Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Billy told the army that his stepfather was ill and had recently lost his job, which made Billy the sole means of support for his mother, father, and siblings, as well as his wife.

  According to some of Billy’s family and friends, the hardship claim was mostly a sham. Jack Downey had voluntarily reduced his workload, perhaps at Billy’s urging. Billy was indeed now subsidizing the household with a biweekly check of $80, but it was by choice so he could get back to the Yankees. For a while it looked like Billy’s pleas were going to be ignored. Finally, in March there came word that Billy’s hardship ploy had worked and the paperwork, which might take a month, was being processed.

  Word of Billy’s imminent discharge made its way to New York and, of course, to Berkeley where the Berkeley Gazette ran a story about Billy’s “hardship.” When he returned to the Berndts’ house on a weekend leave from Fort Ord, he was not as welcome in the neighborhood as he had been a few months earlier. Many young men from Berkeley had been drafted, to serve not at Fort Ord but in the ferocity of war throughout the Korean peninsula. Billy’s hardship discharge, arriving at a time when his able-bodied brothers, Tudo and Jackie, were still living in the area, did not sit well with the locals, a group highly suspicious of the powerful or the privileged pulling strings to get their way. It came off as something a Goat would do, and there was no greater insult west of San Pablo Avenue.

  “There was resentment,” said Rube de Alba, whose older brother was sent to Korea. “Some people were cold to Billy. They talked about it behind his back and he knew it.”

  Billy was perhaps Berkeley’s most famous resident at the time. The Berkeley Gazette published several letters to the editor that were critical of Billy’s discharge. It made Billy uncomfortable in a way he had never felt in the familiar streets of West Berkeley.

  In mid-April, with his hardship paperwork completed, Billy was happy to get out of California and back to New York, and he hoped his absence would help the army deferment issue dissipate.

  On April 27 against the Boston Red Sox, Billy made his first appearance for the Yankees in 1951 when he ran onto the field to pinch run for Johnny Mize. He was, for the first time with the Yankees, wearing jersey number 1. But Billy’s presence in Yankees pinstripes instead of a wartime uniform was noted in the newspapers, in part because he was not the only young Yankee deferred from the armed services.

  Mickey Mantle was in a feud with his local draft board over his claim that he had a degenerative bone condition, osteomyelitis, that made him unfit for duty. The condition sounded believable until people turned on their televisions and saw Mantle galloping across the Yankee Stadium outfield as fast as a deer and as strong as a horse.

  Mantle had already supplanted Jackie Jensen as the heir apparent to DiMaggio, who had announced on March 2 that 1951 would be his last season. For now Mantle was toiling in right field, beating out routine ground balls with a stunning burst of speed from the left-handed batter’s box, and clouting long home runs to all fields.

  “He has more speed than any slugger and more slug than any speedster,” said Stengel. “This kid ain’t logical. He’s too good.”

  Everyone agreed that Mantle’s talent for baseball was out of this world, and off the field, he was the most unworldly rookie any Yankees veteran had ever seen. Embarrassed by the sharp twang in his voice, Mantle talked softly—if at all—and he avoided eye contact. The baseball writers terrified him, and he hid from them whenever he could.

  Mantle longed to be at ease around the veteran players, but he instead sidestepped them and retreated to his rented room at the Concourse Plaza. The Yankees’ dependable outfielder Hank Bauer, who had moved to an apartment over the Stage Deli with Charlie Silvera, coaxed Mantle into a few visits to midtown Manhattan. Bauer helped Mantle buy a couple of sport jackets and showed him around a bit. They stopped at a few bars where Mickey, who was engaged to marry his high school sweetheart, discovered that New York women introduce themselves to ballplayers.

  Still, Mantle had many lonely hours after games at the Concourse Plaza. Until, that is, Billy, now a second-year player who acted as if he had been in the big leagues for ten years, started taking Mantle to dinner after games.

  “Billy liked people and I think it bothered him that Mickey was so uncomfortable,” Bobby Brown said. “It was not a combination that surprised me. Joe DiMaggio was starting to recede at that point. Billy gravitated to Mickey.”

