Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  The clubhouse went silent. DiMaggio was aghast. Billy waited a bit, then confessed that it was a gag. He had bought disappearing ink at a novelty store.

  “I still thought Joe might slug him,” Rizzuto said. “Joe was steamed. Billy kept saying, ‘It will disappear, Joe. Really, it will.’ But it was a tense few minutes until it did.

  “Then ten minutes later, Joe was joking around with Billy again. Billy just had a way with Joe. Nobody else on the team would have dreamed of pulling any kind of prank on Joe.”

  Charlie Silvera, a catcher, was another Bay Area product who knew Billy from informal workouts at Oaks Park. He became a major Yankees prospect, more valued as a youngster than Berra had been. (People always underestimated Yogi.) Silvera lived with Billy during the 1950 season and became Billy’s lifelong friend, coaching for him in Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas.

  Silvera now sees 1950 from a different perspective. Billy may have been DiMaggio’s buddy, but that did not earn him much playing time and that, Silvera said, vexed Billy.

  “What I remember about 1950 was how hard we worked to try and get ourselves into the lineup,” Silvera said more than sixty years later. “Yeah, Billy went out with Joe a little but not like he did with Mickey later when he was an established starter. In 1950, we were at the end of the roster in every way. We were desperate to do something impressive.”

  Like many other Yankees, Billy, Silvera, and outfielder Hank Bauer lived at the Concourse Plaza, a hotel four blocks west of Yankee Stadium’s outfield walls. The Concourse Plaza was an ornate, twelve-story redbrick hotel with three vast ballrooms that hosted the speeches of presidential candidates as well as countless weddings and bar mitzvahs. It stood on a hill at the corner of the Grand Concourse and 161st Street at a time when that part of the Bronx was a moneyed place of refuge for corporate titans eager to escape Manhattan’s gritty bustle.

  Not only did the Yankees stay at the Concourse; so did visiting baseball teams, and the New York football Giants, too.

  Billy walked into the decorative, sumptuous lobby of the Concourse Plaza a week before opening day in 1950, turned to Silvera, and said incredulously, “We’re living here?”

  But the Concourse Plaza did more than awe the newest Yankees; it was within easy walking distance of Yankee Stadium. Bauer had a starting job, but Billy and Silvera quickly developed a routine that they kept throughout the early months of the season. They woke early and went to the stadium for early batting practice. The clubhouses sometimes would not even be open, so a coach left a bucket of balls in the dugout.

  Billy and Silvera took turns pitching to each other until the bucket was empty. Then they would run around the field and retrieve the balls and hit and pitch again until the regulars showed up for their batting practice. The Yankees played no more than fifteen of their seventy-seven home games at night in the early 1950s, so Billy and Silvera could get in at least two hours of practice before yielding the field.

  The Yankees opened the 1950 season at Boston’s Fenway Park. Eager to avenge their 1949 collapse, the Red Sox jumped out to a 9–0 lead through five innings. The Yankees scored four runs in the sixth, and in the eighth, with two runners on, Stengel sent Billy to the plate as a pinch hitter for his first Major League at-bat.

  Before the game, reporters asked Billy what he thought of Fenway Park, which even then was steeped in baseball history.

  “It’s a ballpark and if it’s a ballpark I can hit in it,” Billy answered.

  And what of the big wall in left field?

  “It’s close,” Billy said.

  Now in the eighth, Billy faced Boston’s crafty left-hander Mel Parnell, who had won 25 games in 1949. The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Arthur Daley described the scene for the New York Times: “Up to the plate stepped Billy Martin, the cocky 21-year-old kid from the Coast, for his major league debut at bat. Billy was so awed and terrified that he spilled a double off the left field wall.”

  A run scored and the Yankees’ rally continued until they had batted around. Billy’s second Major League at-bat came with the bases loaded. He singled to center field for two more runs. It was the first time in Major League history that a player had two hits in one inning of his inaugural game. The Yankees won, 15–10; the New York Daily News referred to Billy’s hits as “lightning bolts from an effervescent rookie.”

