Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  And that was just in the workplace. After hours, even in mainstream America, it was cocktails for everyone—Scotch, gin, vodka, and bourbon flowing. Beer was treated like a nectar of life, as harmless as Kool-Aid. People drank to excess and drove their cars without a thought. It was almost impossible to get arrested for drunk driving. If you flipped your car or drove it into a pond, the cops or the tow truck driver just drove you home. As social mores go, it is certainly nothing to venerate, and as a lifestyle it had significant health consequences, not to mention the damage it did to careers and family lives. But it was, in fact, a way of life.

  In this context, it is hard to discern who was influencing whom. Or how much of it was just the times. Some have said that Billy brought out the worst instincts in Mickey, which is undeniably possible. But it is easy to notice that most of the stories that the 1950s Yankees players reconstruct and tell usually involve a group of at least four or five Yankees out on the town—Bauer, Berra, and others like Charlie Silvera or pitcher Bob Grim. Billy, Mickey, and Whitey on the road might have been the most roguish, intent on pushing the party to its utter limits, but drinking and staying out late were ingrained habits of ballplayers who did not have to report for work until 11:00 a.m. the next day.

  Billy and Mickey drank a lot—dangerously so—and the Yankees were a hard-drinking crew. So were the other fifteen Major League teams. From the beginning, baseball was a traveling, athletic-themed entertainment, and like many a circus, it bred some hard-living routines. There was free booze in every clubhouse in the country, and every stadium had a press room lounge where the drinks were complimentary. Players, coaches, reporters, and managers congregated in these press room bars after games, sometimes for hours. It was a tradition that dated to the 1920s, one that did not die out until the end of the twentieth century.

  The trains on which the players traveled had multiple bar cars. The planes gave away free booze. So yes, the 1950s Yankees got drunk often. Billy, like the leader he was, was right there with them. The whole bunch of them were Mad Men before twenty-first-century television writers created Mad Men.

  But Yankees general manager George Weiss was different. Raised in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, he was a short, stout, and jowly man who had been the manager of his high school baseball team and was educated at Yale University. As a young man in the 1920s, he made his name in baseball as the owner and chief publicity agent of a minor league team in New Haven, where he befriended Casey Stengel who was passing through. Weiss then led the Baltimore Orioles when they were a top minor league team.

  In 1932, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert hired Weiss to build a Yankees minor league system, which collected and developed top players for years thereafter. With an imprimatur of proven success, Weiss advanced through the ranks and remained with the Yankees until 1960. He was named baseball’s Executive of the Year ten times.

  Billy believed to his death that Weiss, who died in 1972, had held a grudge against him because of Billy’s impetuous outburst in 1950 when Weiss ordered him to the minors.

  “Four of us would be out somewhere and get in a little trouble,” Billy said. “But I would be the one called into Weiss’s office afterward.”

  There is documentation backing up Billy’s claim, beginning with the multiple stories about private detectives that Weiss hired to tail Billy. He also had detectives following Mickey and Whitey, but their transgressions rarely came up. Weiss respected Stengel, enough to rehire him when Weiss took over the New York Mets in 1961, but he never warmed to Casey’s boy. The sportswriters who covered the team in the 1950s frequently wrote that Weiss, a quiet, decorous man often seen in three-piece suits, had repeatedly expressed his opinion that Billy sullied the dignified image Weiss wanted the Yankees to project. The more the writers called Billy “brash” or “brassy,” the more it offended Weiss, who, when asked what his hobbies were in a newspaper interview, answered that he liked to play golf and putter around his country house in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  “Weiss liked that Billy helped the Yankees win,” John Drebinger of the New York Times wrote in 1958. “He did not like how Billy helped the Yankees win.”

  And in 1956, with Richardson waiting in the wings, Weiss surely did not believe the Yankees would stop winning if Billy were on another team. So throughout the 1956 season, Weiss, no stranger to strategic marketing, started floating the idea in the New York press that Billy was an unwelcome influence on the greatest player in baseball.

