Lou Page 27
“What the hell is all this?” he demanded.
“Oh, I just thought it would be nice to have a little celebration for winning seventy games for the first time,” I said.
“My god,” Zim said disgustedly. “What the hell are you gonna do when they get over five hundred? Buy ’em all Mercedes?”
I couldn’t help laughing. Those 70 wins were the hardest I ever got. After just two years in Tampa Bay I was already burned out. I knew there was no way I would ever have to worry about reaching .500, especially when Vince’s warning words about his hands being tied were confirmed that winter. Our major-league-low $29.5 million payroll in 2004 was going to remain essentially the same for 2005.
An eight-game losing streak from April 24 to May 2 put us in last place and we stayed there the rest of the ’05 season. Our pitchers led the league in runs allowed per game (5.78) and walks (615) and were next-to-last in ERA (5.39). In particular, our pitching had their problems with the Red Sox who, besides beating up on them pretty good, complained about the way they were being pitched to. Tensions boiled over during an 11–3 beating the Red Sox put on us on April 24, when six players were ejected in two bench-clearing scuffles. A couple of days later, Curt Schilling ripped me on a Boston radio station, essentially accusing me of ordering my pitchers to throw at the Red Sox’s hitters. “The problem is when you’re playing a team with a manager who’s somehow forgot how the game is played, there’s problems,” Schilling said. “Lou’s trying to make his team into a bunch of tough guys, and the telling sign is when their players say, ‘This is why we lose 100 games a year because this idiot makes us do stuff like this.’”
I was astounded. Curt Schilling calling me an idiot. After hearing those remarks, I called a team meeting in Toronto and issued a statement in which I said, “Forget how the game is played? I’ve forgotten more baseball than this guy knows. On the idiot subject, I’m appalled he would actually say something like that. I had a meeting with my team and to a man they denied saying it. He’s questioning my character and integrity and that’s wrong. He’s never played for me, never really talked to me, so he doesn’t know what I stand for.”
Schilling was still under my craw when, on July 18 in Boston, I engaged in a very heated argument with the umpires over a reversed call at first base and got myself another ejection. Julio Lugo had been called safe at first base on an infield hit when Dana DeMuth, who was an excellent umpire, ruled that Schilling, covering first on the relay, missed the base. Schilling immediately raised a beef and even appeared to have bumped DeMuth who, after also hearing it from the Red Sox’s manager, Terry Francona, agreed to consult with home plate umpire Laz Diaz to see if he had a better angle. When Diaz subsequently reversed the call, I charged out onto the field, screaming in protest and later had to be restrained by my first base coach, Billy Hatcher. I had never seen a home plate umpire overrule a first base umpire, not when the first base umpire was right there on top of the play. As I said at the time, “You’ve got one base to call; make the call, and stand by it!”
A week later in Saint Pete, David Wells, another Red Sox pitcher with a big mouth, popped off to the writers, saying my players were “petrified” of me—which prompted a quick rebuke from Francona, who said, “I do wish we would stay away from doing stuff like this. I definitely do not agree with our players. I’m sure I’ll make a pass by Lou today to apologize.”
He did, and let me say right here, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Terry, who is one of the class acts in baseball. He’s also one heckuva manager, who did a tremendous job in 2016 getting the Indians all the way to the seventh game of the World Series without the services of one of his best players, Michael Brantley, all year long, and two of his top starting pitchers, Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar, down the stretch.
At the same time, the entire imbroglio with the Red Sox underscored the problem I had with our pitchers. I assured Terry I did not instruct my pitchers to throw at anyone. The problem was, they were young kids who didn’t have command and, as a result, issued a lot of walks and hit a lot of batters trying to pitch inside. And unfortunately, as Toby Hall explained, he didn’t have a joystick to control the direction of their pitches. A few years ago, at a dinner in Boston, I made my peace with Schilling, who I know regrets the things he said. I wish him luck now in his political career.
