baseball player
Personal Information
Born David Mark Winfield, October 3, 1951, in St. Paul, MN; son of Frank (a waiter) and Arline (a public school system employee) Winfield; married Tonya Turner, February 18, 1988; children: (by previous relationship) Lauren Shanel.
Education: Attended University of Minnesota, c. 1970-73.
Career
Professional baseball player, 1973--. Played for San Diego Padres, 1973-80, New York Yankees, 1981-89, California Angels, 1990-91, Toronto Blue Jays, 1992, and Minnesota Twins, 1993--. Founder of David M. Winfield Foundation, a charitable organization.
Life's Work
Dave Winfield has been a top-performing professional baseball player for two decades. His turbulent career has included multiple seasons with the San Diego Padres and the New York Yankees, but he earned his first World Series victory as a member of the 1992 Toronto Blue Jays. A Sports Illustrated correspondent wrote: "Winfield has been around so long he can remember when kids came up to ask him for his autograph just to keep it. At 39 he became the oldest man to hit for the cycle.... He still has that royalty to him, that unmistakable grace and fluidity. He has won seven Gold Gloves. At an age when most guys take a commercial and a half to get from the fridge to the couch, Winfield still has a move from first to third that can bring tears to the eye of a track coach."
Indeed, Winfield has overcome serious injury and the inevitable encroachment of middle age to perform at his best in the twilight of his career. During mid-season of the year when he would find himself on a winning World Series team, he told Sports Illustrated: "For the last few years people have seen me and acted surprised that I'm still playing. Still playing? I'm kicking butt."
Winfield ranks among the top twenty all-time leaders in runs batted in, extra bases, and home runs. He was named to the All-Star game a dozen years in a row and won seven Gold Glove Awards for defensive play in the outfield. Impressive though his records are, Winfield contends they might even have been better. His prime years were spent in the New York Yankees organization, in the steely grip of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. The strife between the two began almost upon Winfield's arrival in New York and lasted literally for years, because Winfield had the power to veto proposed trades to other teams. Worse, Winfield found his private life dragged into court--and the headlines--by a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife, and even his charitable organization, the David M. Winfield Foundation, was scrutinized by the media. Through it all, Winfield pressed on, playing in more than 2600 games and hitting well over 400 home runs. Still he could not hide his frustrations, telling Sports Illustrated: "Only I know how much better I could have been without all the distractions."
David Mark Winfield was born October 3, 1951, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father, Frank, worked as a waiter on passenger trains. When Winfield was three, his parents separated. His mother took a job in the St. Paul public school system and endeavored to raise Dave and his older brother Steve alone. As a Sports Illustrated reporter noted: "The family of three living on Carroll Avenue in St. Paul turned their row house into a fortress. They learned to rely on one another, to need nobody else. So attached was David to his mother that, when it came time to go to college, he enrolled at [the University of] Minnesota so that he could live at home.... David was the kind of boy who took his mother's elbow as she walked, the kind who revered her every step."
As Winfield remembered it in a Sport magazine interview, his youth was quite ordinary. "Considering that we grew up in a broken home, we had a happy childhood because of the love and affection our mother gave us," he said. When the Winfield brothers did venture out, they usually strayed no farther than the Oxford Playground in the next block. There they were befriended by Bill Peterson, the playground director, who encouraged them to play basketball and baseball. "Bill Peterson was a white man in the black community," Winfield recalled in the interview, "but he gave more to that community than anyone I know. To me, at different times, he was coach, friend, father, all rolled into one." The guidance he received as a youngster was not lost on Winfield. When he became a top-earning major league baseball player he founded an organization to help needy children, especially those in San Diego and New York City.
Hard as it may be to believe, Winfield--who now stands 6 foot 6 inches--was small for his age as a teen. He did not even try out for the varsity baseball team at St. Paul's Central High School until he was a junior. A phenomenal growth spurt helped him to catch up with his peers, and by his senior year he was All-City and All-State in both basketball and baseball. His talent attracted baseball scouts, and upon graduating from high school he was offered a contract with the Boston Red Sox. He decided to go to college instead, because he had heard that blacks were treated harshly in the smaller towns where minor league baseball was played.
