Reggie hit Hough’s first delivery about 450 feet into the center-field bleachers, which were painted black because they were directly in the line of sight behind the pitcher’s mound. The white ball bounded around in the black rows of wood as Reggie began circling the bases.
Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in one World Series game in 1926 and in 1928, but no one had hit three home runs on the first three pitches he had seen in one World Series game. Because he had hit a home run on the first pitch of his last at-bat of the fifth game, Reggie had hit four homers in his last four swings of the series—off four different pitchers.
The New York Times columnist Red Smith, who had covered Babe Ruth, wrote, “Not even that demigod smashed three in a row on three pitches, let alone four.”
Reggie had five home runs in the series, another first.
As Reggie passed Steve Garvey at first base after the third homer, Garvey, only somewhat furtively, applauded inside his glove.
The celebration of the Yankees’ 8–4 victory an inning later was replete with a surging crowd of thousands of fans who overwhelmed 350 police officers and tore up the Yankee Stadium field.
The teams quickly retreated to their clubhouses.
The television networks wanted interviews with Billy and Reggie, so they did one together with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Each of them had a bottle of Taylor New York State champagne, from which they drank. Reggie laughed and patted Billy’s chest.
“This man deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Purple Heart, everything,” he said.
Answered Billy, “This guy was sensational. One of the great World Series performances you’ll ever see.”
Billy was asked about whether he had imbued his team with a fighting spirit and Reggie nodded.
“Anybody fights you, skip,” Reggie said, “he’s got to fight both of us.”
“And anybody who fights you,” said Billy, grinning widely, “has got to fight the both of us.”
They then went their separate ways, Billy to his office where he told reporters he was too drained to speak for too long.
“I’m going to have to calm down first—and that might take a while,” he said. “I’m still uptight.”
Billy summoned one of the front-office assistants to his office. He removed the Yankees number 1 jersey he was wearing and handed it over with a Brooklyn address.
“I want you to send this jersey to that Violante kid,” said Billy, who wrote a note to go with the jersey that read, “My heart is with you.”
Then Billy, the man who was often one of the last to leave the ballpark, scurried out the door, heading for an opulent party at a vast ballroom on the ground floor of the Sheraton Hasbrouck Heights.
Remaining in the clubhouse were a handful of Yankees, including Reggie and Munson. The two men hugged. Munson, who had been asking for a trade to Cleveland so he could be nearer to his family in Canton, Ohio, was heading to a party down the hall under the right-field stands.
Dave Anderson chronicled this remarkable exchange in the next day’s New York Times:
“I’m going down to the party here in the ball park,” Munson said. “Just white people but they’ll let you in. Come on down.”
Reggie laughed and said, “I’ll be there. Wait for me.”
But Reggie stood at his locker talking with reporters for 25 minutes and finally Munson returned.
“Hey, nigger, you’re too slow, that party’s over but I’ll see you next year,” Munson said.
“You’ll be back,” Reggie said.
“Not me, but you know who stuck up for you, nigger, you know who stuck up for you when you needed it.”
“I know,” Reggie said. “But you’ll be here next year. We’ll all be here.”
Billy drove with Billy Joe and Gretchen to the New Jersey party. It was a mob scene with loud music, few players, and a diverse collection of fans and hangers-on who had been drinking since before the game started. The boozy crush of the packed room—Billy twice had a drink knocked from his hand—was overwhelming. Billy, usually the life of any party, was getting agitated.
“All the problems we had all year long had left me exhausted,” Billy wrote years later. “The fighting to win the division title, fighting to win a pennant, fighting to win a World Series, the fight against an owner who doesn’t respect you, all year long battling for players against him and he’s telling the players just the opposite. It was all tearing me up and making me sick. It was a miracle I didn’t have a stroke or a nervous breakdown.”
There were other discomforting undercurrents to the party, specifically, the makeup of the guest list. Some of those pressing closest to Billy, who was the guest of honor, gave more than a hint of what Billy, his star bigger than ever, had become.
Gretchen Martin, standing in the Denver airport three years earlier, had foreseen the consequences of her husband taking the Yankees job. Now, somewhat unexpectedly given the utter triumph of the moment in her eighteen years as Billy’s wife, Gretchen was coming face-to-face with her own premonition. In addition to the frenzy in the room, two or three women Billy had befriended during his years living in New Jersey—perhaps intimately befriended—were at the party and vying for at least some of Billy’s attention on this night of great celebration.
Gretchen saw what was going on but did not tolerate it in this setting. Billy Joe was in the room, too.
Billy and Gretchen began quarreling, loudly and in front of other guests.
Billy had a drink in his hand and threw it to the ground, smashing the glass. He turned and stormed out of the party.
“They had a lot of fights but that was the final one that mattered,” Billy Joe said. “That was it. That was the fight.”
Years later, Gretchen, a baseball wife for decades, summarized her feelings in five words. What had she said to Billy?
“Play me or trade me.”
Billy left the hotel ballroom for the Bottom of the Barrel.
“I sat there all by myself,” he wrote of the moment. “I sat there and rested where no one could bother me.”
