In March 1976, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin instituted a rule forbidding players from having beards, mustaches or long hair.
When outfielder Lou “Sweet Lou” Piniella arrived with hair almost to his shoulders, he was told he wouldn’t be given a uniform until it was cut.
As he shares in his new memoir, “Lou: Fifty Years of Kicking Dirt, Playing Hard, and Winning Big in the Sweet Spot of Baseball,” written with sportswriter Bill Madden, Piniella protested the rule to Boss George.
“I don’t understand, Mr. Steinbrenner, what long hair has to do with your ability to play baseball,” Piniella said. “I’m a Christian. Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ had hair down to the middle of his back, and it didn’t affect the way he went about his work.”
In response, Steinbrenner said, “Oh, really? . . . come with me,” and led Piniella out to a pond beyond the left field wall.
“You see that pond, Lou?” he said.
“It’s about seven to eight feet deep. If you can walk across it, you can wear your hair as long as you want.”
Piniella was traded to the Yankees from the Kansas City Royals after the 1973 season, toward the end of an 11-year playoff drought for the Bombers. Playing in four World Series and winning two from 1976-1981, he endured the height of the Steinbrenner/Billy Martin/Reggie Jackson lunacy, with backbiting and infighting as firmly tied to their legacies as were their victories.
Martin and Jackson, who’d been feuding due to the manager’s refusal to bat his slugger cleanup, almost came to blows on national television in June 1977, after a Jackson error on a fly ball sent Martin into a rage. Steinbrenner decided to fire Martin, only to be talked out of it by Jackson, who believed he’d be blamed by fans.
Team morale was plummeting, and at the end of July, catcher and team captain Thurman Munson asked Piniella to accompany him to speak with Steinbrenner.
In the owner’s hotel suite, the pair argued Jackson should bat cleanup, until they were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Martin, who heard what was happening and was steaming mad.
Steinbrenner, in a pathetic attempt at subterfuge, had the players hide in the bathroom before letting Martin in.
The manager might have been out of control, but he wasn’t stupid.
“What the hell is going on here?” Billy screamed. “Who else is in here? ”
The owner’s ruse discovered, Steinbrenner told the players to come out. He and Munson were able to calm Martin down, but it didn’t solve the problem, as Martin still refused to bat Jackson cleanup.
By August, the team was in third place and several players, including Munson and leadoff hitter Mickey Rivers, were asking to be traded.
Piniella had finally had enough. Tired of the fighting and the losing, he went off on the team in the clubhouse, in full view of the press, after a 9-2 thrashing by the last-place Seattle Mariners.
“The writers are all here! Why doesn’t everyone speak up now?” he screamed.
“Everyone wants to get traded? Talk about it now after you get beat 9 to f–king 2 by a last-place team! How come nobody’s saying anything now?”
The tirade lasted several minutes, stunning everyone in earshot. But as Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger reported, it had an effect.
“The next day, the clubhouse was noticeably lighter,” he wrote. “Lou had cleaned out the tension, and when the team got back home, Billy started hitting Reggie cleanup and the team took off. That was the turning point of the season.”
The Yankees finished in first place with a 100-62 record, and defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games to win the World Series.
Piniella reveals all the joy and pain he experienced with the team in the book, including how his worst at bat as a Yankee came during Game 3 of the 1981 World Series against the Dodgers.
The Yankees were up two games to none and their first two batters walked. Then Piniella came to the plate. The count ran to 3-1 and Piniella knew the pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, was a screwball specialist.
But Piniella, conscious that he had never hit a home run in the World Series, thought, “If I can stand off the plate a little and this guy sneaks a fastball, I can really do some damage.”
Valenzuela threw “a very hittable screwball,” and Piniella “pulled it right to the shortstop, who turned it into an inning-ending double play.”
That moment turned the tide for the Dodgers. They scored three runs in the bottom of the inning, won the game 5-4, and went on to take the Series in six games.
Piniella blames himself for the loss of the championship: “If I’d have held back just a little and driven the ball to the opposite field, it would have been good for two runs, and we would have been on our way to putting away the Dodgers right there.”
Piniella retired as a player in 1984, continuing as a coach with the team. He would later become a manager, serving in that position for five teams from 1986-2010, including twice with the Yankees.
His 10-year run with the Mariners, from 1993-2002, found him developing a father-son relationship with a young Alex Rodriguez, who played for Piniella for seven seasons, starting at age 19.
Years later, when news broke about Rodriguez’s use of steroids, Piniella felt a “tremendous sense of disappointment.”
“Why did Alex have to do this?” he asks. “All he had to be was himself . . . I thought we’d taught him better in Seattle.”
Interviewed for the book, A-Rod, who left for the Texas Rangers in 2001, wonders if things might have been different if he stayed.
“I revered Lou, much like a dad. It broke my heart to disappoint him,” he said. “If I had talked to Lou more, I know I probably wouldn’t have made a lot of the mistakes I made . . . Looking back, I wish I could have had a few more years with him. Some things might have turned out differently.”
They’re so close that when Rodriguez fell into a 4-for-31 slump in June 2006, going nine straight games without a home run, he sent his then-wife, Cynthia, who was at Yankee Stadium, to track down Piniella at a charity event in a Stadium suite.
Piniella said he’d love to help, but had dinner plans. Cynthia called Alex, who responded, “Tell him I don’t care what time of night it is. I need to see him.”
Piniella got to A-Rod’s apartment at 12:30 a.m., and gave him a batting lesson until 2 a.m. using a broomstick and a rolled-up sock.
“He’s going, ‘Here’s how you have to do it, you gotta have a f—king weight shift,’” Rodriguez recalled. “Lou starts throwing the sock to me and I’m hitting it all over the apartment with the broomstick with s–t flying everywhere.” The next day, Rodriguez hit a two-run, game-winning home run.
Piniella is now the 14th-winningest manager in baseball history, and the second- winningest not in the Hall of Fame. He was named Manager of the Year three times, and led the Cincinnati Reds to a world championship in 1990.
After that victory, he heard from his old boss, and found him as intransigent as ever. The congratulatory telegram from Steinbrenner read simply, “I taught you well.”