Quinn disagreed. Billy called George, who backed Quinn. Then, Slaught tried running before the game and told Billy he could not play. Billy again called Quinn, who declined to activate another player.
Billy ripped Quinn and Steinbrenner to reporters for making him play the Detroit games with only twenty-four able-bodied players when the Tigers had twenty-five on their roster.
That didn’t go over too well back in New York.
In the game that night, Winfield missed a game-winning home run by two inches, his long fly ball hitting near the top of the outfield wall in left field. The drive instead became a game-tying double. In the tenth inning, Billy brought on reliever Cecilio Guante, a right-hander who had been paired with Righetti as a closer. Guante had earned his keep for Billy with stellar late-inning relief. But Guante had also logged a lot of innings and been on the disabled list. In the tenth inning at Tiger Stadium, Tom Brookens took Guante deep, knocking a solo homer over the right-field fence to win the game, 2–1.
It was a nationally televised game, and the Yankees had fallen out of first place for the first time since early May. The next night, with Slaught still unused on the bench, the Yankees took a 6–1 lead into the ninth inning. When middle reliever Neil Allen gave up a single and a walk to lead off the ninth, this time Billy called on Righetti to close the game.
Righetti liked to pitch often, but he had not been in a game in six days. He quickly gave up a hit to load the bases, but then got two outs. Next, Righetti walked in two runs. Billy summoned Guante.
“You know those moments when you just feel like something is not right?” Boyer said years later. “That was one of those moments. Sitting in that dugout you just have this sick, uneasy feeling. In that series, there was just something eerie, something not right.”
Standing at first base, Mattingly thought about breaking the tension by going over to the mound to say something to Dominican-born Guante.
“But he didn’t speak a lot of English,” Mattingly said. “So I just got ready to play. I was reminding myself that we just needed one out.”
Detroit shortstop Alan Trammell was a six-time All-Star who was having one of his best seasons. He was thirty years old and in the prime of a twenty-year career. Trammell hit 185 home runs as a Tiger, but few of them were more stunning and majestic than the grand slam he launched at Tiger Stadium on June 21, 1988, when the home team scored six runs in the ninth inning to defeat the Yankees, 7–6.
Billy entered the clubhouse after the game and toppled the postgame food table, sending it somersaulting end over end. He went into his office, slammed the door, and did not come out until well after reporters had left the clubhouse. Several players hid out in the trainer’s room, which was off-limits to reporters. The tiny seventy-six-year-old visitors’ clubhouse in Tiger Stadium was funereal.
The next night, the Yankees lost on a tenth-inning single. They had lost three successive one-run games on the Tigers’ last at-bat.
Arriving in Detroit, the Yankees were beginning their seventh consecutive week in first place. Now they were 2.5 games back, albeit with about fifteen weeks left to play in the regular season.
But there was bad news all around. Henderson and Clark were hurt. Al Leiter, the prized rookie starter, had been put on the twenty-one-day disabled list with a finger blister. The bullpen was in shambles, unsteady and inefficient, with Billy being accused of mishandling that sector of the pitching staff. Steinbrenner was firing shots at Billy from afar again, complaining to reporters that a running and conditioning program he had ordered the Yankees pitchers to perform every other day during the season had been largely ignored.
Billy did not yet know about George’s comments—they would be in the next day’s newspapers—but leaving Detroit he tried to offer perspective and lift his team.
“This leaves you a little numb but we just need to go home and get a couple of wins,” he said in his office. “Every team has down periods. That’s why we built the big lead early to survive this. We don’t have to panic.
“This is June; it isn’t September. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Billy was packing a small bag for the trip home. A suit, dress shirt, and tie were draped on a hanger behind his desk. Outside, clubhouse workers were nosily filling trunks with bats, equipment, and clothes. A cargo truck had backed down the narrow aisle beneath the Tiger Stadium grandstand so the Yankees’ gear could be more easily hauled out of the clubhouse. From there, it would be taken to the airport so it could be placed in the hold of the Yankees’ charter jet.
