Billy Martin remained in peak form as he changed clothes at the end of the game. “I saw Maddox and told him he was gutless,” Martin said, describing the acrimonious folkdance that had happened earlier. “I called him gutless,” Billy repeated, “and he didn’t say anything back. Why? Because he’s gutless. That’s why. He’s a disgrace to that uniform. He sets the Yankees back a hundred years. What would guys like DiMaggio think?”
About two dozen New York-based print and on-the-air reporters were there to record Billy’s sentiments. That afternoon’s whole spring training urban street scene, plus Billy’s erstwhile post-game oratory, had been concocted entirely for their benefit and possible amusement. It occurred to me then and there that Billy Martin was not protecting the honor of his good name. He was auditioning for a job. The Yankees had failed to win a pennant for the previous eleven years. And Bill Virdon, the incumbent manager, maintained all the charm and charisma of an old man’s nut sack. Martin knew too well that somewhere, George Steinbrenner was watching and listening.
The Rangers staged a huge going-away party at the Surf Rider pool on the last day of spring training. My back was still killing me and I was going to fly to Texas, having paid one of Joe Macko’s clubhouse boys a hundred dollars to drive back in my rented station wagon. That was exactly the sum that Martin had paid some girl to streak naked through the going-away party. Given what was soon to come, that stood out as one of the more dignified events of the season.
Chapter 22
The best place in the world to watch baseball is Wrigley Field in Chicago. That opinion prevails not only throughout the Midwest but the entire country. True, most who contend that they love Wrigley have never actually been inside the place, but they’ve heard about it and read about it and seen it on TV. A fortune awaits the visionary who produces a Broadway musical set entirely in Wrigley Field and starring Julie Andrews.
Undeniably, the folksy and idiosyncratic Wrigley Field radiates a cultural magnetism that feels real to the traditionalist. What is puzzling is why Comiskey Park, at the other end of Chicago, remains vilified in the public eye. In terms of age, heritage and design, the ballparks were earmarked by all kinds of similar traits. But when the demolition ball went to work on Comiskey Park in 1992, the civic attitude was “good riddance.” Meanwhile, Wrigley Field remains a shrine. It calls to mind the parable of the lovely twin sisters, identical in every way except that one chronically experienced acute attacks of flatulence.
Comiskey got a bum rap. With its Brit-like ivy walls, Wrigley was and is a mecca for closet quiche freaks. But Cosmiskey had a guileless and unfeigned brass knuckles feel to it. This was where the exploding scoreboard was born and the visitor would get the impression that here was a place where Frank Nitti and Eliot Ness might have cast their differences aside on certain afternoons to go out and watch the White Sox play the St. Louis Browns. The place could be breathtakingly spooky on rainy nights and even in bright daylight seemed to transmit a vaguely sinister quality. There was a strange something about baseball at Comiskey Park that made the spectator feel as if he were watching the game in 3-D.
That was viscerally evident when the Texas Rangers came to Comiskey Park for opening day, 1975, and the great man himself, Mayor Richard Daley, was at the stadium to toss out the ceremonial first ball. From the pressbox before the game, through borrowed binoculars, I watched the last regent of the great urban boss breed take his front row in a box between the plate and the first-base dugout. Daley looked like a bullfrog wearing a trench coat. On impulse, I went down to see if I might get some opening day quotes from Daley or, failing that, get him to autograph my scorecard.
Ordinarily, autographs were not a large personal priority. I had exactly two—Linda Lovelace’s and Lyndon Johnson’s—and Daley’s would make an outstanding addition to that collection. Some men near the mayor’s box made it instantly clear that there would be no quotes and no autographs. Daley’s plainclothes security force seemed composed of men who might have been removed from the operational ranks of the KGB because they were too insensitive to the human condition. Their faces were like blue steel. I got the hell away from Daley’s box as quickly as I could.
