Martin, Billy

Billy Martin

1928-1989

American baseball player

Billy Martin was known as a "scrapper" for his tendency toward fist fights and arguments, but he was a spirited and brilliant baseball manager who brought his teams to the top of their league every time he took the helm. He was inclined to express his opinions, a trait that got him into trouble more than once. Martin began playing semiprofessional baseball in his teens, and by age twenty-two he was with the New York Yankees, where he was a protégé of manager Casey Stengel and was befriended by teammates Joe DiMaggio , Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle . His term with the Yankees ended, however, soon after his twenty-ninth birthday, when he was accused of instigating a brawl at a Manhattan nightclub. He was traded to six different ball clubs in five years following the incident. In 1965 he began coaching, and by 1968 he was offered his first managerial job. In 1975, he came full circle as manager of the New York Yankees. Over the next twelve years, Martin was fired and rehired five times by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner , with whom he had a "love-hate" relationship. Martin's successes with the Yankees, as well as his misbehavior on and off the field, became baseball legend.

"Belli," but Tough

Billy Martin was born Alfred Manuel Martin, the son of Joan Salvini Pesano Martin, an Italian-American woman whose mother had immigrated to California from near Foggia, Italy, and Alfred Manuel Martin, a Portuguese man from Hawaii. Billy never used "Jr." as part of his name, however. In fact, until he entered grade school he thought his given name was Billy, a corruption of the nickname his grandmother gave him at birth: "Bellissimos" (most beautiful), shortened to "Belli" and then transformed to Billy by his playmates. Billy's natural father left the family when Billy was eight months old. His mother later married Jack Downey, who was the only father Billy ever knew.

Growing up poor in a tough West Berkeley neighbor-hood during the 1930s and 1940s, Billy learned to fend off members of the massive street gangs. This "scrappiness" would follow him throughout his life. From childhood, his biggest dream was to be a major league baseball player. After graduation, he hoped to be signed by a Pacific Coast League team, but no one was interested because he was too small and thin. Finally, he got a call from an Oakland Oaks farm team, which sent him $300 to buy good clothes and a suitcase and hired him to play ball. Several weeks later he was playing in the Arizona-Texas League at Phoenix. He led the league in hitting (.392) and runs batted in (174) in 130 games, and at third base led the league in errors (55), putouts, and assists. This won him a spot with the Oaks, where he played for Casey Stengel, who immediately loved Martin for his outspoken toughness. He was a kid after Stengel's own heart.

New York Yankee

After Oakland won the Pacific Coast pennant, with Martin playing three infield positions, Stengel was hired to manage the New York Yankees. In 1950, Stengel signed Martin to play with the Yankees, although he spent much of his first year with the farm team. In 1951, Martin met the sensational new player Mickey Mantle, and the two young men—opposite in temperament—became lifelong friends.

When the Yankees played the Dodgers in the seventh game of the 1952 World Series, Martin made a name for himself by running up from second base to catch Jackie Robinson 's pop-up ball near the pitcher's mound, winning the game, and the World Series, for the Yankees, their fourth straight World Series victory. The following year, the Yankees made it five straight World Series titles. That season, Martin had twelve hits, batted .500, and played regular second base.

