Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Billy’s first taste of Texas came during his annual winter visits to Mickey Mantle’s Dallas-area home in the 1960s. It was an extension of their get-togethers as Yankees players when Mantle lived in Oklahoma. Billy enjoyed being around the ranchers and cattlemen Mantle befriended, a city boy drawn to the vast, open spaces and the frontier justice ethos.

  “He used to say that the only other time in history that he would have liked to live was the Old West,” his son, Billy, said. “He said he would have either been a gunfighter or a sheriff.”

  Long before he was hired as the Rangers’ manager, Billy devoured the Western-themed books of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. Besides books on Civil War history, they were the only books he read.

  As Gretchen said, “I could get him to any movie if I convinced him it was a Western.”

  The Wild West was still alive in 1970s Texas, and Billy’s gunslinger’s swagger fit in perfectly. He was also ripe for a middle-age crisis of sorts. Some men buy a red sports car at forty-five years old; Billy went out and bought himself a new Western wardrobe. He grew a mustache, like any good outlaw far away from his boyhood home.

  “He loved the whole Texas wild and loose image,” said Randy Galloway, a longtime Dallas-area newspaper columnist who in 1974 was a Rangers beat writer for the Dallas Morning News. “Almost from day one, he was wearing cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a big belt buckle.”

  The Dallas-area newspapers ran pictures of Billy holding a shotgun in front of the fieldstone fireplace of his home—a Texas longhorn above the mantel. In other pictures, he twirled a replica Colt .45 six-shooter while nine-year-old Billy Joe—in Texas, B.J. more often started to be called Billy Joe—had a hand on the shotgun.

  Toby Harrah, the Rangers’ shortstop, said Billy was known for walking into any bar in Texas and just talking up the locals like he was one of them.

  “I don’t know if all those Texans liked that,” Harrah said, laughing. “He did play all those years for the hated New York Yankees. Billy probably got popped in the nose a few times. But that didn’t stop him.”

  But you couldn’t just put cowboy hats on the 1974 Rangers’ roster and make it a success. Billy Martin the general manager made a good first trade, sending the twenty-two-year-old third baseman Bill Madlock to the Chicago Cubs for pitcher Ferguson Jenkins. Madlock went on to have a terrific career as a four-time batting champ. But the Rangers desperately needed an ace of the pitching staff, and Jenkins, who slipped to 14 wins in 1973, had won at least 20 games every year since 1967. He was on his way to the Hall of Fame and only thirty-one years old.

  Combined with the dependable workhorse Jim Bibby and the third starter, Jackie Moore, whom Billy yanked out of the bullpen, the Rangers suddenly had a respectable top to the pitching rotation.

  Next, Billy turned to his defensive lineup. He traded starting catcher Ken Suarez to Cleveland for Leo Cárdenas, who had played for Billy in Minnesota. The new catcher would be twenty-three-year-old Jim Sundberg, whom the Rangers had drafted out of the University of Iowa one year earlier.

  Sundberg had played just one summer in the Class AA minors, but Billy had scouted him in an off-season instructional league game and declared him ready for the Major Leagues. It was the first of sixteen seasons in the big leagues for Sundberg, who became an All-Star three times and won six Gold Gloves.

  “I don’t think anyone other than Billy Martin would have had the guts to make that call,” Sundberg, now a senior vice president with the Texas Rangers, said. “I don’t know anyone else who would have shown that much confidence in a young player.”

  Billy was just getting started. From the Rangers’ Class A team in the Western Carolina League, he promoted first baseman Mike Hargrove and gave him a starting job. Hargrove had hit .351 in his first minor league season. When a reporter in spring training quipped that Hargrove had never played above Class A ball, Billy had a waiting answer: “Did you know he had a slugging percentage of .542? I’ll take anybody who can do that at any level.”

  When Billy elevated Lenny Randle from reserve status to starting third baseman, he talked about how Randle had been a minor league star “who just needs the chance to play.” Billy raised eyebrows when he put designated hitter Alex Johnson in left field. The moody, sometimes incommunicative Johnson wasn’t a stellar fielder, but Billy said it was important to get Johnson into the normal mix of games. Making him an everyday DH only isolated Johnson more and contributed to his brooding.

