Still, an inspired Detroit team rebounded in Detroit to win the next two games. The Tigers had new momentum, spurred by the return to the lineup of All-Star Bill Freehan behind the plate. Freehan had sustained a hairline fracture of his right thumb on September 21 and had not played since. Declared healthy by doctors, he caught nineteen innings in Games 3 and 4, adding three hits and two RBIs including a home run.
Detroit baseball fans slept on the sidewalks outside Tiger Stadium in subfreezing temperatures to get tickets to the final game of the American League season, which was played on a raw, windy day. In interviews twenty-five years later for an ESPN documentary on Billy’s life, two Tigers players, Northrup and Gates Brown, said Billy arrived late to the ballpark before the clinching game and appeared hung-over.
“I never could understand it,” Brown said, “because I’m saying, you know, this is for everything.”
Other players do not recall Billy’s pregame condition. But they saw the tension in his eyes. The World Series was a game away.
When the game began, the Tigers scored a first-inning run on a Freehan groundout, but the A’s tied it when Jackson stole home on a double steal, a play that concluded with a fierce home plate collision between Freehan and Jackson, who tore his hamstring on the play and was sidelined until 1973.
George Hendrick, who replaced Jackson in center field for the A’s, led off the fourth inning with a routine grounder toward the hole at shortstop. McAuliffe, the emergency shortstop, threw the ball just a bit wide and low to first base, though Cash made the catch steps before Hendrick arrived. Umpire John Rice called Hendrick safe, saying that Cash had lifted his toe off the base while making the catch. In the modern era of endless television camera angles, umpires have been forced to be stricter about the first baseman’s footwork. But in 1972, when “instant replay” was new and taken from one camera angle, it was not uncommon for first basemen to cheat by an inch or so around the base because it was seen as a harmless violation that was rarely called.
Rice’s call sent Billy and other Tigers into a tizzy as they surrounded the umpire on the field, incredulous at the call and its timing.
It included this salty exchange from Frank Howard, the Tigers’ six-foot-eight player-coach and a former first baseman.
“What’s the matter with you, John, you see that play every day during the season,” Howard howled.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Rice asked.
“No, sir,” Howard answered. “But you are full of shit!”
After Howard was ejected, Hendrick did not stay at first base for long as he was quickly sacrificed to second base. Tigers starter Woodie Fryman got the next batter to strike out, but then Tenace lined a single to left field.
Duke Sims, the backup catcher and sometimes outfielder, had been Billy’s choice in left field instead of Willie Horton as Billy tried to get another left-handed bat in the lineup against Oakland starter Blue Moon Odom. He had done the same thing earlier in the series. But on this play, Sims seemed to be slightly handcuffed by Tenace’s hit, and he did not get his throw off quickly as Hendrick headed for home. Sims’s throw was on line, and Freehan caught it and turned to tag Hendrick. It was a bang-bang play but the ball squirted out of Freehan’s mitt. The A’s were up 2–1.
The Tigers were confident they could get to Odom, but to start the sixth inning, Dick Williams summoned Blue from the bullpen. The Tigers barely threatened as Blue pitched four brilliant, scoreless innings.
Billy had lost another one-run playoff game and for the second time fallen short of the World Series in the postseason as a manager.
For years after the final game, Billy was second-guessed for playing Sims, who had hit .316 in the regular season, instead of Horton, who had hit .231. Horton said he would have thrown Hendrick out at home and prevented the second Oakland run. Horton was by far the more experienced outfielder. But Sims had already played 339 innings in the outfield in his Major League career, including 28 innings that year for the Tigers. It may have been a decision that backfired, but it was the same decision Billy had been making throughout the successful second half of the season.
Others pointed to whether Freehan might have been hampered defensively by his recently healed thumb injury since he dropped the ball trying to make the tag on the winning run. If Freehan looked impaired, there was no mention of it after he played nineteen innings at catcher during the previous two playoff games. In scores of newspaper accounts, he was instead lauded as the pivotal leader and driving force in the Tigers’ rejuvenation in the series. With the designated hitter still one season away, it would have been difficult to keep Freehan off the field in the pivotal game.
