Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

“I think Billy showed us right there that he knew how to take control of a postseason game,” Piniella said. “There was a lot of pressure on everyone and it was like Billy said, ‘Watch this, I’m going to turn the pressure up a notch.’ And he did. It was all about who could take it.”

  The Kansas City fans responded in kind the next night, jeering at Billy as he brought the lineups to the umpires before the second game of the series. Nineteen years earlier, traded from the Yankees, he had played his first game for the then Kansas City Athletics. Billy looked at the rows of fans standing to shout at him, doffed his cap, and blew kisses at the grandstand.

  But the aggressiveness of the home fans seemed to put a charge into the Royals as they blew past the Yankees to win the second game in a rout. The Yankees rebounded with a win at Yankee Stadium in the third game but, surprisingly, lost with Hunter on the mound in the fourth game, setting up the decisive game of the series on Thursday, October 14, 1976.

  It was the most anticipated non–World Series game in New York since twenty-five years earlier, when Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning, three-run homer—the “Shot Heard ’Round the World”—won the 1951 National League playoff for the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  The fifth game of the 1976 ALCS was played on a cold night in New York with fans in overcoats and burly parkas. Broadcast by the ABC network, the telecast featured Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson, and a guest commentator, Reggie Jackson, who had been traded from Oakland to Baltimore in 1976. Jackson, as everyone in baseball knew, was going to be the game’s most celebrated free agent not long after the final game of the 1976 World Series.

  One of the principal story lines before the game was Billy’s decision to start Ed Figueroa, who had been faltering late in the season and had been the losing pitcher in the second game of the series.

  But Figueroa pitched well, and the Yankees led 6–3 in the eighth inning, in part thanks to another throwing error by Brett.

  “I’ve got to give Billy Martin a lot of credit,” Reggie said. “He picked Figueroa and stuck with him. He’s a loyal guy. Everyone talks about the fiery, feisty Billy. He’s shown me a lot of class.”

  Cosell gushed in consent.

  “The best manager in baseball,” Cosell said. “Some love him, some despise him. But he’s the best. Maybe ever.”

  Baseball in 1976 was on the cusp of momentous change and was soon to be altered by the free-agency era. But as the Yankees and Royals clashed in the decisive game of the ALCS, baseball was still comfortable in the ways and habits of the 1950s and 1960s. Nine innings moved along quickly, and games almost always ended in about two and one-half hours, even during the playoffs. The players ran on and off the field with haste, as if worried the fans would get bored and leave. It was a legitimate concern—fourteen of the twenty-three Major League teams averaged fewer than fifteen thousand fans per game in 1976. Four averaged fewer than ten thousand fans a game.

  In the stands, even the fans in the most expensive seats close to the field were dressed in common garb and looked like they had just spilled out of the subway, as many no doubt had. There were no personal seat licenses separating the fans by class back then, and the crowd clearly had an all-consuming commitment to the game. With few audio or visual distractions, fans cheered or groaned with every pitch, a back-and-forth reminiscent of the background cacophony heard during the radio transmissions of a 1930s heavyweight prizefight.

  But in the eighth inning, Brett dramatically tied the game, 6–6, with a long three-run homer into right field. Yankee Stadium went uncharacteristically quiet but for the whoops and hollers in the Royals’ dugout. Standing across the diamond with his hands in his back pockets, Billy suddenly looked pale, almost sickened. But noticeably, he nodded at Munson, who was standing at home plate. And Billy rubbed his nose, which was not an uncommon way for a manager to deliver a signal.

  The next pitch to the next hitter, John Mayberry, sailed high and hard over Mayberry’s head. After ducking, Mayberry glared at Billy, who yelled back, “What are you looking at? Get your fat ass back in the batter’s box.”

  As Willie Randolph said, “Everyone had been kind of stunned by Brett’s homer but that jerked us back. It was like, ‘OK, the game isn’t over. We’ve got to find a way to win it again.’”

