Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Corbett, who died in 2012, was told that Billy’s girlfriend(s) were flying on the charters with the team, something that especially became an issue to the players when Billy’s paramour bumped one of the coaches out of the first-class section into the back of the plane usually occupied by the writers, broadcasters, and staff. Protocol on a baseball team is unwritten, but some things are out of bounds and that was one example. Corbett heard all about it.

  “The off-the-field stuff became a distraction,” Grieve said. “It was discussed. It erodes the team a little.”

  Just after the All-Star break, Billy wanted to sign a journeyman catcher, Tom Egan, who had recently been released by the California Angels. The Rangers’ general manager, Dan O’Brien, was against the move and Corbett concurred.

  Billy told reporters, “He [Corbett] knows as much about baseball as I know about pipe. One year in baseball and he’s already a genius.”

  Corbett called the minority owners and team executives and said he was considering firing Billy. He told Billy the same thing.

  The next day, there was a clash unlike any other in Billy’s lifelong succession of fisticuffs, scraps, and tussles.

  As part of his adoption of the Texas lifestyle, Billy had become a big fan of country music. He attended concerts and befriended country music stars like Charley Pride and Mac Davis. During the seventh-inning stretch at Arlington Stadium, Billy wanted the public address system to play John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” It had been the top-selling record in country music in 1974, and the Texas crowd loved it. But the Queens-born Corbett lobbied for the traditional baseball anthem, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The two men argued over which song to play throughout the 1975 season until finally Corbett insisted that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” be played in the seventh-inning stretch at every home game. That was that.

  The day after Corbett told Billy he might fire him, the Rangers were cruising to a 6–0 victory, a five-hitter by Jenkins. In roughly the sixth inning, Billy called the press box and asked to talk to the person who chooses the music played between innings on the public address system.

  Umpire Ron Luciano was working the bases and wandered over to the Rangers’ dugout for some water in the midst of another hot Texas night. He heard Billy screaming into the dugout phone.

  “Billy was saying, ‘I don’t care what the owner says, play the God damned John Denver song,’” Luciano wrote in his autobiography. “I couldn’t believe my ears. Billy’s yelling, ‘I better hear “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”’ And he slams the phone down.”

  The public address system played “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” In the owner’s suite, Corbett steamed. After the game, the Rangers announced that Billy had been dismissed as manager.

  Corbett did not blame John Denver. He specifically said the decision was not based on the Rangers’ losing record.

  “The decision was made because of a lot of factors which had built up over the last month or so,” said Corbett, who would end up having six managers in the next six seasons, including four in 1977.

  Billy was disconsolate and red-eyed as he cleaned out his locker after the game.

  “What I’m proud of is the fact that I brought Texas a winner,” he said. “I brought them a million fans and I brought them some real Major League baseball.”

  Then Billy retreated to an equipment room where he wept as he shook hands with coaches, players, and reporters. “It was a pitiful sight, seeing Billy all broken up,” Rangers trainer Bill Ziegler said.

  A reporter asked the reigning American League Manager of the Year about his future.

  “I have no idea,” Billy said, pausing to wipe away tears. “I love this game; baseball is my life. I love the game. But at this very moment I feel like telling the game to shove it.”

  26

  BILLY, GRETCHEN, AND BILLY JOE went on a fishing trip in western Colorado after he was fired. The phone at the family home in Texas was ringing unanswered. It was the Yankees.

  Eventually, the Yankees started calling Gretchen’s father in Nebraska with a message: Yankees general manager Gabe Paul wanted to talk face-to-face with Billy as soon as possible. He proposed meeting at the Denver airport.

  George Steinbrenner was suspended by Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and prohibited from conducting Yankees business. Steinbrenner had pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign—and then encouraging his employees to lie about it. Gabe Paul was officially the senior Yankees official. But he was acting on orders from Steinbrenner.

  But Billy wouldn’t talk to the Yankees. He put Gretchen on the phone.

  “You be my agent for now,” he said.

