The Yankees won 99 of the 151 games they played that year, a winning percentage that would be equivalent to a 106-win season in the Major Leagues’ current 162-game schedule.
In his autobiography, Billy makes no mention of his 1953 regular-season totals. He was focused, he said, on the Yankees winning a fifth consecutive World Series.
On September 30, the day that California governor Earl Warren was chosen to become the new chief justice of the United States Supreme Court—and just days after Senator John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier—the World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers opened at Yankee Stadium.
Cy Young, who had thrown the first pitch in the inaugural World Series fifty years earlier, was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 1953 baseball postseason. Young, born two years after the Civil War ended and the winner of 511 Major League games, reared back on his right leg and fired a crisp strike to Yogi Berra.
In the bottom of the first inning, with the Yankees ahead 1–0, Billy came to the plate against Brooklyn’s Carl Erskine, a 20-game winner in 1953. The bases were loaded with two outs.
In the original Yankee Stadium the left-field foul pole was just 301 feet from home plate, but the wall in straightaway center field was 461 feet away. The center-field wall was so far away, the Yankees placed three large, chest-high stone monuments to Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Miller Huggins on the warning track just to the left of the 461-foot sign and left them in play—if anyone could hit a ball that far.
Billy was making his twenty-seventh World Series plate appearance, having played in each of the two previous Fall Classics. It was a bright and sunny Wednesday afternoon, and the red, white, and blue bunting that came out only for World Series games was draped across each of Yankee Stadium’s three decks, which were filled with a sellout crowd of 69,374.
When Billy lofted Erskine’s curve ball toward left-center field, Jackie Robinson, who had switched to left field for the Dodgers, was the first to race for it. Brooklyn’s center fielder, Duke Snider, soon gave pursuit as well.
The ball sailed over both outfielders, bounding twenty feet to the left of the monument to Gehrig. Mantle, Bauer, and Gene Woodling charged home. Billy went into third base standing up with a triple and three RBIs. In the fourth inning, he bunted and ended up on third when both the pitcher and right fielder made bad throws. Billy added an eighth-inning single—his third hit—in a 9–5 Yankees victory.
In the second game, the Dodgers had a 2–1 lead when Billy led off the seventh inning with a long home run over the left-field fence against Brooklyn’s Preacher Roe. It was his second hit of the game. Mantle won the game an inning later with a two-run homer.
Brooklyn won the third game, 3–2, on a late home run by Roy Campanella, and then the Dodgers evened the series with a 7–3 home victory. Billy had a single and a walk in Game 3 and a triple early in Game 4, which ended when Billy, who had singled in the ninth, was thrown out at home trying to score on Mantle’s hit to right field.
Billy also tried the hidden-ball trick in the second inning with Brooklyn’s Junior Gilliam at second base. But Charlie Dressen, Billy’s old Oakland Oaks manager, suspected what Billy was up to and called time out from the third-base coaching box to warn Gilliam.
Between the fourth and fifth games of the series, the New York newspapers were filled with stories about eight-year-old Johnny Durkin of the Bronx, who had recently been stricken with polio. A playground baseball fixture, Durkin had recently been confined to his bed when he lost the use of his left leg.
His father, Lawrence, knowing that Billy was Johnny’s favorite player, made a plea to the Yankees for something to cheer his disconsolate son. Martin posed for a photo autographing a baseball for Johnny Durkin, then autographed the photo, too. Both were sent to the boy at Willard Parker Hospital in the Bronx.
“Johnny forgot completely about the fact that he couldn’t move one leg when he saw that picture and the baseball,” Lawrence Durkin told the New York Daily News. “He couldn’t believe Billy Martin would find time during the big World Series to send him a ball and a picture.”
The Yankees rolled over the Dodgers 11–7 in Game 5 with Billy getting two hits, including a two-run home run. The series returned to Yankee Stadium for the sixth game with the home team hoping to end the series. A nervous struggle ensued. Billy had a ground-rule double in the fifth but did not score. He hit a line drive that bounced at the feet of Gilliam at second in the first inning that was scored as an error, a controversial decision at the time—and later. Bauer scored on the play.
