Lou Read online

  We ended up sitting in Newark Airport for hours, waiting for a new charter plane to take us home, but at least that gave me time to reflect. It had been a highly emotional week in New York, and I wondered why in the world I had wanted to play the Yankees in the ALCS, with the coast-to-coast travel, and then getting caught up in all the aftermath of 9/11, when Oakland would have been so much simpler. But then I looked around at my players and coaches, and there was no complaining, no head-hanging, and I realized just how good this team was and how great this season had been. Also in my den at home I have my original signed lineup card from the 116th win, October 6, 2001, as well as a signed team ball. It’s time to give them to the Hall of Fame. I know it doesn’t have the 116-win lineup card from the 1906 Cubs.

  In 2001, the Mariners led the majors in attendance—3,507,326—the first time they’d ever drawn over three million. The franchise couldn’t have been more thriving, and I was still happy about how well the transition had gone from Woody to Pat, who kept making sure I had good teams to manage. Coming off a 116-win season, Pat didn’t feel a need for any major changes, and instead signed James Baldwin, a right-hander who’d won in double figures the previous six years for the White Sox, to supplement the back end of the starting rotation. He also did some fine-tuning with the bench, signing thirty-six-year-old switch-hitter Ruben Sierra, who’d hit 23 homers as a fourth outfielder and DH for Texas the year before, and trading David Bell to the Giants for another switch-hitter, the utility man Desi Relaford. To replace Bell at third base, Pat traded Jose Paniagua, who’d done an excellent job as a workhorse middle reliever for me the previous four seasons, and a couple of other minor-league relief pitchers to Colorado for Jeff Cirillo, a career .300 hitter with modest power.

  During this time, however, my father’s health had started deteriorating, and I began thinking more about how far it was from Tampa to Seattle and how hard it was, with no direct flights, to get back home in the case of an emergency. Much as I loved everything about Seattle, especially the sockeye salmon fishing, for the first time I started thinking about managing closer to home when my contract expired in two years.

  If repeating as division champions isn’t hard enough, trying to live up to expectations after a season for the ages was impossible. It wasn’t until late July 2002 that this became a reality for us. Despite a recurring, disabling hamstring issue with Edgar, significant drop-offs in production from Cameron and Boone, and disappointing performances from Baldwin and Cirillo, we climbed into first place on April 10 and hung on for four and a half months. All the while, though, I knew we were going to need help at the trading deadline. Surprisingly, when I expressed my feelings to Pat and John Ellis, they told me Howard Lincoln’s position was that the team was good enough and that he was unwilling to sacrifice any more prospects or raise the payroll. We would be sitting out the trading deadline. In a meeting in early June, Lincoln made it clear to all of us this was a business and his main interest was making money. Howard was a lawyer for Nintendo, not a baseball man, and he liked the idea of that Brinks truck arriving at the stadium twice a day. He ended the meeting by saying, “That’s it. There’ll be no more conversation about this. If the World Series happens, it happens. I don’t want to read anything about trades or improvements in the papers. Is that clear?”

  It was deflating for everyone in the room. A couple of weeks later, we were in Houston for an interleague series against the Astros, and one of the Houston writers asked me about all the players—Carlos Guillen, Freddie Garcia, and John Halama—we’d gotten in the Randy Johnson trade back in 1998. The writer noted how they were all still doing well for us four years later, while Randy had left the Astros after just two and a half months in ’98 and signed as a free agent with Arizona. Rather than gloat about how well the deal had worked out for us, I complimented Houston’s general manager, Gerry Hunsicker, for his boldness. “They were trying to win the World Series and they thought Randy could be a big factor in that,” I said. “I think if you have a team that’s one piece short, you owe it to your fans and your players to go for it.” I then qualified that just a bit, saying, “You have to make darn sure that’s the right piece. You can decimate your farm system pretty quick.”

  It was an innocent comment and I didn’t think anything more about it until I got back to Seattle and Gillick came into my office and informed me that Lincoln was very upset with me. With that, he showed me a memo Lincoln had sent out in which he said he was disappointed to read my remarks in the paper because they weren’t consistent with the understanding he had with the baseball staff about the public discussion of potential moves. As I read the memo, my blood began boiling.

