In the middle of the fifth inning, Dave Winfield was warming up in center field, having a catch with the left fielder. When it came time to throw the baseball off the field to resume play, Winfield turned and faced a ball boy standing in foul territory. A seagull was standing between the two, about a hundred feet from Winfield.
Winfield, who had one of the strongest arms in baseball, threw a hard, low throw to the ball boy that took one hop and struck the seagull in the head.
“Pow!” said Jeff Torborg, a coach who had a perfect view from the Yankees’ bullpen. “Right in the head. The bird went pffft.”
Another ball boy ran onto the field with a towel and removed the dead gull. Winfield stood in center field with his cap held over his heart. It wasn’t clear whether he was clearly aggrieved or trying to be funny. But the Canadian fans were incensed. They began chanting obscenities about Winfield and throwing debris onto the field.
When the game ended, Winfield was met in the dugout by police, who charged him with cruelty to an animal. The seagull was also a protected species in Canada. Winfield was taken to a station house where he had to post a $500 bond.
The Yankees were trying to fly home, and the chartered aircraft had to wait forty minutes for Winfield.
With a grin, Billy said, “They obviously haven’t been watching him throw all year. That’s the first time he’s hit the cut-off man all year.”
With the Yankees and the American League lobbying the Toronto authorities, the charges were dropped two days later. Winfield said he was exonerated.
Fourteen days after that incident, on August 18, the Pine Tar Game resumed at Yankee Stadium. Once everyone was on the field, Billy told the umpiring crew chief, Dave Phillips, he wanted to appeal whether Brett had touched all the bases after his blast into the stands on July 24. And since it was a different umpiring crew overseeing the resumed game from the one that had overseen the original game, how could they verify that Brett had touched each base?
Good question. But someone had tipped off the league office to Billy’s thinking. The league had gotten all four umpires from the original game to sign an affidavit affirming that Brett had touched each of the bases. In front of Billy, Phillips pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket.
“I’ve got here an affidavit,” Phillips said.
“An affi-what?” Billy yelped.
“You’ll see, Billy,” Phillips said.
Billy read the paper on the Yankee Stadium diamond. His shoulders drooped. It had been twenty-five days since the Brett home run and the pine tar dispute. The game’s outcome, up in the air for weeks and an ongoing distraction, had come to haunt the Yankees. When Brett was originally called out on July 24, the Yankees were, however briefly, only one game out of the division lead and in a virtual tie for second place. Since then, they had won just twelve of twenty-five games, and when the Royals’ Dan Quisenberry set down the Yankees in order to earn the save in the resumed Pine Tar Game, the Yankees had fallen to fifth place, 3.5 games back.
The life had been drained from the season. The Pine Tar Game seemed to have some symbolism with the old mojo of the swaggering, late-1970s Yankees briefly resurrected as Billy plied his magic. It had been another electric moment in old Yankee Stadium.
Then someone pulled the plug. Victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat, then handed back to the original victors. The magic was gone.
On September 12, the Yankees were only five games behind Baltimore and had a double-header with the Orioles in the Bronx. The Yankees lost both games. The stars of the games were former Yankees minor leaguers, catcher Rick Dempsey and bullpen closer Tippy Martinez. Both were traded by the Yankees in mid-1976 for veteran pitching to shore up the Yankees’ pennant drive. By 1983, none of the players acquired in that trade were still on the Yankees’ roster. The Yankees were aging as their younger American League rivals were maturing.
“The 1983 team was kind of a transition team,” Ron Guidry said. “We had good players but the mix was off. There was kind of a disconnect. And there were more players on that roster who had problems with Billy than in the previous years.
“And frankly, Billy was having more problems off the field than before. He had a lot going on.”
The Yankees finished 91–71, which in most modern-day baseball circles would be cause for at least modest celebration. But 20 games over .500 did not get you much in the 1983 AL East. If there had been a wild card playoff format, the Yankees once again would have made the playoffs—more than 80 percent of the teams Billy managed in his career to the end of a season would have been playoff teams if the wild card format had been in place for those seasons.
But 1983 was viewed by Yankees fans as a failed, subpar season, even though the 1983 Yankees had a better record than nine of the next ten Yankees teams (and the one that had a better record, in 1985, was also a Billy-managed team).
The roster was about to get a total makeover with more than a dozen players jettisoned.
On December 16, citing a need for change, Steinbrenner replaced Billy as manager with Yogi Berra. Steinbrenner made it a point to say that Billy was not fired.
“I don’t like to talk about firing managers,” George said. “I’m shifting people in everyone’s interest: Billy’s, Yogi’s, mine.”
It was the eleventh managerial change in George’s eleven years as Yankees owner. Billy had four years remaining on a $2 million contract. Billy was promptly named an adviser for trades and personnel, although he was allowed to pursue other managerial jobs if he chose to (something he did not do).
Billy’s legion of fans were saddened by his exit, but there was not the wailing and riotous tumult of Billy’s first departure in 1978, nor was there the noticeable if more measured backlash when he left after the marshmallow salesman fight in 1979.
The 1983 season had ended with a whimper. It was hard for fans to get too riled up about anything.