Chronology

1928	Born May 16 in Berkeley, California
1946	Graduates from Berkeley High School; begins playing baseball on an Oakland Oaks farm team
1947	Is hired to play for Phoenix in the Arizona-Texas league; leads league in hitting, at bats, hits, doubles, and runs batted in; as third baseman leads league in putouts, assists, and errors
1948	Plays professional baseball on Casey Stengel's Oakland Oaks team; team wins Pacific Coast League pennant
1950	Stengel, now with New York Yankees, brings Martin on board as a utility player; Martin marries Lois Elaine Berndt on October 4—they will have one daughter, Kelly Ann
1950-51	Serves in U.S. Army
1951	Meets Mickey Mantle at Yankees training camp and the two begin a lifelong friendship
1952	Steps in from second base to catch a pop-up ball, saving a seventh-game win for the Yankees over the Dodgers, making it the Yankees' fourth straight World Series win
1953	Plays second base in Yankees' fifth straight World Series-winning season, batting .500; is divorced from Berndt
1953-55	Serves in U.S. Army
1955-56	Plays with Yankees; team wins another World Series in 1956
1957	Martin is blamed for a headline-making brawl at Manhattan's Copacabana Club after his twenty-ninth birthday party; he is traded in June to the Kansas City Athletics and again at the end of the season, to Detroit
1958	Is traded to Cleveland; gets hit in the face by a pitch, breaking his jaw and ending his playing season; is traded to Cincinnati
1959	Marries Gretchen Winkler, an airline stewardess; they will have a
1960	Jim Brewer and the Chicago Cubs file a $1 million lawsuit against Martin after a brawl with Brewer on the pitcher's mound; Martin is traded to the Milwaukee Braves
1961	Is traded to the Minnesota Twins
1962-64	Works as scout for the Minnesota Twins
1965-67	Works as third-base coach for Minnesota Twins
1968	Is hired as manager of Twins' Denver Bears farm club; team finishes fourth and makes playoffs
1969	Is hired as manager of Minnesota Twins; is fired at end of season
1971-73	Manages Detroit Tigers; is fired in September 1973
1973-75	Manages the Texas Rangers; is fired in July 1975
1975	Is hired to manage the New York Yankees; Yankees finish first in league in 1976 and 1977
1978	Martin resigns as Yankee manager after ongoing conflict with owner George Steinbrenner; Steinbrenner hires him back the next day for the 1979 season
1979	Steinbrenner fires Martin after Martin hits a marshmallow salesman in a barroom brawl in October
1980-82	Manages the Oakland Athletics, making "Billyball" famous; resigns after conflict with owner representative Roy Eisenhardt
1981	Is divorced from Gretchen Winkler
1983	Manages New York Yankees; is fired as manager after 1983 season but kept on payroll
1985	Is rehired as manager of Yankees but fired at end of season
1988	Marries Jill Guiver, a freelance photographer, with Mickey Mantle as best man; is hired for fifth time as manager of Yankees; is beaten up in a barroom brawl in Texas after losing a game in May; Steinbrenner fires him as manager in June but keeps him on as special adviser son, Billy Joseph
1989	Dies of injuries sustained in a car accident on Christmas night, December 25, in Binghamton, New York, at age 61
1990	Martin's son, Billy Joe, throws out the ball to open the New York Yankees season; the Yankees win

After returning from military service in 1955, Martin played in another World Series and then in 1956 played one more regular season with the Yankees. Then his world collapsed. For his twenty-ninth birthday party, on May 16, 1957, a group of players went to dinner with their wives, although Martin, being divorced, attended alone. Afterwards, they went to Manhattan's Copacabana Club, and player Hank Bauer supposedly got into a fight with men at the next table. The following day, the newspapers broadcast the story. Yankee owner George Weiss blamed Martin for the mess and called him a bad influence on Mantle. One month later, Weiss traded Martin to the Kansas City Athletics, ending his playing career with the Yankees and leaving him hurt and bitter for years to come.

The Hard Years

Martin remained a professional ball player over the next five years, but was traded to six different teams during the period: the Athletics, the Detroit Tigers, the Cleveland Indians, the Cincinnati Reds, the Milwaukee Braves, and the Minnesota Twins. In 1959 he was hit in the face with a pitch and suffered a broken jaw, which put him out of the game for the rest of the season. In 1960 he hit Chicago Cubs pitcher Jim Brewer on the mound after Brewer just missed Martin with a pitch. In the fight, Brewer suffered a broken bone near his eye socket. Although batters and pitchers routinely scuffled in such situations, Brewer and the Cubs sued Martin for $1 million, an unprecedented action. Martin eventually had to pay much of that amount.

Career Changes

Winding down as a player, Martin began scouting for the Twins in 1961 and held that position for three quiet years. He had remarried in 1959 and had a son, Billy Joseph. In 1965 he accepted a job as third-base coach for the Twins, where he remained until the beginning of the 1968 season. Then he was sent to manage the Denver Bears, the Twins' top farm club. After a successful season there, he was offered the job as manager of the Minnesota Twins.

Martin brought the team to first place, from seventh the previous year. However, Howard Fox, the Twins' road secretary and an old enemy of Martin's, wanted Martin out. The Twins fired him, but the Detroit Tigers hired him for the 1971 season. Martin came on board, bringing with him his right-hand man, pitching coach and friend, Art Fowler, whom he had met with the Bears in 1968. The two worked wonders with the Detroit team, bringing it up to second place from fourth.

The next year, the Tigers came in first place, even though they lost the playoffs to Oakland. By 1973, however, Martin wanted to trade some aging Detroit players for new blood, but the general manager remained loyal to his longtime players. The team slipped to third place, and Martin, blamed for the downfall, was let go.

One week after Detroit fired him, the Texas Rangers hired Martin as manager. The team did poorly during the first season but in 1974 moved up to second place. By 1975, however, a new owner would not renew Martin's contract giving him control over hiring players. The owner then fired Martin when the team's ranking dropped.

