He found the job demeaning and hated asking questions of the players.
Gretchen Martin said she and Billy spent more time together, drawing on each other.
“We tried to build a life outside of baseball,” Gretchen said. “We bought a lake house and a boat. But Billy always had a baseball family and he needed that.”
In July, Charlie Finley, the Oakland A’s enigmatic owner, flirted with hiring Billy. It would have put Billy and Reggie Jackson in the same dugout seven years earlier than their union—if you can call it that—in New York. If Finley had hired Billy, it also might have changed the course of baseball history or Billy’s baseball legacy since the A’s were on the cusp of a run to multiple world championships. But in the end, Billy and Finley could not agree on various terms.
Later the same month, Jim Campbell, the Detroit Tigers’ general manager, called Billy. Though he considered it a risk, Campbell thought Billy was perfect for his slumbering team. By the end of the summer, Billy agreed to a two-year contract worth $100,000 to manage the 1971 Tigers.
In the ALCS that fall, the Twins again played Baltimore, and the Orioles swept the Twins again. This time, Jim Kaat was the starter for the third game. He was knocked out of the game in the third inning and the Twins lost, 6–1.
The 1971 Detroit Tigers that Billy took over seemed much more than three years removed from the incandescent Tigers of 1968 who won the World Series in a stunning seven-game upset of the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals. Their pitching ace, the 30-game winner Denny McLain, was traded after a betting scandal. Fortunately, he fetched two starters: shortstop Eddie Brinkman and Aurelio Rodríguez, a defensive wizard at third base. The Tigers still had stars like Al Kaline and Norm Cash, but both were thirty-six years old. Most of the Tigers’ other prominent starters, like Willie Horton, Bill Freehan, and Dick McAuliffe, were in their early thirties. The 1970 team had finished fourth with a 79–83 record.
Billy’s 1969 Minnesota Twins had run and bunted their way to a title, stealing 115 bases as a team. The 1970 Tigers had stolen a total of 29 bases. The baseball world snickered when Billy was named Detroit manager, skeptical at what daring and dynamic Billy could do with the Tigers’ slow-footed lineup that was now more sluggish than slugging. Many thought it was a poor match of managerial style and talent.
Billy had plenty of enemies in baseball, and some of them thought Billy had gotten lucky in 1969, catching lightning in a bottle in Minnesota. Those people looked at the decay on the Detroit roster and smirked: If Billy is such a managerial magician, let’s see what he can do now.
Most of baseball had given up on the Tigers, and most of the country had given up on Detroit, which had been witness to some of the worst race riots of the late 1960s. The city’s baseball team was seen as representative of the city itself—scarred and withering.
Billy, accustomed to being disregarded, told his new players not to worry about what they had heard about him and his managerial style. He was not a one-trick pony. He could adapt his tactics to the strengths of his roster. He only asked the players to believe in his ways and to be patient.
Of course, it was easier to take a team like the Twins, who had not tasted much success, and ask them to blindly follow. The veteran Tigers still felt the glow of the 1968 championship season as if it were yesterday. They were stars. But Campbell, the general manager, instead referred to his team as a lineup of “personalities.” He did not mean it in a good way. In preseason meetings, Campbell told Billy to do whatever he had to do to break up the cliques on the team and to rattle the veterans out of their complacency.
Billy did not turn the 1971 Tigers into the 1969 Twins. In fact, they ended up stealing only six more bases than the 1970 Tigers.
But Billy said there was more to his system than just stealing bases. For one, there was the threat of a steal, or a double steal. He wanted the players to run even if they were not always successful.
Billy told the Tigers over and over that his system of winning baseball wasn’t about speed as much as it was about aggressiveness. He wanted to always score the first run of a game, to put opponents on the defensive. He did not play for big innings early in games like many managers. He played to score first. If a game were a fight, a comparison Billy would readily make, then it mattered who got in the first punch.
He had other canons: He wanted his players to go from first to third on singles whenever possible. And he wanted hard slides into the third baseman.
