They want to see baseball."Īh. Yogi is baseball all over. Dave Winfield, New York's best player, who has had various run-ins with Steinbrenner that still rankle on both sides, predicted that 1984 will see more of the same: "Afternoon soaps will have nothing on us. Just this spring training the Yankees' captain, Graig Nettles, decried Steinbrenner's "big mouth" and demanded to be traded. Also when your owner gets into a fight either in an elevator, as Steinbrenner claimed, or with an elevator, as skeptics suggested. Bad karma accrues when your manager calls your owner a liar or punches out a marshmallow salesman, both of which Martin did. It's about as uplifting to go over his wrangles with Billy Martin, whom he fired for the third time after last season, as it is to replay the Watergate tapes. Steinbrenner, New York's principal owner since 1973, has fired 11 managers and alienated player after player. "I don't want to play for George Steinbrenner," said star reliever Goose Gossage last December, before he forsook the Yankees for the Padres.
It took them 12 years to win another pennant, and although they have won four in the last eight seasons, those years have been an Era of Ill Feeling. "The Yankees made the biggest mistake in their whole career, firing Yogi," says Berra's old teammate Whitey Ford. The Left Arm of God: Sandy Koufax was more than just a perfect pitcherĪnyone who has followed the Yankees over the last 20 years-since 1964, when Berra was fired as manager although New York won a pennant in its first season under him-knows that the franchise has a karma problem: a festering buildup of the consequences of past actions.
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