Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Jill recalled that she and other family members got into a limousine behind the hearse. The radio was on.

  “That Clint Black song, ‘I’m Leaving Here a Better Man,’ came on the radio which seemed like fate,” she said. “We just jacked it up to all levels. It was so appropriate.

  “I remember that all along the streets, there were so many people on the curb. It went on like that for block after block.”

  The motorcade rolled past Yankee Stadium where the marquee outside the huge ballpark read: BILLY MARTIN, ALWAYS NUMBER ONE.

  The Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, about twenty-five miles northeast of New York City, was built by the trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1917. Its 260 acres are home to the gravesites of many famous New Yorkers, but none better known than Babe Ruth.

  The day after Billy died, the Yankees called the cemetery. The cemetery said it had a plot available about thirty yards from Ruth’s final resting place.

  It was a flat spot not far from the cemetery access road with a tree nearby that offered ample shade. Billy’s funeral procession stopped just below the area. The walk to the gravesite was short. Huddled against the cold and wind, Billy’s closest friends and family, his pallbearers, and many of his former players gathered for a brief graveside service. The congregation was led in two quiet prayers.

  “Everyone was kind of leaning on each other,” Jill recalled. “We were bracing against the cold and the sorrow.”

  The service lasted no more than ten minutes. The Gate of Heaven workers on duty—gravediggers, landscapers, office workers, and clerics—stopped what they were doing and assembled near the gravesite, watching from a respectful distance. There were final goodbyes beside Billy’s casket, and then the funeral procession began its return trip to Manhattan. From there, the mourners scattered; many of the ballplayers attended a private reception at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant across from Central Park. Jill remained with her family, who had arrived en masse from California. A day later, she returned to Fenton, where she spent a somber New Year’s Eve at the farmhouse.

  Soon, it was a new year and a new decade, the last of the century. The page had turned. The festive ceremonies on opening day of the Yankees’ 1990 season were interrupted for a moment of silence in Billy’s honor. The players also wore a black armband on their uniforms to commemorate Billy.

  On June 6, Bucky Dent was fired.

  By then, a handsome gray headstone commissioned by George Steinbrenner had appeared next to Billy’s grave.

  At its base, the tombstone has one long, horizontal rectangular piece bisected by a vertical piece of granite about five feet in height. The center of the vertical stone is inscribed with large block letters:

  MARTIN

  Below that, in smaller writing, it reads:

  ALFRED MANUEL

  “BILLY”

  MAY 16, 1928—DECEMBER 25, 1989

  Both ends of the horizontal piece of the headstone are decorated with carved cutouts of the number 1. There is a sculpture of St. Jude at the left end of the stone. On the right, there is a quotation:

  I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform but I was the proudest.

  Andrew Nagle, the associate director of the trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, oversees the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. A lifelong Yankees fan who grew up in the South Bronx, Nagle said a steady stream of fans make their way to Billy’s grave every year and have done so nonstop since 1989.

  “His grave gets the same attention year after year,” Nagle said. “It has never slowed. Sometimes, it’s a sixty-five-year-old guy showing the grave to his thirty-five-year-old son, and sometimes it’s a bunch of out-of-town Yankees fans who come here before they go to a game at Yankee Stadium. But they always drive up here. The attention never stops.

  “And everyone wants to take a picture next to the ‘proudest Yankee’ quote. I’m told Billy said that when they retired his number at Yankee Stadium. People just love that quote.”

  Frequently, visitors leave things at the grave, little tributes to celebrate their memories of Billy.

  “It might be an old Billy Martin baseball card or a picture of Billy,” Nagle said. “Or a baseball bat, a poster, or anything with a Yankees logo. People want to leave some acknowledgment of what he meant to them. Most of all, they leave baseballs.”

  The most popular inscription on the baseballs left behind is “Billy Ball.”

  One day in 2013, workers passing Billy’s grave found another baseball. There was a small piece of paper beneath it. In the uneven, shaky penmanship of a child, it read:

  Hi Mr. Martin, my team has a tournament this weekend—wish us luck. My Dad says you are his favorite Yankee ever.

