Gene Michael

Gene Michael got fired as Yankees manager twice in less than a calendar year. He also happens to be the single most important front-office mind in franchise history not named Steinbrenner -- the guy who drafted Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada, signed Mariano Rivera, drafted Andy Pettitte, and then refused to trade any of them when everybody in baseball wanted him to. Both of those sentences are true. That's Stick Michael in a nutshell.

The Shortstop They Called Stick

Before he was building a dynasty from a front-office chair, Michael was a light-hitting, good-glove shortstop -- the exact profile every team needs and nobody remembers. Born June 2, 1938, in Kent, Ohio, he starred in both baseball and basketball at Kent State (he actually led the Golden Flashes in scoring one year and reportedly turned down a shot with the Knicks to play ball instead). The nickname came from his lanky build back in college, not anything to do with his bat, and it followed him for the rest of his life.

The Pirates signed him as a bonus baby in 1958 for $25,000, and he debuted with Pittsburgh in 1966. A year in Los Angeles followed. Then the Yankees got him in 1968, and he spent seven seasons (1968-1974) as the club's regular shortstop, teaming with Horace Clarke on double plays through some of the thinnest years in franchise history. His bat never did much -- a .272 average in 1969 was as good as it got -- but he was slick enough with the glove to pull off the hidden ball trick five separate times in his career. (Five. Try getting a modern infielder to even attempt that once.)

Nobody's putting those numbers on a plaque. Stick's actual Hall of Fame case, such as it is, got made decades later, in a different job entirely.

Two Managerial Stints, Zero Patience From the Boss

Michael's first tour running Yankees baseball operations came in 1980, when Steinbrenner named him general manager and Dick Howser's club won 103 games and the AL East. Rather than hire a new skipper for 1981, Steinbrenner just handed Michael the manager's job instead. It went about as well as anything involving Steinbrenner and a manager's job in that era went.

The strike-splintered 1981 season saw Michael's Yankees go 34-22 in the first half (good enough to clinch a playoff spot before the players even walked out), then stumble to 14-12 after the game resumed. Steinbrenner fired him that September anyway, handing the reins to Bob Lemon for the stretch run to the World Series. Then, because consistency was never really the Boss's thing, Steinbrenner fired Lemon the following April and rehired Michael. That 1982 club collapsed to a fifth-place finish, and Michael got fired again mid-season -- his second pink slip from the same owner in under a year. His record across those two Yankees managerial stints: 92-76. A perfectly fine winning percentage for a guy who couldn't keep the job long enough to matter.

(No search committee, no formal interview -- Steinbrenner just decided the manager's job was Michael's for 1981, then un-decided it eight months later.)

Michael took a detour managing the Chicago Cubs from mid-1986 through 1987 (he took over an already-sinking club and finished 114-124 across the two seasons), a brief and unremarkable chapter, before he found his way back to the Bronx for the job that actually mattered.

The Ban That Built a Dynasty

Here's where it gets good. On July 30, 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner from day-to-day Yankees operations over the Howard Spira mess (paying a small-time gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield -- an all-time petty move, even by Steinbrenner standards). Three weeks later, on August 20, 1990, the Yankees reinstalled Michael as general manager. The timing wasn't a coincidence. It was the whole point.

With the Boss out of the building until March 1993, Michael did something no Yankees GM under an active Steinbrenner had ever really been allowed to do: he just... left the kids alone. No panic trades. No shipping a 19-year-old shortstop prospect to Seattle for a rental reliever because the team was six games back in July. He let the farm system actually develop.

The results speak for themselves. Mariano Rivera signed as a non-drafted free agent out of Panama in February 1990. That June, the Yankees took Andy Pettitte in the 22nd round and Jorge Posada in the 24th -- both of them afterthought picks who became cornerstones. Two years after that, on June 1, 1992, the Yankees used the sixth overall pick on a Kalamazoo high schooler named Derek Jeter, largely on the word of scout Dick Groch, who was already telling anyone who'd listen that the kid's only destination was Cooperstown. Michael's front office signed off on all of it and, more importantly, didn't blink when other teams came calling with offers.

The Trade Nobody Wanted (and the One They Wouldn't Make)

Michael's front office wasn't just about sitting on prospects -- he made moves too, and the biggest one looked like a disaster at the time. On November 3, 1992, he sent Roberto Kelly, a homegrown All-Star outfielder, to Cincinnati for Paul O'Neill and a minor leaguer. Fans hated it. Kelly was younger, faster, and a fan favorite. Michael himself called it "a gamble." It turned into one of the most lopsided trades in team history -- O'Neill won the 1994 AL batting title and became a middle-of-the-order fixture for the entire dynasty run, while Kelly bounced around several more organizations for the rest of the decade before a brief, forgettable return to the Bronx in 2000.

Then there's the Rivera near-miss. Mid-decade, with a young Rivera scuffling and Seattle dangling veteran infielder Felix Fermin, Steinbrenner seriously considered pulling the trigger. It took a room full of baseball people -- Michael included, alongside Joe Torre and the rest of the front office -- arguing the Boss out of it during a long, tense meeting. (Imagine explaining to your grandkids that the Yankees almost traded Mariano Rivera for Felix Fermin. Some conversations just don't get easier with time.) Nobody pulled it off single-handedly, but Michael was in that room, standing his ground on the guy who'd become the greatest closer who ever lived.

Stepping Away, Staying Close

Michael stepped down as GM after the 1995 season. Steinbrenner, back from suspension since 1993 and reportedly wanting Michael to stick around, couldn't talk him out of it -- Michael was worn down by the 15-hour days and wanted a lighter workload. Bob Watson took over as GM in 1996, the year the dynasty actually started paying off with a championship. Michael never really left, though. He became the club's vice president of major league scouting starting in 1996, a job he held through 2003, then stayed on as vice president and senior adviser from 2006 until his death. He was still around the organization, still watching baseball for a living, decades after he'd stopped signing the transactions himself.

He died of a heart attack on September 7, 2017, in Oldsmar, Florida, at age 79.

That's about as direct a tribute as you'll find from a guy who doesn't hand those out easily.

Stick never got a plaque in Monument Park, and he's not walking into Cooperstown either -- GMs almost never do, and his own playing numbers wouldn't get him within a mile of the ballot. But walk through the lineup card from 1996 to 2000 and count how many names trace back to a draft pick, a free-agent signing, or a trade he made while Steinbrenner was locked out of his own building. That's the whole point of the job, and Michael did it about as well as anyone ever has.