The start of the baseball game was the official signal for the fans to begin a strange opening-day Comiskey ritual. (I was informed by a man who covered the White Sox that this was, indeed, sort of a rite of spring when the fans of South Chicago came to the park and unleashed months of latent hostilities that had been stored up from the cold and bitter winter.) Random fistfights broke out throughout the grandstand. This mayhem was marginally in step with the crowd patterns of the Beer Night Riot in Cleveland, but none of the antisocial behavior was directed toward anything happening on the field. This was hand-to-hand combat, fan vs. fan, then row vs. row, and occasionally, in the outfield seats, one section would attack another. In the fifth inning, directly beneath the pressbox, one fan clutched another by the throat and attempted to pitch him off the upper deck before a couple of cops and some fans formed an adlib peacekeeping force. That display provided the initiative for the boys in uniform to take charge. After a few thumps and whacks the unruly segment of the fan population was quickly subdued.
If Daley was not mesmerized by the pageant of brutality, the exhibition had certainly won over Billy Martin. After the game he didn’t seem too interested in talking about how his Rangers had won a game in hostile territory. It was the crowd scene that wowed him. “Man! Did you see those Chicago cops in action? I had a great view from the dugout steps. I wish we had some players in our lineup who could use the bat like those guys.”
Law enforcement in Chicago had no more enthusiastic advocate than Billy Martin. But that was the last time, I think, that I saw Billy smiling in a Rangers uniform. The Rangers did go on to sweep the Sox in Comiskey, but in a much promoted early-season series back in Arlington Stadium the rival Oakland A’s played a part scripted for the Chicago cops while the Rangers found themselves cast in the role of the shoplifter getting caught in the act. The first month of the season ended with the Rangers slightly under .500. This was way too early to write the Rangers off entirely as legitimate contenders, but ominous indicators were lurking everywhere. Jim Bibby’s fastball was no longer feared like a death ray by American League batters. Fergie Jenkins was yielding homeruns at twice the rate of the previous season.
Most distressing of all was the performance of the Strange Ranger, Willie Davis. At the plate, Davis was all but hopeless and seemed every bit as off-stride and clueless as another National League transplant, B-e-e-g Boy Rico Carty, had been two seasons previous. In the field, Davis could still run like Seabiscuit but was also not quite reaching some fly balls driven in the left and right centerfield gaps and failing sometimes by a fraction of an inch to make the catch that would determine the outcome of the game.
The Rangers and, more unfortunately from my aspect, the media were being exposed to a version of Billy Martin that was not as affable as the one who was so effervescent in 1974. His tactic for the 1975 Rangers, a team that he was now convinced needed a hard kick in the ass for purposes of motivation, was one of “creative tension.” That is a corporate term for a management technique that was perfected by Josef Stalin in which constructive criticism is employed in the form of a firing squad. In theory, it keeps everyone on his or her toes and enhances productivity.
Additionally, with a growing estrangement between Billy and his players, the manager decided to activate another formula that he favored from time to time—the “us against them” approach. “Us” being Billy and his players and coaches and “them” being the sportswriters and team management. As scapegoats, Martin first selected James Walker of the Times-Herald (better him than me) and Danny O’Brien, hired by the Rangers as general manager two weeks before Whitey Herzog had been canned by Bob Short. Martin was now fuming at O’Brien because he had failed to make a trade that would have brought one of Martin’s favorites, veteran catcher Tom Egan, to the Rangers. “Egan
is exactly the kind of guy this team needs right now,” Billy declared in the newspapers. “He’s a funny guy to have around in the clubhouse and he’s tough in a fight.”
“If that’s what Billy thinks this team needs, then why doesn’t he bring in Bob Hope and Mohammad Ali,” muttered Burt Hawkins, the traveling secretary. The apologies from the previous year’s airplane episode were all a papier-mâché facade. Hawkins despised Billy.
One trade Martin and Danny O’Brien had engineered was a big one. The Rangers had sent Jim Bibby and Jackie Gene Brown to Cleveland. In exchange they got Gaylord Perry. “Sure, I got one pitcher for the price of two,” Martin conceded to me in the bar at Arlington Stadium. “But look what I’ve got now, with Perry and Jenkins … two future Hall of Famers, maybe, on the same staff. But also”—and now Billy’s voice took on a whispery inflection that was half-devious, half-conspiratorial—“I don’t think those two like each other very much and this personal rivalry will develop between them that’ll make them both even more effective. It’s a jealousy thing and it’ll work in our favor.”
