Billy lived at the Berkeley Hotel in Kansas City, considered the finest hotel in the Midwest. It was the hotel of choice of airline pilots and their crews, then called stewardesses. And Trans World Airlines, known as TWA and considered the gold standard of U.S.-based airlines, was based in Kansas City. Many flight crews lived downtown, too.
Billy, not surprisingly, did not sulk in his room. He met a lot of stewardesses. With all the nonstop losing the only thing he looked forward to was his off-the-field adventures. But the Berkeley Hotel was not the St. Moritz. Jackie Gleason was not waiting for him in the lobby.
“He had nights when he was up and fun-loving,” said Lou Skizas, a teammate in Kansas City who also played briefly with the Yankees in 1956. “But he had a lot of nights when he was blue and down-and-out. He would get in a funk and talk about how he wasn’t the same guy without the Yankees.”
His old team might not have been the same either.
The Yankees lost the 1957 World Series in seven games to Milwaukee. Richardson barely played in the series, giving way to Jerry Coleman at second base. Coleman played well, but several New York writers noted that the Yankees lacked their customary October edge.
YANKEES MISSING THEIR FIERY LEADER? a New York Post headline asked after the series. In the story the writer wondered if the Yankees had become too nice without “Battlin’ Billy.”
At the time, the Yankees’ one-time fiery leader was selling cars in Kansas City, a job he got through a teammate. Billy was also looking at real estate in Kansas City and would eventually buy an apartment complex that grew in value rather handsomely as Kansas City blossomed as a model midwestern city in the middle of the twentieth century.
Billy spent the winter mostly in Kansas City, though he did make a two-week visit to Berkeley, spending time with Kelly Ann and with his mother.
His sister Pat recalled that after the trade to Kansas City she thought she saw an increase in how much Billy was drinking.
“It wasn’t like he was drunk a lot,” Pat Irvine said. “But a drink was more important to him. And boy, my mother got on him about that. All her life, she screamed at him about alcohol—‘Stop drinking so much,’ she would yell. Bill was usually all fun and games. For a while there, he wasn’t the same.”
In November 1957 Billy was part of a thirteen-player trade that sent him to the Detroit Tigers, the beginning of a long, nomadic slog around the Major Leagues. In the next five years, he was traded or released six times.
Wherever he went, he was the “ex-Yankee star,” and wherever he went, he was expected to provide the spark that some demoralized team needed. In his first days as a Tiger, the Detroit manager, Jack Tighe, said of Billy, “He is the key to our future. It’s as simple as that.”
The Tigers got off to a decent start but slumped badly in May. They were a flawed team with Harvey Kuenn driving in just 54 runs in the middle of the lineup. The Detroit pitching was also suspect. Billy rubbed many of his new teammates the wrong way. In 1957, Sports Illustrated might have called Billy “the bee which stings the Yankee rump,” but in Detroit he was seen as a pain in the ass. His needling and demanding ways only irritated the Tigers, a no-nonsense, unobtrusive team that reflected the blue-collar city they represented. Billy made too much noise. And he did not have the mercurial but nonetheless domineering Casey Stengel in the dugout to back him up.
These were also not players raised in the Yankee Way, nor did they want to be. Billy yelled at Tigers players who he believed were not focused enough. He tried the intimidation that the Yankees veterans had used on him, getting in guys’ faces in the dugout—“Don’t fuck with my money.” He barked orders on the field in his high-pitched voice. None of it went over well. It did not help that among the Tigers’ biggest problems was Billy, whom the Tigers had decided to turn into a shortstop, something Billy had never been for more than a few games. It was a failed experiment. Billy did not have the range of a Major League shortstop, and now, at thirty, he had other limitations, too. He made 20 errors in 1958, the most in any season of his eleven-year career. The Detroit fans, who had berated him for years as a hated Yankee, were not any happier to see him. They booed his errors mercilessly.
Billy batted .255 with 7 home runs and 42 RBIs for the Tigers, who quietly, almost sleepily, finished in fifth place, 15 games behind the Yankees, who then redeemed themselves in the 1958 World Series with a rematch victory over Milwaukee.
