Said Billy, “Bozzy, you’re not going to do anything like that.”
“Yes, I am,” said Boswell and he headed for the door.
Allison, who was as big as Boswell and one of his close friends, ran after Boswell and stopped him near an alley behind the bar. As usual, there are conflicting stories from this moment on. What is known is that everyone had been drinking.
“If you’re going to be a tough guy,” Allison apparently said, “why don’t you hit me?”
And Boswell did, knocking Allison to the ground. Billy always maintained that when he got to the alley seconds later, Boswell was hitting Allison as he lay on the ground. Billy pushed Boswell away, grabbed a chain with a crucifix that hung around Boswell’s neck, and used it to draw Boswell closer as he punched him repeatedly in the stomach.
When fighting a bigger opponent, Billy later explained, you have to get inside and close to him. Pulling on his chain kept Boswell close. Finally, according to Billy, he punched Boswell in the face, which sent Boswell bouncing off the alley wall. Reporters would later ask Billy what happened next.
“Well, when he came off the wall, I hit him again,” Billy answered.
Boswell fell to the ground and Butsicaris intervened, saying, “Billy, he’s out.”
Years later, Billy wrote, “I looked at Boswell and I felt sick. He was bleeding badly, and I felt terrible because I really like the kid. I was saying to myself, ‘How in the world did this happen? Nobody’s going to believe it. How the hell do I get myself in these situations?’”
Billy ended up going to the hospital with Boswell. The fight made national news since it’s not every day that a manager pummels one of his own players (although it was not altogether uncommon in the previous five decades in baseball). On the team, it was not a total surprise.
“Dave, at the time, was a problem,” Carew said. “He drank a lot, and he was a problem. And he challenged Billy, and knowing Billy Martin, he’s not going to back down from anyone. He put a whipping on Boswell.”
But it did not look good. As Jim Kaat said, “Dave’s face was all black and blue and it looked like he had been in it with Jake LaMotta or something.”
Billy walked around for a few days with a badly swollen and cut right hand.
Griffith interviewed all the involved parties and ended up fining Boswell, who apologized to Billy in the owner’s office.
“It was unfortunate,” Billy said of the fight. “But sometimes those flare-ups happen.”
Boswell would win 20 games for the 1969 Twins, the best season he had in the big leagues.
Griffith later said that he had considered firing Billy after the Boswell fight, just because he was scared for what else might happen. But like many team owners after him, Griffith decided he needed Billy. He had led the Twins to first place, and even if the ride had been like sitting on a keg of dynamite, Griffith wanted to see where the journey ended.
With Boswell winning eight games down the stretch, the Twins won the AL West by nine games over Oakland. When the division was clinched, the Twins celebrated with boxes of champagne that the frugal Griffith had saved since 1967 when the Twins fell short of the pennant on the final day of the regular season.
In his first year as a Major League manager, Billy had taken a team that was 79–83 the previous season and turned them into a 97-win juggernaut.
“This is the biggest thrill for me, more so than as a player,” Billy said as the champagne flowed around him after the clinching victory. “To do it as a leader of a team, that means more to me. I remember celebrating like this as a player but this feels different. It’s bigger, somehow.”
For the first time since 1956, Billy would be back in baseball’s postseason.
20
IN THE INAUGURAL AMERICAN League Championship Series, Billy’s Twins would face the Baltimore Orioles, who had steamrolled the AL East on their way to 109 victories.
The skipper of the 1969 Orioles was Earl Weaver, a short, hot-tempered baseball lifer who had spent fourteen years as a minor league player and then eleven more seasons as a minor league manager. At roughly the same time Billy was taking over in Denver in 1968, Weaver first stepped foot in a Major League dugout when the Orioles suddenly named him their manager.
The Twins were a good team. The Orioles were viewed as nearly invincible. They were led by three future Hall of Famers (four, if you count Weaver): Frank Robinson, who was one of the best all-around players in the history of the game; Brooks Robinson, probably the best-fielding third baseman ever and a significant home run threat; and Jim Palmer, the high school prospect from Arizona whom Billy wanted the Twins to sign and who in 1969 compiled a 16–4 record with a 2.34 ERA.