The more permanent takeaway of the series was an appreciation for the compelling drama it provided. The league championship series was still new to baseball, but the matchup of the Tigers and Athletics made an expanded postseason seem like an idea that was long overdue. The Tigers were praised for getting as far as they did, only to be finally undone by an anemic offense that hit .198 in the series. The A’s were celebrated and feted as a team on the rise, which proved true when they won the next three World Series.
In the losing locker room, Billy barred visitors and media until he addressed his team. Through the rickety clubhouse door of creaky old Tiger Stadium, reporters could hear Billy saying, “I’m proud of every one of you guys. Every one of you’se.”
But on a personal level, Billy was crushed. Charlie Silvera, Billy’s old Yankees roommate, sat with Billy in his office after all the reporters and players had left Tiger Stadium. They were drinking beer.
“We replayed and rehashed the key plays—the ump’s call at first base, the two plays at the plate,” Silvera recalled. “We did that maybe once or twice and then Billy said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go up and see Campbell in his office. We need to go talk to him, too.’”
The Tigers’ executive suite was on the roof by the right-field line, and Billy and Silvera had to walk through the narrow concourse of the stadium beneath the seats to reach the elevator that would carry them to the offices. The fans had filed out and the concourse was empty but for a few maintenance men.
“We were walking in silence, neither of us talking, and then about halfway there, when there was nobody else around, Billy just stopped,” Silvera said. “He said, ‘Charlie, I really wanted this one.’ And he started to cry.
“He put his head on my shoulder, kind of fell into my arms, and said, ‘I wanted to win today so much.’”
24
THE MAGIC, UPLIFTING KARMA and providence that seemed to accompany the 1972 Tigers evaporated quickly in a new year. The harmony of effort soured long before the regular season, and the splintered factions grew farther apart.
For starters, Billy believed he had gotten almost all he could out of an aging roster in 1971 and 1972. He wanted Jim Campbell, the general manager, to trade many of the veterans to revamp the team. Campbell, who had drafted those stars, declined.
In spring training, Billy had another disciplinary run-in with Willie Horton and wanted him fined. When Campbell came up with a different solution, Billy quit as manager for roughly twenty-four hours.
When there was a reconciliation, the team’s official position was that the dispute had never happened. Except that Tigers management never forgot it. And it was a first sign that Billy was starting to unravel the order and peace that had largely surrounded his life in Detroit.
In tandem, and perhaps not coincidentally, the 1973 Tigers weren’t the same team they had been a year earlier. Lolich had a tired arm, and everyone but Horton and Northrup seemed to be having worse years.
There were positives, bred by Billy’s unorthodox thinking. He promoted John Hiller, a reliever who had left the team after he had a heart attack in 1971 at the age of twenty-eight. Heart disease was not much understood at the time, and the Tigers had been unwilling to play Hiller, fearful that he might suffer another heart attack on the field.
Billy asked Hiller about his con
dition.
“He said I’m going to die of something eventually but it’s fine if I pitch right now,” Hiller said.
Billy asked Art Fowler his opinion.
“I agree, he’s going to die of something eventually,” Fowler said.
Billy made Hiller his closer in 1973, and he set a club record with 38 saves. He was one of the major reasons the Tigers stayed in the 1973 division race with the Yankees and the resurrected Orioles.
On a tip from Jimmy Butsicaris, Billy’s old Lindell A.C. friend, Billy also visited Jackson State Prison in southern Michigan to see an inmate playing for the prison baseball team. Ron LeFlore was serving time for armed robbery, but Billy convinced the Jackson State warden to allow LeFlore to come to a tryout at Tiger Stadium in July of 1973. The Tigers then signed LeFlore to a contract and negotiated a limited and then full parole under certain conditions (Billy and the Tigers had to sign off as wards to LeFlore). By 1974, LeFlore was starting in center field at Tiger Stadium, the beginning of a nine-year career.
