Yankees' Bernie Williams loved facing A's as a player, now he's in Oakland as a musician (2024)

Bernie Williams returns to Oakland on Monday, aiming to honor his late father, and he’ll be happy to have the fans on his side this time.

Because during his Yankees playing days, the only place rougher than Boston was the rockin’ Oakland Coliseum of the early 2000s, when the ear-blistering hecklers and outfield drummers provided endless torment. Sure, Fenway Park had its Green Monster, but Oakland had its monsters in green-and-gold.

“It was a very interesting experience,’’ Williams, 53, said with a laugh on Sunday. “There’s an existing well-founded and well-documented rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees. But outside of that, I don’t think I’ve seen any other stadium besides Oakland where I came in as a visiting player and the fans were as tough.

“When I was playing, it was like those people were all still there after a Raiders game or something. They were vicious, man!”

Williams last played in 2006, but on Sunday, the eve of his new Oakland gig — he will perform the national anthem on the electric guitar before the A’s play the Twins — the five-time All-Star sat down with The Athletic at a San Francisco hotel and recounted the glorious showdowns of the “Moneyball” era. He recalled the raucous crowds, the “Jeter Flip,” the Eric Chavez quote that served as bulletin-board material in 2000 and the challenge of facing The Big Three of Barry Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson. “I had some of the best moments in my career playing here in Oakland,’’ Williams said.

He even relived, in vivid detail, a memorably comic at-bat against Mike Oquist from 1999.

But before any of that, Bernie Williams focused on why he was here.

He wanted to talk about his dad.

Bernabé Williams, an able seaman with the Merchant Marine, died on May 13, 2001 — about 21 years ago to the day — and Williams says he’s just processing it now. He obscured his grief behind baseball back then, and 2001 just happened to be a tumultuous year on the field that included the classic five-game series best remembered for Jeremy Giambi being thrown out at home plate.

Bernabé was the man who taught his son to be the switch hitter who would grow up to amass more total bases in a Yankees uniform than anyone but Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Derek Jeter, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio.

Bernabé was also the man who brought a guitar from a trip to Spain and taught a few chords to the 7-year-old who would grow up to earn a Latin Grammy nomination and play with the likes of Brad Paisley, Garth Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Twisted Sister and Jordin Sparks.

Talk about range.

Is there a more fitting way to salute his father’s impact on his life than to play guitar at a baseball game? Williams said that at the time of his father’s death, he stifled his own sadness to be strong for his family. But swallowing his heartbreak caught up to him in other ways.

“I remember waking up in the middle of the night — you know like when in your dream you’re sobbing, but then you wake up and there are no tears?” Williams said. “I don’t know if you’ve had that. But I used to wake up on game nights feeling like that. There’s something that I needed to get out.

“And I think whether I liked it or not, when I was sleeping my brain was processing all these really extremely emotional things. And I never really had an opportunity to talk about it or really come face to face with it.”

Starting in 2017, apart from the pandemic-curtailed 2020 season, Williams has played the national anthem at major- and minor-league ballparks as a way of raising awareness for the disease that killed his father. Williams is a spokesman for the Breathless campaign that’s focused on fighting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Among the sinister things about IPF is that the rare lung disease can be mistaken for, say, asthma, pneumonia or even a persistent cough.

It took five years for Bernabé to get a proper diagnosis, and though there is no cure for IPF, Williams’ father — like so many others — deserved a better quality of life over his final years. Treatment was available if only doctors had recognized what he actually needed to be treated for. About 50,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with IPF each year.

“My dad never complained, but you could tell it was very hard for him to even get one breath,’’ Williams said. “It was just so agonizing. … I mean, if there’s one thing I take for granted in this life, it’s my ability to breathe. And to have that taken from you has to be scary and painful and agonizing.

“And then just dealing every day with it, knowing that your days numbered? He is definitely my hero for the way he took that — not complaining, not really blaming anything.”

Williams played 66 regular-season games at the Oakland Coliseum, wielding his 34 1/2-inch, 33-ounce Rawlings bat. This is the first time he will take the field wielding a custom-made John Suhr guitar.

“What this campaign has done for me is sort of bring all that stuff back and give me an opportunity to not only grieve, but be helpful, in raising awareness,’’ Williams said. “It has been therapeutic, and healing for me.”

Williams was not the only Yankees player whose father died during the team’s dominant run. Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius and Luis Sojo lost their dads in 1999. By 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks only heightened the anguish and the anxiety.

In October of that season, way down on the list of important things by then, the A’s came into Yankee Stadium and won the first two games of a best-of-five American League Division Series. The Yankees said at the time they weren’t worried. After all, they’d won the previous three World Series and four since 1996.

But actually …

“I don’t know if I can agree completely with that. I think there was a certain panic,’’ Williams said. “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But I think being able to manage that sense of panic, and turn it into something else, was where we were better than average.”

The Yankees had experience fending off the pesky A’s, who were eager to end the Bombers’ dynasty. The season before, the A’s pushed the Yankees to a Game 5 in the ALDS in Oakland and were confident they’d knock out the defending champions. In one of the press conferences at the stadium before that Game 5, A’s third baseman Eric Chavez said, “It’s time for some other people to have some glory here. But they have had a great run. They have done a phenomenal job, but it’s time.”