  The tokens left behind do not surprise Nagle.

  “We don’t let go of the people that touched us,” Nagle said. “We see that all the time in a cemetery. It’s why people come to a grave. It’s the same with Billy Martin.

  “People won’t let him go. They won’t forget him.”

  Epilogue

  THROUGH THE 2014 BASEBALL season, there were twenty-two managers in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Billy Martin is not one of them. As a manager, Billy has a higher winning percentage than thirteen of the Hall of Fame managers, including Tony La Russa, Tommy Lasorda, Casey Stengel, Sparky Anderson, Whitey Herzog, Dick Williams, and Joe Torre.

  Three other Hall of Fame managers—Bobby Cox, Walter Alston, and Miller Huggins—had winning percentages that were no more than .005 higher than Billy’s career winning percentage of .553.

  But, clearly, induction into the Hall of Fame is predicated on more than winning percentage, as it should be. The number of championships won is a factor, and Billy won one World Series.

  Four other managers in the Hall of Fame—Herzog, Cox, Earl Weaver, and Leo Durocher—also won only a single World Series. Another Hall of Fame manager, Al Lopez, never won the World Series at all.

  As a thirty-year member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, which is the principal voting group that determines who is inducted into the Hall of Fame, I have been a party to the debates about Hall of Fame worthiness for decades. There are infrequent times when the voting verdict is incontrovertible. There are usually a myriad of contributing considerations and side issues to weigh. In Billy’s case, there is at least one that might be significant when assessing his record.

  Unlike Lasorda, La Russa, Torre, Anderson, Cox, and Herzog, Billy never managed in the era of wild card playoff teams. In Billy’s sixteen years as a manager, five of his teams went to the playoffs. If the modern wild card format had been in effect when Billy was managing, six more of his teams would have qualified for the postseason, which would have given him six more chances to win another World Series.

  These statistics could make a case for Billy’s induction into the Hall of Fame, and two of the recent managerial inductees—La Russa and Cox—are steadfast in their support of Billy’s candidacy. But statistics ignore the obvious reason Billy is not in baseball’s most august and honored fraternity. As much as Billy is known for winning teams, as much as he is without peer for his almost magical ability to resurrect dormant teams, Billy is probably best known for getting in drunken barroom brawls, warring with his bosses, and kicking dirt on umpires. And, especially late in life, Billy had a serious drinking problem.

  Those are not the usual Hall of Fame credentials.

  Even if many of the managers now in the Hall of Fame drank heavily, got in off-the-field fistfights, and mercilessly kicked dirt on umpires, those transgressions did not stick to those managers the way Billy’s missteps stuck to him.

  There is no one to blame for that. More so than his contemporaries, Billy treated his life as an open book. He hid nothing. He let his excesses or his most indecorous habits be known.

  He knew nothing of public relations and did not care to learn about it. And for most of his life, in pivotal times, he had a problem controlling his temper.

  For a public
figure, it is not the best combination.

  Alcoholism is an insidious disease, and it clearly brought turmoil to Billy’s later life. It took a terrible toll on him physically, cost him jobs, brought stress to his personal affairs—not to mention to those around him. In the end, it likely contributed to his Christmas Day demise.

  More than a quarter-century later, it is easy to surmise that Billy’s drinking problem would be treated very differently now. Ours is a culture in which public figures freely and unashamedly admit to needing help for a drinking habit that has spiraled out of control. Friends and families often intervene to ease the transition to a nondrinking life. Professional counseling is available in virtually every town in America, and there is no stigma to asking for help.

  Little of that was readily available to Billy in his times. Moreover, he was immersed in a very different culture—both society-wide and in baseball—one that largely looked the other way when it came to drinking in excess.