Nearly one year to the day after he was traded to Detroit, the Tigers sent Billy to Cleveland. The Indians said they would make him their everyday second baseman.
“The fireplug, ex-Yankee star could give the moribund Indians some sorely needed leadership,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer after the trade.
The Indians did challenge the Yankees, jumping to an early lead in the standings, and on May 16, Billy’s birthday, Cleveland was in New York for a three-game series with the Yankees. Billy announced that he was going out to dinner with his Indians teammates to celebrate.
“And my old Copa gang isn’t invited,” he said, adding with a smile, “Well, maybe Mickey and Whitey.”
But Billy’s 1959 season was star-crossed. And he was breaking down. When a star player becomes a journeyman, it does not happen overnight. The easy assessment of Billy’s playing career after 1957 is that he was brokenhearted and never approached the game with the same spirit and resolve. The presumption is that the Yankees lifted him just as he lifted them. Without the Yankees uniform, he was a desultory player with average skills.
But the decline from unofficial captain of the game’s best team to a bit player on mediocre teams was in fact slow and piecemeal. In early 1959, Billy was batting nearly .280 and playing a steady second base when he charged a ground ball near the pitcher’s mound, scooped it from the turf, and threw underhanded to first base for the out. Even the most graceful and athletic infielders make the play somewhat off-balance with their momentum carrying them forward. The across-his-body throwing motion can send a player tumbling to the grass.
Billy had made the play countless times, including the little somersault forward. But this time, when he fell, he did not roll and bounce with the elasticity he once had. This time, he separated his right shoulder. When he came back four weeks later, he discovered he could not throw with the same force he once had.
“I tried whipping the ball as hard as I could but the ball had nothing on it,” Billy said. “I said to myself, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”
Today, an MRI might have diagnosed the problem, and advanced physical therapy or arthroscopic surgery would fix Billy’s ailing shoulder. In 1959, Billy simply had a weak throwing arm for the rest of his career.
Although just thirty-one years old, Billy was also having trouble with his knees, especially the left one that took much of the pounding from sliding base runners at second base. In 1959, Billy’s left knee started giving out on him periodically. He would run to his left and stumble to stay upright.
He was also warring with his manager, Joe Gordon, the Yankees Hall of Fame second baseman from 1938 to 1950. Gordon did not like the way Billy turned the double play either (here we go again). Billy made just one error at second base in 1959 but it cost the Indians a game, and afterward Gordon criticized Billy, saying Billy did not field the Yankee Way—certainly not as Gordon had done in his time in New York.
Incensed, Billy had someone in the Indians’ public relations department look up Gordon’s Yankees fielding records. Then Billy passed the statistics around to the Cleveland writers: Gordon committed 188 errors in seven Yankees seasons. Billy committed 42 errors in his seven Yankees seasons.
Gordon was none too pleased with Billy’s research.
Still, on the Fourth of July, the Indians were in first place with a four-game lead over the Yankees (if just two games over the Chicago White Sox).
On August 5 in Washington, in the first game of a double-header, Billy singled home the tying and winning runs for the Indians. He led off the second game, and the third pi
tch from Washington pitcher Tex Clevenger, a fastball that sailed up and in, crashed into Billy’s face next to his left ear.
Batting helmets were not yet mandatory and Billy was not wearing one. The pitch knocked Billy to the ground. Blood began pouring from his nose and ears.
Cleveland catcher Russ Nixon was one of the first players to reach Billy.
“I never saw a man look so dead,” Nixon told the Associated Press. “He didn’t even flutter or move. Then his face swelled up like a beehive in minutes. By the time they brought out the stretcher, Billy was moving a little and moaning. But he couldn’t talk. His face was crushed.”
With a fractured jaw and broken cheekbone, he was brought to Georgetown University Hospital, his season over. There would be surgeries to fix the broken bones. A few days later, Clevenger visited the hospital, and news photographers took pictures of Billy’s grossly swollen and stitched face as Clevenger sat on the edge of his hospital bed with a wan smile.
