Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

Billy approached Reggie after one of his better games that August—and after another Yankees victory—and said he wanted to reward Reggie with something, some gesture.

  “Fly in some crabs from Baltimore for the postgame meal tomorrow,” Reggie said.

  Billy obliged, a feast the team devoured after the Yankees victory the next night.

  Reggie hit over .300 the rest of the season, driving in nearly 45 runs.

  It was still a close race, but the Yankees had the pitching advantage with a nice mix of seasoned pitchers like Catfish Hunter, who would finish with a 13–5 record and a 2.17 ERA, and the energy of youthful contributors like Guidry, who in his first full season with the team had a 16–7 record with a 2.82 ERA.

  Overseeing the pitching staff was Fowler, Billy’s former player with the minor league Denver Bears in 1968.

  “Fowler was perfect for that team because he just made everyone laugh,” Guidry said. “Art would come to the mound when you were in trouble and you’d be waiting for some advice on how he was going to solve the situation, and instead Art would just drawl, ‘I don’t know what’s going on out here but you’re making Billy awfully pissed off. So whatever you’re doing I suggest you cut it out.’

  “And then he’d walk away. But, you know, you would start laughing and relax and make some good pitches.”

  Guidry said Fowler, oft depicted as a boob who served as Billy’s drinking aide-de-camp, was not the fool some thought he was.

  “He had a lot of pitching knowledge; he just used it at odd times and it was very subtle,” Guidry said. “He gave me the best pitching advice I ever got. He said you have to throw strikes because big-league hitters don’t swing at balls. Just don’t make it a strike they can hit.

  “And if you think about it, that is the key to pitching. Throw the ball for a strike or what looks like a strike, but throw it in a way that they can’t hit it.”

  Billy was notoriously hard on rookie pitchers and that included Guidry.

  “Oh, he was brutal to me at first,” Guidry said. “I’d walk someone and he’d be yelling from the dugout, ‘You call yourself a pitcher? Pitcher, my ass. You’re a candy ass. Throw the ball over the plate, you pussy.’

  “I was pretty intimidated by him at first and I thought he hated me.”

  In fact, George Steinbrenner routinely wanted to trade Guidry. Billy stood up for his young, rail-thin left-hander. And Guidry said Billy’s haranguing taught him how to win.

  “All of us were much more afraid of letting him down than we were of our opponents,” Guidry said. “And because of his intensity, I started to find the toughness in me to make good, daring pitches in tough situations. I got better and better and then at one point I knew it was my time to stand up to Billy.”

  With Guidry on the mound in 1977 and the Yankees clinging to a one-run, ninth-inning lead in an early-September game in Boston, Billy approached the mound with runners on first and second base. Lyle was warming up in the bullpen.

  “As Billy got next to me I told him, ‘The best thing for you to do is walk away,’” Guidry said. “I said, ‘Get off my mound and go back in the dugout so I can finish this game.’

  “He smiled, turned, and walked away. I got out of the jam. He never bothered me again. He knew his job was done. He was a master psychologist on top of all the other things that have been said about him.”

  Everything was coming together for the Yankees.

  Leadoff hitter Mickey Rivers won the game with Cleveland on September 9 with a drag bunt—the very bunting tactic Billy had encouraged him to try back in spring training (when Rivers angrily refused).

  Piniella recalled another Billy moment from the final weeks of the 1977 season. By late September, the Yankees had a 3.5-game lead on Boston and Baltimore with roughly 8 games remaining.

  “We were playing in Baltimore and it was that time in the season when every win mattered,” Piniella said. “So we were leading 5–2, and it starts raining in the top of the fifth. I’m in the on-deck circle and Billy calls me over and says, ‘Lou, I want you to strike out. Swing and miss three pitches; I don’t care where they are.’

  “I thought he was crazy but I did what he said. So did Chambliss after me. Quickly, the inning was over. Then the Orioles went down in order in the bottom of the fifth. Between innings, it started to really rain, like a pouring rain—a deluge. We never played the sixth inning; the game ended up being called. We won, 5–2. I don’t know how he knew it was going to start pouring rain and that we had to get the top of the fifth inning over with quickly, but that was his plan and it worked.”

