Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Afterward, Billy was heading to the Tigers’ bus, walking across a darkened parking lot outside Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, when a fan accosted him. As late as the early 1980s, visiting teams sometimes had to wade through fans to get to a team bus. Security was often lax or nonexistent.

  “You better win tomorrow,” the approaching fan said to Billy.

  “Take a hike,” Billy answered.

  “I’m not kidding around,” the fan, Jack Sears, a twenty-five-year-old supermarket employee and former resident of Pontiac, Michigan, said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Billy said, according to Detroit writers and players who were watching.

  Sears replied with a “Fuck you” and a shove to the shoulder. Billy responded with a punch to the nose. The two scuffled a little until they were pulled apart. Billy boarded the team bus. Jack Sears, after giving his name to reporters, was never heard from again.

  The Tigers sprinted away from Baltimore in the next few weeks, taking a three-game lead in the AL East in mid-May. Back and forth throughout the summer the teams battled, joined by the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, who were led by their sturdy twenty-five-year-old catcher, Thurman Munson. The Tigers were getting great pitching from Mickey Lolich but inconsistent hitting from the lineup. Billy tried various things to jump-start the offense. One game, he put all the starters’ names in a hat and had Al Kaline pick out the lineup order. It had the lumbering Norm Cash leading off and the slight, banjo-hitting Brinkman at cleanup, but the Tigers won.

  In another game, Billy used eighteen players, including six pinch hitters. The Tigers won again.

  As the 1972 pennant races wound toward the fall, Major League Baseball itself was lurching on unsteady ground. At the same time, a subtle changing of the guard was going on. Economically, the game was suffering as attendance had dropped significantly. Crowds of seven thousand or five thousand were not uncommon at many ballparks. At first, it appeared to be a backlash against the players for their April strike, but there seemed to be more at play than that. In the early 1970s, baseball was paying for a cultural shift in America. As the country’s oldest and most traditional team sport, baseball was an established institution, and anything linked to “the establishment” was unpopular in many quarters of America at the time. Tradition wasn’t a word viewed with much regard either.

  Baseball was also emerging from a second dead-ball era, a period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s when batting averages drooped and strikeout ratios rose. The game looked tired, boring, and stuffy.

  Then, along came Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s. In 1972, as a marketing ploy, the A’s began wearing solid green or solid gold jerseys with contrasting white pants. Their hats and helmets were often a radiant gold as well. Throughout the majors at the time, teams generally wore all white at home, with maybe pinstripes, and all-gray uniforms on the road. Baseball shoes were black. But not the A’s. Their shoes were white and their uniforms all but glowed like neon.

  At the same time, while many teams had rules against facial hair, the A’s not only let their players grow mustaches and long sideburns, they encouraged it. Oakland owner Charlie Finley, in conjunction with a Moustache Day promotion, offered $500 to any player who grew a mustache by Father’s Day. Nearly every player complied and collected the bonus.

  The “Swinging A’s,” as they came to be known, also had the most-feared lineup and the best pitching staff in the American League. And when they came to Detroit in the late summer to face the AL East–leading Tigers, they took two of three games. Two of the A’s stars, Reggie Jackson and Bert Campaneris, were also drilled by Tigers pitchers in the series. An accident? Not likely.

  When the A’s came back for another series in August, both benches emptied after some inside pitches from the Detroit rookie Bill Slayback. Various players squared off, and Horton remained undefeated, decking Oakland’s Mike Epstein with one punch.

  Both the A’s-Tigers series drew an average of about forty thousand fans to timeworn Tiger Stadium, which had now become one of the rare American outposts where baseball was thriving. The blue-collar city of Detroit loved its hard-nosed, gritty manager and leader—the one kicking dirt on umpires and fighting for his team daily. To Detroit baseball fans, Billy was an antiestablishment guy in his own way. They loved his up-by-his-bootstraps background and Everyman appeal.

  “Anywhere you went with Billy in Detroit back then, he would be cheered,” said Ron Perranoski, the relief pitcher acquired by Detroit from Minnesota late in 1971.

