That’s when Billy, his eyes narrowing, roared out from the dugout and ran toward the middle of the diamond. The twenty-six-year-old Pagan, who hailed from a tiny town in Saskatchewan but had certainly heard of Billy’s temper, started running toward left field, fearing for his well-being. But Billy wasn’t coming out to berate or beat up his young pitcher; he was heading for first-base umpire Jim McKean.
“You called time out just before the pitch,” Billy was yelling.
McKean had no response. Billy started screaming, “I saw you raise your hand—you were calling time out.”
After the game, McKean said that with the crowd cheering and Billy screeching, he couldn’t make out exactly what was being said on the field.
Billy made it plain: McKean had raised his hand to call time out.
After conferring with the other umpires—and with the crowd watching uneasily—McKean conceded that Chambliss, with his back turned to the umpire, had asked for time out at first base. And McKean had indeed raised his arm just before the pitch.
No one, it appeared, had seen the gesture except Billy, who always claimed that he could see the entire field in one glance.
Money’s grand slam was nullified. Money then flied out. The Yankees won the game, 9–7.
“I’ve got them now,” Billy told Killer Kane after the game.
Two weeks later, against Kansas City, the Royals’ Al Cowens appeared to score a late tying run. Billy signaled to third baseman Graig Nettles from the dugout, pointing at third base. When time was back in, Nettles appealed the play, suggesting that Cowens had missed third base. The umpires agreed. The Royals lost.
“We’ll win this thing easy,” Billy told Kane in the hotel bar that night.
And Kane nodded his head and smiled.
“Those guys on the ’76 team would have tried to run across a pond if Billy told them to,” Killer said. “They would have assumed somehow that they wouldn’t sink if Billy told them so.”
Day by day, Billy was challenging the rest of the American League to stop his refurbished, hard-charging Yankees. Rivers, Randolph, White, reserve Sandy Alomar, and even Piniella were running teams ragged, stealing bases with abandon. Billy was attempting stolen bases at a rate twice that of former Yankees managers Joe McCarthy and Ralph Houk and three times as often as Casey Stengel.
Moreover, the 1976 Yankees were feisty. Slides into bases were hard and tags were forceful. The pitchers weren’t afraid to throw inside, and Munson scowled at everyone who approached home plate. Billy worked the umpires from the dugout ceaselessly.
“Billy just kept everyone on edge,” trainer Gene Monahan said. “Right from the first inning, if he didn’t like an umpire’s call, he’d be on him. He’d yell, ‘OK, pal, that’s it, you’re off the Christmas card list. You owe me one now. You don’t get back on the Christmas card list until I get that call back.’
“And he’d turn and wink at the players on the bench. But that would get everyone paying attention. He would stand on the first step of the dugout with his hands in his back pockets and jut his jaw out there, almost like a challenge to the other team. Until that year, players usually sat back on the dugout bench. That season, I noticed half the team would be standing on the first step of the dugout with Billy.”
The 1976 Yankees had veterans and young players, but most of all, they were a team in sync with their manager.
“Somebody would slide late at second base and knock me halfway into the outfield,” Willie Randolph said. “And when we’d get into the dugout after the inning, Billy would make a show of coming over and asking me how I was. Then he’d say out loud, ‘That was a bullshit play.’
“And he would walk slowly past the veteran guys like Munson, Piniella, Chambliss, and Nettles and he would just give them a look that said, ‘You know what to do.’ He didn’t say anything, he just looked at them. And boy, the other team’s middle infielders would be getting bowled over the next inning. That’s just the way it went—you got my guy so I’m going to get your guy.
“But it got around the league. People knew Billy would punch back and maybe punch twice.”
The Yankees were comfortably in first place by mid-May, but most of the American League still considered the Boston Red Sox the team to beat. Billy longed for a face-to-face confrontation.
