Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Billy Joe had graduated from Texas Tech—something he says his father did not know until a year later. He was in the early stages of what would become a successful career as an agent for baseball players.

  “But I didn’t see him for quite a while there,” said Billy Joe, who as an adult started to ask people to call him simply Billy Martin. “I had gotten used to those periods when he disappeared. I learned more about what was going on with him through Bill Reedy.”

  There were a few still on the inside. Reedy, who had become Billy’s best friend, remained in the loop. With Jill taking over Billy’s finances and public relations bookings, Sapir said he had largely been pushed out.

  “To make it easier on him, I wrote him a letter saying that I was getting more involved in politics in New Orleans,” Sapir said. “I made it sound like I was going to be busier and stepping aside.

  “But I also told him I’d be there for whatever he needed. I wrote that I loved him because he used to tell me all the time that he loved me. And I also wrote that I know what Jill wants. She wants to run things. And if that’s the way things were going to be, I was fine with it.”

  The Yankees’ season had ended badly with the Yankees 45–48 under Piniella. They had finished in fifth place. An inconsistent, erratic pitching staff, the downfall of the team in Billy’s last days, had only gotten worse as the year progressed. The content, united team that charged to the front of the division in the season’s first three months limped to the finish bickering and resentful. At least six players wanted to be traded. One of those who did not return, Jack Clark, always blamed Billy’s firing for the team’s demise.

  “We all knew our roles when Billy was there,” Clark said. “And I still will always feel, if he would have been there—and I’ll feel this for the rest of my career and the rest of my life—that no matter what happened on or off the field, there was no way we wouldn’t have gone to the World Series and won.”

  In a 1994 interview, Steinbrenner, who by then had turned the baseball operations of the team over to Michael and Showalter and rarely intervened, addressed Billy’s firing in 1988.

  “That was my biggest mistake with the Yankees,” he said. “We really weren’t that far out. I probably should have backed off and let things calm down. But it was hard. There was a lot going on. But, yes, I have reflected on that move. Letting Billy go then was a mistake.”

  Piniella was discharged as Yankees manager on October 7 and replaced by Dallas Green.

  Billy was still lying low on Potter Hill Road. He did attend baseball winter meetings that December in Atlanta. Jill was with him. In the hotel lobby, where all the business gets done, Jill was showing off pictures of the farm.

  The photograph that drew the most reaction was one taken of Billy in overalls looking elfin as he rode an enormous John Deere tractor.

  “I’m really a poor farmer, and maybe not that good at it, but I like it,” Billy said in an ESPN interview. “I’m Port Crane, New York’s, best-known farmer. I like that very much.”

  Asked if he still thought of himself as the best manager in baseball, Billy replied with a smile, “No, I’m the best manager out of baseball.”

  46

  IF BILLY WAS GOING to be a farmer, he needed a pickup truck. A friend brought him down to Corey’s Northgate Ford on Upper Front Street, a family-owned, prominent Binghamton dealership since the mid-1960s. The Coreys knew Billy. Everyone on Upper Front Street did.

  The street, which parallels Interstate 81, was a major thoroughfare of bars, restaurants, car dealerships, banks, and hotels. It was not far from the Comfort Inn where Billy and Jill had briefly lived. Nearby, there was another restaurant with a small bar where Billy had spent some time, Morey’s.

  Billy was a familiar sight along Front Street. The locals liked how he would sometimes appear at a bar in dusty overalls, then sit and talk about hunting, harvesting, the day’s news, or baseball. The locals said they felt as if he was one of them.

  Billy would not usually be on Front Street late at night, although that did happen. More commonly, he would be there in the twilight of afternoon or in the evening, after making a trip to Home Depot, the gas station, the lumberyard, or the supermarket. Billy would stop in for a few pops on the way home two or three times a week.

  “It was part of his routine,” said Earl Wagstaff, the owner of the Fireside Inn. “I think he needed to get out of the house sometimes. Who doesn’t, right? But he would be unrecognized for a while—jeans, boots, maybe a floppy hat. He was one of the nicest guys I’ve had in my bar.”

