Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  It was, for the most part, the product of a lifetime of enduring slights, real and imagined. Even the moment in 1949 when he first became a New York Yankee, in retrospect one of the great moments of his career, was marred by what he took to be a sign of disrespect. He was, at the time, a bony young man with a big nose and jug ears, a second baseman for the Oakland Oaks. Upon hearing a roar from the crowd, he glanced upward and caught sight of a blimp overhead. The news was wrapped around the electronic ticker: BILLY MARTIN SOLD TO YANKEES. “I was kind of mad when I found out the rest,” Martin remarked later. “Oakland was paying me $9,000. When I went to the Yankees the next year they only gave me $6,000. But I knew I’d make it in New York.”

  Others weren’t so sure. Martin was just a throw in on a larger deal for a highly touted outfielder named Jackie Jensen. The Yankees already had two second basemen, Jerry Coleman and Snuffy Stirnweiss. And what did they want with a runty banjo hitter like Martin, anyway? During Martin’s first Yankees’ camp in 1950, Casey Stengel hit him eighth in an exhibition game. “Next thing, you’ll have me batting behind the batboy,” Martin fumed. Opening day at Fenway Park the dead-end kid slapped a double in his first big-league at bat, then a bases-loaded single—in the same inning. (“Listen you,” Martin told one reporter afterward, “the name’s Billy, not Alfred, like you wrote it up. Don’t forget it.”)

  Yet down to the minors he went. “I’ll make you pay for abusing me like this!” a red-eyed Martin shrieked at the Yankees’ general manager, George Weiss.

  A month later Martin was back in New York, this time to stay. He bunked with a couple of other rookies at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, right around the corner from the stadium, so he could get to the ballpark early for extra batting practice. He peppered his coaches with questions and hollered like hell from the dugout. Before long, he’d scratched his way into the starting lineup. It helped that Martin had already endeared himself to Casey Stengel, who managed Martin—“that fresh kid who’s always sassing everybody and getting away with it”—back in Oakland in ’48. (During infield practice Stengel would cock his head and scorch a grounder at Martin. Martin would scoop the ball up, flash Stengel a limp wrist, and then throw it back to him.) In New York the writers had soon taken to calling Martin Casey’s Boy. Martin, who had never known his father, called Stengel old man.

  What Martin lacked in talent he made up for in grit. The same determination that had propelled this juvenile delinquent out of the sandlots of a dirt-poor, fatherless childhood near the docks of Berkeley—his grandmother had floated over from San Francisco with all her household possessions on a raft—drove him to overachieve as a big leaguer. After getting plugged in the face by a fastball near the end of his career in 1959, he started bailing out at the plate. Whenever he came up, he’d tell himself, loudly enough for the opposing team to hear: “Stay in, stay in, stay in.” But Martin kept pulling out. So during batting practice he put on a wool warm-up jacket and instructed the pitcher to throw him a bag full of “bow ties,” balls that were hard and inside. There he stood, his olive skin stretched tight across his face, his dark eyes narrowed in concentration, willing his uncooperative body into submission as one pitch after another buzzed beneath his chin.

  In the field Martin never lost focus. During batting practice he would study the infield grass to see how aggressively he needed to charge slow rollers. Once the game was under way, he’d watch each batter’s feet for a sense of which direction the ball was likely to go. He hated wearing sunglasses during games, so he trained himself to follow pop flies out of the corners of his eyes to reduce the risk of losing them in the sun.

  Martin turned double plays as ferociously as anyone who had ever played the game, and his disproportionately long arms came in handy when he was pivoting on the bag and whipping the ball across to first. He tagged runners so they stayed tagged, and he wasn’t above swiping his glove across their jaws if he felt they deserved it. Sitting next to Ty Cobb at a banquet in San Francisco, Martin told the dyspeptic old-timer that if he had played during his era, Cobb would have come sliding into second spikes high on him only once: “After that, you wouldn’t have had any teeth.”

