This excerpt comes from the Introduction to Touching All the Bases by Dave Winfield. Join us on September 9 to join the conversation with Winfield on his career and its impact on the culture of baseball.

The hour or so I spent in the clubhouse before a game was a time of intense concentration for me. Back then, there were no magic screens with every possible dataset on pitcher-batter matchups, so I had to rely on memory.

What did the pitcher we were facing that day throw me the last time I saw him? What were his tendencies? What adjustments would I need to make to square up a pitch and drive it into the alley or over the wall?

But it’s not easy to visualize hitting a 97-mile-per-hour fastball when you’re thinking about the answers you just gave during a grilling by the team owner’s attorney.

In the early 1980s, I sued George Steinbrenner for breaking his promise to donate money to my charitable foundation. Knowing he didn’t have a leg to stand on, Steinbrenner had his lawyer try to wear me down with monotonous questions about the foundation’s inner workings. As a result, instead of fully focusing on preparing for games, I found myself distracted by my fight against the most powerful man in baseball. The same man who had pulled out all the stops to bring me to New York had now made it his mission to take me down.

At least George had the decency on the days I was being interrogated in Manhattan to arrange for a car service to whisk me from the Upper East Side to the Bronx in time for the ump to bark: “Play ball!”

So there I was, one warm July night in 1984, stepping to the plate in the first inning, not as clearheaded as I would’ve liked to be, but ready to take my aggression toward George out on a baseball. The guy on the mound for Texas threw heat. That much I knew. And his reputation for throwing up and in preceded him. But with the bases loaded, he had nowhere to put me. I didn’t feel like myself, but he didn’t need to know that. I strutted to the plate with a swagger that said: “You don’t want to mess with me.”

After taking a couple of pitches, I locked in and sat on a fastball, which came and promptly went over the center field wall at Yankee Stadium. As I stomped my foot on home plate and received congratulations from my teammates, I looked up at the owner’s box and saw what appeared to be George standing alongside his protégé, a young real estate mogul named Donald Trump. Take that, you MF’s! I thought.

This isn’t your typical baseball memoir. It’s about spies and lies far more than RBIs. By sharing my experiences on and off the field, I’m giving you a front-row seat to one of the most scandalous dramas in sports history. The untold stories of my epic feud with George Steinbrenner resonate now more than ever.

Reggie Jackson once said playing in New York “can be Disneyland or it can be hell.” For me, it was mostly the latter. The historic 10-year contract that I signed with the Yankees in 1980 ended up feeling more like a 10-year cold war. I came to the Bronx to help the Yankees win another World Series or two or three, never imagining I’d spend so much time sitting at mahogany tables in law offices giving depositions and chasing—or being chased by—two-bit hustlers straight out of a Scorsese movie. I can still see the cold steel of the two handguns I bought to protect myself.

I should have lived a charmed life in pinstripes. I played in baseball’s greatest cathedral in front of the game’s most passionate fan base. I lived in a city that never slept, with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to become a multihyphenate star in athletics, business, philanthropy, and media. But as much as I wanted to break new ground, I wasn’t willing to sell my soul or dignity to do it.

This book is also about forgiveness, healing, and coming to terms with the past.

I learned a lot about those things from Negro Leagues legend Buck O’Neil. I remember the day the Yankees were in Kansas City playing the Royals when I noticed an older man watching me take cuts during batting practice.

“Who’s that guy?” I asked Royals third baseman George Brett.

“That’s Buck O’Neil,” he replied. “Want me to introduce you?”

Buck O’Neil and Dave Winfield

At the time, Major League Baseball hadn’t made any effort to honor players like Buck who had been barred from the majors. The league office hadn’t even established a formal way to celebrate Jackie Robinson’s legacy. I was woefully underinformed about Buck’s story and eager to learn more, especially because I’d missed my chance to meet the great Satchel Paige in Kansas City a few years earlier. Satchel and I had made plans for dinner, but before we returned to town later that season, he passed away.

A few minutes later, Buck and I were chatting in the visitors’ dugout like old friends. That was the start of a beautiful bond. His experiences inspired me. We were alike in some ways, different in others. One thing was for sure: I didn’t have Buck’s sense of serenity. Despite constant bouts with racism from childhood onward, he never grew bitter. “Don’t let anger boil up inside you,” he often said. “There’s too much anger out there already.”

As a player, Buck didn’t put up the numbers of Negro Leagues stars like Josh Gibson or Cool Papa Bell. His true gift to the game was as a historian of that era. No one held court like Buck, who was a co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. He had a lyrical way of speaking—sharp and precise at times, whispery at others. I loved listening to him, even though some of his stories from back in the day were painful to hear. I’ll never forget the one about his wife touching a hat at a department store, only to be told by an employee that she had to buy it because it had been touched by Black hands.

