“I looked at him and said, ‘That Scotch is lying to you, Billy. Why don’t you do me a favor and stay here.’”
Piniella and Monahan went to see Whitson, who was mostly unharmed physically. They were happy to hear that Kane had arranged for Whitson to go home.
As Piniella and Monahan were meeting with Whitson, Billy emerged from his room with a drink in his left hand. Across the hall, writers had gathered.
His speech was uneven, his gait unsteady.
“Go to the parking lot in five minutes,” Billy said defiantly. “You’ll see a guy get his ass kicked.”
Billy then retreated to his room and closed the door.
“After about an hour of friendly arguing, Billy agreed to go to the emergency room,” Monahan said. “They put his arm in a hard cast. Broken ulna.”
Billy returned to his room at about 4:00 a.m.
The next morning, most of the players, who had turned in before the scuffle, awoke to the news of the fight.
“I remember going to get breakfast and Dennis Rasmussen said to me, ‘Did you hear about Billy?’” Mattingly said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ Then Dennis said, ‘He had a big fight in the bar with Eddie Lee.’ And as much as you get used to anything around the Yankees, I was pretty surprised this time. And I immediately knew the clubhouse was going to be a zoo when I got there.”
The clubhouse was swarming with reporters and television camera crews. Billy arrived early for him, about two hours before the game. With his arm in a sling, he walked through the locker room toward his office. A Baltimore television reporter came alongside, stuck a microphone in his face, and asked, “What happened to your arm, Mr. Martin?”
Billy did not stop walking and deadpanned, “I hurt it bowling.”
In his office, he answered questions from the assembled media for about five minutes, but he refused to discuss the fight.
“Whatever happened, it’s over,” he said. “We’ve got a division to win. All I’m focused on is winning today and every day after that.”
Then Billy had the team’s press chief, Joe Safety, escort everyone out of the room except the eight traveling writers from the New York–area newspapers. Billy’s countenance changed. He smiled and was at ease.
He then talked about the fight like he was recounting a minor fray at Kenney Park back in West Berkeley. He did not seem angry. He was almost bemused.
“It figures that when I go over to try and stop a fight, I get in an even bigger one,” Billy said. “I was trying to break it up. That’s always how you get hurt.”
Knowing that several of the writers had witnessed the fight, he replayed sections of it, as if it had been something out of a game, and he asked, “Did you see when he kicked me?”
Billy did not mention Whitson by name nor did he criticize him. He only seemed upset that Whitson had used his legs in the brawl.
“I can’t fight feet,” he said.
It became like a scene from any other day in Billy’s office. He was funny, irreverent, politically incorrect. Asked if Whitson could still pitch for him, Billy answered, “I’ve always said I would play Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini if they could help me win. I don’t have to like them. If he can help us win the pennant, I’ll pitch him. And I’ll yank him from the mound, too, if he has to be yanked. But I’ll watch his feet.”
Everyone in the room laughed, Billy included.
Then Billy dressed for the game, pulling a long-sleeved undershirt over his cast. He remained in the dugout, sending a coach out to talk to starter Ron Guidry on occasion. When Rickey Henderson hit a third-inning home run, he met Henderson on the top step of the dugout and extended his left hand in congratulations.
The Yankees prevailed for Guidry’s twentieth win of the season and Billy was all smiles afterward. He deflected questions about the fight, as did most of the Yankees.
“It’s over; these things happen on teams,” Billy said. “I’ve had it happen before. You move on.”
Said one reporter, “But you’ve never had a fight where you ended up with the broken arm.”
Billy glared. It appeared as if he wanted to say something biting or spiteful. But he did not.
“Hey,” he said. “We’ve won two in a row.”
43
THE MONDAY AFTER THE three tumultuous days in Baltimore was an off day in the schedule for the Yankees. Alone at the Carlyle Hotel, Billy went for a walk and kept walking.
His destination he later claimed was an accident, but Billy walked about sixteen blocks south on Madison Avenue to 10 East 60th Street and stood outside the Copacabana nightclub. He had not been there in twenty-eight years. His last visit had made considerable news.
Billy walked into the Copa and was given a little tour. Shown the featured showroom of the nightclub, where Billy and his teammates had been seated at a large banquette table on his birthday in 1957, Billy looked around the room wistfully.
“Yeah, I remember this room,” he said.
He then went upstairs to the bar.
“I was just walking by,” Billy said when someone at the club tipped off a New York Post reporter about his visit. “I thought I’d just stop in and have a beer. I just wanted to see what it looked like.
“You know, long time ago.”
If Billy saw the symbolism of his nostalgic choice of bars less than two days after another barroom fracas had left his right arm in a cast and his future with the Yankees once again in doubt, he did not say so.
“I was thirsty and curious,” Billy said, which could have summed up a lot of his saloon stops.
The same day, Steinbrenner announced he was launching an investigation into the Cross Keys Inn fight. Eddie Sapir knew that he had to start getting testimony from witnesses who could prove that Billy did not start the fight. There were plenty of people willing to do that, including the young attorney from upstate New York, Dale Berra, and Gene Michael.