“Let’s see if their outfielders can make that throw and let’s see if the third baseman will stand in and make the tag with the ball and the runner arriving at the same time,” Billy said. “Slide over the bag—have the third baseman take the contact and the throw.”
He wanted base runners faking a steal of home, hoping to draw a balk from the pitcher. It would steal a run and demoralize the pitcher. He wanted his players to knock down middle infielders trying to make double plays. He wanted to try more hit-and-run plays, teaching his players that they didn’t have to hit the ball toward a particular hole in the defense—as many managers taught the play. Billy instead just wanted the batter to put the ball in play. Rodríguez later insisted he picked up at least a dozen hits doing just that.
Billy made it a standing rule that any player who got hit with a pitch with the bases loaded would get $150 in cash and the right to pick his next day off. And Billy made sure his players knew that he always had their backs. In the first ten days of the 1971 season, Billy got thrown out of two games defending his players who were upset with umpires’ strike zones.
The Tigers had been surprised when Billy, whose feisty reputation always preceded him, was fairly docile during spring training. So they were astonished at the man in the same number 1 uniform who on the opening day of the season became a different person altogether—a jumpy, manic, and hyper dugout presence who was ready to go after everyone in the ballpark.
In the first inning of the first game, Billy started in on the Cleveland Indians’ flamboyant first baseman, Ken Harrelson, who liked to wear a tight, tailored uniform, a Fu Manchu mustache, and multicolored wristbands. Off the field, Harrelson was the king of early 1970s style, known for his closet full of Nehru jackets.
“You clown, Harrelson,” Billy yelled from the home dugout at Tiger Stadium, just feet from first base. “Where are your bell-bottoms? You think your clothes are going to hide the fact that you can’t catch anything in the dirt anymore? Everybody knows you can’t go to your right anymore. Everybody knows you can’t hit a curve ball. You’re washed up. You should get off the field. Go sit with your designer in some disco. That’s where you belong.”
The once-somnolent Tigers’ dugout was sleepy no more.
“We were all looking around at each other,” catcher Bill Freehan said. “This was a whole new ball game. Our manager was crazy. These games were a war—us against them. That was obvious five minutes into the season’s first game.”
Harrelson, as it happened, barely played in 1971 and then retired.
Billy’s intensity was not directed only at the opposition. When Willie Horton, one of his stars and a crowd favorite as a Detroit native, did not run out a ground ball, Billy yanked him from the game and benched him for the next game, too. When Horton was reinserted into the lineup, he said he was injured and couldn’t play.
Billy and Horton had a ten-minute screaming match in the manager’s office afterward. They did not exit as pals. Billy wanted Horton suspended by the Tigers and told reporters so. Horton wanted to be traded. They feuded for a while, but Horton ended up back in the lineup and played well.
“Billy made me see some things for how they really were,” Horton, who became a coach for Billy in the 1980s, said many years later. “He became a mentor.”
Billy also chided the Tigers’ left-handed-hitting fourth outfielder, Jim Northrup. Billy pleaded endlessly with Northrup to pull the ball more toward Tiger Stadium’s short right-field porch. Northrup resisted but ended up hitting 16 homers and d
riving in 71 runs in ’71. Northrup did not become Billy’s chum; in fact, he was something of an arch-nemesis—almost every Billy team had one or five players who could be placed inthat category. Northrup criticized Billy for decades, right until his death in 2011. But in 1971, he told the Detroit Free Press that Billy had “got all of us on one side—his side.”
The team of “personalities” was developing a personality. And guess whose personality it resembled? He was pacing back and forth in the dugout with his hands jammed in his back pockets, his dark eyes darting around the ballpark.
The sculpting of the team psyche developed in pieces.
Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles were the defending World Series champions and had won the last two American League pennants. They were the prohibitive favorites in the AL East. Billy insisted they were overrated and over the hill. He made subtle jabs at Weaver, trying to get under the skin of the Orioles’ leader. The message was unequivocal—the Tigers weren’t playing for fourth place or second place. They were gunning for the Orioles.
