Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  While he had multiple endorsements, he also squandered the chance at a potential big one. The national department store chain Sears wanted to introduce a line of Billy Martin casual wear. It would be a lucrative deal. The top executives at Sears wanted to meet Billy beforehand, and they invited him to their headquarters, sending a private jet to whisk Billy and Sapir to Chicago for an evening dinner and a get-acquainted session.

  The Sears folks perhaps should not have stocked the jet with Scotch. Billy showed up drunk. The Sears officials canceled the deal.

  But there was more money rolling in from other sources, most of it from a long procession of public appearances and autograph-signing opportunities. The checks did not go through the proper tax channels. The IRS was already onto him. Billy never claimed he did not get the checks. He was not charged with fraud, just forgetfulness, a fault that cost him dearly (plus interest).

  In late 1981, the IRS informed Billy that he owed the federal government about $200,000 in back taxes.

  Billy, who never grasped the concept of saving his money, estimated that he had about $85,000 in his bank account. He was still supporting his two principal households: the Ervolinos in Blackhawk and Jill Guiver in Southern California. He also was giving his mother a monthly stipend. He paid for other expenses in his extended family and network of friends.

  Moreover, Billy’s bank account dwindled significantly just about every time he walked out the door.

  “He thought nothing of tipping 100 percent on a bill,” his son, Billy Joe, said. “He’d give money to people on the street. He’d go buy a cone at an ice cream stand, then on the spur of the moment decide to buy ice cream for everyone in line—like, maybe twenty people.

  “I was still just a teenager but even I thought, ‘Does he have to support the whole state of California?’”

  Oakland’s management continued to give Billy their unqualified support.

  Spring training opened, but some of the joie de vivre seemed to be missing. Billy was distracted by his money issues, his secret dual life continued to be more than a little stressful, and there was new, strong competition in the AL West because the California Angels had signed the winter’s biggest free agent, Reggie Jackson.

  In the World Series the previous fall, the Yankees, after winning the first two games, lost the next four games to the Dodgers. Reggie made a crucial error in the outfield that led to a decisive run in the pivotal fourth game when a line drive bounced off his forehead. It would be the last World Series appearance of Jackson’s career. The Yankees never tried to sign him after the season ended. Steinbrenner had decided to remake the team in the image of the 1981 Oakland A’s.

  “He’s going for speed,” Billy said that spring with a snicker. “Except he plays in a ballpark built for left-handed power hitters. You can’t just copy somebody and expect the same results.”

  The Yankees would end up having their first losing season since 1973.

  At the A’s spring training complex, Billy seem distracted. He sequestered himself for hours in a trailer he had situated behind the left-field fence. He insisted he was watching everything through the windows of the trailer, but his players felt a sense of abandonment.

  Billy’s languor about his own team was not easy to explain. Years later, Clete Boyer said he felt Billy was mostly preoccupied with his money woes, but he also said that Billy had health issues.

  “His stomach was bothering him and I know he stopped drinking for about two months because of that,” Boyer said. “No trips to the Pink Pony. He was losing weight and that kind of worried him, too.”

  In the late 1970s, Billy had suggested publicly that there was a spot on his liver, something that was never substantiated. (When he died, doctors said he was in near-perfect health for a sixty-one-year-old.)

  Boyer summed up the early months of 1982 this way: “Billy just wasn’t completely himself that spring.”

  Boyer added that he also thought Billy might have been missing the challenge of the previous seasons when the young A’s were so inexperienced and overlooked.

  “He had already schooled these guys,” Boyer said. “I just think he thought they would pick up where they left off in 1981.”

  But that did not happen, largely because the starting rotation was falling apart. The five-man rotation, called “The Five Aces” on a Sports Illustrated cover in 1981, was ailing and ineffective. Of the five, only McCatty had a winning record in 1982, and he was 6–3.

  Baseball historians have looked back and unequivocally come to an assessment: Billy and Art Fowler burned out an entire staff.