  As he had in Minnesota, Billy adapted to his environment—not that it was hard. Michigan has great fishing and hunting, and Billy spent many an off day or midday before a night game in the countryside throwing a line out on some lake as the guest of a Tigers business associate he had met—or even a random fan.

  Detroit was a shot-and-beer town, and Billy and Art Fowler waded into the thick bar culture with unbridled merriment. It’s where Billy first made friends with Bill Reedy, a local who knew Art Fowler and who would end up owning Reedy’s Saloon, another Billy haunt near the stadium. These were homey saloons full of Teamsters, assembly-line workers, office staff, and tire manufacturers. It was one big convivial gathering, and if anyone got less than hospitable with the Tigers’ manager, Reedy, a burly guy and a former amateur boxer, knew how to keep order.

  By September, the Orioles surprisingly ran out of gas and dropped from the race. The Tigers were stumbling, too, and lost their AL East lead to the Boston Red Sox. Detroit nonetheless hung in there. It was a determined team, though maybe not quite as unified as Billy wanted. Northrup was slumping badly and blamed Billy for moving him around in the lineup. In mid-season 1972, Northrup simply stopped talking to Billy, who after a few attempts at breaking through the silent treatment gave up and refused to talk to Northrup. The two communicated through the coaches, if at all.

  There were other whispers of discord that swept through the team, mostly on the road—Billy was drunk in the front of the plane or Billy almost got in a fight in the hotel lobby bar. The Tigers’ front office heard the rumblings. There was added tension on this team because Billy essentially had only three regular starters (Rodríguez, Brinkman, and Kaline when he was healthy); everyone else was caught in a revolving platoon system that Billy felt was necessary to squeeze every last run out of a sputtering batting lineup. And some players in the Tigers’ dugout were simply tired of Billy’s incessant pressuring tactics, even if they kept their mouths shut—or kept their distance. The veteran core of the lineup continued to play hard, happy at least that Billy had them chasing a division title. In that sense, not much had changed in twenty years of baseball. Casey Stengel, who platooned his players, had once famously said that every manager has ten guys who love him, ten guys who hate him, and five who are undecided. The key for a manager, Stengel said, was keeping the five who are on the fence about you away from the ten who hate you.

  By the last weekend of the 1972 regular season, the first-place Red Sox came to Detroit for the final three games of the season. Boston had a half-game lead over the Tigers. The division winner would be the team that won two of those three sold-out games in Detroit.

  The Tigers quickly won the first two games, ending the drama. The Red Sox won the final game of the regular season, but the Tigers won the division with an 86–70 record, one-half game better than Boston’s 85–70 record. The settlement of the April players’ strike established that some teams would play fewer games than others, but it had been agreed upon in April that division winners would be determined by winning percentage. There were no makeup games. The Tigers would come to be known as the “half-game champs.”

  Billy had led two teams in three years to the American League Championship Series. Each team had been a reclamation project. It was the work of a budding baseball genius, which is exactly how most of the baseball community now viewed him.

  On the eve of the ALCS against the AL West champion Athletics, even Reggie Jackson said, “I don’t like Billy Ma
rtin because he plays tough baseball. But I’d probably love him if I played for him.”

  Billy had won in Minnesota with speed and young talent—some of them unheralded, discarded players from Spanish-speaking countries. The Twins were a middle-of-the-plains miracle. Three years later, in Detroit, a city reeling from racial strife, Billy had taken over an old team divided by cliques and the contempt that familiarity can breed. It was a team that was a mix of white and black players who lacked the spark of youth and the strength of unity. And yet, again, with his detractors chortling that he had walked into an untenable situation, Billy had produced a winner, upending a burgeoning dynasty in Baltimore.

  Billy took satisfaction in those triumphs, but as he told his closest friends and family, he felt unsatisfied until he got back to the World Series and won it. He was happy to have given his players in Minnesota and in Detroit a glimpse of the promised land, but he had to do more than show it to them. He had to bring them there. He had to let them enjoy all its fruits.