  Billy did not play for another two weeks. Later in life he joked, “I guess if I had gotten three hits I would have sat for three weeks.”

  As much as it was apparent to everyone that Billy was Casey’s pet, the players had learned from the previous season that Stengel was not sentimental when it came to making out his lineup. He wanted to win and he could be as cold and unemotional as an auditor when it came to apportioning playing time.

  “He benched anyone anytime, sometimes without rhyme or reason,” Coleman said. “He had his plan but we weren’t always apprised of it and we didn’t always understand it. We just did it.”

  Billy sat at Casey’s knee just as he had at Oaks Park, and he pestered him about playing time. Casey’s response was that Billy could contribute in other ways. Knowing how skilled Billy was in the art of bench jockeying, he encouraged his rookie to stand on the top step of the dugout and get the attention of the opposition. He did not have to tell him twice.

  “And when Billy did get on the field in 1950, he made sure people heard him,” Coleman said. “Phil Rizzuto was kind of a quiet guy out there. So was Bobby Brown. Joe Collins didn’t talk much at first. Billy took charge, yelling commands, encouraging everyone.”

  Added Brown, “And that voice of his—I’m sure they heard him fifteen rows into the stands.”

  Perhaps they did, and it seemed they liked what they heard. Billy became a player that the home crowd noticed. Always in motion, always jabbering at someone, he was entertaining and people cheered for him. Billy’s Yankee Stadium fan base, which would stay loyal to him with unwavering devotion for thirty-eight more years, got its start in the spring of 1950.

  But playing sparingly was no way for a twenty-one-year-old to develop. Plus the Yankees’ roster had not only Coleman but his predecessor at second base, the aging Snuffy Stirnweiss. Carrying three second basemen was also costly to the team. After the day game on May 15, Stengel called Billy into his office to inform him that they were sending him to the Yankees’ minor league team in Kansas City.

  “Give us a few weeks and we’ll sell Stirnweiss and bring you back,” Stengel said.

  It was a day before Billy’s twenty-second birthday. Surprised and embarrassed, he wept in the manager’s office. Casey, who hated seeing Billy distraught, consoled him and conceded that he did not completely agree with the decision, which ultimately was made by general manager George Weiss, whose decisions were often made with a different motivation. Weiss received a bonus annually from Yankees ownership if he kept the payroll below a certain number. Casey and Billy talked for a while until finally Casey suggested that if Billy really did not like Weiss’s decision making he ought to go tell him so. It was not good advice. It was the kind of thing that a twenty-one-year-old Casey Stengel would have done, and it’s also the reason that despite his .284 lifetime batting average Stengel was traded four times in a fourteen-year playing career.

  But Billy didn’t need much of a push, especially from his mentor. He confronted Weiss, something not in vogue in 1950. Curt Flood’s reserve clause suit to end what amounted to slavery in professional team sports was nineteen years away. Few players, let alone rookies, angrily spoke up to top executives (if they spoke to them at all). Weiss was cool and reserved and expected the same demeanor from his Yankees. He tolerated Stengel’s eccentricities but demanded that the manager have a certain standard of comportment in his presence.

  “You’ll be sorry for this,” Billy shouted at Weiss.

  Whatever relationship the two had at the moment only took a turn for the worse. And it never got better.

  Billy went to Class AAA Kansas City, and upset as he was,
he did not show it on the field, compiling a .466 slugging percentage with 6 doubles, 2 triples, and 4 homers in 29 games.

  Stirnweiss was traded to the St. Louis Browns exactly a month after Billy’s demotion, and Billy was recalled from Kansas City the next day. A week later, he drove in the winning run with a single. But playing time was still sparse. On the road, he roomed with Rizzuto, who liked to be in bed by ten at the latest.

  “We talked baseball until we fell asleep,” Rizzuto said.

  Rizzuto noticed something else about his new roommate.

  “He kept a Bible in his suitcase,” Rizzuto said. “I’m not saying he read it every night. But he did read it. And in the middle of a train or bus ride somewhere, guys would be carrying on or arguing about something and out of nowhere Billy would quote a Bible passage that applied to the argument or whatever.

