He was despondent, his sisters and cousins recall. His longtime friend Lew Figone took him hunting in Northern California. He hung out with some of his old Oakland Oaks buddies. In interviews many years later, each described Billy as being in a similar state of mind.
Billy had a lingering resentment toward Steinbrenner. To Billy’s way of thinking, he had followed all of the owner’s directives in 1979. He had gotten along with Reggie Jackson, and he managed the team through an arduous, heartbreaking season without an off-the-field incident or major disagreement with his bosses. There had been no dustups with the press, no problems whatsoever.
He had been professional in every way. Hadn’t George promised that he would be back in 1980? Hadn’t he said that would happen, “no matter what”?
Sure, he had slugged a loudmouth in a bar far away from the team in the off-season. To Billy’s way of thinking, it was a random, unrelated act. Joe Cooper deserved it for being rude. Was that a firing offense?
Not to Billy it wasn’t. He felt betrayed.
“I think the worst thing was that he thought that maybe this was the end of his time as a Yankee,” his cousin Nick DeGennaro said. “He didn’t know if he’d ever be back.”
Billy stayed in the Bay Area for another week. Then another subject came up while Billy was there.
The last-place Oakland A’s, who lost 108 games in 1979 and averaged slightly more than 3,700 fans at home games, were likely going to be looking for a new manager. Billy could come home and manage in the American League.
Billy laughed off the notion. Thirty years before, at twenty-one years old, he had left Oakland for New York, a trip that became more like a passage into another life altogether.
After all these years and all the seismic changes experienced since, who would attempt a return trip?
36
IN FEBRUARY 1980, COMMISSIONER Bowie Kuhn publicly vowed to buy out the Oakland A’s mercurial owner Charlie O. Finley so that Major League Baseball could take over the hapless and financially strapped team and move it to New Orleans.
But Finley would not cooperate with Kuhn or sell the A’s. There would be at least one more season in Oakland—not that anyone in the Bay Area was lobbying hard for that outcome. With the San Francisco Giants suffering through recent lousy seasons as well—the Giants would soon average just 7,800 fans per game—baseball was on life support in the Bay Area.
Finley needed a savior, someone desperate enough to try to revive a broken-down team with an uncertain future. He needed someone who feared being away from a baseball dugout so much that even the oppressed, left-for-dead Oakland A’s looked appealing since the alternative was not managing at all.
Finley, who had fired the preceding year’s manager, Jim Marshall, called Billy and soon had a new manager. Billy’s annual salary on a two-year contract was $125,000, and Steinbrenner also gave Billy a lump sum of $150,000 to terminate his Yankees contract. Billy’s coaches were Art Fowler; Clete Boyer, the former Yankees third baseman; Lee Walls, his old teammate and drinking buddy in Cincinnati; and George Mitterwald, who played for Billy in Denver and Minnesota and coached for him in Texas.
“I could have probably waited for a better job to open up with a good club that got off to a bad start,” Billy said shortly after he donned the A’s brassy green-and-gold uniform for the first time. “One of those jobs will open in May or June this year, but if I sat around, it would have been awful. I already had a tough year last year. I couldn’t wait.”
He was coming home, and most everyone around him was certain that would be good for his equilibrium.
“The most relaxed and happy I saw him since he turned forty-five was when he came back to manage the A’s,” his sister Pat said, recalling 1980. “He knew what he could do. That was his kind of project.”
Said Augie Galan, his former mentor at James Kenney Park who was still living in Berkeley in 1980, “Some people around here said, ‘Poor Billy, it’s nice that he’s come back. But he’s stuck with a dog of a team.’ And I said to those people, ‘Just wait. You’ll see.’”
