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  As I walked across the field, I decided, I can’t do this anymore. I was about to turn twenty-six years old. My wife, Bonnie, was six months pregnant with our first child. I needed to provide for my family. If I had to do that by digging ditches, so be it—I was ready to get in line and start digging ditches. My family came first. If this was how they were going to treat me, there was no use in me staying. I would find something else to do.

  I had made up my mind. I wasn’t going to go back to Syracuse.

  Packing up the car didn’t take long. Bonnie and I had some clothes and a TV—that was it. I had proven everything I needed to prove in the minor leagues. I was going to turn left on Interstate 80—quit the New York Yankees and professional baseball.

  * * *

  —

  The Yankees had taken me in the third round of the 1971 draft. I probably would’ve gone higher if I hadn’t developed tendonitis in my arm while I was in college. It eventually caused me to drop out of school. But some things in baseball never change. A left-hander who can throw ninety-five-plus miles per hour was—and always will be—a valuable commodity.

  The life of a professional ballplayer in the minors takes a lot of getting used to. You’re leaving home, you’re by yourself and need to make new friends. You need to find a place to stay, and you need to pay for everything yourself—you’re not living at Mom and Dad’s anymore. For most players, it’s your first experience being on your own. And it’s not as glamorous as some might imagine. We traveled on crappy school buses that broke down more often than not. It’s a long way from the bright lights of the major leagues.

  In those early years I did little out of the ordinary. Johnson City, Tennessee, was my first stop in 1971, as a rookie. The next year, 1972, I played Single-A ball in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After that season Bonnie and I got married, so she traveled with me. She went where I went, which in 1973 meant Kinston, North Carolina. I had done nothing to convince the coaches I was major-league material. I struck out a lot of guys, but I walked a lot of guys too. I had only one pitch, really, my fastball. I could throw it by most people, but if I made a mistake, they’d kill me.

  To compound matters, in those early years I was always on bad teams. No matter what organization you’re in, it’s hard to do well when everybody around you is struggling. My rookie year, we finished dead last in the league. The next two seasons we finished below .500. If you’re on a good team, you can do more. On a bad team, you do less. It’s a mind-set, and tough to break out of, as much mental as it is physical, especially as a pitcher. When you’re not getting run support and the fielders behind you aren’t making plays, it’s difficult to be at your best. And more than that, there is the issue of who do you learn from to get better?

  Bottom line—my first three years as a minor leaguer were mediocre. When I got to spring training in 1974, the Yankees asked me if I would entertain going into the bullpen as a relief pitcher. The organization had several talented young pitchers—including me—all ticketed for Double-A, too many for a starting rotation. Some guys might say no to becoming a reliever. Others, the team might not think would be able to transition to the bullpen. I said, “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.”

  I hadn’t distinguished myself as a starter. Maybe my ticket to the big leagues was as a reliever. If I could pitch nine innings, I certainly could pitch one inning. It seemed like a small decision at the time, but it would alter the entire path of my career—how I reached the majors, who I met, and what I learned. I didn’t know it at the time, but I never would have become a star starting pitcher had I not toiled away in the bullpen.

  But that 1974 season, beginning with change and optimism, became my worst. The team was awful. When you have a bad season and you’re not winning, it’s difficult to go out and pitch well. There’s nothing inside that drives you, because no matter what you do, it’s not going to make a difference. I turned twenty-four in Double-A with the West Haven Yankees and had a 5.26 earned run average. We finished with the worst record in the league. You can’t make that stuff up.

  After four years on crappy teams, I began to have negative thoughts run through my mind. Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was. Maybe I can’t make a living doing this. Maybe I’m just not good enough.

  But it’s easy to find hope. I read about guys I remembered striking out getting called up to the big leagues. Or seeing other pitchers get the call, and I’d say to myself, “Well, this guy isn’t as good as I am, and he got a shot.” Those things keep you going, plugging away.