When the news photographers left, Clevenger and Billy both wept. Clevenger had been a dependable pitcher to that point, with a career record of 23–21. Though just twenty-nine years old, he started only eleven more Major League games and retired.
Billy recovered at home in Cleveland and his face healed without any obvious disfigurement. He watched as the Indians played .500 ball throughout September and fell five games short of the AL pennant. The Yankees slumped to third place, and the first questions about whether Casey Stengel had been in the dugout for too long began to surface in the press.
On December 15, the Indians traded Billy to the Cincinnati Reds along with a top minor league prospect and pitcher Cal McLish, a 19-game winner whose full name was Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish. The Indians received in return the Reds’ All-Star second baseman, Johnny Temple. Gabe Paul, the Reds’ general manager and Billy’s future boss with the 1970s Yankees, pushed to include Billy in the trade.
It had taken a little more than two years, but Billy’s gradual descent from All-Star to journeyman was complete, and the evidence was in the Cincinnati newspapers the next day when no story made much of the Reds’ new second baseman, the former Yankees World Series hero. Most writers wondered about McLish’s prospective contribution (and the origin of his full name). When the Cincinnati writers got around to discussing Billy, they did not use the usual words—firebrand, fiery, sparkplug. One used this phrase: “The stormy Martin . . .”
Billy, now thirty-one, had batted more than a thousand times as an ex-Yankee. Ten years earlier, the Yankees had bought his contract, and shortly thereafter, he made his American League debut with a double off the wall in Fenway Park. Now he would be making his debut in the National League with a bum shoulder, a balky knee, and the psychological scars of a beaning that was probably an inch from being fatal.
By the time he put on the Reds uniform, it would be a new decade. John F. Kennedy would be the Democratic candidate for president, black college students were staging sit-in protests at North Carolina luncheonettes, and Fidel Castro was entrenched in Cuba.
The 1950s, the cheery, self-indulgent decade that shaped Billy as an adult and established many of the tenets, values, and habits by which he lived the rest of his life, were ending. Billy might not have known it at the time, but he would be sad to see the 1950s go. It was a decade when he made an almost unimaginable ascent, going from a minor leaguer in a browbeaten West Coast city to a national sporting figure whose face graced the covers of prominent magazines. The 1950s in America were a time of limitless hope and optimism, an attitude inculcated in Billy since he had lived a rags-to-riches American dream worthy of a screenplay.
Most of all, the 1950s made Billy a Yankee to his core. And that would never change.
17
THE NIGHT BEFORE BILLY was traded from the Yankees in 1957, Cyril Winkler, a successful cattleman from Alliance, Nebraska, and a Yankees fan, drove to Kansas City to see the team play. His twenty-two-year-old daughter, Gretchen, who had moved to Kansas City when she joined TWA as a stewardess two years earlier, accompanied him and his wife in box seats near the field. Seated next to them were four sailors, who were drinking beer at a one-every-half-inning pace.
“I remember the sailors got feeling pretty good and they were yelling at Billy—nothing nasty, just teasing him and trying to get him to acknowledge them,” Gretchen said, recounting the scene in 2013. “And Billy just kept smiling at them and waving his glove. He was kind of playing with them.
“I remember my mother saying, ‘Oh, that Billy Martin is the cutest thing.’ She liked the way he carried himself. And I remember reading the next day that Billy was traded to the Kansas City Athletics.”
Gretchen did not know Billy at the time. And she had no plans for that to change. Less than a month later, she was working on a flight from Kansas City to San Francisco on the Fourth of July. A passenger in a middle seat had a complaint, which she handled. The passenger in the adjoining window seat caught her eye.
“You look like Billy Martin the ballplayer,” Gretchen said.
Billy, beaming, replied, “That’s because I am Billy Martin.”
Gretchen snickered.
“I answered rather dismissively, ‘Sure you are,’” Gretchen said. “And I went back to the front of the plane. I just ignored him. I knew the Athletics were in Chicago and flew together as a team. It couldn’t be Billy Martin.