  In the top of the ninth, the Royals had runners at first and second with two out and the light-hitting Jim Wohlford at the plate. Brett was on deck. Wohlford hit a ground ball into the hole on the left of the infield, but Nettles snagged it and threw to Randolph at second base. It was a bang-bang play with the baseball and the base runner arriving at the same time. But Randolph caught the ball in stride and then quickly ran off the field before the call was made—something Billy, who had performed the same ploy in the minor leagues in the 1940s, had taught his second baseman. Umpire Joe Brinkman called the Royals base runner, Al Cowens, out. Replays of the sequence at second base later showed that Cowens had beaten the throw and catch. Brett should have come up with the bases loaded.

  In the bottom of the ninth, the Royals pitcher was Mark Littell, a twenty-three-year-old reliever from Gideon, Missouri, a town that had a population that teetered above or below one thousand, depending on how many people the local box-making plant hired in any given year. Littell, whose nickname was “Country,” was six foot three and 215 pounds, and he threw his fastball about 96 or 97 miles an hour. He was fearsome and intimidating on the mound and had a regular-season ERA of 2.08 in 60 games.

  As the Yankees’ half of the ninth began, the home fans were unusually restless. It was 11:37 p.m., late for a game back then when the beer taps were not turned off until the final out. The Bronx fans were throwing things onto the field at the Royals players, who were easy targets in their baby-blue uniforms.

  The Yankees’ first hitter of the inning was Chris Chambliss.

  “I was shivering on the field,” Chambliss recalled years later. “I was just so cold. I was determined to swing at the first pitch. I figured he was proud of his fastball and he’d probably throw.”

  At 11:40, Littell threw a high inside fastball and Chambliss swung early—jumping on it like a man who planned to swing all along. He lofted the ball on a line for the right-field wall, and when it crested that blue barrier, the Yankees had won their twenty-ninth American League pennant, but their first since 1964.

  Chambliss, who batted .524 in the series, was approaching first base as the ball disappeared over the wall. He raised his arms, touched first, and looked toward second. By the time he got there, fans had flooded the infield, tripping him as he turned for third base. He got back up, pushing and blocking fans out of the way like a fullback trying to clear a path. Fighting through the crowd, sometimes with the help of police officers, Chambliss touched third base but gave up on the idea of touching home plate when he saw dozens of fans surrounding it. Some were lying on home plate. Chambliss charged for the dugout instead.

  About a minute later, Nettles insisted Chambliss go back out and stomp on home plate. With a ten-man police escort, he did so.

  The home run liberated a generation of Yankees fans whose parents had told them of Joe DiMaggio, Casey Stengel, and Mickey Mantle but who had been toddlers or grade-schoolers during the last pennants of the early 1960s. This was a new and unforgettable championship moment of their own that would take its place in Yankees history like no other because Chambliss’s home run was preserved in color, captured on videotape from multiple camera angles.

  Throughout the metropolitan New York area, Yankees fans celebrated, pouring out of bars and apartment complexes into the cold night. Outside Yankee Stadium, fans filled the streets.

  “It’s like New Year’s Eve in Times Square,” said Sanford D. Garelik, head of the city’s transit police, who viewed the crowd from the elevated subway platform that ran over River Avenue.

  Inside Yankee Stadium, the scene was almost as wild with Steinbrenner himself handing out bottles of champagne. Only a handful of players, and none of the everyday players
, had won a pennant before. Billy stood in the middle of the clubhouse, the same place, if slightly rebuilt, where he had toasted several pennants as a player.

  Interviewed for the television broadcast, Billy credited Steinbrenner, Paul, and the players for buying into his methods and tactics.

  “It’s a real credit to the Yankee Way,” Billy said. “I just wish Casey were here to see it.”

  Walking through the narrow, concrete subterranean hallways of Yankee Stadium after the clinching victory, Billy turned to Doyle Alexander, a seldom-used starter who had not pitched in three weeks.

  “You’re starting tomorrow,” Billy said.

  “Me?” Alexander answered, surprised.

  “You,” Billy said.

  Billy did not have many choices. All of the other starters except Ken Holtzman had pitched in the previous four days. There was some controversy that Holtzman was not the choice since he had a 4–1 record in the World Series while pitching for the Oakland A’s, but Billy was unnerved by Holtzman’s finish to the regular season when he lost three of four starts.

