Billy returned to Berkeley and began working in a slaughterhouse. He rode the bus or borrowed a ride to other towns to play in games at other well-known fields, mostly to ask around about other pro tryouts. He was for several weeks a baseball player without a team: have glove, will travel.
Among those who ran into Billy during this time was an old Kenney Park friend, Red Adams, the trainer of the Oakland Oaks who was a longtime comrade of Augie Galan’s. Adams, who liked Billy and had been watching him play for Berkeley High, convinced Oaks manager Casey Stengel to give Billy a tryout.
In 1965, Stengel described the day to a reporter from United Press International:
“I had this college shortstop I was looking at in a workout. He was neat as a pin. Did everything according to the book. Wore his pants just so, put his cap on straight and looked like something out of Spalding’s guide.
“I made up my mind to sign him for $4,000 when the club trainer, Red Adams, came along and said I was signing the wrong guy. Told me he had a much better looking prospect. ‘Show him to me,’ I said.
“Well, he brings this kid out and you never saw such a sight in your life. It was Martin here and you oughta see him. Uniform all dirty, one pants leg rolled up and the other falling down. Never saw anything like it before in my life.”
Stengel worked Billy out himself. He hit about twenty routine grounders that Billy fielded cleanly. Then Casey started hitting them harder and farther from Billy—about another sixty ground balls.
“I caught them and threw back at him with a smirk,” Billy said. “I was looking at him like, ‘Is that all you got? I can do this all day.’”
Casey turned to Red and said, “That ragamuffin. I’ve hit him so many grounders I think he’s trying to wear me out. He’s not going to back off, is he?”
Stengel was suitably impressed, even if he sent Billy home without a contract. Billy was back in the slaughterhouse the next day. But within weeks an infielder with the Oaks’ lowest-level minor league team in Idaho Falls, Idaho (yes, the Pacific Coast League had its own minors), was injured. An Oaks scout, Jimmy Hull, who had been watching Billy in high school, persuaded Stengel and Oaks owner Brick Laws to offer Billy a contract for $200 a month.
But the Oaks were well aware of the high school suspension and, like everyone else, knew that West Berkeley was a tough place. Laws proposed that the contract include a clause stating that it could be nullified if Billy got into fights or was guilty of other transgressions. The first of many attempts to write a “misbehavior” section into a Billy Martin baseball contract failed as Billy refused to sign it. Billy was desperate to get out of the slaughterhouse, but even a desperate Billy Martin was always a defiant Billy Martin—and it did not matter if that attitude might cost him everything. He would not back down.
The Oaks needed an infielder for Idaho Falls the next day. Laws gave in, setting a precedent repeated by baseball front-office executives of one kind or another for years to come.
In that moment, Billy’s long-held dream had come true. The kid from the crowded, tumultuous house at 1632 7th Street, who had camped out for years at Kenney Park waiting for the older guys to let him play, was a professional baseball player.
When he signed his contract at a table in the corporate offices of the Oaks, Billy held a pen as Brick Laws steadied the contract with his left hand. A newspaper photographer captured the scene of a smiling eighteen-year-old Billy Martin.
In the photo, Billy is wearing a faded white shirt and over it an odd, dark, patterned V-neck sweater, the very same sweater from the picture of his ninth-grade St. Ambrose CYO basketball team.
Billy would be leaving his West Berkeley neighborhood the next day. But it was as plain as the clothes on his back that the neighborhood would be going with him. And he would never forget it.
6
BILLY LOVED TO TELL the story of how he got from West Berkeley to Idaho Falls. He told it with a smile.
After signing the contract, Brick Laws asked Billy if he had a suit to wear during his trip to his new job.
“Nope, my family took my only suit and used it to dress my uncle in his casket last year,” Billy said.
What about a suitcase?
“No, my brother took it on a trip and ended up selling it to pay for his train ticket back home,” Billy answered.
The story goes that Laws took pity on Billy and gave him $300 to buy a suit, some neckties and slacks, and a suitcase. And that’s how Billy got to the train station the next day.
Pat Irvine rolled her eyes when the story was recounted to her.