Martin was correct on two points. Both Jenkins and Perry would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And they could hardly be described as inseparable companions while they played for the Rangers. But the additive ingredient of the rivalry thing never did take hold. Both pitchers had mediocre seasons in 1975 and of course the Rangers were now structured so that if that happened, the whole team would follow the example of the two star pitchers.
On another battlefront, the doctor who told me that Harold McKinney wouldn’t last the summer was wrong. Harold didn’t even survive the spring.
McKinney came out to cover some of the home games for about a month. He shaved his head and wore one of those little Chairman Mao caps. But his illness was too advanced. Every time I went into the Rangers’ clubhouse for the post-game interview stuff, the first thing I heard from Martin and the players was “How’s Harold?” In the fourteen years I actually covered sports, I never met anybody who was as universally well-liked by other media people and the jocks as Harold.
When I asked the sports editor who would take Harold’s place for the regular season, he pursed his thin, cruel lips and said that since the paper so loveth my work, the whole Rangers beat—at least the road portion of it—was henceforth wholly and entirely in my lap. Except that now I didn’t have a lap. The day after McKinney died, my herniated disc problem had been exacerbated by savage muscle spasms. Now it looked like somebody had screwed the top half of my body off and then screwed it back on backward. A man’s torso would have to be composed entirely of silly putty to accomplish such a pose. I looked like a sculpture in a wax museum after a bad fire, although I have seen some surreal Picasso pencil sketches that depicted that posture as well. Only a newspaper would send something as pathetic as that out to represent the publication in the mainstream world.
Life on the road seemed to have degenerated from sometimes-sophisticated comedy to fifth-rate burlesque.
On a Saturday night in California, somewhere between Anaheim and LA, I found myself in a car with Randy Galloway, the sportswriter, who had borrowed the car from Jim Merritt, who lived in Fullerton. Galloway was desperate to locate a drinking establishment that somehow reminded him of home, that being Grand Prairie, Texas, where the theme song is “Chrome On The Range.”
“Look, there’s a place,” he finally called out. “See? Nothing but Harley-Davidsons and pickup trucks in the parking lot. Go in there,” he demanded, “and check it out.”
So, with my gimpy back forcing me to sort of lurch along in a lateral direction like a bad special effect in a Grade-B horror movie, I hobbled into the place and discovered some go-go dancers performing on a stage—male go-go dancers wearing nothing but motorcycle boots and jockstraps. That single moment stands out as the singular example that typified—for me—the whole season.
If Norman Vincent Peale were looking for a new disciple, I was a bad candidate and so was Billy Martin. Gaylord Perry had lost his first two starts as a Ranger. Now, for PR reasons more than the standings, Martin needed Gaylord to turn things around. On his third start, at Anaheim Stadium, the Rangers gave Gaylord what he needed: a six-run lead (courtesy of future New York Met manager Mike Cubbage, whose first major-league hit happened to be a grand-slam homer) in the top of the first. But Perry was off-course again. The Angels hit everything Perry threw toward the plate. Martin wanted Perry to last at least five innings to officially get the win. But he waited too long and the Angels tied the game. To make the issue even more agonizing, the Rangers scored three runs in the top of the twelfth only to see the Angels match that and then top it with one more to win in the bottom half of the inning. California got the winner when Willie Davis ran underneath a fly ball to the centerfield fence with the bases loaded and then watched as the ball bounced off the heel of his glove.
The Friday night debacle was followed by a day game on Saturday. Less than an hour before the Saturday game I was leaving the Grand Hotel (most of which had been taken over for the weekend by a convention of square dancers) for the ballpark when I heard somebody—a solitary figure—going “pssst … pssst” from inside the bar. It was Martin. “What are you doing in here?” I asked him. Stupid question. He was having a pre-game pop, obviously. “I’m standing in here having a drink with all my friends,” Billy said. Then he proceeded to blame the previous night’s loss on Frank Lucchesi, his third-base coach. “Frank held up a runner (Toby Harrah) who would have scored easily in the second inning,” Billy insisted. “Then we wind up not knocking him in. If Toby scores, no extra innings. Simple as that. And then I get a call from some asshole in Las Vegas at three A.M. claiming he lost two hundred grand because of the Rangers and he was raising hell with me … claiming I’d blown the game by keeping Perry in too long. I told the fucker that if he wanted to bitch at somebody, bitch at Frank Lucchesi.”