  Buck Showalter, whom Billy mentored in the 1980s, has studied Billy’s decision making for decades, and he is convinced that people underestimated how much deliberation went into Billy’s choices throughout his career.

  “Over the decades, a perception has developed that Billy did a bunch of wild, emotional things,” Showalter, who has managed four Major League teams, said in 2013. “People think he just showed up for the games, tried some risky things, and got lucky. Listen, you don’t get lucky over 162 games; that’s the great thing about baseball. And if you look at his personnel moves in Texas, he obviously studied the entire minor league roster and other American League rosters.

  “He had a detailed plan. It was not a bunch of seat-of-his-pants decisions. That’s how he was. Billy was very prepared. Before a series, he wanted to know about every strength and weakness of the opponent. He wanted to know who was hurt or which player’s confidence was fading. He wanted to know who the umpires were going to be for the series and what their tendencies were. He never wanted to be surprised by anything. He wanted to be prepared so he could take advantage of some opportunity.”

  For the first few months, everything was smooth sailing in Texas. Then, just before the season started, Billy’s Texas gift horse burst from the barn and galloped out of town. Bob Short, whose financial footing was not as solid as Billy suspected, sold his controlling interest in the Rangers to a group headed by Fort Worth industrialist Bradford Corbett.

  Corbett, a native New Yorker who started his business career in 1968 with a $300,000 loan from the government’s Small Business Administration, had made a fortune selling plastic PVC pipe and copper tubing to the oil industry. He paid $9.6 million for the Rangers. Corbett, just thirty-six years old, announced that he was delighted to have Billy as manager but that he was firing the entire Rangers’ front office and hiring new executives.

  Billy’s days as general manager with complete control over the twenty-five-man roster were over. The sale of the Rangers, announced two days before the season was to open, clearly rattled Billy, but he soon had other things to focus on. The two-time defending champion Oakland A’s were coming to Texas as the opening-night opponents, and Billy had been playing up the series in the local media as a showdown of the top two contenders in the AL West.

  Never mind that Texas had finished thirty-two games behind the A’s the previous season and Las Vegas made the Rangers a 50-to-1 shot to win the division.

  “In his first meeting with the players, Billy had told us that we were going to kick Oakland’s ass,” Randle said. “The A’s at the time were beating everybody in both leagues.”

  Harrah, the team’s shortstop, said Billy asked for the players’ trust.

  “He said, ‘You might think I’m crazy sometimes but I know what I’m doing and if you stick with me I promise we’ll win and it’ll be fun,’” Harrah said. “What did we have to lose? We had already lost 105 games.”

  The Rangers won only one of the three season-opening games against the A’s, but they were competitive contests with the spunky Rangers knocking the A’s best pitchers around for thirty-four hits in the three games. Jenkins had pitched a one-hitter to win a 2–0 shutout. Most energizing, the series had drawn nearly fifty-two thousand fans to Arlington Stadium, the most for a three-game set since the team’s inaugural games in Texas in 1972. With an average attendance like that, Arlington Stadium’s thirty-five-thousand-seat bowl was almost half full.

  Half full? Corbett and his investors’ group were delirious.

  By th
e end of the month, the Rangers had gone to Oakland and won a series that put them in first place.

  “The days when the Rangers are patsies are over,” Billy declared.

  The Rangers won one of those games in Oakland on two squeeze bunts. Down by one run in the ninth inning of another game in Oakland, the Rangers had runners at first and second base.

  “Billy called a double steal and it worked, putting runners at second and third,” said Tom Grieve, an outfielder for Texas from 1972 to 1977. “Then Jeff Burroughs, who Billy just let swing away at anything, slapped a 3–0 pitch into right field to score both runs and we won.

  “Any other manager would have probably played to tie the game. They would be afraid to try that double steal. Not Billy; he always played to win. In my career I played for Ted Williams, Joe Torre, and Ken Boyer, all of them pretty good baseball men. Billy was the best manager I played for by far. He made every single player better. There was a lot of pressure but I’ll tell you what, it was a lot of fun, too. People don’t talk enough about that. If you did things Billy’s way, it was a ton of fun.”

