Gabe Paul

Late December 1974. A rural airstrip outside Hertford, North Carolina, where representatives from 23 of baseball's 24 teams had already made their pitch to a 28-year-old free-agent pitcher named Jim "Catfish" Hunter. George Steinbrenner flew down with his baseball man, and the baseball man did most of the talking. By New Year's Eve, Hunter was a Yankee. Gabe Paul had closed the biggest deal in the sport's history, and almost nobody outside the room would remember his name for it.

That's the whole career in miniature. Paul ran the Yankees' baseball operations from 1973 to 1977 -- the five years that turned a moribund, CBS-battered franchise into back-to-back World Series champions -- and he did it as the least famous person in the building. Steinbrenner yelled. Billy Martin drank and raged. Reggie Jackson talked to reporters like he was reading from a screenplay. Paul just kept making the trades that worked.

The Kid Who Started in the Clubhouse

Gabriel Howard Paul was born January 4, 1910, in Rochester, New York, and his path into the game started about as low as it gets. At age 10, he was a shoeshine boy in the clubhouse of the Rochester Red Wings, the local International League club. He made batboy within a year (a promotion that probably felt enormous to a 10-year-old and meant almost nothing to anyone else). By 16 he was running the Red Wings' publicity and ticket office. He never swung a bat professionally in his life. He didn't need to.

Paul joined the Cincinnati Reds' front office as traveling secretary in the mid-1930s, under general manager Warren Giles, and worked his way up through the ranks -- including a stretch of military service during World War II -- until the Reds made him vice president and general manager on September 27, 1951. He held that job for nine years. In 1956, his Reds tied the major league home run record with 221 (matching the 1947 Giants' mark), and The Sporting News named Paul its Executive of the Year.

Building Franchises Before the Yankees Ever Called

Paul left Cincinnati in 1960 to help organize the front office of an entirely new team: the expansion Houston franchise that would become the Colt .45s. He didn't stick around to see it play a single game. In April 1961, nearly a year before Houston's debut, he took over as general manager of the Cleveland Indians instead (a franchise-hopping move that would become something of a career habit). He ran the Indians for over a decade, co-owning the club from 1962 to 1966 along the way.

By the time Paul sold his Indians stake in early 1973, he'd already spent more than 20 years running major league front offices. That's when a Cleveland shipbuilder named George Steinbrenner came calling. Steinbrenner led the 12-member syndicate that bought the Yankees from CBS on January 3, 1973, and Paul -- an experienced baseball executive with three organizations' worth of scar tissue -- became the club's new president and general manager.

The Friday Night Massacre

Paul's first big swing as Yankees GM came on April 26, 1974, when he sent four pitchers -- Fritz Peterson, Steve Kline, Fred Beene, and Tom Buskey -- to Cleveland for first baseman Chris Chambliss, reliever Dick Tidrow, and pitcher Cecil Upshaw. The New York press dubbed it "The Friday Night Massacre," and the Yankees' own clubhouse hated it. "You just don't trade four pitchers," Mel Stottlemyre reportedly said at the time.

The deal looked lopsided in the wrong direction for about two years. Then it didn't. Chambliss became the steadiest first baseman in the American League and delivered the pennant-winning home run of the 1976 ALCS. Tidrow turned into exactly the rubber-armed, clutch-in-the-eighth reliever every championship staff needs and nobody outside the clubhouse appreciates. Paul had traded four spare parts for the first two bricks of a dynasty, and he'd done it in April, when nobody was paying attention.

Running the Club Alone

Six months later, on October 22, 1974, Paul traded the most popular player on the roster -- center fielder Bobby Murcer -- to the San Francisco Giants for outfielder Bobby Bonds. Fans howled. Paul made the trade anyway, betting that Bonds's power-speed combination would translate better to the cavernous dimensions of Shea Stadium, where the Yankees were playing while the original Stadium got renovated.

The Murcer trade happened while Steinbrenner's legal troubles were closing in. In August 1974, Steinbrenner pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy count tied to illegal corporate contributions to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and on November 27, 1974, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years. Steinbrenner couldn't officially talk baseball with his own front office. He worked around it constantly, by phone, but for the better part of two years, Paul was the man actually running the New York Yankees.

That stretch included the Hunter chase -- the December 1974 arbitration ruling that voided Hunter's Oakland contract, the recruiting frenzy that followed, and the five-year, $3.75 million deal Paul helped close on December 31, 1974. It included the decision, on August 1, 1975, to fire manager Bill Virdon and hire Billy Martin, a move Paul backed even though Martin's volatility would eventually make his own job much harder.