But it did not take the nation’s baseball writers long to zero in on the most absorbing story line of the Twins-Orioles series—it was the matchup of Battlin’ Billy and the Earl of Baltimore. Both baited and argued with umpires, and both yelled at their players—and opposing players—with a red-faced fury. Even in 1969, they were considered old-school types, the kind of demanding leaders who wanted everyone in their dugout living and dying with every pitch because that’s how they were. Players who did not hustle or who did not look pained by losses were benched. They were funny and engaging with the press, at least until crossed, and each was very familiar with a barroom when the game was over.
The 1969 ALCS was the first act of twenty years of memorable clashes between Billy and Weaver, who would become archrivals as well as the most respected and feared managers in the American League.
More than forty years later, when Earl Weaver was asked to recall the 1969 series, he answered, “I was frightened. Here we had won 109 games and we had to win three out of five against a Billy Martin team.”
The opening game of the best-of-five series had both managers dueling throughout. The game at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, a circular edifice where Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts also played, saw the Orioles take an early 1–0 lead on Frank Robinson’s home run. Baltimore led 2–1 in the seventh when Weaver chose to walk Killebrew, whose 49 regular-season home runs were the most in the Major Leagues. The strategy backfired when Tony Oliva followed Killebrew to the plate and lined a 1–2 pitch into the left-field seats for a 3–2 Twins lead.
Billy met Oliva at the top step of the dugout after the homer and hugged him so hard he knocked Oliva’s batting helmet to the ground.
But in the ninth inning, it was Billy’s turn to make a difficult decision. His 20-game winner, the right-handed starter Jim Perry, had given up just one hit since the fifth inning. But leading off the Baltimore ninth would be Boog Powell, a lefty pull hitter who had stroked 37 homers in the regular season. Billy’s closer, Ron Perranoski, the league leader in saves, was warmed up in the bullpen.
But early in his managerial career, if one of his best starters was on the mound, Billy was not inclined to turn to his closer unless that starter was in trouble. Stengel’s 1950s Yankees did not depend on a closer; they usually let the starters work until they were faltering. Billy would do the same.
But this time, Powell sent a long fly ball to the right-center-field bleachers to tie the game.
“I should have been in there pitching to Powell,” Perranoski said in an interview forty-four years later. “I was getting out lefties all year.”
Perranoski eventually became a close friend of Billy’s.
“Billy’s loyalty was one of his strengths but sometimes it got him in trouble,” Perranoski said. “I think he didn’t want to take Jim Perry out because Perry had pitched a hell of a game.”
Perranoski was right. Loyalty mattered above all other things in Billy’s view of the world, even when it hurt.
Perry gave up a single to Brooks Robinson after Powell’s homer, which finally brought in Perranoski. He did not give up a hit in the inning, but a fielding error by Carew did allow Robinson to advance to third base with two outs. With a chance to win the game right then, Weaver sent up pinch hitter Merv Rettenmund to hit for h
is pitcher (there was no designated hitter in 1969).
Billy countered with one of his favorite trick plays, one taught to him by Stengel. Billy had Perranoski throw high and inside to Rettenmund. As Rettenmund threw himself to the ground to avoid the pitch, Twins catcher George Mitterwald caught the ball and quickly threw to third base. Robinson was picked off, out by five feet.
It was a set play, as Billy would explain later. “The base runner at third always freezes, it’s a natural reaction when someone almost gets hit near the head like that,” he said. “But our guys know it’s a set play so the third baseman covers third on the pitch and the catcher comes up throwing. It gets the stunned runner every time—unless the pitcher is too chicken to throw the ball high and inside.”
The game went to extra innings. The Twins loaded the bases in their half of the twelfth with one out but couldn’t score. A Weaver pitchout thwarted a safety squeeze bunt attempt Billy called with Leo Cárdenas at the plate and the bases loaded.
In the Baltimore twelfth, the Orioles’ light-hitting shortstop, Mark Belanger, reached on an infield single. A sacrifice bunt and a groundout advanced Belanger to third base with two outs.
Paul Blair, who had hit 21 home runs that year, was at the plate. This time Weaver sat back in the dugout and waited.