  Though Billy was about to turn twenty-three and Mickey was nineteen, the two had a connection and were soon acting like fraternity brothers away from home for the first time. Water pistol fights in the hallways of Yankee Stadium, food fights in the clubhouse, and whoopie cushions on the seats in the dining car on the team train—it was all in a day’s fun for the M & M boys, a designation given to them in 1951 (ten years before it was resurrected to describe the more famous Yankees home-run-hitting pair of Mantle and Roger Maris). Early in the season, they acquired a new device, the instant camera later known as a Polaroid. It produced something once thought to be impossible: a photograph thirty or forty seconds after it was taken. Billy and Mickey thought it was endlessly hysterical to use the instant camera to take pictures of teammates on the toilet. Their goal was to catch everyone on the team, except DiMaggio and Stengel, in this setting. And they apparently succeeded, posting the photos in the training room when no one was looking.

  Gil McDougald, a skilled rookie that year who sometimes was called the “third M” on the team, recalled that “Mickey and Billy would do all these things and start giggling until they had tears in their eyes.”

  “They really were the best of friends,” McDougald said. “Some of the older guys wanted to wring their necks at times, but they were like two little kids. People would just smirk and say, ‘There they go again.’”

  There was a kinship between the two that others saw as almost sibling-like.

  “They brought out the best in each other,” Bobby Richardson said, although that was the opposite of what some people, like their future wives, would say. “Billy had a facility with people that Mickey benefited from, and Mickey had a good-natured acceptance of people and situations that softened Billy.”

  Tony Kubek, another Yankees infielder who came to the team late in Billy’s Yankees career but who stayed in touch with both men throughout their lives, said their connection was unshakable.

  “When you were with them, they talked to each other like no one else was even there,” Kubek said. “They went off in their own world. The bond never wavered.”

  The bond was also a source of never-ending mischief. One night in Boston Mickey and Billy arrived at the team’s hotel fifteen minutes after Stengel’s midnight curfew. Before entering, they gazed through the revolving front door, and across the lobby they saw Casey telling stories to entertain a bevy of writers.

  They went around to a back entrance used by the hotel kitchen staff. It was one of their favorite maneuvers. But this time the back door was locked. There was a transom high above the door.

  “Billy said that if I boosted him up, he’d crawl through the transom and open the door for me,” Mantle said. “So I stood on a garbage can and he climbed on my shoulders and then he scooted through the transom.

  “After a minute I hear him shouting through the door, ‘Hey, Mick, this door is chained shut. I can’t open it. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And he went to our room.”

  Mantle, who was wearing a new, expensive sharkskin suit, piled three garbage cans on top of each other and, bracing himself with the extension of a fire escape, tried to get through the transom as well.

  “I fell a few times and ripped some holes in my new suit,” he said. “I knocked over the garbage cans and had lettuce hanging off me and rotten tomatoes stuck to the sleeves. I was a mess but I eventually got through the transom.

  “When I got to the room, Billy was asleep. When we got up the next morning, Billy said, ‘Why does this room smell like garbage?’ I think the cleaning bill for my suit was almost
as much as the curfew fine might have been.”

  For a while that summer, Lois had come to live with Billy at the Concourse Plaza, but even with the Yankees at home she was often left waiting. Mickey and Billy had a habit of making lengthy detours from Yankee Stadium to the Concourse Plaza, four blocks away. There was always another adventure to pursue. On the road, teammates got used to hearing the frat-boy duo of the Yankees giggling in hotel hallways at 2:00 a.m. or later.

  Stengel considered splitting them up on the road, forcing them to room with other players.

  “What good would that do?” Billy said. “It would just keep two other guys up late.”

  But there was a problem, at least in 1951. Mantle’s debut with the team was not going as promised. He had holes in his swing, and big-league pitchers always find them in a new slugger by the end of May. Baseball history is replete with guys who hit 15 home runs in April and May of their rookie season and only 50 more homers for the rest of their careers. Only the good ones who adjust survive. American League pitchers in 1951 adjusted, but by mid-July, Mantle had not and was sent down to AAA Kansas City.

