Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Robinson was a right-handed pull hitter with power, which meant that McDougald at third base, Rizzuto at shortstop, and Billy at second base were playing deep and toward left field. It was Collins’s ball, but he froze at his position, later saying he had lost the pop-up in the sun.

  As the ball dropped through the fading light of a crisp October afternoon, no one was charging toward the ball.

  Describing the scene after the game, Casey Stengel said, “My feller at first base is asleep and my feller behind the plate, I don’t know what he’s doing. I’m watching, but I can’t swallow because my heart is in my throat.”

  The World Series in the 1950s was like a second baseball season unto itself with a vast, nationwide audience. In the twenty-first century, with media of all kinds splintering the nation’s attention, it’s hard to comprehend how one series of baseball games could collectively engross an entire country. But the World Series in the middle of the last century had that kind of pull, luring in dedicated, hard-core baseball fans and casual fans drawn to the only meeting of the National and American League champions each year. Even non–baseball fans could not ignore the national pastime’s singular, featured event. Long before the Super Bowl, televised Olympic Games, and the NCAA tournament’s March Madness, there was the World Series in America, an annual rite of the fall as important as Halloween.

  And within this ritual, there was no drama like a seventh World Series game, which brought American office workers, factory workers, outdoor laborers, and schoolchildren to a stop for the day. With the contest played in the afternoon, people propped up radios on desks, in cars and trucks, and in factories to follow the action. At schools, offices, and living rooms across the country where people were playing hooky from other obligations, televisions were tuned to the game.

  In this setting, with blue-collar Brooklyn once again trying to upset the stately, regal Yankees, Robinson’s seventh-inning, seventh-game pop-up came off like staged theater, a cliffhanger at the end of a seven-act play. One little five-ounce baseball hung in the air, a moment of terror for the usually self-assured Yankees fans and a moment of blessed hope for beleaguered Dodgers fans. As the ball plunged back toward the diamond, the fans at Ebbets Field and baseball fans everywhere rose from their seats.

  The ball might have landed no more than twenty-five feet from home plate, and yet it could have changed the outcome more than any titanic home run. It could have liberated a downtrodden but proud baseball borough, and it could have cast doubt and disquiet throughout a storied franchise still not 100 percent sure who would save the day with Joe DiMaggio gone.

  It all depended on whether someone—anyone—got to the ball before it met the ground.

  Suddenly, from the right side of the diamond, with his chin jutting forward, his arms outstretched, and his legs churning beneath him in a full sprint, Billy Martin raced past the motionless Yankees Kuzava and Collins. The wind was blowing the ball toward home plate, and Billy’s hat flew off as he sped past the pitching rubber. An instant later, Billy lunged, his hands about two feet from the Ebbets Field infield grass. He extended his glove, where the ball nestled, and he closed his other hand around the floppy leather to keep it there.

  Three outs. No runs.

  Billy’s momentum carried him toward the Yankees’ third-base-line dugout, and still in a full sprint, he tossed the ball behind him onto the diamond without looking back. It was a sort of ho-hum reaction, as if to say, “The inning is over, let’s get in the dugout.” Billy was a few strides from the dugout when he realized his cap was still on the field, so he circled back to retrieve it. At this point, he was surrounded by other teammates coming off the field.

  “I didn’t think it was that big a deal until everyone started slapping me on the back,” he said.

  “It was the greatest clutch catch I had ever seen,” Mantle said. “Everyone froze. Except Billy.”

  The Yankees won the game, 4–2, capturing their fourth consecutive World Series. Stengel crowed afterward.

  “People wondered why I wanted that kid from Berkeley,” he said. “Look at that Robinson pop fly, that’s why. It isn’t even his ball but that 140-pound fresh kid on second comes tearin’ in after the ball. If that kid doesn’t make the catch we blow the World Series right there.”