  “It was as if alcoholism did not exist back then—certainly not in baseball,” said Marty Appel, the Yankees’ public relations chief and broadcast executive in the 1970s and 1980s who spent countless hours at Billy’s side. “Baseball almost encouraged drinking, with the long hours after games and all the travel on the road. It was like the manly thing to do.

  “I never once heard anyone say a word about how Billy might need help with his drinking. No one ever said anything to his face either. If Billy was tipsy—and he wouldn’t be the only one when that happened—people just smiled and winked.”

  Which leads to a fascinating thought: What if Billy Martin had been born in 1948 instead of 1928?

  His might have been an entirely different story. There is no guarantee that he would have addressed his drinking problem, but it seems far more likely that he would have been comfortable seeking help, which is an essential, elemental first step. Perhaps, then, he would still be here to tell us his story.

  But that is not what happened. The baseball genius who developed before a captivated, charmed national audience was indeed flawed on many levels. People loved him anyway. People may have loved him more because of his imperfections. They made him seem familiar, which is to say, one of us.

  Then and now, acknowledging that Billy had faults should not obscure the complete picture of an engaging, dynamic, memorable life full of accomplishment. Sadly, losses and devastating personal failures were part of Billy’s story. Happily, they were far from the whole story.

  And what a story it was.

  Acknowledgments

  NO BOOK HAPPENS BY accident. It takes a few breaks and a lot of help from others.

  To that end, in the roughly thirty months I was working on this book, people often asked me how I came up with the idea. I told them I always had the idea, I just didn’t know it.

  In 2011, at lunch with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Susan Canavan, with whom I had worked on a previous book, I somehow started telling Billy Martin stories. It was a habit whenever someone asked about the most fascinating people I had covered.

  “Billy Martin would make a great book,” Susan said.

  So the first thank-you goes to Susan, and it is a big one. Susan also shepherded the manuscript through the many months and was a wise eye during revisions and amendments. Susan always remained the book’s biggest ally.

  My agent, Scott Waxman, knew how to keep things moving, too, and was always there with his counsel and expertise.

  Within weeks of beginning this project I reached out to Billy Martin’s family and closest friends. Part of me expected them to be weary of explaining a complicated personality like Billy Martin—especially after all these years. Instead, Billy’s family was welcoming and forever helpful, most notably Billy’s only son, Billy Martin Jr., who was the go-to guy who opened countless doors for me.

  Gretchen Creswell, Billy’s wife of nearly twenty years, was also immensely accommodating and gracious and as a witness to decades of Billy’s life was an invaluable resource. In fact, I was in touch with each of Billy’s four wives, which was an illuminating experience and something that, to my knowledge, no other journalist or biographer has done for an article or a book.

  Those interviews included several with Billy’s widow, Jilluann Martin-Valliere, who has not spoken to reporters for roughly a quarter-century. My thanks to Jill for trusting me with her recollections of life with Billy, for her plainspoken willingness to elucidate her perspective, and for her memories of the final stages of Billy’s life.

  Other members of Billy’s family and his friends from childhood were amazingly perspicacious, especially his sister Pat Irvine, cousins Mario and Nick DeGennaro, and Billy’s lifelong friend Lew Figone. Many of the West Berkeley Boys are alive and well, too, and while they might not be marching up and down the East Bay hills to annoy the Goats any longer, they are still great company and raconteurs.

  The same goes for Billy’s many 1950s teammates and the players who played under him from Minnesota to Detroit to Texas to New York to Oakland and back to New York.

  Not long after I began this project, I headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame’s president, Jeff Idelson, gave me a big boost early in my research, handing over many contact numbers and doling out some interview advice. The Hall of Fame library and its voluminous files were a significant asset. Thanks to John Horne for his help with the photo archives. I hope the greater baseball community knows what a priceless resource and treasure the Baseball Hall of Fame is.

  At the same time, I can’t imagine writing a historical baseball book without websites like baseball-reference.com and retrosheet.org. The latter is almost like sorcerer’s magic when it comes to uncovering the smallest details of games from half a century ago.

