Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) by Kevin Reggie; Baker Jackson

other free agent, I had played out my option and taken my risk. If I had blown out my knee or something before I signed a new contract, that would have been too bad for me. I would have been out of luck. That’s just the risk I took—and that’s just how a marketplace works.
    Reporters would write things about how I was a lightning rod, or I was always the center of controversy, but I don’t really understand that. Why, because I took the opportunity any ballplayer—or any writer—would have taken?
    What’s more, almost everyone on the Yankees got a raise when I came on the team. Almost all of the holdouts, George ended up giving them bigger contracts. So you could say in the end I helped every one of them get more money. How did that make me the bad guy?
    The situation with Thurman was even more tricky, thanks to the press.
    When I came on the team, Thurman reminded Mr. Steinbrenner that he’d promised him he would always be the highest-paid playeron the club. George was as good as his word: He raised his salary to the same as I was getting in straight salary.
    But Thurman thought he should get the deferred money and the bonus money I was getting, too. He was even upset that I got a Rolls-Royce and he didn’t. He had his reasons and his promises.
    When George wouldn’t pay him the extra money, he started talking about buying out his contract or wanting to be traded. Then George got mad and wouldn’t go to a dinner in Thurman’s honor. It got to be a tangled situation, and I could sympathize with both men. But again, I was uncomfortable that I should be in the middle.
    I felt it was the press that kept me there. Right from the beginning, all they wanted to write about was how Thurman and I weren’t getting along—when they weren’t writing about how Billy Martin and I weren’t getting along. And if they couldn’t find enough to write, it seemed they would drum up things to create controversy.
    The very first day I was in camp, they asked me how I got along with Thurman. I told them, “I don’t know him.” I told them, “Why do you want to write about that?”
    I could see what they were trying to do, but I didn’t see why they should. What did they mean, how did I get along with Thurman? We’d never played together. When Gene Tenace came on as a catcher on the A’s, nobody asked me how we got along. Why wouldn’t we just get along like two great pros on the same team, trying to win a championship?
    In fact, from what I knew, Thurman was one of the guys very much in favor of me coming to the Yankees. What I heard was that he told the Boss, “George, if you’re going to get a free agent, go get the big S.O.B. in Oakland. That’s what we need.”
    Thurman wanted the power. He understood it. He wanted a player he thought could get the team over the top and help win a World Series. George talked to his players, especially Thurman and Lou Piniella, and that’s what they both told him.
    But right from the start, the writers were trying to make something between us. They wrote a story that was in
The Bronx Is Burning
. That first day of spring training, I wanted to go hit in the batting cage before I did my running, and Thurman came in as the captain and said, “Hey, you have to run first, that’s how we do it here.”
    And then, supposedly, I went over his head and appealed to Dick Howser, our third-base coach at the time, and asked him if I could hit first. And Dick supposedly said yes, and that made Munson mad, and it was all downhill from then on.
    Makes for a nice story, doesn’t it? Matches with what my personality was—or, I would say, what they
made
my personality out to be.
    Thing was it never happened. It couldn’t happen. You don’t do anything on your own on a team. You can go out early and work on things. But if the team runs, everyone runs.
    If the team does exercises, everyone does exercises.
    And you don’t hit first. You always do your stretching and your exercises first, before you