Weaver always drove Billy crazy.
“That little shit never even played in the major leagues, what does he know about knockdown pitches?” Billy said. “Career minor leaguer. Go tell him to shut up.”
Which the writers dutifully did. Responded Weaver, “I never played in the majors but I drove in 101 runs one season in the minors. I bet he never did that.”
When the managers met at home plate the next day, Billy turned to Weaver and said, “Three-ninety-two.”
“What’s that?” Weaver said.
“That was my batting average in C ball in 1947,” Billy said. “Did you ever hit .392? You want to talk about your 101 RBIs in the minors one year. I had 101 RBIs by July in 1947.”
Weaver giggled.
“This is good,” Weaver said. “And if we keep fighting, we’ll have a big crowd in Baltimore when you come there next week. We need that.”
Billy laughed and walked away.
But the month of May brought more uninspired play by the Yankees. On May 14, after Rivers lazily chased a fly ball that led to a crucial run in a defeat, Billy announced that he was going to bench Rivers for a while.
The mood around the team was foul. A benching of a star player puts everyone on edge. Making matters worse, the team was flying a commercial flight to Chicago after the game. More accustomed to convenient and sophisticated—and insulated—charter flights, the players weren’t happy.
Then the flight was delayed, which gave the Yankees, Billy included, ninety extra minutes to drink in the airport bar (the drinking had started in the clubhouse). By the time the passengers boarded the flight, it was not a good combination in the cabin—semi-drunk, slightly ornery Yankees mixed in with midwestern men in business suits heading to Chicago.
Munson and Gossage, both well oiled from the bar, were in coach listening to country music on a portable tape deck that Munson held in his lap. The music was loud, and a man seated in front of Munson turned around and asked, “Would you mind lowering that a bit?”
As Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger wrote later, Munson’s retort was “Mind your own business, fuckface.”
Word got back to Billy in first class that trouble was brewing back in coach with his players. He dispatched Elston Howard to talk to Munson about turning down the music.
“Who are you, the music coach?” Munson said to Howard when Billy’s message was relayed.
Now Howard was mad at Billy and wanted him to reprimand Munson, which Billy tried to do. But Munson, usually one of Billy’s best buddies, wasn’t in the mood for peacemaking. A verbal row ensued, enough to get the rest of the passengers’ attention. Rivers, playing cards in the back of the plane and annoyed in general, decided to take Munson’s side of things and threw a deck of cards at Billy.
Coaches Dick Howser and Yogi Berra managed to keep the major combatants separated. The “regular” passengers on the flight had to scurry for their safety amid all the cursing, pushing, and shoving.
Two things happened in the wake of the incident:
One, after 1978, the Yankees never again flew commercial as Steinbrenner ordered Killer Kane to book only charter flights for his riotous Yankees.
And two, Steinbrenner once again started to believe that Billy did not have control of his team.
The off-the-record phone calls to reporters from George resumed, both to plant the seed that the owner was worried about his manager but also to gather information. Billy had his enemies among the writers, and some were willing to tell George their impressions of how the team was unraveling because Billy was not enforcing a code of discipline. The commercial flight experience was cited as proof.
In fact, Billy always had trouble telling his players what to do off the field. He did not believe in it, just as Casey Stengel had not believed in it. The players weren’t supposed to embarrass the team—in other words, don’t get caught—otherwise they could do pretty much what they wanted.
Not much had changed on the Yankees since the night at the Copacabana. But just like George Weiss in 1957, George Steinbrenner in 1978 did not like to think that his team was unfit to mingle with the general public. Fighting with each other was one thing; fighting with the rank and file was not acceptable and Billy was being put on notice again.
In that way, it was business as usual; conflict off the field irked management. But worse, the 1978 Yankees were losing. The combination of the two always brought trouble and typically substantial, deleterious change as well.
Billy was hurtling toward another career cataclysm, and as was usually the case, he did not see it coming.
