Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  “And you know Billy, he wasn’t always yelling sweet nothings to them.”

  Stengel noticed that Billy’s provocative nature did not just unnerve the other team; it kept the Oaks in games. They would laugh at something Billy said and watch the game more closely to see what happened next. The other team would often respond with a dare or a taunt that would challenge and motivate the Oaks to raise their game. The level of intensity would get ratcheted up, with everyone leaning forward on the dugout bench following every pitch—just what Casey wanted—and it all might have started with Billy making fun of the way someone ran to first base.

  This was good baseball, Casey thought, and it helped create a bond on the team, which was important because the Oaks traveled a lot. The PCL stretched from Washington State to Southern California, and though the teams flew on planes when they could, the journeys still dragged with every team playing about 180 games a year, many more than the 154 the Major League teams were playing at the time. But these long trips proved important to Billy culturally as they inculcated in him the ways of top professional athletes. Billy, though streetwise, had little sophistication in the interactions of the middle class, let alone people with money to spare in their pockets. He did not know how to behave, or how to make that money open doors for him.

  But by watching the Nine Old Men, most of whom had been Major Leaguers, he saw that a dollar tip to a waitress on her arrival at the table brought better service, good advice on what to order, a larger piece of pie for dessert, and maybe the waitress’s phone number too. Billy had never seen the 25 cents he customarily left for a tip accomplish that. He saw that the big leaguers knew how to barter the commodities that they had—tickets, autographs, and small talk about life in the Major Leagues—for things they wanted, which was dinner reservations at top restaurants, a better hotel room (or suite), or a cab in the rain at a busy train station. The younger players learned that these same commodities, and their status as professional ballplayers who might someday be famous, differentiated them from a crowd at a hectic nightclub and could turn the heads of pretty young women on the road. It was a perk of the ballplayer fraternity.

  The length of the Oaks’ trips also made roommate combinations a central consideration of the manager. Stengel initially had Billy room with Duezabou, a lifetime .300 hitter in the minors. The goal was for Duezabou to teach Billy some batting techniques. Instead, Stengel observed that both Billy and Duezabou kept late nights—and not in the hotel either but in bars. Billy was also making up for whatever shyness or inadequacies he felt around women as a teen. He soon had a black book filled with women’s names and numbers, divided by PCL stops: Portland, Sacramento, Hollywood.

  Stengel, no stranger to bars himself, did not mind his players having a good time and would, in fact, disdain players who did not drink as “milk drinkers who can’t be trusted.” But Billy worried him in the summer of 1948 because Billy the player wasn’t getting any better.

  Stengel hatched a new plan. One day, the thirty-five-year-old Lavagetto, fresh from a turn as a World Series star for the Brooklyn Dodgers, approached Duezabou and announced that he was Billy’s new roommate.

  Lavagetto was supposed to do more than rein in Billy’s wildest habits. He was to educate him in the highest levels of professional baseball. Lavagetto had a willing pupil, and like many of Billy’s mentors, he came to admire his student and learned what made him tick. Lavagetto discovered that keeping Billy out of the bars wasn’t too hard if Billy was distracted with baseball talk. Lavagetto invited questions, and Billy asked for a detailed description of every Major League ballpark. Billy had Lavagetto go over dozens of pitchers he had faced in the big leagues. Billy inquired about the Major League umpires and how to deal with them. He did the same for the baseball writers. Lavagetto was Billy’s baseball oracle.

  Recognizing Billy’s craving for knowing all the intricacies of the game, Lavagetto, who was in the midst of his sixteenth year of professional baseball, started working with his young roommate before games. He wanted to improve his footwork in the infield, and he had teammate Lodigiani, who was thirty-two, help as well.

  “Billy was still pretty raw,” Lodigiani said. “Casey was right to try to change the way he turned the double play. We worked for hours on doing it more efficiently.”

  That included teaching Billy to stop winding up to make the throw from second to first base. Power wasn’t as important as getting the ball on its way quickly—before an oncoming runner could prevent the relay. The tutoring did not stop when the ballplayers left the field. Instead of barhopping, Lavagetto would put a pillow in front of a full-length mirror in a hotel room and have Billy practice his double-play pivot by hopping over it time and again.

