Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Billy’s umpire baiting was well honed, and well known, at an early age. His high school yearbook had a cartoon noting as much, and also featured Billy’s childhood buddy Rube de Alba.(Lewis Figone)

  The 1948 Oakland Oaks were known as “Casey’s Eight Old Men and The Kid.” The Oaks’ ballpark was just a few miles south of Billy’s childhood home.(Lewis Figone)

  Billy with teammate Dario Lodigiani, joking that they’ll win the Pacific Coast League title by a nose. As soon as he had the money, Billy had cosmetic surgery on his nose.(Lewis Figone)

  Billy with the Oaks in 1949.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Billy, with manager Casey Stengel, when he joined the Yankees. Billy eventually came to be known as “Casey’s boy.”(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  The Yankees’ new doubleplay combination in 1950, Phil Rizzuto and Alfred Manuel “Billy” Martin.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  In 1950 the New York press used the same words over and over to describe the new Yankees infielder. He was a sparkplug, an agitator, irrepressible, and, most often, Billy the Kid.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Billy’s method of turning the double play was controversial throughout his career.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Billy’s first marriage, to Berkeley’s Lois Berndt, always seemed superseded by baseball. The wedding ceremony did not start until Billy finished an exhibition game.(Lewis Figone)

  Billy’s lunging, game-saving catch of Jackie Robinson’s windblown pop-up was the dramatic turning point of the 1952 World Series.(Corbis/Bettmann)

  World Series winners Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, Billy, and Joe Collins. Billy was the 1953 Series MVP.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  The Three Musketeers. Billy (center) with Mickey Mantle (left) and Whitey Ford, on their way to breaking another Yankees curfew.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy is tagged out while attempting to steal home in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Brooklyn and the Yankees met in the Fall Classic almost every year during baseball’s Golden Age.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Billy and Mickey Mantle, whose pranks in the Yankees’ clubhouse tested the patience of the team’s veterans. Even the stoic Joe DiMaggio was not immune to their hijinks. “Billy and Mickey were like school kids when they were together,” said teammate Bobby Richardson.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  In the 1950s, Billy (third from right) regularly rubbed shoulders with Hollywood’s biggest stars. To Billy’s left is singer-showman Jimmy Durante. Whitey Ford is third from left.(Lewis Figone)

  Now a Cincinnati Red, Billy slugged Chicago pitcher Jim Brewer after a 1960 brushback pitch. The brawl kept Billy in court for years.(Corbis/Bettmann)

  Billy Jr. spent many hours with his father at the ballpark.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy and his second wife, Gretchen, with their son, Billy Jr., in the early 1970s. Billy relished his comfortable suburban existence for more than a decade, beginning in the mid-1960s.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy and his lifelong friend Lew Figone hunted frequently in Northern California. Figone became one of Billy’s most trusted advisers.(Lewis Figone)

  In his first season as a Major League manager, Billy revamped the Minnesota Twins and won the inaugural AL West Championship in 1969.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  In Detroit, where Billy took a downtrodden Tigers team to the playoffs.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy and Reggie Jackson had a complicated relationship in 1977. They nearly came to blows in a Fenway Park dugout but months later horsed around in the outfield before a World Series game.(Associated Press)

  Gretchen with a Texas Rangers memento.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  With Billy in the dugout, an umpire’s night was rarely uneventful.(Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux)

  Billy’s stunning Old Timers’ Day return, days after he was forced to resign as manager. A boisterous standing ovation by the crowd went on for several minutes. Billy called it his best day in baseball.(National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  Billy and George Steinbrenner were all smiles during the 1978 news conference announcing his return. (General manager Al Rosen is in the background.) Billy would be dismissed and rehired by Steinbrenner three more times.(D. Gorton/The New York Times/Redux)

  Something seen more often before games than after them: Billy in repose in his Yankee Stadium office.(Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux)

  Billy leaving the Ohio funeral of Thurman Munson.(Corbis/Brian Smith)

  Always the people’s choice: a banner in a sold-out Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum welcomed Billy back in 1980.(Ron Riesterer/Photoshelter)

  The fiftieth wedding anniversary party of Jenny and Jack Downey. Standing, left to right: Billy’s older brother Frank, Billy, sisters Pat and Joan, and younger brother Jack Jr.(Pat Irvine)

  Whatever uniform Billy wore, the men in blue were a frequent target of his ire.(Ron Riesterer/Photoshelter)

  Billy and his mother walking on the field in Oakland in the early 1980s. Jenny threw out the first pitch. At the end of the decade, they died within weeks of each other.(Pat Irvine)

  Billy’s family gathered at Yankee Stadium in 1986 when Billy’s number 1 was retired. Although Billy had been a fixture in New York since 1950, for many in his California-based family, it was their only trip to the city.(Pat Irvine)