  A favorite Billy haunt was the Bull’s Head.

  “Billy was the one of the guys in the Bull’s Head,” another Bull’s Head regular, Johnny Franklin, said. “We might have been surprised to see him the first couple of times, but after that it was never like, ‘Oh, there’s Billy Martin, the famous Yankee.’ It was just like, ‘There’s Billy.’”

  Franklin also added that on at least two occasions, other Bull’s Head patrons drove Billy home. Corey Ford had given Billy an F-Series blue-and-white pickup truck in exchange for two television commercials promoting the dealership. Once, as Billy climbed into the truck and drove himself home, some of his friends from the Front Street bars followed him to make sure he got back to Potter Hill Road safely.

  Davey Springer, who worked at a deli on Front Street, said of Billy, “I never saw him have a cross word with anyone.”

  In the good weather months of 1989, Billy spent many days sitting alongside his ten-acre pond fishing. After a few trips to Home Depot, he had built wooden stairs between the house and the pond. The house was on a bluff about fifty feet above the pond, and the stairs were anchored into the soil of the hillside. It was a two-week project, but the stairs were sturdy and proved to be durable, still in use twenty-five years later.

  Fishing by the pond was relaxing but it had its limits.

  As Billy told his friend Bill Reedy, “Jill is always saying, ‘Why don’t you go down and wet your line.’ And that’s fine but how many days in a row can I do that?”

  Billy did escape upstate New York frequently, flying to appearances, dinners, and charity golf outings. He stopped at Yankee Stadium sporadically but tried to keep his distance from the disaster that the Dallas Green regime was becoming.

  As expected, Green had remade the Yankees in the image of a National League team, spurning Willie Randolph to sign former Dodgers second baseman Steve Sax. He acquired other National Leaguers and tried many National League tactics. Years before interleague play, the mingling of the two styles of play did not work. Plus the team was aging—Mattingly and Winfield were both injured.

  By the Fourth of July, Steinbrenner’s fifty-ninth birthday, the Yankees were 1 game under .500 and 6.5 games out of first place. Green was rumored to be on his way out. Steinbrenner was leaning toward the 1978 playoff game hero, Bucky Dent, who had been managing in the Yankees’ minor leagues.

  Steinbrenner kept in touch with Billy. He knew the phone number to the farmhouse. Mary Lynch, who was not a baseball fan, recalls fielding some of the calls.

  “The phone was ringing all the time and I hung up on Steinbrenner several times,” Lynch said. “He’d start yelling at me and saying, ‘You need to go get him now.’

  “And I’d say, ‘Listen, you need to understand that Billy is a private person and he likes his privacy.’ And I’d hang up. Billy would come in a little while later and I’d say, ‘Some guy, George Steinburner or something, called.’

  “Billy loved that I did that but he always called him back.”

  As a daily presence in the household, Lynch became intimate with many details of Billy and Jill’s life in 1989. She ran errands for them, driving Billy’s pickup truck to fetch Drano or mousetraps. She mailed their packages and made the check deposits at the bank, which averaged about $35,000 a month.

  “Even with the urinal in the bedroom upstairs, Billy still wasn’t that accurate in the middle of the night,” Lynch said. “He had a hard ti
me hitting it. I was potty training my young boys at the time and they weren’t too accurate either. I had tried a trick with them so I tried it with Billy. I put Cheerios in the toilet and urinal and I left him a note, ‘Please aim to sink the Cheerios.’

  “That definitely helped.”

  While others close to Billy and Jill witnessed frequent screaming arguments that ended with golf clubs thrown on the front stoop or a hotel door kicked in, Lynch said Billy and Jill never quarreled in front of her during her years with them.

  But Mike Klepfer, a former New York state trooper who later started a Binghamton-area trucking company and befriended Billy, said he saw or heard serious, vicious disputes in which Billy and Jill threw heavy objects at each other or charged at one another. Klepfer, who died in 2012, told biographers David Falkner and Peter Golenbock that one of these fierce confrontations ended up with Jill heading to a doctor for a neck brace.

