The 1980s were a Rough Decade for the Yankees

Note: This is a guest post from Eric Kabakoff

I first started following baseball in 1985, shortly after that year’s midseason players’ strike. My father was a lifelong Yankees fan who’d grown up watching Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford and their teammates dominate baseball for years, and I settled in to watching games with him. For the next few years, if WPIX wasn’t carrying the game as announced by Phil Rizzuto and Bill White, then I put on WABC radio to hear Hank Greenwald and Tommy Hutton tell me how my team was doing. On weekends, I’d often watch games myself and rush out to give my father updates as he trimmed the lawn or did whatever it was he did out there. The Yankees teams of the latter half of the 1980’s were a special mix of coulda, shoulda, and didn’t.

Donnie Baseball

The 1986 Yankees, whose Opening Day was recapped for us by a classmate on the playground who had a transistor radio, were the first team to be managed by Lou Piniella. A fiery guy in his own right, he learned to manage from the great Billy Martin, who could have been remembered as far greater had he not been so sadly self-destructive. Lou managed the team to 90 wins but finished second behind the Boston Red Sox. Don Mattingly was at the peak of his powers then. Arguably the game’s best player, he was coming off his 1985 MVP season with a .352 batting average (238 hits!) to go with 31 home runs, 113 RBI, and an absurd .967 OPS. Oh, and boy could that man field. The Gold Glove Award could easily have been renamed the Don Mattingly award for his defensive prowess at that time.

Mattingly’s teammates that year included Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, whose fifth straight season of 100+ RBI wasn’t nearly enough to make owner George Steinbrenner like him for any reason, and Hall of Famer and all-time great Rickey Henderson, who scored 130 runs and stole a mere 87 bases. Mattingly batted behind the criminally underrated Willie Randolph and had third baseman Mike Pagliarulo follow him, a man who my father called “Pagliaro.” However, despite the high-octane offense and the closer Dave Righetti racking up a then-record 46 saves, they just didn’t have enough to catch the Red Sox and their young ace Roger Clemens. Clemens went 24-4 that year and won the Cy Young Award, the AL MVP and quite possibly an election or two that we’ve forgotten about. There was just no stopping him that year. The Red Sox also had Hall of Famer Wade Boggs and his .357 batting average, which wasn’t helpful to the Yankees’ cause. The Yankees did have a young pitcher named Doug Drabek. They realized how good he would become, so they traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Rick Rhoden. Ron Guidry was in the waning days of his career and the Yankees brought in Tommy John, who won 13 games for them at age 43. At that point, as for nearly every point up until the 2016 season, the Yankees only thought of the present.

The 1987 season dawned and the pitching staff, led by Rick Rhoden, Dennis Rasmussen (until he was traded for Bill Gullickson) and Tommy John, once again couldn’t support the great team offense. The Bronx Bombers finished in 4^th place, well behind the division-winning Detroit Tigers (back in the old two-division, 26-team format), Don Mattingly hit a record-tying six Grand Slams that season (remarkably, the only six he ever hit), and also hit home runs in a record-tying eight consecutive games. I heard the 8^th one live on my grandparents’ state-of-the-art hi-fi living room radio. Mattingly also batted .327, no biggie. Rickey Henderson was injured for much of the year but still had a .927 OPS, and Dave Winfield drove in 97 runs. The Yankees did promote to the majors a young prospect named Al Leiter, and he showed promise for the team until being traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for Jesse Barfield a few years later.

Tomorrow Isn’t Guaranteed

The Yankees headed into the 1988 season by doubling down on offense, adding St. Louis Cardinals slugger Jack Clark as their Designated Hitter. My friends and I got giddy talking about all the runs the team would score that year. Billy Martin was back for part of the year too, managing the final 68 games of his career in his 5^th stint as the team’s manager. Tommy John and Rick Rhoden didn’t have stellar seasons, though, and newcomer John Candelaria wasn’t much help. The team floundered to a 5^th place finish. They did have a promising young outfielder named Jay Buhner, so they traded him to the Seattle Mariners for veteran Ken Phelps. The trade proved to be such a disaster in hindsight that later on it literally became a joke on Seinfeld. The Yankees were still focusing on the present, which was becoming increasingly lackluster.

The years of trading off prospects for veterans, which had also included trading away players like Willie McGee and Fred McGriff earlier in the decade, finally caught up to them in 1989. The decade closed with Dallas Green managing to start the season but not finishing it as Bucky Dent replaced him. It’s hard to remember now with the team having had two managers in the past twenty years, but George Steinbrenner was as patient with his managers as he was with his prospects, and Green became just the latest casualty on that front. Dent himself was replaced the following season by Stump Merrill.

Losses Set the Stage for Dominance

The 1989 team shipped out Jack Clark and Rick Rhoden and brought in Steve Sax, Andy Hawkins and Mel Hall. Sax played pretty well for the team, though Hawkins is best remembered for later pitching a no-hitter that he lost 4-0 (since stricken from the record books). Mel Hall is currently spending life in prison as a serial sex offender. Don Mattingly had his final season as an elite player, batting .303 with 23 homers and 113 RBI, before an old back injury sapped his power and effectiveness. Dave Winfield missed the entire season with a back injury. He’d be traded to the California Angels the following season for pitcher Mike Witt. George Steinbrenner’s hatred for his star outfielder escalated to the point that he was suspended for life a year later for conspiring with a gambler to get dirt on Winfield. Or something. In any case, his suspension was lifted two years later. Rickey Henderson was traded in midseason for Luis Polonia, Greg Cadaret and Eric Plunk, none of whom can get into the Hall of Fame without a ticket. Mike Pagliarulo, John Candelaria, and Ken Phelps were all traded too, and Tommy John was released in May. The window of these latter-half 1980’s Yankees was now closed.

The team was awful in the early 1990’s as a hangover from all the bad moves they’d made, but that enabled them to draft well. George Steinbrenner’s brief “lifetime suspension” enabled them to hold on to these new prospects until they all came up in the mid-1990’s and heralded a new era of Yankees baseball.

 

Eric Kabakoff has visited every major league baseball park (35 total) and wrote about the trips in his book “Rally Caps, Rain Delays and Racing Sausages.” He’s done numerous radio and TV interviews about ballparks and has given several speeches on the topic, including at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. He lives with his wife and son in New York City and currently writes for the website Baseball Essential.