  Billy brought his good friend Yogi Berra back to the Yankees as a quasi–assistant manager in 1977.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy with his longtime lawyer and confidant, Judge Eddie Sapir. The flamboyant, charismatic Louisiana judge got Billy out of some notably messy transgressions.(Courtesy of Judge Eddie Sapir)

  Billy in 1988, his last season in the dugout. The Yankees were twelve games over .500 when he was discharged as manager.(Billy Martin Jr. Collection)

  Billy and Jill Martin at a Christmas party in the late 1980s. Together throughout the decade, they married in January 1988, roughly two years before Billy’s fatal auto accident.(Courtesy Of Jilluann Martin)

  Steinbrenner, Mantle, and President Richard Nixon beside Billy’s casket.(Associated Press/Pat Carroll)

  Billy Jr., left, and Jill, whose hand is being held by President Nixon. Earlier, Nixon had taken a sobbing Billy Jr. by the arm and shown him the crowds outside the cathedral. “I want you to see all the people who loved your father,” Nixon said.(Associated Press/Susan Ragan)

  The crash scene of Billy’s fatal accident in Fenton, New York. At dusk on a snowy Christmas Day, Billy’s pickup truck roared through the intersection, took a left down the hill, and slid off the road, plummeting into a ditch. This picture was taken in 2013. The four-foot ditch was filled in by town workers in the 1990s.(Bill Pennington)

  Billy’s gravesite at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. Babe Ruth’s grave is nearby. Visitors leave baseballs and Yankees memorabilia at both sites.(Jack Pennington)

  29

  REGGIE NEVER CONTACTED BILLY after his introductory news conference. Billy did not reach out to Reggie. It might be customary for a manager to call a new player signed to his team, especially a player of such renown.

  It would also be more than customary for that manager to have been invited to the splashy news conference announcing the acquisition of a celebrated new player. That would make it easy to welcome him.

  But neither thing happened, a foreboding and awkward first step in the relationship between Billy and Reggie. Both said the right things when contacted by reporters. Reggie, who did not know that Billy had not been invited, praised Billy for getting the Yankees to the World Series. Billy did not bring up his preference for Joe Rudi or any of his reservations about how Reggie would affect the team chemistry.

  “I’m happy to have another bat in the lineup,” Billy told the New York
Post. “Reggie will make us better. He’s been a winner everywhere he went. And I like winners. We’ll get along just fine.”

  Most of Billy’s friends and allies now say that Billy was telling the truth when he said he did not have an issue with Reggie. Though perhaps not the whole truth.

  “Billy had nothing personal with Reggie,” Eddie Sapir, his adviser and legal consultant, said. “The problem was the people that Billy was loyal to on that Yankee team: Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, and guys like that. Those were Billy’s guys. And Billy knew they had a problem with Reggie, or probably would. They were blue-collar-type guys and Reggie had this big contract and you could see it all coming. It was going to be trouble.”

  Lou Piniella, a friend of Reggie’s when they were Yankees teammates and a friend and managerial protégé of Billy’s in the 1980s, agreed, although he saw both sides to the brewing acrimony.

  “It was obviously going to be explosive,” Piniella said. “And Billy was right, it did cause problems with Thurman and Graig. But at the same time, let’s face it, Reggie was never Billy’s kind of player. I think Billy did resent him a little. He didn’t like most guys who called attention to themselves.

  “And on the other side, Reggie had issues with anybody who didn’t love him right away. He’s a nice guy at heart but he wants to be noticed. He certainly didn’t make it easy on Billy. And Billy wasn’t going to make a big deal about Reggie out of respect for the other players who had already played hard for him and won a pennant.”

  Others saw Billy’s dislike and resentment of Reggie from the start.

  “He never wanted to give Reggie a chance,” said Henry Hecht, the New York Post beat writer who had a complicated and eventually adversarial relationship with Billy. “That was always obvious to me.”

  Whatever the preconceptions, the rancor that Billy feared started before Reggie and Munson were ever in the same clubhouse together.

  Before spring training started, Munson instigated a public snit with George Steinbrenner, claiming that Steinbrenner had promised him that he would always be the highest-paid Yankee other than Catfish Hunter. Now Reggie’s salary exceeded Munson’s. Steinbrenner appeased Munson with a few deferred payments, but the bad blood was already highlighted in the New York papers.

  The atmosphere around the Yankees was tense not only because of the ramifications of the Reggie signing. Steinbrenner, embarrassed by Cincinnati’s World Series sweep, was micromanaging every detail of the team’s operations and began to exert the total control for which he would become famous in the next few years. Top executives were fleeing the Yankees’ offices in droves, taking other baseball jobs to get away from Steinbrenner.

  Three general managers had quit; so had the club’s attorney, Joe Garagiola Jr. Two publicity directors had already resigned (there would be many more to follow), and so had a number of scouts and assistant general managers, such as Pat Gillick, who would go on to build winning teams in Toronto, Baltimore, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

  Overall, more than twenty-five top Yankees’ front-office workers left the team between 1975 and the beginning of the 1977 season.