Back in Arlington, the fans were still streaming into the park in numbers that satisfied Brad Corbett and the rest of the ownership. Corbett hadn’t completely outgrown his “fan” stage and a parade of celebrated figures who arrived at the park for various purposes was a source of real fun for him. It has often been said that the two happiest days in a boat-owner’s life are the day he buys it and the day he sells it. Thus it would also be with Brad Corbett and his baseball team. But in the early stages of Big Brad’s Rangers ownership it was frequently noted that when Corbett decided to buy a toy, he sure loved to play with it. After just over one season, Corbett had been photographed with enough sports stars, past and present, to open his own Italian restaurant.
One of these was Don Newcombe, Dodger pitching great and nemesis of the Yankee Fortress that had included Billy Martin as the second baseman in the Fifties. Newcombe was not in Arlington, however, to help Corbett sample the newest case of Pinot Noir or single malt scotch or whatever it was that Brad sipped from his own private stock in the press lounge. Newcombe was traveling the majors from team to team, warning players of the hazards that lurked within the bottles that surrounded him in the press lounge. I forget who was funding Newcombe on his speaking tour, but his message was near-revolutionary for its time. This was 1975 and the first big leaguer to publicly enter alkie rehab, another Dodger pitcher, Bob Welch, didn’t do that until 1980. Newcombe, known around the country as Big Newk in his prime, had a simple point—booze is bad. Booze, he told me, was the singular reason his prime years had ended prematurely.
“My real downfall came when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles,” Newcombe said. “I had a deathly fear of air travel. When the Dodgers were in Brooklyn we still rode the trains a lot, but after heading to California it was nothing but airplanes and I was petrified. It was a phobia and the only way I thought I could last out the flight was to drink and drink some more. Before long I had developed a real drinking habit. And that impacted my ability to pitch. So, for all intents and purposes, I drank myself out of the game.
“And I’m not the on
ly one. There have been hundreds of players just like me. Maybe it wasn’t fear of flying that made them drink to extreme,” Newcombe continued. “I don’t guess you can count the reasons that make people drink but I think that fear of failure is a big cause with professional ballplayers. Big-league baseball is a great lifestyle, but with a lot of these guys, they know that they won’t be experiencing that lifestyle for very long if they don’t maintain their performance level and so that’s a big source of anxiety. They don’t realize how drinking can actually hasten their departure from the big leagues.”
I wondered how many Rangers ballplayers had listened to what Newcombe was talking about when he had met with several of them earlier that afternoon. “And then … to make the problem much worse … after some of these players realize that they have drunk themselves out of the game, then they proceed to drink themselves to death,” Newcombe said. “I can pick up a newspaper sports section any week of the year and see some one-paragraph item where ex-major leaguer so-and-so has died at some age like fifty-eight. They might list the official cause of death as heart failure or stroke or something, but when I see where a guy dies at a relatively young age like that, I often wonder if excessive drinking wasn’t the real cause. For a lot of players, life really doesn’t seem to have that much to offer them after they’re through with the game. So hitting the bottle becomes a form of passive suicide.”
About two weeks after Newcombe’s visit to Arlington, the press lounge was jammed with photo opportunities for Brad Corbett. The Rangers had staged an Old-Timers Game promotion and plenty of regal names had participated. Joe DiMaggio was there. Willie Mays. Ralph Kiner. Bob Feller.
After the regular game was finished—Catfish Hunter, now pitching for the Yankees in the dawn of the free-agent era in baseball, had pitched a shutout—I hammered out my story and joined the party in the press lounge. Now I was heeding Don Newcombe’s clearly prophetic forecast of doom … at my own pace, naturally. I had formed my own twelve-step program. Instead of twelve drinks a night, I would stop at eleven, and so on, until I got down to zero. Obviously, no timetable had been yet arranged, although the year 2000 seemed reasonable. But the fact was that I was growing weary of the taste of scotch.
Seasons in Hell Page 21