“On his own Paul decided to put down a drag bunt,” Weaver said in December 2012, about a month before he died of an apparent heart attack. “I didn’t know anything about it although Paul did signal to third-base coach Billy Hunter who then warned Belanger.”
A great game of strategy and managing ended with a bold decision by a player. Who would have figured that?
Said Perranoski, “When he bunted that ball between the pitcher’s mound and third base, I felt sick. I knew we couldn’t get him and I watched Belanger run home.”
Perranoski had not let a ball out of the infield in the inning but the game was lost, 4–3. He went out after the game with Art Fowler and Billy.
“We sat at a bar for about an hour,” Perranoski said. “Nobody brought up the Boog Powell home run and whether I should have been in there. We just let it go.
“But I’ve always felt like that game turned the tide of the series. If we beat them in their park in the first game, we gain momentum and put the scare in them.”
Instead, in Game 2, Baltimore’s Dave McNally held the Twins to three hits as the Orioles won 1–0 in eleven innings.
The Twins flew back to Minnesota, trying to gain confidence from nearly defeating the powerful Orioles twice. And they could turn to Jim Kaat to pitch Game 3. Kaat had debuted in the Major Leagues ten years earlier, as a twenty-year-old. Though restricted by injuries in 1969, he was a seasoned vet who had already won 142 games in the big leagues.
To everyone’s surprise, Billy informed the team that he was planning to instead start Bob Miller, a journeyman with a 53–62 career record. Miller had won some big games during the pennant drive, but Kaat still seemed the obvious choice. Griffith and others in the Twins’ management begged Billy to reconsider.
Billy stood by his decision. The Orioles had seen Kaat for years, he reasoned, while Miller was a career National Leaguer with only eleven American League starts at that point. Miller would be unfamiliar, the surprise choice. To some, it seemed as if Billy was trying to channel his inner Stengel, who had made the ultimate unconventional starting pitcher choice when he sent Don Larsen to the mound in the 1956 World Series and was rewarded with a perfect game.
There were other factors. Billy never forgot even the most minor slight, and Kaat had sided with former Twins pitching coach Johnny Sain in 1965 when Sain and Martin were at odds as coaches under Sam Mele. Kaat was also chummy with former traveling secretary Howard Fox, who was now a vice president in the organization. That by itself might have been enough motivation for Billy to spurn Kaat and give the ball to Miller, who was devoted to Fowler, Billy’s right-hand man.
Billy’s loyalty and allegiance might have been his undoing again.
Miller did not fare well in Game 3, giving up five hits and three runs by the second inning. The Orioles won the game 11–2. Palmer pitched the complete-game victory. Billy’s first postseason series as a manager—and his first match against Earl Weaver—ended in a sweep.
When the final game ended, the Twins fans who remained at Metropolitan Stadium rose to their feet and gave their team a long ovation. It was a thank-you sendoff. Home attendance had risen 35 percent. There was a buzz about Twins baseball again. The fans were eager to see what Billy would dream up next year.
But the mercurial Griffith stewed about the snub of Kaat. There was also the Boswell fight, the nap business, and the fight with Howard Fox years earlier.
Billy made Griffith uneasy, but he decided he might be able to hem in his excesses with some behavioral clauses in Billy’s new contract. There was a meeting shortly after the playoff sweep. Billy surprised Griffith by asking for a raise and a two-year contract—had he not resurrected a seventh-place team?
Griffith asked for time.
Billy asked Griffith a series of questions:
“Did I do everything I said I was going to do?”
“Yes,” Griffith said.
“Did I make them hustle?”
“Yes.”
“Did they win?”
“Yes.”
Billy left the room.
The next day, Griffith called a meeting of the Twins’ brass, which was a disjointed collection that was supposed to include his brother, Sherry Robertson. But Robertson overslept and missed the meeting. Tom Mee, then a young public relations staffer, was the lone Billy supporter at the meeting. Fox, who had Griffith’s ear, argued vehemently for Billy’s ouster.