The Yankees’ head clubhouse man, Nick Priore, came into Billy’s office. He needed Billy’s uniform to pack on the truck.
Billy peeled off his Yankees jersey and pants and handed them to Priore. The change of clothes was going quickly, and as reporters were leaving the room, Billy had started to button his dress shirt.
“Tomorrow is another day,” he said.
45
LOU PINIELLA WAS DRIVING south on the New York State Thruway from Albany, New York, where he was visiting the Yankees’ Class AA team. It was a sunny Thursday morning, one of the first days of summer. Piniella was planning a barbecue at his house in northern New Jersey. Then he would watch that night’s Yankees game against Cleveland on television.
Cell phones were still a few years in the future, but there were beepers, and Piniella got a message to call George Steinbrenner and Gene Michael. He stopped at a rest area. He called George first.
“George said he was moving Billy to an adviser again and he wanted me to take over managing the club,” Piniella said. “My first reaction was no, because I didn’t want to become someone who he hired and fired all the time. I had seen what it did to Billy.”
Piniella only said that he would think about it. But Steinbrenner said he needed an answer by early afternoon, if not sooner.
Piniella then dialed Michael, who was acting as a special scout and adviser to the Yankees.
“You’ve got to take the job,” Michael told his friend.
“Why? You’re the one who says that you’ll never manage for George again, why should I?” Piniella answered.
“Because he’s hiring Dallas Green if you don’t,” Michael replied. “Is that what you want? Look, Billy is gone, there’s nothing we can do about that. But this is a good team—a first-place team. They should win the division. If you come back, I’ll coach for you.”
Green had managed the Philadelphia Phillies to a 1980 World Series victory, but he was a loud, domineering presence and definitely a Yankees outsider. He was a career National Leaguer who would probably try to drastically remake the roster. And he would surely clash with Steinbrenner. Their partnership would likely be a calamity.
The best alternative seemed to be Piniella trying to manage for Steinbrenner again. Piniella called Steinbrenner back and accepted the job, although on the remainder of the drive home he twice pulled over to the side of the road and considered calling Steinbrenner back to renege on the deal. Piniella also was upset for Billy and thought George might be acting rashly.
“I just knew that Billy had to be devastated,” Piniella said. “It was always like a small death for him when he was separated from the Yankee job. Nothing else made him feel totally alive.”
Piniella went to his house in Allendale, New Jersey, but his wife was not at home. He left her a note because he had to get to Yankee Stadium for the pregame news conference announcing the fifteenth managerial change in Steinbrenner’s fifteen-year tenure.
The note left for Anita Piniella on the kitchen counter briefly summarized Piniella’s day: “Accepted Yankee manager job, left for stadium, see you tonight.”
Many years later, Piniella said he should have started the note: “Lost my mind . . . accepted Yankee manager’s job . . .”
Billy learned he was reassigned—fired in practical terms—by Steinbrenner for the fifth time via a phone call from Eddie Sapir, whom Steinbrenner had called. The conversation was brief. It was the ninth time Billy had l
ost a big-league managerial job.
“He did not see that one coming,” Jill said of Billy. “He never saw it coming at all. Billy was really shocked. George did things with spontaneity. He was a generous guy but an impatient one.”
At Yankee Stadium, the players seemed almost oblivious. Another season with more than one manager. Ho-hum.
Among Yankees fans, there was angst for Billy. The team, after all, had a 40–28 record, which was the fourth best in Major League Baseball. Billy’s legion of fans took to the airwaves of something new in New York—sports talk radio—and lamented their loss.
But the drumbeat of Billy’s 1980s transgressions, underscored by the beating he took at Lace and his ongoing issues with umpires, had irreparably altered the conversation about the most beloved Yankees manager in the team’s history to that point. His critics said he needed to seek treatment for alcoholism, and his supporters mostly worried for him.
