“He had every player, even the slow ones, out there doing the stealing-home drills,” said Mele. “It wasn’t that they were all going to steal home, but he wanted them thinking about going home on a wild pitch or an infield ground ball. It was about putting pressure on the other team. And it worked.”
In the Twins’ regular-season-opening victory over the Yankees, the Twins, who had stolen just 46 bases in 162 games the previous year (an average of 0.28 per game), stole 2 bases. They executed the hit-and-run twice. The 1965 Twins charged and never looked back.
“The opposing teams started rushing throws and you could see the infielders getting tense,” Mele recalled decades later. “That was all Billy.”
Billy had a way of keeping the dugout alive, too. As usual, he was stealing signs and trying to outguess the opposing manager. He got some of the players in on the guile, trying to get them to steal signs—anything to keep the bench involved in the game within the game.
“The guy impressed everyone because of the things he saw,” Tony Oliva, a star outfielder on the team and now an executive with the Twins, said. “We all listened to him.”
Oliva, born and raised in Cuba, may have listened more than most. The Spanish-speaking players all gravitated to Billy, notably Zoilo Versalles, the Cuban-born shortstop. Versalles, a regular in the Twins’ infield since 1961, was gifted but moody and he clashed with Mele and many of the coaches. The Twins had tried throughout the winter of 1964–65 to trade him.
But Billy, who had learned enough Spanish to communicate in a rudimentary way, took Versalles under his wing. He taught him to bunt more effectively and encouraged him to use his speed. Versalles ended up leading the league in runs—a statistic Billy valued above all else—and he drove in 77 runs, too. He had 45 doubles and 12 triples to go with 19 home runs. Amazingly, a player the Twins had been desperate to unload only months earlier became the 1965 American League Most Valuable Player.
Billy got much of the credit in the local press for the Twins’ improvement from an 87-win team in 1964 to a 100-win team a year later. Mele said he did not mind.
“Billy was responsible for a lot of new energy,” he said.
Billy did not get along with everyone on that Twins team. He warred with the other coaches, particularly his former Yankees teammate Johnny Sain, the pitching coach.
“It’s always Billy against the world,” pitcher Jim Kaat, an 18-game winner in 1965 for the Twins who would become a Yankees broadcaster, said. “It’s almost as if he needs adversaries in his life.”
The Twins won the pennant by seven games over second-place Chicago. The aging, disintegrating Yankees were twenty-five games out. For Billy, the lone disappointment of the season was the Twins’ seven-game defeat by the Dodgers in the World Series. It was a minor setback in what had been a long period of contentment. For more than five years, he and Gretchen had made a home in the suburbs outside the Twin Cities and lived the American middle-class dream. Billy was determined to have a stable family life as epitomized on television shows of the era. Gretchen even resembled Donna Reed, doyenne of TV domesticity.
The Martins’ Richfield neighborhood had big, old maple trees and was close to the Twins’ ballpark in Bloomington. There was a backyard for Billy Joe—Gretchen called him B.J.—and there was a garden where Billy grew vegetables. The Twins coaches, and some of the Richfield neighbors, had a yearly contest to see who could grow the largest tomatoes.
Billy contacted a friend of a friend who was in the tomato-growing business, making sure he won every year.
Nearly forty years later, remarried to a retired doctor and living outside Dallas, the former Gretchen Winkler Martin spoke very fondly of her years in Minnesota—as she almost always does of Billy.
“Billy was something of a homebody back then,” Gretchen said of her husband, who with a steady diet and placid lifestyle had gained nearly fifteen pounds. “He played with B.J., he cooked, and he hung out with the neighbors. He liked being home. He was tired of eating in restaurants and staying in hotels.”