  “He wants your response,” Gillick said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll give him my response!” I said. “Tell him I’ll meet him here tomorrow morning. I can’t believe this. This is embarrassing to me. If he’s upset about something I said, why didn’t he just pick up the phone instead of putting out this damn memo?”

  Howard obviously thought I was showing him up, even though when I said what I did to the Houston writer, I hadn’t given a thought about that meeting he’d had with us. The fact still was, I came from the school of Mr. Steinbrenner, who always went for it, just as I’d learned from Marge in Cincinnati what happens when you don’t go for it … We were never able to catch Atlanta in 1992.

  I was still steaming about the memo the next day when I entered the conference room at Safeco for my meeting with Howard. As usual, Anita gave me the advice she always gave me: “Be kind and gentle.” But I was in no mood for that. I was expecting a private audience, but instead there were a half dozen other people there including Pat, John Ellis, Chuck Armstrong, and our assistant GM, Lee Pelekoudas. It reminded me of meetings Mr. Steinbrenner always used to have, in which he stacked the room with all his subordinates whom he could count on to vote the way he wanted them to.

  Howard started off by demanding to know what I meant by my comments in Houston, and I explained to him they were simply an innocent compliment to the Astros. I told him I meant no harm and that I hadn’t even been thinking of our situation. But then I told him, as good as our team was, we weren’t at all assured of getting to the postseason, adding that I didn’t agree at all with his philosophy. I knew behind the scenes he felt I’d been given too much power by Woody, which was not true, and that he thought, as a manager, I shouldn’t have that much influence in player personnel matters. From there, we got into it pretty good, to the point where I finally said to him, “If you don’t like the job I’m doing, Howard, feel free to fire me and send me the hell home!”

  To his credit, Howard didn’t lose his cool. He was very pragmatic. He said he wouldn’t fire me, but that if I wanted to quit, to go ahead. “You’re a paid employee here and you’ll do what your bosses say.”

  I didn’t want to quit. I still had a year and a half on my contract, which, thanks to Alan Nero, had crept up to $2.1 million a year, and I wasn’t going to forfeit all that money. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking of all we’d done in my ten years there, saving baseball in Seattle and turning the franchise around into one of the most successful and prosperous in the game, with record attendances and revenues, and now here we were, acting like it was 1979 again. There was only one wild card, and nobody was better at making deals than Pat Gillick, but his hands were tied. At my induction into the Mariners Hall of Fame in 2014, John Ellis came up to me and said, “My biggest regret in all my years in Seattle was not going for it in 2002.”

  It would have been nice if we could have left our disagreements at that, but after the trading deadline came and went without us doing anything, I was shocked when Lincoln, in defending our inaction, told a Seattle Times columnist, Larry Stone, “The goal of the Mariners is not to win a World Series. It is to field a competitive team, year after year, to put itself in position to win a World Series, and hope at some point it happens.”

  One thing was sure: I knew I wasn’t working for Mr. Steinbrenner
anymore. And I also suddenly had a huge morale problem in my clubhouse. How do you explain that kind of thinking to your players? I held a meeting and I told them, “We’re good enough to win with what we have, and I don’t want to have any distractions from here on out.”

  We didn’t have any more problems the rest of the year. But also, as I had warned Lincoln, we didn’t have enough—especially on our bench—to hold off Oakland and Anaheim, which won 103 and 99 games respectively to our 93.

  My frustrations boiled over on September 18, when, with two out and the score tied 2–2 in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Rangers, C. B. Bucknor called my backup catcher, Ben Davis, out on a bang-bang play at first base. There had been runners at second and third, and Davis had hit a line shot back at the pitcher, which the Rangers’ second baseman, Michael Young, had picked up and fired over to first. I was sure Davis had beaten the throw, which would’ve given us the ball game (and later, the replays showed the first baseman’s foot was off the bag as well). I raced out to first and confronted Bucknor, who quickly gave me the thumb. But I wasn’t finished—not by a long shot. When I saw the smirk on Bucknor’s face, I completely lost it, throwing my cap and kicking dirt on him. Then when I started heading back to the dugout, John Moses, my first base coach, handed me back my cap. Or should I say my prop, which I proceeded to throw at Bucknor. That provided the momentum to continue this tirade. Next, I went over to first base, and like the stunt I had patented years ago in Cincinnati, pulled it from its moorings and tossed it into right field. I then ran the base down and tossed it again, before finally making my unceremonious exit.