  Losing was another story. Everyone who played for Billy had at least one story of how hard Billy took a loss. Billy always said he never wanted to be a good loser. He never was.

  “I remember after one loss, I came into the clubhouse and on the way to my locker, I reached out and grabbed one potato chip from the meal spread,” Grieve said. “As fate would have it, Billy was a few steps behind me and he went nuts, screaming, ‘How can you eat? Goddamn it, you losing fuckers!’”

  The players from Minnesota and Detroit could have predicted what happened next. Food was soon flying around the room.

  “It sounds funny now, you know, all that for one potato chip,” Grieve, now a broadcaster with the Rangers, said. “But the next day, Billy came to me and said, ‘Hey, look, don’t make anything of it because I don’t. You just happened to be the one who touched the food but that message was for everyone.’

  “And let me tell you, the guys didn’t want to lose any game after that.”

  Some of Billy’s methods were more subtle. Several of the young Rangers said Billy taught them lessons they used throughout their careers. Harrah, who played seventeen years in the majors, said Billy approached him in 1974 and wanted to know which AL pitcher gave him the most trouble.

  “He said he wanted to know so he’d take me out of the lineup against that guy,” Harrah said. “I told him I couldn’t hit the Indians’ Luis Tiant. So next time Tiant goes against us, I’m in the lineup. I said, ‘Hey, skip, remember what I told you?’ And Billy just smiled at me.

  “Don’t you know that I faced Tiant every time after that; I never came out for even an inning. And you know what? I started learning to hit him. I had to face him for another eight years and I got pretty good at it. That was Billy. Don’t back down.”

  The Rangers performed just as Billy planned, with each of his off-season moves panning out: Jenkins was on his way to a 25-win season; Hargrove and Randle would both hit over .300; and Sundberg, although unnerved by the pressure Billy put on his catcher and his pitch calling, was one of the league’s best defensive catchers.

  The Rangers hung close to the A’s until the All-Star break, then fell to fourth place. But they rallied in late July and chased after Oakland again. A Texas DJ recorded a song, “Billy’s Turnaround Gang,” and it played at Arlington Stadium between innings and on local radio airwaves. The flip side of the single was “I Want to Play Ball for Billy.”

  It was during 1974 that Billy’s arguing with umpires became like performance art. There is no Wild West without outlaws and they’re often beloved. Billy’s confrontations with the umpires—the sheriffs of baseball—came to be expected at Arlington Stadium, and the fans arrived eager to cheer on their rabble-rousing manager. No baseball fans seemed to enjoy watching Billy go after the umpires—kicking dirt, throwing his hat, or flinging bats from the dugout—as much as the Texas fans did. Egged on, and adept at playing to the crowd, Billy took things to new levels.

  He was thrown out of both games of one double-header. Twice, he was ejected before the game began.

  “It was to fire up the crowd, and he also wanted the players to know he was fighting for them,” Jim Evans, an American League umpire from 1971 to 1999, said. “Then maybe they would fight as hard as he was fighting. Crowds urged him on. He had a terrible temper, but that was just Billy. I never minded working his games. It was a challenge.

  “Besides, off the field, he was such a charmer. We’d see him and he’d come over to the umpires and make jokes. He’d always want to buy everyone a drink. On the field, things were different. Billy had essentially three kinds of arguments. He knew the rules pretty well, so one argument would be a rational discussion about the rules and you almost enjoy that.

  “The second argument was all about trying to get the next call. Once I had two bang-bang plays at first base and I called his guys out both times. Billy charges on the field and says, ‘I don’t know if those two guys were out or safe but I better get the third call.’

  “And the last argument was just crazy. He would snap from the losing or the pressure or whatever. He’d come out and not even be making sense. I’d try not to throw him out because that was almost too easy. I’d wait to see what kind of crazy thing he would do. But that didn’t happen too often. He usually had a point when he came out there.”

  Evans noticed that Billy had other strategies when it came to umpires. In Texas, Billy would have Sundberg signal him in the dugout when a pitch close to the strike zone was called a ball.

