not the long-standing WPIX. But they weren’t going to preempt their prime-time lineup for baseball.

There were objections from other owners about the sale, some thinking that this would infuse so much money into the operation of the Yankees that the divide between them and the rest of the teams would become insurmountable. As an owner, CBS would have the ability to know how network negotiations were progressing with the Commissioner’s Office, learning too much about rivals NBC and ABC in the process. There was general unease throughout the game.

Judge Roy Hofheinz, owner of the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros), called it the “blackest day for baseball since the Black Sox scandal.”

Topping and Webb agreed to a league meeting in Boston on September 9 to hear the arguments against the sale. But the five-hour meeting resulted in an 8–2 approval vote, and the deal was on.

ON OCTOBER 15, as soon as game seven was wrapping up in St. Louis, Bob Fishel placed a long-distance call to the Savoy Hilton. “Warm up the coffee, we have a press conference tomorrow.”

Just twenty-four hours after losing a seven-game World Series, the Yankees were going to fire Berra as manager. He thought he was being called into the office to be given a raise, but Houk told him he was out.

At the same time, in St. Louis, the winning manager, Johnny Keane, was sticking it to his bosses and quitting his job. He’d been second-guessed all season, and when it appeared the Phillies were going to win the pennant, he figured he would be fired. Now he was being proactive.

Yogi didn’t attend his press conference, even though he was being “moved” to a position as “special field consultant” at $25,000 a year for two years. Houk and Topping were present, and Houk said, “Losing the World Series had nothing to do with [this]. The decision was made before the World Series.” He also said the decision was his and Topping’s, and that CBS was consulted but played no part in it.

Berra, playing golf with friends in New Jersey, was stunned. In addition, it had to sting that the man who had been his third-string catcher a decade before, when Yogi was racking up MVPs and world championships, was firing him.

Yogi didn’t express any of that to reporters. “I feel pretty good. I suppose I’ll be doing some scouting. If another offer turns up, I’m free to take it. And hey, we won the pennant and it took seven games to beat us in the Series.”

Years later, he told sportswriter Bill Madden, “The way I looked at it, the Yankees had given me a job they wouldn’t even trust Babe Ruth with.” He said he smoothed things over with Houk “through the years.”

Houk told Madden, “Worst thing I ever had to do … Every time I’d see him at some public function, I felt awful.”

Fans were in shock, and adding to it was the hiring of Keane the very next day. Everyone sensed this had all been in the works for weeks, with Yogi the only one not in on the plan. Keane was coming aboard at a moment of triumph, but to the fans he was an unknown, whereas Yogi had always been an enormously popular figure. And sure enough, within a month, the Mets offered Berra a coaching job and he took it. He’d be back in uniform, and back with Stengel for 1965, paying two tolls to drive to Shea Stadium instead of just one to Yankee Stadium.

IF THE FIRING of Stengel in 1960 had been a little sloppy, and the firing of Berra in 1964 a little cold, the firing of Mel Allen was just … empty.

On September 21, Mel was called up to Topping’s twenty-ninth-floor office in the Squibb Building and told he wouldn’t be offered a new contract for 1965. The news was devastating to Mel, a lifelong bachelor whose whole adulthood had been the Yankees. Still just fifty-one years old, he was the Voice of the Yankees, and those who understood marketing knew that the right announcer could be bigger than the players, bigger than the owners, perhaps the most talked-about man in town.

Maybe that was the problem.

Mel was never given a reason. Suddenly his friendships and allies on the team weren’t there.

He wasn’t the same announcer he had been in his heyday. He had begun to ramble on air; his stories became too long, too predictible. He was more short-tempered.

He was brutal to his young stat guy, Bill Kane, unforgiving of errors large and small.

A lot of people who used to enjoy his company would cross the street if they saw him coming.

There was even a problem with Ballantine, the team’s principal sponsor. Business was bad. As the fees to advertise increased, sales were decreasing with the coming of national brands like Budweiser and Miller and their big ad budgets.

“They were being marketed as ‘premium’ beers,” explained Tom Villante, the former batboy who became head of the Schaefer account at the BBDO ad agency. “They weren’t really—the consumer was being asked to pay more for them to cover the cost of trucking them around the country. The consumer thought a higher price meant a premium flavor, and those brewers were happy to go along. Local beers like Ballantine, Rheingold, and Schaefer were feeling the pinch.”

Ballantine, which had been sold since 1840, would hang in there with the Yankees until 1966, but then the brand faded from the marketplace. If Mel had still been there, it would have been very hard to attract a new beer sponsor, with Mel’s voice so identified with Ballantine.