  “Looking back, being a little wiser as an older woman and not a young kid, I did see things that mean a little more to me now,” Lynch said in 2013. “I’d come in for the morning and there would be broken glass everywhere like he or she had been throwing things. She’d say, ‘We had a slight accident.’ So looking back, there must have been some real big fights.

  “And every once in a while, he would leave for New York in kind of a huff and not come back for two days.”

  Lynch also insisted that Jill knew how to keep her husband happy.

  “She pampered him, she would draw his bath for him,” Lynch said. “She was definitely out to keep him happy. She kept up her appearance; that was extremely important to her, with the long blonde hair and clothes that played up her figure. I mean, she was a looker, no doubt about it, and he liked hanging out with her in public. He loved showing her off.

  “They had a healthy sex life. She had a dresser full of matching Victoria’s Secret outfits.”

  Asked to assess the tenor and volatility of her marriage to Billy, Jill, who has since remarried, smiled.

  “Our marriage was not any more tumultuous than any other marriage,” she said. “We had our fights. We disagreed. We got mad. He might storm away or I might storm away. What couple does not have those moments?

  “So, yes, that happened. And the alcohol could enhance whatever emotion was going on there. But he could also calm down very quickly. That was an extraordinary gift of his. So I don’t think it was out of the ordinary; we lived a pretty normal life.”

  Jill was troubled by Billy’s drinking in 1989, and she said that Billy knew he had to do something about his alcohol dependence, too.

  “Billy had a drinking problem, there’s no question about that,” Jill said. “At times it was under control and there were times when it wasn’t. As we’ve learned over the many years now and been educated, I think it’s clear that there are different levels of alcoholism. Twenty or thirty years ago, we didn’t know as much and didn’t handle it the same.

  “Billy would go weeks or months without drinking. He didn’t drink every day. He didn’t usually overdrink when he did drink. Other times he was a very well-functioning alcoholic.”

  Jill sighed.

  “In the last year of his life, I did confront him and he got it back under control,” she said. “I do think eventually that he would have stopped altogether. He knew his drinking was something he had to confront. It had to be addressed. New opportunities were coming up in his life. He was making appearances, speaking to more groups and different groups, and I think he saw the rest of the world out there and wanted to keep being part of it. And that probably meant change.

  “I think he would have gone to get help. He was a brave guy and he was starting to realize that he had a problem. I think that’s the first step, right? But it was hard for Billy because it was a different era. It was wrapped up in his persona. Back then, society wasn’t as accepting of people who admitted to a problem. It wasn’t as easy to reach out for help in those days. It’s a different world now and it’s so easy to look back and judge. But it wasn’t the same. Which is a shame. But it’s something I believe he would have addressed at some point.”

  She continued, “If he had stopped drinking, he’d probably still be alive right now.”

  By August of 1989, Steinbrenner fired Dallas Green, who had a 56–65 record as Yankees manager. Dent took over. Billy remained far away, ensconced in Fenton, sitting on the back deck of his farmhouse and gazing across the rolling hills of central New York.

  But he was restless.

  He called trainer Gene Monahan to talk about baseball and what was going on with the team.

  “It wasn’t anything specific,” Monahan said. “He just needed a little connection to the game. There was obviously a hole in his life. Sinatra didn’t stop singing until he no longer had the health to continue. Billy was still vibrant and eager to stay with it.”

  Billy was also still an adviser to the Yankees. Buck Showalter recalls receiving calls from Billy on multiple occasions.

  “He would just want to talk baseball,” said Showalter, who had become a coach in the South Bronx. “When Billy called, I would tell him what I was doing, and because he watched most of the games, he would help me with suggestions and his observations, which were incredible.