Sapir forwarded all that information to George, who eventually became convinced that Billy might not have meant to fight Whitson. Within a day, George announced that neither Billy nor Whitson would be suspended or punished in any way. What upset Steinbrenner most was that so many players had obviously been in the hotel bar well after midnight, the supposed curfew.
It was a classic reaction by George. He knew Billy might get in fights; that was a given. But if Billy wasn’t enforcing the discipline George wanted, well, that could be a firing offense.
As in past years, what did not come up was whether Billy needed to do anything about his drinking. The players certainly did not think it was their place.
“Back then, it was not a thought that crossed anyone’s mind,” Winfield said. “Having a manager who drank too much was not exactly unheard of, if you know what I mean.”
Roy White was working in the Yankees’ front office that season. He had been with the team since Billy’s first managerial gig in 1975.
“I never heard anyone talk to Billy about his drinking or late-night habits,” White said. “I didn’t have that kind of authority. I guess others did. He lost jobs but I don’t know that anyone felt the need to address why.”
In an ESPN documentary made after Billy’s death, Steinbrenner was asked if he had ever regretted not trying to counsel Billy about his drinking.
“I did feel that I had failed to a certain extent to turn him around,” Steinbrenner said. “But I couldn’t be with him every minute. I couldn’t convince him, I just couldn’t convince him.”
It was the story of Billy’s career. From the 1950s to the 1980s, few people in baseball were going to intervene about his drinking. It was the same way everywhere in baseball. On the New York Mets, two of the team’s biggest stars, Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, were about to throw away much of their outsize promise because of alcohol and illicit drug use. Most of the Mets in the mid-1980s drank heavily and caroused late into the night. From Keith Hernandez to David Cone, the Mets were proud of their wild ways and did nothing to disguise it.
This attitude cost many their careers. For others, it ruined marriages and family life. For a few, a lifestyle cultivated in the white-hot spotlight of baseball stardom—cocaine was a burgeoning problem in the game in the 1980s—became a fatal dependency. At the time, baseball, and baseball fans, looked the other way.
Suffice it to say, late in the 1985 baseball season, Billy’s risky drinking habits were not a hot topic of conversation. There was still a pennant race to follow with less than two weeks left to the season.
Then the Yankees lost a few more games to fall seven games behind Toronto. The 1985 Yankees were understandably given up for dead.
Whitson rejoined the team, and Billy told him that he would make his next scheduled start the following week.
Whitson, who watched games in the bullpen for the rest of the year, addressed reporters briefly outside the locker room.
“I’m here for one reason—to help the Yankees win the pennant,” he said in an even, somber voice.
Whitson has never addressed the Cross Keys Inn fight since. Contacted at his home in southern Ohio in 2012, he said he would talk about baseball in general.
“But I won’t talk about that man,” he said when asked about Billy. He later said he refuses to so much as speak Billy’s name.
The 1985 season resumed, amazingly, almost as if nothing had happened.
“I think we were so hardened to every other crazy thing by then that we really could put it away and try to focus on the baseball,” Mattingly said when he looked back at 1985. “We really could. And, you know what, it worked. That’s the thing.”
With virtually no one paying attention—the Yankee Stadium crowds had dwindled to about ten thousand—the Yankees won five successive games.
The Yankees then won five of their next eight games while Toronto lost five of eight. The Yankees had improbably climbed back into the AL East race and were three games behind the Blue Jays with the season-ending, three-game weekend series beginning in Toronto the next night.
Whitson would be the starting pitcher of the first game.
On the Yankees’ charter flight to Toronto that night, spirits were high—and being consumed generously. Billy and all the coaches broke the normal protocols and spent most of the flight standing and drinking together in the back of the plane with the players. The music was loud and the setting was convivial, more like a party than a voyage. There were no card games, just a team laughing and joking and excited that it somehow had something to play for after an eight-game September losing streak.
The Yankees’ jet did not land in Toronto until around 2:00 a.m. The team buses rolled down the wide Gardiner Expressway heading for downtown and passed close by Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium, where some of the lights were still on. Pointing through the bus windows, Billy rose in his seat and yelled in the bus, “Let’s beat those bastards three times and get on with it. Fuck them!”
There were cheers and there was laughter.
The mood the next night was much the same. The Yankees took a 2–0 lead and Whitson pitched four effective innings before he gave up two runs in the fifth. But Toronto seized the advantage and held a narrow 4–3 lead into the ninth inning. Toronto manager Bobby Cox brought in his best reliever, Tom Henke, who had a blazing 94-mile-an-hour fastball and whose nickname was “the Terminator.” Henke got the first two Yankees batters out easily in the ninth.
Wynegar walked to the plate before a standing, raucous sold-out home crowd eager to celebrate Toronto’s first division title.
“All I was thinking was don’t make the last out,” Wynegar said. “I didn’t want to be running off the field trying to get through their celebration.”
The New York writers had already filed their “Yankees lose the division” stories and were standing in the back row of the press box near the exit so they could get quickly to the locker room.
Wynegar, a switch hitter, turned on a Henke fastball on the inner half of the plate and drilled a game-tying homer over the right-field fence. The Yankees won in extra innings.