The Twins finished second in 1966 to Baltimore, which was led by second-year starter Jim Palmer. Billy was still the team’s passionate third-base coach. Now, he was also being mentioned as a future manager somewhere in the Major Leagues. But the 1966 season marked Billy’s first behavioral misstep during his coaching or managing career, and it was the typically impulsive, flash-of-temper kind of mistake that would cost him in the future as well. Although, as was true of many of Billy’s scuffles, he was not the only one at fault, and perhaps not even the instigator.
It all began when Howard Fox, the Twins’ traveling secretary in charge of getting the team from one city to the other, invited the Yankees to piggyback on a Twins charter flight because available aircraft were scarce during an airline strike. What was going to be a crowded flight then became a delayed flight, too—by several hours. Players from both teams were drinking heavily during the delays, including Billy, who was reunited with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.
Once they were airborne, the Yankees’ part of the cabin, where Billy was standing, was far more raucous than the Twins’ portion of the aircraft. Fox approached Billy and shouted, “Can you get your drunken buddies to shut up?”
That did not go over well. There was some shouting and cursing back and forth, but relative calm was eventually restored. Still, the Twins did not get to their hotel until nearly 2:00 a.m.
The traveling secretary’s job is to call ahead to a hotel so that a team’s guest keys are laid out on a large table in the lobby before the team arrives. The keys are put in envelopes with the name of each guest on the outside, then spread across the table. It speeds up the check-in process as players and coaches grab keys and go to bed. But on this trip from hell, the keys were not ready. Fox had to get them and hand them out individually. There is an unwritten rule in such cases and it is rarely breached. The manager always gets his key first, followed by the coaches, then the players, then the trainers, staff, and broadcasters, and then the writers.
Fox did not follow the established pecking order. Yes, Mele got his key first and then most of the coaches. Then the players and staff. But Fox kept Billy waiting.
When Billy protested, Fox threw his key at him. Some said he threw it in Billy’s face.
“If you do that again,” Billy told Fox, “I’m going to beat the living hell out of you.”
Fox took off his glasses, put them on the hotel counter, and said, “All right, you loudmouthed bastard, you want me, then how about now?”
Billy leaped at Fox, who was about ten years his senior, and smashed him with a right hand. Fox went down and there was a pile of bodies on the hotel lobby floor breaking up the fight.
Fox, bleeding from a cut on his cheek, and Billy later shook hands and tried to put it behind them as a consequence of the aggravating travel circumstances. But Fox, a good friend of Griffith’s, never forgot the episode. Neither did Griffith.
The 1966 season ended in dispiriting fashion, and when there was little improvement in 1967, Mele’s job was in jeopardy. Billy was seen as the likely successor, but Griffith, still mindful of Billy’s punch-out of Fox and what it predicted for the future, instead promoted the Twins’ minor league manager from their top affiliate in Denver, Cal Ermer.
The Twins surged under Ermer but faltered badly on the final weekend of the 1967 season. When the Twins started the next season in fifth place, Griffith called Billy into his office. Billy expected to be offered Ermer’s job.
Instead, the Twins wanted him to take over the Denver Bears, the Twins’ top minor league team in the AAA Pacific Coast League. Denver’s record at the time was 7–22.
Billy didn’t like the idea. He took it as a demotion. Billy wondered if the Twins were trying to get him out of Minnesota so it would be easier to hand Ermer’s job to someone else. The American League was also expanding by two teams in 1969, and Billy would be a candidate for those new managerial jobs, but he felt he would be out of sight and out of
mind if he was in Denver.
Griffith encouraged Billy not to give him an answer yet, although he could read Billy’s mood. He expected the answer to be no.
Billy drove home to Richfield and told Gretchen about the meeting with Griffith. She jumped out of her chair, hugged him, and immediately started talking about the move to Denver.
Billy told her he wasn’t going to take the job.
“And I just started telling him over and over that this was his chance to show them he could lead a team as the number-one guy,” Gretchen said. “I knew they thought he was just enough of a reckless character that maybe he couldn’t run the whole show. And I kept saying, ‘Billy, this is not a demotion, it’s an opportunity to show what you can do.’