  They left despite knowing what everyone in baseball knew—that the Yankees were a team on the rise. They left because Steinbrenner was an intractable and unreasonable boss.

  Decades later, it’s easy to view Steinbrenner in a different light. By the time he died in 2010, Steinbrenner’s image had been transformed into that of a benevolent, almost grandfatherly presence shepherding the Yankees family. He was the aging patriarch who doled out the big checks and smiled, even wept, as the Yankees raised championship trophies in the late 1990s and 2000s. Steinbrenner had been changed by his second suspension from baseball in 1990. When he was reinstated in 1993, he was chastened, at least compared to his earlier self. The edges had softened.

  But in the 1970s and 1980s, Steinbrenner was tyrannical. He badgered everyone on the payroll and anyone else who was even remotely associated with the team. Reporters covering the team who wanted a season parking pass had to personally appear before him in his spring training office. If the reporter was new to the beat, George would subject the reporter to a grilling that might include all kinds of probing questions:

  Who was the greatest president of the United States?

  Should Truman have dropped the A-bomb on Japan?

  Who was America’s best author?

  What’s your favorite poem?

  If George did not like a reporter’s answers, he would start an argument that might end up with George standing, shouting, and calling the reporter names. Needless to say, that reporter would be sent away from George’s office without a parking pass. Several days or a week later, George would call him back (George never grilled or argued with the very few female reporters who covered the team). In the second meeting, the reporter would then be grilled again on different topics, and though it might take thirty minutes, George would wait until he received answers that satisfied him. That made the reporter worthy of a parking pass (a privilege more or less assured by the press protocols of the day anyway).

  Steinbrenner’s demanding ways wore down everyone. At the team’s spring training complex one year, he impulsively fired a teenage intern who had inadvertently left his aging Datsun compact car in the wrong spot in the team parking lot. George had a thing about his parking lot. In this case, the misplaced Datsun was making George’s guest, Donald Trump, wait too long for his white Lincoln Continental.

  With an unceremonious “You’re fired,” George discharged the young intern on the spot as Trump stood nearby. (Maybe that’s where Trump got the idea for his catch phrase on The Apprentice, the TV show he starred in twenty-five years later.)

  Anyway, with the intern no longer available to help, George soon realized there was no one left to move the cars. George jumped behind the wheels of the various cars and started moving them himself—gunning accelerators and jamming on the brakes until they squealed. Then George handed Trump his car keys with a theatric apology: “As you can see, I won’t let this happen again.”

  No one escaped George’s incessant meddling and browbeating. As Harvey Greene, one of many to work as George’s press relations director, said, “When the team was on the road, you’d come back to your hotel late at night, and if your phone light was on, you knew that either there had been a death in the family or George was looking for you. After a while, you started to hope that there had been a death in the family.”

  If George was one continuous complication for Billy, and Reggie was a budding one, there were other changes to the 1977 team that required the manager’s attention. Another new arrival was Don Gullett, a pitching star of the 1976 World Series for the Reds. He had signed a six-year, $6 million free-agent contract. That caused two other Yankees starters to hire Gullett’s agent, hoping to get their salaries increased. Other Yankees were seeking raises, too. The reliever Sparky Lyle was holding out for a $150,000 pay increase. Mickey Rivers, upset that the Yankees asked him to draw more walks and drag bunt in 1977, announced that he wanted to be traded.

  But for all the expected drama among Reggie, George, Thurman, and Billy, it was an uneventful spring training in 1977, and every Yankees starter or key contributor eventually signed a contract. Two days before the start of the season, the Yankees traded for Chicago shortstop Bucky Dent, maybe the last piece they needed.

  The Yankees lost three of their first four games once the regular season started. As they headed to Milwaukee for their fifth game, Steinbrenner—not Billy—informed the team that he was calling for a voluntary workout during an off day. The players’ union contract prohibited Steinbrenner from making the workout mandatory.

  “It’s not that I think we should be in a panic about being 1–3,” Steinbrenner said. “But I think we should make sure everyone is in shape and focused.”

  At his locker, Munson had a response for Steinbrenner: “Did he really use the word ‘panic’?”

  Munson, Billy, Reggie, and almost all the pla
yers did not show up for the voluntary workout.

  “I remember I went to the racetrack,” Piniella said years later, adding with a laugh, “I saw most of the team and the coaches there.”

  The Yankees didn’t play that well in Milwaukee, and the first tiff between Reggie and Billy occurred. Jackson told reporters after one game that his left elbow was sore and prevented him from throwing effectively from the outfield. Billy benched Reggie the next day.

  “He just told the whole world his elbow was hurting,” said Billy, who did not like his players to ever discuss injuries because it gave opposing teams too much information. “I’m not going to let Milwaukee run on us every time a ball is hit to Reggie in right field.”