THE RETURN OF BILLY THE KID : With a Wealth of Talent, Yankees and Martin Hope the Fifth Time Is a Charm

Billy the Kid turns 60 in May, the years measured by the calendar and his tumultuous tenures as manager of the New York Yankees.

Keeping things straight: Billy Martin was married in January, for the fourth time, and has returned to manage the Yankees for the fifth time.

“George wants a winner, and I’m going to give him one,” Martin said, his relaxed and rested appearance on a recent afternoon seeming to support his claim that the marriage has been an elixir and that he takes the Yankee helm with a new maturity, finally the wiser for those bad experiences of the past.

Is that possible?

Can the combination of Billy Martin and Yankee owner George Steinbrenner be titled anything but “Les Miserables” ? Or as Reggie Jackson calls it: “Fatal Attraction”?

Since leading the Yankees to a World Series championship in 1977, Martin has managed the Yankees for one full season, 1983, and parts of three others, 1978, ’79 and ’85.

His average length of service in those years has been 117 games. The Yankees this season will play their 117th game Aug. 14 in Minnesota. Will it be Martin’s last of this fifth stint as manager? Or will he last through the two-year managerial contract he was given in October, when he replaced Lou Piniella, who was bumped upstairs to general manager?

The rumor is that Bucky Dent, serving his managerial apprenticeship with the Yankees’ Triple-A team at Columbus, Ohio, is destined to replace the self-destructive Martin. But Martin shook his head and said: “I’m not grooming anyone. I’m here grooming this team to win. Anything else is speculation. I have a two-year contract. I don’t know how I’ll feel beyond that.

“I do know that whatever I decide, George will back me and that I’ll never step down, only up.”

Martin can say that because he also has a personal-services contract with Steinbrenner, guaranteeing him lifetime security.

“George likes me and is a generous man,” Martin said, smiling.

This is the same George whom Martin once referred to as “a convicted liar.” Has there ever been a stranger union?

Steinbrenner isn’t talking. He is in camp with the Yankees but refuses to discuss anything involving the team, as if he is determined to maintain the uncharacteristic tranquility. Even the players, for the most part, seem to be making a studious attempt to avoid the familiar controversies of past seasons.

Much of their caution, perhaps, stems from a conviction that the additions of Jack Clark, Richard Dotson, Rafael Santana and John Candelaria, among others, put them in the American League East driver’s seat and that no one is more capable of guiding them to their destination than Martin.

Not since the 1981 strike season have the Yankees won a division title. They want it and think they have the ability to get it. Why rock the boat even before it sails up the Intracoastal Waterway?

Said first baseman Don Mattingly: “So much is made of what happens off the field that people lose sight of how good a manager Billy is.”

Steinbrenner, perhaps, hasn’t, which may be why he keeps unretiring the No. 1 and the man who wears it. Steinbrenner has employed nine different managers and made 14 changes in 15 years as owner, but the bottom line is that the Yankees have a .591 winning percentage under Martin and a .558 mark under the eight others.

Martin, a four-time winner of the manager-of-the-year award, also has a .551 career winning percentage that ranks second to Sparky Anderson’s among active managers and is 16th on the all-time list.

“Check the record of any team I finished the season with,” Martin said. “If we weren’t first or second, I’ll eat my cap.

“People say that a manager means only three or four games to a team. If that’s all it is, why don’t they hire Sears, Roebuck to manage.

“I mean, they think of me only as a boozer and hothead. They say that if I can’t control myself, how can I control my team?

“But I don’t think my winning percentage is accidental. Look it up. Isn’t that what Casey would say?”

There is no way of knowing what the late Casey Stengel would say about his protege’s off-field behavior.

Martin ended his last assignment as Yankee manager with a broken arm, the result of a bar fight with pitcher Ed Whitson.

How many times has Martin produced a team admired for aggressiveness and execution, only to lose his job because of an inability to cope with ownership or himself?

Can this potent and promising Yankee team go about its work knowing that history is likely to repeat?

“Sure,” said Tommy John, the 44-year-old pitcher. “It’s going to happen here whether it’s Billy or Lou or Gene Michael managing. The bottom line with George is winning. It’s a tough market. You’ve got to produce. It comes with the territory.

“We’re used to it by now--or should be.”

The 1987 season tested that process of playing in a constant caldron. The fourth-place Yankees won 89 games--four more than the Western Division and World Series champion Minnesota Twins--despite a barrage of injuries that made it difficult at times for Piniella, as he said in August, to put a lineup on the field or remember who was on the roster.

He used 48 players, a club record. He used 15 starting pitchers and 7 different players at both second base and shortstop.

Did Steinbrenner understand? Why even ask?

He blasted Piniella for failing to be in his Cleveland hotel room to take a scheduled phone call, drove a wedge between the manager and the catalytic Rickey Henderson by saying publicly that Piniella felt Henderson should have been released for malingering, and made the frequent point that he had erred in selecting a manager who had no minor league experience.

When the players voiced their support for Piniella, Steinbrenner said: “If support behind Lou instead of me means getting blown out of first place and losing 15-4 and 10-1 (in consecutive games against Detroit and Kansas City), who needs that kind of support.”

Martin spent the summer as a Yankee broadcaster and observer. He did not travel or stay with the team.