Going into the All-Star Break, we lost 14 of 16 to fall to 28–61. I was beaten up physically and mentally. Right before that losing streak began, I let my feelings be known, while laying down the gauntlet to Sternberg after Marc Topkin asked me when we were going to start to win. “I’m not going to take responsibility for this,” I said evenly. “If I had been given a forty-to fifty-million-dollar payroll as I was promised, I’d stand up like a man and say it’s my fault. Well, I’m not going to do it. So if you want answers about what’s going on here, you call the new ownership group and let them give them to you.”
Well, that created quite a firestorm. Immediately, the media interpreted that as my farewell address, especially when, the next day, I stood by my words, adding only that “the new people who bought this baseball club, they’re nice people. I have absolutely nothing against anybody. It’s a tough business and what I said, I said.” I wasn’t offending anybody. I was just telling the truth.
It was when we were in New York in mid-August, playing the Yankees, that I asked Sternberg himself. He was sitting in the third base box seats, next to the visiting team’s dugout, and I wanted to know exactly what his vision was. He told me success was going to take a while, that he couldn’t do it right away, and that his priorities were to build up the ballpark in Saint Petersburg and build up the minor-league system. The payroll was not going to rise much, to which I told him, “I can’t compete like this.” He said he understood, but that he still had to do things in the order of preference. “It’s just not going to happen for a while,” he said.
That was it for me. I knew I had to get out of there. I had come home to Tampa in hopes of turning the franchise around like we’d done in Seattle, and I was even willing to give it a couple of years. But I never had a chance—and now Sternberg was confirming I wasn’t going to have a chance any time soon either. It had gotten to the point where I didn’t even like going out to restaurants and having friends, associates, and just plain people asking me when the team was going to start winning. (I was almost relieved when Malio closed down his landmark restaurant on Dale Mabry Boulevard in September 2004, so I wouldn’t be constantly running into Mr. Steinbrenner.) Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, and Bobby Cox, who all went into the Hall of Fame in 2014, are three of the greatest—and winningest—managers of all time. But I guarantee you if they’d managed in Tampa Bay, with the payrolls I had, they’d have lost just as many games as I did.
Years later, after Sternberg changed the name of the team to the Rays and the farm system started to deliver another core of young players in Evan Longoria, David Price, James Shields, and Ben Zobrist, who got them to the World Series, a lot of the people in Tampa and around baseball asked me if I had any regrets leaving when I did. My response was to look at the record of my successor, Joe Maddon, his first two years in Tampa Bay: 61–101 in 2006 and 66–96 in 2007. There wasn’t enough money in all of Tampa for me to endure two more years of that kind of losing.
After that conversation with Sternberg, I called Alan Nero and told him to see what he could do to get me out of the last year of my contract. I told him, “The new owners probably deserve to hire their own manager and not pay him what they’re paying me.” Alan worked out an agreement in which I would forfeit one-half of my salary and sit out the 2006 season, at least in terms of a uniformed or baseball management position. That was fine with me because I needed the year to “detox.” In the meantime, the Fox network hired me to do color commentary on the 2005 World Series games, and they liked my work enough to give me a full-time job for 2006 on the backup Saturday Game of the Week.
I really enjoyed my year in the booth, espe
cially working with Thom Brennaman, whose father, Marty, is the longtime Hall of Fame radio announcer for the Reds. Marty and his broadcast partner, Joe Nuxhall, were two of my dearest friends my three years in Cincinnati. Some of my most favorite times in baseball were my dinners with Marty and Joe. It was not surprising that Thom and I hit it off right away. He’s a top-notch broadcaster who helped me a lot. We had a lot of fun together—just as I did with his dad—and we played off each other really well.
In June 2006, my life in my first season out of uniform unexpectedly intersected with one of my favorite prodigies. I was at Yankee Stadium the night of June 27, doing a charity event in one of the suites, when who should walk in but Cynthia Rodriguez, Alex’s wife. She was quite eager to talk to me. I guess I should let Alex tell the rest of this story.