Billy receded into the background, awaiting his longest layoff from the dugout since 1970.
Around Christmastime, there were reports that Billy was hospitalized in Minnesota at the Mayo Clinic. One news report stated that Billy could have cancer.
On January 11, back for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic, Billy met with a local wire service reporter.
“I do not have cancer,” Billy said, adding in an unsolicited comment that he had not sipped a drop of hard liquor in six months.
He had lost about fifteen pounds because of surgery to remove bleeding hemorrhoids. He had indeed, according to his friends, stopped drinking altogether except for the occasional beer or wine. He said he was disheartened about losing the Yankees managerial job, but not despondent.
“I’m not going to lie,” Billy said. “I love managing, it’s like living and breathing for me.”
But he said he was ready to take a step back.
“I’m very content with the way George has handled everything in a true Yankee manner,” he said. “I hope in the near future I can be of assistance to him and to the Yankees in any way.”
Billy then used a simile, saying that he was going to spend some time in repose—like a man sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch.
“I haven’t done anything like that for quite a while,” he said. “I’m going to see what that feels like.”
40
BILLY MAY NOT HAVE settled into a rocking chair somewhere, but he did stay out of sight. There would be only one day in 1984, and one episode, when Billy made any kind of news. But the incident, and the coverage of it, did not help convey an image of someone peaceably sitting on a front porch.
More to the point, it contributed to the pattern of worrisome behavior, a trend that stained his public image and continued to taint his public persona. It began in mid-April, when Jill Guiver flew home from Seattle, where the Yankees had played a series. She had been with Billy, who was scouting the team for Steinbrenner. On the plane she saw the wife of a Yankees player, whose name Jill chooses not to reveal.
The player�
��s wife had not seen Jill in Seattle, and spotting her on the flight, she approached and asked, “So what are you doing now that Billy’s married?”
“I was so mortified and embarrassed,” Jill said in 2013 at her Massachusetts horse farm. She insisted that she had not known of Billy’s marriage to Heather until that moment.
Jill continued, “Being in love, you’re hurt. I thought, ‘What have I been doing with my life?’ Certain things started to click, like some things that had happened over the last year. Now they all made sense. It’s like these tumblers click in your head. But I hadn’t put it all together before. I mean, he had hid it from almost everyone. The Yankee players didn’t know. Lots of people didn’t know.”
Others in Billy’s community of friends, many of whom despised Jill, find it hard to believe that Jill didn’t know of the marriage. Maybe she did not know of it right after the wedding, they say, but she learned of it certainly within a year. They say it is revisionist history.
“She knew what was going on,” said Lew Figone.
Eddie Sapir: “Of course she did. Jill was very smart and shrewd.”
Billy’s good friend Mickey Morabito, however, was not so sure.
“That whole time was hard to figure out,” he said. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know who knew what.”
But Jill’s memory is clear.
“I called Billy and told him what I now knew—and I was going fairly berserk,” she said. “Then I went and stayed with friends because I didn’t want to be seen. Billy was calling my house in Newport Beach nonstop. Remember, there were no cell phones then and Billy didn’t know where I was.
“But eventually I came back to Newport Beach and he was waiting for me there at the doorstep. He was very passionate and certainly very truthful when it all came out. But I was so angry.”
Jill said she took what clothes and belongings Billy had left at the Newport Beach home and threw them on the front lawn.
“As any woman would have and should have,” she said. “And we started having a terrible, screaming argument. We made a terrible racket and the police came and arrested him.
“The story that people later wrote said that we were fighting over a horse of mine that I wanted a new trailer for. But that’s false. It was not a fight over a horse. It was because I found out he was married.”
The Associated Press filed a story about the incident, quoting a Newport Beach police investigator who said Billy was arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Billy spent four hours in a jail cell and was released on $100 bond at about 4:00 a.m. In the AP story, the investigator said Jill and Billy argued over a horse.
The New York Times published the Associated Press story with the headline MARTIN JAILED AS DRUNK.
In the city’s tabloid newspapers, it was not back-page news—Billy was the ex-manager—but there were conspicuous stories. The charges were dropped soon afterward, and the incident was Billy’s doing, as were most of his public transgressions. But the effect and consequences this time seemed to be more lasting. The “drunk” headlines, when added to his other high-profile, recent barroom episodes, were all part of the ongoing denigration of his reputation in the 1980s.
The Hagar fight, the Miller Lite commercials, the suspensions for arguing with umpires, the Pine Tar Game fiasco, the marshmallow salesman, the outburst against a New York Times researcher, and the tirade against the New York Post’s Henry Hecht were all adding up. Now, he was drunk and disorderly in California. The headlines this time had a more acerbic tone. The media had a field day with Billy, and many of those reporters and commentators soured on him for good.
Many members of the media were now from a younger generation, and they came to their jobs with different attitudes and sensibilities from the writers raised in the 1950s. The previous generation of scribes was brought up in another era when mischievous Rat Pack–like stars were celebrated for their alcohol-fueled roguishness. These writers had also known and esteemed Billy as a prominent player and leader on the country’s best-known athletic team. He was Casey’s boy who had been a miracle-working manager in Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas. Those writers had perhaps been charmed by Billy in face-to-face meetings in less threatening settings and found him flawed but engaging.