  Lavagetto also related how pitiless Major Leaguers could be. Middle infielders know that advancing base runners are trying to knock them down or into the outfield, and during the 1940s such collisions were common and permitted without penalty. It was all part of the game. The infielder’s only defense was the ball, and Lavagetto told Billy that if a base runner did not slide to get out of the way, Billy should aim his double-play pivot throw right at the runner’s forehead. It would induce a slide in a hurry and it might be a good relay as well.

  Billy bragged of doing just what Cookie taught him throughout the 1950s, and he taught his infielders the same thing for three decades thereafter.

  The ingenious Lavagetto had all kinds of theories on making a player better.

  “He’d make me sit in a restaurant and stare at a wall without blinking my eyes,” Billy wrote in his autobiography. “I’d practice that for hours. Try it sometime. It isn’t easy. He had me do that because he felt that when you were up at the plate, the ball would go by so fast that if you accidentally blinked, that fraction of a second would be enough of a distraction to make you miss the ball.”

  Lavagetto’s influence started to take effect as the 1948 season continued. Billy started hitting, which was timely because mid-season injuries to Lodigiani and another starter meant Billy was in the lineup for 132 of the Oaks’ 188 games that season. Billy was more popular than ever at Oaks Park, both among the regular fans and especially in the VIP section of the seats where a pretty young woman from Berkeley was sitting for every game. She was Lois Elaine Berndt, and she got her prized seats from Billy, whom she had known since she was in ninth grade.

  Lois, four years younger than Billy, had been his friend for years. They had also dated on and off in the mid-1940s and had remained in constant contact since Lois was best friends with the girlfriend and eventual wife of Billy’s good friend Howard Noble. Lois was from a neighborhood north of San Pablo Avenue, though she did not live far enough up the hill to be called a Goat—or at least Billy never thought so. After Billy’s relationship with longtime high school girlfriend Bobbi Pitter ended—a victim of the long summer in the Arizona-Texas League—Lois became Billy’s permanent guest at Oaks games. He would leave tickets for her and his family, which would sometimes be awkward because Billy’s sisters and his mother rarely approved of any of Billy’s girlfriends and that included Lois.

  “We always thought she was kind of stuck-up,” Pat Irvine said. “She was never warm to us. She wouldn’t really talk to my mom and it was hard not to talk to my mom.”

  Lois, asked sixty years later to recall her first interactions with Billy’s family, sighed.

  “I’m not getting into that,” she said. “Let’s just say we were on opposite sides with Billy in the middle. I had one view of him. They had another view.”

  Lois recalled that Billy was very attentive to her.

  “He was always the gentleman—opening doors, holding your chair for you, putting his coat around you if you were cold or it was raining,” Lois said. “You know, he has this reputation for being rough and a fighter. He wasn’t like that. Get him off the field and away from baseball and he was quiet and sensitive.”

  Then, in a considerable understatement, one that eventually may have served as a summa
tion of her time with Billy, Lois said, “Of course, getting Billy away from baseball was never easy.”

  But Lois, like many others, saw two sides to Billy. He was affectionate and wanted to go to out-of-the-way places where no one knew him.

  “We would take long walks all the time,” she said. “We would talk about what we wanted to do with our lives. Billy especially had a lot of dreams.”

  Billy wanted to see the world, metaphorically he wanted to set it on fire, but Billy also dreamed of coming back to Berkeley to live without the sizzle.

  “There were always two Billys,” Lois said.

  And two dreams.

  Deep into September 1948, the Oaks hung tough with the San Francisco Seals. It was a taut, two-team race. Stengel kept the troops loose with his brand of John McGraw–inspired inducements. A victory meant a free case of beer in the clubhouse afterward. Getting hit by a pitch with men on base, a successful squeeze bunt, or an opportune hit-and-run would all be recognized with some reward—gift certificates from local businesses or tickets to a movie house.

  Billy and others noticed that Stengel’s leadership style was more than glad-handing.

