“But the guy wouldn’t stop. ‘Come on, let me buy you a Miller Lite.’ And my dad would say, ‘That’s OK, thanks. Why don’t you go back to the bar while we eat?’ And then the guy would say, ‘Why? Are you going to punch me now?’
“And it would escalate. The guy would say, ‘Did you get fired today?’ Or, ‘Why don’t you take a swing at me? Come on, you don’t look so tough.’”
Billy’s appearance was definitely part of the problem. Only five foot nine or five foot ten as he aged, Billy was a wispy 160 pounds.
“I watched hundreds of big bruising guys come up to my dad in a bar and say they were going to kick his little ass,” Billy Joe said. “Big, scary guys. And my dad wouldn’t back down. But he did try to talk them out of fighting. It just didn’t always work. Frankly, that’s why he hung around with some big guys like Lee Walls, who coached for him for several years. It was Lee’s job to get those guys away from Dad.
“When I was in my twenties, it was sometimes my job. But I’m telling you, it never stopped. And if there was no one there to defuse it, and if some guy kept at it, sometimes my father would deck him. He didn’t start fights but he was very good at ending them. People just never heard about those fights.”
Billy’s friend Lew Figone, who was a fearsome, brawny guy as a younger man, recalled a day around 1980 when he was meeting Billy at a bar in Northern California. From there Billy and Figone were to drive to Figone’s hunt club.
“Billy used to wear this cowboy hat with a feather in it and in this bar before I got there, there were three guys at the other end of the bar who recognized him and started making fun of his hat,” Figone said. “Billy apparently didn’t say anything and these other guys kept drinking and getting more bold. Pretty soon they’re challenging Billy to go outside and fight. It was the usual stuff: ‘I’m no marshmallow salesman, Billy; why don’t you try beating me up.’
“Billy just kept smiling at them. When I walked in, he stood up and announced to the three guys, ‘OK, now we can go fight.’ And he said to me, ‘Let’s go, these guys have been giving me shit for thirty minutes.’”
Everyone got up to walk toward the parking lot. Figone asked one of the other guys for his phone number.
“Why do you want that?” the guy said.
“Because I’m going to have to call your house,” Figone said.
“Why?” the guy asked.
Answered Figone, “Because you’re going to be unconscious in the parking lot and someone will have to come pick you up.”
The guys who had been hassling Billy decided to just go home.
“But Billy had to put up with these guys and their beer muscles all the time,” Figone said.
This kind of pugilistic celebrity did not attach itself to other managers and athletes, even if they got in a public brawl. The Dodgers’ Tommy Lasorda traded punches with a former coach, Jim Lefebvre, in the greenroom of a Los Angeles television station before the two were scheduled to go on an interview show in 1980. Lasorda was bloodied and left the station without going on camera. Newspaper stories were written about the episode. It was big news in Los Angeles for a day or two. Then it was soon forgotten.
Earl Weaver was no stranger to gin joints, and he had a few late-night tussles with unnamed patrons that made minor news. Those fisticuffs had no longevity in the public consciousness. Lasorda and Weaver are in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“I always thought Billy got a bad rap for all that bar-fighting stuff,” Weaver said a few months before he died in 2013. “It’s true that he didn’t control, or manage, himself as well in those situations as he maybe should have. He would snap. Public figures aren’t allowed to snap. It would have been nice if he could have found a way to avoid all that. But people didn’t make it easy on him either.”
When Weaver’s comments were related to Lasorda, he had another opinion.
“Maybe Billy was just better at punching people than the rest of us,” Lasorda said. “Maybe that’s why everyone knew about it when it happened. He was laying guys out.”
Steve Vucinich, the A’s clubhouse manager then and now, became Billy’s driver and quasi-official team companion whenever Billy made public appearances, which he did frequently when promoting the A’s in the East Bay community in 1980–81.