  The other good news was that for a pitcher, there are plenty of spots in the big club. If I was a catcher, I wasn’t gonna take the job away from Thurman Munson. He wasn’t going anywhere. If you were a first baseman in the minor leagues in 1985, you weren’t going anywhere as long as the team had Don Mattingly. Or a shortstop in 2000 when the Yankees had Derek Jeter. But I was a pitcher, and I knew they had ten spots to fill. I just had to be good enough to be the tenth.

  That hope was rewarded in 1975. Even though I had a bad year in Double-A in 1974, I was promoted to Triple-A in Syracuse. For the first time in my minor-league career, I was on a winning team. And as I discovered, when you’re around other good players, it brings out the best in you.

  But that wasn’t the only change. First, there was our manager, Bobby Cox. Just a few years earlier, Coxy had been a major leaguer with the Yankees. A few years after I played for him, he would go on to manage in the big leagues for twenty-nine years, including twenty-five with the Atlanta Braves, winning five pennants and the 1995 World Series. It doesn’t get much better than having Coxy as your Triple-A skipper.

  Second, the players surrounding me were the best the organization had to offer. Some, like Scottie McGregor and Tippy Martinez, would go on to have long major-league careers. A few, like Tippy and Dave Pagan, had already been in the majors. In the majors you learn more in a week than you do in a month of minor-league ball. I hadn’t been to the majors yet. But those guys passed along everything they’d learned—how to approach batters, work your pitches, and get outs. I was a sponge for information, trying to pick up everything I could, any little thing that could make the difference between becoming a major leaguer and washing out like the many thousands of minor leaguers who never crack the bigs.

  “Pitch, don’t throw” is a classic baseball adage. It was 1975 when I really learned how to pitch. I watched guys who threw ninety miles per hour get hitters out with ease. It’s easy to just throw when you throw ninety-five miles per hour and can count on one hand all the people on this earth who can throw harder than you. But the hitters you go up against at this level are good too. That’s why they’re there. Pitching is about harnessing and fine-tuning what you’re throwing, placing it on the corner. You can’t be scared that the guy is gonna hit it, because he’s going to. And you want him to swing at it but not have a great swing at it. You can’t strike everyone out. But you can try to get everyone out. If you throw the ball in the right spot, most of the time, you’ll get the right outcome. It’s no different from anything else in life. You may be great at math, but you need to know what problem to solve. Sometimes savvy and know-how trump talent.

  Coxy made me his closer in Triple-A. Now that I was surrounded by him and all these talented professionals, the minor leagues quickly changed from being a struggle to being easy for me. I was striking guys out, and when I wasn’t, the defense was making plays behind me, just like they were supposed to. By the end of July, I was leading the league with fourteen saves and a 2.90 ERA, with seventy-six strikeouts in sixty-two innings. The league leader at the end of the year had fifteen saves. But that wasn’t me.

  That year Coxy was my biggest ally and advocate. When he saw the way I was pitching, he’d send reports to Yankees management, telling them, “Look, I got this kid—he does not belong here. You have to bring him up, okay?” They finally did, on Sunday, July 27. We were in Rochester at the time
, and they rented me a car to drive back to Syracuse, where I grabbed some clothes and flew to New York. I had finally made the big leagues. I thought there was no going back.

  That Sunday the Yankees had a doubleheader against the Red Sox. I arrived at Shea Stadium during game one. In 1975, Yankee Stadium was in the middle of a two-year renovation, so we split time at Shea, in Queens, with the Mets. I got to the ballpark and was quickly ushered into the locker room, where our clubhouse guy, Pete Sheehy, told me to get my uniform and meet the manager, Bill Virdon, who sent me down to the bullpen.

  Then I got to the bullpen. I didn’t know the guys. But I knew of them: Sparky Lyle, Dick Tidrow—two of the best relievers in all of baseball. And within a couple of minutes they were talking to me, figuring out what to call me.

  “What do they have a lot of in Louisiana?” Tidrow asked.

  “Well, we got a lot of snakes, frogs. We got a lot of rain. We got a lot of alligators…”

  I looked down. Lo and behold, my shoelaces were on fire. Sparky had lit me up. Welcome to the big leagues.

