In His Way, He’s Earned His Pinstripes

If ever a ballplayer was born to play Broadway, it was Dave Winfield. He was a skyscraper among outfielders, the Empire State Building of baseball’s skyline. He was so big, he should have had windows. He was made to wear pinstripes. The Yankees were the team for him.

Still, he was playing the Palace of baseball. He was getting some tough acts to follow. He was a hick by New York standards.

He never played a minute of minor league baseball. He came from some hayseed neck of the woods in Minnesota. He played in the bucolic isolation of San Diego, and the presumption was, New York would cut him down to size. Wait’ll he got a load of the media. Wait’ll that Yankee Stadium crowd got down on him. They would wipe that hick grin off his face. He would hear some words that hadn’t gotten to St. Paul yet.

Roger Maris hit 61 home runs with New York, and his hair fell out from the tension. Sparky Lyle set several relief pitching records, then fled to write a book about the experience entitled “The Bronx Zoo.”

New York was a place to be from. New York was hard. New York was unforgiving. Life was real. Tryouts were for out of town. Amateurs stay out. New York was pro territory, grim city, the most impatient place in the world. A place with great sympathy for the overdog.

Winfield’s $23 million contract didn’t help. For that kind of money, New York expected someone who could walk ashore at the Battery, cure colds, clean up traffic and change water into wine. The very least he should do is hit 60 home runs.

“Let’s say the expectations of the town were very large,” Winfield was recalling the other night as he sat in a dugout in Anaheim Stadium.

“They had some really high standards to compare. You hit .340 (as Winfield did last year) and they said, ‘Well, DiMaggio hit .381 once and he was right-handed, too.’ You hit 37 home runs and they sniffed. ‘Maris hit 61,’ they told you. ‘Ruth hit 37 by Mother’s Day.’ You drove in 116 runs and they said, ‘What’s that! Gehrig had 184.’ You got 193 hits and they say, ‘Gehrig used to get 220,’ ”

Winfield was playing against a bunch of statues in center field. He didn’t have to be better than the 1984 Toronto Blue Jays. He had to be better than the 1927 Yankees. He had to take on Cooperstown.

The Yankees weren’t a team--they were a legacy. Dave Winfield was so big when he joined the Yankees that they thought he should have landing lights on his cap so airplanes wouldn’t crash into his upper floors. But the betting was that by the time New York got through with him, he’d be able to walk through a Volkswagen, with his hat on.

It’s not a town, it’s a jury.

“They did kind of sit on their hands,” Winfield recalls. “They didn’t boo. But they didn’t exactly cheer, either.”

Why did Winfield choose New York when he had a choice of franchises as a free agent? Why be a target instead of a hero? After all, New York had drawbacks other than community hostility.

There was left field, for instance, a right-handed batter’s domain. It was so capacious, it was known to the fraternity as Death Valley or Tombstone East. Line drives went there to die.

“They figure it cost Joe DiMaggio a hundred home runs, at least,” Winfield says.

“But my thought was, I was hitting .308 at San Diego, driving in 116 runs with 34 homers and nobody knew my name. I wanted to put the act up in lights. New York is where you do that.”

Friends had misgivings. It wasn’t enough to handle the curveballs on the field in New York. The tough ones were the ones from the community. The pressures in New York are about what they are on a downed submarine in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific.

Observers remembered that Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played their entire careers out without once getting caught smiling on the field. Frank Crosetti always looked as if he had just heard that Paris fell. Yankee Stadium was as dour as a castle in Denmark. Hamlet would have been right at home in the Yankee Stadium. Holding a skull.

“You’ll have to practice scowling,” they told Winfield.

The first indication that he would instead bring a fresh approach to this haunted house occurred in the 1981 World Series. The $23 million beauty was having the kind of Series that would have had to improve to be described as merely catastrophic. He went five games without so much as a base hit. When he finally got one, he just laughed--and called for the baseball as if to bronze it.

Yankee purists were horrified. Winfield should have been standing there in sackcloth and ashes, grinding his teeth, kicking lockers, demanding: “Why me, Lord?” Instead, he thought it was funny.

It is the attitude that has kept the plates from buckling on Dave Winfield’s psyche in the fathomless depths where a Yankee must play. Like Babe Ruth, he plays the game in the high good humor of a man who knows it’s just a game, not nuclear warfare.

“Did I bronze that ball?” repeats Winfield, laughing. “No. The last I saw of that ball was when I rolled it into the dugout. I was just laughing at my own expense.”

In Toronto two years later, Dave Winfield was whiling away idle moments lobbing baseballs at a cluster of sea gulls lined up on a nearby foul line. “I wasn’t trying really to hit them. It was kind of like, you know, when you drive your car towards a pigeon in the road. You figure it’ll get out of the way. Well, this one didn’t.”

You would have thought Winfield had set fire to a baby carriage. He was arrested for destroying one of Canada’s national treasures, the sacred sea gull. He became a villain to conservationists, a destroyer of wildlife.

His hair didn’t fall out over the incident. That winter, he was invited to Toronto for a banquet to raise money for Easter Seals. Winfield went, auctioned off a painting for $32,000 for the charity and then stood up and told the sellout audience: “As I got dressed to come here in my mink coat, my lizard shoes and my ostrich leather briefcase, I thought I might get 5-10 just getting off the train.” He brought down the house.

“You know,” an American league manager was saying recently, “Dave Winfield has this kind of inner conceit the great ones have. He knew he could handle New York, and he did. His way. He knew he could play ball well enough he didn’t have to do it with a long face and a bad temper. People forget that wasn’t the way Babe Ruth built the original Yankees either.”

The Winfield Yankees came into Anaheim hard on the heels of a six-game winning streak the other night and promptly hit five (count ‘em) home runs into the soft night air. Those are Murderers’ Row statistics. Winfield’s was his 20th of the season and his 85th run batted in.

If the Yankees win the pennant--a safe bet--it won’t be because Dave Winfield finally accepted New York on its terms. It’ll be because New York accepted him on his.