E-Mail This Article to a Friend Those were the days (continued)

When Lemon’s squad got off to a 6-8 start in ’82, off went the skipper into the sunset and who should come riding in but — nope, wait for it! — Gene Michael again. Alas, the Yanks finished in fifth place, just a game out of the cellar, and Stick was replaced in favor of Clyde King midway through the campaign when the team was 44-42 (and NY ultimately closed out the ’82 season at 79-83).

Are you sure you’re getting all this? All of these shenanigans happened in the five years after New York’s ’78 title, but the fun’s just beginning.

Not surprisingly, Martin was brought in for his third tour of duty in January of 1983, and the rowdy skipper’s term that summer was marred by a three-game suspension for kicking dirt on an ump, plus another two-game benching for calling one of the men in blue "a stone liar." The ’83 Yanks finished 20 games over .500, but third place wasn’t good enough for the top brass, and to avoid a players’ mutiny and seemingly restore order to this incarnation of the Bronx Zoo, Hall-of-Famer Yogi Berra got to try his hand at the reins in 1984. Berra had led the crosstown Mets to a surprising NL pennant a decade earlier, and had even steered the Pinstripers to a pennant 20 years earlier, and seemed to be a breath of fresh air amidst the chaos of the revolving-door managerial situation in the Yankees clubhouse. Berra guided the team to a respectable 87-75 third-place finish, but once the team sputtered out of the gate the following season with a 6-10 record, the kibosh was put on the affable skipper’s managing career at age 60.

Now who should he be replaced by? Hmmm.

Would the fourth time be a charm for the author of Billyball? Not so much. The Pinstripers went 91-54 the rest of the way in ’85 following Berra’s exit, but the team fell two games short of the divisional lead behind the Blue Jays, and all the good things that came out of the promising season — an MVP season for Mattingly and a 20-win season for Guidry — could not prevent the inevitable from happening: the ouster of Alfred Manuel Martin.

But wait! Over? Nothing’s over until we say it is . . . and despite two full seasons of managing by a former Yankee outfielder named Lou Piniella — including two 89-win seasons — the popular ex-Yank was also dismissed in the fall of ’87, only to be replaced with. . . .

Sad, isn’t it? But this is the way it was for the Yankees during the decade of the ’80s, and when Martin was indeed brought back for a fifth (and, hallelujah, final) time in 1988, fans of the sport could only shake their heads at the mindless machinations of King George, the Yanks’ principal owner. And when Martin was fired for the final time in June (even though the team was 40-28), it was based more on his pattern of questionable behavior than his record on the field. Thankfully, that would be the end of the professional career of Billy Martin, and his ultimate end would come on Christmas Day a year later — not surprisingly, in a drunk-driving accident.

Until Torre was hired prior to the ’96 campaign, the Yankees went through five more managers, including Piniella one more time, Bucky Dent, Dallas Green, Stump Merrill, and (for a whopping four full seasons up until 1995) Buck Showalter, with little to show for it until the right guy came aboard in the fall of ’95. (Piniella ultimately won a World Series with the Reds in 1990, and had a successful tenure with the Seattle Mariners before taking over the beleaguered Devil Rays franchise last season. Showalter, after a few disappointing seasons in Arizona in the late ’90s, has turned around the Texas Rangers franchise this season and is a leading Manager of the Year candidate.)

At the time, Torre’s hiring wasn’t exactly worthy of a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan either (he had winning records in just five of 15 prior seasons), but his delicate touch obviously worked wonders for the then–beleaguered franchise, and seven pennants and four world championships later, and the New York Nine finally have their man.

Now the team is again one of the hallmark organizations in baseball, but for those who love to hate the Striped Ones, it wasn’t that long ago that the world was laughing at the Yankees.

The controversial days of Billy, Reggie, and Darryl Strawberry are long gone, but Red Sox fans know that a possible return of those halcyon days of Yankee infamy remains realistic and perhaps imminent — as long as George Steinbrenner is at the helm.

Christopher Young writes the twice-weekly "Sporting Eye" column on this site.