Labor Day weekend was fast approaching, a vantage point from which the end of the season could be seen lingering mirage-like somewhere in the distance. The cumulative fallout from the long campaign was understandably taking its toll on Whitey, on the players, even on the humble media. Dissention erupted in a taxicab after we had finished filing our stories.
The idea of going for a late meal had been agreed upon, but now, in a city that offered some of the best, if not the best seafood restaurants in the United States, Randy Galloway was making loud braying noises and insisting that we try to locate some joint he’d heard advertised that served all-you-can-eat catfish for a quarter. I demurred. “How come you only like to eat at restaurants where the waiters all wear those little sailor-boy costumes, huh?” demanded Galloway. Harold McKinney was on my side in this dispute and, as the cab drove past Johns Hopkins Hospital, McKinney yelled at the driver to put Galloway out at the emergency entrance. “His brain is so fucked up, I’ll bet they treat him for free,” McKinney told the driver. “Of course, they’ll never let him out, either.”
The cabbie said he thought it might be a better idea if we all got out. I was the only who did, promptly finding myself wandering the streets of Baltimore, carrying a Smith-Corona portable in one hand, a Xerox telecopier in the other and wondering if the Peace Corps might have any openings for a baseball writer.
Chapter 15
A dozen or so curious onlookers gathered at the gate at Love Field in Dallas, where the Rangers’ charter was due to arrive momentarily as the team returned from its trip to Cleveland and Baltimore. The onlookers weren’t there to gawk at the players and get autographs; they were ogling the players’ wives and live-ins who had assembled to meet the flight. Almost without exception, these women looked sensational, like soap-opera starlets with the posture and bearing of Philadelphia debutantes.
Baseball players are universally successful in attracting high-quality lifetime companions. And why not? Like their wives, most ballplayers seem to have been manufactured in a special cloning laboratory. Ballplayers can generally be identified by their extraordinarily long arms and low foreheads, giving them that primitive appearance that a lot of American women seem to go for.
Plus, baseball players apparently bring most of the assets these same women require in a husband. First, of course, they make lots of dough and, second, they’re on the road for—if you count spring training—over 110 days a year. Even when they are in town, ballplayers spend virtually every waking hour at the golf course or in a bass boat, so they are rarely around or underfoot to impede the wives’ leisure pursuits or modeling careers. No worries about fooling around with the hometown cheerleaders, because in baseball there aren’t any cheerleaders. Another key asset: unlike pro football, basketball and hockey players, baseball players strongly tend toward passive behavior when they become house-drunk. Rather than smashing furniture and spouses, they pass out in the flower bed. So, ladies, if you’re looking for Mr. Right, head for the ballpark.
When the Rangers’ charter landed at Love Field, the players piled out like conquering heroes, back now from their most successful road trip of the season: three wins and only four losses. Also, the team had been the focal point of some national news, thanks to Jim Merritt’s greaseball declaration. ESPN had not yet been invented in 1973, and neither had USA Today, but Merritt and the Rangers had at least earned some mention on NBC’s “Today” show. Two of the players were so exuberant they rode from the gate in wheelchairs for the simple reason that they were too impaired to negotiate the long walk out to the parking lot.
Merritt’s daring stunt continued to sustain its ripple effect around the league. The top wire-service baseball story of the day concerned Billy Martin. In Detroit, the proud skipper, now seemingly locked into a state of terminal frustration by the Tigers’ late season disappearance from the race against the Orioles, had ordered two of his pitchers, Fred Scherman and Joe Coleman, to coat their fingertips with a mixture of Vaseline and water when they took the mound against Cleveland. The entire league was arming itself with petroleum jelly and seemed poised to engage in a retaliatory war against the poor Indians.
As a result, Martin received a telegram from American League president Joe Cronin, whose Western Union tab had been hugely enlarged since the Merritt episode of the previous Sunday. Cronin’s telegram to Billy read: “This is to inform you that you are suspended for three days for directing your pitchers to throw illegal pitches. Your endorsement of such tactics cannot be tolerated.” An interior decorator could paper the walls of a Billy Martin museum with telegrams such as this one that the self-ordained “Little Dago” had received from various types of defied authority over the years.