  That gave Lois her husband back for a while, but it would have been a happier experience had Billy been playing more than sparingly. McDougald, who was platooning with Coleman at second base and also playing at third, was having a season that would win him the 1951 American League Rookie of the Year award. Billy played only occasionally. By all accounts, he continued to adhere to the Yankee Way. He did not complain. He worked on his fundamentals, continuing to perfect his double-play pivot—his way. And he had not dropped his friendship with DiMaggio, who was struggling through a variety of injuries and certain he had made the right decision to retire at the end of the year.

  DiMaggio also had begun dating Marilyn Monroe, and Billy had dinner with Joe and Marilyn on a few occasions.

  “She was polite,” Billy said. “And she was much more beautiful in person than she was in the movies.”

  Billy gave Monroe credit for DiMaggio’s late surge that season.

  “He was happy again once he was going out with Marilyn Monroe,” he said.

  Mantle was back in New York by late August. Lois headed back to Berkeley. A New York summer in the days before air conditioning was not as inviting as it once sounded for a Northern California girl, especially with her husband on the road half the time. Billy ended up playing in 51 games during the 1951 regular season with 58 at-bats. He hit .259 with only 2 RBIs, or 6 fewer than he had in 1950.

  The season was certainly a setback statistically, but there wasn’t a lot of available playing time in an infield crowded by the precocious McDougald. There were other gains for Billy. He was a genuine Yankee—no more trips to the minors. And he had taken over jersey number 1, which he considered essential. Single-digit Yankees had done all right so far: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, and Dickey. Mantle in 1951 was wearing number 6.

  Billy was also getting seasoning, learning the quirks of playing in the then seven American League ballparks and intensely studying the league’s pitchers at a time when a batter had to acquire a dossier on just thirty opposing starting pitchers and about fifteen relief pitchers. Starters finished most games, and the ten- or twelve-man pitching staff was decades away.

  Billy did his work and kept his eyes open. He was a popular player even if his teammates had to put up with his high jinks with the Polaroid and the occasional presence of an overly ostentatious blonde on his arm. And in the 1951 World Series against the New York Giants, he presaged his knack for making big plays on baseball’s biggest stage.

  Late in the second game of that series, the Giants, who were only two days removed from Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” trailed the Yankees 2–1. But the Giants had been threatening in several previous innings and seemed on the verge of catching up to the Yankees’ starter, Eddie Lopat. In this tense setting, Bobby Brown singled and Billy pinch ran for him. Billy went to second base on a force-out, and pitcher Eddie Lopat smacked a single to center field, where Willie Mays charged and threw home. The Giants’ catcher, Ray Noble, fielded the ball ahead of Billy’s arrival. But as Noble went to make the tag, Billy eluded it with a classic left-legged hook slide—just as he had been schooled to do by DiMaggio, who may have been the most artful player sliding into a base in the history of the game. The insurance run let the Yankees comfortably close out the game, especially after the Giants’ Monte Irvin led off the final inning with a single.

  Giants manager Leo Durocher noticed Billy’s contribution.

  “Good slide by Martin; that’s a big run,” he told reporters afterward.

  Durocher, who once had a fistfight with Casey Stengel under the stands at Ebbets Field, paused.

  “Ol’ Casey has all the answers,” Durocher said. “Found the right player there.”

  Mantle blew out his right knee—most likely a tear of the anterior cruciate ligament—in the same game. It was a scene from a Greek tragedy. Mantle, extracted from the Oklahoma mine country like a precious gem, was running at full speed after a soft Willie Mays fly ball to right-center field. DiMaggio, a player so graceful his play seemed more like divine art than athletics, was limping on a bad heel toward the ball as well. But Mantle had been told by Stengel to cover for the aging DiMaggio, who was playing one of the last games of his career. Mantle was supposed to try to get to anything he could.

  The ball was descending equidistant between the two outfielders, and at the last instant DiMaggio appeared to Mantle’s right and called for the ball. Mantle knew his place.

  As he later said, “No rookie could just crash into the Yankee Clipper in the middle of a sold-out Yankee Stadium during the World Series.”