  Billy Martin the manager could not be fulfilled until he was what he was as a player—a World Series champion, a World Series hero. If Billy in the 1950s was chasing a childhood dream, then Billy in the 1970s was chasing the vision of himself he had fashioned as a young adult. That’s when he was the best at his job, a perennial champion. He was baseball royalty, the game he loved giving back to him in innumerable ways. Billy the manager wanted nothing less. He had to reclaim his kingdom.

  23

  AS HIS TWINS WERE in 1969, Billy’s 1972 Tigers were big underdogs in the ALCS. The A’s had the better starting pitching and a more dependable bullpen, a more potent lineup, more youth, more athleticism, more speed, and a veteran, astute manager in Dick Williams. But few expected the Tigers to roll over. Detroit and Oakland had already come to blows on the field in consecutive seasons, donnybrooks that resulted in broken bones and stitches. In the baseball community, there was every expectation of more fireworks, a portent that proved prescient.

  The sparring began before the first game of the series in Oakland. When the Tigers checked into their Oakland hotel, Billy discovered that he could not have his usual rooftop suite, which he always used to entertain his East Bay guests when the Tigers visited Oakland during the regular season. Aware of Billy’s habits, and hoping to unnerve him, Charlie Finley had reserved the rooftop suite throughout the playoffs.

  Privately, Billy fumed, but when reporters asked him about it, he laughed it off.

  “You could probably fill a suite like that with all your friends from the area,” a reporter remarked.

  “Or my enemies,” Billy quipped.

  During the first game in Oakland on Saturday, October 7, Lolich, who won three games in the 1968 World Series, and the A’s starter, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, kept the game at 1–1 through eight innings. Duke Sims led off the top of the ninth with a double. Cash was up next, but Williams had a deep bullpen and he went to it.

  With Monday an off day in the series, Williams needed only three starters, so he relegated Vida Blue, the 1971 Cy Young Award winner who had sat out most of the 1972 season in a salary dispute, to relief duties. It was a wonderful ace to have up your sleeve. Not many teams have ever had a bullpen setup pitcher who months earlier was the youngest American League MVP in the twentieth century.

  Billy didn’t like the lefty-hitter Cash’s chances against the left-handed Blue, so he had Cash bunt. In the early 1970s, even cleanup hitters could bunt—at least on Billy’s teams—and Cash put down a perfect sacrifice bunt toward third base. When the throw to first was misplayed, the Tigers had runners at first and second with no outs.

  Horton was the next batter, but Williams took out Blue for the right-handed Rollie Fingers, a second ace up his sleeve. Billy countered with the lefty pinch hitter Gates Brown, but Fingers got Brown to pop out in foul territory. Northrup was up next, another lefty but normally a good bunter.

  As Fingers went into his motion—a full wind-up—Sims sprinted toward home plate from third base. The suicide squeeze was on, but Northrup, who wheeled around to bunt late, fouled off the pitch. Billy always wondered if Northrup missed the bunt attempt intentionally, preferring to swing away. He also claimed that Northrup either missed or ignored the squeeze bunt signal since he had not given the third-base coach the return signal acknowledging the squeeze play. It may have been somehow apropos that a communication breakdown between a player and a manager who did not speak to each other got in the way of the potential winning run in a pivotal game.

  With the element of surprise gone—Fingers went into the stretch on his next pitch—Billy could not try another squeeze bunt. Northrup smacked a hard ground ball to second base that became an inning-ending double play.

  In the top of the eleventh inning, the Tigers took a 2–1 lead and Billy faced a familiar decision entering the bottom of the inning. Lolich had given up only seven hits and he had retired the last seven A’s in order, but it was also the eleventh inning and Lolich had already pitched more than 2,600 Major League innings in his career. He had done enough in a tense playoff game. Then again, Lolich’s postseason record at that juncture was 3–0 with a 1.46 ERA.

  Billy did not have Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers in the bullpen. His closer was twenty-four-year old Chuck Seelbach, who had won the job by default when Perranoski’s aging arm gave out during the summer and he was released. Seelbach had no playoff experience.