  It is the most prevalent theory about what happened in 1982 and the years beyond. And there is telling evidence to support the theory, like failed careers and sore arms. The statistical backing is damning. No one could win an argument at a modern baseball analytics conference trying to defend Billy’s handling of the Oakland pitchers. Billy certainly worried about winning in the present and not the future. Everything about his managerial style was about seizing an advantage now, not one or two years down the road. He had already been fired five times, so overtly or subconsciously he had to be worried about chasing as many wins as he could while he could.

  At the same time, each of the five pitchers from the 1980–81 Oakland A’s will steadfastly, even vehemently, refuse to say they were overworked or that the 1980–81 seasons led to their downfall. They will point out that many pitchers from their era pitched more innings than they did. Dozens of pitchers from the 1980s, including future Hall of Famers Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer, Bert Blyleven, Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan, Catfish Hunter, and Phil Niekro, pitched more than 320 innings in one season. The A’s starters averaged 251 innings in 1980.

  As McCatty has pointed out, the top three starters for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970—Palmer, Dave McNally, and Mike Cuellar—averaged 299 innings pitched that year. The Orioles were World Series champions, the only world championship that Earl Weaver won. As a group, Palmer, McNally, and Cuellar threw more than 250 innings in a season nineteen different times.

  The five 1980 A’s starters pitched an average of 18.6 complete games. The 1970 Orioles starters, all of whom had long careers, averaged 18 complete games.

  Is anyone disparaging Earl Weaver’s Hall of Fame credentials because he appears to have overworked pitchers throughout a seventeen-year managerial career?

  As Gene Michael said in 2013, “All the managers back then pitched their pitchers too often and for too many innings. They didn’t know better. No one did. Billy wasn’t any worse. He wasn’t any better.”

  Said McCatty, still immersed in the overworked pitcher debate as a current pitching coach for the Washington Nationals:

  The problems the 1980s Oakland pitchers developed had more to do with bad luck and poor medical science. Norris hurt his arm in 1982 after we got in a fight on the field. He lost some feeling in his right hand a couple of minutes after it happened. It was a nerve problem that started right then.

  Keough slipped on a wet mound in Baltimore—we shouldn’t even have been playing that day. He came off the field and said, “Something happened to my shoulder.” But instead of getting it checked out, he kept pitching. Billy didn’t make him ignore it. Matt just did it. Today, he would have gotten an MRI that day and shut it down.

  Langford one day felt something pop, just like that. I had a problem with my arm that took eight years to diagnose. Nowadays, it wouldn’t take that long. I had some hidden cartilage damage and a bone spur under a bicep. I tried to pitch through it.

  All that happened in one season, 1982. You can’t ruin all five of our arms that fast. That’s some weird, bad luck.

  None of the five regained their old form. After 1982, Norris battled drug addiction. Langford had elbow surgery.

  “I’d been throwing a baseball since I was six years old,” Langford said in 2012. “I threw 195 innings in 1981, which isn’t that many. I don’t think that caused it. It was part of a long process since I was a kid. Part of building it
up is breaking it down.”

  Keough lasted the longest, but he won a total of 20 games in seven seasons after 1982.

  “I don’t buy that Billy broke all our arms,” Keough said. “We didn’t do any conditioning or weight training. The medical advice was sketchy. It was a lack of knowledge that hurt us.”

  Kingman descended the fastest. He was out of baseball by 1984. He comes the closest to suggesting that Billy’s tactics cost him in the end.

  Kingman told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, “I never thought all the work hurt our arms, but history says maybe it did.”

  But McCatty is defiant.

  In the same Los Angeles Times article, McCatty said, “It was our own macho trip. We did it to ourselves.”

  In modern times, with pitch counts and a new world of exercise science, the manager—and the strength and conditioning coach, a position that did not exist in 1980–81—would not let five outstanding starting pitchers throw that many innings. Especially since the team would likely have had about $80 million in salaries wrapped up in those arms.