  It was a calculated campaign because Weiss knew that trading Billy would be met with a backlash in the New York press and with the Yankees’ fan base. Billy was exceedingly popular with reporters and columnists. He knew the writers and hung out with them on the road and at that way station of Manhattan athletic culture, Toots Shor’s, the saloon with a landmark oversize circular bar at 51 West 51st Street. Yankees fans were also drawn to Billy’s hustle, fiery demeanor, and reliability in pressure situations. He was an Everyman hero even then.

  So as early as 1956, Weiss did what he could to lay the groundwork for his opinion that Billy must eventually go. It was for the good of the franchise and its franchise player.

  In the meantime, the 1956 Yankees juggernaut chugged on with an air of invincibility.

  During a game at Fenway Park that year, third baseman Andy Carey was at the plate when Stengel called time out and summoned Billy from the on-deck circle.

  “Go tell him to pick out a good pitch and hit a home run,” Casey said.

  “What did you say?” Billy asked.

  “I said to tell that son of a bitch to swing at a good pitch and hit a home run,” Casey repeated.

  Billy trotted to the plate and relayed the instructions. Boston catcher Sammy White turned and said, “You guys have got to be kidding.”

  On the next pitch Carey slammed a high drive over the Green Monster in left field. As Carey rounded the bases, White looked over at Billy. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” he said.

  Replied Billy, “When the old man tells us to do something, we do it.”

  The other memorable incident involving Billy in 1956 was a tussle with a portly little pitcher with the Kansas City Athletics named Tommy Lasorda.

  Lasorda had been pitching inside to a couple of Yankees batters, and when he nearly hit Hank Bauer in the head, Billy jumped to the top step of the dugout and screamed at Lasorda, “I’m going to get you later.”

  Lasorda stalked off the mound in the direction of the Yankees’ dugout.

  “I said to him, ‘You don’t have to wait, banana nose, come out now,’” Lasorda barked. “And, of course, Billy being Billy, he did.”

  There was a scuffle involving several Yankees and Athletics, but no punches were thrown.

  “The next day, Billy comes over to me before the game and says, ‘You know, you’ve got balls. Two tough dagos like us shouldn’t be fighting,’” Lasorda said. “And we shook hands and went out for a drink that night. And from that moment forward we were the best of friends.”

  Lasorda was out of the Major Leagues by the next season, but his path crossed Billy’s numerous times thereafter, conspicuously when they managed against each other in the 1977 World Series.

  The Yankees won the 1956 American League pennant by nine games. For his 1956 performance, Mantle won the first of his three MVP awards.

  Billy had another strong year at the plate, but there was a sense that he might have lost a step in the field from his two years off in the army. Maybe it was the weight he had gained, although he was still lean and gangly. Maybe he had lost some incorporeal edge because he was no longer popping two greenies a day. Or maybe it was injuries. Billy missed 28 games with a swollen knee and a troublesome back. Whatever it was, it was subtle. The Yankees’ infield was still the glue that protected the pitching staff, and it had led to 97 victories and a pennant. But some people, like George Weiss, thought they saw a difference defensively in Billy. The mid-1950s was no time to crunch numbers so it was hard to prove, but
modern baseball researchers have a statistic they call the “range factor.” It is a player’s putouts and assists divided by innings played. Billy’s range factor at second base in 1953 was 5.35. It dropped to 4.77 in 1956. If he played 140 games, that would equate to about 81 fewer putouts and assists. Billy’s total fielding chances in 1956 dropped to 978.1 from 1,288.1 in 1953. Since Billy also played in 28 fewer games in ’56 than he did ’53, the number would be expected to drop, but the number of fielding chances per game nonetheless dropped by a significant .56 per game, which would equate to about 80 fewer fielding chances in a 140-game season.

  It seemed that Billy’s twenty-eight-year-old legs were getting to fewer balls than his twenty-five-year-old legs had. There was some talk of moving him to third base in 1957.

  None of this was part of the conversation in October 1956 as baseball fans turned to yet another World Series pitting the Yankees against the Dodgers. While there was a “here we go again” familiarity to the matchup, it would turn out to be the last all–New York World Series for forty-four years, until the Mets and Yankees met in 2000. It may have gone unannounced, but it was an end of a baseball era, one populated by players who became legends in the game.