Still, the seismograph readings on Earthquake Billy had been more active than usual in recent days. After a loss at Baltimore, Martin didn’t talk to reporters about the game itself but rather how somebody had broken into his hotel room while he claimed he was asleep and tiptoed off with $330 cash. Martin told the gentlemen of the press that the next night he had attached a coat hanger to the chain lock in his room to make future incursions more challenging for the intruder. “In other words, Billy was trying to catch Art [Tiger pitching coach Art Fowler] in the act,” Whitey Herzog said with his characteristic cackle.
The manager was having to rely on events from afar more frequently as a source of mirth since the events in and around his own field headquarters didn’t seem that funny to him. Jim Merritt’s first appearance since arousing the league-wide clamor turned out to be a wasted evening. Merritt was blasted by the Twins. Plate umpire Jim Odum inspected the ball three times but detected nothing suspicious. “I think Merritt threw a few,” Herzog said. “Those were the only pitches he actually threw for strikes the whole game.”
On Saturday, the Twins beat Jim Bibby in a game that lured 4,000 paying guests into the park, a sickly number even for the Rangers on a Saturday night. All of the sports fans in the area were at home watching a Dallas Cowboys exhibition game on TV. Then, on Sunday, David Clyde pitched against Minnesota. The last time Clyde faced the Twins had been back in June when his big-league debut had packed the stadium. In his second effort against Minnesota, Clyde attracted 7,700 paid admissions. Results on the mound against the Twins in the rematch would take an awkward turn as well. Clyde lasted an inning and a third—this was a trend by now—and Texas got soaked, 10-7.
Afterward, the team skipped town with an absence of fanfare. A quick three-game trip to Chicago was on the schedule that included, happily, two day games at Comiskey Park after a night-time opener. On the flight to O’Hare I sat beside Toby Harrah, the shortstop, who outlined his off-season plans. In those days most of the big-league players occupied their autumn and winter months by taking prolonged hunting trips and earning cash by greeting customers at new-car dealerships. Not Toby, who so loved the game that he would be playing baseball, from Halloween until Ground Hog Day, in Venezuela. Zulia, to be exact. Plenty of up-and-coming U.S. talent migrate to various Latin leagues in the winter to polish their baseball technique and pick up a nice paycheck. But Toby Harrah was one of the very few well-established major leaguers who continued his annual pilgrimages to the Piña Colada provinces.
“Aw man, it’s great down there,” said Toby. “The fans are unbelievable. Not as stodgy as the ones who come to most of the Rangers games. Down there, every time somebody gets an extra-base hit they shoot pistols into the air. And the visiting teams catch hell. Those fans, they’ll pour cans of piss into the visitors’ dugout and throw fireworks and big poisonous snakes in there. Nice people, basically. Nice area, too. I rent a little house there in Zulia. One day I came home and found a dead horse in the front yard … but mostly, Zulia’s really OK.”
After the opening game of the short series at Comiskey Park, still another loss, the writers were quick to finish their account of the latest fiasco. Nobody wanted to miss the team bus that always left forty-five minutes after the game and run the risk of being
stranded at night in South Chicago. Ed Fowler, one of the Chicago writers, amplified the paranoia by warning us: “If you do get stuck on the streets around the ballpark, do not, under any circumstances, make any outward show of fear. Because if you do, the people around there will sense it, and there will be nothing left of you but a pile of bones and a pair of tennis shoes.”
Back at the Executive House Hotel, most of the players hopped from the bus and transferred directly into cabs that would carry them to nocturnal explorations of Rush Street. My stamina was shot and I went to my hotel room, turned on the TV and learned that Billy Martin was back in the news. The Tigers had fired him.
