Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  George Steinbrenner was in the first row of coach, wearing another new suit.

  Many players were asleep, their heads resting on their wives’ shoulders. In some cases, it was vice versa with the wife exhausted from the series while the husband remained wired from the excitement of winning another pennant.

  In the last row of coach, staring forward and sitting alone, was Reggie.

  When the plane landed in Newark early Monday morning, some of the five thousand fans who came out to the airport broke through police barricades and charged toward the players and wives. The overwhelmed airport authorities had been expecting about three or four hundred people.

  According to the New York Times story about the scene, George Steinbrenner was gleeful about the crowd reaction. The article recounted this interaction:

  “Can you believe this?” Steinbrenner remarked.

  A fan who overheard this said: “We believe it. But keep Billy, George.”

  This touched off a chant among the fans for Billy Martin.

  “We want Billy, we want Billy,” they shouted.

  Billy emerged from the jet after the players and received the loudest ovation from the attending crowd.

  “It was that way all year,” Morabito, the team publicist, said. “Billy was always our most popular player. Except he wasn’t a player.”

  The crowd pushed toward Billy on the tarmac, mobbing him as if he were one of the Beatles. A pocket from his pants was ripped off as was a gold chain around his neck. Police freed him from the crush, but a shoulder bag with papers and other personal effects was never recovered. Not one Yankee needed his own security detail to get to the team bus.

  Outside Yankee Stadium, an overflow gathering started lining up for World Series tickets minutes after Patek grounded into his double play. It wasn’t just another World Series, it was a Yankees-Dodgers World Series. From 1941 to 1963, the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers played eight times in the World Series. No two teams have ever met as often.

  Billy had already called Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, his old rival from the 1950s and now one of his best friends. As historic as the upcoming series might be, there was none of the animosity that marked the Royals series.

  The only apparent dynamic was that the Dodgers were this happy collective—“We all bleed Dodger blue,” Lasorda said—while the Yankees were as close as the Hatfields and the McCoys. Piniella said he worried that the Dodgers might hug themselves to death.

  The first game at Yankee Stadium, played two days after the ALCS finale, was tied 3–3 after nine innings. Billy turned to Sparky Lyle for the extra innings while Lasorda used four relievers. Keeping his word, Billy started Reggie but that did not mean he would play nine innings.

  As he had for most of the second half of the season, Billy replaced Reggie with Blair, an eight-time Gold Glove winner, late in the game for defensive reasons. In the twelfth inning, Randolph led off with a double, and Munson was intentionally walked so the Dodgers right-hander Rick Rhoden could pitch to the right-handed Blair.

  Blair, who had beaten Billy’s Minnesota Twins in the playoffs with a clutch extra-inning bunt eight years earlier, slapped a ground single through the left side of the infield to score Randolph. The Yankees won, 4–3.

  In the second game, Hunter took the mound, even though he had pitched rarely in the second half of the season because of a shoulder strain that would eventually bring a premature end to his career. The Dodgers teed off on Hunter’s subpar pitching, swatting four home runs in a 6–1 rout.

  The series was tied 1–1, the most common outcome after two World Series games. But there was nothing usual about the 1977 Yankees. Things had been calm around the team for nearly three days. That was way too long.

  After the game, Reggie wasn’t happy for two reasons: he thought Billy had unfairly asked Hunter to pitch when he was hurt, and he was convinced he would be benched in the third game of the series against the Dodgers’ left-handed starter Tommy John.

  “I’m not swinging well and you know what happens then,” said Reggie, who had one hit in his six World Series at-bats.

  When Reggie’s remarks were relayed to Billy, he said, “I’m not taking Reggie out. Reggie’s in there. Splittorff isn’t pitching for them.”

  Back the writers went to Reggie with Billy’s comments. The Splittorff reference incensed Reggie, who was packing his bag for Los Angeles, where the next three games would be played.

  “I don’t need to take that from nobody, especially from him,” Reggie snarled. “I know what I can do. If he did, we might be a lot better off.”