“But he was still worried about leaving the Major Leagues.”
It was a Saturday and the Martins went to a dinner party that night.
“We got home at midnight but I was still talking until I was blue in the face,” Gretchen said. “Finally, at 2:00 a.m., Billy said to me, ‘Gretchen, I have to get some sleep tonight.’
“He went to bed and then to 9:00 a.m. Mass the next morning and then straight to the ballpark. I was too tired to get out of bed. I woke up not knowing if I had convinced him or not.”
Billy took the job. Billy, Gretchen, and B.J. were in Denver within a week. Asked what kind of manager he was going to be, Billy told the Denver Post, “A good one. I’ll use a little Stengel and a little Dressen, but most of all, a lot of Billy Martin.”
Billy Ball now had a birthplace. It would be Denver, one month after Billy’s fortieth birthday.
Just before he left Minnesota for Denver, Billy asked the Twins’ farm director if the last-place Bears had any good hitters.
“Not this year,” he was told.
How about pitchers?
“Not really.”
Billy had the thought that he was being set up to fail. But he was determined to prove a point—that his managerial style would work and he could motivate a team of twenty-five players. For most of the last four years, he had generally kept his mouth shut working for other managers. Still, he had seen hundreds of things he would have done differently. Now it was his turn to prove his way was better.
The first day in Denver he got the Bears together and immediately started to enforce his rules, which included mandatory infield and outfield workouts before games and a zealous aggressiveness on the bases. The goal, Billy said, was to generate runs. He did not care about batting average or slugging percentage. He wanted more runs.
If that sounds familiar, it is one of the tenets of Money Ball, as popularized by the Oakland A’s—and celebrated in a best-selling book and Hollywood movie of the same name. Some of Billy’s methods would be considered anti–Money Ball, but there were many similarities, too.
Billy, for example, knew that walks by pitchers were deadly. When Billy got to Denver, the Denver Bears pitching staff led the league in walks. Billy announced that any pitcher with more than two walks in a game had to run laps around the field’s warning track—four laps for every walk over two.
The pitchers were not the only ones warned by the new Denver manager. There was punishment for missing a sign—sprints after the game—and everyone had to take bunting instruction before every game until Billy was satisfied they could reliably bunt in a game.
He taught sliding drills. The infielders practiced pickoff plays before every game. A few were schooled in the hidden-ball trick. The outfielders weren’t allowed to take batting practice until they had practiced relay throws.
This was Billy’s plan, even if it was mid-season. He would show them a minor league version of the Yankee Way, mixed with Billy’s pressuring offensive tactics. He preached doing the little things properly every time: squeeze plays, double steals, and stealing home. The little things, Billy said, add up to big wins. He implemented his entire program in ten days. There was only one problem.
“Everyone on the team hated him,” said Graig Nettles, the Bears’ twenty-three-year-old third baseman and best power hitter. “I couldn’t stand him. You’d come into the dugout and he’d be yelling at you in front of everyone, just screaming: ‘Why didn’t you take the extra base? Didn’t you notice that the right fielder has a weak arm? You went to college, why don’t you use your brain out there?’
“I had never had a manager talk to me like that before.”
George Mitterwald was a catcher and outfielder for the Bears. Born seventeen years after Billy in Berkeley, he had heard about Billy all his life but did not know him.
“He came in ranting about all these little details,” said Mitterwald. “We had lost nine in a row when he got there. When we lost again the next night, he went crazy in the clubhouse. He was throwing things around. He just shattered a wooden chair that he threw against the wall. He said losing was not going to be tolerated, that it was a state of mind.
“I don’t know that anyone believed him but we were afraid to lose after that. We knew he’d go nuts again.”
The Bears rallied a bit, winning at least 40 percent of their games for the next two weeks. At this point, Billy started explaining the causes of the losses—a missed outfield cutoff cost one run, throwing to the wrong base cost another run, missing a bunt attempt cost another run.
