Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  On October 13, 1949, a promotional blimp that used to circle Oaks Park with local advertising messages instead flashed a news bulletin: OAKS PLAYERS JACKIE JENSEN AND BILLY MARTIN SOLD TO NY YANKEES.

  The crowd began to cheer, and the players on the field paused to look up at the blimp. After the game, an Associated Press photographer had Billy and Jackie Jensen pose at the dugout railing because the New York papers wanted a shot of the two newest Yankees.

  Jensen was a six-foot, two-hundred-pound former All-American football star at Cal-Berkeley with blond hair, blue eyes, a barrel chest, and muscular forearms. He was a perfect specimen of post–World War II America and, by the measure of Billy’s old neighborhood vocabulary, 100 percent a Goat. Billy stood next to Jensen. In the picture, Billy’s nose still looks too big for his face and his ears protrude. His uniform is baggy, the sleeves hanging to the elbows, and his belt is cinched tight around a narrow waist that looks like it was still being fed by mustard sandwiches. The photograph captures, in real terms, one of Billy’s last moments as a West Berkeley boy.

  He wrapped an affectionate arm around Jensen’s shoulder and offered a thin smile.

  As much as Billy had realized a childhood dream, having willed his way from ramshackle 7th Street to the most famous sports team in the world, he was far from satisfied. The New York newspaper accounts the next day mostly focused on Jensen and called Billy “a utility infielder.” Billy also soon learned that he was taking a pay cut to go to the Yankees, his salary dropping from $9,000 to $7,500. Jensen, meanwhile, was seen as a possible heir to DiMaggio in center field (in 1949, Mickey Mantle was a wild-armed shortstop in Class D ball). Jensen had signed a three-year contract worth $80,000.

  The day after Billy was sold to the Yankees, the New York Times did use that word again—sparkplug—in describing “the sprightly 21-year-old from the Coast.” They also identified him as Alfred M. Martin, another thing that annoyed Billy to no end. No one called him “Alfred.” At least not to his face.

  Billy, who had never been east of Texas, joined the Yankees the next spring, although not before another brief visit to a San Francisco hospital.

  “Another nose operation,” said Lew Figone. “But at least this one worked. It was finally smaller.”

  Billy’s family does not recall any prominent sendoff when Billy left in February for what the Yankees were calling an instructional league—a pre–spring training camp in Phoenix.

  Billy’s friend Billy Castell recalls being in the house at 1632 7th Street just before Billy departed.

  “His mom gave him a pep talk like only she could,” Castell said. “You know, practically all four-letter words. She said, ‘Now listen, don’t you let any of those fucking New York big shots give you any fucking bullshit. You know how to fucking play baseball just as fucking good as they do.’

  “Billy just looked at her and when she turned away he looked at me and smiled. But I think he heard her.”

  Phoenix was an intermediate stop in many ways. It was also a somewhat secretive gathering—in 1950 you could have forty-three professional baseball players and ten coaches work out for two weeks in Arizona and have no one know it in the New York offices of the commissioner of baseball. There was no local TV news let alone smartphones and Internet service. The Yankees surreptitiously ordered some of their best young prospects, rookies, and young players to Phoenix. By 1951, Commissioner Happy Chandler had found out about this “league” and decided it breached the rules prohibiting spring training from starting earlier than early March. It was henceforth prohibited.

  But in 1950, before anyone caught on, the cream of the Yankees’ young crop stepped off trains in Phoenix, including a shy eighteen-year-old Oklahoman named Mickey Mantle. Yogi Berra, though he had already logged more than a thousand Major League at-bats, came from St. Louis. Syd Thrift, a lanky first baseman from Virginia who would never make the Major Leagues but would become a pioneering general manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1980s and a not-so-successful one for the Yankees in 1989, was there. Whitey Herzog, an outfielder who later spent many a postseason matching managerial wits with Billy, was there from Illinois. A smiling Whitey Ford, whose nickname then and forevermore was “Slick,” stepped off a plane he had boarded near his home on Long Island.