“I was really struggling at that time, in a 4-for-31 slump that had dropped my average nearly 10 points to .276,” he said, “and I’d gone like nine games without a homer. We were playing the Braves, and during the game I got a text message that Lou was in the ballpark, up in one of the hospitality suites. It was comforting just knowing he was in the ballpark. It had been so long since I’d seen him. So I called Cynthia, who was sitting in the stands, and told her I needed her to go up to the suites, find Lou, and tell him it was very important I see him after the game. Cynthia said, ‘How am I gonna get up there with all the security? They’re liable to arrest me!’ I said, ‘The way I’m hitting, they’re gonna throw me out of the stadium! Just tell any guy with a badge up there who you are, show ’em your ID, and get to Lou.’ Somehow she worked her magic, talked to Lou, and told him that I’m massively struggling with the bat and desperately needed his help. Could he meet us for dinner or a drink after the game? Lou had Anita with him and said he’d love to get together but that he had dinner plans in the city. Cynthia called me back and explained the situation and I said, ‘Tell him I don’t care what time of night it is. I need to see him.’
“Cynthia brokered the meeting and Lou showed up at my apartment in Manhattan at twelve thirty—we had a day game the next day but it didn’t matter. As soon as he got there, he launched into a hitting lesson. He’s going, ‘Here’s how you have to do it, you gotta have f-ing weight shift,’ … getting into all that stuff … and Cynthia’s sitting there with Anita and can’t believe what she’s seeing: Lou Piniella giving me a batting lesson in my apartment at twelve thirty in the morning! After a while, Lou asks me, ‘Do you have a bat?’ I didn’t, but I found a broomstick. ‘What about a ball?’ he asked. I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and went into my bedroom and came out with a rolled-up sock. Now Lou starts throwing the sock to me and I’m hitting it all over the apartment with the broomstick with shit flying everywhere. Finally, Lou left around 2:00 a.m. I got to the stadium the next morning with only a few hours’ sleep.”
I was obviously really happy to see Alex, as was Anita, who was very close to both him and Cynthia. The next day, Anita and I rented a car to drive over to New Jersey to visit some of our old friends from Allendale. We had the Yankees game on the radio, which was now in the twelfth inning, and here comes Alex, with one out and one on, and he hits a game-winning walk-off two-run homer! I pulled the car over, and we just listened to the crowd cheering and John Sterling going wild. We both had tears in our eyes.
“After the game,” said Alex, “Cynthia met me outside the Yankee clubhouse and she’s screaming, ‘Oh my god! Lou Piniella is Jesus!’”
CHAPTER 14
Billy Goats to Bartman to Chance
Toward the end of the 2006 baseball season, as the bad taste of three losing seasons in Tampa Bay slowly began to dissipate, I started getting the feeling back. There was no way I wanted my managing career to end on such a downer. I had prided myself on winning for most of my entire life, going all the way back to my high school Pony League days with Tony La Russa in Tampa, and I needed to start doing just that once more before I reached retirement age. At the same time, I wondered: Do I still have appeal to any teams?
That question was answered when I started getting feelers from four or five teams, in particular the Giants, the Yankees, and the Cubs. Long after we’d gone our separate ways from the Yankees, the Giants’ general manager, Brian Sabean, remained a close personal friend. Whenever I would be in San Francisco for a game, I would make a point to stop up to Brian’s office and we would spend the time in nonstop laughter, retelling our war stories about Mr. Steinbrenner, whom we both referred to as “the commander.” After two straight losing seasons, Felipe Alou, at seventy-one, was planning to retire as the Giants’ manager at the end of 2006, and Brian was looking for a replacement. He asked me if I would be interested. My initial reaction was “hell yes!” The Giants, under Brian’s leadership, were one of the best organizations in baseball; he and I had a wonderful relationship; and San Francisco was one of my favorite cities. It was also, like Seattle, on the other side of the continent, some three thousand miles away from Tampa, and therein lay my dilemma. I told Brian I’d have to think about it and discuss it with Anita. A day or so later, he had Peter Magowan, the Giants’ managing general partner, call me in Tampa to make his pitch to me. Anita and I talked about it. She was pretty firm about my not taking another West Coast managing job. She just didn’t want to go across the country again, and there were more and more family considerations that would require being a shorter distance from home. I told Brian all this, and he understood. Instead, he hired Bruce Bochy, who after losing seasons his first two years with the Giants, went on to win three world championships from 2010 to 2014, and is still there looking for more. Great move on my part.