  But as Mantle tried to stop from colliding with DiMaggio, the spikes of his right shoe also landed and stuck into a rubber drain covering. The foot came to a stop but the rest of his leg and body kept going. Mantle’s knee shredded, and he went to the grass in a helpless heap as DiMaggio caught the ball next to him.

  Second baseman Jerry Coleman, who served in the Marines in World War II, said he wondered if Mantle had been shot.

  “That’s how he went down, like a soldier in battle,” Coleman said. “Just crumpled.”

  As Mantle curled into a fetal position and remained there for several minutes, some fans in the stands later said they thought the rookie might have had a heart attack.

  As Mantle was carried off in a stretcher, his knee ballooned and he was hospitalized. But it would be at least twenty-five years before surgeons developed any techniques for repairing the ACL. Mantle would simply play with a gimpy knee for the rest of his career.

  Five days later, the Yankees won the series in six games. Billy returned to Lois’s parents’ home—for exactly four days. Then he was off to Hawaii and Japan with a team of Yankees and West Coast stars, including DiMaggio, who toured Japan to play a series of exhibition games. Billy would be in Japan for more than a month.

  Billy made it home to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. There was an uneasiness in the neighborhood. The month-long Battle of Heartbreak Ridge in an area of North Korea known as the Punchbowl had claimed more than three thousand lives, many of them from the First Cavalry Division, which had a large representation of young men from the Bay Area.

  Not long after, West Berkeley learned of the death of Rube de Alba’s older brother, a leader and popular figure west of San Pablo Avenue. The funeral brought together all the West Berkeley Boys. Billy was a pallbearer. Many of Billy’s old friends were in uniform. His conceived hardship deferral never came up but it did not have to. A few weeks later, Rube, Billy, and some other friends went out drinking. Some teasing between Rube and Billy led to more serious taunts and then insults. The two old friends started slugging it out. In a nasty exchange, Rube got the worst of it.

  They got together a few days later and both apologized.

  “We stayed friends for life,” de Alba said. “But we were never the same. That was it. Blame the war, the deferment, or my br
other’s death. I don’t know for sure. But something had changed forever.”

  11

  THE UNITED STATES ARMED services had been a thorn in Billy’s side the previous year, but in 1952 the government did Billy a favor. It called Jerry Coleman back into the Marines.

  Stengel announced that he would shift McDougald to third base and make Billy his regular second baseman.

  “He’s ready,” Stengel told the writers. “I learned him everything I know.”

  Billy was more than ready. He was desperate. He had burned some bridges back home. He did not fit into post–World War II America in the same way as others his age as he was neither a veteran nor a family man like most of his friends and cousins. He was a professional baseball player, but so far all he had to show for it was a Pacific Coast League championship and the underwhelming total of 24 Major League hits—19 of them singles.

  Joe DiMaggio, whose acceptance helped lend Billy credibility for two seasons, was no longer there to throw an arm around Billy in the clubhouse, call him “Dago,” and take him to dinner with Marilyn Monroe. Billy was way past being a rookie but not accomplished enough to be called an established player either. He did not own a home or a car. He had been feted in the New York press for his potential, but they, too, were done writing about Billy Martin’s future. They wanted results. And in the off-season, George Weiss had tried to trade Billy to several teams.

  Billy knew he would either make it in New York now or be in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, or Washington by the next baseball season, a banishment that could destine him to obscurity. There are no noted “fireplug” players on losing teams playing before meager crowds.

  Filled with a sense of urgency, Billy was impressive as spring training opened.

  Stengel regaled the reporters after the early workouts with how in harmony Rizzuto and Billy looked.

  “Martin is turning the double play as quickly as anyone now,” Casey said. And everyone agreed. He wasn’t ballet-like as Jerry Coleman was, but he had become just as quick when it came to catching the throw and relaying it to first base. He was also wielding a hot bat. But one morning, an awkward slide snapped two bones in his ankle and Billy was sidelined for about two months. He was crestfallen. He had finally made the starting lineup and yet he was still watching from the dugout.