  The instructional league was not a league at all except that the congregation occasionally played scrimmage games in the afternoon. The intent of the gathering was mostly to inculcate in the young players the Yankee Way as preached by Casey Stengel and his lieutenants, principally Frank Crosetti, who had played seventeen consecutive seasons as a Yankees infielder beginning in 1932.

  Billy had two advantages in Phoenix. He already knew the Yankee Way because it was the unique baseball proselytization of Casey Stengel, with which Billy was quite familiar. His second advantage was that he felt confident he could get away with most anything because he was “Casey’s boy.”

  “I remember that we had a curfew and we were supposed to stay away from the dog track in Phoenix,” said Berra, whose lifelong friendship with Billy began in 1950 at Phoenix. “So the first few nights we were good and stayed in but it was boring. By the fourth night, Billy and I just decided to go to the dog track.

  “I said, ‘What if the old man finds out?’ And Billy said, ‘Case? He won’t care. He’s probably there right now himself.’ So we went to the dog track that night and almost every night after that.”

  There was a popular bar at the dog track. The Phoenix-based Yankees, even if they were the youngest ones in the system, were celebrities. Billy thought to himself that he could get used to this kind of status.

  Thrift was Billy’s roommate in Phoenix.

  “Billy had a gleaming smile and a twinkle in his eye,” Thrift said. “Women loved that look he would give them. It was a look that said, ‘Hey, we’re having fun over here. Why don’t you come join us?’ And they did most of the time.

  “But he was all business once the baseball part started the next day. And the thing I remember most about that camp was that he was cocky from the moment he walked into the clubhouse. He was telling everyone how he was going to take Jerry Coleman’s starting job.”

  Coleman, the Yankees’ second baseman, had just won the American League Rookie of the Year award.

  Many years later, Thrift said he learned something about Billy that he did not know in 1950.

  “In the 1970s, I reminded him of how brash and boastful he was when we were roomies way back when,” Thrift said. “And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Syd, I was scared shitless. I just wasn’t going to show it.’”

  Though less verbose, Ford was nearly as self-assured, and he and Billy became immediate pals. Like a little bug drawn to the incandescence of a neon light in the darkness, the shy Mantle saddled up next to Whitey and Billy, captivated by their worldliness and street smarts. Mantle was so raw and discomfited that the simplest of logistics could confound him. The first day of practice he had missed the players’ bus to the ballpark. Stengel had to swing by in his car and rescue him.

  The Phoenix tutelage did not last long. The defending World Series champions surreptitiously convened a camp to hone the next generation of champions, but then the newest Yankees were spirited to the epicenter of elite baseball in March 1950: Miller Huggins Field, the Yankees’ official spring training home in St. Petersburg, Florida.

  If Billy was shaking inside as he entered his first truly big-league clubhouse, he did not show it. Writers in spring training then and now devote much of their early attention to new faces on the team, especially if they are new Major Leaguers. And once they had done breathless stories on the Samson-like Jensen, they wandered over to the angular, intriguing Alfred M. Martin.

  He welcomed them with a declaration he wanted to get off his chest before the first of their questions.

  As Milton Gross, a popular writer from the New York Post, wrote, “The new kid from the Coast wanted us to know something. ‘The name is Billy Martin,’ he said. ‘And
don’t you forget it.’”

  9

  BILLY HAD NEVER BEEN in a baseball camp like the one at Miller Huggins Field, the ballpark named for the Yankees manager who had won three World Series and six American League pennants in the 1920s. Yes, there was Stengel’s usual instruction-based process, a series of stations with each one stressing a different baseball fundamental: bunting, sliding, baserunning, relay throws, and fielding by position. But here future Hall of Famers awaited him at virtually every station.