“I didn’t want it to appear that I was undermining Lou,” he said. “In fact, I tried to be a buffer for him. He played for me, coached for me and was a protege of mine. You can’t look at the number of players he lost and fault the job he did, but (Steinbrenner) makes up his own mind. He wants to win, it’s that simple. He called in October and said he had decided to make a change and asked if I’d be interested.”

The change also involved the position of general manager, such as it is under Steinbrenner. Woody Woodward left to join the Philadelphia Phillies, and Piniella moved upstairs, where he will be a buffer for Martin.

History indicates that Martin will need one, though all parties, confident of the Yankees’ chances, may finally carry a stronger commitment to peace and solidarity.

The silent Steinbrenner, for example, seems to be letting his manager run the show.

He allowed Martin to bring back confidants and drinking buddies Clete Boyer, Art Fowler and George Mitterwald as his coaches and is said to have privately assured Martin that he can work on fundamentals rather than stressing spring victories, the absence of which has sent the owner into rages in the past.

Martin, for his part, said that he is approaching the task with that new maturity, no longer worried about where he is going and what he will do.

He said that his marriage to the former Jill Guiver, 32, whom he met when she was on a free-lance photography assignment at Anaheim Stadium in 1983, has given him a sanctuary to turn to, the option of ice cream on the couch rather than Scotch in the bar.

His bride, in a recent New York Post interview, described Martin as an expert chef who does most of the shopping and seldom passes an antique store without stopping to search for relics of the Civil War.

Martin talks openly about his alleged drinking problem, insisting that it has never been out of control, despite appearances to the contrary. He also said, however, that there will never be a time when he backs down or away from a fight, the man always being more important than the manager.

“My reputation, like it or not, is as the gunfighter,” he said. “People think of me as Billy the Kid and that’s the way I am. I’m the same aggressive Billy, but I’ve learned and grown from my experiences.”

He says he has learned, among other things, that reporters can misinterpret what he says and create problems with his players or owner. He intends to hold his postgame press briefings in the middle of the clubhouse, so the players can hear what he says.

Said Boyer: “The Yankees are Billy’s life, and he knows this is his last chance to manage them. He wants desperately to get them to the World Series. He wants to prove himself all over again. His perspectives have changed.”

In some ways, perhaps, but in others he remains Stengel’s student, hoping to rekindle the pride of the Yankees, in part, with curfew and dress codes dealing with both uniform and street wear.

“We need a wardrobe consultant,” a veteran Yankee said the other day, then smiled and winked, choosing not to disrupt the calm. In fact, that calm has been shattered only once so far, when Henderson reported and accused Piniella of having forced him to play hurt last year. It was a move, he said, that Martin would never have made.

Martin is Henderson’s man from their years together in Oakland, and there is strong reason to believe that a pivotal aspect of Martin’s reappointment was the hope that he could regenerate Henderson’s enthusiasm. That hope seems to have been fulfilled.

“He’s been acting like a rookie,” Martin said, having moved the delighted Henderson to left field, his rookie position in Oakland.

Center field will be shared by veteran Claudell Washington and promising Roberto Kelly.

Dave Winfield will play right, with Mattingly at first, Willie Randolph at second, Santana at short, Mike Pagliarulo at third and either Rick Cerone, Don Slaught or Joel Skinner catching.

Clark, of course, will be the designated hitter, though he has yet to put stress on the injured right ankle of last season by running hard.

Gary Ward, who hit 16 homers and drove in 78 runs last year, is on the bench, a measure of the punch in the starting lineup.

Martin reflected and said it is a better Yankee team than any he has opened a season with and that Clark is the best cleanup hitter he has had in New York, including Reggie Jackson, who often hit elsewhere in the lineup because of tendency to strike out.

“They’d have had to find room for Clark in Murderers’ Row,” Martin said. “But he’s not only a power hitter, he’s a contact hitter as well.”

He added that with Henderson and Kelly, he will have speed at the top and bottom of the lineup and often as many as six guys in between “who can pop it.”

The question is pitching, though the trade for Dotson, the signing of free agent Candelaria and the promise of farm product Al Leiter, joining John and Rick Rhoden, gives Martin the appearance of a respectable rotation that could be joined in May by Ron Guidry, who is recovering from a rotator cuff injury.

“The Twins proved last year that you don’t need five 22-year-old pitchers throwing it 90 m.p.h.,” John said. “You just need five guys who complement each other and do the job when they’re supposed to, which is what we have. The key for us is to get 250 innings from both Rhoden and Dotson.”

Another key was to keep a free agent named Dave Righetti as the bottom line in the bullpen. The Yankees did it by guaranteeing him $4.3 million for three years. Clark was signed for two years at $3 million, and Mattingly has been guaranteed $6.7 for three years.

In the wake of that announcement, Mattingly guaranteed that the Yankees would win their division title. He hasn’t backed off, recently telling the New York Daily News:

“I realize what I said this winter was out of character, but I’ve never seen so many people come up to me and say, ‘Yeah, that’s right, we’re gonna do it.’ I feel confident with what I can do and confident with what the whole team can do. I’m to the point now where I say, ‘I’ll say what I feel.’ And I feel we have the best team and are going to win it.”

Said Martin: “I like my players to talk like that because it’s contagious and it reminds me of the way I talk. I want them to feel they’re going to win because it’s the way I feel.”

And, of course, his four dismissals by the Yankees having bred a lot of maturity, Martin would much rather have the players talking than the owner.