Their stories usually reflected at least an arm’s-length appreciation of Billy, and their opinions of him often seemed mixed with an empathy for a complicated if imperfect soul.
The next generation of writers tended to look at Billy with more scorn. He was the guy who disrespected umpires, was frequently suspended, and had a penchant for being where alcohol and fistfights occurred—so much so it was a source of parody on TV. For many of them, it was not a picture that they found intriguing or amusing. Billy still charmed many columnists and announcers. He had friends in high places—national broadcasters like Howard Cosell, Joe Garagiola, Curt Gowdy, and Bob Uecker were vocal Billy supporters.
But the tenor of the criticism of Billy, especially in the nation’s newspapers, unmistakably changed in the mid-1980s. Billy remained popular with fans, but for the rest of his life he regularly encountered a sector of the media whose opinions had primarily been shaped by the police blotter notices of Billy’s conduct. They knew what they thought of him before they met him—if they ever met him. Who could blame them for their viewpoint given the mounting misbehavior, but it was evident in their writing that Billy was someone to distrust or avoid. This segment of the media did not see him as endearingly imperfect and oddly productive. They were either wary of Billy or repulsed by him.
On the most palpable level, the Newport Beach incident added up to nothing except that it became another discredit easily resurrected—one that fit a developing caricature.
In the timeline of Billy’s life, however, the confrontation in Newport Beach became a turning point. Soon after, Billy and Jill reconciled.
“It was a terrible time we went through,” Jill said. “And people, of course, have asked me why I didn’t leave him then.
“But when you think about it, he was all I had. He was who I was in love with. He promised me that he would make it good—that we would be together. He was going to leave Heather.
“He said he would be with me and take care of me for the rest of my life. And he did.”
In the New York baseball community, Billy remained an afterthought. There were bigger issues, like the Yankees’ awful record in 1984. Detroit was running away with the AL East and on their way to a World Series victory. Steinbrenner strangely withdrew from the public eye. He told associates the season was lost. The Yankees finished in third place. On the final day of the 1984 season, eight Yankees expressed their displeasure with how they were being used or being treated by Berra. That’s when Steinbrenner came out of hiding. He wasn’t happy either.
“I don’t know where to rate Yogi as a manager,” Steinbrenner told the beat writers. “In spring training, I didn’t feel we were ready but my baseball people assured me we’d be ready when the gong rang. They were wrong. I’m not letting that happen again.”
Most telling, and Steinbrenner mentioned it to reporters, the Yankees’ home attendance dropped by nearly 450,000 fans from 1983 to 1984.
Billy’s life away from the field was going through yet another transition. He was distancing himself from Heather. He went home to Blackhawk after the regular season and spent time in the Bay Area. Morabito recalls going to lunch with Billy and Heather at Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. But it was one of the last times Morabito saw Heather and Billy together.
According to news reports about the divorce proceedings filed about a year later, there was no final act that spurred the separation. Depending on whose side of the story you want to believe, the trigger was the Newport Beach episode or it was something more complex, a falling-out that evolved over months if not years. But it is indisputable that there was no decisive moment that signaled the end of Billy’s marriage with Heather. It ended in a series of lawyer
s’ offices.
It was not a competition, but to Billy’s friends and family, Jill had won in the love triangle. She would remain at his side for the next five years, omnipresent and in command of many aspects of Billy’s life. They did not marry until January 1988, but long before that Jill had taken control of Billy’s finances, hatched a new marketing plan for him, and, for a little while, gotten him to stop drinking completely. As Billy and Jill grew closer, several of Billy’s best and oldest pals—Eddie Sapir and Lew Figone among them—felt pushed away and stepped into the shadows of his life. Some but not all severed their ties with Billy, feeling that Billy, or Jill, wanted the relationship to end.
“Yeah, I know, I became that woman who took the great guy away from everyone,” Jill said in 2013. “All those people hate me for that. In any new relationship, in the newness, both parties spend more intense time together and other people feel left out or feel eliminated. Isn’t that common in a new relationship?
“So it happened with us. That’s how it works. But Billy had a lot of people in his life and he was used to doing a lot of different things, not all of them good for him.”
Jill did not approve of all the outings and junkets and the time spent with his buddies drinking. She was not fond of the hunting trips.
“I didn’t like the killing of animals,” she said. “So, yes, my presence probably kept him from some trips and outings. But all I cared about was the time I had with him. He was a wild and crazy guy, but we had a blast. He was a busy guy and he wanted me to be with him. So, yes, we were together a lot and some people went the other way.”
At baseball’s winter meetings that December, Billy convinced the Yankees’ brain trust to trade for Rickey Henderson. The Yankees sent Oakland several young pitchers, including José Rijo, who ended up winning 116 Major League games. But now the Yankees had the game’s best leadoff hitter, which made for a fearsome top of the lineup. Batting behind Henderson would be Randolph, Mattingly, Winfield, and Baylor. A young power-hitting third baseman and a Billy protégé, Mike Pagliarulo, would hit next.
Billy Martin Page 49