Chavez was speaking from a dais of an interview room in the bowels of the stadium. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, his words were being piped over the PA system at field level.

“And we were in the middle of our batting practice, and we were listening!” Williams said. “And we were like, ‘Oh, really?’” The Yankees would score six runs in the first inning of that game to win the series, en route to their third straight World Series title.

Armed with that experience, and the grit that comes from winning all those titles, the Yankees came roaring back when the 2001 ALDS returned to Oakland. In Game 3, the Yankees’ Mike Mussina and the A’s Barry Zito put on a pitching clinic, with Jorge Posada’s home run accounting for New York’s 1-0 lead going into the bottom of the seventh.

That’s when, with two out and a runner on first, Terrence Long hit a double that sent Jeremy Giambi chugging around the bases and heading toward home. It ended with Jeter, who came over from shortstop to pick up an errant throw halfway between home plate and first base, making a shovel pass to get Giambi at home plate.

“You know, Jeremy had to slide,’’ Williams said. “If he slides, it’s a non-issue, you know, because he’s safe. But I think Jeremy sort of thought that he was gonna score easily. And just sort of took it for granted. And all of a sudden, Jorge’s like, tagging his foot and it’s like, ‘Whoa, what happened here?’”

Williams saw the whole play from center field but was hardly shocked by the way things unfolded. He said the Yankees rehearsed that play. So even when right fielder Shane Spencer air-mailed his throw past second baseman Alfonso Soriano and first baseman Tino Martinez, it was always the plan for Jeter to serve as what the shortstop later called “the third cutoff man.”

“I wasn’t really that surprised about it,” Williams said. “That’s one of those things that you practice every year in spring training.”

Though the Yankees went on to win that series in five games (before ultimately losing in the World Series to the Diamondbacks), his respect for those A’s teams remains immense — especially for the pitching staff. Williams went 2 for 23 (.087) in his career against Tim Hudson, and both of his hits were singles.

“Hudson to me was kind of like Pedro (Martinez) in that sense,’’ Williams said. “He had total control of three or four pitches, above average, and he could just throw them anywhere in any count.”

Williams fared better against Mark Mulder (.313/.353/.344 in 34 plate appearances) and Zito (.237/.286/.395 with two homers in 42 plate appearances).

The matchup he really remembers is Mike Oquist, and it happened at the Coliseum on Aug. 9, 1999. With the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the second inning, Williams started fouling off pitches.

“I was just having this big battle with him. I think the count goes to 2-and-2 and he throws me a forkball in the dirt. I take it and I think it’s ball four,’’ Williams recalled. “So I start walking first base and I see people like, yelling at me.”

The people shouting his direction included manager Joe Torre, who told him to go back to the box. Williams wheeled around to see home plate umpire Richard Shulock reminding him that the count was now only 3-2.

Williams stepped back up to the plate, still cringing.

“I look at the dugout and everybody’s laughing. And, I mean, you could hear the crowd doing the same thing,” Williams said. “So, the next pitch right after that, I hit the ball out of the park: grand slam. As I’m rounding the bases, people in the dugout were just crying, and laughing all over the floor. The umpire looked at me with his arms crossed, like, ‘What a doofus.’”

In all, it was part of a baseball life in which Williams hit .297/.381/.477, with an OPS+ of 125 in 16 seasons, all with the Yankees. He hit 287 home runs and finished his career with 449 doubles, third in Yankees history behind only Jeter (544) and Gehrig (534).

In the major-league postseason record book, Williams hit 22 home runs — a mark topped by only Manny Ramirez (29) and Jose Altuve (23).

Not bad for his first career.

If you hear Williams play the “Star-Spangled Banner” on Monday night, listen closely. He is not some ballplayer who noodled on a six-string to kill time on bus rides. He’s a full-fledged musician now.

Williams earned a Latin Grammy nomination in 2009 for his 14-track album “Moving Forward.” Along the way, he sought out formal training, studying guitar and composition at SUNY-Purchase and later earned his bachelor’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.

“That gave me this sort of motivation to be an advocate for music education because I knew looking in hindsight how important music has always been in my life,” he said.

As in his playing days, Williams can cover some ground. Not long ago, he was playing a tribute to the late Dave Brubeck at the invitation of his son, Darius Brubeck. They played “Take Five” and Williams relished playing with so many great jazz players.

“And I’ll tell you that two days later, I’m in Long Island playing with Twisted Sister — ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’” Williams said. “And it’s a completely different thing! And I was able to play with them. I was wearing like, Dee Snider’s jacket, you know? And they said, ‘Well, you can wear it, but you got to give it back because we’ll find you if you take it with you.’”

Of course, this all started with Bernabé Williams bringing a guitar back for his son after one of his far-away travels with the Merchant Marine. After his father’s passing, Williams wrote an instrumental piece about him, titled “Para Don Berna.”

And it’s been reworked with lyrics as part of the campaign to raise awareness about IPF.

That’s the song Williams and Jordin Sparks performed on “Good Morning America.” And if Williams were to need a walk-up song Monday when he returns to one of his favorite road ballparks, the words from that piece would honor his father well:

Every day I think of what you’ve done for me

And the breath of life you gave.

(Top photo of Williams from 2010: Al Bello / Getty Images)