  Happily, we won the game the next inning on a pinch-hit RBI single by Sierra, so as I said to the writers afterward, “I ran a minimarathon out there, but we got the job done.”

  I later heard that Lincoln had gotten tired of my tantrums, telling a reporter, “You can’t have prima donnas out there.” For what it’s worth, I’m not proud of the way I acted either. I hate seeing the replays of my histrionics on TV today. It’s frankly embarrassing now. But the truth was, I was tired of Howard too. I didn’t like the fact that he pushed Woody out, or the way he was increasingly imposing his will on Pat in the baseball operations. So at the end of the season, with my dad’s situation weighing heavily on me, I told Pat, “I don’t think I’m coming back here next year.”

  Pat begged me to reconsider. “Play it out one more year here,” he said, “and we’ll win another championship and then both leave together.” I believed we could, and I would’ve loved to have worked with Pat for as long as I was managing. There were so many other people I was also going to miss sorely in Seattle; in particular, Dave Niehaus, the Mariners’ legendary Hall of Fame broadcaster and his radio partners, Ron Fairly and Rick Rizzs. I really enjoyed having dinner on the road with those guys and we all became very close. Dave was a walking encyclopedia of the Mariners, and Ronny and I loved talking hitting. My all-time favorite memory with them was a trip we took to the wine country on an off-day in Oakland one year. I had it all planned out and rented a Thunderbird convertible, and we were going to drive through Napa all the way up to Calistoga, then head back south through Sonoma. There was just one small problem. After stopping at three wineries, we were all loaded, and I had to hire a driver to get us back to Oakland. When I got home to Tampa, Anita wanted to know why the FedEx guy had brought us twelve cases of wine!

  Ten years in Seattle, countless friends and memories. But my mind was made up.

  “Lou and I had three really good seasons together in Seattle,” said Gillick. “He’s a lovable character, with a big heart and a real softy down deep. We never had one disagreement, which I know is rare for a manager and a general manager. I did everything I could to keep him from leaving, but I knew why. Lincoln wanted to win on the bottom line, but not on the field. I tried to hold it together, but Lou likes winning and success more than money.”

  A few days later, Pat, Howard, and Chuck flew to Tampa to meet with me. I had my good friend and consigliere Mondy Flores with me. By this time, there weren’t any lingering hard feelings on my part. I told them I just wanted out. We talked about the one year left on my contract and that, if possible, I wanted to manage somewhere closer to home in 2003. They went back to Seattle and made the announcement that I would not be coming back, leaving unsaid the status of my contract. In the meantime, Alan Nero got on the case for me.

  Through intermediaries, the Mets’ owner, Fred Wilpon, was put in touch with Alan. Wilpon had just fired Bobby Valentine and was looking for an established, successful manager who was popular in New York. I guess I fit that profile. I let Alan know that I would love to manage for Wilpon, whom I knew to be a real gentleman. I knew also, in New York, I wouldn’t have to worry about payroll issues. Lastly, the thought of managing right across the Triborough Bridge, in Mr. Steinbrenner’s backyard, was especially intriguing. (When word began to spread in New York about me possibly coming to the Mets, Mr. Steinbrenner called my pal Malio to have him try and dissuade me. I was having lunch with Malio at his restaurant and he kept saying things like “You don’t want to go to the Mets” and “You know as well as anyone that the Mets are second-class citizens in New York to the Yankees.” I knew exactly where all this was coming from.)

  What I did not realize was there was no way Howard Lincoln was going to let me manage in New York. Lincoln let Nero know that he would let me out of my contract but he was going to have to be compensated from whatever team I went to. Howard played hardball with Wilpon. He told him if he wanted me he was going to have to fork over the Mets’ number one prospect, Jose Reyes. Wilpon, rightly, refused, while hoping he could wait Howard out.