Now he was gone again. Yankees fans hoped Piniella could turn the team around from its recent slump—or at least keep up the pace that had kept the Yankees close to a division title.
Neither would happen. The Yankees would not have a winning record again until 1993, when Billy’s protégé, Showalter, took over the club.
Jill said Billy did indeed take his firing hard. He blamed Steinbrenner, but unlike Yogi Berra, he could never completely turn his back on him. Berra stayed away for years; Billy remained drawn to Steinbrenner’s Yankees like a gnat to the light. He could not do without them.
Privately, Billy would rail against what he saw as the unfairness of it all. He hated that George controlled him like a puppet, and he found the firings demeaning. But ultimately, he justified them as the conditions of life around the modern Yankees. His Yankees.
And there was something else: he needed George to keep paying him. He needed the money. He also needed to stay in George’s good graces so he could come back and manage again. There was always going to be another time to manage the Yankees.
About a week after his firing, Billy and Jill escaped to upstate New York where some new acquaintances had been kind enough to offer guest quarters on their property. It would also give Jill and Billy more time to look for land and a home that could possibly be converted into a horse farm.
“Billy when he was fired would usually stay away from people for a while, just become kind of a homebody and not go out for a period of time,” Jill said. “We had places where he could go and fish. We were finding the place outside Binghamton and then rebuilding it. We had things to occupy our time.”
Billy came back to New York to meet with Steinbrenner at the Carlyle Hotel in early July. They talked for ninety minutes. Eddie Sapir attended the meeting, too.
Sapir recalled that Steinbrenner was remorseful (his Yankees had fallen farther from first place since Billy left). The Yankees’ owner gave Billy another raise.
“Billy was pretty down, but I remember leaving that meeting at the Carlyle and we were walking down Madison Avenue and a guy working on a scaffold looked down and called to Billy,” Sapir said. “The guy yelled, ‘Hey, Billy, we still love ya.’ Whenever Billy was down, all he had to do was walk around Manhattan because the people there never stopped rooting for him. He was one of them forever.”
While visits to New York City might have been restorative to his psyche, he retreated to upstate New York for refuge in the middle of the 1988 baseball season. Billy and Jill had found their sanctuary, or at least a version of it, in the Binghamton area.
Binghamton is a city of forty-seven thousand about 180 miles northwest of Yankee Stadium. Situated at the confluence of two major rivers, the Susquehanna and the Chenango, it was a transportation crossroads during the railroad era and is home to a large state university. Binghamton in 1988 was a blue-collar city with ties to its heyday as a manufacturing center.
The city, which sits in a bowl-like setting, is surrounded by rolling hills. It was on one of these steep hills, about thirteen miles east and north of Binghamton, that Billy and Jill bought their farm on Potter Hill Road. They paid a little more than $340,000 for about 150 acres, getting a mortgage from a local bank. The farm was on a bluff with sweeping westward views. It had a three-story, five-thousand-square-foot farmhouse that was all but gutted and remodeled in the next year. A barn was constructed near the main house, which was set back about six hundred feet from the road. It had the feel of an estate, with an ornamental stone entryway at the foot of the driveway that included an electronically controlled black iron gate with an intercom connected to the house.
The farmhouse had broad display windows and a large deck that looked out on a ten-acre pond that was rife with bass and trout. There was a large garden on one side of the house and apple trees a short walk away.
“Billy was not a farmer at heart, he was a city kid,” Jill said. “But the trips to Texas and Oklahoma and all those fishing and hunting outings had changed him over time. I remember being surprised when we first looked at that farm. We were walking down the driveway and Billy just stopped and said, ‘I want this.’”
The farm was rough around the edges with many dense, wooded sections, but it also had a vast network of trails and open fields. The land had potential for multiple uses.