  That was enough for one day for the New York writers. They had stories to write and a plane to catch themselves. They hustled to the press box knowing their stories would surely prompt a rejoinder from Billy.

  That would be tomorrow’s story.

  And it was.

  When the Yankees arrived at Dodger Stadium for their afternoon workout during an off day in the World Series, Billy had read the newspapers.

  “Why do we have to have all this kind of talk—this shit—now when we’re trying to win the World Series?” Billy asked, angrily flinging his Yankees cap on the visiting manager’s desk.

  The room was filled with reporters, an hour before the Yankees’ 3:00 p.m. workout.

  “I told Reggie after the Kansas City series that he would play every game in the World Series,” Billy said. “Where’s his memory. What happened to that 180 IQ?”

  As for Reggie second-guessing him about starting the ailing Hunter, which most viewed as a strategic ploy to rest Guidry and the rest of an overworked pitching staff, Billy snickered.

  “Reggie is having enough trouble playing right field,” he said. “I don’t think he has time to manage the team, too. He should leave that to me.”

  As Billy railed, Reggie was in a taxi to Dodger Stadium. The cabdriver, who was obviously not a big baseball fan, asked Reggie if he was a Dodger or a Yankee. When Reggie said he was a Yankee, the driver said, “I hope you win for Billy.”

  Reggie laughed and shook his head.

  “Everywhere I go,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Munson was holding a press conference before the workout at Dodger Stadium. He was asked about yet another round of quarreling between Billy and Reggie.

  “It’s just an overheated argument,” Munson said. “Reggie’s been struggling and he’d like to be doing better. Billy just doesn’t realize that Reggie is Mr. October.”

  It was the first time that anyone had called Reggie Mr. October.

  Billy and Reggie coexisted on the field during the Yankees’ workout without incident or much interaction. When the session was over and they retreated to the visitors’ clubhouse, Billy was asked about Reggie again.

  “I’m done with that,” he said.

  There was a ruckus in the clubhouse. Piniella was complaining that the tickets given to the Yankees families attending the three games in Los Angeles were lousy seats.

  “Way up in the upper deck,” Piniella was yelling loudly. “I bet we didn’t do that to them. Total bullshit.”

  Billy heard Piniella’s protest and stuck his head out of his office.

  “Say something crazy, Lou,” Billy said. “Take the heat off Reggie and me.”

  Then Billy went to shower and shave. He and Gretchen had a dinner date with Frank Sinatra.

  Billy Joe Martin does not recall where his father and mother had dinner with Sinatra, who was accompanied by several friends including Lasorda. Gretchen does not remember either. What Billy Joe does recall is that he was not invited and that pleased him greatly. He would instead stay in the Yankees’ Los Angeles hotel and hang out with the children of the players. They would have the run of the hotel, order room service meals, and play in the pool.

  But first it was Billy Joe’s job to escort his mother and father through the hotel lobby so they could find the limo that would take them to dinner.

  “My dad said to me, ‘Listen, pard, I need you to run interference in
the lobby,’” Billy Joe said. “He told me to keep moving, that a teenager could be pushy in a crowd even if he couldn’t.”

  Gretchen recalled those instructions, too. Sitting next to her son many years later, she said, “You failed.”

  The hotel lobby of the Los Angeles Hilton was packed with dignitaries, fans, families, Hollywood moguls, actors, actresses, directors, baseball executives, reporters, and others eager to catch a glimpse of the famed Yankees.

  Into this atmosphere Billy and Gretchen emerged, trying to get from the guarded hotel elevators to the opposite side of the lobby where their limo awaited.

  “I had my dad’s arm and he had my mom’s arm and I was trying to drag him through the crowd but it was impossible,” Billy Joe said. “Every two steps, someone would stop him. My dad wouldn’t refuse people. That was one of his things. He wouldn’t brush people off or tell them, ‘Not now.’”

  Said Gretchen, “It took forty-five minutes to an hour for us to get through the lobby. When we finally got to the restaurant, Frank himself came out to meet us and said, ‘What happened? We were so worried.’