  The Yankees finished the season with a 100–62 record, 2.5 games ahead of Boston and Baltimore, who each won 97 games but went home for the winter because there were no wild card teams in the 1970s.

  It was the fourth time one of Billy’s teams had won a division title. After the final game, fans were lining up outside the River Avenue gates at Yankee Stadium for $1.50 bleacher seats for the upcoming playoff series with Kansas City.

  Inside the stadium, seated beneath a portrait photograph of Casey Stengel, Billy sat smoking a pipe. On a shelf behind his desk were two Civil War books. Billy turned philosophical.

  “I might have been almost fired three or four times this year,” he said. “But who cares? We’re here now. But we’re only one third of the way. Part two is with Kansas City and then part three is the World Series. When you’re a Yankee, you’re always looking at the big picture.

  “The Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 1962. That’s too long.”

  Billy donned a beige cashmere sweater and light blue pants and drove over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey.

  “He had me meet him at the Bottom of the Barrel,” Eddie Sapir said. “And we’re sitting at the bar there for a while and he says to me, ‘Judge, I have to get these guys a World Series championship. There aren’t any excuses left. I’ve got to win one as Yankees manager or what’s all this been worth? What’s it mean?’

  “And I said, ‘Ah, come on, Billy, you’ve done so much.’ But he wouldn’t hear it. He said, ‘If we don’t win now, then what’s all this worth? What have I been doing? I’ll have failed.’”

  31

  GRUDGE MATCHES ARE RARE and often overstated. When it came to the Yankees and Royals of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was no need to exaggerate. The hostility between the teams was outward and palpable.

  In the second game of the 1977 American League Championship Series, Kansas City’s Hal McRae executed a football-style rolling body block while breaking up a double play. In today’s game, McRae’s collision with second baseman Willie Randolph—the 190-pound McRae catapulted over the base at about waist high, knocking Randolph into the outfield grass—would have drawn a multigame suspension. In 1977, it was just one of many hard knocks in the series. McRae got up, dusted off his uniform, and jogged off the field. The teams played on.

  McRae’s takedown did seem to awaken the Yankees, who had lost the opening game of the series. They scored three runs in their half of the inning after Randolph was bulldozed and went on to win, 6–2, tying the best-of-five series as it switched from New York to Kansas City.

  “Maybe I’m playing in the wrong era but there’s more of that to come,” said McRae, an outfielder and designated hitter.

  Through tightly pursed lips, Billy had a message for McRae.

  “You tell him that the Royals have a second baseman they like, too,” Billy said. “His name is Frank White and he’ll have to catch a double-play ball at second base one of these games.”

  Kansas City’s Dennis Leonard pitched a complete-game four-hitter to dominate the Yankees in a 6–2 victory in Game 3 of the series. Baseball fans throughout the Midwest were thrilled by the prospect that the Yankees could be eliminated at Royals Stadium in Game 4.

  “Everyone is rooting for us,” said Royals manager Whitey Herzog, whom Billy had replaced as Texas manager four years earlier. “Nobody likes the Yankees.”

  Told o
f Herzog’s comment, Billy said, “He ought to keep his mouth shut or somebody will shut it for him.”

  Herzog’s response?

  “I’m ready when he is,” he said. “Let me know where.”

  In the first inning of the third game, Mickey Rivers doubled and Graig Nettles singled. With runners at first and third base, Munson hit a ground ball to Brett at third base. When Brett threw to second base trying to start a double play, Nettles crashed into White, the Royals’ second baseman. Nettles did not so much as attempt to slide; he hit White shoulder to shoulder, throwing an elbow as both players somersaulted toward the outfield grass.

  Nettles was out—an hour later he left the game because he felt dizzy from the collision—but Rivers scored on the play.

  Gura was the Kansas City pitcher, and Billy had been goading him since the day before.

  “I’m so anxious to face Gura I might send a bodyguard to his house tomorrow to make sure he gets to the ballpark safely,” Billy told reporters. “I don’t want him getting in an accident. I need him on the mound for Game 4.”

  During the game, as he had done the year before, Billy was mercilessly riding Gura. By the second inning, it was 4–0 Yankees.