  As usual with Billy’s somewhat unconventional choices in the postseason, there was intrigue. But Billy believed Alexander’s herky-jerky motion and change of speeds would confuse the Reds, a fastball-hitting team in a fastball-throwing league.

  Alexander did not perplex the Reds very much at all, giving up nine hits and three runs in six innings. Holtzman probably could not have done worse. The Yankees hitters, meanwhile, looked tired and unfocused, losing 5–1.

  “We had a little bit of a letdown,” said catcher Thurman Munson. “Let’s face it, we were flat, no question about it. If you’d won a championship series and partied to six in the morning and had to play 30 hours later, how would you feel?”

  Some writers called attention to the Alexander decision, but there was a bigger story looming: the first night game in World Series history.

  Game 2 was on a Sunday night, and both teams howled in protest when the weather forecast was for temperatures in the high thirties. They wanted the game moved to the afternoon.

  But Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had sold the night game rights to NBC-TV for the then-astounding sum of $700,000. So everyone bundled up and played. It would be good for the television ratings.

  “Sure it’s good for ratings,” Berra said before the game. “What are we playing for? The championship of Nielsen?”

  Both teams looked stiff, and the game was tied 3–3 in the ninth inning when shortstop Fred Stanley threw away a ground ball and the Reds scored an unearned run off Catfish Hunter, who lost his first World Series game.

  It did not get any better for the Yankees when the series returned to New York.

  On another chilly night, Dock Ellis could not halt the surging Reds, who won again, 6–2. Billy had worn one of Casey Stengel’s long-sleeved T-shirts beneath his uniform, hoping to change the Yankees’ luck. Fifty-three years earlier, in the first World Series game in Yankee Stadium, Stengel had won the game for the visiting New York Giants with an inside-the-park home run. But Casey’s undershirt held no magic for Billy’s Yankees. Game 3 ended up being another desultory defeat for a drained team.

  The Yankees and Reds were in the midst of rewriting baseball history, although they may not have known it.

  Sunday night’s Game 2 had been watched by 49 percent more households than had watched Game 2 of the 1975 World Series, which had been played on a Sunday afternoon. NBC-TV reported that it was going to stick with World Series night games for the immediate future.

  The Yankees lost the fourth game of the series, becoming only the second Yankees team to be swept in the World Series. Billy wasn’t around to see the bitter end. Arguing an umpire’s call, he had been ejected from the game—a rare occurrence in the World Series.

  “We just weren’t mentally ready,” Roy White said. “It all came on us so fast. They were the better team, but not 4–0 better. Somebody said the ALCS that year was our World Series and maybe that’s right. We were gunning to get to the World Series; the Reds were gunning to win it.”

  Lou Piniella, a close witness to the last fifteen years of Billy’s life, has always viewed the 1976 season as a pivotal, necessary step in the Yankees’ evolution into a championship team. Piniella was Billy’s kind of player. He smoked, drank, swore like a sailor, and played with a fury.

  “On the field, he’s always got a case of the red ass,” Billy said of Piniella. “I like that about Lou.”

  But off the field Piniella was astute. He successfully made his own investments in the stock market and real estate. He was well read and a sage observer of people, someone who saw the little things. Piniella would notice when one reporter had started cinching his belt a notch tighter (or looser), or when one had stopped wearing a wedding ring.

  To this day, Piniella believes Billy had a plan for the Yankees, even if it included losing the World Series.

  “I’m not saying he wanted that,” Piniella said. “But getting there and getting whupped was part of the learning curve. We needed that to get us hungry again. We needed to see the big stage before we could own it.

  “The day after we were swept, I went to see Billy at that hotel in Hasbrouck Heights where he was living. We had a drink. Let me tell you, he was fine. He wasn’t beaten. He knew what happened and he knew what we were going to do next.

  “He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Lou, we’re going to get a player or two and we’ll win everything next year. You wait and see.’”