The Yankees had a 3–1 lead in the ninth until Carl Furillo hit a two-run homer into the right-field stands to tie the game. In the Yankees’ half of the ninth inning, Bauer walked and Mantle beat out a weak grounder to third base for a single. With one out and runners at first and second base, Billy left the on-deck circle and started walking purposefully toward the plate. The day had begun with sunny skies but clouds had moved in, and Billy was blowing on his hands in the late-afternoon chill of an October day as he readied for his at-bat.
“Nobody ever said anything to Billy in those situations,” Yogi Berra said. “You wouldn’t interrupt him. You didn’t have to talk to Billy. He knew what to do.”
Watching from the dugout, Charlie Silvera examined his former Concourse Plaza roommate and noticed how much had changed since Billy was a raw 1950 rookie.
“When he came up to the bigs, Billy could be fidgety in the batter’s box,” Silvera said. “I remember looking at him that day and seeing that he just stepped into the batter’s box without any messing around—no dirt kicking, no tapping his spikes. He stood upright. No nonsense.”
Bauer gazed into home from second base.
“Billy was born for that moment,” Bauer said years later. “I wasn’t sure he’d get a hit but I was sure he’d hit it hard somewhere.”
The Dodgers’ Clem Labine had pitched two scoreless innings in relief. Billy took Labine’s first pitch for a ball, then fouled off a fastball. Labine offered a sinker to Billy, who smacked it past the pitcher’s mound. The ball bounced once in front of second base and didn’t bounce again until the outfield grass just behind second base.
Bauer roared around third base and beat the throw to home without sliding. A small gaggle of Yankees hugged him and about twenty Yankees, led by Stengel, sprinted toward first base where Billy was mobbed. The newsreel of the game shows a smiling Billy being hugged by Stengel and Dan Topping in the clubhouse. Seemingly every Yankee came by to tousle his hair. Rizzuto came over and, holding Billy’s chin in his right hand, kissed Billy on the cheek.
Stengel, meanwhile, was holding up his right hand with his fingers and thumb spread wide. No team had ever won five consecutive World Series, and Stengel was making sure everyone could count the five extended digits of his hand. It was the Yankees’ sixteenth championship in the last thirty years.
Billy had 12 hits in 24 at-bats with 8 RBIs, 2 home runs, 2 triples, and a double. Billy’s 12 hits set a record for a six-game World Series and tied the record for hits in any World Series (several writers commented that he would have broken the record had his hot shot at Gilliam in the final game been scored properly). His .500 batting average was the highest in any series that had gone more than four games, and his 8 RBIs were the most in a six-game series. Billy’s slugging percentage in the series was .958, which was .328 more than any other batter on either team. He was voted the Most Valuable Player of the series in a landslide.
“That Martin must be the best .250 hitter in the world,” said Labine.
“Martin’s the best on the club,” said Dressen, the Dodgers manager. “He just kills you.”
During the series, Billy had been writing a short diary for United Press International.
After the final game of the World Series, under the byline Billy Martin, the series MVP began his diary with this sentence: “The ball I hit in the ninth inning went out into center field, they tell me, but I’ll always believe it rolled in
to the Promised Land.”
He later wrote:
It seemed to me as if it was happening to somebody else, not me . . . it’s the way you think about it as a kid but then it’s real, and if what I am saying now isn’t making too much sense you’ll have to excuse me. I’m still so excited that I can’t keep my thoughts from colliding with one another. All I know is that when I came up to face Clem Labine in the ninth I thought to myself how nice it would be if I could come through with just one last RBI this year.
Billy wrote that he ran to first base, not feeling his feet touch the ground. He briefly mentions the celebration, and then Billy being Billy, he couldn’t help but mildly complain that his one-hopper at Gilliam should have been scored a hit. But he rallied nicely, thanking his teammates and Casey. In farewell, he wrote, “Now I’m just going someplace quiet and relax for a long time. Any minute I expect someone to jab me in the ribs and say: ‘Hey, Martin, wake up! You’re dreaming.’”