The University of Minnesota offered Winfield a scholarship, and he declared a double major in political science and black studies. Trouble found him after his freshman year. He was arrested as an accomplice in the theft of a snowblower from a Minneapolis store, and he was taken to jail. The experience changed him for life. "My mother came to the jail and there were tears in her eyes," he said in Sport. "I pledged to my mother that I would never do anything like that again, ever. I was lucky. They let me go. But I was on probation the rest of my time in college. I feel that shame burning through me again, just by telling the story now for print. But I do it so that kids can know what a terrible feeling it is to do something so stupid and wrong and how awful it is to hurt someone who has loved you and cared for you."
As a college sophomore Winfield became a starting pitcher for Minnesota, winning 8 of 11 outings. He moved to the outfield the following year after an arm injury. By his junior year Winfield was playing both basketball and baseball. In his senior year the Gophers won both the Big Ten basketball championship and the Big Ten baseball championship. Returning to the mound, Winfield had a 13-1 season while hitting .385. He was named Most Valuable Player in the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament and received collegiate All-American honors.
The decision to attend college proved immensely fruitful for Winfield. In 1973 he was drafted in three major sports: baseball (by the San Diego Padres), basketball (by the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA and the Utah Stars in the ABA), and football (by the Minnesota Vikings). The attention from the Vikings was particularly astonishing, because Winfield had never played football in college. Even so, the NFL coaches felt he might excel as a receiver. But Winfield chose the Padres baseball team and embarked for California. He never spent a day in the minor leagues. His starting salary was $18,000 with a signing bonus of $50,000.
A franchise that struggled in those days, the Padres allowed Winfield to improve his talents in the big league arena. His pitching aspirations were quickly put to rest, and he became an outfielder. The club management found his ability as a hitter quite encouraging. During his rookie season he batted .277, and over the next four years he never batted below .260. At first he was plagued by streaks--brilliant hitting followed by long slumps at the plate. Coaches worked with him consistently, and he learned the art of prolonged concentration. In 1978 he batted .308, went to his second All-Star Game, and was named Padres team captain. The following year he again batted over .300 and won his first Gold Glove Award.
In the late 1970s Winfield became acquainted with a retired businessman named Albert S. Frohman. Frohman began to advise Winfield on money management and then offered to be his agent. Winfield accepted. Sports Illustrated described the unlikely friendship that would lead Winfield into trouble: "An odder pair of friends you couldn't invent. Winfield was tall, sleek and gorgeous. Frohman, who was short and wrinkled, looked like 10 pounds of Malt-O-Meal stuffed into a five-pound bag. Frohman ate badly, blew his stack readily and had had his tact removed surgically. Everybody, or so it seemed, took an instant dislike to him, just to save time. Everybody, that is, except Winfield."
Frohman helped nurture the idea that Winfield's talents were being wasted in San Diego. In 1979, when Winfield became eligible for free agency, the abrasive agent engineered a deal with the New York Yankees. At the time the Winfield contract broke all the records. It was a ten-year deal with cost-of-living escalators, a million dollar signing bonus, and a built-in $300,000 yearly contribution to the David M. Winfield Foundation, Winfield's charity for inner city children. The whole package would cost George Steinbrenner close to $25 million. Everyone was happy when the deal was announced and the contract was signed on December 15, 1980. But the troubles began almost immediately.
Steinbrenner claimed that he did not understand the cost-of-living increases Frohman had written into the contract. Winfield was caught in a crossfire between his agent and the irritable Yankees owner, who began trading insults in the mass media. "After less than a year of Winfield/Frohman, Steinbrenner was trying to bum rush them both out of the Big Apple," noted a Sports Illustrated correspondent. "He started trashing Winfield in the papers, especially after Winfield led the Yankees into the 1981 World Series and then went 1 for 22." Comparing Winfield to former Yankee Reggie Jackson--called "Mr. October" for his stellar postseason performances--Steinbrenner dubbed Winfield "Mr. May" and accused him of choking. The following year Steinbrenner quit making contributions to the Winfield Foundation. Winfield sued.