  He was just a .250 hitter—and 75 percent of his hits were singles—but Martin got his knocks when they mattered most. A 1956 profile in Sports Illustrated labeled him “The Damnedest Yankee of Them All.” In his six full years with the team, 1951 to 1956, the Yankees won five pennants. Only once did they fail to make it to the World Series: 1954, the year that Martin did a brief tour in the army. His lifetime World Series batting average was a gaudy .333, but his most memorable series moment came on defense. With the bases loaded and two out in the seventh inning of the final game of the 1952 series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, Martin streaked toward home from the edge of the infield, his cap disappearing behind him as he charged, to spear a windblown pop fly at his shoe tops. Somehow, Martin had sensed that the Yankees’ first baseman, for whom it should have been a routine play, had lost track of the ball.

  Martin would have done anything to avoid losing, but winning came at its own cost. In short, his emotional makeup was not equal to the pressure, external or internal, of playing so far above his head.

  When Martin first broke into professional baseball, his boyhood priest, Father Dennis Moore, who had supplied Martin’s impoverished family with baskets of food, prayed that he’d get some wise counseling. “Life had made him most vulnerable,” Moore once said. The priest’s prayers went unanswered. Martin fought insomnia, hypertension, and what was then known as acute melancholia. His churning stomach kept him from eating for long stretches. What he did eat, he’d often puke back up. Martin tried to cope, popping sleeping pills and drinking bottomless glasses of scotch, but nothing could quite cure the distemper. “The guys who are happy playing ball are those who can adjust to the nuthouse they have to live in,” Martin told Al Stump for a 1956 story in The Saturday Evening Post, a rare profile that got at the essential darkness beneath Martin’s “peppery” exterior. “Some of us can. Some can’t. I’ve never been able to get a good steady grip on myself in this racket.”

  Instability bred truculence. Martin’s fists always seemed to be finding someone’s face. “The Bible says you should turn the other cheek,” Martin once said, “but God couldn’t have known anything about baseball.” Baseball brawls are famously harmless affairs marked more by frenzied flailing than real combat. Not when Martin was involved. Most notoriously, he pulverized a mentally ill Red Sox rookie, Jimmy Piersall, beneath the stands at Fenway. When Piersall was institutionalized for a nervous breakdown a month later, even Martin was embarrassed. His only defense, he remarked, was that he was just a step ahead of the men in the white coats himself.

  Martin lived in constant fear of having everything taken away from him, and his paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified. He wasn’t going to be able to fight off the younger, more talented players forever. What’s more, it was no secret that Weiss, a wealthy German-American from Greenwich, Connecticut, figured the unstable, bellicose Martin for a bad influence on the team’s biggest box-office draw, Mickey Mantle. (Martin was convinced that Weiss had hired detectives to trail him.)

  Sure enough, at the beginning of the ’57 season Martin lost his job to a twenty-one-year-old rookie, Bobby Richardson. Six weeks later, on May 15, he went out to celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday with a few teammates. After dinner at the chic steak house Danny’s Hideaway and drinks at the Waldorf-Astoria, they made their way to the Copacabana to catch Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 2 a.m. show. The table of Yankees was soon exchanging heated words with a bowling team from the Bronx. In the tangle that ensued, a forty-year-old delicatessen owner was knocked out cold. YANKEES IN DRUNKEN NIGHTCLUB BRAWL, blared the next day’s banner headline in the New York Mirror. Martin reportedly didn’t throw the punch, but he wasn’t going to rat out the Yankee who did. Weiss now had the excuse he needed.

  There was a month to go before the trading deadline, and Martin twisted in the wind for its
duration. On June 15, with the midnight deadline just a few hours away, the Yankees were in Kansas City playing the Athletics. Absent from the lineup, a fidgety Martin walked out to the bullpen to watch the game, hoping somehow that if Weiss couldn’t find him, he couldn’t trade him. The bullpen phone rang in the sixth inning, and Martin was summoned to the clubhouse. The Yankees’ farm director, Lee MacPhail, delivered the news: The next day he should report to the other dressing room. He had been traded to lowly Kansas City.

  Martin drank late into the night with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, then returned to his hotel room and sobbed until sunrise. The following day he debuted at second base for the A’s. In the eighth, Ford, on the mound for the Yankees, signaled to his old pal to expect a curve, then hung a slow, fat one over the middle of the plate. Martin sent it into the left field bleachers on a line. It was small consolation. “I was running around the bases and I wasn’t even happy,” Martin reflected later. For seven years he refused to speak to Casey Stengel, whom he blamed for failing to protect him from the Yankees’ brass.