  “I got on the phone and told them that Billy was not in any hurry to get back to baseball,” Gretchen said. “I knew Billy was upset. He had built three winning teams and got fired three times. He was the reigning Manager of the Year and yet he still got fired. He just wanted to fish right then and that’s all.

  “He didn’t want to go to New York and I told the Yankees that. But the Yankees were insistent. Billy’s heart ached, but I also knew in my heart what he actually wanted to do.”

  Seven years earlier, Gretchen had talked Billy into accepting the Twins’ minor league manager’s job in Denver, which proved to be a pivotal move in Billy’s professional career. Without it, Billy might never have managed in the big leagues.

  Now, as Gretchen and Billy sat in a fishing lodge high in the Colorado mountains, they faced another decision, one that Gretchen, if not Billy, knew was more complicated than the one seven years earlier. Now it was Gretchen’s heart that ached.

  “I said we should go to Denver and talk to the Yankees,” she said.

  So they made arrangements to meet Paul inside the Denver airport, then take a cab to an airport hotel.

  “Our flight from western Colorado landed and we were standing in the airport waiting for the Yankees’ flight from New York to land,” Gretchen said, recalling the scene. “And all at once, this sad feeling came over me. I turned to Billy and I said, ‘You know, if you go to New York, it’s probably the end for us.’

  “It just flooded over me and I was overwhelmed by the thought because I suddenly understood it all in that moment. And I was crying and Billy started to cry, too. He said, ‘OK, well, then I won’t go to New York.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh, yes, you are. This is your destiny. You were always a Yankee. It’s what you’ve been working your whole life for. It’s a self-fulfilling life moment.’”

  Gretchen and Billy waited in the airport, clinging to each other and drying their tears so they could properly greet the Yankees executives.

  “Our marriage wasn’t over right then, but I could see down the road,” Gretchen said. “It hit me in that moment that there was an end coming. I knew Billy would be captivated by all the excitement of New York and all the options there.”

  Gretchen had made a home for herself and her son in Texas. Billy was not committed to any one place or fully committed to his marriage.

  “I knew where this was heading but I wouldn’t stop it,” Gretchen said. “I knew what had to happen. Billy had never said he wanted to be Yankees manager. But he never had to. We both knew he had to go.”

  Even if Gretchen would not go with him.

  “They had started to have their problems before that—it was there, even I saw it,” said Billy Martin Jr., who was eleven at the time. “It just wasn’t outwardly acknowledged. I was about to start at a new school in Texas that I liked. My mom and I were going to stay in Texas and visit New York when we could.”

  The house the Rangers gave the Martins to live in was leased to the team, so Billy bought it to prevent any further upheaval to his family.

  At the Denver airport hotel, the contract negotiations with the Yankees moved quickly. At one juncture, there was a squabble over a behavioral clause—“a good boy clause,” as Billy’s legal adviser, Eddie Sapir, called it. George
Steinbrenner got on the phone and said, “Let’s face it, Billy, this is the job you’ve always wanted. I’m giving it to you.”

  It was not the last time that George held a carrot in front of Billy and demanded that he take it.

  On August 2, twelve days after he was fired by the Rangers, Billy was named Yankees manager. The New York newspapers had been predicting the move for days—news leaked by Steinbrenner. In a press conference in New York, Billy, his face flushed and his voice cracking, said the day was a dream come true. Eighteen years after George Weiss had banished Billy to Kansas City, then Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Detroit again, and finally Texas, Billy was back. He had predicted as a child that he would play for the Yankees and he had. Now in middle age, three years short of fifty, he would be the Yankees manager.

  Gaunt and weary as he exited Texas less than two weeks earlier, Billy now appeared revitalized. “This was the only job I ever wanted,” he told reporters. “The only job, the Yankee job.”

  Then Billy thanked Casey Stengel for bringing him to the Yankees twenty-five years earlier. He was wearing his familiar jersey, number 1, and looked at home. It was as if any other uniform—there had been nine counting the Denver Bears—had been an ill-fitting substitute.