When the Tigers lost their first regular-season game to Baltimore in April—a tight, one-run defeat—Billy came back to his team’s clubhouse and saw his players surrounding the customary meal spread—a table in the center of the room piled high with a hot entrée like fried chicken, meat loaf, or pork chops, as well as cold cuts, condiments, and other food and drink.
In a scene that would be repeated in clubhouses from Oakland to New York from 1971 to 1988, Billy screamed, “Go ahead and stuff your faces, you fucking bunch of losers! We should have won that game. How can you eat?”
And then Billy charged across the room in a fury, grabbed the food table with both hands, and angrily flipped it over. Then he kicked at it once or twice.
“Stuff went flying everywhere,” Horton said, remembering the scene decades later. “There was chicken in lockers, cole slaw in guys’ shoes, beans on clothing, and food and drink all over the walls.
“Then Billy just stormed into his office and slammed the door. We kind of looked around—nobody had ever seen anything like that. But everybody knew that Billy really hated to lose and maybe we better start hating to lose, too.”
There were other moments later viewed as motivational or as a case of team bonding. When Cleveland’s hard-throwing Sam McDowell hit two Tigers in one game and threw inside to two more, Billy put reliever Bill Denehy—known as “Wild Bill”—into the game. Billy told Denehy to use his natural wildness to its best effect. When Denehy hit the first batter, catcher Ray Fosse, in the back, Fosse charged the mound. In a flash, Billy sprinted from the dugout, the first one to get to the wrestling mob around Fosse and Denehy. The rest of the Tigers naturally followed. Both benches and bullpens emptied, and in the brawl that ensued, Denehy kicked Fosse in the head and cut him badly. Horton, a former amateur boxer, broke an Indians pitcher’s nose with a one-punch knockout, and Gates Brown, who was a tough, 220-pound reserve outfielder who had once served time in jail for burglary, decked another Indians player and sent him to the disabled list with a concussion.
After the game, about fifteen Tigers were in a bar across the street from Tiger Stadium.
“Fans kept sending over drinks,” said Charlie Silvera, one of Billy’s coaches who was in the bar that night. “They’d raise their glasses and yell, ‘To the slugging Tigers.’ And you know what? The guys on the team loved it. The hitters loved that Denehy had protected them, and the pitchers loved that the hitters had run out to protect Denehy. It brought everyone closer.”
Not everyone liked Billy’s managerial style, or liked him. He yelled too much for many a player. Dick McAuliffe, the All-Star second baseman, was one who bristled at the hollering. But like most of his teammates, he listened to Billy. McAuliffe, who was not fleet of foot, won a big game in September by stealing third on his own with Kaline at the plate and one out in the ninth inning of a tied game at Tiger Stadium. Kaline then lofted a walk-off, game-ending sac fly that had the Detroit fans and press nearly in shock. The slow-footed Tigers won a game by taking an extra base in the ninth?
McAuliffe was asked afterward what made him head for third. “Billy taught us to watch the catchers when you’re on second base. Sometimes they get lazy and they don’t set up in their crouch with their weight on the balls of their feet as they normally do when a runner is on base. That’s just what happened and I took off for third.”
It was one of only four stolen bases McAuliffe had all season.
The 1971 Detroit Tigers did not catch the Orioles.
“The Orioles are a great ball club,” Billy said at season’s end. “They are better than I thought they were. But we’ll give them a battle next year.”
The Tigers had improved to 91–71, 12 more victories than in the previous year. Attendance had jumped 25 percent. Detroit baseball fans, some scared away from downtown Tiger Stadium by the race riots, were reconnecting with the Tigers and revisiting the Tiger Stadium neighborhood. There was optimism where there had been only uncertainty and despair. And few in baseball were now doubting what Billy the manager could do. The 1969 Twins were not a fluke. Billy could win with more than one style. And as the American League was finding out, he was just getting started.
“We can beat Baltimore,” Billy said as he headed into the 1971–72 off-season. “And Baltimore knows it.”