  “Guys would stop and look at him, like, ‘Did Billy just say that?’”

  Sitting out of the lineup annoyed Billy, but it did afford him an inside view of what made the Yankees the most successful sports franchise of the twentieth century. It was a twenty-five-man unit, and each player was held to a standard passed on through generations and motivated by the most primitive of incentives: money.

  With the average player’s salary around $13,000 and the check per player for winning the World Series at about $5,700, the Yankees cared deeply about winning in the regular season and the postseason for what it meant to their bankbooks. If a Yankee did not make a throw to the right base and it cost the Yankees a run, and in the end, a game—even during a random game in July—that Yankee heard about it from another Yankee.

  When a young Berra did not run out a pop-up and it fell for a single when it could have been a double had Berra been running hard—and when a subsequent single would have scored Berra with the tying run in what became a Yankees loss—Berra was upbraided in the dugout immediately afterward by several veteran Yankees.

  “Don’t fuck with our money,” the burly, intimidating Yankees outfielder Charlie Keller growled at Berra.

  There were other protocols. Yankees were not supposed to publicly complain about playing time because Yankees supported whoever was trying to win the game that day. Reserves kept their mouths shut and stayed ready. Even personal habits were scrutinized and evaluated based on how they might impact the team.

  Yankees who arrived late for batting practice or did not partake in the daily fielding practice—Major League teams took team-wide infield and outfield practice before every game until the mid-1980s—were rebuked.

  There would be an admonishing query: “Where were you?”

  “In all my time with the Yankees I never heard one guy say, ‘Have fun,’” infielder Gil McDougald said. “It was the opposite—‘Get serious, we have to win this game.’ Nobody thought failure was fun. After the game, we had fun. First, you had to win the game.”

  It was all about the paycheck, and it was a deadly serious pact that twenty-five Yankees made to each other. Devotion to the team always came first. Wives and girlfriends were not supposed to get in the way of anything related to what happened on the field. Even staying out late would be noticed and commented on if the other players thought it was affecting a player’s on-the-field performance. It was no room full of saints and early risers, but there was a code: Never let it cost the team on the field. As the Yankees veteran pitcher Eddie Lopat said, “It doesn’t matter if my infielders are beer drinkers, whiskey drinkers, or tea drinkers as long as they turn the double play. And if they don’t, I hate them equally.”

  Billy observed and learned the all-important Yankee etiquette from his seat on the bench in 1950, and he absorbed the efficiency of its ways. The Yankee Way was more complex than he had probably perceived, but it appealed to Billy because of its elemental purpose. Everything a Yankee did was in the service of winning.

  Billy went to the plate only 39 times in 34 games in 1950, hitting .250 with 1 home run and 8 RBIs.

  His roommate, Rizzuto, had the best year of his career and was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player after he batted .324 in 734 plate appearances with 7 home runs and 66 RBIs. Rizzuto turned 123 double plays and had just 14 errors in 1,351.2 innings in the field.

  “Years later, the Yankees’ brass talked about Billy being a bad influence on guys with the club,” Rizzuto said. “All I know is the year he roomed with me I won the MVP. A couple years later, he roomed with Yogi and Yogi won the MVP. In 1956, he was rooming with Mickey, and Mickey won the MVP. Some bad influence.”

  The Yankees swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series that October, but Billy never got on the field in any of the four games. Coleman was the series MVP. Billy was happy for his buddy Whitey Ford, who won the clinching game of the series, but he felt odd in the champagne-soaked clubhouse afterward. He always wanted to be a part of the biggest games. The $5,738 winning players’ check was a salve for his hurt, though, and Billy headed home to Berkeley. Stengel went with him; he was managing a barnstorming team of all-stars in the Bay Area that month and had asked Billy to play for him.

  Billy was playing for Casey again “on the Coast.” So much had changed and so much had not changed.