  “It was like learning from the master because nobody had an eye for a game like him—nobody. But I also had to ignore some of his other advice. I would give him a taste of some of the internal Yankees’ politics and he would give me his opinion of what to do. His advice was usually not the most tactful approach. He had no diplomacy.

  “I would say, ‘Billy, I’m not trying to win every battle; I’m trying to win the war.’ And his answer would be, ‘Let’s win every battle and every war.’”

  Showalter snickered.

  “That’s Billy in a nutshell, right?” he said. “He refused to lose at anything, even if it was going to cost him in the end.”

  Late in 1989, Billy reconnected with his childhood friend Lew Figone, too. Figone had gotten caught up in the vicissitudes of Billy’s life thousands of miles away from his West Berkeley roots. He was pushed out of the inner circle. But Billy reached out late in 1989, and Figone listened and wanted to help. He told Billy he would give Billy whatever he needed. To Figone, Billy sounded confused and depressed.

  Sitting in his office twenty-three years later, Figone had a succinct assessment of Billy’s problems—in 1989 and throughout most of his life. To Figone, who had known Billy since he was a toddler, every setback or difficulty was rooted in his pursuit of the wrong women—or women in general.

  “Billy’s downfall was not drinking,” Figone said. “It was women.”

  Told of Figone’s assessment, Morabito, also one of Billy’s oldest friends, amended it.

  “It was a combination,” he said. “The drinking led to the women.”

  The 1989 Yankees got no better under Dent, whom the players treated as an interim leader. The 1989 Yankees finished in fifth place with a 74–87 record, the worst record for the team in twenty-two years.

  At the season’s end, Steinbrenner told reporters that Dent would return as Yankees manager, but privately he was thinking otherwise. He felt he had to give Dent a chance to manage a team from the beginning of the year, but he had little faith in Dent’s ability to make the Yankees champions again. Steinbrenner was hatching another plan.

  Separately and unaware of George’s plans, Billy had written George a personal letter from the Fenton farm imploring Steinbrenner to give him a more active role with the Yankees. Billy wanted a job with genuine input. He wasn’t asking to manage the team, but he was all but begging George to let him get closer to the field again.

  Steinbrenner was delighted to get the letter. He loved that Billy wanted to be involved in the governance of the team again. And the Yankees’ owner planned to put him in uniform during spring training and then keep him very close to the team, even if Billy would watch games from the owner’s box.

  It was part of a grander scheme. Bill
y would be the manager-in-waiting should Dent falter—as almost everyone expected because the pitching-poor 1990 Yankees once again looked overmatched. But George kept his thoughts to himself in the early fall of 1989.

  So Billy did not know of George’s scheming when he attended a New Jersey baseball card show in late November. Speaking to a New Jersey reporter, Billy was asked how he was doing outside of baseball.

  Billy explained, with some enthusiasm, about his life on the farm. But he grew melancholy as the interview went on. At one point he offered a striking appraisal of his life situation: “Now I know why people who retire die soon after.”

  47

  DURING ONE OF THE last days of November, George summoned Billy to Yankee Stadium. He said he wanted to discuss the roster, which the two men did. They were alone in Steinbrenner’s office overlooking the Yankee Stadium diamond. Steinbrenner’s office in the 1980s was equipped with a large desk behind which the owner almost always sat. Another prominent feature of the spacious room was an oversize brown leather lounge chair shaped like a baseball mitt.

  George typically would insist that visitors sit in the mitt/chair, perhaps because it would swallow up a person and make the visitor feel small. Looking down from his tall, straight-back chair and leaning on his imperious, massive desk, George would do what came naturally to him: dominate the conversation.

  But when Billy came to George’s office late in 1989, after thirty minutes of talking about personnel, the two men did something Yankees’ front-office workers had never before seen—they left the office and went down to the empty field.

  According to multiple Yankees employees at the stadium that day, George and Billy donned coats against the fall chill and took the elevator to the lowest level. It was a short walk to the Yankee Stadium diamond. Because the infield was covered with a tarp, the team owner and the team’s five-time manager walked along the warning track encircling the grass field.