Dave Winfield: George Steinbrenner Feud, Fighting Nolan Ryan, Untold 80s MLB Stories
All The Smoke
The Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 7.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dave Winfield sits down with Matt Barnes and Chris Young for an extremely revealing conversation. By every measure, Winfield had one of the greatest careers the game has ever seen. 7-time Gold Glove winner. 3,000 hits. Hall of Famer. Drafted by four leagues in a single year. But the numbers only tell part of the story. For the first time, Winfield opens up about the years behind the stats: a decade of battling George Steinbrenner that made him miserable during his years in New York.
He also talks about joy, specifically when he signed with Toronto at 40 years old, playing 156 games, driving in 108 runs and winning the 1992 World Series. Winfield also touches on his upbringing in Minnesota, the most underrated players of his generation, making $15,000 as a rookie, his brawl with Nolan Ryan, and much more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:38.5 | Welcome back to All the Smoke Baseball. See why, it's been a fun day. It's been a great day. We got some work in, and we got to get to finish with one of the greatest of all time. Of all time. I've been looking forward to dive in on this one. 12-time All-Star, seven-time Gold Glove, Hall of Famer, 3,000 hits. top 20 in RBI, one of the best athletes. I can't wait to get in that of all time. Welcome to the show, Dave Winfield. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You have a new book coming out. I do. It'll come out in September. This is the cover right here? Touching, there it is, touching all the bases. |
| 0:45.3 | And I've had a lot on my mind, in my heart, and in my career, and you reach a certain time in life, you say, it's time to talk about this. |
| 0:48.5 | Because there are so many years that I played, and, you know, you have a life away from baseball and um you know sometimes you |
| 1:01.0 | they play with your name they play with your legacy they play with you know I got sick of that |
| 1:06.6 | because I had battled too much for you know your integrity your legacy the truth and |
| 1:14.6 | You can't fight it every day sometimes so you step back and I'll be I'll be straight with you guys man for |
| 1:24.1 | Many years despite me having played well just about every year that I played |
| 1:29.9 | It was never easy. There were some of the hardest toughest years of my entire life on the field and away from the game |
| 1:42.6 | I can I could pick 15 years almost in a row. |
| 1:47.4 | They were horrible. |
| 1:48.7 | Terrible. |
| 1:49.7 | And I mean, I do elaborate, open up on a lot of these things in the book. |
| 1:56.6 | And I'll just mention that it's interesting I'll be doing a documentary later on as well. |
| 2:03.4 | I don't call them companion pieces and I don't want them to eat up one another if you will |
| 2:08.8 | cannibalize one another but you know it's time I mean you reach a certain age you know you |
| 2:15.6 | can talk about it I can tell the truth I ain't worried about it, fighting about it, reading in the newspaper. He said, she said, or social media, which didn't exist. I got tired of driving down the street in New York and you're looking at the newspaper stand. Winfield this. This is happening. And it's only one sided too, and I think not to cut you off, that's the one thing that I found out more in this baseball space since we've been doing baseball interviews was a majority of our guys, Chris, that we talked to, there was no social media. So whatever the ball club has said about them or whatever the paper had said about them or if ESPN at the time had said something, we never got their side of the story. |
| 2:54.8 | And for someone who had a little touch of trouble during my career, understanding what they put out about me and what actually happened, sometimes it's night and day. |
| 3:02.4 | Sometimes they're spot on, but sometimes it was night and day. |
| 3:04.7 | So what I found with the Kenny interview and some ED stuff we did, |
| 3:26.7 | these guys really have a lot, and I'm excited too, because you already said you got a lot to get off your chest. So we're going to get all that off your chest today. But I think it's almost therapeutic to kind of be able to speak your truth after all this time of having to hold it in. Even the landscape of the time that you were planning in and the comfort that one would have even had to speak your mind in a certain time. |
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