June 29th, 1973. For me, that was a day that forever lives in my personal infamy! I know that I’m borrowing a quote from President F.D. Roosevelt but it really is so appropriate.
That was the day that I was brought into the Yankees locker room for the first time.
I was handed over to an old man named Pete Sheehy. He was the Yankees clubhouse/ equipment manager.
This man would tell me that today must be your lucky day because the man that brung you in here is the owner of the team (George Steinbrenner).
Now you belong to me.
I would learn that Sheehy first started working for the Yankees in 1927. As a 17-year-old kid, his duties consisted of being a batboy along with the Yankees’ first batboy Eddie Bennett. He also worked in the clubhouse with the then-equipment manager Fred Logan.
At a young age, he would become the confidant and aid de camp ( a fancy term for gofer ) to the greatest players of that era. Before games, he would run across the street to the Yankee tavern and pick up hotdogs for Babe Ruth and mail letters to Lou Gehrig’s girlfriend Eleanor Twitchell who lived in Chicago. He would learn to bone-to-bone bats ( that meant that you would take the barrel of a baseball bat and rub it against a giant animal bone to harden it.
He would learn all the little idiosyncrasies that went with working with twenty-five egos. He would learn that in order to survive and truly be helpful to the players especially those from the first iconic Yankee teams he would have to be a little brother, psychologist, and mentor wrapped into one.
I would learn from different people that Pete was the person who always helped Lou Gehrig around the clubhouse when Lou was dealing with the ALS.
One time Gehrig was so weak that while untieing his shoes he fell. When Pete ran over to help him up Gehrig was so embarrassed that he so no Pete please don’t… I can do it myself. At that moment Pete learned how to help Lou and all the players without always showing them that he was throwing himself at them. He learned to always get to the park extra early so that everything in the locker room was ready when the players would get there. He knew all the tricks and he would teach all his assistants throughout the years.
Pete loved all the players at that time but naturally, he would develop an extra closeness to Ruth and Gehrig and the team manager Miller Huggins.
It was that relationship that influenced my extremely close friendship with Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, and Billy Martin.
Pete use to tell Reggie that the relationship that I had with him and Thurman was the same one that Pete had with Ruth and Gehrig. When Reggie put that in his biography (Reggie with Mike Lupica) I was very flattered.
In 1974 I would meet the umpires locker room manager. His name was Lou Cucuzza Sr. He was a very nice fatherly type of person. That year we were playing at Shea Stadium because they were renovating Yankee Stadium. Lou was a very good person who I could tell was trying to learn as much as he could from Pete.
Lou understood that Pete had been with Ruth and Gehrig, Dimaggio Yogi, and of course Mantle and Maris. I got to understand that Cucuzza Sr. was learning and truly understanding what went behind taking care of so many players of different backgrounds, cultures, and personalities.
The reason for his interest was because Cucuzza Sr. was being groomed to become the visiting side clubhouse manager when we went back to Yankee Stadium in 1976.
Cucuzza Sr. was a natural. He used a lot of the tricks that he picked up from Pete plus his natural talent to become arguably the best visiting clubhouse manager in baseball.
In 1977 he started to bring his young son Lou Cucuzza Jr. around. In the home and visiting sides he was known as Little Lou. He was probably 12 years old then. All of us batboys and clubhouse kids loved him because as we would say in the streets of the Bronx… he could hang!
Even though he was the clubhouse boss’s son we could say anything in front of him and he was always willing to get involved with the clubhouse pranks. There were nights that we would sleep in the Stadium after night games because the next day was a day game. It was in those nights when we would have the times of our lives.
Since half of the Stadium lights were left on for the cleaning crew we would have the Stadium all to ourselves to play our own fantasy baseball games. Pete Sheehy usually would also spend the night. One night when Pete fell asleep we actually put on the player’s uniform and went on the field to shag fly balls and were chased off the field by some security guards who didn’t know who we were.
It was during this time that Little Lou was learning all the ropes about the locker room not knowing that someday he might become one of the keepers of the pinstripes In 1939 Pete would have to deal with the tragedy of Lou Gehrig contracting ALS ( amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ) I use to love sitting with Pete and listening to him talk about all those times. He would tell me the good the bad and the ugly. He also jokingly once told me that it was almost better than sex. We would laugh about that because Pete was the most moral person ever and that was the only time that he would ever mention sex. At least in front of me.
If you really knew Yankee history then you knew that Gehrig was Pete’s very favorite player even though he had a true fondness for the Babe. In the 70s he fell in love with a chubby catcher by the name of Thurman Munson.
Thurman practically became like a son to Pete.
Because they lived close to each other in New Jersey, Thurman would pick Pete up and take him to the Stadium even though Pete had to be there so early.
On August 2nd we lost Thurman in an airplane accident. Maybe the saddest day of my life. Whenever I see the movie, The Pride of the Yankees there is a scene where Eleanor Gehrig screams out… But Lou was so young, so strong! That stayed in my mind the rest of the night because I could only think of Thurman.
On August 3rd with the exception of Pete and trainer Gene Monohan, I was the first person in the locker room. Pete was sitting on the picnic table that was stationed in the center of the clubhouse.
As I walked up to him our eyes met and he said… I stood in the corner of my street and waited for Thurman even though I knew he was gone.
It was the only time I would ever see Pete cry.
Through the years I would get to witness Pete with two of his assistants. The first was a guy named Little Pete Previt and his last assistant was a real Brooklyn Bronx-type guy named Nick Priore. He loved Little Pete because Little Pete idolized Sheehy and would have taken a bullet for him. If Sheehy said jump Little Pete would have put springs on his shoes and said how high.
With Priore, it was a different situation. There was no love lost there but Sheehy was always too nice to fire him even though he always wanted to especially when our Batboy Sam Carey would go to Pete and tell him that Nick was telling Catfish that he did all the work. It was the only time that we would ever hear Pete curse like a sailor. Some of the players knew what Sam was doing saying they would egg him on because it would bring a big laugh.
In the 80s Little Lou would become a full-time batboy under the Yogi / Billy regime. He got to be full-time with Pete and Nick. This was a good thing because, through the two styles of Pete and Nick, he learned about the good and the bad in running a championship clubhouse.
At this time little Lou’s younger brother Rob started working in the clubhouse and his education at the University of Steinbrenner Sheehy began.
Unfortunately, we lost Pete Sheehy in 1985. Billy Martin had known Pete the longest and thought of him like a father. Billy went into his office closed the door and you could hear him cry like a baby.
Pete always looked a lot older than what he was. He was only 75 but the unselfish education that he gave to so many through the years was beautiful. You were being educated even though you didn’t realize it. The reason for that was we were always having the time of our lives.
Let me just close by saying that Lou Cucuzza Sr. Retired sometime in the 90s and his sons little Lou and Robby would become the official keepers of the Pinstripes.
Major League Baseball honors Pete Sheehy by giving out the Pete Sheehy Award to the best equipment manager in baseball during the Winter Meetings. Naturally, the Cucuzzas have won that award and I’m proud to say that Brandon Boyd a young man that I helped get into baseball as a batboy and today is the equipment manager for the World Series Champion Texas Rangers won the award last season.
The bridge to Yankees’ greatness started with Sheehy and is in great hands with the Cucuzzas.