  When a fight broke out in Portland one night—fighting was common in the PCL as it was in most American professional sports at the time—Billy charged from the dugout to join the fray. He had been in the middle of two fights of his own that season already, one that involved his future boss with the Yankees, Al Rosen, but this time he was sprinting to help a teammate. Approaching the diamond, Billy saw that a half-step behind him, dashing from the dugout at a gallop, was his fifty-eight-year-old manager.

  And when both reached the scrum, Casey wasn’t there to be a peacemaker. He dove into the pile and started punching and grappling with the other team. When things calmed down, Casey’s ill-fitting wool uniform was torn, and he had scratches on his arms and bruises across his jowls.

  “Something like that really affects a team,” Billy said years later, describing Casey’s willingness to mix it up. “I saw how the guys reacted. We all said, ‘He really does have our back.’ That is loyalty. I wanted to be like that.”

  The 1948 season came down to the final day, Sunday, September 26. The Oaks swept a double-header to clinch the pennant before a sold-out home crowd, some of whom slept overnight along the right-field foul line to reserve their seats the next day.

  The Oaks finished with a 111–74 record, the best finish by any Stengel team, including his championship Yankees. A film crew caught the celebration on the field afterward, including an interview with Stengel as he stood next to Billy.

  “I owe it to all these players,” Casey said. He hugged Billy with one arm and continued, “The Nine Old Men, they said. And how about this fresh kid here?”

  A celebration was held in downtown Oakland five days later, the players parading through the streets sitting in the back of convertible cars. Stengel was in the car he won as the league’s Manager of the Year. Billy, who hit .277 with 42 runs batted in and 28 doubles, did not drive his 1934 vehicle with the missing fender in the parade. He instead had a new black 1948 Chevy convertible, a gift of Oaks owner Brick Laws.

  During the 1948 season, the New York Giants had offered Laws $50,000 to sign Billy. Casey talked Laws out of it. For one, he had a pennant to win with the Oaks. And besides, Casey wondered if he might get another chance to manage in the Major Leagues again. And if he did, he planned to take Billy with him.

  Ten days after the Oakland parade, at a packed news conference at the swanky 21 Club in midtown Manhattan, the Yankees named their new manager for 1949: Charles Dillon Stengel. The news shocked the eastern baseball establishment. In the Major League circuit at the time, where the westernmost team was in St. Louis, Stengel had dropped off the Earth and was never expected back.

  Now he was leading the Yankees, the gold standard of all American professional franchises?

  “This is a big job, fellows, and I barely have had time to study it,” Casey told the newspaper writers and another new media constituency that the New York Times described as a “television operator.”

  The Yankees’ new owners, Dan Topping and Del Webb, flanked Stengel.

  “He’s been here before,” Webb said. “He knows what it takes to win in Yankee Stadium.”

  Casey Stengel smiled.

  It was October 12, 1948, exactly twenty-five years to the day since Casey had lifted a pitch into the right-field seats at Yankee Stadium to win a 1923 World Series game, then circled the bases while thumbing his nose at the Yankees’ dugout.

  8

  WHEN THE 1949 SEASON commenced, Billy was in a funk, dispirited and feeling deserted. He had spent the winter waiting for the Yankees, or their new skipper, to call.

  “Billy was devastated that Casey had left,” said his cousin Nick DeGennaro. “You know, Billy was a vulnerable guy. He was easily hurt. I didn’t hear him criticize Casey but out of nowhere sometimes he’d ask, ‘You think maybe he’s waiting for somebody to get hurt? You think maybe then he’ll call?’

  “And I would say, ‘Maybe, Billy.’”

  Billy spent time with Lois in Berkeley—and other women in other towns because Billy’s roving eye was now well developed and he had an inclination to give in to it. He also hung out with his old buddies, driving his new car around to bars and parties throughout the East Bay. But his longtime friends were getting jobs or getting married. They were transitioning to the rest of their lives.

  Mario DeGennaro, born two months after Billy, recalls driving everywhere with his cousin that winter in the new Chevy. Looking back, it was Mario’s view that those months were the beginning of the end of Billy’s time as one of the West Berkeley Boys. And one of the last times the West Berkeley Boys were as they once had been.