  Billy was a Yankees World Series hero. For days afterward, he was praised for a diversity of contributions. Recalling the Dodgers’ botched suicide squeeze from the fourth game, McDougald called Billy’s subterfuge “our $70,000 steal,” which was the difference between the winner’s share of the World Series money pool and the loser’s share, or about $1,800 per player. His four RBIs in Game 2, with the Yankees already down in the series, were considered the early spark the Yankees needed after a long, tiresome pennant chase. A picture of his lunging grab of Robinson’s pop-up was voted the best sports photo of 1952. The film of the catch was replayed in thousands of movie houses across America, as an announcer described the streaking infielder in the middle of the screen as “the Yankees’ firebrand second baseman.”

  Baseball fans around the country and Americans not terribly interested in baseball knew Billy Martin’s name now. He was the Yankee who had made that World Series catch of Jackie Robinson’s wind-blown pop-up—the one who came flying in from nowhere, lost his cap, and held the ball.

  Within a week, Billy was back living at Lois’s parents’ house, but requests for him to appear at various athletic and civic functions came rolling in from around the country. He traveled up and down the West Coast and sometimes back to the East Coast for dinners and other appearances.

  If Billy was smiling for newspaper photographers on a regular basis that fall, it was a different scene at home, where there was a palpable tension. Lois would not give birth to the couple’s daughter, named Kelly Ann, until December 20, but she and Billy were moving in different directions long before that.

  At that point, Billy was going to baseball banquets about four nights a week, and he did not spend much time with Lois at the end of her pregnancy. He was at the hospital when Kelly Ann was born, but when Lois brought their daughter home, Billy later said, “I could see that she hated even to see me. She hated everything about me.”

  Billy’s sisters had told him that Lois had been hanging around other men while Billy was back in New York, but as Billy wrote, “Looking back, it really didn’t matter. We never should have gotten married in the first place.”

  Still, about six weeks after Kelly Ann’s birth, Billy said he was shocked when he was served with divorce papers while taking a nap at Lois’s parents’ home.

  He returned to the house at 1632 7th Street, where his mother had raised him after his father had left her and her infant son. Billy stayed in a cramped second-floor bedroom and waited for the 1953 season to begin.

  12

  THE YANKEES WON ELEVEN of their first fourteen games to open the 1953 season. Behind Mantle, Billy, and Whitey Ford, who had returned from his military obligation, the Yankees had the fresh blood to vault the team out of the Joe DiMaggio era and into another generation of Yankees championship teams. The trio also portrayed a different image from that of the Yankees of the previous decades. While those teams featured reserved, refined, soft-spoken tacticians, the 1953 Yankees were lighthearted, boisterous, and flamboyant.

  The New York papers had already depicted in jovial detail the extracurricular spring training exploits of Mantle, Ford, and Billy—missed team flights because of late-night excursions to distant bars that led to $500 cab rides the next morning, a steady stream of pranks played on one another and teammates, and largely harmless, if drunken, misbehavior on train junkets.

  Stengel rolled his eyes—when they weren’t averted. His Yankees were in first place and pulling away from the rest of the field.

  But on May 6, bad news interrupted the party for Billy. His grandmother, Nonna, in whose bedroom he had slept until he was of high school age, had died. He flew home to Berkeley. The trip also became the first chance for Bill
y since he left for spring training to see his daughter, Kelly Ann. It also gave him a chance to make a plea for reconciliation with Lois.

  Billy was inconsolable about the breakdown of his marriage and challenging the divorce. He begged Lois to take him back. Lois was adamant; the relationship was over.

  “You can’t stay in love with a newspaper clipping,” she said. “Too much baseball. Too little married life.”

  Billy said the divorce was a complete surprise. Lois disputed that. “No one gets a divorce and is not aware,” she said. Her lawyer continued to pursue the divorce, sending correspondence to Billy in Berkeley and in New York.

  He refused to open the letters. Distraught and feeling guilty, Billy was also devoutly Catholic, and in 1953, divorce defied church doctrine.

  “He was pretty broken up about Lois,” said his cousin Nick DeGennaro. “It was sad but anybody would have seen it coming. Billy was running around everywhere and Lois was alone at home. Billy just didn’t see it.”

  Billy liked being married; he just did not know how to be married.