  The peerless DiMaggio glided around the diamond in the baserunning drill. Tony Lazzeri, the five-time world champ and now a coach, ran the outfield/infield relay station. Bill Dickey was tutoring the catchers, including Berra, and Stengel took the outfielders. Phil Rizzuto was the infield leader. Johnny Mize, thirty-eight years old and sweating in the Florida heat, was flawlessly picking grounders off the Bermuda grass near first base, showing everyone why he was nicknamed “The Big Cat.”

  That’s seven players who would eventually have plaques in Cooperstown, and that grouping does not include two other future Hall of Famers who would join the team in less than a year: Ford, a 1950 mid-season call-up, and Mantle, who debuted at the big-league spring training camp in 1951.

  Billy knew he was among baseball royalty. These were players whose names he had read in newspapers at the drugstore at the corner of 9th Street and University Avenue. He had watched them in newsreels at the Rivoli Theatre on San Pablo Avenue. Now they were standing next to him.

  “It could be an intimidating environment,” said Coleman, who remained in baseball into his late eighties as a radio analyst for the San Diego Padres (and was inducted into the broadcasting wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame). “It was an atmosphere of high achievers. And Casey Stengel ran a tight ship between the lines. Off the field, it was different, but when Casey was on the field, he was all work and no play.”

  Billy noticed the change in his mentor immediately. The clowning jester who had entertained fans from the third-base box at Oaks Park was stern at Miller Huggins Field. He was no longer a baseball lifer having a good time. He was a bona fide baseball genius, having won with the Yankees the Major League Manager of the Year award in 1949, and a fawning New York press corps hung on his every word.

  Billy kept his place in this setting, at least for a while. He accepted jersey number 12, because the veteran George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss had already claimed number 1. He performed all the drills as instructed and kept his mouth shut.

  Rizzuto, the 1948 American League Most Valuable Player, did not know what to make of the new young second baseman from California in those earliest days, but he was certain something was bugging Billy.

  “You know how Billy gets that look when he’s frustrated?” Rizzuto said years later after he had become one of Billy’s closest friends. “He had that look all day when he first got there. I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow, this kid is going to explode. Something is bothering him.’

  “I could always see when something was getting under his skin and that’s a good thing to know when you’re around him.”

  At the 1950 spring training camp, what was irking Billy was the adulation being heaped on Coleman. Frank Crosetti, who had played his entire seventeen-year career for the Yankees, was schooling the middle infielders on the fine art of playing shortstop and second base.

  Billy valued Crosetti’s guidance and had regard for him for a variety of reasons. He was from the same North Beach San Francisco neighborhood that had produced the DiMaggio brothers, Lazzeri, and the current backup Yankees catcher, Charlie Silvera, who was becoming one of Billy’s good friends on the team. Crosetti, known as “The Crow,” had been an All-Star and a steady mainstay up the middle on four successive Yankees championship teams from 1936 to 1939. He was Billy’s kind of player, renowned for the hidden-ball trick and for shoving an umpire during an argument in the middle of the 1942 World Series.

  But Crosetti was enamored with the fielding stylings of Coleman, whom he had praised for a week on the practice diamond. Coleman was smooth and elegant, and Crosetti wanted all the Yankees infielders to turn the double play that way. As Casey Stengel already knew, Billy had a thing about being told how to turn the double play. Plus, he had since received hundreds of hours of additional instruction on the pivot at second base from Cookie Lavagetto. And he planned on taking Coleman’s job anyway.

  On the fifth day of Crosetti trying to get Billy to emulate Coleman, Billy erupted.

  “That’s not how I learned to turn the double play; I’ve got a better way,” Billy said loudly in that strident, high-pitched voice that carried across every baseball diamond whether it was Kenney Park or Comiskey Park.

  As usual, everyone heard him now, especially the Yankees veterans.

  “No one talked back to the Crow,” Rizzuto said. “I was shocked.”

  Before anyone could say anything else, Billy took a baseball from Crosetti and demonstrated his way of turning the double play. Crosetti disagreed and told Billy why. Billy countered with the whys and hows taught him by Lavagetto. It was near heresy to be quoting a former Brooklyn Dodger infielder in a Yankees camp, but Crosetti let the debate go on for a while.