Awards and Accomplishments

1952	Yankees won World Series
1953	Yankees won World Series; named Most Valuable Player in World Series
1956	Yankees won World Series; named to All-Star team
1974	Named Manager of the Year in the American League by the Associated Press
1976	As manager of New York Yankees, won American League pennant
1977-78	As manager of New York Yankees, won American League pennant and World Series

Related Biography: Pitching Coach Art Fowler

John Arthur "Art" Fowler, born July 3, 1922, in Converse, South Carolina, was Billy Martin's pitching coach from the time Martin took over as manager of the Minnesota Twins in 1969 until George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, fired Fowler in June 1983. He was rehired briefly during the mid-1980s but was fired again in June 1988, along with Martin.

Although some critics said Fowler was Martin's "drinking buddy," the two had great success with players. The tough and disagreeable Martin passed along his instructions to Fowler, who then, amicably and with a sense of humor, passed them along to the players. The three-way rapport worked well. The Twins came up from seventh to first place in the American League Western Division in 1969 under Martin and Fowler. In 1972 the pair helped to bring the Detroit Tigers in first, over the Baltimore Orioles, who had been on a winning streak. In 1974 the Texas Rangers improved by twenty-seven games and finished second to Oakland. Martin and Fowler went on to three American League pennants and two World Series wins with the New York Yankees from 1976 to 1978 and first- and second-place wins at Oakland in the early 1980s.

Fowler was mostly a relief pitcher during his playing days, with the Cincinnati Reds (1954-57), the Los Angeles Dodgers (1959), and the Los Angeles Angels (1961-64). His brother Jesse had played with the St. Louis Cardinals thirty years before Art began his career in the major leagues. Art finished his pitching career with a 54-51 record, 539 strikeouts and thirty-two saves.

Martin wrote in his autobiography Billyball, "My pitching coach, Art Fowler, has taught our pitchers how to throw the spitball." Fowler also encouraged them to throw strikes. Pitcher Matt Keough recalled, "Art was master of the psychological approach. If you weren't throwing strikes, you'd have to go to the bullpen and watch him … throw fifty pitches- and forty-five for strikes. It was embarrassing."

Return to the Yankees

Just eleven days after the Rangers let him go, the New York Yankees asked Martin to be manager. In New York he began a tumultuous relationship with owner George Steinbrenner, who wanted control as much as Martin did. However, as Martin took the position once held by his mentor, Casey Stengel, he began to work miracles. With some new players, the team came in first place in 1976 but lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. In 1977 they came in first again and this time won the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Martin managed for the first half of the 1978 season, but the tension with Steinbrenner, coupled with conflicts with player Reggie Jackson , pushed Martin to the breaking point. In late July he told sportswriters he was disgusted with both men.

"The two of them deserve each other," he said. "One's a born liar," (referring to Jackson) "and the other's convicted." (Steinbrenner had been convicted of perjury in 1972 in an elections law violation case.) He told the writers to print his statement and then resigned from the Yankees. The next day, Steinbrenner invited him back as manager for the 1979 season. He made the announcement at Yankee Old-Timers' Day, to the delight of 46,000 fans, who gave Martin a seven-minute standing ovation. Bob Lemon from Chicago took over for the rest of the 1978 season, and the Yankees won the World Series, so Stein-brenner kept him on until the middle of the 1979 season, when he fired Lemon and got Martin back.

Seasons of Billyball

The constant frustration drove Martin to heavier drinking and barroom brawls, which never failed to make headlines. In 1979 he punched a Minnesota marshmallow salesman in a bar, and Steinbrenner fired him again. This time Martin was hired to manage the Oakland Athletics. In 1980 the A's came in second in the league; the following year they were first and then second in a season split by a players' strike, but they were defeated by the Yankees in the World Series. In 1982 they fell to fifth place, even though Rickey Henderson stole a record-breaking 130 bases. Martin left, believing that the team owners had interfered with decision making and the pitchers had failed to stay in shape during the strike.

During Martin's seasons with Oakland, he built a playing strategy around Stengel's "run sheep run baseball" style. Columnist Ralph Wiley of the Oakland Tribune gave it a name: Billyball. Equipped with Henderson as a base stealer, Fowler as his pitching coach, and the freedom to hire players he thought could do the job, Martin developed Billyball as the envy of the baseball world. His plays included the hit-and-run, the double steal, and the suicide squeeze, adding up to a total of runs that led the league. Henderson said of Martin in 2001: "We did anything to get a run. He was a genius as a manager. He might not say anything until the sixth inning. He'd let you play until then. Then he would start managing."