  “To him, the divorce was a failure,” said DeGennaro. “And Billy never handled failure very well. He wasn’t a good loser.”

  Back in New York, the Yankees continued to win, and Billy was having a stellar year at the plate for a middle infielder. In one stretch from late May to mid-June, the Yankees won eighteen consecutive games. But Stengel and other Yankees noticed that their fiery second baseman seemed precariously on edge—even for him.

  In a game at St. Louis, Billy was a central figure in a second brawl involving catcher Clint Courtney. Half a dozen Yankees converged on Courtney after he drew blood with a high slide into Rizzuto. Whitey Ford stomped Courtney’s eyeglasses into pieces as they lay in the infield dirt. Four Yankees were fined, including Billy. But the league report on the fracas especially noted that it took several minutes and multiple umpires to subdue Billy, who continued to fight on the field even after some semblance of order had been restored.

  Billy told Mantle that he felt like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And his teammates noticed something else: Billy seemed to be withering away in front of their eyes. Gus Mauch, the team trainer, approached waiters at team hotels on the road and asked if they had noticed anything about Billy’s eating habits (the players got breakfast, lunch, or dinner for free as part of the hotel meal plan).

  The waiters told Mauch that Billy would order his food, but then not eat much of it. Mauch and other players bodily lifted Billy onto a scale in the locker room one day in Philadelphia. Billy, who normally played at about 165 pounds, weighed 132.

  In 1957, for a lengthy story for the Saturday Evening Post, which was a publication of major import during the 1950s, writer Al Stump conducted several extensive interviews with Billy across two weeks. The tone and message of the story were that Major League Baseball was a pressure-filled existence and not all fun and games—even for the dynastic Yankees.

  Stump’s case in point was Billy, who described to the magazine what he was going through in 1953.

  Billy said that doctors had discovered he had high blood pressure, insomnia, and a nervous stomach that made it hard for him to eat comfortably. Billy was prescribed sleeping pills, which he said made him drowsy during the day so he took “greenies” during games to be more alert. The use of amphetamine tablets—also known as speed and common along the frontlines during wartime combat situations—was widespread in baseball during the 1950s and 1960s. But Billy had taken the routine to an extreme.

  “I was on them almost all season—two a day,” Billy told Stump. “I took over 300 goof balls. Then more pills to get back to sleep, which didn’t work many nights. I’d be walking the floor until daylight. I was a wreck.

  “Everything seemed to be going wrong.”

  Things got worse in 1953 when a Chicago newspaper wrote about the divorce proceedings and reported—inaccurately—that Billy was not sending money to Lois and Kelly Ann. The newspaper wrote that mother and child were back in California without food and basic services because of Billy’s neglect.

  The next day, as Billy was coming off the field at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, a fan threw a baby bottle on the field and yelled, “Go home and feed your baby, you no-good bum.” Other fans in other cities heckled him about being a deadbeat dad.

  News of the divorce and the situation with Kelly Ann, though never substantiated, spread nationally. When in New York, Billy regularly attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. He went to church throughout his life, but in 1953, he was frequently seen quietly sitting in a pew, praying for guidance about his unsettled personal life. Leaving St. Patrick’s one day, another parishioner approached him on the long staircase outside the cathedral.

  “If you’re a member of this parish,” the man said to Billy, “then I quit.”

  The taunting about abandoning his family continued for several weeks until Stengel, irked by the displays wherever the Yankees went, used his power with the press to defend Billy.

  “The Yankees send those checks back to Mrs. Martin themselves,” Casey said. “So I know what he’s paying and it’s plenty. There is no disputing that this is the truth.”

  Through all this, Billy was having his best season as a Yankee. In fact, it would be the best season statistically in his eleven-year career.

  “He was always very confident, but at that point he had seen a lot of baseball and he knew exactly how to work the pitchers into the counts he wanted,” said Charlie Silvera. “He wasn’t a .300 hitter but he seemed like a .350 hitter when the game was on the line.”