  “He was waiting to move on,” Mario said. “We were moving on.”

  Mario remembers sitting in the new Chevrolet with Billy that winter, waiting at a red light on San Pablo Avenue in Albany, one town north of Berkeley and one notch up the socioeconomic ladder. Mario looked to his right and saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of an auto parts store. He opened the passenger-side door of the Chevy, got out, and told Billy he was going in to apply for the job.

  “Billy said, ‘Get back in, we’re going up the road to meet some girls,’” Mario said in 2012, sitting in his living room in Brentwood, fifty miles east of Berkeley. “I said, ‘No, you go have a good time. I’ll find my way home.’

  “He was confused. He said, ‘Why are you doing this now?’ And I just said to him, ‘It’s time. You go ahead. I’ve got to get a job.’”

  Mario got the job on the spot and started that day, the dawn of a career that eventually saw him own several prosperous auto parts stores in the area.

  “I didn’t see much of him after that, not for a couple of years,” Mario said. “Here and there but not like before. I know he went back to the Oaks. I was too busy to go to the games.”

  The new Oaks manager was Charlie or Chuck Dressen, a former player who was fired as a Yankees coach when Stengel was hired. Dressen was Stengel’s opposite in style and philosophy—meticulous, fastidious, and militaristic when it came to preparation and rules. There would be no free cases of beer in Dressen’s clubhouse after victories, only more analysis of what had worked and what had not worked.

  In upbringing and background, Dressen was not unlike Stengel. He had been a scrappy player in the National League who knew and liked old-school baseball. Billy did not like Dressen when he met him; he found him arrogant.

  But in time Billy saw that his new manager had a strategic outlook on baseball that Billy had never fully considered. Dressen believed all games were won by the team making the fewest mistakes. And he was convinced that a zealous, aggressive style of play—stealing, hit-and-run, taking the extra base—would force the other team into the pivotal game-losing mistakes and errors. A team won games, Dressen preached, by putting pressure on the other team. The idea was to make them crack first.

  Dress
en could do something else that fascinated Billy. He could steal any opposing catcher’s signs. Dressen was pretty good at stealing the third-base coach’s signs, too. This kind of baseball skullduggery left Billy spellbound. The notion that there was another layer of the game that existed in full view and yet was slyly duplicitous at the same time appealed to him. And, of course, it reinforced what he had learned at Kenney Park—there was always another way to beat the other team if you looked for every advantage. Billy, following his lifelong pattern of learning from his baseball elders, wanted to know what Dressen saw and when he saw it. Dressen, not accustomed to having a player that interested in an obscure talent, happily schooled Billy in everything he knew, which mostly hinged on discerning patterns of movements and becoming a master at reading body language.

  Billy, the everyday second baseman, played 172 games that year and sat next to Dressen in the dugout during games, picking his brain.

  The Oaks would not win the PCL pennant in 1949 but Billy would flourish. He hit .286 with 12 homers and 92 RBIs and had a whopping 623 at-bats, which might have been his most impressive stat because it proved the bony West Berkeley boy was durable.

  Back in New York, Stengel was being enshrined as a genius, shepherding the Yankees through a difficult, injury-plagued season that ended with Joe DiMaggio recovering from pneumonia in time to lead the Yankees to consecutive victories over the Boston Red Sox on the last days of the regular season, completing a come-from-behind chase for the American League pennant. The Yankees then won the World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Billy had not communicated directly with Stengel, but the wily manager was communicating with his protégé indirectly. He had noticed Billy’s stellar play in Oakland during the 1949 campaign, and throughout the end of that season Stengel talked up Billy in the New York press, which most of the writers found odd since the Yankees’ infield was set with established players. The shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, was only thirty-one. Jerry Coleman and Bobby Brown, each twenty-four, were at second and third base respectively. All three were having solid seasons. Puzzled, some in the New York press even went off on their own and decided that perhaps this “Coast star,” as they liked to call Billy, would be converted to the outfield when he was lured to New York as everyone was now expecting.