The Red Sox had won the 1975 pennant and captivated the nation when their spunky team lost in seven games to Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in a thrilling World Series. The Red Sox had young stars and future Hall of Famers like Carlton Fisk and Jim Rice, and they had a still-formidable leader in Carl Yastrzemski, another Hall of Famer-to-be.
The Red Sox came to Yankee Stadium on May 20 trailing the Yankees by six games, but they still had the swagger of a champion. In the mid-1970s, players did not fraternize before games; in fact, oftentimes they genuinely did not like each other or resented one another’s success. It was before the modern big-money era of baseball when the players, each flush with cash and the accouterments of prosperity, began treating each other as coworkers and comrades in a billion-dollar enterprise.
Munson resented that Fisk received more favorable media attention, something Munson attributed to Fisk’s movie-star looks. Munson was squat and rough-hewn.
Fisk, a native New Englander, was raised to detest everything about the Yankees, most especially that they had won twenty world championships since the Red Sox’ last World Series victory in 1918.
The game on May 20 was the first of four scheduled. In the sixth inning, Piniella slammed into Fisk at home plate as he tried to score on a single. Piniella was out, but Fisk didn’t wait for the umpire’s call to deliver his own verdict on the collision. The Red Sox catcher started punching Piniella. The benches emptied in a flash. Mickey Rivers and then Graig Nettles grabbed Boston starting pitcher Bill Lee from behind, with Nettles throwing the pitcher to the infield grass on his left shoulder. When Lee came at Nettles again, he got the worst of it again and later left the field with torn ligaments in his left shoulder.
Lee, who had won 17 games in each of the three previous seasons, wouldn’t rejoin the Boston rotation until September. The teams split the four-game series, but Billy’s team had made a statement.
“We had become like Billy—defiant, backing down from no one, willing to do anything to win,” Randolph said. “There’s no question we took on his personality.”
The Yankees had a ten-game lead over the Red Sox by the Fourth of July and never looked back.
The 1976 Yankees became one of Billy’s favorite teams, something he would say for the rest of his life. It was an eclectic group but balanced at the same time. Rivers, his teammates learned, was mysterious, comical, and prone to entertaining excesses. Rivers’s finances were a constant source of disquiet and amusement. Killer Kane gave the players their entire allotment of meal money when any road trip began. Rivers would spend it the first day.
Once, he and his wife got into an argument in the players’ parking lot outside Yankee Stadium, then jumped into separate cars and started crashing into each other, as if that would settle the dispute. Security guards had to intercede to put an end to the impromptu demolition derby taking place thirty yards from Yankee Stadium.
Reliever Sparky Lyle kept everyone loose with a series of one-liners for any situation. Catfish Hunter teased the sometimes truculent Munson and got him to relax. On the rare times when Steinbrenner was acting up and causing a stir in the clubhouse, it was Nettles who brought levity to the situation.
“George is Mr. Vesuvius with bullshit instead of lava,” Nettles said.
Billy liked his cast of characters. They stuck up for one another, hung out together on the road. They drank together and Billy drank with them. Complaints were kept to a minimum. They did not seem to mind when he fell asleep on the couch in his office—sometimes nursing a hangover—and forgot to post the lineup card until an hour before the game.
When this had happened with past Billy teams, there was considerable consternation, especial
ly over who would hit with whom during batting practice.
The 1976 Yankees went to Yogi Berra, a quasi–assistant manager who had joined Billy’s staff. Berra had known Billy for nearly thirty years and turned out to be amazingly accurate at predicting that day’s batting order. Berra would set the batting practice groups. There were few protests.
The resurgent Yankees were celebrated in the New York press, and the team would draw 2 million fans for the first time since 1950, Billy’s rookie year.
The boost in attendance was in part due to what everyone was now calling the new Yankee Stadium. It had some features rare in ballparks at the time, like a 565-foot center-field scoreboard that played replays, escalators to whisk fans to their upper-deck seats, and air-conditioned dugouts. The home clubhouse was twice the size of the one where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had dressed.