  In the New York newspapers, Billy, who had been named Manager of the Year again, talked about how the Yankees had enough left-handed power hitters. He wanted a slugging right-handed-hitting outfielder. George Steinbrenner read the stories and understood everything his manager was saying except the right-handed-hitting part.

  The Yankees’ brass held a meeting at Yankee Stadium two days after the World Series. Everyone chimed in about what the team needed in 1977—a shortstop, another starting pitcher, and another power hitter. There were several free-agent outfielders available. Billy, still adamant about getting a right-handed bat, lobbied for signing Joe Rudi, who had driven in 94 runs for Oakland in 1976.

  Reggie Jackson’s name came up. Several Yankees scouts were vociferous in their belief that Jackson would destroy the Yankees’ team chemistry.

  Billy left the meeting thinking that Reggie was not considered a priority.

  Billy spent a week in Puerto Rico with Mantle and a few weeks hunting with Lew Figone. He returned to Texas, albeit briefly.

  “My parents never officially separated,” Billy Jr. said. “I’ve asked my mom, ‘So when did you break it off?’ She doesn’t have an answer. I once asked my dad the same thing. He didn’t know what to say. But it didn’t happen in 1976.

  “My dad came to some of my games that winter. He took me places. He was there. He wasn’t missing. But I also remember he wasn’t there for Christmas; that was kind of a red flag.”

  Home had become the Sheraton Hasbrouck Heights, a fourteen-story tower overlooking Route 17 in northern New Jersey, not far from that dark saloon, the Bottom of the Barrel. Another favorite haunt was four miles down Route 17, a 1930s-era hunting lodge that had been converted to a restaurant called Steve’s Sizzling Steaks.

  Billy would eat a steak and drink Scotch, bourbon, or vodka—he liked to change his liquor choice every few years. He would summon owner Steve Venturini, who would tell stories about how Babe Ruth made Steve’s his favorite northern Jersey haunt in the mid-1930s, stories that involved huge quantities of steak and beer and trysts with the waitresses or women who had accompanied Ruth.

  Billy had heard the stories before. He loved hearing them again anyway.

  The routine was not always solitary.

  Cousin Nick DeGennaro visited that winter.

  “Billy did not lack for companionship when he wanted it,” Nick said. “But he seemed to want to be alone a little more. Billy could be the life of the party but he didn’t always want to be. There
was maybe more of that during that winter after the World Series sweep than other winters.”

  There was an inherent pressure on Billy in the time between the 1976 and 1977 seasons and everyone knew it.

  As columnist Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times, “Billy Martin knows that many baseball people consider him a one-year manager. Billy knows that many baseball people will be surprised if turmoil does not develop on the Yankees next season. It’s been the usual path in Minnesota, Detroit and Texas.”

  That winter, Billy also came to understand that Steinbrenner was going after Reggie Jackson at any cost. Billy did not try to talk him out of it. He told Steinbrenner that he could use a right fielder.

  Steinbrenner courted Reggie with every inducement he could muster. He took him repeatedly to the 21 Club with the Yankees’ general manager, Gabe Paul. George and Reggie had lunch with the New York mayor, Abe Beame.

  Reggie had once made the comment, “If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.”

  With George’s help, Reggie was already meeting with Standard Brands about producing a Reggie candy bar.

  When Jackson signed a five-year, $2.96 million contract with the Yankees, Billy was not invited to the news conference.

  “I kept reading about George taking Reggie to lunch at the 21 Club,” Billy later wrote. “And I was sitting across the river in my hotel room the entire winter, and George hadn’t taken me out to lunch even once. Reggie told a reporter, ‘It’s going to be great with the Yankees because George and I are going to get along real good.’

  “I said to myself, ‘You’re going to find out that George isn’t the manager of the team.’”

  Billy (front row, second from right) joined a school basketball team sponsored by the local church. A parish priest sometimes donated food to Billy’s struggling family. Years later, Billy reciprocated by giving the priest the car he won as MVP of the 1953 World Series.(Lewis Figone)

  Berkeley Junior High School, where playground battles could be bloody and fisticuff s were a way of life. Billy is third from left, middle row.(Lewis Figone)