13
THE DREAM SOON BECAME something akin to a nightmare, at least for someone as restless, ambitious, and baseball-centric as Billy. For most of the next two years, Billy did not play another Major League game.
Billy’s latest problems were actually a holdover, and they stemmed from an evident reality: it is hard to be a celebrated World Series hero and a hardship case at the same time.
At this juncture in his life, Billy could have used the advice of a sage public relations executive. Instead, his life remained as it usually was—an open book. That included the financial ledgers of his new fame as Billy made no effort to hide the many monetary benefits of his dazzling World Series performance. At home, he was given a baby-blue 1954 Cadillac convertible by a local car dealer, who took a picture of Billy standing next to the car and displayed it in all the Bay Area newspapers.
As part of the winning team, he got his World Series share of the gate receipts: $8,280.68, a payout that drew headlines in an era when hefty compensation for professional athletes was news, not commonplace.
Billy also accompanied other American Leaguers on a ten-day barnstorming tour. When he returned home and reporters asked what he was paid for the trip, he told them, “About $5,000.”
Less known, except in the neighborhood, was what Billy did with the other car he received in 1953—a Pontiac for winning the World Series MVP award. He donated that to Father Dennis Moore at St. Ambrose Church. He also told his sister Joanie that he would pay for her college tuition.
For a while, Billy had no reason to suspect that his hardship deferment from the army would soon be challenged. And besides, he was distracted; he was leaving with other Yankees for a series of exhibition games in Japan. He took with him his childhood friend Bill Castell.
“The Japanese people treated Billy like a visiting god,” Castell said in 2012, sitting in his California home. “I remember riding in a parade with him, propped up in the back of a big convertible sipping a drink called a grasshopper. These women, like Geisha girls I guess, kept running up to the car and giving us grasshoppers.
“We sat there waving to the crowd, and every once in a while Billy would look over at me and say, ‘How about this? Not bad for a couple of nobodies from West Berkeley.’”
Castell also recalls the decorative Japanese dolls and other mementos and souvenirs that Billy mailed home to his mother. Jenny bragged about the gifts to her neighbors, showing them to anyone who came to her house.
At about this time, according to a Berkeley Gazette story, the local draft board began reviewing Billy’s hardship case because, as an official told the newspaper, “now he is in the money.” Asked about it when he got back from Japan, Billy answered, “I haven’t heard anything about that. I haven’t received any notice. But I’m here if they want to come and get me.”
And come and get him they did. But not without months of governmental paper pushing to reclassify his draft status. So for about a week, Billy went to rest at his mother’s house, moving back into the second-floor bedroom. Bored, he called Mickey. Then he called his cousin Nick.
“Billy says to me, ‘Want to drive to Oklahoma with me?’” Nick DeGennaro said. “And that’s how I went to Mickey Mantle’s house—a trip I’ll never forget.”
The baby-blue Cadillac rolled toward Oklahoma with stops along the way in Reno and Las Vegas. Not long after they crossed the Oklahoma state line from New Mexico, Billy and DeGennaro stopped for gas next to a tiny roadside diner.
“I remember Billy standing there getting gas with a little cigar in his mouth,” DeGennaro said. “The kid pumping the gas goes, ‘You look like Billy Martin.’ And Billy laughed and said, ‘I better since I am him.’
“The kid was all excited and got an autograph. We decided to go inside the diner for dinner. Well, the kid had apparently run around and told everyone in town that Billy was there, and the diner started to fill up with locals who wanted to meet him. We were sitting at the counter and people were slapping him on the back and asking him about the World Series. There was almost a line for autographs, and girls were sitting on his lap and having their picture taken with him.
