For Martin, Baseball Is Not a Game

The hurt shows in Billy Martin. The anger. He’s baseball’s Dead End Kid. Suspicious, combative, convinced that all life is 8 to 5 against.

You don’t get too close to Billy Martin. He praises sparingly, criticizes lashingly. Baseball is not a game to him. Baseball is life. Billy always plays as if life has the bases loaded on him and it’s starting to rain.

He doesn’t seem to enjoy what he does, but he keeps coming back to it. He seldom smiles, almost never laughs. Something seems to be eating away at Billy. He stays thin and gaunt no matter how much he eats or drinks.

“Somebody took something away from Billy at an early age, and he hasn’t forgiven the world since,” a psychiatrist once guessed. Billy just sneers. Psychiatry doesn’t make his lineup.

Martin is a throwback. He belongs to a time when the game was played with high spikes and head pitches. Billy plays the game as if he is walking down Main Street and it’s high noon and the enemy is everywhere and everybody--the press, the front office, the umpires, sometimes even his own players. He wears No. 1 on his back for the same reason generals wear braid--so there’ll be no confusing who’s boss. Martin doesn’t want to be popular, just successful.

When he took over the Yankees this year--for the fourth time in his career--replacing the lovable Yogi Berra, Billy was blunt. “Yogi was my friend, too,” he said. “I liked Yogi as much as you did. But you didn’t play for him. If you played for him, he’d still be here. I don’t care whether you like me or hate me, just play for me.”

Billy regards the Yankees the way priests regard the Vatican. Yankee Stadium is more than a ballpark, it’s a shrine, the St. Peter’s of baseball. Baseball is like Caesar’s Gaul, divided into three parts--the American League, the National League and the Yankees. Everybody else is just a ballplayer, but a Yankee is nobility. As for the National League, that’s a disease.

Not above a bar-room fight himself, Billy nevertheless insists that a Yankee behave like a lord of baseball--wear a coat and tie at all times and never do anything Lou Gehrig wouldn’t have done. Show up sockless and in sandals, and you take your bare feet to the American Assn.

Billy still solves problems with a punch in the nose, but he knows baseball and his record proves it. He thinks Casey Stengel belongs on Mt. Rushmore, but that didn’t stop him from not speaking to Casey for years once when Stengel let him get traded away.

He is complicated, tormented, lonely, even haughty to the world, but there is about him what the Latin poet Aeneas once called “a sense of tears.” Billy Martin would like to be liked. But not if he has to lose to do it.

He quite obviously knows something about winning baseball games that other managers don’t. When a thing happens once, it can be luck. Twice, it could be coincidence. When it keeps happening, it’s know-how.

Martin put Minnesota in the playoffs his first full season as a manager. He put Detroit in two years later. He took the Texas Rangers from last place to second place in one year there, from 48 games won when he took over to 84 games won the next year. He took the Yankees to their first pennant in 12 years, then to their first World Series championship in 15 years. Next, he put Oakland in the championship series.

In a dozen years of managing, Martin’s teams have won five pennants and been in two World Series. He departed other teams unceremoniously on the eve of victory, once when he called the owner a convict and the star player a liar. Billy goes down swinging.

As emotional as the third act of Carmen himself, Billy’s specialty is instilling emotion in a game that is too often played with all the zeal of robot chess.

When he came to the Yankees this year, they were a dispirited bunch of star players, floundering desperately in the caboose of the division, 14 games or so out of the lead. When last seen, they were challenging Toronto for first place.”One guy tested me,” Martin reported. “And he’s gone. He wasn’t a Yankee.” He was an Omar Moreno.

On a recent swing through Texas, the manager was suffering back spasms. He called in the Rangers’ team physician, an old friend, for an injection. Somehow, it went wrong. The needle went in too far and pierced a lung, which collapsed.

Martin was rushed to the hospital. Long, patient bed rest was prescribed. The lung did not reinflate. “There was, like this big bubble sticking out of my chest,” he recalls.

Nevertheless, he called for his clothes. The doctors protested, refusing to sign his release. “I signed myself out of the hospital,” he said. “What was I going to do, lie there and read box scores?”

Why did he take a chance and come back on half a lung?

“Why did I come back in the first place?” Billy demands. “I got a five-year contract with the Yankees. I get paid whether I manage or not. I came back because it’s one of the greatest honors in the world. Why, this country needs the Yankees! Like hot dogs, apple pie, the flag--and the New York Yankees! You want this country to turn into a National League?”