Driving around on a golf cart he had brought to the property, Billy made friends with his new neighbors quickly, learning everyone’s name, occupation, and interests. He otherwise kept to himself, but he was available when someone needed an extra hand on a small project. He also donated to the local firehouse—a fire truck still has a plaque noting that it was the benefit of a donation by Billy. He went to the local Catholic church for Mass, made friends with the priests and parishioners, and donated to the local Catholic Youth Organization, which sponsored area youth sports.
“He was always so friendly; he fit in so well,” said Betty Jenks, who lived next door to Billy. “He was just one of us. He didn’t put on airs. The arguing or aggressive person they talk about on television and in the newspapers is different than the person I knew.”
It took months for the farmhouse renovations to be completed, and Billy and Jill lived in a nearby Comfort Inn while the biggest work was being done. Eventually, they moved in even as more work was being done, most of it to complete an extravagant, sumptuous, and profligate master bedroom suite that had a fireplace, hot tub, sauna, and, among other things, a twenty-four-karat-gold-plated urinal affixed to a bathroom wall. When Billy got up late at night to relieve himself, he was apparently notoriously inaccurate.
So a normal toilet would not do. The man used to bars and saloons made less of a mess with a urinal. The gold plating apparently added some dignity to an unusual household bathroom fixture.
Jill hired a local housewife, Mary Lynch, to help her around the house. For Lynch, who was in her twenties, it was the start of a three-year relationship. Lynch became a combination housecleaner, caretaker, valet, and aide-de-camp of Fenton’s most famous residents.
Jill, Lynch said, was detail oriented and a taskmaster—critical of the contractors and others she was doing business with in Billy’s sphere.
“Billy would spend the day tooling around on his tractor, and they had bought all these sheep, a ram, geese, and ducks,” Lynch said. “Billy wanted to be a farmer. He wanted to try that life. But Jill would spend her day in the house in an office just off the kitchen. She would be watching the stock market tables and on the telephone talking to people.
“She was smart; she was always reading manuals and architectural magazines. She was studying things. And if someone crossed her, she could cuss up a storm. But she could turn it on and off. She’d be on the phone in the office just reaming someone out—screaming into the phone. And then she would come out to the kitchen and be as sweet as could be. In a calm, pleasant voice she would say, ‘Hi, Mary, how are you?’”
Lynch saw how the roles in the household had developed. Jill had to take some control. Billy was carefree but highly irresponsible, too.
“The UPS
driver was coming to the house every day because Jill was ordering things for the house—or getting Victoria’s Secret lingerie delivered,” Lynch said. “And Jill or I would have to make sure we got to the driver before Billy did because Billy might tip him fifty bucks.
“Billy could be like a big kid. He loved to cook spaghetti sauce from scratch. But he’d leave it on the stove and walk down to the pond to fish. The burner on the stove would get hotter and hotter until the sauce would just explode out of the pan. I swear I was always up cleaning spaghetti sauce off the kitchen ceiling. He also loved Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream, which he would eat out of the container while watching TV. But he’d fall asleep watching TV while eating the ice cream and the whole container would melt into the living room couch. I’d have to clean that up, too.”
From Fenton, Billy kept in touch with his extended family in California and in Texas. But it was not an easy period for those friends and family now at an arm’s distance from Billy. They were upset and confused why he had invested in land in upstate New York. The family wanted him back in California, where he had periodically promised to return for good. According to Eddie Sapir and Billy’s children, Jill had made it difficult to get in touch with Billy. Calls to the Fenton house went unreturned. Letters and other missives went unanswered. Billy was hardly seen in California after 1987.
Kelly Ann told a story from that time period. She said Billy’s granddaughter hardly knew her famous grandfather.
“When people ask Evie what her grandfather does, she used to say that he kicks dirt on people,” Kelly Ann said. “Now she just says, ‘He gets fired.’”
Back home in Northern California, where the Blackhawk house had been returned to the Oakland A’s, there was not much else to say.
“That woman, that mean-spirited witch,” Pat Irvine said of Jill. “She cut him off from all of us.”
Billy Martin Page 57
