I’m not a basketball fan in large
because I live in New York and growing up during the 1990s that was just a
reason for heartbreak. Nevertheless, it has been hard to deny the effect Tom
Thibideau had on the Knicks when he was hired at the end of the 2019 season.
For nearly twenty years the
Knicks had been so terrible that mediocrity seemed too good to describe them;
we were yet another New York franchise that was a disgrace to the city.
Thibideau very quickly managed to bring do something I had long since thought
impossible: not only make the Knicks respectable but genuine contenders.
Over five years he led the Knicks
to 226 wins, the fourth most of any coach in the franchises history. He guided
them to the postseason four years out of five, getting them to the
quarterfinals three times. Just this past May he managed to accomplish something
that the Knicks hadn’t done in a quarter of a century: get to the semi-finals.
He did so by defeating the Celtics, last year’s NBA champion. It was a stirring
achievement that most franchises would reward.
So it didn’t surprise me that
just two days after the Knicks lost to the Pacers in six games, the Knicks
management chose to fire Thibideau.
As I’ve mentioned before despite
the fact that New York has not been the center of the sports universe since the
1970s, there is built in belief of New York fans of any franchises that
championships in any title are ours by birthright. Therefore while some
franchises are satisfied if their team manages to make it to the quarterfinals,
semi-finals or even lost the championship every person who is hired to lead a
New York team is always under a clock. You are supposed to win the championship
that season, regardless how mediocre your team was the year before. Failure is
not an option but second place is actually considered worse than that.
Like everything else in our fair
metropolis this dates back to the Yankees, the winningest franchise in sports
history as well as the most unforgiving. When Thibeau was sacked yesterday the
immediate comparison was to Buck Showalter being fired just days after he led
the Yankees to their first postseason appearance in fourteen years. George
Steinbrenner had just returned from baseball after a three-year suspension
which had led to a period of relative calm, a rebuilding of the farm system and
the acquiring of good players. Steinbrenner, who always felt the Yankees were
an extension of himself, needed to show his muscle so he not only fired
Showalter but the general manager who had gotten them there, Genie Michael. Had
he not managed to rehire Joe Torre and Brian Cashman and they had not won the
World Series the following year, the Boss would no doubt have been run out of
town. As it was this decision led to the Yankees winning four World Series in
five years, starting the next Yankee dynasty and no doubt restoring
Steinbrenner’s reputation in his final years of running the team.
There have been countless
examples prior to that of New York franchises firing managers after superb
seasons. The most egregious won came in 1980 when Dick Howser led the
Yankees to 103 wins after finishing
fourth the following year. When they were swept by Kansas City in the ALCS,
Steinbrenner than did something far more humiliating by pretending that Howser
was leaving the Yankees to explore opportunities ‘in Florida real estate’. The
Yankees would not have nearly as good a season until Torre took over the team;
Howser would be hired by the Royals and lead them to their first World Series
in 1985.
But I feel the most relevant –
and cautionary – comparison is the story of the 1964 Yankees in which Yogi
Berra ended up leading the Yankees to the pennant, much to the embarrassment of
the front office.
In the fall of 1963 the Yankee
dynasty looked like it was going to go on forever. They had just won their
fourth consecutive pennant and their thirteenth in fifteen years. However
during the off season the front office made a crucial change. Ralph Houk, who
had led the Yankees to their last three pennants, was becoming general manager.
Yogi Berra was going to manage the Yankees in 1964.
Berra was one of the great
catchers in history and had already been offered jobs to manage when his career
ended. Both Boston and Washington had offered him the job while he was still
active, but he turned them down because they were eighth place franchises and
short-term jobs. Baltimore, which was becoming a contending team, offered him
the job in 1963 but by that time Houk had promised him the managing job for the
Yankees.
The problem was everyone thought
Yogi was a clown, not capable of managing the elite ball team. In fact a large
part of the reason he had been given the job was because of the Mets. Ever
since Casey Stengel had taken over the horrible Mets, they were drawing at a
comparable level to the Yankees at home. Much of this was attributed to the
quotable Stengel and the fact that New York fans were still bitter that he had
been fired in 1960, for turning. 70. Berra was hired more to put a human face
on the franchise and bring fans back to the park.
There were two problems with
this. First of all, much of the humor attributed to Berra was purely the
invention of sportswriters and the real Berra as manager was not particularly
quotable. The bigger problem was that Berra had been a teammate of the players
he was now managed a year earlier and the team had a hard time taking him
seriously. Furthermore they all had grown attached to Houk during his tenure
and Berra took a lot of heat for this.
All of this would have been
forgotten if the Yankees had just been able to run away with the pennant as
they had the three previous season. The problem was for most of the year they
were struggling for first place and Berra took most of the heat – and a lot of
it came from the teammates. Many of them went to see Houk and complained about
how he wasn’t doing a good job. Most GM’s would have told Berra about this and
backed him. Houk listened and by the middle of the summer was sure that Yogi
had to go.