Now Billy was establishing an employment pattern. In 1969, he had managed the Twins to a division championship. The next season Billy was canned and placed on the shelf next to the peas and okra for ongoing skirmishes with front office management. Billy’s Detroit Tigers had taken the Eastern Division pennant in 1972 and now, a year later, Martin was out. Why? Was it this spitball suspension? According to Jim Campbell, the Detroit general manager: “It was a breakdown on company-policy matters. There were misunderstandings. From foul line to foul line, he did a good job. I cautioned Billy about making comments about the commissioner, the league president and club executives.” Jim Campbell concluded his statement with the immortal Billy Martin epitaph: “WE CAN’T HAVE THAT SORT OF THING.” Martin and Jim Campbell did not part as friends. For the next two years at least, Billy, in polite company, liked to excuse himself, head for the john and announce, “I’ve gotta go take a Jim Campbell.”
Billy’s players in Detroit appeared mystified by the sudden departure. Al Kaline, who would be finishing his Hall of Fame career in another three weeks, said, “The last two weeks have been very hectic. It wasn’t just the spitball thing. I can’t see him getting fired over that.”
Persons who actually knew Billy Martin were also certain that wasn’t the case. They suspected his dismissal in Detroit was likely due to what the engineers at Three Mile Island would one day refer to as an “incident.” It was later, maybe a year or two, that a Detroit sportswriter, seated near the jukebox at the Lindell AC, described the “incident” to me this way: “John Fetzer, the Tigers’ owner who also owned Upjohn Pharmaceuticals and lived in Kalamazoo, made a rare visit to a game at Tiger Stadium and sat in the owner’s box next to the Tigers’ dugout. He was there with some family and friends, including one who might be described as an attractive young woman.
“Some time after the game started,” the writer contended, “somebody, allegedly Billy Martin, reached out of the dugout and handed the woman a note. It read something like: ‘Why don’t you meet me in the players’ parking lot after the game and we can go have a drink. Love, Billy.’ So the girl hands the note to Fetzer, who’s a nice old fellow with straightlaced values, and says, ‘What’s this all about, Uncle John?’ That’s pretty much what happened.” Another episode in the The Saga of Billy Martin.
“WE CAN’T HAVE THAT SORT OF THING.”
Repercussions of the upheaval in Detroit extended down to Texas. After the short series in Chicago, the Rangers were back in Arlington for a weekend engagement against Oakland. Friday afternoon, Burt Hawkins called me at home. “Get out to the park early,” he said. “Bob Short is having a press conference.” Well, a Bob Short press conference ordinarily did not give cause for network alerts that began, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programing …” Jim Merritt gave good press conferences. Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson of the Yankees gave an outstanding press conference when they announced they were trading wives. Bob Short, up to this point, had failed miserably in his occasional attempts to rouse the rabble.
This one would be different. Short sat behind a desk in his stadium office. Whitey Herzog sat immediately to Short’s left. Short began the press conference by announcing that he had fired Whitey. His reason, he said, was “the artistic state of the Rangers.”
The relationship between the Rangers’ management and the Rangers’ press corps had, from the first, been more informal than what is more commonly seen in professional sports. This press conference was typical. Harold McKinney began calling Bob Short the same names that McKinney called his ten-year-old Buick Skylark on the frequent mornings that it wouldn’t start.
“Jesus Christ, Bob! Artistic state of the Rangers! Whitey’s not the one who went and rounded up Rico Carty and Mike Epstein to be the heart of the batting order! You were! Some fuckin’ art you collected there!” People out in the parking lot could probably hear Harold yelling at the owner. Now the cameras were clicking and Bob Short found himself pressed into a defensive posture. Short said that Del Wilbur, the AAA manager from Spokane, had been pressed into service on an interim basis. The full-time guy for 1974 had not been identified yet, Short kept insisting.
Here was where Bob Short could have made matters easier on himself at the press conference … by simply confirming that the instant Billy Martin was ousted in Detroit, he had found a warm nest awaiting in Texas. It made sense. All around Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs like Blue Mound, Joshua and Grapevine, guys were roaring up and down the blacktop roads in pickup trucks adorned with bumper stickers that read: “The West Wasn’t Won With A Registered Gun.” They had money to spend, but they were spending it all in bowling alleys and head-shops and not at the ballpark that Short had presumed would have established itself by now as the Poor Man’s Country Club.