  A few weeks later the A’s were in the Bronx playing the Yankees. The archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman, was at the game, and he called Martin over to speak with him during batting practice. Cardinal Spellman asked Martin how he liked Kansas City. “Oh, just fine, your eminence,” he answered. A few minutes later Martin was back behind the batting cage, waiting for his turn. “How do I like it in Kansas City?” he muttered. “I wanted to ask him, ‘How would you like it in Kansas City?’”

  After an uninspired hitch with the Athletics, Martin knocked around the big leagues for several more years. As he bounced from one flagging franchise to the next, his arrival was almost always accompanied by the expectation that his famous intangibles—“pride, fortitude, and aggressiveness,” as Dick Schaap described them in Sport magazine in 1959—would transform the club into a contender. They never did. Martin played hard, but his mediocre skills deteriorated rapidly, and he never really got over the trade. “I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t get my heart into it,” Martin later reflected. “From then on I was through. It was all downhill.”

  When the Minnesota Twins cut Martin in 1962, they offered to keep him on as a scout. Martin jumped at the chance. He was gradually promoted through the club’s ranks and in the summer of ‘68 was named manager of its Triple A affiliate, the Denver Bears. The team was 8-22 when Martin took over and 65-50 when he left. His performance earned him a one-year contract for the ’69 season with Minnesota’s sleepy big-league club. “He will be either the greatest or the worst manager in the majors,” the Twins’ president, Calvin Griffith, said ominously as the season opened. For his part, Martin guaranteed the baseball fans of Minnesota the most exciting summer of their lives.

  They got it. Martin managed the game just as he had played it: personally, emotionally, intensely. Before games he’d take infield among his men. During games he’d bound out onto the field almost every inning—his right hand jammed into his back pocket, just like his mentor, Casey Stengel—either to issue an instruction to a pitcher that could just as easily have been communicated from the bench or to argue a call, which he usually did with his jaw an inch away from the umpire’s nose. More than once the scene ended with Martin getting the heave-ho and then kicking red clay all over the umpire’s trousers. He was a micromanager who shifted fielders, called pitches, and forbade even his fastest men to run without his permission. Most managers enjoy engaging in postgame analysis, getting the chance to explain to the writers why they did this or that. Martin guarded his strategic decisions like state secrets: “What do you want? The whole country to read it, for chrissakes?” At night he’d routinely violate baseball’s unwritten prohibition against bending elbows with the help. (No one knew this rule better than Martin. After all, he’d heard Casey Stengel repeat it at the start of every year: “One thing I want understood—I do my drinkin’ at the hotel bar. Stay out of it.”)

  As a player Martin had checked the lineup every afternoon half expecting to find that he’d been left off it. As a manager he wanted his players to live with the same uncertainty. He was more than happy to platoon his biggest stars to help get the message across. If that star was also a pet of one of the know-nothing suits in the front office, so much the better.

  Martin led the Twins to a division title, drew a record 1.3 million fans to Metropolitan Stadium, and forever endeared himself to the Twin Cities. He also blasted the front office—“the second-guessing sonsabitches”—for mishandling a promising minor leaguer, decked the team’s traveling secretary in the lobby of a hotel in Washington, and ordered Vice President Hubert Humphrey to get his ass out of his dressing room.

  But nothing quite compared with the scene that unfolded one night at the Lindell AC, a popular Detroit saloon where Martin and a number of Twins had gathered to drink on a road trip. One of Martin’s pitchers, Dave Boswell, had refused to run laps after the game that afternoon, and the team’s pitching coach, Art Fowler, sat down next to Martin and told him as much. Boswell came over after Fowler left and let Martin know he was going to kick Fowler’s ass for snitching on him. From here the details grow sketchy, but the undisputed facts are these: Martin pummeled Boswell, who had a good three inches and twenty pounds on his manager, so severely that the doctor in the emergency room assumed that the pitcher had been attacked by someone wielding a pipe. (Boswell said later that he’d been pinned by a few of his teammates while Martin went to work on him.) To Martin, it was just part of the job. “I like to treat my players as men,” he once remarked, “but sometimes they act like little boys and little boys have to be slapped down.”