“Billy was great with the crowds, people loved him,” Vucinich said. “He was great with kids and did his Donald Duck voice, which they loved. Women were drawn to him. He could charm anyone and it was a lot of fun being around him, I’ll tell you that. After a public appearance, we’d go off to some bar and it didn’t matter the neighborhood because he was good with ethnic or diverse gatherings, too. He was especially good with regular workers, tradesmen, dockworkers, just all those kinds of guys. He was authentic and they sensed that.
“But on some of those nights, as it got later, there would just be one guy who didn’t like him. Billy would get up to go to the bathroom and I’d hear some guy say, ‘That Billy Martin is an asshole.’ And I knew there could be trouble.
“I remember one night, the guy sitting next to him just kept flicking his cigarette ashes on Billy’s arm and hand. Billy kept asking him to stop, but the guy just stared at him and kept flicking the ashes on him. We got up and left.
“Another night, at the Oakland Hyatt bar—a nice place—a guy hauled off and sucker-punched Billy without warning. Billy didn’t hit him back. We left. But that’s what could happen. Not every night but it happened.”
Early in the 1980 season, on the road fans found a novel way to remind Billy of his new place in the American culture. They pelted him with marshmallows. It was a cheap, and almost harmless, way to taunt him. Would stadium officials throw someone out of the ballpark for flinging a marshmallow? And how would they do that if dozens of people were doing it?
In Minnesota during a 20–11 loss, hundreds of people were throwing marshmallows at Billy.
Billy did not help his cause when he filmed a Miller Lite beer commercial that featured Jim Shoulders, the rodeo cowboy. Shoulders talked about how real cowboys liked Miller Lite because it had fewer calories and kept them light on their feet.
Standing next to a crowded bar, Shoulders says, “You don’t want to be filled up when you’re out there punching doggies.”
He taps the turned back of a seemingly anonymous patron in Western garb and asks, “Ain’t that right, cowboy?”
Billy spins around on his barstool and says, “I didn’t punch that doggie.”
So maybe Billy was more at peace with his image than those around him were.
As Vucinich said, “I think Billy knew what Billy Martin had become. Some of it he didn’t like. But he liked being famous. He liked having the money and flying first class. We’d be driving across the Bay Bridge and people would recognize him and pull alongside the car to take pictures.
“He liked that. He had once been a nobody in the East Bay. Now they’re snapping his picture on the Bay Bridge. He’d wind down the window and give them a big smile.”
Billy’s 1980 A’s were no longer in first place on June 13 when the Yankees made their first visit to Oakland. Dick Howser, Billy’s former third-base coach, was the visiting manager. On the first pitch of the game, Billy had starter Brian Kingman throw a brushback pitch under the chin of the Yankees’ leadoff hitter, Willie Randolph.
Reggie was backed off the plate twice. But the Yankees won anyway. A week later, the A’s made their first trip to New York and Billy was greeted with a long ovation from the Yankee Stadium fans. They still loved him. A couple of days later, he wore his number 1 Yankees jersey at the Old Timers’ Day game. Before he was introduced to the Yankee Stadium crowd, wire service photographers caught Billy sitting alongside Reggie, the two laughing and talking.
In the Yankees’ clubhouse afterward, Howser said he was just happy to get through an Old Timers’ Day without Billy being announced as the future manager of the Yankees.
The Yankees and Reggie were having spectacular years, with the Yankees w
ell on their way to claiming the AL East with a 103-win season. The A’s would rally late to win 83 games and finish second to the high-flying Kansas City Royals, who won 97 games. Again, there were no wild card teams.
Billy was named Manager of the Year for a third time for improving Oakland’s record by 29 victories.
The 1979 A’s had won 33.3 percent of their games. With roughly the same roster and no additional financial backing—the A’s were the only team in Major League Baseball not to sign a single free agent—the 1980 A’s won 51.2 percent of their games.
Henderson stole exactly 100 bases, including home 4 times. He had a .420 on-base percentage. Matt Keough, the hard-luck starter in 1979, had a 16–13 record with an impressive 2.92 ERA. The A’s stole home 8 times, just as Billy said they would. The A’s scored 109 more runs in 1980 than in 1979 and had 136 more hits, including 24 more home runs. In the field, they made 44 fewer errors.
