Billy Martin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Photos

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Research and Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Sample Chapter from ON PAR

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Bill Pennington

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Pennington, Bill, date. author.

  Billy Martin : baseball’s flawed genius / Bill Pennington.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-02209-6 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-02294-2 (ebook)

  1. Martin, Billy, 1928–1989. 2. New York Yankees (Baseball team)—History. 3. Baseball managers—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Baseball players—New York (State)—New York—Biography. I. Title.

  GV865.M35P46 2015

  796.357092—dc23

  [B]

  2014039677

  v1.0415

  To Joyce, Anne D., Elise, and Jack:

  the best of patience, support, wisdom, and inspiration

  Introduction

  THE MULTICOLORED CHRISTMAS lights in the trees at the foot of the driveway dotted the crest of the ridge that is Potter Hill Road. You could see them from a distance of several hundred yards as you approached from beneath the rise—little bulbs of red, blue, and green piercing the snowy darkness.

  At 5:45 p.m. on Christmas night 1989, as Billy Martin’s pickup truck turned toward home, the ornamental lights waved a holiday greeting, bobbing from the branches of evergreens that framed the path to his farm in upstate New York.

  It was a peaceful country setting, calm and serene, but earlier a gusting wind had left a glaze on a road that had been plowed but was never completely cleared of snow. Billy’s pickup truck approached a sharp bend 100 feet before the driveway to his 150-acre property.

  It took no more than five seconds, but this is when and where Billy Martin died. With an ill-timed turn of the steering wheel, Billy’s Ford truck slid off the road into a ditch, then lurched forward until it crashed into a five-foot-wide culvert and bridge that spanned the trench. The truck came to a halt at the foot of Billy’s driveway, the Christmas lights that he had hung in the trees reflecting on the vehicle’s crumpled blue hood. Slumped inside, Billy had fractured his neck when he slammed headfirst into the windshield.

  Twenty-four hours after the accident, on December 26, 1989, I drove to the scene. I stood at the end of the driveway and bent over to pick up a piece of headlight glass gleaming in the snow. It was quiet, a kind of rural quiet, and the hush and bitter cold accentuated the isolation of the landscape.

  Inconceivably, Billy Martin, the big-city, bright-lights manager cheered by millions in his time, which included five loud stints as a central character in George Steinbrenner’s 1970s and 1980s mix of follies and championships, had died in the still of a lonely, pastoral road.

  “Billy would probably be alive today if he was wearing a seat belt,” Ken Billo, an officer in the local sheriff’s office, told me at the crash scene.

  Perhaps that’s true, but if there was anyone who went through life without a seat belt on, it was Billy Martin.

  And yet, standing next to the nondescript, barren piece of country road just north of Binghamton, New York, I found it hard to believe that this was where it had all ended, the last act of a tumultuous life.

  After all the firings, the suspensions, the fistfights, the dirt-throwing incidents with umpires, the hobnobbing with celebrities, the funny beer commercials and television appearances, the media wars and all the backbiting warfare in clubhouses and executive suites, it was natural to believe Billy was indestructible. He had wiggled his way out of countless bar fights, close games, and back-alley tight spots. Then a slick country road sneaked up and claimed him.

  As a Yankees beat writer from 1985 to 1989, I had traveled all over the country with Billy. I had been threatened by him, almost beaten up by him. I had also been charmed by him, benefited from his natural graciousness, and enjoyed being in his charismatic presence for countless hours on the baseball trail. It was my job to be at his side day after day, year after year, in hotel lobbies, team buses, and chartered jets, in ballpark offices before and after games and into the wee hours of the morning as Billy—and the Yankees beat—was transported into a thousand bars, lounges, and saloons around the continent. In that time, I discovered that Billy was without question one of the most magnetic, entertaining, sensitive, humane, brilliant, generous, insecure, paranoid, dangerous, irrational, and unhinged people I had ever met.

  In the more than twenty-five years since his death, I always pondered writing a book about Billy principally because I saw the fascination in people’s eyes when I told them stories about him. Across the decades, at cocktail parties or any gathering when I would be asked to tell tales from my more than thirty years as a sportswriter, I could always depend on Billy Martin to entertain and intrigue. No other single figure would draw people in, or get as many laughs, or leave listeners puzzled and curious. He was someone they could visualize instantly, a character they knew as genuine and yet flawed, with a common-man vulnerability that set him apart. Billy’s emotions, ever so apparent, would seem to make him an open book, but his actions left a different impression, one both undefined and hauntingly mercurial.

  At the same time, it was the lack of orchestration or affectation in his life that gave him a deeper appeal. Billy was beloved because he represented a traditional American dream: freedom.