On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, not surprisingly, Billy was moved to think about his future. His musings on an older Billy Martin could not have been more at odds with the Billy Martin he came to be in the eleven years that followed. But those ruminations about his future depict a far more contemplative Billy than his familiar image suggests—which he also acknowledged.
On the day of his birthday, Billy sat down for a long interview with Murray Chass, the New York Times’s respected Yankees beat writer. Billy almost always gave Chass good quotes. Billy likely respected Chass’s professionalism, though theirs was not a natural connection. Billy usually got along best with the writers who drank with him, something Chass generally did not do.
But in his birthday interview with Chass, Billy admitted that he had thought about a day when he would no longer manage. He wanted to be a team executive.
“Man would like to make his roots somewhere,” Billy said. “I don’t want to go around from club to club. I’m here where I started, I’d like to stay here as long as possible. Then someday, I’d hope they would say: ‘You’ve done a good job. Come upstairs; there’s a job for you.’ I’m not anxious to be a general manager but I’d like to be something like assistant to the president where I’d help coordinate things.”
Asked if he had the diplomacy for such a job, Billy answered, “I’m actually very patient. I only use my temper to get things done. It motivates me and it definitely motivates others around me. But I know what’s going to happen 50 years from now. People will think I got mad every time somebody said hello to me.”
In the story Chass wrote, he quoted Steinbrenner on Billy’s evolution as a middle-aged man.
“People say he hasn’t changed,” George said. “But they’re wrong. He’s becoming a better man, a better organization man, a better business man and a better manager because of it.”
Which was all well and good in May when Billy turned fifty, but by mid-June of 1978 the Yankees were seven games behind the Red Sox.
The Yankees had dropped in the standings largely because their starting rotation was in shambles. Messersmith couldn’t pitch at all. Catfish Hunter’s Hall of Fame career was running on fumes. Gullett had a seriously damaged arm. His last Major League game was only weeks away, on July 9, 1978, when he would face nine batters in the first inning in Milwaukee and get only two batters out. He never pitched again.
Tidrow was about to begin a long career as a setup reliever because he was faltering as a starter. Ed Figueroa had unspecific but debilitating arm pain that the Yankees’ doctors could not diagnose. Munson’s knees were keeping him out of the lineup, and second baseman Willie Randolph had been sidelined with a knee injury as well.
“So many injuries,” Roy White said. “It wasn’t Billy’s fault. With everyone out, we couldn’t jell.”
To Steinbrenner, all that mattered was the losing.
“I’m not waiting until we’re 10 or 12 games back to do something,” he said. “We’ll have to shake up the clubhouse somehow.”
On June 20 Billy boarded a plane to Detroit, and while on board he assembled the writers.
“This talk about me getting fired is ruining my sleep,” he said. “My son reads about it and it bothers him. My mother reads about it and it bothers her. There are managers all over baseball who have never won, let alone won two straight pennants and a World Series. They don’t have to put up with
this. But I do.”
Multiple writers wrote how drained and gaunt Billy appeared. One suggested that he was 20 pounds below his 1950s playing weight of 175 pounds. Billy was indeed neglecting his body, eating less and drinking more with his mind fixed on whether he would be fired from the only job he ever wanted.
Munson met with Billy at a bar on the road in early July to try to raise his manager’s spirits. But as the two men talked about what was happening with the team, and likely to happen, tears started to well in Billy’s eyes.
Munson, fearful that others would see Billy crying, took him outside. The two walked around the block.
“That man doesn’t know anything about what we do—what we go through,” Billy said of Steinbrenner. “We’re the real Yankees. What’s he? Some rich guy.”
Billy was sobbing.
“I’m a Yankee,” he said. “I’m a Yankee.”
Munson guided Billy toward another block. They would walk for fifteen minutes until Billy regained his composure. The next day, Munson became the anonymous source for a couple of newspaper stories. This unnamed, prominent Yankee implored Steinbrenner to get off Billy’s back, saying that the team could still win if the stress level around the team was reduced.
