Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  In May, Billy returned to the lineup during a 5–3 Yankees victory against the first-place Cleveland Indians. To that point, the Yankees were slumping by their standards, losing as much as they were winning and mired in fourth place. After one defeat, Stengel had harshly called his team “soft.” DiMaggio was gone. Coleman and Brown were in the military. The Yankees lacked leaders.

  “Billy never asked permission to take charge,” Yogi Berra said years later, describing the Yankees of the early and mid-1950s. “It was just what he did.”

  On May 24, during Red Sox batting practice before that day’s game, Boston’s rookie Jimmy Piersall, whom the local papers called a “sharp-tongued bench jockey from Connecticut,” started taunting the Yankees as they warmed up near the visitors’ dugout. The slumbering Yankees trailed the third-place Red Sox by two games in the standings. Billy told Piersall to shut up.

  Piersall answered by telling Billy that he only listened to “guys who actually played.” That got everyone’s attention. There was some more back-and-forth until Piersall called Billy “a dago busher.” A busher was an unqualified amateur, short for “bush league,” which meant something or someone unworthy of the Major Leagues. Billy dropped his glove to the ground and challenged Piersall to meet him under the Fenway Park grandstand.

  Piersall disappeared into the Red Sox’ dugout and Billy into the Yankees’ dugout as both raced to their respective clubhouses. At Fenway Park, then and now, the doors to both clubhouses empty directly into a concourse used by fans walking to their seats. It was in this concrete common area behind home plate that Piersall and Billy met and started throwing punches.

  Several players from both teams were there to watch, but no one thought to break it up. Billy quickly landed two right hands to Piersall’s face that knocked the Red Sox player to his knees. When Piersall got up, Billy hit him again, and the two began wrestling as Billy landed more punches. Billy’s cheek was cut, but Piersall was semiconscious with blood from his nose and mouth spilling onto his ripped jersey when finally Yankees coach Bill Dickey and Boston pitcher Ellis Kinder stepped in and separated the brawlers.

  “What do you think now, big shot?” Billy screamed at Piersall as more players arrived at the scene.

  Stengel grinned broadly when news of the fight reached his office twenty-five yards away.

  “It should wake up the other tigers,” he told reporters. “It’s about time they realize they gotta fight harder this year. I just hope that some of the kid’s fire spreads to some of the others.”

  Two weeks later in Cleveland, with their thirteenth victory in their last eighteen games, the Yankees trounced the Indians 11–0 to climb into first place. Billy had hit .360 since his fight with Piersall. The Yankees had won twenty of the twenty-seven games since Billy returned from his broken ankle.

  Piersall would eventually be hospitalized with a mental disorder, which Billy later said made him feel ashamed.

  “I didn’t know he was sick like that,” Billy said. “Maybe we deserve each other. Sometimes I think I’m ready for the guys with the white coats myself.”

  Piersall and Billy would eventually become lifelong friends. When Piersall was out of baseball in the mid-1970s, Billy got him a job in the front office of the Oakland A’s. Later that same decade, when Billy was managing in Texas, he arranged for Piersall to become a team broadcaster. Piersall parlayed his Texas radio experience into a long-term job as a television announcer for the Chicago White Sox.

  “I love Billy Martin,” Piersall told the New York Post in 1980. “He helped me when I was down.”

  Of the 1952 fight, Piersall said, “It was just one of those things that happened in baseball back then. Neither of us held a grudge.”

  As spring became summer in 1952, the Yankees kept winning. Not only was Billy the everyday second baseman, but Stengel had installed Mantle as the team’s center fielder after Jackie Jensen was traded in May. The Yankees won fourteen of their first seventeen games with Mantle in center field.

  Billy and Mickey were fixtures in the lineup and nearly inseparable off it in 1952. They rented adjoining apartments at the Concourse Plaza where their wives had joined them. Lois had come to New York determined to be a companion to Billy for more than a few weeks a year.

  Lois knew Billy was immature about the concept of matrimony—more in love with the notion of a wife to come home to than he was actually interested in the wife and the coming-home part. But seventeen months into her marriage, Lois was not giving up yet.