  “That would be Billy’s cue to yell, ‘Hey, come on, Jim, that’s a strike,’” Evans said. “It wasn’t a strike but since he knew it was close he wanted to put a seed of doubt in the umpire’s head so maybe he could get the next one. It was all very calculated.”

  Evans has been retired nearly fifteen years and spends much of his time at umpiring camps and speaking engagements.

  “The number-one person people ask me about is Billy Martin,” Evans said. “He was unforgettable. A little off his rocker, but unforgettable.”

  In 1974, Billy did not have too many arguments with the Rangers’ management and most of the rest of the season was without incident. Except for June 3 in Cleveland, when the downtrodden Indians decided to host a 10-cent-beer night. Patrons were served unlimited draft beer at 10 cents a cup. The game’s attendance was 23,134, but Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium sold more than 65,000 cups of beer. Predictably, by the later innings, fans were showering the players with debris and running onto the field. There were multiple streakers, and about six fans surrounded Burroughs in right field, stealing his cap and glove and pulling on his shirt. Led by Billy, the entire Rangers’ dugout emptied to defend Burroughs. They threw some fans to the ground and wrestled with others as they retrieved Burroughs’s equipment. After a few more chaotic minutes—newspaper reporters would call the scene a riot—the game was forfeited to the Rangers. Billy was thrilled by his team’s show of corporeal unity.

  The Rangers dogged the first-place A’s through August and were within four games of Oakland by September 20. There were eleven games to play. Texas hung in until September 26, when the Rangers lost both games of a double-header as Oakland’s Catfish Hunter was winning his twenty-fifth game in Minnesota. It was the last gasp for Billy’s Turnaround Gang.

  The Rangers finished with an 84–76 record, a 47 percent increase in the number of victories year to year. The second-place 1974 Rangers became the first team in baseball history to finish over .500 after losing 100 games in back-to-back seasons. Home attendance had more than doubled to 1.2 million. Billy was named the AL Manager of the Year. Burroughs was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Oakland won the World Series for a third successive time.

  Billy spent the off-season on the winter dinner circuit, once again feted around the country as baseball’s rising managerial star and dugout genius. Gretchen and Billy Joe were ensconced in Texas. Billy did no
t lack for companionship on his trips to the many baseball dinners. Girlfriends on the road had become part of his life, and the team’s management looked the other way, if uncomfortably.

  In spring training of 1975, many writers were picking the Rangers to usurp the three-time defending world champions. Billy, for once, held his tongue. He might have seen what others did not—that the Rangers had not improved their pitching, especially in the bullpen, which had been a weakness in 1974.

  The 1975 Rangers got off to a slow start, recovered, then stumbled through May, finishing the month at .500 and in fourth place, five games behind Oakland. The dreamlike zest of the previous year was missing. Jenkins was mediocre and Bibby was hurt. Sundberg was batting under .200. There seemed to be a team-wide malaise. Only one starting pitcher would finish with a winning record, and no batter would drive in 100 runs.

  “Billy was so intense and so focused on what he was doing to get things turned around,” Hargrove said, “that there just wasn’t a whole lot of energy left once it got turned around.”

  By the end of June, the Rangers were three games under .500 and twelve games behind Oakland. By the All-Star break, there were rumors that Billy’s job was in jeopardy, and as usual, it was not just because the Rangers had slumped.

  “We started to see the effect of his drinking,” Grieve said. “He would come in late to the ballpark and look terrible. The players weren’t mad at him. I think we felt bad it was happening. It was more sad than annoying.

  “Almost forty years later, people ask, ‘Why didn’t someone say something to him? Why didn’t someone talk to him about his drinking?’ But that’s not what people did forty years ago. We didn’t think it was any of our business. No one would have dreamed of approaching him and talking about his drinking. But I admit I think about it now, even forty years later. It was sad because I loved playing for him.”

  Rangers road trips were getting wilder and wilder with the charter plane journeys resembling a flying saloon and casino. That did not exactly set the Rangers apart in baseball back then, but that kind of behavior always gets mentioned more often when the team is losing. And team owner Brad Corbett, wily and irrepressible in the George Steinbrenner mold of team owner, had encouraged several players to spy on Billy for him.