32
THE YANKEES WERE FETED in a ticker-tape parade through lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes the day after their World Series victory. The team looked bushed, and not just because many of the players were hung-over.
“I am emotionally worn out from the season—not from playing the game but from all the questions about our internal problems,” Piniella said in an impromptu news conference. “If things don’t change from how they were this year, we’ll be a good fourth-place club next year and that’s it.”
Nearby, Chambliss was asked if a championship would settle the Yankees. Wouldn’t the 1978 Yankees be calmer, less rebellious?
“I really doubt that,” he said.
There were issues throughout the roster. Munson wanted to be traded to Cleveland and kept saying so. Mickey Rivers said he wanted to go home to California (and he wanted another raise). Figueroa still felt snubbed about not getting the sixth-game start in the World Series. Mike Torrez, who had won two World Series games and the series clincher, was a free agent on his way to Boston. Nettles wanted a new contract.
“Give them a month off to enjoy their World Series win and they’ll all feel differently,” said Billy, who was in a noticeably better mood at the parade than he had been the night before.
The Yankees did take a month, or two, off after the parade. Billy went hunting in the Dakotas and Northern California. He made his familiar stops in Berkeley and Texas, although New Jersey remained the closest thing to home. Divorce proceedings between Billy and Gretchen had not yet begun, although each would contact lawyers within the year.
“They were upset about the divorce,” Billy Joe said years later. “I thought they were both better off.”
Billy was seen often in Manhattan that winter, a star of the dinner circuit and television talk shows. Madison Avenue was interested in using his face for advertisements, and he accepted almost every offer—and ev
ery check for it.
Generally speaking, he would not, however, pay income tax on those checks. He would just pocket them. His agent at the time, Doug Newton, who worked jointly with Eddie Sapir in a curious arrangement, worked hard to get Billy to understand the concept that state and federal taxes had to come out of every stream of income, but Billy never liked to consider the financial details of his life. So he kept cashing the checks without much thought.
This oversight, or recklessness, or deception, left him in debt to the Internal Revenue Service for most of the rest of his life. When he was paid only by a team, which took taxes out of his paycheck, there were no money problems. But after the 1977 championship, Billy’s ancillary income ballooned.
“He was just terrible with money,” said Sapir. “He’d never had any, and when he did get some, he just thought he should spread it around. I always said that when the Yankees were winning and Billy was managing, every maitre d’, bartender, cabdriver, doorman, and cocktail waitress within twenty miles of Yankee Stadium went up an income bracket.”
And so it was in the winter of 1977–78. Billy was also now moving in new circles. Like the Billy of the 1950s, he was rubbing elbows with the biggest TV personalities of the day. The cast members of Saturday Night Live—John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray—liked to drink with Billy. Who, after all, could show a couple of newcomers to New York a better time? They were a generation younger, but the Yankees were royalty again in Manhattan, and Billy loved the company of the young comedians, in part because they introduced him to twenty-something women.
It was during this winter that Billy first got involved with a relatively new product, Lite Beer from Miller. To convince Joe Six-Packs across the nation that they should be drinking a lesser caloric beer, Miller approached macho athletes as subjects in their humorous ads. Battlin’ Billy Martin, fresh off a championship, fit the billing.
“Billy loved to perform,” Sapir said.
Since the commercials also tended to feature an ensemble cast of athletes and comedians like Rodney Dangerfield, Billy not surprisingly became the ringleader—a quasi manager of the Lite Beer team.
Bob Giraldi, the maker of the commercials, considered Billy the straw boss of the group, a workingman’s hero who bucked authority. He was also someone who could get men with credentials in line and lead them. Giraldi told author David Falkner in 1991:
Here they are, these sports heroes, all banding together, drinking together, waking up together, having a great time, coming to the set in a bus . . . and Rodney only comes to the set in a limousine, he won’t come to hang around. And Rodney, in the commercials, wonders why nobody likes him, you know? Billy would pick up on that and break his balls. I think Rodney was actually more petrified of Billy than he was of anybody. Billy was a genius, maybe that’s why he was a good manager. But he was a genius at finding that vulnerability, that weakness of a person—that’s what he obviously was able to do as a manager.
Giraldi left the commercials convinced that he wanted someday to make a movie of Billy’s life.
Billy was the toast of the town again, and he did not need much encouragement when it came to the toasting that winter. Billy hired a driver, a tall, imposing former New York City cop named Carl P. “Tex” Gernand, who ferried him back and forth to New Jersey from his favorite Manhattan bars. He still visited Steve’s Sizzling Steaks and the Bottom of the Barrel (though it would soon be unimaginatively renamed Jerry’s Bar). But there were so many invitations to functions in the city, and Billy, shunned the winter before, was not sitting the party out.
Billy may have been onstage having a good time, but surreptitiously cracks were developing in the foundation of the championship platform upon which he was so happily cavorting.
In December, Gabe Paul announced he was going back to Cleveland to run the Indians. Paul decided that Steinbrenner’s wrath was bad for his health.