Steinbrenner backed off and announced that Billy would be his manager for the rest of the season regardless of where the Yankees ended up in the standings. New York was still new to the meaninglessness of George’s proclamations. When Billy appeared with the lineup card at home plate that night at Yankee Stadium, more than fifty-two thousand fans gave him a standing ovation. They believed their favorite Yankee was once again safe.
Then the Yankees fell 11.5 games behind the Red Sox.
By Monday, July 17, the Yankees were thirteen games out of first place. Before that day’s game, Reggie met with Steinbrenner. Reggie, like many other Yankees, was not happy with the way the season was going. He was struggling against left-handed pitchers, his batting average had dipped 15 points from 1977, and he was on a pace to hit 10 fewer homers than he had hit in 1977. Plus, his fielding was a continuing source of concern, and he had been relegated to the designated hitter’s role. Reggie liked playing the field.
He asked Steinbrenner to get him in right field more often. But Steinbrenner sided with Billy. He told Reggie that his fielding was lousy.
As Reggie tells the story, he and George started arguing about a variety of things. Rosen was also at the meeting, though he said little. George decided that the moment should be a tough-love pep talk for Reggie.
“You better get your head on straight, boy,” George said at one point.
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” Reggie said.
“I’m talking to you.”
“Well, let me tell you something. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again as long as you live.”
As he had in Gabe Paul’s hotel suite a year earlier, Reggie turned to the Yankees’ general manager.
“Al, you’re Jewish, what do you make of that ‘boy’ remark?” he asked Rosen.
Rosen said Reggie was interpreting it incorrectly.
“I think you should both cool down,” Rosen added.
But Steinbrenner was raving.
“Cool down, hell,” the owner bellowed. “Reggie, you get the hell out of my office.”
Reggie answered, “I don’t feel like leaving. I kind of like it here. I’m staying.”
So George stormed out of his office. And after several minutes, Reggie went down to the Yankees’ clubhouse. He was the designated hitter, batting fourth, in the game against Kansas City that was starting in forty minutes.
Billy knew nothing of Reggie’s meeting with George. He later said he noticed that Reggie was acting “pissed.” He planned to ask Reggie about it after the game or the next day. It was nearly game time. He wasn’t going to bother him now.
Nothing unusual happened until the tenth inning when Munson singled in a tied game. Reggie came to the plate. As Reggie stepped into the batter’s box, Howser, the third-base coach, signaled for a bunt.
Reggie was incredulous. He was batting cleanup. Not inconsequentially, especially to Reggie, the game was also the Monday night nationally televised game.
Reggie turned to stare in the dugout at Billy, who did not flinch. Howser flashed the bunt signal again. When Reggie squared to bunt—way too early—the Royals’ closer, Al Hrabosky, recognized what was going on and did what all pitchers of that era were taught to do in the situation. He threw at Reggie’s head and Reggie had to get out of the way. There was no way to lay down a bunt on that pitch.
With the count now 1–0, Brett and Royals first baseman John Wathan each took a few steps toward home plate. This was part of Billy’s ploy; if the bunt did not work, at least it got the corner infielders to play in. It was a one-pitch strategy, so Billy took the bunt sign off. But Reggie, angry at everything in the Yankees’ world at the time, wasn’t looking at Howser by this point. Instead, he made a halfhearted attempt at bunting the next pitch and fouled it off.
Lou Piniella was watching from the dugout.
“I looked at Billy and I thought he was going to explode,” he said. “We all saw him take the bunt sign off. It was baseball mutiny.”
Billy was yelling to no one in particular, “What the hell is he doing? Swing away, swing away.”
Gene Michael felt as if he was witnessing a moment of déjà vu.
“I had not seen it before but it was like I had seen it in a dream or a premonition,” Michael said. “I knew something like this would happen eventually. It was like destiny.”
Billy and Reggie, on intersecting paths since 1969, were poised to clash again.