Perhaps the most important stats were off the field. The A’s drew about 500,000 more fans. That made it easier for Finley to sell the club for $12.7 million to the owners of Levi Strauss, the Bay Area apparel company. A year earlier, the estimated value of the team was about $5 million.
The chief executive of the A’s new ownership group, Roy Eisenhardt, quickly gave Billy a new five-year contract. It named Billy as manager and director of player development, which put him in charge of all baseball personnel decisions in the Oakland system. The A’s would not have a general manager. Billy was running the entire baseball side of the franchise.
The deal also gave Billy the use of a sprawling mansion in tony Blackhawk, an exclusive master planned development east of Danville and Oakland. Billy quickly made plans to move Heather Ervolino and her family to the Blackhawk mansion.
“Billy was set,” said Morabito, the publicity director and Billy’s good friend who had left the Yankees to take a similar job with the A’s in 1980. “He had it all.”
That fall, the Yankees were swept by the Royals in three close games during the AL Championship Series. Shortly thereafter, George let Howser go. Gene Michael was named the new manager.
“Billy and I were sitting in a bar in Oakland after Dick Howser got fired,” Morabito recalled. “And Billy said, ‘Do you believe what George did?’ I said, ‘Of course I do. Let’s just be happy we’re here and not there. This is good. This is as good as it gets.’
“And he kind of looked at me funny. And I said, ‘What? You’re not thinking of ever going back there, right?’ And he took a sip of his drink and slowly said, ‘No. No way. Not right now.’”
37
BILLY’S NEW LIFE AS a field manager and general manager began with baseball’s winter meetings in Dallas. Joe DiMaggio was there to receive an award and greeted Billy in the vast lobby of the Anatole Hotel. The two were going to dinner.
“Hey, Dago,” DiMaggio said as Billy walked up. Some things do not change.
The sixty-six-year-old silver-haired DiMaggio sized up Billy and asked, “Are you growing taller or am I growing shorter?”
“Don’t worry, it’s my cowboy boots,” Billy replied.
Unexpectedly, an elderly man appeared at Billy’s side, grabbing him by the arm as if to capture his attention. The man, whom Billy had never seen before, gently began pulling Billy in another direction for a private conversation.
“Hey, easy, pard,” Billy calmly said.
“I just need to talk to you for a minute,” the man said.
Billy smiled at DiMaggio, turned to the man, and asked, “You’re not a marshmallow salesman, are you?”
Billy was in good humor heading into 1981. He believed he was sitting on a young, maturing A’s team that was ready to explode.
“He told me one night that we were going to destroy the division,” Clete Boyer said.
A’s pitcher Mike Norris, a castoff before Billy arrived who had become the ace of the staff, said many years later that the 1981 team fed off Billy’s cheery, joyful demeanor heading into the season. Matt Keough said Billy had created a giddy, happy family.
“And Billy encouraged us to hang out and enjoy the togetherness,” Keough said.
In spring training in Arizona, party central was the Pink Pony bar. It was the social hub of the Cactus League, which back then was not much more than a handful of Western-based teams. The Pink Pony might as well have been Toots Shor’s West.
Zagaris, the team photographer, had a background as a photographer for British rock stars. He was friends with the Who and the Rolling Stones. He thought he had seen it all on their tours of the world.
“I’d been around a lot of crazy shit, but Billy, his coaches, and some of the players, they kept up to that level,” Zagaris said. “I didn’t see drugs. It was all alcohol based. But some of these older guys were serious, professional drinkers. Some mornings at the batting cage in spring training with the coaches standing there, it didn’t smell like alcohol. It smelled like someone had dumped a quart of Jim Beam on home plate.
“The players didn’t stay out as late, but they’d come by to catch part of the fun. It probably wasn’t good for anyone’s health, but Billy forged a close-knit bunch of guys.”