  10

  THE ALL-STAR TEAM CASEY was parading around Northern California had the usual Bay Area baseball talent, some Oakland Oaks and San Francisco Seals players, Silvera, Ernie Lombardi, and Billy. On October 20, 1950, thirteen days after the World Series ended, Billy played in a late-afternoon game for Casey’s all-stars at Oaks Park. He scurried from the park after the game, quickly grabbing his things and dashing for his car. That wasn’t Billy’s postgame style. He usually liked to sit and have a few beers and talk about the game. About the only thing that made Billy ditch a clubhouse in that kind of a hurry was a woman.

  And on this Friday evening, there was a woman waiting for Billy. It was eighteen-year-old Lois Berndt, dressed in a wedding gown at St. Ambrose Church. Billy arrived fifteen minutes late and hastily changed into his rented black tuxedo in a vestibule behind the altar. Somehow his dress shoes had not made the trip to the church.

  Billy came out for the wedding wearing his baseball shoes. Years later, Lois called it an omen. But the wedding went on, and all of Billy’s West Berkeley friends were there. Billy eventually borrowed a friend’s brown dress shoes, though they clashed with his black tux.

  Billy said that he got married because his buddy Howard Noble had married his girlfriend, who was Lois’s best friend. He also called Lois “a doll, a real pretty girl.”

  “Lois kept telling me how depressed she was with me away from home playing ball, and all that same old baloney you always hear,” Billy wrote in 1980.

  Billy’s sister Pat said Billy was not dragged to the altar. In fact, as she would do with each of his four wives, Pat tried to talk him out of the marriage and failed.

  “I said, ‘Bill, this isn’t the right girl,’” said Pat, who conceded she never liked Lois, whom she had known since they were in junior high school together. “I said, ‘She just wants to get married.’ But he wouldn’t listen. I think he was lonely. He wanted something to hold on to. Bill was like that.”

  All of Billy’s closest friends from the 1940s to the 1960s, whether they knew him in West Berkeley or west of Minneapolis twenty years later, agreed that Billy always yearned for a traditional family life of the kind that existed in a Norman Rockwell painting. Ever the romantic, he had a vision for his life that came to him, some said, in the dark of the Rivoli Theatre as he watched Hollywood’s depiction of small-town, stable family life in the 1940s. One can imagine young Billy falling in love with the quiet country qualities portrayed in The Yearling—he was the ultimate sentimentalist—or being wooed by the homey contented life from It’s a Wonderful Life.

  And then Billy left the theater and walked onto chaotic, grimy San Pablo Avenue and headed back to the tumult of his 7th Street home. But he could dream.

  Lois Berndt would eventually marry one of Billy’s classmates, Sam Curtain,
and she remained in the Berkeley area for most of her life. In a 2012 interview, Lois said that she and Billy married “because it seemed like the natural thing to do after all the years of going out. And Billy, in his heart, wanted a home life.”

  Billy’s Berkeley friends and family stressed that the biggest attraction for connecting with Lois was the foundation she offered because Lois came from a close, traditional family where the dinner table wasn’t constantly punctuated by four-letter-word arguments. It was Billy’s dream to have the same kind of family life, something he brought up in newspaper interviews for the next three decades. And at various times Billy lived his dream. Being a family man was important to him. He had multiple suburban homes in his life, charming residences that seemed to be right out of TV’s Father Knows Best. But the first of those homes was within the home of Lois Berndt’s parents, where the Martin honeymooners lived in November 1950. Billy had respect for Lois’s father and lived by his rules in the Berndt household. But he did not stay long.

  A family member of another sort, Uncle Sam, intervened to call him away. The Korean War had begun on June 25, and by December, President Harry Truman called for an emergency increase in the number of men drafted into the armed forces. Billy became one of the more than 1.5 million conscripted during the next three years, and he was not happy when he left Berkeley for basic training at Fort Ord near Monterey Bay in Northern California. Fort Ord was considered one of the best places to be stationed in the country—the beach was nearby and the weather was wonderful—but Billy was miserable.

  Eight months earlier he had finally started playing for the Yankees, and now he was playing soldier instead? It was more than he could bear, and he immediately asked for a discharge by the start of spring training in 1951. His first requests for a discharge were denied, but with the help of a commanding officer who was a baseball fan—and a former Oaks fan—he was instructed in the various hardship discharges available and how best to be granted one.