  “I don’t know what Gura was doing out there,” Herzog said afterward. “He was throwing all fastballs and sliders. He wins when he uses his change and curve.”

  Of course, Billy would howl every time Gura threw a breaking pitch.

  “Candy ass! You’re afraid to throw us a fastball!” Billy’s high-pitched voice would bellow from the dugout. “We’re going to wait for the goddamned fastball, Larry.”

  As much as the Yankees pounded on Gura, Yankees starter Ed Figueroa was also struggling. In the fourth inning, the Yankees were leading 5–4 when the Royals put runners on first and third base with two outs and Brett coming to the plate.

  In a move that was so unorthodox it seemed absurd at the time, Billy brought his closer, Sparky Lyle, to the mound to face Brett. As Billy later explained, if the Royals took the lead, the Yankees might never have recovered and would have been eliminated from the series.

  “Why save your closer for some other moment when that could be the do-or-die moment that decides a do-or-die game?” Billy reasoned.

  Lyle got Brett to fly out to left field, then pitched five more scoreless innings, a rare achievement for a closer.

  The Yankees victory set up another climactic Game 5. Except this time the final game was in Kansas City. And worse for Billy’s team, the Royals were starting Paul Splittorff, a tall, cunning left-hander who bedeviled the Yankees’ left-handed bats, especially Reggie, who was 1-for-14 in the series and did not have an RBI.

  Throughout the night after Game 4 and on through the next day Billy consulted with his coaches about whether to play Reggie in right field or replace him with the right-handed-hitting Paul Blair. Reggie had also been having his problems in right field on Kansas City’s hard, bouncy artificial turf field.

  During the afternoon before the game, Billy went to see George Steinbrenner to inform him he might bench Reggie. George, who had given Reggie millions of dollars principally for his postseason prowess, was incredulous.

  Billy and George took a walk through Kansas City’s Crown Center Hotel lobby. They were going to get coffee. Billy explained that all of his coaches thought Reggie should sit, too. They had seen Reggie struggle mightily against Splittorff, who had been in the American League since 1970 and used his long arms and six-foot-three frame to flummox left-handed power hitters. He had also handily defeated the Yankees in Game 1 of the series. Reggie was 2-for-15 against Splittorff in 1977.

  Billy and George happened to pass Catfish Hunter as they walked through the lobby.

  “Hey, Cat,” Billy said. “Can Reggie hit Splittorff?”

  “Not with a fucking paddle,” Hunter responded and kept walking.

  George later gave his grudging consent, adding, “It’s your call as the manager and you’ll get the credit if we win. But if we lose, you get the blame.”

  Eddie Sapir said Billy and he then went to a Catholic church four blocks from the hotel.

  “Billy went in and prayed,” Sapir said. “He was very quiet. We were there for maybe twenty minutes. Just me and him in a pew in an empty church.”

  Once Billy got to the ballpark, he called Healy into his office. He wanted Healy to tell Reggie he wasn’t starting.

  “I’m not telling him, you’re the manager, you tell him,” Healy said.

  “If I tell him, things might get ugly and that doesn’t help the team,” Billy said.

  “Why don’t you have one of the coaches tell him?” Healy asked.

  “They won’t do it,” Billy said.

  Healy said he was refusing as well. Billy implored his backup catcher, the quiet New Englander whom everyone now called “Kissinger.”

  “I know this is a rotten thing to have you do but you have the best chance of telling him and calming him down, too,” Billy said. “If things go our way, I’m going to need Reggie later in the game. We need to keep him in a good frame of mind so he can help us win.

  “And tell him that if he does this without making a scene and we win, I’ll praise him to everyone and make it up to him during the World Series.”

  Healy reluctantly delivered the news. Reggie was predictably upset. He wanted to confront Billy, to ask him why he was humiliating him on national TV—again.

  Healy kept Reggie at his locker. He also gave him all of Billy’s message and convinced Reggie that it was in his best interest and the team’s best interest to stay ready, that he might be needed later in the game. Healy made one other pivotal suggestion: Look like you’re into the game and ready to play for the TV cameras during the game. Cheer for the team on the bench. In other words, don’t sulk.