  He lived independent from rules. He bucked the system. He lived the life he wanted to live, despite the many personal costs. People admired him because he did what they wished they had the courage to do.

  He told his boss to shove it. Often.

  Unafraid of failure, he repeatedly faltered, then resurrected himself to succeed again.

  He never backed down, even when to do so would have been an act of self-preservation and career conservation.

  He was the hero, the antihero, and the alter ego—or some combination of all three—for several generations of American sports fans, as both a player and a manager.

  Born in a broken home surrounded by a shantytown, he was raised with fists clenched, ever ready to mete out punishment aimed at resolving the societal inequities he saw in his hardscrabble life. Rescued by sports, he found a mentor in Casey Stengel, who made him a profe
ssional athlete and eventually a Yankee, where he found success as a scrappy, beloved, and clutch player. For the next four decades, no one in baseball ever ignored him, least of all his legion of fans. He was not the kind of guy you could, or should, turn away from.

  This was true right up to the last seconds of his life. Just before making the final turn in the road near his farm, just before the concluding twist in a life of many curves, Billy’s truck rumbled past the Hickling farm on Potter Hill Road. There was a beep of a horn and a wave.

  “He always waved or stopped to talk to you,” Colleen Hickling said later. Then she added something that could have summed up Billy’s sixty-one-year life: “Billy wasn’t going to ignore you; he would always try to catch your eye.”

  At that he succeeded. He spent forty years catching people’s eye and came in close contact with practically every prominent figure in the history of twentieth-century baseball. He played for baseball royalty in the game’s Golden Age. He was the other second baseman in New York in the 1950s—opposite the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson, who went head-to-head against Billy nearly every fall in the World Series. He managed more than thirty Hall of Famers and revived a browbeaten, demoralized Yankees franchise in the late 1970s. He made memorable television commercials and movie appearances, gambled with Lucille Ball, played pool with Jackie Gleason, golfed with Jack Nicholson, and lived on the back page of the New York tabloid newspapers. He could talk for hours about Civil War history and Robert E. Lee’s battlefield strategies just as easily as he could explain the history of bunt coverage schemes dating to the 1800s. He never refused autograph seekers, would sit for hours in hotel lobbies talking with children, and slipped clubhouse boys and valets $100 bills like they were nickels. His smile, natural and unforced, could disarm any audience, from the field at Yankee Stadium to the couch on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

  At the same time, he could get in a growling snit with a complete stranger because of the way the man ordered a drink. He started arguments on bus rides just to see who would argue back. He sensed insult in nominal things, like whether someone called him “buddy,” which he did not like for some reason. Clasping the rail of a bar, his fingers would tense into a fist when someone made that mistake.

  Especially late in his life, he routinely ignited alcohol-laden brawls, a confirmation of an immaturity, or a substance dependency, he could never entirely regulate.

  Altogether, they were the paradoxes of a complicated but compassionate life. Billy, for example, loved people; that’s why he always drank in public. He despised phoniness and wanted to be with regular folk, relishing his role as the endearing underdog, a man of the people who always had a joke and an open bar tab. And yet, something about Billy’s rough-and-tumble roots left scars that always made him feel he was being judged by those same people—and never quite measuring up. He saw slights everywhere.

  As his dear friend Mickey Mantle said, “Billy is the only guy in the world who can hear someone give him the finger.”

  Unfortunately, since Billy’s death, all the contradictions and complexities of his personality and life—all the considerable good, the notable bad, and the eternally puzzling—have been simplistically molded into a crude caricature. He was the guy who was frequently hired and fired, almost fought with Reggie Jackson in a dugout, and drank a lot. Many raised on ESPN know Billy only as the guy who kicked dirt on umpires. All of those things happened. But separately or altogether, it is a wholly incomplete depiction.

  It also overlooks a remarkable record of achievement beginning with five World Series championships as a player when he was considered the unofficial captain of the Yankees. In that period, the only time the Yankees did not play in the World Series was when Billy was in the military. As a dugout manager he may have had no peer. The Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa told me in 2013, “Without reservation I would call Billy the most brilliant field manager I ever saw. He was unmatched. None of us felt up to him.”

  The Elias Sports Bureau, one of the most respected analytical entities in American athletics, spent years in the latter part of the twentieth century devising a formula to measure the effectiveness of baseball managers. The model assessed each team’s record in a given season going back to 1903. The rubric took into account the team’s performance in the previous season and the succeeding season and all kinds of personnel factors. In the end, the Elias calculators assigned a number of projected wins—an expected record—for each team in each season. The managers of those teams were then assigned a negative or positive number depending on whether the team had exceeded or underachieved based on the projected/expected record.