  As it happened, the day Billy reunited with the Yankees was also the team’s Old Timers’ Day, and Billy, in a move that presaged Steinbrenner’s love of showmanship, was to be introduced last during the on-field festivities, after DiMaggio, Mantle, and Ford. Public address announcer Bob Sheppard called his name, and Billy jogged out and waved his cap. The crowd stood and cheered. The 1975 Yankees had been lethargic. The anticipated dynamism of Billy Martin was appreciated and welcomed. The ovation continued, longer than it had been for the Yankees Hall of Famers. Billy was back; in his mind, the circle was complete.

  He stood on the field and waved his cap repeatedly as he wiped away tears with his other hand.

  At his home that day in Glendale, California, Casey Stengel was confined to his bed. In 1974, his wife, Edna, had sustained a stroke and was now living at a nearby nursing home. Casey, who had turned eighty-five three days earlier, had recently been diagnosed with leukemia. In pain and increasingly immobile, Casey had hired a housekeeper to help him, Mrs. June Bowlin.

  Sportswriter Maury Allen interviewed Bowlin shortly after Billy was hired as Yankees manager. She said the television was on in Casey’s bedroom when a newscast mentioned Billy Martin. Mrs. Bowlin got Casey’s attention, pointing to the screen, which showed Billy on the field at Old Timers’ Day.

  “Casey, Casey,” she said. “Billy is the new manager of the Yankees.”

  Mrs. Bowlin said Casey smiled. Then wept.

  During the summer of 1975, Billy lived alone in a New York hotel, something he had not done in sixteen years. Billy was back in Manhattan, striding through the same streets he had once walked with Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball, but everything around him was different. The vibrant, confident city of his Yankees playing days had vanished. New York’s mid-century heyday had passed. In the mid-1970s, the Wall Street area was in decay, reflecting a faltering national economy. Times Square was no longer a place of panache and glitz as it had been in the 1950s or 1960s. It was now a repository of peep shows, strip clubs, and whorehouses. The Broadway show industry was in a decade of decline with many predicting its ultimate demise as television and film became more culturally relevant. Toots Shor’s on West 51st Street had closed and was now a bank. Central Park, where Billy had walked from his suite at the St. Moritz, rarely saw a pedestrian after 3:00 p.m. now; people were too afraid of being mugged there.

  Strikes had damaged the public schools and city services. Welfare rolls were expanding. The subway system was unsafe and undependable. The city’s police force had been exposed as corrupt by former detective Frank Serpico. Cities like New York were failing all across America, and there was no apparent plan for reviving them. In 1975, when New York officials turned to the federal government for help with a fiscal crisis, President Gerald Ford announced he would veto any bailout.

  The headline in the New York Daily News the next day—in huge bold type on page 1 of the tabloid—reverberated throughout the city: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

  The city had seemed to lose its fight. The Yankees had not been in the World Series since 1964. The Mets, magical only a few years earlier, were like the 1975 Yankees, a third-place team. Three days after Billy was hired, the Mets fired their manager, Yogi Berra.

  The football Giants had not been in the postseason since 1963. The New York Jets’ last winning season was their 1969 Super Bowl team. They would be 3–11 in 1975. The New York Knicks were in the midst of three consecutive losing seasons.

  Meanwhile, Yankee Stadium, once a majestic symbol of the city itself, had been shuttered so it could be modernized and renovated. That forced the Yankees to play the 1974 and 1975 seasons at Shea Stadium, squeezing in games whenever the Mets were on the road. Renting space from a fledgling baseball colleague was humiliating to the franchise of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle. The Yankees were dressing in the Jets’ locker room. And the ceiling there leaked.

  “I had heard so much growing up about the Yankees and New York, and then I got there and it was like we were playing in some minor league place, like Toledo or something,” said Lou Piniella, whom the Yankees traded for in 1974. “We all couldn’t wait to get out of Shea.”

  The 1975 Yankees that Billy inherited were playing winning baseball, but they were still ten games behind first-place Boston, a team thick with young talent and power hitting.