  Now in the Bronx, on hot nights, the Mantles and Martins would leave open the door that connected their rooms to encourage a cool cross-ventilation in the days before air conditioning. The apartments were not roomy and hardly plush. They had a telephone, but a television cost $10 a month. Lois and Billy, because of Billy’s larger salary, rented a TV and the Mantles would come over to watch it, although either Mickey or Merlyn Mantle would have to sit on the floor because the apartment was furnished with only one two-person couch and one chair.

  When they did retire for the night and if they closed all the doors, Billy and Mickey liked to sneak out on the ledge of their adjoining balconies and try to catch the other couple in bed. They did this on the road when they knew a teammate was having a one-night stand or had arranged for an “import,” as road girlfriends or steady paramours were called.

  It was a childish prank and it sometimes put the two in danger—they crawled around a hotel ledge fifteen stories above the streets in Detroit one night—but Billy and Mickey were nothing if not childish.

  That spring of 1952, the Martins and Mantles hung out together in the South Bronx or they dined in Manhattan on occasion, but whenever the four were together, it was Billy and Mickey entertaining each other as if their wives were not there.

  “They were their own party,” Lois said. “They didn’t need anyone else.”

  By the time Lois joined Billy in New York, she had arrived with news: she was pregnant. It was not necessarily by design; Lois worried about all the time Billy spent away from home. And she was not naive about what Billy and Mickey might be doing on the road. For a short time, Lois had companionship and support from the other Yankees wives, a close-knit group. Merlyn Mantle was pregnant, too. Lois found the days when the Yankees were playing at home tolerable, but when the team was on the road, she felt an enduring loneliness. It was no different for Merlyn Mantle. Then Mantle’s father, Mutt, who had shaped Mickey’s life and career, died in May, and Mickey receded farther from his wife.

  By the summer, Lois and Merlyn Mantle went home.

  “Merlyn and I both felt neglected,” Lois told journalist Maury Allen in 1982. “And when we told the boys we were leaving, they didn’t exactly put up a fuss. I remember that we just left. That was that.”

  Billy and Mickey were not highly introspective at that juncture of their lives. If Billy saw the significance in Lois’s return to California, no one close to him recalls him speaking of it at the time.

  “Being a baseball wife is not easy,” said Charlie Silvera. “I think Billy just thought she was going home to see her parents and get out of a hot New York summer.”

  Besides, from his perspective, he had a lot on his hands. He was playing full-time for the best-known sports team on the planet. And being on the field all the time exposed Billy on a regular basis to a kind of testosterone-laced challenge that was routine to Major League Baseball at the time. Rough play was customary and expected. In June 1952, the New York Times published accounts of eight fights during Major League baseball games. That was in one month.

  Many of the ballplayers in 1952 were World War II veterans who weren’t averse to fighting with their enemies, or their comrades if tempers got hot in a ball game, a card game, or a barroom. In his autobiography, Billy matter-of-factly described two scenes from the 1950s that serve as a window into a ballplayer’s life at that time, and how routine a fistfight was in their lives. In the first story, five Yankees started conversing in the team’s hotel lobb
y with five women who had just left a hotel function. A minute or two later, five guys arrived who had been the women’s dates for the night, and they weren’t too pleased that five Yankees appeared to be trying to steal their girls. One of the guys wanted to fight the Yankees.

  Billy, Mickey Mantle, and Charlie Silvera were part of the group, and so was Hank Bauer, an ex-Marine who had earned two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts in World War II. Also present was Ralph Houk, the future Yankees manager but now a backup catcher who as an army major had been awarded a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for his bravery in the Battle of the Bulge.

  Bauer and Houk calmly went about discussing who was going to take on the guy who wanted to fight. It was like a business meeting, with Houk saying he probably wouldn’t play the next day so it didn’t matter if his knuckles hurt, and Bauer countering that he hadn’t been in a good fight for a while. In the end, it didn’t matter who stepped forward; the guy annoyed by the Yankees’ flirting was knocked down three times. The Yankees went to bed.