“After a while, a couple of these good ol’ boys at the other end of the counter were getting fed up with all the attention Billy was getting. They started saying things to each other and doing it loud enough for us to hear, stuff like, ‘He ain’t very big—except for those ears.’ They were making fun of his clothes and calling him a skinny shit. They were kind of heckling Billy. Another one said something like, ‘Some big-league brawler, I’m sure I could take him.’
“Billy said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”
DeGennaro said they paid their bill—Billy left his usual big tip—and started for the door. But somebody else stopped Billy to talk.
“We were standing there with our backs to the counter and there was a mirror on the wall we were facing. One of the guys who had been making comments gets up and starts toward us. I could see him in the mirror. He raised his arm real quick like he was going to grab Billy from behind, and all at once Billy wheeled around and just decked the guy. He hit him square on the jaw so fast the guy just went down in a heap. He’s lying on the floor of the diner.
“Everybody kind of froze and we walked out the door.”
But some of the male patrons from the diner eventually followed Billy and his cousin.
“We got in the Cadillac and they’re yelling things at us standing in the dirt parking lot but no one is coming near Billy,” DeGennaro said. “They’re standing back and just yelling. Billy just laughed at them. He said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and we roared off. One of the guys picked up a rock and threw it.
“Billy turned to me and said, ‘See what I have to put up with?’ I’ll tell you what, I understood his new life a lot better.”
The welcome in Mickey’s hometown of Commerce near the Kansas and Missouri borders was considerably warmer. No one from the Yankees had ever come to Mickey’s birthplace. The arrival of the 1953 World Series MVP was cause enough for a weeklong celebration in Commerce.
“We went from one party or bar to another,” DeGennaro recalled. “It was like Mardi Gras.”
Said Mickey about the visit, “Everybody loved Billy—even the wife of one of my best friends.”
The boys went hunting and fishing, and Billy started buying and borrowing the Western-style clothing everyone else in Oklahoma was wearing.
“He bought cowboy boots and a hat,” DeGennaro said. “He really threw himself into that.”
Throughout his early and later life, Billy spent hours reading historical fiction about the Old West. He loved Louis L’Amour’s frontier-story novels and could quote from dozens of them, especially one appropriately enough called The First Fast Draw.
DeGennaro recalled that they hunted during the day and by midafternoon they were drinking.
“All I saw of the two of them that winter was their backs going out the door,” Merlyn Mantle wrote in A Hero All His Life, the book she authored for the family after Mickey’s
death. “If they did all the hunting and fishing they claimed they were doing, the fish and quail population of Oklahoma and Missouri took a fearful beating.”
It is during this period that Mickey began telling a story about one of his hunting excursions with Billy. When Mickey was paid to speak at baseball-related dinner engagements from the 1960s to the 1980s, he often told the story and it always brought down the house with a sustained, uproarious laugh. It perfectly captured the two men, impish and always playing off each other. And it certainly sounded like Billy. The story may be apocryphal, and some say it dates to vaudeville comedians, but none of that ever mattered to audiences across America who drank it in when the great Mickey Mantle told it.
Mickey would stand at the microphone and in his syrupy drawl start to talk about how Billy in the 1950s wanted to hunt on private land where no other hunters, or strangers, would interfere or bother him.
“So I told Billy I knew a guy who had a big ranch where the hunting was terrific but we would have to drive about three hours to get there,” Mickey would say to start the story.
And everyone would smile, drawn in by the notion that they were going to get an inside look at what it was like to be young, a world champion, and a Yankee at play.
“So we get to the ranch and I park my pickup truck,” Mickey would continue. “And I said to Billy, ‘Let me go inside and say hi to the guy and ask his permission to hunt on his land. It’s just a courtesy.’”
As Mickey told the story, he talked to the rancher who was happy to have Mickey and Billy hunt on his land, but the rancher asked a favor. One of his aging mules had gone blind and was lame but the rancher didn’t have the heart to shoot him.
“Would you shoot that mule for me before you go out to hunt?” the rancher asked Mickey.
Billy Martin Page 14