The tension filtered down into the locker room, where fearful managers dared not praise Winfield to reporters, and other players tried to avoid taking sides. One year the Yankees did not even submit Winfield's name for the All-Star ballot, although he was one of the team's biggest stars. "There is no way to fathom what was being done to me," Winfield told Sports Illustrated. "It was immoral, improper and reprehensible. It was a battle for everything, your performance, your credibility. Do you know what it's like to have people fooling with your career?" Steinbrenner tried to trade Winfield repeatedly, but a clause in Winfield's contract allowed the player to veto the trades. "I have had to fight adversity and animus, and I've answered: one, by the way I play, two, by speaking up when nobody else would, and three, by taking [Steinbrenner] to court and winning the money he owes the Winfield Foundation," the player stated in 1984.
Winfield had strong allies among Yankee fans, especially at first. After all, he was the first Yankee since Yogi Berra to get at least 100 runs batted in every year for five consecutive years. In 1984 he ran a tight race for American League batting champion and lost--to fellow Yankee Don Mattingly. By the mid-1980s, however, his popularity had begun to erode. First he was taken to court by a woman who claimed to be his common-law wife. She was awarded a settlement and support for her daughter, whom Winfield has never denied parenting. Then independent auditors began to examine the finances of the Winfield Foundation, casting a shadow on a charity that had sent more than a half million children to ballparks, zoos, and plays for free. And in 1985, the mother-in-law of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson sued Winfield on the charges that he had given her a venereal disease. Winfield denied the charge and settled the case out of court.
Throughout all the years of screaming headlines, scandals, and bitter disputes with Steinbrenner, Winfield somehow managed to maintain his cool on the baseball field. He was blessed with stamina and a body not prone to injuries, enabling him to start almost every day, year after year. In 1988, for instance, his .322 batting average was fourth highest in the American League. He continued to be known as a power hitter who could knock long balls in a home ballpark with one of the deepest outfields in the major leagues. Still, the stresses of life began to tell on the aging star. He began to question Frohman's management of his assets and the Foundation's top-heavy bureaucracy. Then, in what amounted to a last blast at Steinbrenner, he published an autobiography, Winfield: A Player's Life. The book enraged Steinbrenner and alienated some of the other Yankee players.
In 1989 Winfield suffered the first major injury of his career. He underwent surgery to remove fragments of a herniated disk from his back and missed an entire season of baseball. When he returned to the field in 1990, he was finally traded--to the California Angels. There he led the team in runs batted in (78), finished second in home runs (21), and batted .290 after the All-Star break. The Sporting News named him "Comeback Player of the Year." In 1991 he batted only .262 but hit 28 home runs.
Winfield signed with the Toronto Blue Jays as a free agent in the winter of 1992. Married and developing a relationship with his natural daughter, he seemed finally to be enjoying baseball, enjoying the new city, and especially enjoying the prospects of advancing to the World Series. He told Sports Illustrated: "I've been thinking about this. If my career had ended [before Toronto], I wouldn't have been really happy with what baseball dealt me. I would have had no fulfillment, no sense of equity, no fairness. I feel a whole lot better now about the way things have turned out." Winfield's happiness turned to open enthusiasm in the 1992 World Series, when his double in the 11th inning of Game Six drove in the winning runs and gave the Jays the crown.
Dave Winfield finally has the World Series victory he always yearned for. He has played long enough to see former teammates become big league managers, and his long years of turmoil in New York are now the stuff of history. In 1993 he began his 20th major league season--having signed with the Minnesota Twins--remarkably spry and free of injuries. It is fitting that Winfield's singular career has brought him full circle, back to the region from which he launched himself years ago. Now in the twilight of his playing days--and a certain candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame--Winfield can look back with satisfaction. "Always wanted to live that 3-D life," he told Sports Illustrated. He has done exactly that.
Awards
Elected to All-Star lineups from San Diego and New York 12 times, 1977-88; winner of Gold Glove Award for defensive play 7 times; YMCA Brian Piccolo Award for humanitarian services, 1979; named "Comeback Player of the Year" by the Sporting News, 1990.
Further Reading
Books
- Winfield, Dave, Winfield: A Player's Life, Avon, 1989.
- New York Times, June 1, 1975, p. 3.
- New York Times Magazine, March 29, 1981, p. 25.
- Sport, December 1975, p. 69.
- Sports Illustrated, September 10, 1984, p. 20; April 11, 1988, p. 36; May 30, 1988, p. 62; June 29, 1992, p. 56; November 2, 1992, p. 18; December 28, 1992, p. 12.
— Mark Kram
