Can Green Bring Happiness to George and His Yankees?

‘Everyone blames me when we lose. But how many games have I played or managed?’

--GEORGE STEINBRENNER, Yankee owner

What happens when the euphoria of spring fades into the reality of summer?

What happens when Mr. Bluster feels the need to go bombast to bombast with the Boss?

Isn’t it inevitable? Don’t Dallas Green, the blunt new manager of the New York Yankees, and George Steinbrenner, the outspoken owner, form a combustible mixture?

Are we really to believe that what the Yankees are calling their new look won’t eventually disintegrate into a familiar pattern? Hasn’t Steinbrenner employed 18 managers in 17 years as the owner, including Billy Martin five times and Lou Piniella, Bob Lemon and Gene Michael twice each?

“It’s a volatile situation,” Green acknowledged.

“We’re both very stubborn. We both have a tendency to say things without tact. We’re both likely to chastise players in the media, which the players don’t always like.

“But we both want to win very badly, and I don’t think that’s all bad.”

George Dallas Green won as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies and general manager of the Chicago Cubs. At an imposing 6 feet 5 inches, his hair now a distinguished gray, he is the gunslinger at high noon, seemingly capable of winning any showdown.

Then, too, there’s that perfect complement, the baritone voice that can penetrate a clubhouse wall, not to mention a player’s skin. Greg Luzinski once compared Dallas Green to the Gestapo. There are those who have said worse about Steinbrenner.

“I know it won’t be a bed of roses, but hopefully George will have learned a lesson from not always having been successful in the past,” Green said with that customary directness.

“For the first time, he’s hired a manager from outside of the Yankee family and allowed that manager to name his own coaches.

“I’m no messiah, but I think I put something on the table that can lift us over the hump. I have a program that has proven to be successful when given the chance.

“I have faith in it and faith in my ability to handle the problems that come with managing. I believe I’m strong enough to sell George on it. He seems determined to let me handle things on the field. If he does that, I’ll be very happy and I think he’ll be happy, too.”

Steinbrenner is only happy if the Yankees win a pennant, which they haven’t done since the strike season of 1981.

Last year, when they were expected to win the title in the American League East after signing Jack Clark, they finished fifth, but only 3 1/2 games out.

Martin started the year as manager. Piniella finished it.

“Everyone blames me when we lose,” Steinbrenner said from his office in Tampa. “But how many games have I played or managed?

“Each time I hire a new manager, he puts in all these new rules and they’re gone by mid-season. Dallas tells me it will be different and I believe him. It was time to try new people. I like what I see.

“I think Dallas will still be the manager when we win in October.”

Green, 54, has a two year-contract, but all Yankee managers operate day to day. What separates Green from his predecessors, he believes, is a stronger commitment to discipline and t-e-a-m.

He hammered it into the Phillies in 1980, the year they won the National League pennant and World Series, after coming down from the front office late in 1979 because he believed that Danny Ozark had lost control.

“I wasn’t here, I only know what I heard through the grapevine,” Green said of the Yankees. “I’m told they haven’t had a structured program or any kind of work ethic. I’m told their discipline hasn’t been worth a damn.

“Look, I respect talent and veteran status. I’m smart enough to know you have to have great individual stats. But you can only win as a team. Look at the Dodgers. They had no business winning last year, but they busted their . . . and did it as a team.”

The Yankees are cautious. They’ve been through so many revolving doors that they yearn for continuity and stability more than anything.

“Discipline is a stupid word,” relief ace Dave Righetti said. “What does it mean? Describe it to me?

“If I’m taking care of myself, showing up on time and doing my job, isn’t that discipline? I’ve seen a lot of injuries here the last two years.

“I don’t think there’s been a lack of discipline.”

Said Don Slaught, the catcher: “Every manager has his rules, and it follows that the harder you work the better you’ll be, but anything that puts more pressure on a player in New York, especially a younger player, isn’t really a plus. New York is different from any place there is.”

Will that matter to Green? Probably not.

Yankee General Manager Bob Quinn refused to call it complacency but said there was a definite need to improve club atmosphere. Thus, the conscious attempt to create a different look.

“I don’t mean this derogatorily, but how many times can you bring back Billy and Lou?” Quinn said. “How many times can you ask the players to respond? Doesn’t familiarity breed contempt?

“I’ve known Dallas for 22 years and the thing that has always characterized him is his all-consuming desire to win. I think George is hoping Dallas will do anything to get us to the World Series.”