Two Trades in One December Afternoon

If April 26, 1974, was Paul's quiet masterstroke, December 11, 1975, was his loud one. On that single day, working alongside Martin, Paul completed two separate trades that finished the roster. He sent Bonds to the California Angels for center fielder Mickey Rivers and right-hander Ed Figueroa. In an unrelated deal the same day, he sent pitcher Doc Medich to Pittsburgh for Willie Randolph, Dock Ellis, and Ken Brett.

Randolph would play second base in the Bronx for 13 seasons. Rivers gave the lineup a leadoff spark it hadn't had in years. Figueroa became a durable, dependable innings-eater in a rotation that badly needed one. None of it made the front page the way the Hunter signing had. All of it mattered more, in the long run, than most of what did make the front page.

The guy is a mental case, a liar, an egomaniac, and a crook, and that's a pretty good parlay.

Paul never said that to a reporter. He said it to a tape recorder, alone, most nights, after a scotch, unloading about "this Steinbrenner" the way any exhausted employee vents about a boss who won't stop calling. His son found the tapes in a garage years later. They're the closest thing that exists to Paul's honest, day-to-day account of what it actually felt like to run George Steinbrenner's baseball team.

The Reds Get Their Revenge, Then the Ring Arrives

The 1976 Yankees won the pennant, their first since 1964, and ran into the buzzsaw of the Big Red Machine in the World Series. Cincinnati swept them in four (the same Cincinnati Reds organization Paul had run from 1951 to 1960, sweeping the very team he'd spent three years rebuilding -- baseball has a sense of humor, and Paul was on the wrong end of the joke). UPI still named him Executive of the Year for 1976. The roster he'd assembled was clearly good. It just wasn't finished.

A year later it was. The 1977 Yankees beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, and it stands as the only championship Paul ever won as a general manager, across more than 25 years running front offices. He didn't hit a home run in Game 6 (Reggie Jackson did, three of them). He built the roster that made those swings possible, one unglamorous trade at a time.

Gone Before the Second Ring

Paul's authority narrowed fast after the 1977 title. Steinbrenner brought Al Rosen into the front office that fall, and the arrangement left Paul without the room he'd had for five years. In 1978, Paul returned to Cleveland as Indians president and minority owner, partnering with fellow Yankees limited partner Steve O'Neill on the purchase. He never saw the Yankees' 1978 championship from inside the organization.

He ran the Indians until retiring at the end of 1984, closing out a professional baseball career that had started 64 years earlier with a shoeshine rag in a minor league clubhouse. Gabe Paul died April 26, 1998, in Tampa, Florida, at 88 years old.

Key Moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Gabe Paul and what did he do for the Yankees?

Gabe Paul was the Yankees' team president and general manager from 1973 to 1977. He engineered the trades and free-agent signings -- Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow, Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa, Willie Randolph, and Catfish Hunter -- that built the back-to-back World Series champions of 1977 and 1978, working alongside owner George Steinbrenner.

Did Gabe Paul run the Yankees while George Steinbrenner was suspended?

Yes. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Steinbrenner for two years starting November 27, 1974, over federal campaign-finance violations. Steinbrenner worked around the ban by phone, but Paul handled the club's day-to-day baseball operations, including the Catfish Hunter signing and the Billy Martin managerial hire, through most of that stretch.

What trades did Gabe Paul make to build the Yankees' 1970s dynasty?

Paul traded four pitchers to Cleveland for Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow on April 26, 1974, then traded Bobby Murcer for Bobby Bonds that October. On December 11, 1975, he sent Bonds to California for Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa and separately dealt Doc Medich to Pittsburgh for Willie Randolph. He also helped sign free agent Catfish Hunter on December 31, 1974.

Why did Gabe Paul leave the Yankees?

Steinbrenner brought in executive Al Rosen in the fall of 1977, narrowing Paul's authority after the Yankees' championship season. Paul returned to Cleveland in 1978 as Indians president and minority owner, partnering with fellow Yankees limited partner Steve O'Neill.

What was Gabe Paul's career before the Yankees?

Paul started in baseball as a 10-year-old clubhouse attendant for the Rochester Red Wings. He became Cincinnati Reds GM in 1951 (winning Executive of the Year in 1956), helped organize the expansion Houston franchise in 1960, and ran the Cleveland Indians as GM and part-owner from 1961 until he joined the Yankees in 1973.

He got the one ring the record book credits him with, and it came the year before Steinbrenner started boxing him out of the room he'd spent five years running. Paul went back to Cleveland, ran the Indians for six more years, and never made much noise about what he'd built in the Bronx. The trades did the talking. They still do.