22
WHEN BILLY, GRETCHEN, AND their son, B.J., first came to Detroit after ten years in Minnesota, they were completely unprepared for the move. After several weeks, they had still not found a home and were instead living in a hotel downtown.
One day, Billy was speaking to a Detroit luncheon attended by about three hundred local businessmen, the kind of public relations work that he did at every managerial stop. At the end of the talk and after a question-and-answer period, Billy told the businessmen he had a question for them.
“We’re living in a hotel and my wife can’t chase our seven-year-old son all day in a hotel,” Billy said. “Does someone in this city have a place for us to live?”
Soon the Martins had moved into a townhouse in a complex called Cranbrook Manor in the tony suburb of Bloomfield Hills. They were close to the Cranbrook Schools, one of the best prep schools in Michigan. The entire neighborhood had an aura of reserve and refinement.
“We had room to play, good schools, and the other ballplayers lived in the area, too,” Billy Martin Jr. recalled. “I had a crush on Bill Freehan’s daughter. We went to all the home games. We never, ever missed one.”
John Fetzer, the Tigers’ owner, was a pioneering radio and television executive who then acquired the soon-to-be-everywhere elevator music company Muzak. Fetzer was not much interested in running the club day to day.
“He was a silent owner,” Gretchen said. “That wasn’t something Billy had very often. Billy and Jim Campbell ran the club.”
Before the 1972 season, Campbell had torn up Billy’s original two-year contract that paid him $50,000 annually and extended it by a year with a $10,000-a-year raise. A sense of tranquillity enveloped Billy’s life. Gretchen recalls the couple going to watch a new movie, The Godfather. President Nixon was visiting Communist China, the first U.S. president to do so. While Nixon was in Peking, his attorney general, John Mitchell, resigned to become the chairman of the president’s 1972 reelection campaign. In about two months Mitchell would oversee the first of the Watergate burglaries.
The principal baseball news that year was the threat of a players’ strike over pension dollars. But no one took it seriously. The former Twins broadcaster Bob Wolff, then doing New York Knicks games and national baseball broadcasts, recalled visiting the Tigers’ spring training camp that year and meeting with a relaxed and confident Billy. Wolff had another reason to be at the Tigers’ camp. His son, Rick, a recent Harvard graduate, had been a thirty-third-round draft pick of the Tigers. He was destined for the low minors, but he was nonetheless on some back field of Billy’s camp.
“I remember I only had time to watch the first five
innings of that day’s exhibition game,” Wolff said. “And I told Billy that. When the game started, my son was in the starting lineup with all the Tigers stars. That had not been the original lineup. I got to watch Rick steal a base and hear his name announced on the public address system.
“It was the thrill of a lifetime for a father. That’s the kind of guy Billy was. He cared about people.”
The players’ strike movement did interrupt the season for about a week. The 1972 season would have each team playing anywhere from 154 to 156 games.
The Tigers’ second game of the revised season brought them to Baltimore, and the tone of the nearly season-long competition between the teams was established from the first pitch. Earl Weaver immediately started getting on home plate umpire Dave Phillips because he thought he wasn’t calling enough strikes for Orioles starter Jim Palmer. Unwilling to let his opponent get the advantage, Billy started yelling across the diamond at Weaver.
“Shut up, you little midget,” Billy shouted.
“I will if you tell the guy behind the plate to do his job and call that pitch at the knees a strike,” Weaver answered.
When Palmer’s next pitch was called a strike, Billy howled at Phillips.
“Don’t let him call the game for you,” he yelled.
“Mind your own business, Billy,” Weaver countered.
And that was only the first inning. By the fourth inning, Phillips had had his fill of the dugout repartee. He called both managers to home plate and insisted he would eject the next manager who said anything about balls and strikes.
Billy lasted until the sixth inning, then he was gone, thrown out by Phillips—Billy’s first ejection in one hundred games with the Tigers. Weaver smiled and waved goodbye as Billy exited.
Billy Martin Page 23