  By July, Billy had replaced Rizzuto, then thirty-five years old, as the Yankees’ leadoff hitter. He had become an adept bunter, he was a good batsman in hit-and-run situations, and he knew the value of a well-placed ground ball that moved a base runner from second to third. He also found other ways to unnerve opponents and motivate—or entertain—his teammates.

  In a July game against St. Louis, opposing shortstop Billy Hunter slid into second base safely on a stolen base attempt, just eluding a tag by Billy, who then pretended to toss the baseball to Whitey Ford on the mound as Hunter, who was bent over, knocked the dust and dirt from his uniform pants.

  Billy kept the ball in his glove and lingered near second base as Ford turned his attention to the next batter. When Hunter stepped off second base to take his lead, Billy leaped toward him and tagged him out. It was the hidden-ball trick, something Billy did often and taught to generations of Yankees infielders.

  That summer, Ty Cobb was asked by a San Francisco reporter which current players he liked to watch play.

  “If I were managing a ball club,” Cobb answered, “I certainly would do everything within my power to get a player like Billy Martin. Sure, there are better hitters and better fielders, but for fight, spirit and whatever it takes to win a game, Martin is something special.”

  In the 1953 season, Billy, Mickey, and Whitey acquired a nickname: “the Three Musketeers.” And they earned it. But one of the Musketeers was usually painted as the ringleader and took most of the blame if something went awry.

  “I don’t know why, but Billy always got labeled the instigator, which wasn’t true at all,” Ford said. “Mickey just had that innocent, country-boy look and I was quiet about a lot of things in public. But Billy didn’t care about appearances and he had that mischievous grin, so people just thought he was stirring us up all the time. It wasn’t really the case. We got into plenty of trouble on our own.”

  Whitey Ford, like Silvera, Hank Bauer, and other Yankees from the 1950s, insisted that Billy was not a heavy drinker in this period of his life.

  “We used to make fun of him for nursing a drink for an hour,” Ford said. “I’d catch him dumping Scotches we bought for him in potted plants. I’d say, ‘Where’s your drink?’ And he’d say, ‘I drank it.’ And I’d say, ‘Then, where’s the ice? You drank the ice, too?’

  “He stayed out late with us, but he wasn’t the one ke
eping us out late. But he would always be the one getting blamed for us drinking too much and staying out too late. It got to be a joke between us. We’d tease him that he was leading us astray. We’d say, ‘We should go home but let’s have another drink because Billy is a bad influence.’ Billy would get pissed at us because he knew that’s exactly what people would say.”

  “I’m no playboy drinker,” Billy told the New York Times columnist Arthur Daley in 1953. “Sure, I go places. I’m single and I can’t sit in a hotel room talking to the floor lamps.”

  The Three Musketeers were busy off the field, often mentioned in gossip columns for hanging out in Manhattan or Chicago with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but they were still producing on the field. By late August, the Yankees had a nine-game lead over the second-place Chicago White Sox.

  The dichotomy of Billy’s season continued at every level. He was playing his best baseball, but Billy could not escape a pervasive melancholy. He was still contesting his divorce and made periodic calls back to Berkeley to ask his sister Pat what Lois was doing.

  “She’s moved on without you, Bill,” Pat told him. “And you should move on without her.”

  “I’m still a mess,” Billy told his sister.

  To the Saturday Evening Post, he said, “Mothers and fathers of kids think you get ahead on ability and opportunity. They don’t know about the outside pressure. The guys who are playing ball up here are the people who can adjust to the nuthouse they have to live in. Some of us can. Some can’t. I’ve never been able to get a good, steady grip on myself in this racket.”

  Twenty-five years old, he missed just two games and led the team in plate appearances and at-bats. He had career highs in home runs (15) and RBIs (75) and batted .257, which eventually was his career average. In 812 fielding chances, he made 14 errors. By comparison, McDougald had 23 errors in 525 chances at third base and Rizzuto made 24 errors on 647 chances at shortstop. With the help of his infielders, Billy turned 126 double plays. He also managed to get hit by a pitch 6 times, which led the team. And he led the team in sacrifices.