The Yankees felt like kings in their new palace. Major League Baseball, happy to have a vibrant team back in the nation’s biggest city, was eager to fete the new ballpark, too. It brought the 1976 All-Star team to the new Yankee Stadium, and the league office used its influence to have Yankees home games featured often on the NBC and ABC television national broadcasts, which was important exposure in the pre–cable TV era.
New York City itself was still reeling with crime and rampant arson, especially in the Yankees’ South Bronx neighborhood. But on the days and nights of Yankees games, the area might have been the safest place in New York. Swarming with police and prosperous fans from the New York suburbs, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Yankee Stadium became a place to be seen.
Manhattan’s elite was not left out. From Billy Joel to Cheryl Tiegs to Dustin Hoffman to Gloria Vanderbilt, the bold-print set made regular appearances at Yankees games. In 1976, it was the surest way to get into the gossip pages of the city’s tabloids. People did anything to be near the dynamic Yankees, and celebrated at the center of it all was number 1, Billy Martin.
Gretchen Martin recalls her visits to New York in the summer of 1976 when Billy Joe was out of school. Billy was staying at the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue and 56th Street, Frank Sinatra’s usual choice of lodging in Manhattan.
“We couldn’t walk down any street without people stopping Billy,” Gretchen said. “It would take twenty-five minutes to walk four blocks to lunch.
“I thought he had been well known and well received in Detroit or Texas. New York was completely different. He was a hero to everyone and New Yorkers wanted to tell him so.”
He was not a hero to everyone, and the attention had other consequences. Billy Martin’s first file with the FBI was opened in 1960 when he received threatening mail as a player for the Cincinnati Reds. By 1976, the FBI had updated the file several times.
Billy received several disturbing letters, including one reprinted in his FBI file 9–61912. The letter, mailed from Brooklyn—perhaps no surprise there—was handwritten:
Dear Martin,
How would your wife and kids get along after you’re gone. Did you write out your will yet? Don’t wait until it’s too late. You better hurry up. You don’t have long.
The letter was not signed. But later in the season, Billy moved to the harder-to-find Sheraton Hotel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. He had a top-floor suite.
But what he liked best about his New Jersey digs was that they were across the street from a dark little bar where no one bothered him after games. Billy’s newest hangout was called the Bottom of the Barrel.
“That’s not a joke; I used to call him there sometimes,” Eddie Sapir said. “They’d answer the phone, ‘Bottom of the Barrel,’ and I’d start laughing. Only Billy. It’s trendy to hang out in dive bars nowadays. Billy was forty years ahead of the trend.”
With the Yankees’ lead over second-place Baltimore at eleven games, on Saturday, September 11, Steinbrenner called a press conference ostensibly to announce that Yankees playoff tickets would sell for a Major League Baseball record of $24 per seat. Steinbrenner then surprised reporters with a second announcement: Billy had been signed to a three-year, $300,000 contract extension through 1979.
“A lot has been written in the past about Billy’s difficulties with the front office,” Steinbrenner told reporters. “But we have an outstanding working relationship and my respect for him as a leader of men has grown immeasurably.
“He could not have been more effective and outstanding in all respects.”
Said Billy, “I want to thank George Steinbrenner with whom I’ve had a perfect relationship.”
And yes, Billy said “whom.”
On September 25, the Yankees won a day game in Detroit, and Steinbrenner held a party for the team at the Caucus Club downtown. While eating dinner, the Yankees were awaiting the results of a game in Baltimore. When the Orioles lost, the Yankees had clinched the division. They would eventually win 97 games, a 14-game improvement from 1975 that could have been larger except the 1976 team had its final 3 games rained out.
At the Caucus Club the night the division was clinched, Steinbrenner, in a scene that would be hard to imagine years later, started spraying the room with champagne. Piniella drank out of his own champagne bottle, talking about how each player had just earned $5,000 for a first-place finish. Munson was hugging Randolph. White and Chambliss clasped hands.
One key figure was not there.