  In the meantime, however, Howard had gotten himself another bidder for my services—my hometown Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the worst team in baseball, which had finished in last place all five years of its existence and had averaged nearly 100 losses a season in the process. Once it became known that my services were available, the Devil Rays’ owner, Vince Naimoli, who I knew only casually in Tampa, aggressively pursued a deal with Alan and the Mariners. For me, he offered a four-year contract for $13 million, which was over $1 million a year more than my Mariners salary, and to the Mariners he offered as compensation the left fielder Randy Winn, who’d been the Devil Rays’ lone All-Star in 2002, batting .298 with 14 homers and 75 RBI. After the deal was announced, Lincoln bragged, “Wilpon shot himself in the foot. He thought he was the only bidder,” and added, “Piniella got what he wanted—to manage close to home.”

  “Fred did everything humanly possible to get Lou,” said Nero. “It just wasn’t meant to be. The timing just wasn’t right. Once it became evident Seattle wasn’t going to let Lou go to New York, Fred had to get a manager. I was also representing Art Howe and that’s how that happened.”

  I have to admit, I was astonished Naimoli agreed to give up a player of Winn’s caliber for me. I also had to laugh. All those years in Seattle, the front office could never get a left fielder for me. Now they had.

  I am immensely proud of my ten years in Seattle. I’d like to feel I made a difference there. The only thing I would add is that Howard Lincoln remained CEO of the Mariners for fourteen years after I left, during which time they went through nine different managers and never once made the postseason, much less the World Series.

  CHAPTER 13

  Out at Home

  In the summer of 1998, I was drowning. On the field, I was enduring my first out-of-contention season in Seattle, exacerbated by Randy Johnson’s contract issue. This, however, was nothing compared with the financial crisis wreaking extreme duress in my personal life.

  The weight of all the debt and liens from my failed investments in the condominium project in Connecticut, the car dealership in Ossining, and my restaurants was crashing down on me. I was constantly answering depositions through my attorney, and 25 percent of my take-home pay from the Mariners was being garnished by the State of Washington. It was at this absolute worst time in my
life when I turned to God.

  For years, Anita had always been urging me to try and get closer to God. She prayed for me to be reborn again. I had never sought to have a more personal relationship with God, but it appeared He was using my finances to get me to pay more attention to Him. God uses our worst of times to summon us to Him. During that time, I started doing a lot of praying. My close friend Mondy Flores got me to start attending Bible-study classes, and I began reading different verses on a daily basis. What a calming experience. Little by little, I was starting to handle things so much better. Although I’d grown up in the Catholic religion from the first through the twelfth grade, Mondy encouraged me to join another church, a half mile from my home in North Tampa, where the senior pastor, Ken Whitten, became a profound influence on my life, strengthening my Christian beliefs. There’s a saying in the Bible that when you’re at your weakest, you’re at your strongest. In 1998, I was at my most vulnerable, but I learned to get my strength through God. It set me free and allowed me to dwell on the things that were important and eternal. It’s been a tremendous transformation for me, making me a better person and a better manager.

  I bring this all up now because my faith in God, and the network of friends and spiritual advisers surrounding me in my hometown, helped me enormously as I coped with all the losing in the three trying years I spent as the manager of the Devil Rays.

  In the negotiations leading to my exit from Seattle and my return home to Tampa, Alan Nero and I had a series of meetings with Vince Naimoli designed to firmly gauge both his commitment to winning and to me. The answer to the latter was quickly established when we agreed on my four-year, $14 million contract. In addition, Vince gave me a free hand with my coaching staff. I hired my old Mariner warhorse Chris Bosio as my pitching coach and brought Uncle Lee Elia, John McLaren, and Matty Sinatro over from Seattle, joining the holdovers Tom Foley, a great third base coach who in my opinion could have been an excellent manager in the big leagues if only given the chance, and Billy Hatcher, the first base/outfield coach who’s one of the best people I’ve ever been around in baseball.