After a resurgence in the late 1970s. the Yankees entered a dry patch. From 1982 through 1994 they did not reach the playoffs and were just plain awful from 1988 to 1992, when they finished in fifth place in the American League East four times and in seventh (last) place in 1990. Free agents came and went, and so did managers. The Yankees’ minor league system was stripped bare because team owner George Steinbrenner employed a win-now mentality.
It wasn’t working.
The ultimate indignity came when Andy Hawkins took a no-hitter into the bottom of the eighth inning on July 1, 1990. Hawkins was mowing down the Chicago White Sox, but two walks and two errors resulted in a 4-0 loss. Hawkins had his eight-inning no-hitter — and even that was taken away thanks to a new rule the next season — but the Yankees lost.
That is how Bill Pennington opens his latest book, From Chumps to Champs: How the Worst Teams in Yankees History Led to the ’90s Dynasty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; hardback; 351 pages; $28). Pennington, who has been with The New York Times since 1997, was a beat writer covering the Yankees during the 1980s and 1990s with the Bergen Record in northern New Jersey. His 2015 biography, Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, was full of insights thanks to Pennington’s job on the Yankees beat.
From Champs to Chumps is a story Pennington is qualified to write, since he witnessed the Yankees’ rise from the dust. There are two major heroes in this book — Yankees general manager Gene Michael is one. “Stick” drafted well and restocked the team’s minor league system, bringing along players like Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada. These players would become the “Core Four,” who led New York to three World Series titles in five seasons.
Pennington also gives the reader a blow-by-blow description of the draft that brought Jeter to the Yankees, which is a tantalizing story of “what if.”
Michael also brought veteran leadership to the team, trading for the intense, hot-tempered Paul O’Neill. And he resisted overtures to trade his Core Four or Bernie Williams, rightfully believing he had a solid group needed seasoning, not tampering.
The second hero in Pennington’s book is Buck Showalter, who managed the Yankees from 1992 to 1995. Michael brought in the players, and Showalter used them as “culture creators,” who did things the Yankee Way.
“You can talk all about stats and analytics, and I get that,” Showalter tells Pennington. “But you can’t measure how to build the most productive team culture. And that gets lost. Or it can.
“We tried to make sure it didn’t.”
Managers can talk about culture, but they still have to field a lineup. Inevitably, some players won’t he happy platooning, or sitting on the bench.
Pennington shows how Showalter’s attention to detail — no matter how trivial —helped build the culture he wanted.
After filling out his lineup card, Showalter listed the non-player members of the team in alphabetical order “so that no one would feel slighted.”
“Every player looks at the lineup card closely,” Showalter tells Pennington. “When I was playing, if I wasn’t starting, I’d look at the list of reserves. If my name was listed at the bottom I’d say to myself, ‘I’m the last person on the manager’s mind.’”
That kind of routine helped Showalter gain trust and respect, and it is the kind of nugget Pennington uses to show how the Yankees’ culture was indeed changing.
That attention to detail also translated into the future. Steinbrenner once questioned why Showalter held Jimmy Key’s start back a day, Pennington writes. Showalter explained the umpire the following day called “a lot of low strikes,” which would make Key’s assortment of sinkers, sliders and low fastballs that much more effective.
Showalter also spruced up the clubhouse with better food, better facilities and a family atmosphere.
There is one more hero in this book, albeit a reluctant one. For all that Michael and Showalter did to build the Yankees up from the dust, it was the banishment of Steinbrenner that enabled them to nurture the team and put the pieces together for the dynasty of the late 1990s.
Steinbrenner took a lifetime ban, rather than a suspension, because he wanted to be a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee and viewed the word “suspended” as a stain on his legacy, Pennington writes. It led to a bizarre ban that even had Commissioner Fay Vincent shaking his head, leaving him “dumbfounded.”
Pennington shows how, with Steinbrenner out of the picture, the Yankees were able to draft players they needed and trade for key veterans. Given Steinbrenner’s penchant for impatience, it is unlikely that Rivera or Pettitte would have remained on the team if he was still involved in day-to-day operations, for example. Jeter might have been gone, too. But Michael would not have it that way, and the Yankees prospered because of his vision.
Pennington is thorough in his research, and he makes the book come alive through his interviews with 125 people who went on the record — he notes that some team officials asked to remain anonymous, so the number of people interviewed is closer to 140.
Much of the reporting in this book, Pennington concedes, was made possible by the professional relationships he established as a beat reporter and columnist, “even if I did not know it would someday lead to a book.” He was delighted to discover that, when he began his research in 2016 and started interviewing the principal subjects for the book, their memories were “crisp, potent and edifying.”
The book has a personal touch because Pennington was there to see it, but he also fact-checked his memories through newspaper archives and the records at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
From Chumps to Champs is an entertaining book that digs into an era that most Yankees fans would like to forget. The dogged work of men like Michael and Showalter, however, yielded big results by the middle of the 1990s. While a strike prevented the Yankees from reaching the playoffs in 1994 and the team fell short against Seattle in the 1995 playoffs, the pieces were in place. The next eight years would produce six American League pennants and four World Series titles.
Pennington’s research and insight serves as a prelude to those years of glory.