Slightly more than 16 years apart, Steve Howe and Billy Martin, two troubled baseball souls whose most notorious times occurred with the Yankees, died in similar accidents while riding in their pickup trucks.
Martin, who died on Christmas in 1989, had a stormy tenure as manager of the Yankees and was most notoriously known for his departures. He resigned under pressure once, and George Steinbrenner fired him four other times. Baseball commissioners suspended Howe seven times, the last time when he was pitching for the Yankees.
Both are baseball records.
PHOTO: AP
Howe was killed Friday, the authorities said, when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, California, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, at 5:55am Pacific time. In 1997, when Howe was trying to make a comeback in an independent league, he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident in Montana. In that instance he was charged with drunken driving.
There was no immediate word on the cause of Howe's fatal accident.
Howe, who turned 48 last month, was addicted to cocaine and alcohol. Even his biggest supporters, including his baseball agent, Richard Moss, acknowledged that he had problems. Howe preceded the steroids era, but he underwent more tests for drugs than any player ever will for steroids. Fay Vincent, the baseball commissioner who issued Howe's seventh suspension, which an arbitrator overturned, recalled Friday that when Howe was out of baseball after suspension No. 6, he appealed to Vincent to be reinstated.
"He wanted one more chance," Vincent said in a telephone interview. "He begged me to give him one more chance. He got religion and had cleaned up his life. I sent him to the minors and had him tested. He passed all the tests. The Yankees brought him up. He almost immediately bought drugs from an undercover agent."
Vincent suspended Howe for life in June 1992. The players association challenged the suspension, and in a departure from usual practice, Moss, the union's former general counsel, argued the case before an arbitrator, George Nicolau.
"He was misdiagnosed," Moss said in a telephone interview. "He was sent to programs that had nothing to do with his disease."
Howe, Moss argued, had attention deficit disorder, and that caused his addictions. Yankees officials strongly supported Howe, an effective relief pitcher.
"George Steinbrenner was not sympathetic to Howe," Vincent recalled of the Yankees' principal owner, whom Vincent had suspended for other reasons. "When I called him and told him what I was doing, he said: `You won't have any problem from me.' But I had problems with Michael and Showalter."
Gene Michael, the Yankees' general manager, argued that baseball's drug policy was bad. Vincent strongly reminded Michael that as a club executive he was obliged to support the policy, not fight it. It's difficult to believe that any club executive today would criticize baseball's steroids testing policy. He wouldn't be around long if he did.
Nicolau agreed with Moss's argument on attention deficit disorder, finding that "an underlying psychiatric disorder" had contributed to Howe's cocaine addiction, and overturned the suspension, reducing it to time served. Howe pitched for the Yankees into the 1996 season, and they released him in June.
Howe's troubles didn't end there. Two days after he was released, he was arrested at Kennedy Airport when security officers found a loaded .357 Magnum in his suitcase. He subsequently pleaded guilty to gun possession and was sentenced to three years' probation and 150 hours of community service.
Moss said he hadn't seen Howe in a long time, but had last talked to him just before Christmas. "He told me his daughter was going to get married," Moss said.
Moss, who generally felt very highly of all of his clients, said Howe was a good person despite his problems.
"He got vilified in the press and got this reputation for being a bad guy," Moss said, "but talk to any player on the team he played for and they'll tell you he was a wonderful guy. He was a sick guy and misdiagnosed." Mossadded, "One of the proudest moments in my professional life was being able to get him back into baseball, seeing what his disease was and having him treated."
The grievance victory had to be a highlight of Moss' career. Any time a lawyer can use something like attention deficit disorder to extricate a player from his seventh baseball suspension, he has to feel good. Howe, however, needed more than a good lawyer.
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