  Griffith couldn’t get rid of Martin quickly enough. “Prior to hiring him, realizing his explosive personality and his inexperience as a manager, I had numerous meetings with him to set policy and guidelines,” he said. “I feel he has completely ignored our understandings.”

  Martin’s firing drove the people of Minnesota into a foul fury. Bumpers were plastered with “Boycott the Twins” stickers, and screeds poured into the Minneapolis Star, including one signed by 218 fans renouncing the team in protest. More than a few letters were addressed to Griffith himself. “In my judgment,” wrote one outraged Twins’ fan, “history will record your decision on Billy Martin along with decisions that were made by Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, and Napoleon, when they took it upon themselves, in defense of their own egos, to determine what was good for all the people.” A Teamsters’ chapel, a natural constituency for Martin, threatened to cancel its season tickets. More surprisingly, though Martin had not a liberal bone in his body, his anti-Establishment, stick-it-to-the-man persona made him a cause célèbre among local campus radicals. At an anti–Vietnam War protest at the University of Minnesota, shaggy-haired demonstrators wore “Fuck Griffith” buttons and chanted, “Bring back Billy.” “It’s an out-and-out revolt by the Minnesota baseball fans,” reported The Sporting News. “They feel they have been robbed of their loveable, scrappy, outspoken, toe-stomping Italian leader.”

  A year later Martin was back in baseball, this time as manager of the Tigers. Again, he improved the team’s sagging fortunes dramatically, bringing home a divisional flag in his second season. Again, he inspired fierce loyalty among fans. Again, he quarreled with the front office and was ultimately fired. Martin managed baseball teams well, the joke went; he just wasn’t very good at managing himself. The Orioles’ Earl Weaver later put it in starker terms: “Billy understands baseball, he just doesn’t understand life.”

  The Texas Rangers picked Martin up near the end of the ’73 season. In the winter he pushed the club to sign Ferguson Jenkins, a tall right-hander who was coming off a dismal year with the Cubs. At the end of spring training Martin elevated an unknown twenty-four-year-old named Mike Hargrove from Class A ball. Jenkins won twenty-five games and was named Comeback Player of the Year; Hargrove hit .323 and was voted Rookie of the Year. Having transformed the team with the worst record in baseball into an
84-76 club, the first winning season in franchise history, Martin was voted Manager of the Year.

  Martin pushed his men to play over their heads, much as he had. He expected a level of intensity that was difficult, if not impossible, to sustain over a 160-game season. He shortened the careers of numerous pitchers, giving them the ball on three days’ rest and keeping them in games with their pitch counts soaring. Martin’s management style didn’t please everybody, nor was it intended to. “You hire twenty-five players. Fifteen of them are for you a thousand percent. Five are probably undecided and probably five don’t like you,” he said. “The secret is to keep that last five away from the undecided so you’ll have twenty going for you instead of fifteen against ten.”

  Still, he was a brilliant tactical manager, a fact that even those who loathed him are apt to concede. “I didn’t like the way he treated his players, myself included,” says Ken Holtzman, who pitched for Martin in New York, “but as a field manager, in terms of the X’s and O’s, he was the best.”

  Martin, who had been known as Billy the Kid in his playing days, liked Texas. The gunslinging swagger suited him. He even started wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots and adopted a Southern drawl. The team’s owner, Brad Corbett, set Martin up with a membership at a fancy golf club in Fort Worth. When he and his old pal Mickey Mantle nearly ran over Ben Hogan in a golf cart, Shady Oaks cut Martin loose. So did Corbett, in late July 1975. “He’s the easiest guy in the world to work for … as long as you just do it his way,” Corbett said. Martin of course took a different view. “I was the perfect guy to be crucified,” he said, after smashing the five-hundred-dollar wristwatch that Corbett had given him for Christmas. In six years he had saved three teams and been fired three times.

  Martin was licking his wounds when Bernie Tebbetts tracked him down fishing for trout in Colorado. Tebbetts worked for a man named Gabe Paul who worked for a man named George Steinbrenner.