  But the early 1980s were a different era, borrowing much more from the middle of the twentieth century than the early part of the twenty-first century. In 1982, while Billy’s starters imploded, forty-one other pitchers in the Major Leagues threw 220 innings or more.

  By way of reference, in 2013, five Major League pitchers threw more than 220 innings.

  But the 1982 Oakland A’s, missing their Five Aces, went down fast. They were a .500 team for the first two months of the season, then started to slide. By the end of June, they had a 33–45 record and were 13.5 games behind the streaking Angels. It was a death march for the A’s from there.

  One highlight was the play of Rickey Henderson, who was on his way to becoming the most dangerous, complete player in the game. Henderson may have been the best overall player in baseball in the mid-1980s. He was an unmatched combination of power, speed, and cunning, a player with a tiny strike zone he knew well, and he had the ability to intimidate a whole team just with his presence on the bases.

  He had the perfect manager to maximize his talents.

  Said Dwayne Murphy, “Billy saw all the things Rickey was capable of doing, maybe even before Rickey really knew it.”

  Rickey, like Billy, had grown up poor in the East Bay. From the beginning Billy shepherded his young charge, taking him to dinner, buying him clothes, and arranging for the use of a new car.

  “A star like you shouldn’t drive a broken-down heap,” Billy told Henderson when he flipped him the keys to a gleaming red Ford Mustang. Billy had convinced a local car dealer to lease the car to the team.

  Said Henderson’s mother, Bobbie, “I think with Rickey, there was a trust factor there. Billy saw that Rickey’s career was going to take off and he knew what to teach him to get there. So Rickey could see what Billy was doing and they sort of had that bond. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that Rickey doesn’t think of Billy.”

  Henderson is an odd man. He tended to call other players by nicknames although his teammates were occasionally convinced he did this only because he never learned their names. John Olerud, a first baseman who wore a batting helmet in the field because of a brain aneurysm he suffered in college, played with Henderson as a New York Met in 1999. Olerud went to the Seattle Mariners the next season and in mid-2000, Henderson also signed with the Mariners.

  Approaching Olerud in the field during batting practice one day, Henderson asked Olerud if he always wore a helmet in the field. Olerud explained that he did.

  “We had a guy on the Mets last year who did that, too,” Henderson said.

  “Yeah, Rickey,” replied Olerud. “That was me.”

  Henderson had two stints with the A’s, and during his second tour with the team he earned a $1 million bonus at the end of the season. Months later, the A’s accountants were flummoxed as to why their books were off by $1 million. They discerned that Henderson had not cashed his bonus check.

  When the team asked him about it, he said he had instead framed the check and put it on a wall in his condominium.

  In 1982, Henderson set the record for stolen bases in one season with 130. There were not too many other highlights for the A’s that year.

  Late in the season, Billy asked for a loan from the team’s owners for his IRS debt, and they refused. A day later, the A’s lost a close game at home.

  Billy came into his office with Boyer and Fowler and locked the door. The three men then proceeded to destroy the office, tearing light fixtures off the wall and breaking up the furniture by slamming it against the walls. The players heard the commotion. No one dared to investigate.

  The noise abated, and after a few minutes, Billy, Boyer, and Fowler emerged. Left behind in the office were a pile of broken glass, a desk in pieces, and smashed chairs and tables. There were multiple punctures in the walls. The screen of the television set was kicked in, and the refrigerator looked as if it had been thumped multiple times with a baseball bat. There were no longer pictures hung on the walls.

  “It looked like a bomb had gone off in the office,” said Jackie Moore, an A’s assistant coach.

  Billy went to have a drink in the trainer’s room.

  “The A’s called me to come get him,” said Lew Figone, whom Oakland’s management had begun to value as a consigliere to their increasingly irrational field general. “Billy had just had it with all that was going on around him. But what has never been reported is that he also had a fight on the phone that day with that woman—Jill.”