Before he left, Paul talked Steinbrenner into signing the free agent reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage, who was twenty-six years old, instead of the thirty-one-year-old starter Mike Torrez.
It would prove to be a shrewd move for the Yankees in the long run, but heading into the 1978 season, it presented Billy with a significant headache. Sparky Lyle, the incumbent bullpen ace, did not want to share the closer’s duties and neither did Gossage. And Billy, ever loyal, sided with Lyle. He did not want Gossage, something the rest of the team, Gossage included, knew. Gossage, who ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, never forgave Billy for spurning him before he had thrown a pitch for the Yankees.
But Lyle was never again happy to be with the Yankees either. Gossage’s arrival quickly ruined the happy, post–World Series buzz.
A crowded bullpen was not Billy’s only problem. George had decided he should be more active in other ways. He wanted to restructure Billy’s coaching staff, so he appointed Gene Michael, the former Yankees shortstop and then a valued Yankees scout, Billy’s “administrative coach.”
Billy immediately considered the tall and skinny Michael, who went by the nickname “Stick,” George’s in-house spy.
“Stick this,” Billy said of the appointment.
Michael was just beginning his five-decade career in various roles for the Yankees and he was close to George.
“But I wasn’t a spy,” Michael said thirty-five years after his 1978 appointment. “I know Billy hated me being there. But I was supposed to help implement some things and report to George on how they were going. I know it wasn’t a usual arrangement but I was not running back to George about things that were none of my business. I wasn’t spying. I was trying to help Billy. Not that he believed me.”
The Yankees’ new president and general manager was Al Rosen, a Cleveland Indians third baseman in the mid-1950s and a sometime antagonist of Billy’s. But Rosen approached his new job with a determination to soothe the fractious relationship between the manager and owner, whom Rosen knew personally from his Cleveland roots.
Rosen, a former amateur boxer, was convinced he had the toughness to stand up to both Billy and George and to weather the storms of the tempestuous Yankees’ state of affairs. Billy didn’t mind Rosen’s presence because George had promised Billy a new communication arrangement. Billy did not have to go through the general manager; he could talk directly to George. It was just one of many misguided presumptions.
Reggie, for example, announced at the start of spring training that 1978 was going to be controversy free.
“This time, I won’t get involved in all that stuff like I did last year,” he said. “We’re all over that.”
He then said that playing for Billy had made him a better player.
“He makes you a more complete player because he demands that,” Reggie said. “I’ve been working my butt off this spring to show him that I know I’m not too big to work on my defense and my bunting.”
Reggie said he was not too big to work on his bunting. Store that thought.
Things were calm for a while. But a dose of bad karma descended on the Yankees’ Fort Lauderdale camp. Dick Tidrow, expected to be a starter on a team short of starters, pulled a hamstring running out a bunt in an exhibition game. Don Gullett, perhaps the ace of the staff, developed a shoulder ache and stopped pitching (he would pitch only eight games that season and then retire). Randolph got hit in the face with an errant throw and sat out a month. His replacement, Fred Stanley, tore a thigh muscle on the same day. Andy Messersmith, another starter signed during the off-season, separated his shoulder and was declared unavailable for several months (he would end up pitching only six games and retiring in 1979).
The Yankees were losing most of their preseason games. Said Steinbrenner on March 18, “We’re at the point where Billy better start buckling down on them or we won’t repeat.”
The first game of the regular season—the first game that counted—was still twenty days away.
Billy was ostensibly alone at spring training, which is to say that neither Gretchen nor Billy Joe spe
nt much time there with him. That’s not to say that Billy was lonely. He was soon to be fifty years old, and his tastes had not changed. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his age, and just as he did in the 1950s, he found plenty of women in their twenties who were still drawn to him.
Billy had reentered the realm reserved for the New York elite. He was a star in the biggest sports market in the world. The stable suburban family life Billy yearned for since childhood, and had lived in Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas, had disintegrated, never to be replicated. But Billy traveled in a new sphere now, and at a different, accelerated pace. A spotlight lit his path.
When he came to New York in 1950, he was identified in tabloid newspaper headlines as “Martin.” Nearly three decades later, headline writers never used his last name; he was simply “Billy.” It never led to any confusion. Alfred Manuel “Billy” Martin of Berkeley, California, was forevermore emblematic of New York and the Yankees. It was a representation so strong, Billy might as well have had the interlocking NY logo tattooed on his forehead.
The Yankees and Billy would be detached for years at a time but never separated. But first there was the matter of defending the Yankees’ world title.
The Yankees’ 1978 season started unevenly, but the mood remained calm in the clubhouse. For Billy, there was only one dustup, and it involved his old archrival Earl Weaver. Gossage had thrown a pitch over a Baltimore player’s head in April, and Weaver had protested to the umpire who then warned Billy.
Billy did not mind being warned, but he was furious that the umpire, Joe Brinkman, appeared to issue the warning because it was Weaver’s idea.
“I’m taking the lineup card out to home plate tomorrow afternoon and if that little midget of a manager says anything I’m decking him right there at home plate,” Billy said.
Billy Martin Page 37
