San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gossage torches his Yankee bridges
LEADVILLE, Colo. — As Goose Gossage stepped onto the deck outside his cabin on a recent morning, he considered the view.
Beyond the small lake in front of him, a broad grass valley gave way to an escarpment of spruce and pine that climbed until it ran out of oxygen, leaving exposed the tops of a snowcapped, snaggletooth row of 14,000-foot peaks.
Gossage, who turns 67 next month, first came to the edge of this former mining town one summer in the late 1950s, singing, “America the Beautiful,” while riding in the back of his Uncle Bert’s Jeep on what was then a day trip from his home in Colorado Springs.
Gossage bought one cabin in this enclave in 1974, just as his Hall of Fame pitching career took root. He bought the cabin next door in 1978, after the New York Yankees bestowed on him what was then an eye-popping, free-agent contract for a reliever: six years, $2.85 million.
“I was put on Earth to be a baseball player and to throw a baseball; I’m convinced,” Gossage said. “But my whole life isn’t that. I’ve got another life. I love my life. I love being up here. The mountains — if you’ve ever grown up around an ocean or the mountains, the power of those are incredible. They’re in your DNA.”
If Gossage sees this place as a sanctuary, as a counterweight for the 23 years he spent bouncing from city to city, including a season in Japan, it is not hard to see it now as an island — a place where he is living in exile.
Few sports franchises embrace their history as firmly as the Yankees, and few former ballplayers relish reliving it more than Gossage. But that was not enough to prevent the Yankees from banishing Gossage from two of his most cherished rituals: working as a spring training instructor and participating in Old-Timers’ Day, which is Sunday, when the Yankees play Tampa Bay.
The culprit, not surprisingly, was his mouth. In recent years, Gossage had become a headache to the Yankees, railing about what was wrong with today’s game to any reporter who would ask. His short, expletive-laced answer was: just about everything — analytics “nerds,” bat flips, drug cheats and how Mariano Rivera (and other modern-day closers) had it easy throwing just one inning. Then, when word got out before spring training that Gossage had not been invited to return as an instructor, he incinerated any bridge that might have led to reconciliation, laying into general manager Brian Cashman as “a disgrace” and “an embarrassment.”
Gossage’s pique toward Cashman stems from the general manager’s not returning his call more than a decade ago when Gossage was hoping to garner an invitation to minor league camp for his youngest son, Todd, who had recovered from a detached retina at the end of his college career.
Gossage does not blame the Yankees for casting him out. “I didn’t leave them any choice,” he said. Yet a fuller portrait might be of a man who is as vulnerable and bighearted as he can be vicious and boorish.
Few have seen as many sides of Gossage as Bucky Dent, who roomed with him in Class A ball in Appleton, Wis., teamed with him to win a World Series, and managed him with the Yankees in 1989.
“There’s a lot of things that people don’t understand because they only see the gruff side of him,” Dent said. “He’s all baseball. His life has been baseball, but he’s got a heart of gold.”
Gossage, who grew up in a largely Italian, working-class neighborhood in Colorado Springs, realized early that he had a gift for throwing things — first rocks, then footballs and baseballs. He had never been out of the state until he boarded a plane for Sarasota, Fla., after the Chicago White Sox drafted him in 1970.
Shortly before he left, he borrowed his brother’s car and drove to his favorite spot, near the Wilson Ranch, where his father, who had died the year before from emphysema, used to take him to hunt rabbit and deer, and forage for arrowheads. Gossage sat under a pine tree and cried.
“I was scared to death,” he said. “I thought Hank Aaron and all the greats put their pants on different, that they were fictitious characters that didn’t really exist. But through those tears I had a talk with myself, that there aren’t going to be any woulda, shoulda, couldas. When I made that commitment to myself, I felt this weight off my shoulders.”
The White Sox, the first of nine teams for whom he would play — he had stints with the Giants and A’s toward the end of his career — had the foresight to stick Gossage, with his tempestuous demeanor and blazing fastball — in the bullpen, where he could let his adrenaline ride.
Even now, nearly 50 years later and with a left ankle that had to be fused after decades of landing on it, Gossage ambles in his familiar slump-shouldered, pigeon-toed gait. His hair is white and mostly gone, although his Fu Manchu mustache — the one that somehow evaded George Steinbrenner’s grooming police — remains.
Gossage can still reach back for that intimidating glare — particularly when the subject is Cashman. But he admits that it was largely a facade, that the cocksure confidence he projected on the mound was fragile.
So it was that Gossage broke down when he described how Steinbrenner consoled him in private after Gossage gave up a three-run homer to George Brett that sealed Kansas City’s sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 American League Championship Series.
As Gossage wiped away tears, he moved on to another story: how Catfish Hunter extended a hand and then a dinner invitation with several teammates after Gossage had collapsed amid a pile of clothes in his locker after throwing away two bunts in the bottom of the ninth inning in Toronto shortly after he came to the Yankees in 1978.
This brought more tears. “You have no idea what that meant to me,” Gossage said, wiping his eyes. “I love those guys. The biggest stars that they were, they’re world champions, and I’m digging us this big hole. I suck in every way. I can’t function. I’m almost paralyzed. I can’t even put into words what that meant to me.”
This is the 40th anniversary of the Yankees’ 1978 championship season. It was the only time Gossage won a title, and he treasures the season because of how it unfolded. The Yankees, after trailing Boston by 14 games in mid-July, caught and passed the Red Sox by mid September but could not shake them. The Yankees won six in a row in the final week but lost on the final day of the season to force a one-game playoff at Fenway Park.
While Dent is remembered as the unlikely hero that day for his three-run homer over the Green Monster, Gossage helped the Yankees hang on for a 5-4 victory, stranding the tying run at third base when he retired an old nemesis, Carl Yastrzemski, on a pop-up for the final out.
Two weeks later, he was on the mound at Dodger Stadium, retiring Ron Cey on a pop-up for the final out as the Yankees, after losing the first two games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, clinched the title.
As he sat in a vintage wooden chair in his wood-paneled cabin, surrounded by his hunting trophies — deer, owls, rams and fowl — Gossage said he does not watch much baseball these days. The game, with more strikeouts, more home runs and fewer balls in play than ever, bores him.
As Gossage got more animated, he turned to replay, which has ensured that most umpiring mistakes are rectified, but at the cost of disrupting the game and largely robbing it of a favorite sight — managers kicking dirt on umpires. By now, he was worked up — and headed toward his favorite punching bag: the Ivy League-educated numbers wonks who never played the game. They have, he said, turned managers and coaches into baby sitters.
Gossage was not sorry about anything he had said.
“I am absolutely at peace with it,” he said. “I said my say and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got it off my chest.”