Steven V. Roberts teaches journalism and politics at George Washington University.

BILLY MARTIN

Baseball’s Flawed Genius

By Bill Pennington

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
530 pp. $30

When the New York Yankees won the World Series in 1977, their manager was Billy Martin, a second baseman for the Yankee teams that had dominated baseball in the 1950s. After the final game, he stripped off his jersey and sent it to a young man from Brooklyn who had lost an eye to a notorious killer known as Son of Sam.

But the dark demons that drove Martin his whole life soon resurfaced. At a victory party later that evening, the guest list included “two or three” of his old girlfriends. Martin drank heavily and quarreled loudly with his wife at the time (number two of four, if you’re counting). As described by Bill Pennington, a sportswriter for the New York Times (where I used to work), in this thorough and thoughtful biography: “Billy had a drink in his hand and threw it to the ground, smashing the glass. He turned and stormed out of the party.” He made his way to his favorite bar, a neighborhood joint called the Bottom of the Barrel. “I sat there all by myself,” Martin wrote later, “I sat there and rested where no one could bother me.”

Martin’s first wife once said that “there were always two Billys.” Soft-hearted and hard-headed. Scintillating and solitary. Loyal friend and lasting foe. The manager who had just guided the Yankees to their first championship in 15 years ended the best night of his life drinking alone in a crummy bar. In New Jersey.

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There is no question about Martin’s baseball acumen. Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa says: “Billy was the most brilliant manager I knew. No one worked a game better.” Ron Guidry, who pitched for Martin’s Yankee teams, adds, “Because of his intensity, I started to find the toughness in me to make good daring pitches in tough situations.” The Elias Sports Bureau analyzed his record over 16 seasons and concluded, “Billy Martin happens to be the best manager in the history of Major League baseball.”

But “having Billy as manager was like sitting on a keg of dynamite,” writes Pennington, who covered Martin for a New Jersey paper in the late ’80s. He was a chronic boozer and barroom brawler, “the most famous saloon slugger in America,” who once broke his arm punching out one of his own pitchers. He was dismissed nine times during those 16 years. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hired and fired him on five different occasions, and incredibly enough was preparing to hire him a sixth time when Martin was killed in a car crash on Christmas Day in 1989 after three hours of heavy drinking.

Martin’s pugnacious character was shaped by the flatlands east of San Francisco Bay, where he grew up poor and fatherless. His aunt owned a brothel, and his mother worked there — doing exactly what is uncertain. “He was raised with fists clenched [and] he saw slights everywhere,” Pennington notes.

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At age 8, “Billy already knew that his way out was going to be baseball,” and he dreamed of playing for the Yankees, whose rising star, Joe DiMaggio, was a fellow Italian from across the bay. When he signed with the Yanks at 18 and was sent to their minor league team in Idaho Falls, he was asked if he had a suit to wear on the trip. “Nope,” he replied, “my family took my only suit and used it to dress my uncle in his casket last year.”

As a player, Martin was often overshadowed by stars such as Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, but his impact was largest when the spotlight was brightest. In 1952 he made one of the most famous plays in World Series history, catching a windblown popup off the bat of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and saving three runs in a close game. “If that kid doesn’t make that catch we blow the Word Series right there,” said his manager, Casey Stengel.

The next season Martin stroked 12 hits in a six-game Series, setting a record that he still shares. In 1957, however, his birthday party turned into an embarrassing imbroglio at New York’s Copacabana nightclub that blemished the Yankee image and branded him a troublemaker. He was soon traded to Kansas City; 20 years later he recalled, “My heart was broken.”

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Martin made it back to the majors as a manager in 1969, but even as he aged his nerves stayed taut and fists clenched. He fought with everyone — owners and umpires, friends and lovers. His daughter Kelly Ann says Martin rarely saw his granddaughter, Evie: “When people ask Evie what her grandfather does, she used to say that he kicks dirt on people. Now she just says, ‘he gets fired.’”

Even for a lifelong Yankees fan like me — who cheered for Martin as a player and manager — this book drags in spots. Alcoholic antics get real boring, real fast. And there are some startling factual errors. Pennington talks about the Carter-Reagan election being “weeks away” in the fall of 1979.

But Martin is worth the full treatment Pennington gives him. He is buried 30 yards away from Babe Ruth, just north of New York City, and fans still make pilgrimages to his grave, leaving old cards and photos and baseballs as tokens of their enduring affection. “People may have loved him more because of his imperfections,” Pennington writes. “They made him seem familiar, which is to say, one of us.”

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