  Trusting his heart, Billy chose to stick with his veteran. The Tigers ace promptly gave up back-to-back singles. The A’s had runners on first and second base when Billy brought on Seelbach. Anticipating a bunt, Rodríguez played in from third base. Oakland catcher Gene Tenace did bunt, and Rodríguez pounced on it and threw to third base where Brinkman had run over from shortstop. The lead runner was out.

  The Tigers seemed to have dodged the most dangerous bullet and had kept runners at first and second base with one out. But Oakland rookie Gonzalo Marquez slapped a slow ground ball through the right side of the infield for a single. The pinch runner from second base, Mike Hegan, scored easily. Kaline fielded the ball in right field, and with Tenace racing around second base, the ten-time Gold Glove winner—known for his strong and accurate arm—fired a strike to Rodríguez at third base.

  The A’s were giving Billy some of his own medicine, forcing the defense to make a play with Tenace sliding into the base just as the throw arrived. Kaline’s throw was a one-hopper and on line, and Rodríguez, also a Gold Glove winner in his career, was in position. In the cloud of dust, the ball deflected off Tenace’s hip and skipped by Rodríguez.

  Tenace leaped to his feet and ran home with the winning run in a 3–2 Oakland victory.

  Billy had managed four ALCS games, and three of them had now ended in one-run defeats. Not surprisingly, Billy focused on his team’s missed opportunities.

  “We should have won it in nine innings,” Billy told reporters in his office after the game. “The screwed-up suicide squeeze beat us.”

  Game 2 was not close with Oakland jumping to a 5–0 lead after five innings. But as was expected, the combustible nature of the matchup eventually produced a notable flare-up.

  In the first inning of the game, the speedy Campaneris had singled, stolen second and third base, and scored on a single. In the third inning, he had singled again. In the fifth inning, he had another single and eventually scored on a wild pitch.

  The Cuban-born Campaneris, who would lead the AL in stolen bases six times and played with a fiery intensity, was Billy’s kind of player. Indeed, in the 1980s, Billy would trade for him with the Yankees. But watching his team on its way to an 0–2 deficit in the series, Billy was fed up with Campaneris’s unbridled assault on his Tigers defense. He had apparently anticipated as much, according to Tony Kubek, Billy’s former Yankees teammate and now an NBC broadcaster working the game. The two had dinner the night before Game 2.

  “Billy and I were sitting there and Billy said, ‘We gotta stop Campaneris,’” Kubek said. “He went on, ‘He�
��s beating us with his feet. We gotta get him.’”

  Campaneris led off the seventh inning, and the first pitch from Detroit rookie Lerrin LaGrow was a fastball down and in that struck Campaneris squarely on the left ankle. Campaneris fell backward but never released the bat in his right hand. When he rose to his feet, he flung the bat at LaGrow, the bat whirling through the air horizontally. The bat spun like a helicopter blade about five feet off the ground, and the six-foot-five LaGrow ducked low to avoid it.

  Home plate umpire Nestor Chylak kept Campaneris from charging the mound, but now the Tigers were coming after Campaneris, led by Billy, who was restrained by three umpires as he tried to get at Campaneris.

  Campaneris and LaGrow were ejected from the game. The rest of the game, a 5–0 Oakland victory, was uneventful. In his office, Billy said of Campaneris, “I don’t know what that idiot was thinking. If there’s ever another fight out there, I’m going out there and beat the shit out of him.”

  LaGrow said his pitch to Campaneris “just got away.” Few were convinced it was unintentional.

  Oakland owner Charlie Finley blamed the whole episode on Billy. Billy’s response proved that he had been paying attention when Gretchen took him to see The Godfather in the spring.

  “Tell Charlie that if something like this happens again,” Billy said, “he may wake up some morning with his mule’s head in his bed.”

  Campaneris was suspended for the rest of the series, but separately, the Tigers also lost their shortstop, Eddie Brinkman, who aggravated a pinched nerve running out a double. Brinkman, who had played 315 of the 318 games at shortstop under Billy in Detroit, was out of the series with a numb foot. Billy had used “Steady Eddie” so much he did not bother carrying a true backup shortstop. Now the Tigers would have to play McAuliffe, the second baseman who had not been a regular shortstop since 1966.