The 1979 Oakland A’s had the worst record in baseball, but the roster was not without talent. There were four durable starting pitchers under the age of twenty-eight. There was no bullpen to speak of, but Billy had a plan for that. The infield play was sketchy, but Billy thought the A’s were underutilizing an infielder on their roster who had been a Yankees farmhand, Mario Guerrero. Billy made him the starting shortstop. And he elevated Mickey Klutts, one of his favorites from the Yankees, who had been buried on the A’s bench. He had solid hitters at the corners with first baseman Dave Revering and third baseman Wayne Gross.
But the real stars of the team were the three young outfielders. In left field, Rickey Henderson, raised in Oakland, was in the second year of a Hall of Fame career. Under Billy’s tutelage, Henderson became the best leadoff hitter and base stealer in the history of Major League Baseball. He was also a stellar outfielder.
Center fielder Dwayne Murphy was a fleet defensive player who could hit for average, steal a base, hit-and-run, and, like Henderson, had a high on-base percentage. The two were tough outs, took a lot of pitches, and unnerved opposing pitchers. The final piece to the trio was right fielder Tony Armas, a prototypical right fielder who hit for power, had a strong arm, and was a clutch hitter with men in scoring position.
So how did the A’s lose so many games?
“We didn’t know how to win,” said Rickey Henderson. “All we knew was how to lose.”
There was more to it than that. The 1979 A’s had stolen 104 bases and had an on-base percentage of .302, which was the worst in the American League. In fact, the ’79 Oakland A’s were last in seven other categories: batting average, slugging percentage, total bases, hits, runs, doubles, and at-bats. They were second to last in home runs.
The pitching staff was last in hits and walks yielded and second to last in earned-run average.
Billy had his work cut out for him. There was a reason sportswriters had begun to call the team “the Triple-A’s” or “the Oakland Pathetics.”
But from the first day of spring training, Billy put in place a premeditated plan that was a little of his work in Denver, Minnesota, and the South Bronx. There were also some new strategies tailored to the 1980s, things that also suited the kinds of skills on the A’s roster. Billy was beginning his thirtieth season around Major League Baseball (with one season, 1970, out of the game). He was ready to utilize everything he had learned from his many and varied experiences.
But mostly he was going to teach the fledgling A’s the value of rattling an opponent, so that the opposing infielders, pitchers, and catchers were unsettled and unsure what the A’s might try next. He wanted to show them the possibilities and how they led to runs. And just as “Money Ball” rediscovered two decades later albeit in a different way, it was all about producing runs—any way you could.
It came to be called Billy Ball, and it may have been his best work as a manager given the lack of resources available to him and how little the community cared about the team initially.
It began, as it always did for Billy’s teams, in spring training. The first drills were about sliding with everyone in rubber pants. The next drills were about how to take a lead off first base, then second base, then third—especially third base. Billy told the A’s they were going to steal home at least seven or eight times in 1980.
They laughed. The twenty-eight Major League teams combined probably didn’t steal home eight times in 1979.
“You’re crazy, Billy,” Henderson said, giggling.
Answered the new manager, “Rick, you’ll steal home at least four times. And you’re going to break Ty Cobb’s American League record for stolen bases in a season.”
Henderson, a peculiar, inscrutable man whose crude language skills hid an astute knowledge of baseball, knew the record.
“That’s 96 bases, skip,” he said.
Said Billy, “We don’t stop until you’ve got at
least 100.”
Then Billy explained how to execute a double steal, and a triple steal.
A triple steal? Trust me, Billy said, it confuses and demoralizes the other team.
The tutoring was nonstop at the A’s spring training complex in Scottsdale, Arizona. The pitchers were retaught how to throw an inside brushback pitch, how to safely throw at a batter’s head on a suicide squeeze bunt attempt, and how to cover first base on a ground ball.
“I don’t care how else you already learned it,” Billy said. “Now you’re going to learn it the right way.”
The infielders learned bunt coverage and how to pull off the hidden-ball trick and were instructed to let throws from the outfield bounce on the infield dirt when there wasn’t a play on a base runner. Why let the ball bounce?