  Nineteen players who were eventually voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame played or managed in 1950s all–New York World Series games: DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Ford, Mantle, Berra, Stengel, Campanella, Robinson, Durocher, Mays, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Enos Slaughter, Monte Irvin, Johnny Mize, Walter Alston, and Dick Williams.

  The series opened on the same day that the world was marveling at an engineering wonder: the first telephone cable laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching from Newfoundland to Scotland. The Dodgers won the first two games of the 1956 World Series at home, but in Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees won behind Ford and Billy’s second home run of the series. In Game 4, Billy broke open a tied game with an RBI single in the fourth inning. In that game, Billy also faked Jackie Robinson into running toward second base when Robinson should have tagged up on a fly ball—a deception that likely cost Brooklyn a run. It began when the Dodgers’ Sandy Amoros lifted a foul ball to deep left field, which Robinson did not pick up initially. Seeing Robinson’s indecision, Billy went through the motions of fielding a ground ball. Fearing he would be doubled up on the bases, Robinson broke for second. By the time Robinson realized Billy was deking him into a mistake, it was too late to tag up. Robinson would likely have scored on a single later in the inning.

  In Game 5, Stengel went with a last-minute hunch and decided to pitch Don Larsen, a journeyman starter known throughout baseball for his heavy drinking. Only two years earlier, Larsen had led the American League with 21 losses for Baltimore. He showed up for Game 5 hung-over, then went out and pitched the greatest game in World Series history. As Dick Young, the famed New York Daily News columnist, said that day, “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.” (Amazingly, Young donated that line to his colleague Joe Trimble, who was stricken with writer’s block trying to sum up the weight of Larsen’s accomplishment.) In a famous photograph of Larsen delivering his last pitch of the game, Billy is in the background just over Larsen’s shoulder.

  Billy later wrote that he was happy for Larsen but added, “But to be honest, I wasn’t all that excited or thrilled about his pitching a perfect game. I was just glad that we won. Otherwise we would have gone to Brooklyn down three games to two.”

  It was a good thought because the Dodgers won Game 6, 1–0. On the Yankees’ bus back to Yankee Stadium after the game, Billy sat next to Casey Stengel. Slaughter had misplayed a fly ball in left field for the only Dodgers run. Billy told Casey to get the forty-year-old Slaughter out of the lineup. Billy wanted him to play twenty-seven-year-old Elston Howard. And he wanted twenty-five-year-old Bill “Moose” Skowron to replace the thirty-three-year-old Joe Collins at first base.

  “If you don’t go with the youth, we’re going to lose this thing,” Billy told Casey.

  Stengel listened. Howard had a double and a home run in Game 7 and played flawlessly in left field. With the Yankees ahead 5–0, Billy led off the seventh inning with a single and was standing on third base three batters later when Skowron drilled a grand slam to right field. The Yankees broke the Brooklyn fans’ hearts again, romping to a 9–0 victory for their seventeenth championship since 1923. It was their fifth World Series title of the decade.

  In the newsreel footage of the final out, Billy is in the middle of the celebratory pack jumping up and down, his head bobbing above the throng as if he were attached to a pogo stick. It had been three years since his 1953 World Series fame, but he was back on top of the baseball world again.

  Billy batted .296 in the series with 2 home runs and 3 RBIs. When he struck out in the eighth inning of Game 7, it was the 99th at-bat, and the last, of an illustrious World Series career.

  With 33 hits in five World Series dating to 1951, Billy had batted .333 with 19 RBIs and 5 home runs in 28 games. His slugging percentage was .566. By way of comparison, Mantle, considered one of the best postseason power hitters ever, had a career World Series slugging percentage of .535. In 252 innings at second base, Billy made 1 error.