“My friend in the crew said, ‘Did you see who we have on board? It’s Billy Martin.’ I said, ‘It can’t be him, the team is in Chicago.’ And she said, ‘He hurt his arm last night, didn’t you see the sling on his arm? I think he’s going home for a while.’”
Gretchen Winkler, pretty and curvaceous, had attended the University of Nebraska for two years before she decided to enter the TWA stewardess training program in Kansas City in 1955. She had met some Athletics ballplayers in her time but generally avoided them. As she said more than fifty years later, she had never been in love.
“I was still playing hard to get,” she said.
She was embarrassed and mortified that she had snubbed Billy and spent the rest of the flight evading eye contact. But Billy talked to Gretchen’s crewmates and got her name and the name of the San Francisco hotel where the crew was staying that night. He called the hotel and invited all the women to his mother’s house in Berkeley for dinner.
“We had plans so we couldn’t go,” Gretchen said. “One of the other girls called to tell him that and apparently gave him my home phone number because we all lived pretty much together. So when I got home a few days later, he had left messages with my three roommates, asking me to call him.”
But Gretchen did not return Billy’s call.
“That wasn’t my style,” she said. “I didn’t know him. But he kept calling. And calling. We had a rule in the house that no girl could flirt with any man calling for someone else, but one morning a couple weeks later the other girls said, ‘Are you going to date Billy Martin or not? Because if you’re not going to call him back, we are.’
“So I called him. He wanted me to go to the second game of a double-header and then out to dinner. And that’s what I did. I brought one of my roommates and we ended up double-dating with Ralph Terry, the Yankees pitcher who was traded to Kansas City with him.”
A half-century has not dimmed Gretchen’s recollection of the evening.
“My mother was right, he was the cutest thing,” she said. “So charismatic and so charming. He just had me laughing and talking all night. As I told everyone for years and years later, I had never met anyone like him.”
Gretchen and Billy dated throughout 1957 and into 1958 when Billy was in Detroit. In the Detroit Free Press, there was a mention in a gossip column revealing that “the stunning stewardess on Billy Martin’s arm is named Gretchen Winkler, one of TWA’s most fetching.” Once the schedule-makers at TWA got wind of the romance, they started looking more closely at the Detroit Tigers’ schedule.
“I think those men in scheduling were fas
cinated with our relationship—they thought it was neat,” Gretchen said. “So they’d call me and say, ‘Listen, Winkler, you’re scheduled to go to Chicago next week but the Tigers are playing in New York. Do you want to go there instead?’ And, of course, I jumped at the chance.
“I saw a lot of ball games in 1958 and 1959 and I saw a lot of Billy.”
They were engaged mid-season in 1959 and planned an October 7 wedding at Las Vegas’s Desert Inn. The groom would be eight years older than the bride.
“He made you love him,” Gretchen said. “He looked you right in the eye and commanded your attention. When Billy was talking to me, I was the only person that mattered in the room.”
The night before the wedding, Bobby Darin, whose single “Mack the Knife” was the number-one best-selling song of 1959, serenaded the wedding party in a private performance.
After a honeymoon in Europe, the couple returned to the Bay Area because Billy was opening a new restaurant in the town of El Cerrito, four miles north of Berkeley on that umbilical cord of the East Bay, San Pablo Avenue. His longtime friend Lewis Figone was the primary investor, with a few other partners. Billy and Gretchen, who involved herself in everything her husband did, including his finances—she saw their marriage as a partnership, whether it was business or social—recalled that they did not have to put up any money. It was his name that had the financial clout.
Billy Martin’s Cerro Square had a yellow and green façade—the future colors of the Oakland A’s—and was in a shopping plaza near the commuter train station. Newspaper advertisements in 1959 invited customers to come sit in its “rocking chair lounge.”
The menu was Italian with lots of seafood. Mickey Mantle and Dodgers hurler Don Drysdale attended the grand opening, which got the restaurant’s publicity in every Bay Area newspaper and television news station.
Billy Martin Page 18