“That will always be one of my biggest regrets,” said Anita, “talking Lou out of going to San Francisco.”
I had just finished broadcasting the first round of the American League playoffs between the A’s and Tigers when Alan called and told me the Cubs’ general manager, Jim Hendry, was flying down to Tampa to meet with me. I picked Hendry up at the Tampa Airport Marriott and we went over to the nearby Ruth’s Chris Steak House, where, over a few martinis and steaks, we really hit it off. Jim was easy to talk to. He said he needed to turn the Cubs’ situation around real quick—they were coming off a 96-loss, last-place season under Dusty Baker—but that the parent Tribune Company was prepared to put a lot of money into it to make it easier for him. The reason for that, which neither of us knew at the time, was because they were getting ready to sell the Cubs along with all their newspapers, and a winning team would enable them to command a much higher price.
In the meantime, I had heard that after two straight eliminations of the Yankees in the division series, there was some friction between Joe Torre and Mr. Steinbrenner. I could relate to that, except with me it had taken only one year; Joe had been there ten and won four world championships. No matter. With Mr. Steinbrenner, it was always a “what have you done for me lately” proposition. Alan Nero had heard that Mr. Steinbrenner wanted to talk to me, but since we were already in talks with the Cubs, I wanted to see where that was going.
In the year I’d been out of baseball, I’d run into Mr. Steinbrenner a couple of times in Tampa, and one day when I had lunch with Malio and him, I could see he was slipping somewhat. His memory seemed to be failing and he wasn’t nearly as sharp as he’d always been. I also heard he was scaling way back with the Yankees, turning most of the decision making over to his sons, Hal and Hank, and his son-in-law. So when Nero said the Yankees might be interested in talking to me, I was skeptical. Even though the hard feelings I’d felt toward Mr. Steinbrenner were gone, I didn’t want any part of revisiting them. I told Nero not to pursue anything with them.
It was the right decision, because let me say something right here: managing the Cubs is something everyone should do—at least once.
During our conversation, Jim did mention the superstitions surrounding the Cubs but said that if I ever went to a Cubs convention I’d see how rabid and loyal their fan base was. We talked about the makeup of the team, a coac
hing staff, free agents, and the fact that the Cubs had not been in a World Series since 1945 and had not won one since 1908, and by the end of the night I was pretty much committed to taking on another great challenge. Chicago was only a two-and-a-half-hour plane flight from Tampa and a great city to live in during the summertime. All that was left was for Alan to work out the contract details with Hendry’s boss, John McDonough. Before we called it an evening, Hendry and I went over to SideBerns, another Tampa eatery, for a nightcap. While we were at the bar, a couple of friends of mine came over and, out of the blue, said to me, “You know, Lou, you should manage the Cubs!” They had no idea who Hendry was, and I said to myself, If these guys only knew.
Once the news started leaking out of my possibly going to the Cubs, I got a call from Bob Castellini, the new owner of the Reds, whom I’d gotten to know during the 2006 season through my Cincinnati ties. He’s a terrific guy—whom I now work for as a special assistant—but on this particular phone call he was not too happy with me. “C’mon Lou,” he pleaded, “you can’t take a managing job in our own division! Come back to Cincinnati!” It was tempting. I’d have loved to try and win another championship in Cincinnati—especially for Bob Castellini—but it was too late.
A few days later, Alan worked out a contract that was three years and an option for $14 million. A press conference was called for October 17 at Wrigley Field. After being introduced by McDonough and Hendry, I made the statement, “Long-suffering Cub fans, we’re going to win here, and that’s really the end of the story.” If only it was.
Instead, it opened up a whole line of questioning to me about the Cubs’ tragic history: The supposed billy goat curse, in which a local tavern owner was said to have put a curse on the Cubs after he and his pet goat were ejected from game 4 of the 1945 World Series because the goat’s smell was bothering the fans. What did I know of billy goats—or for that matter Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan who interfered with a foul pop Moises Alou was about to catch with the Cubs just four outs from clinching the pennant in game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series? It was pointed out to me that the Bartman interference, which led to Miami erasing a 3–0 Cubs lead and scoring eight runs in the inning, was merely another extension of the billy goat curse.