To be clear the struggles of the
Yankees had nothing to do with Berra. The dynasty was starting to show its age
and its cracks. Mantle was no longer as effective a left-handed switch hitter
as before and his injuries were so severe he was all but playing on one leg.
Maris was going through a horrible slump: by August he had only hit thirteen
home runs and driven in forty runs. The infield situation was worse. Joe
Pepitone at first ran hot and cold. Second baseman Bobby Richardson fielded
well but wasn’t hitting. Shortstop Tony Kubek was suffering from a neck injury
that would end up ending his career the next season and late in September,
frustrated from his appearance he slapped his hand on a door he thought was
wood but was steel, putting him out of the lineup for good. Clete Boyer at
third base was having his worst season at the plate, hitting .218
The pitching was also subpar.
Ralph Terry, who had won 23 games the season before struggled most of the year
and finished 7-11. Jim Bouton was suffering from a stiff shoulder and finished
the first half of the season 7-7. Al Downing pitched well but it was erratic.
And the long-time ace Whitey Ford was pitching on guile, control and doctoring
the ball. He was having circulatory problems under his left arm and stopped
sweating under it. The bullpen had only two pitchers of note Steve Hamilton and
rookie Pete Mikkelsen and while both did well, they were also overworked.
Most of all the Yankees were
paying for their past, particularly when it came to race. During the tenure of
George Weiss had refused to integrate. He didn’t think the white customers
wanted to sit with black fans and in his heart he didn’t think blacks were good
enough to play with whites. The only African-American player Weiss signed who
made the Yankee varsity was Elston Howard, a reserve catcher who was there to
back up Yogi Berra, who during much of the 1950s played every day. A photo of
the Yankees team prior to the 1964 World Series shows just how racist the
franchise was: there are only three players of color on the entire Yankee team:
Howard, pitcher Al Downing and Panamanian Hector Lopez.
It was only because of two late
moves by Berra that the Yankees managed to win the pennant. Berra demanded Mel
Stottlemyre be brought up from Richmond. Stottlemyre won 9 games in the final
six weeks for the Yankees. They were also helped by a late season trade for
Pedro Ramos, a Cuban born closer who became the reliever they needed. They had
a tremendous pennant drive, winning 30 of the last forty games and were helped
by hot streaks by Mantle, Maris, and Pepitone. The Yankees won the American
League Pennant by two games over Chicago and Baltimore.
However during the months leading
up to this Houk had been looking for a manager for 1965. While this was going
on the Cardinals had been struggling for the national league pennant. Owner
Gussie Busch had fired general manager Bing Devine and had been losing patience
with Cardinals manager Johnny Keane. Behind the scenes he offered the job to
Leo Durocher, who believed the Cardinals should have been winning. It was
understood Durocher would be the Cardinals manager in 1965.
Then in the last weeks of the
1964 season the Philadelphia Phillies, who had been leading the National League
for the last two months, suffered one of the most notorious collapses in
baseball history, losing ten straight games, six of them to their nearest
contenders, the Cincinnatti Reds and the Cardinals. The Reds won nine straight
games and the Cardinals won eight. The pennant was decided on the final weekend
when the Phillies beat the Reds on the last day of the season while the
Cardinals beat the Mets.
Gussie Busch then had to eat crow
and offered a three year contract with a raise and an apology to Keane. What he
didn’t know was that Houk had offered Keane the job of Yankee manager in 1965 –
and Keane had accepted. Keane was about to go into the World Series leading the
team he had agreed to manage the following year.
In one of the most thrilling
World Series of the decade the Cardinals managed to beat the Yankees in seven
games. Mantle hit three home runs to set an all-time world Series record for most
home runs, RBIs and runs scored which he still holds. (Conflated postseason
records don’t count.) But Bob Gibson showed the world how great a pitcher he
was winning 2 games and striking out 31 batters, setting a new record for most
strikeouts in a World Series. (He would break his own record four years later
against the Tigers.) The Cardinals the World Champions for the first time in
eighteen years.
Berra had understandably thought
he had done a good job managing the Yankees that year. He had brought them from
behind to win the pennant, done a good job of patching an aged team together
and even after losing Whitey Ford in the first game, they had nearly won. He
had no idea Houk had lost faith of him and had decided to replace him. He was
stunned when he learned he was out.
In St. Louis, Busch called a
press conference to announce the rehiring of Johnny Keane. Keane showed up late
to the conference with a letter that Busch ignored – which said he was
resigning. Asked for his future plans, he said he was going to do some fishing.
They actually asked him about the Yankee job and he demurred.
The decision backfired on Houk
immediately when they realized the betrayal. It didn’t help that Stengel and
the Mets immediately hired Berra as a coach, another PR victory. But the worst
part came for Keane. The players thought he was too much of a disciplinarian
and it was an aging team with not much of a farm system. He was considered a
martinet with too many rules and little flexibility. He was the right man for
St. Louis, the wrong one for New York.