Howser called time out and jogged down to talk to Reggie. As Reggie wrote in Becoming Mr. October, “Billy Martin wanted a bunt; he was going to get a bunt. I was tired of all the crap . . . I suppose it was obvious that I was giving a half-assed effort at bunting. Dick came down, made sure I knew Billy wanted me to hit away. But I was past that now.”
Howser told Reggie again that Billy wanted him to swing away. Said Reggie, “No, he told me to bunt. And no offense to you, but I’m going to bunt.”
Answered Howser, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Reggie went back to home plate and fouled off another bunt attempt for strike two. Then he popped another bunt attempt into the air behind home plate where it was caught for an out. Reggie returned to the dugout, walking to the far end opposite where Billy stood. Reggie put his glasses on a ledge behind the bench. He later said that he was waiting for the fistfight he expected to have with Billy.
“I hoped I had done something to create a spark, to create a confrontation,” Reggie wrote in his second autobiography. “I was looking for it this time!”
But Billy did not move from his post on the home plate side of the home dugout. He had been condemned in some quarters for initiating the tussle in the Fenway Park dugout.
This time, Billy did not try to have the national television cameras peering into the dugout covered with a towel. He seethed. But he kept it together. The inning went on. The Yankees did not score.
Billy called over Michael, a coach he could trust to keep his calm. He told Michael to go over and ask Reggie to go inside the clubhouse.
“Billy kind of spit out the words, but he didn’t swear and he didn’t call Reggie any names,” Michael said. “You could see he wanted to explode but I think he was determined not to do anything where he could be at fault.
“I went over there wondering if Reggie was going to swing at me.”
Michael approached Reggie in the silent Yankees’ dugout.
“Billy wants you to go inside the clubhouse,” he said.
“If he wants me to go inside,” Reggie answered, “tell him to come here and tell me himself.”
Reggie sat on the bench for an inning, then walked inside, passing Billy as he did. Neither man said anything. After the game, which the Yankees lost, Billy grabbed a clock radio on his desk and
threw it against the wall. He slammed his office door and fired a cup of beer against the blue cinder-block walls. The beer spattered the picture of Casey Stengel behind Billy’s desk chair.
Yogi Berra shooed reporters away. “No interviews right now,” he said. “Later.”
Billy called Rosen and then Steinbrenner, and the three agreed that Reggie would be suspended immediately. George issued a statement:
The basic thing has to be the discipline of the ball club. There have to be a boss and a leader and Billy is the boss and the leader of this ball club. Everybody knows that Reggie is close to me. He’s a good friend. But you’ve got to back the manager. If you don’t, you get to the point where a player can disregard the manager and then you’re done. You might as well hang it up.
Billy wanted Reggie suspended for the remainder of the season, but George settled on five games and $9,000. Informed of his suspension, Reggie was asked by the writers what he would do.
“I’m going to California on the first plane smoking tomorrow morning,” he said.
If the grappling, snarling near-fight in the Fenway Park visitors’ dugout was Billy-Reggie I, then Billy-Reggie II was more of a psychological, counterintuitive skirmish. Criticized for his excessive outbursts, Billy had kept his composure, at least publicly. It was Reggie, known as a cerebral player who always worried about his image, who had unraveled with a national television audience watching. He had deliberately hurt himself and his team.
In the aftermath, Reggie was vilified across the country and within his own team.
“It was basically an openly defiant act on Reggie’s part to say, ‘Look, I don’t care what the manager says, I’m going to do what I want to do,’” Nettles said.
The Mets’ manager at the time, Joe Torre, was incredulous at Reggie’s behavior.
“Reggie out-and-out disobeyed him,” Torre said. “Billy did the right thing.”
Piniella recalled that no one supported Reggie in the locker room that week.
“We had all been asked to bunt,” he said. “You can question whether it makes any sense strategically because maybe Reggie couldn’t bunt. But you know, Billy tried the bunt once and it didn’t work. No harm there. And then he took the bunt sign off. Billy was saying, ‘OK, never mind. Go ahead and hit.’
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