But if there were good vibes about the 1973 Tigers, and there were since they were in or near first place in the AL East as late as mid-August, there was also an undercurrent of simmering rancor. Billy and Campbell feuded constantly, with Billy criticizing the team’s scouting department in the press, a public display of the team’s dirty laundry that incensed Campbell and others in the Tigers organization. John Fetzer, the low-key owner who wanted his organization to have a defined and accepted chain of command, was disturbed by Billy’s lack of professional protocol. In the past, Campbell would protect Billy, saying the end was worth the means. Increasingly exasperated, Campbell was no longer rushing to Billy’s defense.
There were other hiccups along the way; Billy showed up uncommonly late for the occasional game, striding into the park about an hour before the first pitch. Without a batting order written out, the players did not know who was taking batting practice, or who was at what position for infield and outfield practice—something all teams did before every game in the 1970s. Players and team executives also noticed that Billy seemed more impatient than ever with umpires and with his coaches. In June, he missed a couple of games to fly home to West Berkeley to be with Jack Downey, who had suffered a heart attack. When he returned to the Tigers, players and coaches said Billy appeared gaunt and drained.
“Billy looked like he was getting kind of beat down,” Silvera said. “The more he worried, the less he took care of himself. You could kind of see it slowly happening.”
Billy lobbied strenuously for a couple of trades, only to be blocked by Campbell and the scouting department. Billy seethed anew. So it was something less than one, big happy Tigers family. But the team was winning. And in that case, almost everything else was overlooked.
Then, in late August, the Tigers started losing just as the Orioles roared through the end of the month by winning twelve of fifteen games. The Tigers fell 7.5 games out of first place.
At a game in Detroit against Cleveland on August 30, the Indians’ noted spitball pitcher Gaylord Perry was beating the Tigers 3–0 after seven innings. Billy was livid with the umpires for not detecting Perry’s illegal pitches. Truth be told, Billy was probably most incensed by the notion that someone besides him and Fowler was getting away with doctoring the baseball.
Billy’s reaction was to have two of his pitchers start loading up the ball with Vaseline. As Fowler taught them, it was easy—put the Vaseline on the crotch part of your uniform and put your hand there before throwing a pitch. If the umpires came out to the mound to inspect the pitcher, it was presumed that no umpire, in front of an entire stadium of fans, would start pawing around in a player’s crotch to investigate.
The Tigers still lost. After the game, to the astonishment of the Detroit writers, Billy announced, “My pitchers were deliberately throwing spitballs the last two innings on orders from me. I did it to prove a point that it can be done without the umpires doing anything about it. They’re making a mockery of the game by not stopping Perry.”
American League president Joe Cronin suspended Billy immediately. Three days later, Jim Campbell called Billy to his rooftop office and told him he was fired.
“Did I not make this team a winner?” Billy said, repeating himself from his Minnesota exit.
Campbell told Billy the same things he told reporters later: “From foul line to foul line, Billy did a good job. There were certain things that made me uncomfortable with him. You couldn’t have somebody working for you who would destroy the rest of the organization. I don’t know if Billy ever understood that there were different parts of the baseball team. There is more to it than just what goes on between the lines.”
In some ways it was a sentiment that could have summed up Billy’s managerial philosophy, meaning that there is so much more to winning at baseball than the obvious play between the lines. But the paradox was that it was an axiom Billy never agreed with or chose to live by. Billy’s question would be: “Did I not get this team to win?” And often the response of his boss would be: “Yes, but at what cost outside the lines?”
It was the dual, and dueling, tenets at the core of a life strewn with conflict. And once again, and not for the last time, it put Billy at a crossroads.
When Billy called his wife, Gretchen, with the news of his firing, she was bewildered.
“I didn’t see what Billy had done wrong,” she said. “The city loved the Tigers.”