  Like many of Billy’s friends—although not all—Figone detested Jill. Sitting in a bar with Billy, he would sometimes leave whenever she arrived.

  “Lew was a good guy to have around and a terrific influence on Billy,” said Vucinich. “He was there for Billy that day he trashed the office. He and Billy left and we started cleaning up.”

  The destruction took place after reporters had exited the clubhouse, so the goal was to rebuild the office by game time the next day. That way, in theory, no one would know what happened. (It got out anyway.) But first, Vucinich called construction contractors of all kinds—drywallers, furniture makers, appliance outlets—and had the office put back together.

  “That was some night, finding a new TV, a new refrigerator, a new desk, new wall outlets—heck, new walls,” Vucinich said, laughing about it thirty years later. “But we got it done.”

  As impressive as the rebuild was, Sandy Alderson and the A’s ownership began to believe that Billy was becoming seriously unhinged. They called Sapir the next day.

  “The A’s management at the time was a bunch of preppy guys—Cal-Berkeley guys and Ivy Leaguers,” Sapir said. “They felt embarrassed by Billy. First of all, they didn’t like the two girlfriends. They couldn’t live with that. They didn’t like some of the extreme behavior. They said to me, ‘We won’t find a better manager and the losing this year isn’t his fault but we have to consider a change. We just don’t feel good about all this.’”

  Vucinich recalled something Roy Eisenhardt, the club’s chief executive, said at the time.

  “Roy said, ‘I don’t worry about Billy from the first inning to the ninth inning, I worry about him from the end of the ninth inning to the first inning the next day,’” Vucinich said. “After Billy was cut loose, people said he lost the team, but that’s not true.

  “The team never stopped believing in him. He lost the support of management. He worried them. Obviously, he drank too much after games. I never saw Billy drink before a game or during a game. I never saw it affect his performance. But there was a lot of booze after games back then. It was a sign of the times. But management had lost its tolerance.”

  Billy, who was among the sports world’s worst losers, had helped push Oakland’s management to the decision. As his son, Billy Joe, said, “He was not a person that was happy going through the motions. That was hell for him. And you look at his career, he manufactured some of his own firings almost.

&n
bsp; “You could make the case that he had everything he wanted in Oakland. He had color back in his face. He even had a little gut. He was comfortable. That’s the problem. He didn’t want comfortable.”

  The A’s did not make a switch immediately. The season concluded with a 68–94 record for the A’s—the lowest winning percentage by far of any team that Billy guided for a full season. About three weeks later, on October 20, Oakland let Billy go with three years remaining on his contract.

  Billy was allowed to remain in the Blackhawk house, although he was supposed to buy it at the original asking price (he did not, once again showing his lack of financial acumen because the house would have been a fabulous real estate investment).

  Billy, meanwhile, was not too worried about what he would do next. George Steinbrenner had already floated the notion that Billy should come back to the Yankees. George had reached an all-time high, or low, for him in 1982 when he had three managers: Lemon, Michael, and the former Dodgers pitcher and frequent Yankees adviser Clyde King. The Yankees had finished in fifth place.

  But Billy did not run into George’s arms. Gabe Paul, then the Cleveland Indians’ general manager, was interested in Billy, too. Billy stalled.

  In November he went with Jill and Sapir to shoot another television commercial in Manhattan. At a nightclub party during the visit, a New York Daily News photographer spotted Billy and took a picture of him standing close to Jill.

  The next day, with Billy still perceived as the likely next Yankees manager, the photograph took up half a page in the Daily News. Billy was certain that Heather would hear about the photo from one of her many cousins, aunts, and uncles who still lived in the Bronx. He was furious.

  With the photo on newsstands across the city, Billy and Sapir ended up in a Blarney Stone bar, a chain of unsophisticated but popular Irish pubs that seemed to be in every Manhattan neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s.