In 1965, the Yankees finished
77-85, the first time in forty years that they had a losing season. In the
first 20 games, they went 4-16 and then Keane was fired. Houk took over as a
manager and everyone thought the good old days were back. Instead the Yankees
finished last for the first time in more than half a century.
The real tragedy was for Keane.
Less than a year after he was fired, he died of a heart attack at Houston at
the young age of fifty-five. His former players on the Cardinals thought the
decision to go to New York more than anything else had led to his death.
Looking back it’s clear that the
fates of Berra and Keane both have a similarity to what happened with
Thibodeau. In the case of Berra, the front office lost confidence in him early
and decided to fire him no matter what the outcome of the season was. This was
not without precedent in Yankee history even then. In 1948 Bucky Harris was
fired after winning the World Series in 1947 and finished 2 games out of the
A.L. Pennant in 1948. The decision had been made by the new GM George Weiss
early in the 1948 season as Harris was part of the previous ownership and he
wanted his own man – Casey Stengel. Twelve years later, Stengel ended up
getting forced out after bringing the Yankees to one game of winning the 1960
World Series. They tried to say he wanted to retire but Stengel had made it
clear he’d been fired for being seventy years old.
In both cases the Yankee front
office to a huge amount of grief for what was considered cruelty to a manager
the reporters and the fans were very fond of. And to be clear I don’t think any
other team but the Yankees would consider this acceptable behavior. Back then,
as is the case today, sentimentality plays second to winning the championship.
One was reminded of that last October when Aaron Boone led the Yankees to their
first pennant in fifteen years – and there was still rumbles of his job not
being secure when the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in five game.
Again this is the mindset of New
York and its sports teams. If Thibedeau had the same track record over the last
five seasons with the Pistons or the Sixers or the Celtics or really any
other team in any other city but this one, the natural response would have
been to give him a three year contract. It’s only in New York that there are
some sportswriters – and certain parts of the fanbase – who think it is
acceptable to show Thibideau the door with the same dispatch that the front
office showed Berra after he won the American League pennant but lost the
series.
Perhaps some might have thought
that a man who had just won the World Series by beating the Yankees could have
the same magic touch. But Keane was going from a friendly organization to one
with a demand of excellence and veteran players. Almost immediately after he
took over the mantle Jim Bouton would later point out the problem. “They might
not have respected Yogi, but they liked him. Keane they didn’t like or respect.”
Indeed not long after Keane arrived the players wanted Berra back.
The decision to fire Thibideau
like that to get rid of Yogi Berra is already meeting huge pushback from the
sports media who justifiably realize that the Knicks ownership has decided to
do what New York ownership always does when the team comes up short: fire the
manager. That Thibideau was responsible more than any other individual for
raising the Knicks from two decades of mediocrity to a force in the NBA, that
he got them to the semi-finals this year, doesn’t matter.
This will almost certainly come
back to hurt the Knicks when it comes to looking for a replacement. Considering
that management has made it very clear by its sacking of Thibideau is that the
only acceptable result is a championship or you will be ousted, it is going to
be difficult to find anyone willing to put his head in the noose. And just as
Berra found out when he replaced Ralph Houk and Keane when he replaced Berra,
he will be forced to step into the not inconsiderable shoes of Thibideau and be
judged if his track record is inferior during his first season. Considering
that Thibideau averaged 52 wins a year with the Knicks, those are very large
shoes and it will almost certainly lead to chants at the Garden of ‘Bring Back
Thibideau’
And it’s not like what happened
in 1964 will offer much guidance. I suspect whether the Thunder or the Pacers
end up coming up short by the end of the finals, the losing team will not cast
its manager aside for failing. Like I said, this is something that will only
happen in New York: the coaches of Indiana or Oklahoma City are going to get
extensions win or lose. (By the way the Celtics coach still has his job. Only
in New York.)
As for Berra things worked out
for him. He eventually became manager of the Mets and managed to get them to
the 1973 National League pennant and within one game of the World Series. When
Steinbrenner took over the Yankees Berra eventually came back as a coach. Of
course Steinbrenner would eventually fire him after the 1984 season and Yogi
refused to come to Yankee Stadium for a very long time. But eventually
Steinbrenner would reach out and Berra would be back at Old-Timers games until
his death.
I suspect Thibideau will not have
much problem finding work after his stint as coach of the Knicks. We’ll have to
wait until the off-season begins to see where he ends up but he’ll probably get
hired for a franchise that will no doubt be appreciative of what he can do with
a lesser team and give him the resources they need. He will no doubt win a
championship someday. And no doubt after that the Knicks will offer him another
turn at the helm. I hope that he shows the same decorum and class to them that Keane
ending up showing to the Cardinals when they lost confidence in him. Never has
a franchise deserved a ‘thanks, but no thanks” then the Knicks.
No comments:
Post a Comment