Following the 1988 season, Dallas Green was hired as Yankees manager and recognized a breach in the relationship between his best player, Don Mattingly, and the team’s owner.
George Steinbrenner had criticized Mattingly for putting himself ahead of the team while hitting homers in a record eight straight games in 1987, and the first baseman fired back the following season. So Green asked Mattingly if he still wanted to be a Yankee. The team captain said, yes, but he wanted to be treated with respect. Green recommended that Mattingly call The Boss.
“We talked and he got mad at me and I got mad at him, and we both said exactly how we felt,” Mattingly remembered yesterday. “At the end, he wished me good luck and hung up on me. I was positive I was done. I figured I will just pack up my house [in New Jersey] and put it on the market and go back to Indiana because I am going [to get traded].”
But Mattingly did not change teams. He altered his relationship with The Boss.
“From that point on,” Mattingly said, “him and I never had a problem again.”
In that, Mattingly and former Yankees manager Buck Showalter both expressed an essential point in dealing with Steinbrenner: You had to stand up for yourself. If you didn’t, Steinbrenner’s bullying tendencies became worse; he became kind of an emotional hostage-taker to the weak. But if you showed some spine, then Steinbrenner was more apt to listen to your advice or avoid over-the-top behavior.
“The guys who worked for him for a long time had backbone,” Showalter said by phone. “If you showed some spine, [Steinbrenner] was more likely to do what you suggested. But then he would probably just say, ‘Do what you want to do, but you better be right.’ ”
Showalter used former general manager Gene Michael as an example of someone who stood up to Steinbrenner. Michael, when reached by phone, said the key to dealing with Steinbrenner was to not fight every issue “or else you would just be arguing every day.” Instead, he said, for the stuff you really wanted, you needed to be persistent.
“The first time George would say, ‘No we are not doing that,’ ” Michael recalled. “Then the second time, he would say, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ Then if you went to him a third time, he would see that you really wanted something and would let you do it.”
Michael said the impatience and meanness “was not the way I would have done it. But I think of him as a great owner. He had the greatest work ethic of anybody I was ever with and the one thing he had patience for was meetings when we were trying to figure out how to get better.”
Mattingly agreed the process could be discouraging and messy, but also called Steinbrenner a great owner.
“What he built, I think about that all the time,” Mattingly said. “People look at where they are now. I remember where they were when he bought them. He has built that to something totally different, even for the Yankees, and I marvel at that. He took it from a low point to what it is today. He revolutionized this game. He was bold and made bold moves, and built an unbelievable franchise.”