  I also want to thank my buddies on the baseball beat from the mid- to late 1980s and beyond—Michael Kay, Bob Klapisch, Moss Klein, Bill Madden, Michael Martinez, the late, great Mike McAlary, Marty Noble, Tom Pedulla, Claire Smith, and Tom Verducci.

  If we did not realize we were living through historic times, it was only because we were too busy having fun.

  I am indebted to the many journalists who so scrupulously documented Billy’s career and life day after day. This went on from the 1940s to the 1980s. Somewhere in the middle of that span, Murray Chass must have written nearly a thousand articles about Billy (and I read them all). The same is true for Phil Pepe, Steve Jacobsen, Dave Anderson, and, years earlier, Milton Richman, Leonard Koppett, and John Drebinger, who somehow covered 203 consecutive World Series games from 1929 to 1963.

  At the New York Times, Tom Jolly, Jason Stallman, and Jay Schrieber have helped guide my career in abundant ways and made me be a better reporter and writer. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I benefited from the ever-thorough copy editor Barbara Wood, publicist Laura Gianino, the intrepid Chesalon Piccione, and executive manuscript editor Larry Cooper.

  The Yankees’ Jason Zillo paved the way for multiple interviews as did John Blake with the Texas Rangers. Thanks to Mickey Morabito for being a key eyewitness to much of Billy’s life and for having such a terrific memory. The same is true for Morabito’s predecessor, Marty Appel, and Morabito’s successors, Harvey Greene and Lou D’Ermilio.

  I am forever thankful to hundreds of baseball people who happily shared their stories, and special thanks go to Bobby Richardson, Lou Piniella, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry, Gene Michael, Gene Monahan, and Buck Showalter.

  I am grateful to Rhoda and Bob Lerman, who happened to buy Billy’s final home in upstate New York. When I knocked on their door unannounced in August 2013, they took me in and rounded up the neighbors for five entertaining, informative hours.

  As she did for my previous books, my wife, Joyce, threw herself into the research of the manuscript without being asked. I now assume that I have the greatest library of Billy Martin material on the planet—thousands of newspaper clippings dating from 1942, plus books, magazines, photos, videotapes, DVDs, blog posts, memorabilia, FBI files, correspond
ence, and cartoons. The files created are now stored in a big, dull cabinet, but their vibrant, real-time words and brilliant images breathed life into every page of the book. Joyce’s work was a contribution beyond any other in this project.

  My children, Anne D., Elise, and Jack, were also drawn into the venture on numerous occasions, whether it was reading random old baseball books and summarizing key chapters, transcribing interview tapes, or finding obscure videos of long-ago games and Billy Martin television appearances. I’m sure they thought it would never end. I appreciate their everlasting willingness to help.

  As everyone in baseball knows, you can’t win without teammates. I’ve been fortunate to have some of the best on my side.

  Notes on Research and Sources

  I BEGAN THE RESEARCH for this book roughly thirty years before I ever wrote a word of it. I first met Billy Martin in 1980 as a young reporter just out of college, but a few years earlier I had been a Boston college student in the stands at Fenway Park watching with the rest of the baseball world as Billy and Reggie Jackson almost duked it out in the visitors’ dugout.

  I had never seen that before. It is the kind of thing that sticks in the mind of a developing writer. As a traveling beat writer in the 1980s covering the Yankees for the Bergen Record and a syndicate of other smaller New Jersey newspapers, I got to know Billy well and also spent countless hours with those who played for him and against him. I also knew Billy’s contemporaries in the managerial ranks, heard the umpires complain about him and laugh with him. It was part of my job to have close, professional relationships with many in his inner circle, like his coaches, his confidants, and his ex-teammates from the 1950s Yankees. I also developed a rapport with George Steinbrenner and was a part of hundreds of interviews with the Yankees’ owner, including several one-on-one conversations at breakfast, lunch, or during meetings in his office. Billy Martin was often a central figure in those Steinbrenner talks, including three interviews about Billy after his death.