  Reggie understood that concept.

  Although, in Becoming Mr. October, Reggie wrote he only pretended to be cheering for the Yankees because “he was a broken man.”

  Regardless of Reggie’s state of mind, he was witness to a good game. In the first inning, Brett tripled off Guidry to drive in McRae. Brett slid hard at third base at the end of the play, his momentum propelling him into Nettles, whom he also shoved with a forearm to the chest. Nettles responded by kicking Brett in the ribs as he lay on the ground. Brett jumped up and threw a right-hand punch that grazed the top of Nettles’s head and knocked off his cap.

  Nettles turned and jammed his right hand to Brett’s face and slammed the Royals’ third baseman back to the ground. The benches emptied, but no one seemed to want to get thrown out of the pennant-deciding game. It was mostly wrestling. Billy watched the tussle with a bemused grin. He stood apart and ended up with his left arm draped affectionately over the Royals’ diminutive shortstop, Freddie Patek, as if they were at a barbecue watching the grill heat up.

  In another sign of the times, no one was ejected. Splittorff and the Royals took a 3–1 lead into the eighth inning. When Randolph laced a leadoff single, Herzog replaced Splittorff with Doug Bird.

  “We will always be grateful,” Billy said, who accused Herzog of overmanaging the moment.

  It opened the door for Reggie to pinch-hit, and he came to the plate with runners at first and third base after Piniella singled.

  Reggie wrote that he was “kind of stuck between ‘Should I give it my all? Or should I just say to Martin: Dude, you think I stink? Let me just stand there. Take three strikes and go back to the dugout.’”

  But Reggie was no quitter. Like Billy, he had many layers to his motivations, but giving up rarely crossed his mind. And, besides, in Reggie’s words, it would only make him as big a fool as Billy.

  Reggie instead turned on a Bird fastball and smacked a crisp liner to center field that cut the Royals’ lead in half. In the Yankees’ ninth inning, Blair rewarded Billy’s faith in him with a single, then Roy White drew a pinch-hit walk. Rivers’s single tied the game.

  With White at third base and one out, Randolph’s deep fly ball to center
field put the Yankees ahead. Another run scored on an error by Brett, his second of the game.

  It was the final indignity for the Royals, who for a second year would fall short, undone by defensive lapses and a lack of clutch late-game pitching.

  Lyle gave up a one-out single in the Royals’ ninth, but Patek rapped a ground ball to Nettles, who relayed to Randolph, who stood in at second base to smoothly and calmly turn a game-ending double play in the Yankees’ 5–3 victory.

  Midwest baseball fans went silent. All that could be heard was thirty Yankees players and coaches celebrating on the Royals Stadium diamond. In the clubhouse afterward, Blair was still out of breath and gasping for air as he met with reporters.

  “That was the most pressure I ever had on me because Billy gave me a chance and I didn’t want to let him down,” he said. “That took a lot of guts from Billy to start me and keep me in there. He probably gets fired if I make an out and we lose.”

  Champagne was flowing in the Yankees’ clubhouse.

  “My new suit,” George Steinbrenner bayed as he was doused with a bottle of the bubbly.

  Billy came by and poured more champagne on George.

  “That’s for almost firing me,” he said.

  “What do you mean almost?” George shot back.

  Billy headed to his office where he immediately began praising Reggie.

  “He really showed me some kind of class,” Billy said. “A lot of other people would go off and sulk but he was just terrific about it. A real man.”

  Reggie entered Billy’s office with a magnum of champagne in his hand.

  “Want some?” Reggie asked.

  “I will if you will,” Billy said.

  And Reggie sat beside Billy on a couch in the office. They toasted each other.

  “I love you, big guy,” Billy said. “You did great tonight.”

  Reggie smiled and put his arm around Billy as a flock of photographers snapped the picture, the flashbulbs of their cameras bathing the scene in a hypnotic, surreal off-and-on brilliance.

  On the Yankees’ charter flight back to Newark airport Sunday night from Kansas City, Billy sat in an aisle seat in the first row of first class—the manager’s seat of honor on all flights and bus rides. He held a relatively new invention in his lap, a Sony Walkman, which was playing a country music tape.