There were other bad marks on Mel’s ledger. In 1961 he’d referred Mickey Mantle to his doctor for a “cure-all” injection, ultimately resulting in the infection that caused him to miss games in that fateful September home run chase.

In ’63, he had lost his voice during the World Series telecast, and some thought that psychologically he was losing it—he couldn’t bear to see the Yankees get swept, and had lost his instrument. There were also whispers of excess drinking and homosexuality, but they were nothing more than rumors.

There really was no single reason ever given to Mel or to the fans, and none ever materialized over the years. Mel had apparently just gotten annoying, and maybe too expensive, to the people who employed him.

The Yankees told NBC that Rizzuto should broadcast the ’64 World Series, which broke Mel’s heart, even though he knew by then he was done. That was a big deal, and began a series of news stories suggesting he might be gone. But the Yankees didn’t formally announce his firing until December 17.

“There is no point in going into any details as to why we made the change,” said Houk. “We just thought that a change would be beneficial.”

Mel’s replacement was Joe Garagiola, Yogi’s childhood pal who worked the ’64 Series with Rizzuto, who was a familiar face on the
Today
show and the author of the hit book
Baseball Is a Funny Game.
It was a wise choice because Garagiola was well liked and didn’t suffer from comparisons to Mel. When Joe left after three seasons, Frank Messer came up from Baltimore and brought a fine, no-frills professional style with him, suffering not at all from Mel Allen comparisons thanks to the Garagiola span between them.

But for more than a decade, the most asked question among fans was always, “Why was Mel Allen fired?” And no one ever stood up with an answer.

Mel remained a somewhat saddened figure for the rest of his life. The Yankees meant the world to him. “I carry my heart on my sleeve,” he’d tell people. He had a second act as the voice of
This Week in Baseball
. The Yankees even brought him back as a cable broadcaster in 1978, and he called Dave Righetti’s no-hitter in 1983. When I was the WPIX producer, I had him do a few innings in 1990 so that he could be a “seven-decade announcer,” and I had him record our opening so that each telecast began with his signature, “Hello there, everybody, this is Mel Allen …” But he died an unhappy figure in 1996 despite a plaque in monument park and lifetime ownership of the title “Voice of the Yankees,” and as the first broadcaster (with Red Barber) to win the Ford Frick Award, presented in Cooperstown on induction day. But he had lost his great love at age fifty-one and it was never the same.

So in one eventful year, the Yankees changed ownership, fired Berra, and fired Allen. Ballantine was on the way out. Anyone who believed in curses had plenty to work with.

IN JUNE 1965, A YOUNG FAN WROTE a letter to the editor of the
Sporting News
, saying, “Why is everyone giving up on the Yankees? They always come through in the end. They will be fine.”

I know because I was that fan.

The letter writer was wrong. Johnny Keane had arrived at what would be a turning point in Yankee history. When he was handed the key to the manager’s office, he couldn’t have known that the dynasty was over. The team had collapsed, and would spend the next decade trying to rebuild itself for the first time since Babe Ruth arrived.

Even baseball experts didn’t see it coming. It came to be said that Topping and Webb, knowing they were going to sell, had let the farm system run dry. But that was an oversimplification. Did they cut back on scouts? No. Did they reduce the number of farm clubs? No. Did they cut back on bonuses? No. In fact, they gave $100,000 to Ole Miss quarterback Jake Gibbs, signing him as an infielder and converting him to a catcher. And they offered a pitcher named Bob Garibaldi $125,000, only to see him sign with the Giants. The effort was still there.

But maybe they were a little gun-shy.

In 1948 they signed their first bonus player, pitcher Paul Hinrichs, for $40,000. He never pitched an inning for them. Two years later, $80,000 to pitcher Ed Cereghino. Never made it. In the fifties they signed Frank Leja and Tommy Carroll, men who would take up space on the roster, contribute little, and ultimately prove to be less than quality players. In 1960, $65,000 to Howie Kitt, who had been 18–0 at Columbia. Nothing. They had a
pitcher named Bob Riesener who went 20–0 for Alexandria in 1957 but never made the majors. So they had been burned a little, and maybe they didn’t reach out often enough for bonus players. Maybe they could have signed Frank Howard, Ron Fairly, Rick Reichardt, or Bob Bailey, who went to other organizations prior to the introduction of the amateur draft.

The collapse was due to a combination of factors. No one could point to an elite player the Yankees skipped because he wanted too much money. The hard fact was that Lehman Brothers was right: Baseball had hit a rough patch. It was no longer the sport of choice for elite high school players. Football was really taking hold of the nation, and basketball was building.