  The second story Billy told was more head-spinning. Several Yankees got into an argument with several bar patrons after one of the Yankees said something to a woman whose boyfriend wasn’t too pleased. (This happened often.) As the dispute escalated, four or five bouncers arrived, and one of them pulled a gun on the Yankees. Houk quickly grabbed a whiskey bottle, broke it on the bar, and put the broken bottle up to the neck of the bouncer holding the gun. As Billy wrote, “Ralph said: ‘I’m not afraid of guns. You put that gun away or I’ll cut your throat.’ The bouncer said: ‘O.K.’ And using him as a hostage, we all walked backward out of the bar with the bottle to his throat. Did you ever see eight guys get into a cab? We all jumped in one cab and got the hell out of there.”

  It was in this context that Billy was involved in the first of his many celebrated on-field fisticuffs on July 12, 1952. In recent games, the bespectacled St. Louis Browns catcher Clint Courtney, who had briefly been a Yankee and with whom Billy had tussled in the Arizona-Texas League, had several times slid into Yankees infielders with his spikes aimed above the ankles. Rizzuto had nimbly avoided Courtney once, as had Billy and Gil McDougald. But the Yankees infielders had discussed retaliation.

  In the eighth inning, with a Ladies’ Day crowd of 22,327 at Yankee Stadium looking on, Courtney attempted a delayed steal of second base. When Billy took the high throw from Berra, he gave the crowd an example of the ungentlemanly ways that 1950s ballplayers handled internal squabbles. He tagged Courtney right in the kisser with a hard smack of ball and glove. Billy paused over the dazed Courtney, then jogged off the field, but Courtney soon rose and ran after him.

  As the New York Times wrote the next day, “Billy heard Courtney’s approach, wheeled quickly to meet it, and on the theory that the best defense is a speedy offense, promptly met Courtney with two perfectly aimed righthanders to the jaw.”

  The thirty-two words in that sentence more or less describe most of the public, and not so public, fights Billy would get into in the next thirty-five years. Some would call this tactic a sucker punch. And it is likely that on more than a few occasions, as hostilities in a barroom were brewing but had not yet reached a flash point, Billy would just haul off and clock someone. Some people argue, shove, threaten, and then fight. Billy, especially when he was younger, would occasionally just skip the intermediate steps and proceed right to the punching stage during a difference of opinion, which no doubt surprised many a combatant.

  But in many cases, Billy saw a genuine unavoidable threat coming and decided to act first. The 1952 Courtney fight was a classic example.

  Courtney was a worthy opponent, though, and he squared off with Billy as each player threw haymakers and the benches emptied. Billy and Courtney swung and wrestled, bowling over two umpires who tried to stop them. The fight went on for a couple of minutes with dozens of players involved. Pictures of the scuffle appeared in newspapers across the country the next day.

  “That’s the fight that got me labeled a brawler,” Billy later said. “And I didn’t start that fight.”

  It is true that Courtney was ejected from the game and fined $100 by the league while Billy finished the game and was not fined.

  It’s also true that Billy had to be dragged off Courtney, flailing and thrashing like a madman. It is how most of Billy’s fights or near-fights ended. From Clint Courtney to his dustup with Reggie Jackson in a Boston dugout twenty-five years later, the final scenes are always the same: Billy, wild-eyed and out of control, trying to get at someone to continue the fight.

  Most of the rest of the season the Yankees were holding the American League lead with Billy contributing in quieter, less newsworthy ways. He was also increasingly ducking the chance to fight. In late August, the New York Post described a batting practice session in Cleveland: “The Indians bench jockeys were on Martin. ‘Hit it with your nose, Pinocchio,’ they shouted. ‘How did that pitch get past your nose?’ they shouted again. Billy the Kid ignored them.”

  Billy was also playing spectacularly in the field and seemed to have a knack for being in the right place when the Yankees most needed a game-changing play. In a victory at Cleveland in August, Billy made the pivotal play when a line drive ricocheted off the glove of first baseman Joe Collins, and Billy dashed into shallow right field to dive and snag the ball before it fell to the grass. He then scrambled to his knees and threw to first base to double an Indians runner off the base and end a Cleveland threat.