  At the time, among those who had managed at least 1,000 Major League games, Billy was the top-scoring manager, averaging 7.45 more wins per season than expected in a sixteen-year career. The next-best manager averaged 6.38 wins. As the Elias analysts wrote, “Billy Martin happens to be the best manager in the history of Major League baseball” (the italics are theirs).

  That, naturally, could start an argument in many a barroom, something Billy would have surely enjoyed—and stoked, most likely with a wink of his eye.

  As Billy once said, “I believe if God had ever managed, he would have been very aggressive, the way I manage. Of course, God would never have been wrong and then had to face all the consequences.”

  The consequences were many, and not just in Billy’s professional life. In his heart of hearts, Billy longed for a family and a white-picket-fence existence, something he achieved at various stages in his four marriages. But as his son, Billy Jr., said to me as he flipped through a family album that contained picture after picture of father and son playing in the backyard or relaxing in front of the living room television, “Whenever everything was going good, whenever things were too calm, that’s when he had this uncontrollable need to shake things up. He had to create some excitement. It was his tragic flaw.”

  Creating excitement was what made him Billy Martin, even if it was often his undoing.

  Not that he lived unhappily. Billy had as much fun as anyone in an adult life that stretched from 1947 to 1989. He laughed, partied, caroused, sang, danced, and drank—often with no consideration for the next day. During the more than two years of research for this book, when I told interview subjects that I was doing a book on Billy, almost everyone I contacted immediately started smiling or laughed over the phone. The mere memory of Billy amused them. A very few scowled, snorted, or refused to discuss him. But even those who ended up criticizing him harshly usually began by saying something like, “There was never a boring minute around Billy.”

  Earl Weaver, his most bitter managerial rival, said, “There were plenty of times I wanted to wring Billy’s neck. And I know he felt the same way about me. But deep down I believed he was a good guy just trying to get everything he could out of every situation. But we didn’t live at a time when you sat around waiting for those things to happen. You fought tooth and nail for everything you could get.”

  Significantly, Billy was a man of his times—all of them, because, as his son said, Billy liked change. But it is also true that Billy was a creation of a bygone era. American sports will never see someone like him again. In the age of several round-the-clock ESPN channels, the ceaseless chatter of sports talk radio, and omnipresent smartphone cameras, Billy could not exist. At least not as an employed baseball manager. A prying news cycle and the need for instant analysis would not grasp the nuances of Billy’s genius, and it certainly would not tolerate his precarious excesses. His popular legend would not have had time to grow organically as it did from 1950 until his death. His grass-roots appeal might never have the space it needed to flourish.

  Which is all the more reason to remember him.

  The ditch that Billy’s pickup truck slid into on Christmas Day 1989 has been filled in to make the turn at the top of Potter Hill Road safer. It remains a lonely, secluded spot that is hard to find. And yet, it is still a destination for those unwilling to forget Billy Martin.
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  Bob and Rhoda Lerman, who now own the house and farm where Billy lived, said people regularly leave mementos of Billy at the foot of their driveway, which is a 130-yard drive from the property’s house. There will be commemorative coffee cups with photos of Billy and the 1977 championship Yankees team, a T-shirt from the halcyon Billy Ball days in Oakland, or a ticket stub from Billy Martin Day in 1986 when his number was retired at Yankee Stadium.

  “We left the house one day and found two guys sitting by the end of the driveway having a beer for Billy,” Bob Lerman said when I visited him in 2014. “Sometimes it will be a husband and wife who say they just wanted to see where it all ended for Billy. One time, it was three fans all wearing Billy’s number 1 Yankee jersey.

  “I’ve gone down the driveway and found people standing there weeping.”

  Lerman has lived in the house since 1998, which he agreed to buy before he knew of its famed former owner. A native New Yorker, he knows the fable and folklore of Billy’s life. Nonetheless, he remains awed by the renown of his quiet country corner in upstate New York.

  “How long ago did he die?” Lerman asked. “It’s like twenty-five years, right? But they still come. They do not forget.

  “I guess that’s it. They want to make sure Billy is not forgotten.”

  1

  “BLESS ME, FATHER, for I have sinned,” Billy Martin said.

  He was in second grade.

  Billy did this every Friday in 1936, entering the confessional of St. Ambrose Church to sit before the same priest, Father Dennis Moore. Like most second-graders, Billy did not actually have that many wrong deeds to tell Father Moore about. To what could he possibly confess?

  Failing to honor his mother and father? Billy did not talk back to his parents. For one, he did not know his father, who left his mother when Billy was an infant. And he did not dare cross his mother, who ruled her household with an iron fist—a representation that was more than figurative. Jenny Martin knew how to throw a punch. Everyone in the family had seen with their own eyes her prowess in a fistfight, with women, and men.