  Billy would play another 537 games in the Major Leagues and stride to the plate another 1,983 times. But he never again played in the World Series spotlight that brought out his best. In the center of the diamond during the final baseball act of the 1956 baseball season, he had indeed made it to Yankee Stadium and the October cheers were for him. A baseball star on the best-known sports team in the world, he had lived the fantasy he invented as a kid at Kenney Park.

  What he did not know is that the biggest piece of his childhood dream was over.

  15

  BILLY DID NOT GO back to Berkeley during the winter of 1956–57. Nor did he go to Japan. Or to Commerce. He lived in the Hotel St. Moritz overlooking Central Park South. The St. Moritz was a thirty-six-story, thousand-room gathering spot of East Side Manhattan high society. Designed so that most rooms had windows facing Central Park, the hotel featured cooling breezes and a sense of airiness much prized in bustling midtown. The façade of the building, now a Ritz-Carlton hotel, was made of brown sandstone, and the lobby floors and walls were built of Rosso Levanto marble from Italy. The hotel had an opulent dinner-dancing nightclub on the thirty-first floor, a tearoom, and a rooftop garden where an orchestra played during lunch and dinner.

  Alfred Manuel “Billy” Martin of 1632 7th Street, West Berkeley, was seen often walking through the sumptuous St. Moritz with a wide smile on his face. Bellmen loved him (and his big-tipping ways). Entertainers loved that he was not awed by their fame. The playwrights who used the tearoom as a writing salon were enamored of his easygoing manner, especially since they knew it also hid a forbidding intensity. He reminded them of a complicated, fascinating character they wished they had invented with pen and paper. Musicians meandered through the St. Moritz, and Billy, who kept the same night-owl hours as they did, knew them all. Essayists and authors frequented the St. Moritz, too, and Billy, who could talk to anyone, would engage them in conversation. His was not an academically trained mind, but it was nimble and perspicacious—at least before too many drinks—which is why in the mid-1950s many a magazine and newspaper writer found time to compose a probing, intellectual treatise on the Yankees’ gifted but enigmatic second baseman.

  All of this mattered not at all to Billy, who was simply enjoying himself. In the 1950s and for decades thereafter, people would psychoanalyze Billy, or suggest he would benefit from psychoanalysis. Billy always had his own brand of therapy. And it was having fun.

  One of Billy’s frequent pals that winter was comedian Jackie Gleason, whose show The Honeymooners had started filming in New York in 1955. Gleason loved to drink and gamble, in that order, a combination that often led to an inebriated Gleason daring bar patrons to challenges that involved some kind of athletic performance. Billy, often standing not far away, was always game—much to t
he delight of many a saloon gathering.

  When Billy and Gleason got tired of the standard barroom dares—balancing shot glasses on a forehead while jumping up and down or vaulting from the floor to the seat of a barstool without spilling a beer—they moved farther afield. One regular stop: the city’s many bowling alleys. Gleason and Billy had several high-stakes matches at bowling alleys, almost all of which Billy won. It took a while for Gleason to realize that bowling was a blue-collar sport, and West Berkeley Billy, not surprisingly, had plenty of experience at it. He was an excellent bowler who routinely rolled games in the 225 range. So after Gleason got tired of losing at bowling, they gambled at dart boards around the city. And after losing at that, Gleason finally took Billy to pool halls. This is where Gleason had the edge, although Billy could be unnerving with an acerbic tongue and sharp, jabbing wit. The duo also went to the racetrack together, sometimes accompanied by another Gleason pal, Desi Arnaz, who often brought his wife, Lucille Ball.

  Billy’s hobnobbing with television’s top-rated male and female stars was great fodder for New York’s more than ten daily newspapers, which happily ran pictures of Billy with his famous friends. The Yankees’ George Weiss saw the images. Billy was also often seen in the company of an assortment of pretty young women, his arm around a rotating cavalcade of Broadway dancers and chorus girls. Billy was single, that was his business, but the Yankees’ front office was already fast-forwarding to the approaching 1957 season. What effect would Billy’s newly magnified Manhattan nightclub lifestyle have on Mantle, the married man with children who was supposed to be an All-American hero? The Yankees had been worried about Billy’s influence before. Now they feared the worst.