Said Green: “I didn’t invent the game, but I’ve been everything from a player to a club president in 33 years. I don’t pretend to know it all, but I know more than most, and I’ll out-work anyone.

“I am what I am and I won’t change. I’m a pusher, basically. I push myself, my coaches, my players, the clubhouse guys, the traveling secretary. I do my homework and I expect you to do yours.

“I know I have a big mouth at times, but I also know when to keep it shut. I’m not a hugger and kisser like Tommy (Lasorda), but I think I know when to pat a player on the back and when to kick him in the rear.”

Dallas Green was once a promising pitcher in the Philadelphia system who had attended the University of Delaware on a basketball scholarship. He hurt his arm early, however, and his fastball died.

He survived on desire and perseverance, pitching all or parts of eight seasons in the big leagues on what former Philadelphia associate Paul Owens called “courage alone.” Is it any wonder that he has blown out the decibel meter after watching gifted players perform below their capability?

“I know what you can accomplish through sacrifice and determination,” he said. “It’s that message I’ve always tried to get across.”

He became a minor league coach for the Phillies in 1967, then a manager, then assistant to the farm director, then the farm director under personnel director Owens in 1972, the position he held until late in the 1979 season, when he replaced Ozark.

The Phillies were perceived as a team of whimpering, arrogant, self-centered egotists. Green preached discipline and team. He frequently challenged the manhood of his players.

“I yelled loud enough and often enough that I finally got their attention,” he said of the 1980 drive to a division title, playoff victory over the Houston Astros and World Series win over the Kansas City Royals. “I finally convinced them it had to be done my way, not theirs.”

He yelled loud enough between games of an August doubleheader that reporters, waiting outside the clubhouse doors, were able to tape the tirade. Then they got a bigger story in the second game when Green came to blows with pitcher Ron Reed.

Whatever happened, he never backed away.

When Luzinski compared him to the Gestapo, Green responded by wearing a Nazi armband to the clubhouse.

When shortstop Larry Bowa, prodded, perhaps, by the memory of farm director Green once suggesting he should be traded, second-guessed the late-season benching of Luzinski, Bob Boone and Garry Maddox, Green replied: “If I ever really unloaded on Larry Bowa, he’d never play another game of baseball in this town.”

When Maddox and Bake McBride said the manager only talked with them when they got game-winning hits, Green said: “If they want me to talk with them more then maybe they should get more game-winning hits.”

He also eventually said: “I’m sick and tired of hearing what the players say.”

Pete Rose, the Phillies’ first baseman that year and now manager of the Cincinnati Reds, reflected and said of Green: “He was the missing piece for us.”

And even Bowa, now coaching third base for Philadelphia, conceded: “What Dallas did was try to make you so angry that you’d show him something. He wasn’t really putting me down as much as trying to motivate me, and it always seemed to work.”

Luzinski, now a football and baseball coach in South Jersey, remains unconvinced.

“You know, we had a pretty good club when Danny Ozark was the manager,” he recently told the New York Daily News. “We were in the playoffs three or four times. (Green) came in and got credit for getting us over the hump.

“Personally, I always thought he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Green managed the Phillies to a first-half championship in the strike season of 1981, then lost the mini-playoff to the Montreal Expos. In 1982, he became general manager of the Cubs, moving up later to club president.

“When the Chicago Cubs promoted Dallas Green to president, they promoted him beyond his level of competency,” charged broadcaster Harry Caray, fuming over the installation of lights at Wrigley Field and Green’s advocacy of it.

Again, there are mixed opinions on Green’s six-year tenure with the Cubs, but the bottom line seems more positive than negative.

He made moves--acquiring Rick Sutcliffe and Ryne Sandberg, among others--that led to an Eastern Division title in 1984, the Cubs’ first title in 39 years, which revived attendance.

He brought in Gordon Goldsberry to rebuild a farm system that produced Shawon Dunston, Mark Grace, Rafael Palmeiro, Greg Maddux, Damon Berryhill, Jamie Moyer and Mike Harkey, among others.

“In some ways, we won too soon,” Green said. “But we had a shot at it in ’84 and took it because the club hadn’t won in 40 years. Then we had to re-sign some of those players for a lot of money, even though in some instances it was undeserved. And when we had the physical breakdowns a year later, the farm system wasn’t ready to kick in yet. We just weren’t prepared to win.”

Even so, Green said, he and his staff remain proud of their accomplishments in Chicago, believing that they brought respectability to a downtrodden organization, and still do not understand their departure.