Billy’s managerial outline for success may not have been in writing, but he implemented it as if it had stages you could read from a PowerPoint presentation.
Billy stole opponents’ signs and told his players about it, predicting an opponent’s steal attempt before it happened. He’d say in the dugout, “Now after we pitch out and throw that runner out at second, watch the other manager, he’ll look over here and make a face.”
The whole bench would erupt laughing as things happened just as Billy said they would—right down to the frustrated manager glaring into the Bears’ dugout.
Billy hoodwinked other teams into errors and missteps with his favorite trick plays, which impressed his players. With runners at first and third, Billy would have the runner at first base start to steal but trip and fall down just out of reach of the first baseman. The defense tended to chase the stranded runner and turn their backs on the runner at third, who, with the proper schooling on when to break for home, was rarely thrown out and scored. The runner from first might be out, but not before the Bears had stolen a run—and unnerved and embarrassed the opposition.
Soon, everyone was watching Billy, wondering what he would do next. And Billy would just keep pacing in the dugout, his hands in his back pockets and his chin jutting forward, yelling out to the field as he encouraged his charges to keep up the pressure.
The final step was breeding loyalty in his team by ardently defending his players in every dispute or close call. He drew a three-game suspension after his first ejection from a game in late June. Nettles was sure he had tagged a runner out at third base and jumped up to go nose-to-nose with the umpire over the safe call. Billy rushed toward third base, pushed Nettles out of the way to keep him from being ejected, then screamed and gestured at the umpire until he got himself thrown out.
The Bears then came from behind to win the game.
Billy was ejected eight times in the summer of 1968. He unveiled for the first time that odd bit of performance art that would become his calling card: kicking dirt on umpires.
“That kind of thing woke up the team,” Nettles, who later played several seasons for Billy in Minnesota and New York, said. “You could see how much he cared. And as players, we thought, ‘We’ve got to care that much.’ Billy changed the team’s attitude and united us, too.”
It was part of the Billy Ball blueprint—the team, the unit, mattered more than any player. The team was in a warlike struggle, an army in uniform pitted against opposing armies in other uniforms. The Bears—“Billy’s Bears,” according to the Denver papers—started expecting to win and fighting not to lose.
“We saw that he could lead us to victory if we listened to him and did what he said,” Nett
les said. “He wasn’t crazy at all. He had a plan. We started to believe that the mental part of the game and the strategy were as important as hitting, fielding, and pitching.”
Attendance at the Bears’ games doubled. Sensing that people came to see the unexpected, Billy had his two top sluggers and most slow-footed players, Nettles and Bob Oliver, steal home in the same game.
Taking a page from Stengel’s book, Billy also went onto the field before games and entertained the fans. He had the public address system play rock-and-roll music and organized dance contests among fans he would pull from the grandstand. Billy was not above dancing himself. He posed for pictures and signed autographs. He used his Donald Duck voice on kids congregating at the field’s railing.
The new energy enveloping the Bears was contagious, and Denver became a tough place for visiting teams to play. Everyone but the home team was on edge; that included the opposing players and the umpires, too.
Billy watched from the dugout with a little grin. Now this was exactly what he had in mind.
“There was a method to the madness,” Mitterwald, who went on to become a coach for two of Billy’s Major League teams, said decades later. “But our team in Denver was the first time. That team was playing terrible before he got there, and by the end of the year nobody could beat us.”
There was a forty-five-year-old pitcher on the Bears in his eighteenth season in the minor leagues named Art Fowler. Billy ran into him at a Denver bar one of the first nights he was in town. The two men hit it off. Fowler did not have much of an arm, but he threw strikes and pitched with guile. He knew how to throw a spitball and he also threw a scuffed, marked-up baseball that dipped and darted. Billy started using Fowler like a second pitching coach.
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