Because it might scar and dent the baseball, and Art Fowler was teaching his pitchers how to throw a scuff ball that broke down in the strike zone. Fowler also instructed his young charges in how to throw a spitball if they wanted to try it. The method went like this:
The pitcher vigorously rubbed the inside of his pant leg—right leg for right-hander, left leg for left-hander—with a bar of soap before the game. As the pitcher warmed up and began to sweat, a slimy but largely unnoticeable goo began to ooze through the pant leg, which the pitcher could easily access on the mound for the spitball. If an umpire suspected something, he would check a pitcher’s glove, cap, jersey, and sleeves for illegal substances, but he would not pat down the pitcher’s legs, especially the inside part of the leg.
So that the pitchers could learn all these tricks out of the media’s view, Billy had a mound and plate set up near his trailer, behind a fence that obscured what was going on. When reporters asked him about it, Billy said it was a conditioning area.
A brainwashing center might have been more accurate.
Overall, the A’s pitchers were getting an education in pitching from Fowler and Billy in multiple ways. The chief message was this: Walk more than two batters in an outing and you’re going to be doing a lot of running as punishment.
The A’s had led the AL with 654 walks in 1979. In 1980, they had 133 fewer walks. In fact, the pitching staff went from ranking at the back of the pack to ranking first in the league in several important categories, like earned-run average, earned runs yielded, and hits given up.
Billy also made it his personal project to raise the spirits of the twenty-four-year-old starter Matt Keough, who had a nasty array of pitches but also lost 15 straight starts in 1979. He finished with a 2–17 record and a 5.04 ERA.
“He just needs a manager who believes in him,” Billy said. “He’s a mixed-up kid who needs a father figure.”
The 1980 A’s, like many previously unsuccessful teams that absorbed and believed everything Billy said in spring training, started the season fast, winning seven of their first ten games and nine of the next fifteen games.
By late April, the A’s had already stolen home twice—and did it in the same inning. On May 3, they entertained the Detroit Tigers at home in Oakland. On the mound for the Tigers was their ace, Jack Morris, an intimidating, fierce right-hander who had won 17 games the season before.
When the A’s first base runner, the burly 220-pound Gross, reached third base, he broke for home as Morris began his wind-up on the first pitch to the next batter. As a right-hander, Morris saw Gross lumbering toward home—how could he miss him in that garish A’s uniform?—but the startled Morris rushed his throw home and threw so high that catcher Lance Parrish had to leap to catch it. Gross slid in safely.
In the next inning, with the bases loaded and two outs—surely not a stealing situation—Billy called a triple steal with the fleet Dwayne Murphy at third base.
This time Morris threw so high the ball went to the backstop. Murphy scored standing up, and his teammate Mitchell Page, running from second, scored as well.
Morris was so enraged, after he got the final out of the inning, he flung the baseball into center field where it bounded to the wall. Parrish did Morris one better, going into the dugout and destroying the water cooler with a bat, which caused a minor delay in the game when the Tigers’ dugout flooded and players were forced onto the field to escape the cascade of water.
Billy smiled under his black mustache, the one that would have been at home on either a riverboat gambler or a gunslinger. The A’s won the game, 5–3, and kept their hold on first place in the AL West. The word spread in the East Bay. Attendance at A’s games soon averaged more than twelve thousand fans, quadruple what the team was drawing in 1979.
People came to see what Billy would try next. With a runner on first base, he would call a hit-and-run but have the batter bunt instead of swing away. Why?
Because he would have the batter bunt toward the third baseman, and he had instructed the base runner not to stop at second base. A surprised shortstop would usually be too late trying to outrace the runner to third base for a throw.
“I can’t tell you how many times that worked,” Henderson said. “And the other team starts grousing and complaining. They’re half angry and half embarrassed. And we’re smiling. I tell you, it was fun. We felt like Billy knew something nobody else did.”
Billy also taught Henderson to score from second base on a routine infield ground ball.