  Then Dick looked at me again. “We like you,” he said. “We won’t call you Alligator. We’ll call you Gator for short.” The nickname stuck. I was Gator for the rest of my career.

  That same day, in the second half of our doubleheader, I got into my first game, facing the heart of the Boston Red Sox order, which included three future Hall of Famers: Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, and Carl Yastrzemski. I got Rice and Yaz out. Rice, who finished third in the MVP voting that year, was my first major-league strikeout. I finished the game without allowing a run in two innings.

  But it didn’t matter. That season, 1975, I pitched my first nine games out of the bullpen. And we didn’t win any of them. Every single game I got into, we lost. I pitched just fine—I had a 1.74 ERA in those nine appearances. But the team wasn’t going to put me in for an important situation. Heck, they never trusted me with a gigantic lead, only when we were getting blown out. I made the first start of my career in late September, again against the Red Sox. We were long out of the pennant race by then, and injuries to our staff had put me out there. In five and two-thirds innings—as many innings as I had thrown in the last month—I gave up four runs, while a Louisiana-style downpour drenched Shea Stadium.

  The big thing going on was that in my first week with the team, owner George Steinbrenner sacked manager Bill Virdon. The Yankees had gone 89–73 in 1974, and we were supposed to be competing for the pennant in ’75. Steinbrenner had shelled out $3.75 million for Catfish Hunter, and with that kind of spending he expected to win the title. Virdon was fired with a 53–51 record, because that just wasn’t cutting it. We had lost eighteen of our last twenty-nine games. Virdon’s replacement: Billy Martin.

  Billy Martin brought a lot of credibility to the job. He brought the street cred of the legendary Yankees teams, having won four World Series as a player, in 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1956. He brought managerial success, having won more games than he lost in three stops: Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas. He also brought a lot of baggage. There’s a reason the man had been sacked from three manager jobs in less than a decade. As a player, he was a scrappy fighter. He was fired in Minnesota because he beat the tar out of one of his players outside a bar. In Detroit he was let go after a suspension for telling his pitchers to throw spitballs. He was fired from his job in Texas just a few weeks before we hired him.

  Of all the things that have been said about Billy Martin, the one that mattered to me was that he did not like rookies. And I was an inexperienced player. This didn’t just mean he didn’t pitch me much. He didn’t even talk to me much.

  So the next year, when I arrived at spring training at our complex in Fort Lauderdale, it felt like I was on a different team. This was Billy’s first full season as manager. The Yankees had made a bunch of big moves during the off-season, so even the guys in the clubhouse were different. We traded starting pitcher Doc Medich to the Pirates, getting back a massive haul: Dock Ellis, Willie Randolph, and Ken Brett. We also traded away Bobby Bonds (who at the time had an eleven-year-old son named Barry, who you also might’ve heard of) for Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa.

  I did not pitch well in spring training. The thing is, I never had good spring trainings in my career, because I didn’t throw during the off-season. When I threw that last pitch in September, I didn’t throw another baseball until that first day of camp. Not because I was lazy. I consciously rested my body all winter. Every year I went home to Louisiana during the off-season with Bonnie and my kids. I lived in New York during the season, but Louisiana was my home. I saw family and friends and went hunting, bringing back ducks, rabbits, quails.

  And even though my off-season approach meant I came back rusty, I knew it was best for me. Spring training games don’t count; all that mattered was that I was ready when the season actually started in April. The worst thing would be if I tried to throw during the winter and tired my arm out for the season. My arm needed to rest.

  So when I got to spring training, I had to take my time to build up my strength. I would start slowly, throwing only fastballs at first. And I’d get lit up a lot because all I was throwing was fastballs. My slider wouldn’t work if my fastball wasn’t where it was supposed to be, so it wasn’t worth throwing early on. Besides, my slider wasn’t very good at the time.

