Stump Merrill

June 6, 1990, and the Yankees were 18-31, the worst record in the sport, when George Steinbrenner fired Bucky Dent and reached down to Triple-A Columbus for the man managing his farm club. Carl "Stump" Merrill had been in the organization for twelve years by then, mostly in towns nobody outside the system could find on a map -- West Haven, Albany-Colonie, Prince William. Now he had the job every one of Steinbrenner's other 1980s hires had eventually gotten fired from. He'd spend the next season and a half finding out exactly why.

Merrill never played a game in the major leagues. He never managed anywhere else in the majors, either -- not before the Yankees, not after. Two seasons, 275 games, 120 wins, 155 losses. That's the entire big-league résumé for a man who spent nearly four decades wearing the interlocking NY in one uniform or another.

The Long Way Up

Carl Harrison Merrill was born February 15, 1944, in Brunswick, Maine, and the nickname came early -- his college coach at the University of Maine, Jack Butterfield, started calling him "Stump" in 1963, and it stuck for the rest of his life (a fair description for a 5-foot-8, 185-pound catcher who looked built to block the plate). He caught for the Black Bears' 1964 team that knocked defending champion USC out of the College World Series, then signed with the Phillies in 1966 after Baltimore drafted him and let him walk.

The playing career was nothing special. Six seasons in the Phillies system, topping out at Triple-A Eugene, a .232 average with two home runs in 385 games. Merrill was smart enough to know what that meant. He went home to Maine in 1973, coached three sports as an assistant at his old college, and got Maine back to the College World Series in 1976 -- this time from the dugout instead of behind the plate.

Butterfield, by then working in the Yankees' front office, offered him a job in 1977. Merrill took it and started managing in the system the next year. What followed was over a decade of winning in towns that don't show up on ESPN -- Double-A titles, a Carolina League championship with Prince William in 1989, two different runs managing Triple-A Columbus before this one was even over. He even got a cup of coffee as Yankees first-base coach in 1985, under Yogi Berra, before Billy Martin took over 16 games into the season and sent him back down. (Nobody's Yankees tenure in the 1980s was safe, coaches included.)

Taking Over a Fire

When Steinbrenner called him up in June 1990, Merrill didn't pretend he was inheriting a contender. "I'm not going to say we'll win the pennant," he told reporters, "but we're going to put a product on the field that will perform." It was an honest answer to an impossible question. The team he took over had scored the fewest runs in the American League and was on pace to lose 100 games. He couldn't fix that in a dugout.

He didn't. The Yankees finished 1990 at 67-95 -- Dent's 18-31 plus Merrill's 49-64 -- dead last in a seven-team AL East, 21 games behind Boston. Don Mattingly's back was already starting to betray him. Rookie Kevin Maas hit 21 homers in 79 games and briefly looked like the second coming (he wasn't, but nobody could blame a last-place fan base for grabbing onto whatever was working), which tells you how thin the roster actually was.

Then, on July 30, 1990, something happened that hadn't happened to any Yankees manager before or since: Commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner for life from running the team day-to-day, the fallout from paying a small-time gambler named Howard Spira $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield. The ban got reduced later, and Steinbrenner was back by 1993. But for the better part of two seasons, Stump Merrill managed the Yankees without the Boss looking over his shoulder -- the one man in this era's revolving door who never had to answer to him for very long.

It didn't matter much. The roster was still bad, and no owner in the box seats was going to change that.

A Full Season, and Then Gone

1991 was the only complete season Merrill ever managed in the majors, and it went about how 1990 had. The Yankees finished 71-91, fifth in the AL East, 20 games behind a Toronto team that would win the division outright. It was, by a hair, his best winning percentage as a manager -- .438 against .434 -- which says more about the previous year's hole than anything Merrill built in this one.

The Yankees fired him on October 7, 1991. Steinbrenner was still barred from day-to-day operations at the time, so there was no big scene, no "Manager George" moment to make the exit memorable -- just general manager Gene Michael, running baseball operations in Steinbrenner's place, who'd decided he wanted someone with big-league managing experience already on his résumé. The Yankees passed on Buck Showalter at first. Three weeks later, at an ownership meeting on October 18, they changed their minds. Showalter got the job on October 29, at 35 the youngest manager in the majors, and the Wilderness years finally started climbing out of the hole Merrill had been managing inside the whole time.

Merrill kept managing in the Yankees' minor league system for years after the big-league job ended, kept winning at Columbus the way he always had, and eventually retired to the Maine coast he'd never really left behind. He's given interviews as recently as 2025, still talking baseball from home. The Bronx job was the one that got away from him -- two seasons, a banned owner, a roster that never gave him a real chance, and a record that reads worse than the situation actually was.