  “We were seated like the guests of honor, right next to Frank and his wife. It was a long table of about twenty people. Lasorda was in the middle telling old baseball stories. Tommy would start the story and Billy would finish it. We were there for hours with everyone eating, drinking, and laughing.

  “I kept thinking that these two men were going to be managing against each other in the World Series in less than twenty-four hours. But boy, they were having a good time first.”

  Billy and Lasorda were like best friends, two baseball lifers from meager means.

  “We knew we were two lucky SOBs but we also knew we had worked like dogs for everything we got,” Lasorda said in a 2012 interview. Lasorda put in twenty-two seasons as a minor league player and manager before getting his chance to manage in the big leagues in 1976. “We could share that, and one other thing, if Billy Martin was your friend, he was the best friend you ever had.”

  Lasorda recalled an off-season visit to Minneapolis in the late 1960s when Billy was the Twins’ third-base coach. Lasorda was the Dodgers’ manager in Ogden, Utah, a rookie-league team.

  “I called ahead and told him I was coming to Minnesota for a couple days,” Lasorda said. “I was visiting some college player they wanted me to talk to. Billy met me up at the airport and we took a cab to my hotel. I asked him why he didn’t drive his car and he said a cab was easier, which I thought was odd.

  “But I check in and we go to my room and I unpack a little. We’re talking and catching up. Then we went down and had a drink in the lobby and we’re sitting there and I saw that Billy had this bracelet on his wrist, like the kind they give you when you’re in the hospital.

  “I said, ‘Billy, what’s that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m in the hospital, I had hernia surgery the other day.’

  “I was shocked. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And he said, ‘Relax, I’ll go back in a couple of hours. I wasn’t going to let you come here and have you hang out by yourself.’ I said I could have met him at the hospital and he said he didn’t want to worry me.

  “He just waved his hand at me and said, ‘What fun would that have been?’ But he did look kind of pale so I made him finish his drink and go back to the hospital early.”

  The morning after Billy, Lasorda, and Ol’ Blue Eyes broke bread, there was another meeting of Billy, Reggie, and Gabe Paul, this time in Billy’s Hilton hotel suite. More smoothing over. Paul hosted reporters in his room afterward, about six hours before the third game of the World Series.

  “Another chapter in the tumultuous life of the 1977 Yankees,” Paul said with a laugh. “And I don’t mind the controversies. Controversial ballplayers are many times better ballplayers because they are not afraid of the consequences.

  “Besides, so far, some of the unhappiest players on our team have played the best ball. We judge players by what they do on the field. If we want all nice boys, we’d go to church and collect them.”

  At Dodger Stadium several hours later, Reggie said, “Everything’s resolved.”

  The game began with a moment of silence for Bing Crosby, who had died that afternoon when he collapsed of a heart attack on the eighteenth green of a golf course in Spain. The former Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella, now in a wheelchair following a near-fatal 1958 auto accident, threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

  Then Rivers lined his first hit of the series, which was followed by RBI singles by Munson, Reggie, and Piniella—the three players doing the most grumbling in the days before the game. Billy was first to greet Reggie on the top step of the dugout as he scored. The Yankees parlayed their 3–0 first-inning lead to a 5–3 victory.

  The next day, Reggie doubled and hit a long home run, and Ron Guidry, the Yankees’ lowest-paid player with a salary of $30,000, pitched a complete-game four-hitter. The 4–2 Yankees victory, preserved when Piniella climbed a fence and denied Ron Cey of a game-tying home run, gave the Yankees a 3–1 lead in the series.

  How did the Yankees overcome three days, if not months, of turmoil to win so convincingly?

  “You should probably give Billy Martin the Nobel Peace Prize for managing this damn, crazy team,” Reggie said.

  “I accept,” Billy said when informed of Reggie’s nomination. “With deep humility, I accept and thank you very much.”

  Asked what he would nominate Reggie for, Billy smiled, then said, “The good guy award.”