When the regular season began, the A’s won their first eleven games, eight of them on the road. At the second home game of the year, it was two years to the day since the A’s drew 653 fans to a game. Now the A’s had a crowd in excess of 50,000.
By the third week of the season, Oakland had a 17–1 record. At the end of April, the A’s were 18–3. Time magazine put Billy on the cover under the headline IT’S INCREDIBLE!
The five-man starting rotation of Norris, Keough, Kingman, Steve McCatty, and Rick Langford was plowing through the American League, overwhelming batting lineups. The starting five’s cumulative ERA was 1.42. Because there was little help in the bullpen, the starters usually finished what they started.
Years later, there was concern that the young arms on the staff were being ruined by overuse. At the time, it did not come up.
“That’s because it really wasn’t Billy’s idea,” said McCatty, now the pitching coach for the Washington Nationals. “It became a badge of honor among the five of us. One of the things Billy and Art had taught us was how to get batters out the third time around the batting order. Your fastball velocity is down at that point, they’ve seen your other pitches. Can you get those batters out again?
“It took guile and guts and once we learned to do it, we wanted to keep doing it. We hung our pride on that as a group. Billy tried to get us out of games; we just didn’t want to come out. And Billy was loyal. He was the kind of guy who stuck with you. He liked to see that mettle.”
A few years later, when the same five pitchers struggled and had significant injury issues, the strategy to let the starters pitch so many innings would not look so prudent.
But in 1981, the A’s were pressing the accelerator to the floor. The A’s were a streaking comet, challenging some of the best starts in the history of the Major Leagues. And that turned out to be important in a season that was being played with a discernible undercurrent of labor unrest.
At issue was free agency and how it would be carried out in the future. With the owners taking a hard line, the players’ union voted to strike in June. Most expected the season to be interrupted with a new agreement and contract coming along about a month after the players’ strike began. (Previous work stoppages since 1972 had not lasted much longer than five weeks.)
The prevailing belief was that the 1981 regular season would be split in half. The division winners of the two halves—if two different teams won each half—would play in a postseason divisional series with the winners advancing to the league championship series.
With the likely interruption of the season coming in June, every team was trying to make sure it was in first place when the strike occurred since it assured a postseason berth.
The A’s were in better position than anyone. At home, they passed the million mark in attendance for the first time in se
veral years and did so in early June. Billy was enjoying life, although he did twice wear a bulletproof vest—once at a game in Oakland and once in Chicago—when a man called and threatened to shoot him.
Police told Billy to stay off the field. He did not listen, even going out for several minutes to argue with an umpire in Chicago. And Billy, in general, was not getting along with the umpires any better than he had in the past.
In May, Billy was suspended for a week for bumping umpire Terry Cooney. The umpires’ union said they were considering suing Billy for assault. It was not the first, or the last, time that was considered. Billy also had an ugly exchange with another ump in 1981, kicking and throwing dirt at him.
Now fifty-three years old and well into middle age, Billy was not mellowing when it came to the arbiters of the rules. It was a battle he never stopped fighting.
“Probably the meanest, most unfair man of all on the field,” umpire Durwood Merrill said of Billy in 1981.
When the players’ strike did indeed interrupt the 1981 season on June 12, the A’s were in first place with a 37–23 record and became the first-half winner of the AL West. They could relax for the so-called second half of the season.
It took about six weeks for labor peace to be achieved. Billy used the time to try and sort out a personal life that had grown increasingly complicated and byzantine, even for him.
Heather Ervolino, her brother, mother, and grandmother were living in the Blackhawk house leased to Billy (with an option to buy). Heather, demure and never demanding of Billy, had been in Billy’s sphere for several years. That didn’t stop Billy from courting other women.
In July 1980, while the A’s were playing in Anaheim, he spotted Jill Guiver, a twenty-five-year-old freelance photographer working near the visitors’ dugout. Jill was not hard to notice. Pretty and shapely with long blonde hair, Jill had a sultry appeal along with what people once called a “nice figure” because it was impolite to say that she easily filled out a tight blouse.
Billy Martin Page 45