  The Yankees’ lineup was a curious mix of holdovers from the ownership of the CBS Corporation, which had little baseball acumen, and the Steinbrenner regime, run astutely by Gabe Paul, a top baseball executive in Steinbrenner’s native Ohio since 1951.

  Paul had signed free agent Catfish Hunter and acquired Piniella, first baseman Chris Chambliss, and pitchers Rudy May and Dick Tidrow. Left over from the CBS days were Munson, an All-Star catcher; the third baseman, Graig Nettles, whom Billy had managed in Denver; Roy White, an underrated switch-hitting outfielder with power; starting pitchers Doc Medich and Pat Dobson; and Bobby Bonds, a productive but unpredictable and temperamental star whose eleven-year-old son, Barry, was a regular in the Yankees’ clubhouse.

  Billy spent 1975 assessing his roster. Catching the first-place Red Sox was highly unlikely; the goal would be preparing for 1976 when the Yankees would be back in the refurbished Yankee Stadium.

  Billy wanted to build the team around Munson, already the team’s on-the-field leader. He was happy to have veterans like Nettles, Chambliss, White, and Piniella. Hunter, everyone knew, was a Hall of Famer-to-be. The starter Rudy May was important as a left-handed presence, as was the reliever Sparky Lyle, whom the previous manager, Bill Virdon, had used sparingly. Billy told Lyle that he would be his bullpen closer, and in the mid-1970s that meant often pitching three innings in relief. Lyle was ready. He liked a lot of work.

  Billy was calm in most Yankees settings in 1975, getting along with his players and the writers covering the team. One columnist noted that Billy started one pregame press conference by asking the questions himself. They were not baseball questions. Billy fell back on usual, favored topics.

  “Which state was the first to secede from the Union at the beginning of the Civil War?” he asked (South Carolina was the answer).

  But if Billy was playing with the press, he was educating his troops, getting them ready for the big battle coming in 1976.

  Roy White recalled a game in August when he was the base runner at second base and Lou Piniella was at the plate.

  “Thurman Munson was on first base and Billy put the bunt sign on,” White said. “Lou fouls off the bunt attempt on the first pitch. I didn’t even look at the third-base coach; I assumed the bunt was still on. But on the next pitch, Lou hits a single to right field and I went to third. I scored when the next batter hit a ground ball. I’m coming into the dugout
and everyone is shaking my hand. I figured I did something good.

  “Billy comes toward me and I extend my hand and he sternly says to me, ‘You missed a sign and you cost us a run.’ It turns out Billy had changed the bunt to a hit-and-run on the second pitch to Piniella. I had never heard of a hit-and-run with runners at first and second.

  “Billy says to me, ‘Thurman couldn’t run on the hit-and-run because you didn’t run. If you are both running on Piniella’s single, then you score and Thurman gets to third. He scores on that groundout, not you. You cost us a run.’

  “And I thought to myself, ‘Uh-oh, I better start really paying attention. This isn’t the same game I’ve been playing.’ We all knew Billy could help us, but we didn’t really realize how much concentration that would take.”

  One week later, Billy gave notice to the umpires that he was still watching everything. The uniform was different. His eye for the details of the rule book had not changed.

  In a game against the California Angels, Billy protested that the bats used by Angels hitters had pine tar on the barrels more than eighteen inches from the handle end of the bat, which violated a league equipment rule. Home plate umpire George Maloney refused to take measurements of the bats. Billy argued, if without fervor. It wasn’t worth getting thrown out of a game with the Yankees out of the pennant race, but as any fan of baseball history knows, he kept an eye on the opponents’ bats and how much pine tar they used forevermore.

  With Steinbrenner not allowed at the ballpark or the team offices, Billy was developing a good working relationship with Gabe Paul. The season ended with the Yankees at 83–77, twelve games out of first place. The team had been 30–26 under Billy. But heading into the off-season, Billy and Paul had agreed on a plan to completely remake the roster. The central goal was to give Billy some youth and quickness in the lineup. Billy was certain the Yankees would be a winner in 1976.