Griffith was not in a good mood that day. Billy had called the influential newspaper columnist Sid Hartman and told him off the record that the Twins were considering firing him (Billy talked a lot to his favorite writers off and on the record). Hartman wrote a column pleading with Griffith not to be so foolish. It was a power play that irked management.
Griffith knew that turning Billy away would outrage the fan base, although he may have underestimated the level of outrage. Griffith, whose family had run the hapless Washington Senators for decades, also might have been inured to public opinion.
Years later, his son, Clark, said the decision on Billy’s fate was more complicated than it may have appeared. The Twins, Clark Griffith said, had received multiple complaints about Billy’s drinking on the road. And Clark Griffith added that when Billy’s fate hung in the balance, his uncle, Sherry Robertson, who was once Billy’s close buddy, had not pushed his father to keep Billy.
In the end, Griffith’s own words from before the 1969 season might have summed up the situation best. Having Billy as manager was like sitting on a keg of dynamite. It produced some majestic highs but it was volatile. Griffith, a man with reserved, Old World sensibilities, did not value volatility.
On October 13, one week after the inaugural ALCS ended, Griffith announced that Billy was not coming back as Twins manager. Billy heard he had been fired while driving back to Minnesota from Nebraska where he, Gretchen, and B.J. had spent a few days visiting Gretchen’s parents.
“That was a very difficult time,” Gretchen said. “Billy had made the young players believe they could win. He had brought all the Latin players into the fold. He had motivated and rejuvenated the veterans.
“Billy had changed the culture. He went to a hundred banquets and dinners for free. The fans were ecstatic. He put the Twins on the baseball map. Sure, some crazy things happened that season but it was also just Billy’s first year.
“Billy didn’t understand what he had done that was worth being fired. He felt certain that with one more good pitcher, the Twins might have won five or six divisions in a row.”
Griffith told the New York Times, “The Twins are as much a part of me as of Billy Martin. I’m the one who has to sign the ballplayers. I should have a right to say what’s what.”
&n
bsp; Twins fans hung Griffith in effigy in downtown Minneapolis. The team received hundreds of phone calls. Don Cassidy of the Twins’ media relations staff said some fans “broke into tears” during the calls. The local Teamsters Union said it was organizing a boycott of Twins games in 1970. The Twins drew fans from Iowa and the Dakotas as well as Minnesota. State legislators from each of the three states petitioned Griffith to reconsider.
“Calvin Griffith has dealt a blow to his fans by failing to appreciate the importance to the organization of Billy’s popularity,” the Minneapolis Tribune columnist Dick Cullum wrote. “Martin is the people’s choice, their only choice.”
Rod Carew said the players were stunned.
“Who fires a guy who took a seventh-place team and turned it into a division winner?” Carew said. “Everyone was disappointed. We were obviously building a good thing. And then he was gone.”
The disappointment in the area was not short-lived. In 2009, the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Twins’ division victory, the Minnesota newspaper columnist and radio host Patrick Reusse wrote about how in late 1969, you couldn’t go anywhere in the Twin Cities without hearing the vow, “I’m never buying another ticket to a Twins game.”
“The Martin effect was more than myth,” Reusse continued. “In 1970, the Twins won 98 games and another division with Bill Rigney as manager as attendance fell 88,000.”
By 1971, when the Twins were losers, attendance had dropped by more than 400,000 from the team record set in 1969, a drop of about 30 percent.
“And this is a fact,” Reusse wrote in conclusion to his 2009 column. “A decade after Billy was fired, you still could run into a 40-year-old sipping a beer in a local bar, waving in disinterest at the Twins game on the corner TV and saying, ‘I haven’t been to a game since they fired Billy.’”
21
BILLY’S FRIEND CHARLIE SILVERA called 1970 “the loneliest year of Billy’s life.”
He had expected a managerial offer from some team but none came. His principal means of support was a job with Minneapolis radio station KDWB, where he hosted a radio show that was broadcast twice a week before Twins games. The show meant he had to carry a bulky microphone and tape recorder around before games—often on the road—interviewing players. He bunked with friends from the baseball network—Yogi Berra, Lee Walls, Bob Uecker—because the radio station would not pay for a hotel room.
Billy Martin Page 22