  The purpose of spring training is to get ready for the season. It’s not part of the season itself, so that’s how I looked at it: I’m gonna take my time. But that’s not how Billy saw it. “You’re getting hit. Why?” Well, heck, I saw he wasn’t saying anything to the veteran pitchers who were getting lit up during the exhibitions. Catfish was getting hit. Sparky was getting hit. Everybody on the staff was getting hit. But they were all experienced guys. Billy wasn’t gonna say shit to them. But I was a rookie, so he decided to pelt me because he didn’t think I was doing my job. That’s just the way it was.

  At the end of spring training I had just boarded the team bus to head north. Billy called me off into the parking lot. He explained that because of the trades we had made, especially getting Ken Brett, there wasn’t a spot on the roster for me. Brett was a veteran, so he was out of options—he couldn’t be sent back down to the minor leagues. I had options. So I was getting sent back down to Triple-A.

  I understood. I wasn’t too upset. So I went down from Fort Lauderdale to Hollywood, Florida, where the Triple-A team was practicing. Coxy was already waiting for me; he knew what was going on. “Okay, fine,” he said. “They’re going to give Brett a shot, and if he doesn’t work out, you’ll be called right back up there.”

  Triple-A had been easy for me the year before. Now it was a joke. All of the knowledge that I had gained in the last two-plus months with the Yankees, as well as two more months in spring training with them, made it all too easy. By the middle of May I was mowing down batters left and right, and the Yankees decided Ken wasn’t working out and traded him away. They called me back up on May 20. Again I went through the drill of getting my stuff and going back to New York. I hoped this would be the final time.

  The day I was called up, Billy put me in a game. Most of the time that would be welcome news to me. But I had just pitched a few nights in a row in the minor leagues, and Coxy had sent a report saying I should have a couple days off. Of course, Billy ignored that and threw me into a game right off the bus. I just didn’t have very much. He was sending me out to slaughter. I recorded one out and gave up four runs.

  Billy had gotten Coxy’s report. But he was testing me, because he didn’t want me there; he was setting me up for failure. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I was a rookie and he wanted a more experienced guy. But it was clear he didn’t like me.

  So began my stint in hell. For forty-six games and a total of forty-seven days, I parked my ass in the bullpen and never pitched. In 1975 at least I was being given the chance to pitch when we were getting blown out. Now I wasn�
��t even getting that opportunity. The calendar flipped from May to June to July, and I didn’t pitch in a single baseball game.

  It’s not like Billy forgot about me. In the fifth inning the phone in the bullpen would ring. “Okay, get Guidry up, and get Tidrow up.” And we’d get ready. I’d get my arm loose and start throwing. The phone would ring again. Tidrow was going in the game. The next time there were problems, I got up again. Somebody else went in.

  The ironic thing was that every time there were trade rumors, my name was involved. It seemed like everyone wanted me except the New York Yankees. But the weird thing was, the Yankees didn’t want to let me go. In June, smack-dab in the middle of my bullpen-prison sentence, the Yankees traded Tippy Martinez, Scottie McGregor, Dave Pagan, and a couple of other guys in a big deal with the Orioles. Now, Tippy went on to be a great reliever in Baltimore, but the Orioles didn’t want Tippy—they wanted me. The trade only went through because they accepted Tippy when our general manager, Gabe Paul, my biggest advocate in the front office, refused to give me up.

  At the time I didn’t know exactly what was going on in the front office. But here’s what you had at play: Billy was bitching and moaning because I wasn’t doing my job. So, of course, when the field manager is pissed off, Mr. Steinbrenner gets upset. He was paying a player who was not living up to expectations. So George wanted me gone. Meanwhile, our general manager refused to trade me. This would happen again the following spring. And all the while, guess what? I wasn’t pitching.

  I didn’t look at it like I was getting cheated. I looked at it more like it was a test of my character. My teammates were a crutch. They had troubles too, whether personal or professional. It wasn’t just me. But everybody else was in a good frame of mind, thankful to be there playing the game. Looking at them, knowing everybody was dealing with their own problems and holding their heads up, gave me some strength. That’s what I had to do. I had to do as good a job as I could, and if that wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t meant for me to be here.