“He had a suitcase,” she bellowed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
And a suit? Pat Irvine paused. She was not so sure.
His cousin Mario DeGennaro does indeed remember Billy’s suit being used to make an uncle look presentable in death.
“Deaths in the family often meant a raid to your closet,” Mario said. “Deaths were bad for your wardrobe.”
But Mario also believes Billy probably had a suitcase but perhaps saw the advantage in not admitting to it. Billy was plenty street-smart at eighteen; he could have recognized an easy way to get an extra $300 out of Laws, the wealthy movie theater magnate who had bought the Oaks in 1943.
Whatever the circumstances, everyone agrees that Billy showed up at the train station the next day wearing at least a sports coat, carrying a suitcase, and sporting a wide grin.
His childhood friend and former high school teammate Billy Castell said several people came to the train station to see Billy off.
“But we were not awed,” Castell said. “This was the day we expected.”
The train was bound for Salt Lake City where Billy would meet his new team, the Idaho Falls Russets of the Class C Pioneer League. Though he had not played third base since his freshman year of high school, that was his new position, and he struggled with the throw from the far corner of the left side of the infield. His arm was strong enough, but erratic.
He booted the very first ground ball hit his way, one of 16 errors he made in just 32 games at Idaho Falls, but he did bat a respectable .254 in 114 at-bats with 7 doubles. Moreover, he kept his nose clean. There were no reports back to Brick Laws about a brawling Billy Martin. From the beginning, he did things that got the attention of his manager, Eddie Leishman, who had been a player, coach, or manager in the minors since 1930.
“Billy read the field, read the other players, read the umpires, read the situation, and anticipated better than any eighteen-year-old I had ever seen,” said Leishman, who had played ten years in the minor league system of the New York Yankees during the 1930s. “Some players wait for the game to come to them; not Billy.”
Even at eighteen, Billy only waited for the moment to do something to alter the course of the game.
The average age of the Idaho Falls team was twenty-three. Billy was the only teen on the roster but played as if he were older. One teammate, right-handed pitcher John Conant, recalled a game he was pitching when his wily new third baseman seemed to steal two big outs at a big moment.
“It was a one-run game and we were playing the Twin Falls Cowboys, a Yankee farm team that used to beat us like a drum,” Conant said, telling the story nearly seventy years later. “The Cowboys had runners on first and second base with one out. The batter ripped a screaming one-hopper down the third-base line.
“It was foul; I’m sure it was foul, but Billy snagged it in his glove, stepped back and touched third base, then flipped the ball to second base for the double play all in one motion. Then he dashed right off the field. We all just followed him and ran off the field, too. It happened so fast I think the umpires were stunned. Billy had kind of made the call for them—end of inning, you know? What were they going to do? Call us back?”
Billy’s sheer and absolute conviction that it was a fair ball and a double play had led everyone on the field to the same conclusion—not the last time that conviction sealed a verdict, in Billy’s life or any other.
Years l
ater, Billy would resurrect his end-of-inning ploy with a twist, having his infielders run off the field after a routine force-out when, in fact, there were only two outs. The idea was to fake any other runners still on base into thinking the inning was over. The infielder who had caught the ball for the force-out would always absent-mindedly linger somewhere on the diamond with the ball in his glove. Everyone else would head for the dugout. When a base runner—seeing nearly everyone leaving the field—stepped off the base thinking the inning was indeed over, at that moment Billy’s infielder with the ball would tag him for the third out. Then the inning was over.
As Billy would say, it always worked, “except when the stupid umps would get fooled too and not be looking as we were making the tag.”
The Idaho Falls Russets finished with a 53–76 record, good for second-to-last place. Billy enjoyed the life of a professional athlete that summer, especially the playing baseball every day part. A city kid through and through, he did complain of the remoteness of eastern Idaho, though the isolation had one benefit that Billy thought significant: it allowed him to save several hundred dollars of his salary.
And Billy wanted that money in his pocket for something important. As soon as he returned to West Berkeley in the fall, he had the first of several operations to reduce the size of his nose.