  “The Crow saw that Billy had thought about this and practiced it—he wasn’t just starting an argument,” Rizzuto said. “The old Crow did not agree, but he let Billy be. And meanwhile, Stengel was in the outfield listening—he always saw everything—but he never said a word.

  “We just moved on and Billy kept doing it his way.”

  The Yankees’ third baseman, Bobby Brown, who was attending medical school in the off-season, recalled the conversation more philosophically.

  “It was a baseball theory squabble,” Brown, who was standing a few feet away, said. “We hadn’t seen that before. But we were learning a lot of things about Billy that first year.”

  By all accounts, Crosetti did not take it personally. Instead, he instructed Billy in all the little things on the field that mattered—hitting behind runners to move them over a base, bunting, hit-and-runs, and purposeful sacrifice flies. Crosetti in his day had what baseball men of the era called “a clever bat.” Billy liked the sound of that. He wanted to learn how to have a clever bat. Throughout the spring of 1950, like other old-timers before him, Crosetti was happy to oblige his inquisitive—if argumentative—young charge.

  “It was hard not to like and help Billy,” Brown, who became a cardiologist and eventually the American League president, said. “He had an aggressive personality, and at first I think some guys were put off by him. But in time we saw that he was just so determined to get better. People wondered what made him tick.”

  To the astonishment of everyone, the player who seemed most curious about Billy was DiMaggio, who befriended few teammates.

  “Yeah, Joe loved hanging around with Billy,” Rizzuto said. “It was the most weird thing. Here was Joe all reserved, quiet, and perfectly groomed and Billy who was loud and noisy.”

  Said Brown, “I think DiMaggio was intrigued by Billy. Like Casey was, like a lot of us were.”

  As the 1950 regular season began, Billy still did not have a regular position on the field. It was Coleman at second base, Rizzuto at shortstop, and the platoon of Brown and the right-handed-hitting Billy Johnson at third base. But Billy went to New York with the big club that spring anyway, an almost magical accomplishment.

  In his autobiography, Billy wrote that he saw Yankee Stadium for the first time from the train that took the team from Florida back to New York. He had seen the stadium on the television at a West Berkeley barber shop—he did not have a TV at home—and he had listened to many Yankees World Series games on the radio. But stepping from the train, he was now walking inside the imposing concrete edifice that loomed over River Avenue, the most famous stadium in the world. As other players unpacked at their lockers, Billy quickly scurried onto the field.

  “I stood there for the longest while, staring into the grandstands and the bleachers and the dugouts, noticing
how beautifully the grass was cut,” he wrote.

  He then made his way to the dugouts, thinking that these were the same dugouts where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth had waited to hit.

  “I reached down and touched the steps where they used to walk up and down,” Billy wrote. “I was just so happy to be a Yankee.”

  The acclimation to his new environs was made infinitely easier because of his friendship with DiMaggio. The Yankee Clipper squired Billy around Manhattan, showing him how a Yankees celebrity could own the town. DiMaggio brought Billy to the best tailors and restaurants. Both kinds of establishments were happy to have representatives of the regal, revered Yankees and would not charge them a dime if they posed for a picture that would be put in a prominent place on the wall for all to see. DiMaggio introduced Billy to the scores of women who flocked to DiMaggio’s side, a benefit Billy much appreciated and did not soon tire of. Because DiMaggio preferred blondes, Billy did, too.

  “They were the original odd couple,” Berra said decades later. “Behind their backs we called them the big dago and the little dago.”

  And Billy kept his youthful irrepressibility. DiMaggio may have refined him some but he did not change him. An oft-told 1950 story had the always-dapper DiMaggio arriving in the clubhouse before one game in a pressed white shirt and light gray suit.

  Billy ran over to greet him holding a fountain pen and a baseball he said he wanted autographed for someone back in California. But as Billy thrust the pen at the Yankee Clipper, it squirted ink all over DiMaggio’s white shirt and suit.