The reaction of Detroit’s baseball fans was similar to what transpired in Minnesota in 1969. They were enraged that the workingman’s hero had been fired. They flooded the team’s phone lines with complaints, filled the local radio airwaves with their anger and dismay, and protested outside Tiger Stadium, waving placards and vowing not to come back. Campbell became a recluse, locking himself in his office or apartment because fans cursed at him and yelled in his direction whenever he was in public.
Billy came home the day of the firing and talked with Gretchen about how the Tigers were going to honor the last year of his contract in 1974. To Billy, there was no rush to accept another job.
But a day later, Bob Short, a Minnesota politician for whom Billy had campaigned in 1970, called the Martin home in the Cranbrook Manor townhouses outside Detroit. Short was also the owner of the Washington Senators, and in 1972 he had moved that franchise to a town outside Dallas and renamed the team the Texas Rangers. The Rangers were in last place in the AL West and drawing crowds as small as two thousand people.
Short wanted Billy to come to Texas as his manager that day. Short said he would fire his current manager, Whitey Herzog, the future Hall of Famer. Billy said he wanted to rest. Short said he was offering a contract through 1975 worth $65,000 a year, plus the use of a new house and a new car.
Billy wanted to think about it. He was tired. He mentioned that another move would mean his son, B.J., would have to find another Catholic school to attend. A new school year had just started and his son liked his teachers and friends.
Short said he would find Billy another Catholic grade school in Texas. Billy was unmoved. He told Short to call him back in a couple of days.
When Short got Billy on the line again, he told him he had found the perfect Catholic school and it would be happy to accept B.J. Then Short offered Billy something new: control.
Billy would have the final authority over the twenty-five-man roster. He could call up whomever he wanted from the minors, oversee the farm system, and make all the trades.
Billy did not think long before accepting the job. It was September 8, six days after the Tigers fired him. Billy would be managing his third team in five years, and this time, he would be his own general manager. He was forty-five years old.
When Texas writers asked him what he could do with a team that had already lost 91 of its 140 games in 1973, Billy replied, “I’ve been fired twice. I’m a two-time loser. I know losing. But I also know winning. And I know how to get from one to the other.”
25
WHEN
BILLY’S WIFE, GRETCHEN, began relocating to the Dallas area during the winter of 1973–74, she went to a local bank to fill out an application for a checking account.
“I was asked for my husband’s employer and I wrote, ‘Texas Rangers,’” Gretchen said. “When the bank manager looked at my application, he said, ‘Oh, your husband is in law enforcement.’
“I was so perplexed. I said, ‘Oh, no, this is baseball.’ And my goodness, then he looked so perplexed.”
Bob Short had brought Major League Baseball to the Dallas–Fort Worth area, but few had noticed. One, the Rangers were such a lousy team. And two, Texas was football country. The average high school football game outdrew the average Rangers game, often by thousands of fans. College football was a religion, and the Dallas Cowboys, recent winners of their first Super Bowl, were surging behind new quarterback Roger Staubach.
In 1974, it is likely that the average Texan could name more Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders than Texas Rangers baseball players.
Billy was hired to change that. Maybe after a few months someone in Texas could at least name the manager of the Rangers.
But Billy knew that his name alone wouldn’t get people to come to the Rangers’ ballpark, Arlington Stadium, which was essentially an oversize minor league stadium between Dallas and Fort Worth. The stadium, surrounded by barren, sun-baked lowlands, was drab, squat, and lifeless. Its grounds were scorched by a Texas sun that made game-time temperatures, even in the evening, soar to 100 degrees. The Texas Rangers had the worst record in the Major Leagues, the worst attendance, and the worst attitude because no one, even the players, wanted to go out in the oppressive heat and in front of the empty stands.
Billy had to construct a winner fast, and he had to do it in a Texas sort of way.
“Texas was like another country,” Gretchen said. “But Billy was ready to move to another country. Billy threw himself into the Texas culture.”
Billy Martin Page 25