  The national television cameras were watching Reggie and Billy in the dugout on this day, just as they had been in Fenway Park four months earlier. This time the scene was nearly as stunning: the two embraced in a lengthy hug with each man whispering something in the other’s ear.

  “He told me, ‘helluva job,’ and I thanked him for letting me get one more at-bat,” said Reggie, acknowledging that Billy had not replaced him for defensive purposes in the ninth inning.

  Lasorda had a pep talk with his team before Game 5, telling them they were the best team in the world and he wouldn’t trade them for any other team. The Dodgers then roughed up the Yankees’ starter, Don Gullett, in a 10–4 victory that sent the series back to New York for a sixth game.

  On the eve of the sixth game at Yankee Stadium, George Steinbrenner sat for a two-hour interview with the New York Times.

  “Modern athletics is entertainment and we’ve proven that,” George said.

  He added, “Billy Martin could never have made it this far without me and I couldn’t have made it this far without Billy.”

  Two stories below Steinbrenner’s office, at the field level during the off day between the fifth and sixth games of the series, Billy welcomed a visitor: twenty-year-old Robert Violante of Brooklyn, a Yankees fan who had lost his left eye in the final Son of Sam gun attack. Billy and Violante talked and Billy gave Violante some autographed balls and pictures. He asked for Violante’s Brooklyn address because he said he wanted to keep in touch.

  Billy then returned to New Jersey, where he spent most of his time before the sixth game trying to avoid talk of a victory party in a ballroom at the Sheraton Hasbrouck Heights.

  But a party was being planned, as much as Billy avoided all talk about it.

  “I had to take my phone calls in the lobby about anything that wasn’t directly related to the sixth game,” Gretchen said. “The pressure at that point was enormous. The Yankees simply couldn’t come home and lose the World Series. There was talk in the newspapers that Billy was going to be fired immediately if they lost the series.

  “Billy heard it all. You could see in his eyes the pressure he was feeling.”

  The Yankees had not won a World Series in a generation. Billy, now forty-nine years old, had not won one in twenty-one years.

  Around noon on the day of the sixth game of the series, Billy got a call from Gabe Paul, who wanted to see him in his office at 1:30. Billy feared it was another strategy session with George. Instead, the Yankees were ex
tending his contract, giving him a bonus of $35,000, plus a new Lincoln Continental. They had also agreed to pay his $400-a-month rent at the Sheraton Hasbrouck Heights for as long as he was the Yankees manager.

  The press was alerted immediately about the Yankees’ gesture. Reggie was asked about it when he arrived at the ballpark.

  “I saw Billy and congratulated him,” Reggie said. “For the first time in a long time, he looked 49 instead of 99. I think it’s great. And good timing.”

  Yankees fans knew of the new arrangement as well. When Billy brought out the Yankees’ batting lineup to the umpires before the game, the stands overflowed with applause, which in many sections became a standing ovation. Standing next to him, Lasorda briefly clapped his hands as well.

  The rest of the Dodgers were not in the mood to celebrate the Yankees and took a 2–0 lead in the first inning. Chambliss tied the game with a two-run homer after Reggie walked on four pitches. The Dodgers had regained the lead, 3–2, when Reggie came to the plate with a runner on in the fourth inning.

  He laced the first pitch from Burt Hooton just over the railing in right field. Greeting him at the top step of the dugout after his homer was Billy. Billy patted Reggie on the cheek lovingly while vigorously shaking his hand. Piniella made it 5–3 Yankees with a sacrifice fly.

  In the fifth inning, Reggie again hit the first pitch, this time from reliever Elías Sosa. It soared over the right-field wall, several seats deep in the grandstand. Another two-run homer and a 7–3 Yankees lead.

  By the time Reggie came to the plate in the eighth inning—Billy said he never considered using Blair as a defensive replacement—the crowd of 56,407 was chanting, “Reg-gie, Reg-gie.”

  Throughout his career, Reggie loved to hit against knuckleball pitchers, and Lasorda had resorted to Charlie Hough, who would have a long career throwing mostly knuckleballs.