Billy had come to the club at Steinbrenner’s behest, but he had one drink and left before the Baltimore game ended.
“I’m not celebrating anything,” he told reporters as he departed. “Whether we clinch tonight or tomorrow night or the next night, this will be my third division winner. So this is my third try. I won’t be happy till I get into the World Series. The next series is everything.”
28
THE JET CARRYING THE AL East champion Yankees back from Detroit landed at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and was greeted by more than a thousand fans. One woman held aloft a sign: TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE SECOND YANKEES DYNASTY.
New York was in a celebratory mood, and the national media descended on the South Bronx to chronicle the ascendant Yankees and their magnetic manager. The number of reporters, broadcasters, and photographers who applied for media credentials to cover the 1976 ALCS was more than double the number who wanted to cover the National League Championship Series between the defending world champion Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies.
New York was the focus because the Yankees were a beguiling team with an intriguing leader, and best of all, they were making a comeback—a story within the story of New York itself.
But in the plains of middle America, the Yankees represented something else. The Yankees were another case of a big-city power broker trying to buy his way into the winner’s circle. The Yankees had purchased Catfish Hunter and outmuscled the rest of the Major Leagues for other talent. The finances of baseball were changing, and the rest of America wondered if the Yankees were the moneyed blueprint of the future. Worse, in places other than New York, Steinbrenner was just beginning to hone his image as the ultimate wealthy, urban bully.
In Kansas City, where the 1976 ALCS would open, the Yankees were more than just the opponent for the AL West champion Royals; they were the enemy in a cultural war between traditional rural values and cosmopolitan flamboyance and privilege.
And if that wasn’t enough to stoke the fires of a rivalry that would burn for nearly a decade, Billy had been feuding all year with two of the Royals’ star players, pitcher Larry Gura and third baseman George Brett.
Billy had traded Gura from the Texas Rangers to the Yankees in 1974 and then dumped him again as Yankees manager early in the 1976 season. Gura had asked for the trade from the Yankees, saying Billy mistreated him.
Billy fired back.
“I got rid of him because he wasn’t as good as the other pitchers I already had,” he said. “If I had him here now, I’d get rid of him again.”
The hostilities with George Brett began when Billy traded Ken Brett, a pitcher and George’s oldest
brother, to the Chicago White Sox for Carlos May. George Brett told reporters that Billy lied to his brother, who had asked to be traded to Kansas City. It is one of baseball’s oldest protocols that players say little about the trading of other players because sooner or later almost everyone gets traded and it never seems fair to someone. Billy, who knew all about being traded, seethed that Brett broke the unwritten code.
As fate would have it, Gura, Brett, and Billy factored prominently in the first game of the 1976 ALCS.
Gura started the game at Kansas City’s new stadium, where the field was carpeted with artificial turf. The left-handed-hitting Mickey Rivers—Mick the Quick—immediately chopped a ground ball on the synthetic surface toward Brett at third base. The Yankees’ dugout was on the third-base side at Royals Stadium. As Brett fielded the ball, Billy and his players jumped off the bench and roared.
“They were all calling him names and shouting to distract him,” said Gura, who watched Brett fling the ball ten feet to the left of the Royals’ mammoth first baseman, John Mayberry.
Then Billy and the rest of the Yankees’ bench turned their attention to Gura.
“I wasn’t the only one on him,” Billy said after the game. “A lot of guys went after him. But we did it man-to-man, on the field. Not in the newspapers like they’re doing it. Yeah, we were yelling at him and Brett. That’s old-time baseball.”
Gura walked Roy White, then gave up a single to Munson. With one out and the bases loaded, Chambliss hit a grounder to Brett that should have been an inning-ending double play. Brett touched third base and, with the Yankees in the dugout howling at him, skipped the relay to first base in the dirt well in front of Mayberry, who did not come up with the ball as two Yankees scored.
The Yankees never looked back, winning 4–1.
Billy Martin Page 29