  The Yankees took the American League lead over the Indians on September 12 when Billy had a home run and a triple in a win in Chicago. Soon after, the Yankees tore up Billy’s contract and signed him to a new one through 1953 worth $10,000 annually. On the next-to-last day of the season, the Yankees clinched the pennant when Billy singled with the bases loaded in the eleventh inning of a tied game against the Philadelphia Athletics.

  Pictures from the jubilant Yankees’ locker room showed Stengel between Mantle and Billy, the manager hugging each with one arm.

  “What did I tell you about these two fresh kids?” Stengel said.

  Billy batted .267 for the season with 33 RBIs and 3 home runs. More important to the pitching-rich Yankees, he had helped turn 92 double plays and made just 9 errors in 107 games and 576 fielding chances.

  Mantle in his first full season hit .311 with 23 home runs and 87 RBIs and made 12 errors in 374 fielding chances.

  The World Series was against the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had never won the championship. The Dodgers had been losing to the Yankees since Casey Stengel patrolled right field in Brooklyn. The Dodgers were led by their All-Star second baseman, Jackie Robinson, the National League MVP a few years earlier. Not surprisingly, Robinson received most of the attention in the newspapers before the series.

  The Dodgers won the first game of the series, but in the second game, Billy broke open a tied game with an RBI single. In the sixth inning, he added a three-run home run, giving him four RBIs in the game, which was just one short of the record set by Yankees Tony Lazzeri and Bill Dickey in 1936.

  The teams split the next four games. There was, however, one remarkable game-changing sequence between former manager and former player in the fourth game. The Dodgers manager was Billy’s mentor from the 1949 Oakland Oaks, Charlie Dressen, who had taught Billy many of his sign-stealing secrets. In the top of the fifth inning with the Yankees ahead 1–0, the Dodgers had runners at second and third with one out and pitcher Joe Black at the plate.

  Dressen, as he had been in Oakland, was also the Dodgers’ third-base coach. From his position at second base, Billy watched closely as Dressen flashed a flurry of signals at Black. Dressen’s tempo and movements in the coach’s box quickened, which Dressen—watching opposing managers—had always said was a tip-off that some kind of play was on. Sizing up the situation, Billy suspected a suicide squeeze and got Yogi Berra’s attention behind the plate. He made a fist, turned his hand upside down, and waved it slightly—the sign for a pitchout. Berra crouched and made the sa
me signal to Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds.

  The pitch was appropriately wide of the plate, and Black could not reach it with his bat as he attempted to bunt. Berra then easily tagged out the Dodgers’ Andy Pafko, who had dashed toward home plate on the pitch. The suicide squeeze had failed. The Dodgers never scored in the game, losing 2–0.

  “Tell me another player who would have seen that?” Stengel asked reporters afterward. “That’s why he’s my winner.”

  The back-and-forth between the evenly matched teams continued throughout that first week of October, dominating the headlines in the New York tabloids, which barely made room for news from Australia that Great Britain had exploded its first atomic bomb. The drama culminated with a taut seventh game at Ebbets Field, which the Yankees led 4–2 in the seventh inning when the Dodgers loaded the bases with two outs.

  What followed next was the crucial moment of the series. To some, it was a pivotal moment of 1950s baseball.

  Robinson was the batter, and he worked the count to 3–2. The runners took off on the next pitch, but Robinson undercut a fastball that he skied high in the air just to the first-base side of the pitching mound. It was a sunny but windy day and the ball was wavering in the air, drifting back toward home plate and away from the Yankees infielders.

  By the time Robinson’s pop-up had reached its peak above the diamond and began its descent, one Brooklyn runner had crossed the plate, a second was steps away, and a third was on his way home. Yankees relief pitcher Bob Kuzava moved out of the way, as pitchers are instructed to do. Berra, rising from his crouch behind the plate, stepped toward the pop-up, but he would be too late and it wasn’t a catcher’s responsibility anyway. Berra was calling for first baseman Joe Collins to make the catch.