Short’s long-range plan to sell the team to Texas ownership needed a boost, and a Texas baseball team with Billy Martin as the manager stood out as exactly the sort of attraction that might justify the ten-million-dollar price tag that the vendor had hung around the neck of this turkey of a franchise. Exactly the right touch. To these potential buyers … when it came to making a luxury purchase, it was the size of the hood ornament that mattered more than what might be under the hood.
At his press conference, though, Short was trying hard to fox-trot around the topic of Billy Martin. His strategy there was simple enough. Herzog had received Short’s full assurance that he was in the boat for the long cruise when he signed on the previous fall. Now Herzog was being dumped for no reason other than the obvious one: Short had stumbled over what he figured was a rare gem in Billy Martin.
“I thought that the emphasis here was supposed to be more on development than winning right away,” Herzog said. “I guess I was wrong about that, and when you’re wrong with a 47-91 record, you are not going to get very far.” Whitey, once again, was demonstrating his usual candor and rare ability to sit on a media platform and place matters into correct focus while those around him could not.
If Bob Short didn’t want to talk about Billy Martin, then Whitey Herzog would do it for him. “If he can get Billy Martin, then it would be a great move for the organization,” Whitey continued. “I think that Bob has made him an offer and hopes to get his shot in before Houston or New York or somebody. You can’t blame him for going after Martin. I have a lot of respect for Billy Martin.”
Certain members of the Texas media “corral” were not as convinced that Short was doing the right thing, certainly not at the expense of Whitey Herzog, whom the writers realized was a once-in-a-career departure from the array of dull tools and craftsmen of the con who populate the realm of sports in staggering numbers.
McKinney called Bob Short more names, and the owner, now backpedaling, said, “B-u-u-t, all of you have been saying that the team is better than its record.” Herzog interrupted and for the first time indicated that he might be marginally irritated.
“No—I don’t think that’s what’s been said,” Herzog asserted. “What they said was that this team was more interesting and colorful than last year.” And Whitey Herzog was understating his point.
Down in the clubhouse, the men most responsible for drawing the blueprints for the unsightly 47-91 record that Herzog had mentioned, the players themselves, seemed appropriately chagrined by the events of the early evening. “They said a team meeting
had been called for six o’clock and I figured it was something routine … like to announce that I had been traded to some team in Japan in exchange for a broken bat,” said Rich Billings. “When they said Whitey was fired, it was a shock. In fact, it was one hell of a shock.”
Several of the others went on the record, agreeing that “if you can’t play for a man like Whitey, you can’t play for anybody.” Professional athletes have been reading from the same weary script that conventionally appears when the coach or the manager comes to work and discovers that somebody has changed the locks on his office door.
They never say so, but the players are usually elated when the boss goes stumbling out like a gutted snowbird. That was not the case with the 1973 Rangers and Whitey Herzog. But Herzog’s formal dismissal had been posted for less than an hour, and already the unofficial presence of Billy Martin was hanging heavily in the clubhouse. You couldn’t actually see Billy yet, but he was up there in the rafters and the players were watering down their comments accordingly.
The next day—Saturday—I showed up at the stadium in mid-afternoon. I wanted to bang out a story for the Sunday edition about the lingering aftertaste of Whitey’s abrupt dismissal. Then I planned to skip out early and spend the remainder of my Saturday at an agreeable ballpark alternative—the Cave. That was a location in Arlington that encouraged the development of area vocalists and string musicians who performed Texas ballads like “When The Moon Goes Down On Medina, I’ll Be Going Down On You.”
Good old Merle Heryford, the Morning News guy, had agreed to substitute for me as official scorer. I didn’t have to ask him twice. Merle was probably the only person in the history of the game who actually liked to score.
Seasons in Hell Page 14