“It’s about getting a good jump and watching to see if there’s an opening for it,” Henderson said, explaining the ploy. “Is the first baseman watching me? Can I surprise him by not stopping at third? Did the guy fielding the ball just lightly toss the ball over to first? That could give me extra time to score. I scored several runs that way.
“It took some guts to try it. But that wasn’t a problem. Billy never flinched. ‘Keep the pressure on,’ he’d say in the dugout.”
Billy’s family was delighted to be able to watch him at work whenever they wanted. And they attended regularly. The team photographer, Mike Zagaris, recalls standing near the A’s dugout before a game when a tiny old woman in the stands leaned over the railing and started screaming at him.
“Hey, photographer! Yeah, you, come over here,” the woman said.
Zagaris walked over.
“Where’s Billy?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, ma’am, probably in the clubhouse.”
“Well, tell that little cocksucker to come out here,” the woman said. “His mother is here to see him.”
His sisters Pat and Joanie remember going to the games and seeing the excitement that Billy Ball was generating.
“That was Bill at his best,” Pat Irvine said. “He had everything. He had it all.”
Heather Ervolino was a semipermanent visitor. Her relationship with Billy had evolved far beyond the dating stage. She was his regular girlfriend, and Billy and Heather talked about her moving to live with him in California.
But Heather, at least twenty-nine years Billy’s junior, worried about her mother, younger brother, and grandmother who would be left behind in the Bronx.
Without hesitation, Billy suggested that the entire family should come to the West Coast with Heather when the time came to do that.
In the summer of 1980, Billy also saw his daughter more regularly. Billy Joe came to visit. Off the field, Billy occasionally went to the showy bars of Oakland’s Jack London Square on the waterfront, but he usually didn’t stay long, choosing to do his drinking in less boisterous, peaceable joints where the bartenders and most of the clientele knew him well. He favored the same places over and over, most of them in the town of Danville in San Ramon Valley not far from the apartment he kept. His regular stop was the Danville Hotel, an old stagecoach stop that in 1980 was mostly just a bar. No one bothered him there.
On the road, it was another story.
The two prominent fights with Ray Hagar and Joe Cooper, who in every story was now simply called “the marshmallow salesman,” had permanently altered Billy’s reputation and legacy. Before those two bar incidents, he had been known as Battlin’ Billy, and he was noted for
his fights on the field. Yes, there had been other bar fights, but they were more obscure and years removed when the media coverage was less obtrusive.
Most significantly, he had not been the manager of the world champion Yankees when they occurred. A Twins manager punches out one of his players in a Detroit bar and it’s a one- or two-day story. But when the Yankees manager almost fights his best-known player on national television in the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park, then knocks out two other guys between seasons, those are stories with legs. That got the public’s attention forever.
Billy was suddenly as renowned for his fists in drunken brawls as he was for his managerial career. He was likely more famous for the former than for the latter. He had always likened himself to a desperado from the Wild West; now he was living that life.
In bars, he was a marked man. Every guy with a few beers in his belly who thought he was a pretty good barroom brawler wanted to test himself against the most famous saloon slugger in America.
Even outside of bars, everywhere he went, people seemed to make a remark about his temper and inclination to start duking it out.
“When I checked into our hotel the other day, a guy held up his hands and said, ‘Don’t hit me now,’” Billy told Dave Anderson of the New York Times in 1980. “I get that all the time now. Like I’m going around slugging people. But some guys are hoping I will. One night in New Jersey, four different guys in four different bars tried to goad me. I finally had to go home. It must have been a full moon.”
It would be this way for most of the rest of his life.
“I lived it a thousand times in a thousand places,” said his son, Billy Joe. “Even when we’d be sitting at a table eating dinner some guy would almost always come over. It starts sort of harmless. Most guys come up and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Martin, can I buy you a beer?’ And my dad would say, ‘That’s OK, pard, I’ve got one and we’re eating. But thank you.’
Billy Martin Page 44