“I remember picking him up at the hospital after that operation,” said Lew Figone. “But truthfully, cosmetic surgery was so bad back then, they only cut his nose down a little bit. It wasn’t that obvious a change. It would be two or three operations later before his nose got noticeably smaller.
“I drove him home from those too.”
Billy was sent to the Phoenix Senators of the Arizona-Texas League in the spring of 1947. It was a higher level of minor league ball, although Billy bristled at the assignment. He had been in the Oaks’ preseason training camp practicing alongside five former Major Leaguers, including Vince DiMaggio, Joe’s brother, who had played ten seasons in the National League.
Billy, nineteen, felt he measured up to the veterans and should remain with the Oaks. In an era when it was not uncommon for future Baseball Hall of Famers to play three or four years of minor league baseball (there were only sixteen teams in the Major Leagues), Billy’s assignment to Phoenix was hardly an insult.
But Billy did not take it that way.
“You sure blew one,” he told Stengel.
“Prove me wrong,” Stengel responded, who was just beginning to understand how to motivate his young charge.
“You wait and see,” Billy said.
The remote, sun-baked, and grubby 1947 Arizona-Texas League was an unlikely incubator for the professional career of someone who, in just a few years, would shine beneath the bright lights of New York’s Golden Age of baseball. But it was the irregular, hard-to-explain Arizona-Texas League where Billy went from a minor leaguer with dreams of being a Major Leaguer to a bona fide big-league prospect.
The Arizona-Texas League was actually a U.S.-Mexican league, in which the best team was from Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. The Juarez team was made up of hardened, grizzled veterans in their late twenties or early thirties. It was one of only four or five teams playing in the league, in a round-robin schedule that bred familiarity, and contempt, among the teams.
Games were played on dried-out fields where the infield clay—if it was clay—cracked and split under a midday sun that would often elevate temperatures into triple digits. The Phoenix players were housed in barracks beyond the right-field wall, a sultry garrison cooled only by a rare breeze. The team played almost every day, and when it did not, there was a workout. Transportation between games was by bus, or worse, station wagon behind which the baseball equipment was dragged in trailers.
The circumstances and regional/national rivalries made ballplayers ornery, a tension stoked by sold-out ballparks full of half-drunk fans swilling beer and tequila as they enjoyed one of the few entertainment vehicles in the frontierlike atmosphere. It was like a scene from an old Western, except the games replaced the gunfighters’ pistol duel in the middle of town.
Fights in Arizona-Texas games were almost as common as the seventh-inning stretch, and while Billy did not lead the circuit in fisticuffs, unlike in Idaho Falls, he did not shy away from one or two when it seemed unavoidable.
It was a punishing environment designed to separate those who liked baseball from those who planned to make it a vocation. It is not known what Billy thought of all this, but this much is documented: in his first game for the Phoenix Senators he had 6 hits, and the next day he had 4 more hits and drove in 5 runs. Within two weeks, the Phoenix newspaper had run a feature story on the Senators’ new third baseman. He started the season as the eighth hitter and quickly moved up to the third spot.
At mid-season, Billy was still hitting over .400, and he had become a vocal, assertive team leader despite giving away four or five years to most of the other players.
Akry Biggs was the team’s manager who played second base until a game just past mid-season when a Yankees farm product named Clint Courtney, a catcher who had been released from the U.S. Army two months earlier and had already earned a reputation for spikes-high slides, slammed into Biggs at second and cut him. Biggs, like many other players in the league, did not need to be coaxed into a fight. With the baseball in his right hand, he punched Courtney in the face.
The fracas that followed was not eventful except for the fact that Biggs came out of it with his right hand swollen, painful, and broken.
Phoenix needed a second baseman. Though he had never been a regular second baseman, Billy was the only one on the roster with middle-infield experience. He took over for Akry Biggs and played more than one thousand games at the position for the next fourteen baseball seasons.
The day after Biggs was injured, Courtney spiked another Phoenix player at third base, which obviously didn’t go over well with the Senators. The first player sprinting across the diamond from his second-base position to jump Courtney was Billy. They would tussle a couple more times that year, and again in the Major Leagues, in 1952. And in 1953.