Green insisted that he was fired, though he has also said he resigned.

He said the Chicago Tribune Co., owner of the Cubs, never offered an explanation but that he was unwilling to accept an expansion of the corporate influence. According to Green, he would have had to fire associates Hugh Alexander, Charlie Fox and Goldsberry because they were too old, he would have lost his business authority to a corporate executive and he faced a corporate tightening of the budget.

The final straw, he implied, was his desire to hire John Vukovich as managerial successor to Gene Michael. On the day of the scheduled announcement, the Tribune Co. reportedly balked, insisting that Green agree to the loss of his business authority and the firing of his friends. Green rejected the trade-off. “In some ways, people like Charlie, Hugh and myself are dinosaurs,” he said. “I don’t know where the new managers and baseball people are going to come from. There’s more corporate involvement now and I don’t like it. They have no feel for people. They’re too cold-blooded.”

Some might say that his own firings and public denouncements of Michael and Jim Frey, among others, showed similar ruthlessness. Green obviously can carry a grudge. At the last winter meetings in Atlanta, he refused to shake hands with either Frey, now general manager of the Cubs, or Don Zimmer, now the manager.

“What’s his problem?” asked Zimmer, who once coached for Green. “He’s the one who fired us.”

Green also fired Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, for missing public relations functions and fired pitching coach Billy Connors while Connors was in a hospital recovering from hip surgery. Connors, who will be careful now not to get sick, is back working for Green as his pitching coach. Fox is also on the coaching staff, as is Lee Elia, who was Green’s first manager in Chicago.

Green sat out last season. He and his wife, Sylvia, divided their time among a 60-acre farm they own in Eastern Pennsylvania and two properties they own in the British West Indies.

Steinbrenner began to sound out Green late last season.

“I had my year off,” Green said. “I had time to pout and work (the parting with the Cubs) out of my system. I didn’t want a 12-month, 24-hour-a-day general manager’s job again, but I felt that the Yankees represented a top position, with time left over for my family.

“You think about the tradition, the stadium, the logo and only the Dodgers are in the same class as the Yankees. I’m juiced about the opportunity, but I come into it with my eyes open.”

Green also comes into it with a commodity his predecessors lacked. The signings of free agents Dave LaPoint and Andy Hawkins have given Green two pitchers capable of working 200 innings.

The Yankee staff was also strengthened by the acquisition of Lance McCullers and the promising Jimmy Jones in the trade that sent Clark, who requested it, to the San Diego Padres.

There was also the free-agent signing of former Dodger second baseman Steve Sax, who, in Green’s words, knows how to win and spell team.

Green, as he insists, may also know when to keep his mouth shut. He will inevitably clash with Steinbrenner, but he has avoided a pair of early opportunities:

--Green wanted no part of veterans Tommy John and Ron Guidry, but shrugged off Steinbrenner’s insistence that both be given a spring shot.

--He hoped to play Claudell Washington in center field but did not make an issue of it when the Yankees refused to offer more than two years to Washington, who wanted three and got it from the Angels. Green must now hope that long-touted Roberto Kelly is ready to play center.

In addition, when Rickey Henderson caused a furor recently by saying that the Yankees partied too much last year and lost the pennant because of their drinking, Green did not inflame the situation.

He suggested that if teammates were mad, maybe they should “kick the . . . “ out of Henderson, but he said it with a trace of humor, and explained that he will allow only wine and beer on team flights.

“I don’t have a problem with what (Henderson) said,” he added. “I can’t worry about 1988. I’m worried about 1989, and (excessive drinking is) not going to happen. If it is, they’ll be doing it in a closet.”

Ironically, it was over a beer or two that Green and Steinbrenner met. Green was 24, pitching for the Buffalo Bisons of the International League and living in a low-rent apartment over a tavern.

He would stop there for a postgame beer and occasionally encountered Steinbrenner, then 28 and working for his father’s shipbuilding company. Neither had any idea that their paths would cross again professionally, Green said, and their brief encounters never developed into a tight friendship.

Will it be tighter now? Is it possible for Mr. Bluster and the Boss to survive this relationship?

“I sense a more hands-off approach from George,” General Manager Quinn said. “I think he senses a real shot at success with Dallas and that there’s a mutual admiration society either because of or in spite of their similarities.

“Of course, with ownership comes proprietary rights and I would expect Dallas to bite his tongue at times.

“No one is going to suggest or tell the other fellow to do it.”