Even as he entered his 90s, Buck and I got together as often as possible to discuss baseball and life. In 2006, when I was working as an executive vice president for the San Diego Padres, I sat with Buck to discuss an initiative I was spearheading to increase Black participation in baseball. We talked about the recent election of the inaugural class of Negro Leaguers into the Baseball Hall of Fame, a vote that inexplicably resulted in Buck being snubbed. At some point, the conversation that day rolled around to my time with the Yankees. Buck wanted to hear about how great it must have been to play at Yankee Stadium. “It would’ve been a whole lot greater if I was a lefty,” I joked, referring to the stadium’s short right-field porch.

I didn’t get into the specifics of what I’d experienced in New York. It wouldn’t have felt right to complain about it to a man who had experienced far, far worse than me.

If Buck could forsake bitterness, why couldn’t I?

A few weeks after that meeting with Buck—which would turn out to be our last—I sat on a flight from LAX to Tampa en route to see George Steinbrenner. George’s health was deteriorating following a series of mini-strokes. My wife, Tonya, echoed Buck’s wisdom and encouraged me to go. “You should bury the hatchet with him before he’s gone,” she coaxed.

Bury the hatchet? You mean the one he used to do a hatchet job on me? I was skeptical after all the ups and downs—mostly downs—we’d been through. Still, I decided to make the trip, hoping it might help quiet some of the angry thoughts that had been pinballing around in my head for decades.

The pinball ricocheted especially hard during the six-hour flight to Tampa. As I started to nod off, I flashed back to a time 20 years earlier when George and I sat in his office, supposedly to discuss drug-testing policy. But he had come to the meeting with his own agenda. We had been at each other’s throats for a few years by then, and I guess George had reached his
boiling point.

“There is only one captain in this organization, and it’s me!” he informed me. We were in the workplace, but he was treating me like a disobedient child.

“I don’t like you, and I can make things very hard for you!” he continued.

Now I felt like a disobedient child being disowned by a father who had learned everything he knew about leadership from reading The Art of War and watching the movie Patton.

Twenty years later, I was searching for something—I’m not sure what. Reconciliation? Closure? Validation?

 

George Steinbrenner and Dave Winfield, 1989, Getty Images (Bettman / Contributor)

I could feel the weight of people’s stares when I arrived at 1 Steinbrenner Drive, home of the Yankees’ spring training facility in Tampa. The younger employees there were barely out of diapers when I got to New York, but they knew enough about me to understand that Steinbrenner and I had a stormy history.

In Tampa, I saw a man who was a shell of his former brusque and menacing self. George was frail and soft-spoken and clearly slip-sliding away into the hereafter. He asked me about my family. That was a first. In all our years of combat, small talk—especially about family—had been kept to a minimum, maybe because George had tried to meddle in my personal and family life during the peak of our conflict.

I guess George was feeling nostalgic, because he soon started reminiscing about the press conference at a New York steakhouse that announced my signing in 1980.

“We were wearing matching suits, remember?” he asked.

I sure did remember. For that moment in time, it looked like we were going to make quite a team.

Unlike so many of our previous encounters, the one in Tampa was pleasant enough. It started with a handshake and ended with a hug. The 90-minute conversation never got around to the darker chapters in our personal history—the parts about George getting kicked out of baseball for hiring a huckster to dig up dirt on me, or about that same huckster going to prison for his actions. Did the meeting give me a sense of reconciliation, closure, or validation? To some extent it did. But I’ll never reclaim those years of anguish.

I came to New York fully prepared to end my career there, to raise the bar for player salaries, take my place alongside all the other Yankee greats, to enter the Hall of Fame in pinstripes, and above all, to become a champion. Instead, I became a polarizing figure in the city and had to go elsewhere to win a championship and feel truly appreciated.

As much as I hoped it would, my time in New York didn’t offer the final word on who I was as a player or person. But those years in the Bronx helped define a critical era in both baseball and American society. I didn’t experience segregation, thankfully, but that didn’t mean that some of the vestiges of those dark years didn’t fester late into the twentieth century—and beyond. Americans like Buck O’Neil, Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali belong in a class by themselves when it comes to awakening public consciousness. But my experience as a Black man who went to war with one of the most powerful owners in sports tells an essential story, not just about the triumphs and challenges of my own career, but about the dynamics of race and power in America then and now.

As I said, this isn’t just another baseball memoir.

Excerpted from Touching All the Bases, copyright © 2026 by Dave Winfield with Alan Maimon. Reprinted with permission from Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

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