Now the Blue Jays’ lead was just two with two games remaining in the season.
“I can’t believe it,” Mattingly said. “It’s the team that won’t die.”
Billy bought everyone in the Yankees’ hotel bar in Toronto a round when he arrived there after the game. An hour later, he did it again. Several players were there. But everyone, including Billy, turned in just after midnight. It was not an accident. In the clubhouse after the game Billy had reminded his players that the owner would probably have spies planted at the hotel.
The next day was windy and raw, not good conditions for Joe Cowley, the Yankees starter who relied on a big, sweeping curve ball. Toronto lit up Cowley for three early home runs. Billy used five pitchers and eleven position players trying to find something to ignite his team. But the Yankees had only five base runners. This time, there was no miracle comeback.
“I’m glad we made it close,” Righetti said. “That shows something.”
Billy was having none of it.
“Second place in the standings leaves you with nothing,” he said.
After 1994, second place often left teams in the postseason as a wild card team and several of those teams have won the World Series. The 1985 Yankees would finish with a 97–64 record, the fourth-best record in baseball and six games better than the AL West–winning Kansas City Royals, who would win the 1985 World Series.
Following their 6–10 start to the season, the Yankees were 91–54 under Billy, a .628 winning percentage that was higher than that of any team in baseball that season. For the rest of the twentieth century, only one team would have a higher winning percentage.
Nearly thirty years later, Mattingly still thinks the 1985 Yankees are underappreciated.
“Our team scared other teams,” he said. “I remember we beat Kansas City something like eleven of twelve games that year. We just abused them. And they won the World Series.”
But the 1985 Yankees were heading home.
“It just leaves me empty,” Billy said. “You don’t know what to do next.”
There was the business of the final day of the season in Toronto. Niekro was once again going for his 300th victory, and he would mercifully get it. Leading 8–0 in the ninth inning, Niekro looked out at the Yankees’ bullpen and started laughing.
“Billy had gotten every pitcher off the bench to pretend to be warming up in case I couldn’t finish,” Niekro said. “I think some of the catchers and backup infielders were warming up too.”
When the game ended, the Yankees scattered as a cheerful bunch. Their manager may have had his arm in a cast from a fight with one of his pitchers. Their original manager may have been callously ditched after sixteen games. The owner was often criticizing the best players, and there was that ten-day period in September that was complete chaos, but the 1985 team nonetheless felt it was going places. Yankees fans rarely remember the 1985 team for how good it was, but the players on the team felt things were looking up.
“Look, it was an insane season,” Mattingly said decades later. “But we won 97 games. I mean, 97 games is an impressive number no matter what else happened. We felt like we needed another starting pitcher or two but we were on our way up. There was a lot of optimism.”
Billy felt the same way. In fact, he apparently felt too confident about where the team was heading. Before the final game of a season, it is customary for the manager to speak at length with reporters to give a summation of the season. Billy delivered a traditional end-of-the-year soliloquy and more. He shocked his pregame audience by demanding a raise.
“Earl Weaver is making $500,000,” said Billy, who was making about $265,000. “Sparky Anderson just got three more years and the guy in Cleveland, Pat Corrales, finished last and got a new contract. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m not putting any pressure on anybody, but it’s up to George.
“Managing the Yankees is special, but I have to take into consideration my responsibility to my family. I have to
have more money. I have to put that first for the first time in my life and put the Yankees second.”
Putting the Yankees second was not a customary thought, nor a rational one, when pleading for a raise. But Weaver’s salary filled Billy with envy and stoked his jealous nature, a feature of Billy’s personality that rarely needed stoking anyway.
“Something about Earl drove Billy nuts,” said Piniella, who had played for both men. “All you had to do was mention Earl and you could see the veins on Billy’s neck start to bulge.”
The 1985 Orioles barely had a .500 record under Weaver, and they finished fourteen games behind Billy’s Yankees, an outcome that Billy just happened to mention a couple of times.
As it turns out, Billy was also once again struggling with money woes. During the season, the IRS had put a lien on his salary for payment of back taxes. He also knew, even if he had not yet acknowledged it, that he was facing another possibly costly divorce.
But Billy’s salary demands were horribly ill timed, which was fitting in a sardonic sort of way. If nothing else, late in life Billy always seemed to lack good timing. In October 1985, Billy’s status with Steinbrenner was already considered tenuous. It was well known that George wanted Piniella to manage the club in the near future. Like Billy, the Yankees’ owner also did not think much about second-place finishes. It had now been four years since the Yankees had won the division, the longest drought since Steinbrenner had bought the team eleven years earlier. And there had been plenty of turmoil in Billy’s wake in 1985. As Billy was making a public, undiplomatic petition for a raise, he was still at least a month from getting the cast off an arm broken in a barroom brawl, and he had to be careful when standing up from a sitting position because his cracked ribs were still healing.
Incredibly, Billy had led the Yankees to a 97-win season, but given everything that happened, he was not bargaining from a position of power. Not surprisingly, Steinbrenner had little reaction to Billy’s demands.
Billy Martin Page 53