Those two fights were hardly big news in the league. One brawl between Billy’s Senators and the Globe-Miami Browns spilled into the stands and was not quelled until police threw tear gas on the diamond. Then, once everyone’s eyes had cleared, the teams resumed play.
But throughout the summer of 1947, Billy was doing more than establishing his willingness to defend teammates and stand up for himself. He was having one of the best seasons of any minor leaguer—or Major Leaguer—in America.
There were some issues as he acclimated at second base, but the shorter throw wasn’t one of them. And at the plate, he exhibited impressive batsmanship. With 230 hits in 586 at-bats in 1947, he hit .392, with 48 doubles, 12 triples, and 9 home runs. His slugging percentage was .561.
Billy was thriving, having the kind of season that he knew was the ultimate comeback to Stengel’s end-of-spring-training retort: “Prove me wrong.”
He was also shaping pieces of a persona, one cultivated without nuance but in bold strokes. In 1947, for example, he chose jersey number 1, something he tried to wear at every baseball stop thereafter. He adopted second base as his home on the diamond and was fittingly territorial about it. He played every inning of every game, not wanting others in his spot. And he did not favor trespassers on his dominion either. Opposing players encroaching into the second-base area were treated like marauding invaders and dealt with punitively. Meanwhile, he found comfort in the inconvenience of the Arizona-Texas League logistics, strangely at ease in the conditions that were wearisome to the other players trying to survive the heat and enervating circumstances of the Arizona, Texas, and Mexico summers.
Billy was named the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1947—a triumph everyone in baseball had to notice on some level. The Oakland Oaks surely did as they called Billy up for the final fifteen games of their season. Billy won two games with doubles that drove in r
uns. When the team returned home, Billy was immediately popular with the fans in Oaks Park, a square-shaped old bandbox of a ballpark in Emeryville about three miles from Billy’s boyhood home. People in the stands knew him, or knew of him, and he played to the crowd when they applauded his at-bats—tipping his cap and smiling warmly at them. Unpolished, ungainly Billy—his nose still protruding over his lips—loved being applauded. Popularity was, and always would be, like a drug that soothed Billy’s misgivings about the world around him.
But Billy did not play that often on a veteran team closing out a solid year. And in all that time off the field Billy took to sitting next to Stengel during games.
“He was glued to Casey,” said Dario Lodigiani, the Oaks second baseman who was with the team after stints in the Major Leagues with the Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Athletics. “I don’t think it was to get in Casey’s good graces because neither of them was like that. I think Billy was trying to learn what was going on inside Casey’s head as the game was going on. Both of them had real active brains. Billy was a nonstop stream of questions for the old man.”
Knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder in the Oaks’ dugout, nineteen-year-old Billy and fifty-seven-year-old Casey spent the final month of September in tandem, the early stages of an eventful, ten-year dance together. Billy stayed in touch throughout the winter, visiting Casey periodically at his Oakland home, and when they were reunited in uniform during spring training of 1948, they picked up where they had left off the preceding season.
The Casey-Billy relationship has often been described as one akin to father and son. While that might seem simplistic or theatrical, like a novelist’s convenient leap, it also had the advantage of being authentic and discerning. To Billy, Casey was a father figure the likes of which Billy had never had. Jack Downey instilled values in Billy, of work and perseverance, but he was not a sportsman. Stengel, meanwhile, was a man who lived for baseball as Billy did. He had an aggressive and irascible temperament, but he also had a cunning, measured, and analytical side. Stengel’s worn, creased face was called clownish by some, but others saw in his countenance an expression of knowing worldliness. For Casey Stengel, born in the previous century and a professional baseball player before World War I, had seen many things beyond the East Bay and San Francisco. Stengel was not a man to be taken lightly, and Billy certainly did not. He knew Stengel, for instance, had done what Billy hoped to do—play professional baseball in New York, and for nine seasons. Stengel was clever like an old sage, using humor and a fractured sense of the English language to disguise his intellect and deflect his inner thoughts when it served his purposes. People who underestimated him usually regretted it.
Billy Martin Page 6