Bouncing Back to the Yankees

When Martin left Oakland, his old antagonist Stein-brenner wanted him back again. The Yankees finished third in 1983, and Martin was suspended twice for abusing umpires—he kicked dirt on one and called another "a stone liar." In December, Steinbrenner fired Martin as manager but kept him on as adviser. In 1985, Steinbrenner fired manager Yogi Berra and rehired Martin, for the fourth time. The team finished second, and Martin was fired again but kept in the office. In 1988 Steinbrenner again put Martin in the manager's position, and the team was on a winning streak when Martin got injured in a brawl in a Texas nightclub. In June, Martin was let go again, and the Yankees finished fifth.

Martin was still employed by the Yankees as an adviser when, on Christmas night, 1989, he and longtime friend William Reedy, a Detroit bar owner, were driving on an icy road near Martin's home in Binghamton, New York. With Reedy at the wheel, the truck skidded off the road and Martin was thrown through the windshield, fracturing his neck and injuring his spinal column. He died soon afterward in a Binghamton hospital. Reedy was charged with driving while intoxicated.

Just eight days earlier, on December 17, Martin and Steinbrenner had read "The Night before Christmas" together at a charity concert. Rumors circulated that Stein-brenner was considering Martin for a sixth term as manager, but Steinbrenner told the New York Times, "No way. He was too happy doing what he was doing. He was coming upstairs. He was going to be there more than ever before."

Man and Manager

Billy Martin has been called a baseball genius, yet he seemed bent on self-destruction. Because of his many conflicts with umpires, Richie Phillips, general counsel of the Major League Umpires Association, called him "the quintessential recidivist in baseball." However, he had another side, one that the public rarely saw. Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Times that away from the baseball stadium Martin was "generous, thoughtful, a loyal friend, wonderful with children, the elderly, and even strangers down on their luck." Matt Keough, a former Oakland pitcher now working as a scout, told journalist Ron Bergman in a 2001 interview, "It's a travesty that Billy's not in the Hall of Fame. He won with every kind of team he ever had."

Martin had firm convictions about his management style, and he adhered to them throughout his career, in spite of his seemingly brash personality. He told sportswriter and author Leonard Koppett, "For a team to win, a manager has to find ways to motivate different individuals. He has to judge correctly each man's abilities and weaknesses, and find the right ways and the right time to use them. He has to show them how something can be done better, and offer them loyalty and confidence. And he has to have authority, above all, because none of the other things can happen if the players don't have confidence in the manager's judgment." Martin established personal relationships with his players, and they loved him for it. He once said, "Out of 25 guys, there should be fifteen who would run through a wall for you, two or three who don't like you at all, five who are indifferent and maybe three undecided. My job is to keep the last two groups from going the wrong way."

SELECTED WRITINGS BY MARTIN:

(With Peter Golenbock) Number One (autobiography), Delacorte Press, 1980.

(With Phil Pepe) Billyball, Doubleday, 1987.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Koppett, Leonard. The Man in the Dugout: Baseball's Top Managers and How They Got That Way. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993.

Periodicals

Bergman, Ron. "Ex-A's Look Back Fondly on the Summer of Billy Ball." San Jose Mercury News (July 3, 2001).

Creamer, Robert W. "Arrogance: Umpires Issue Resolution Censuring Billy Martin and Criticizing AL Pres. Bobby Brown's Light Sentence of Martin." Sports Illustrated (June 13, 1988): 13.

Creamer, Robert W. "Golden Friendships." Sports Illustrated (June 27, 1983): 18.

Harvin, Al. "An Outburst of Affection from Martin's Fans." New York Times (December 28, 1989): A27.

"Married, Billy Martin and Jill Guiver." Time (February 8, 1988): 71.

Neff, Craig. "A Pair of Battlers: Billy Martin and Doug Harvey Die." Sports Illustrated (January 8, 1990): 7.

"Road Accident Kills Billy Martin, Ex-Yankee Player and Manager." New York Times (December 28, 1989): A1.

Wickens, Barbara. "A Violent Death for Billy Martin." Maclean's (January 8, 1990): 35.

Other

Baseball Almanac. "Art Fowler." http://www.baseballalmanac.com/ (November 5, 2002).

Baseball-Reference.com. "Billy Martin." http://www.baseball-reference.com/managers/ (October 31, 2002).

Gallagher, Mark. "Billy Martin." BaseballLibrary.com. http://www.pubdim.net/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/ (November 4, 2002).

Historic Baseball: Art Fowler of South Carolina. http://www.historicbaseball.com/ (November 4, 2002).

Jozwik, Tom. "Art Fowler." BaseballLibrary.com. http://www.pubdim.net/baseballlibrary.com/ballplayers/ (November 4, 2002).

Newsmakers, Issue Cumulation. "Billy Martin." Gale Group, 1988. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (October 31, 2002).

Newsmakers 1990, Issue 2. "Billy Martin." Gale Group, 1990. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (October 31, 2002).

Sketch by Ann H. Shurgin