Commentary : Not Billy the Kid, but Billy the Foolish Child

Is the depressing saga of Billy Martin getting more silly or more serious? The incidents that surround baseball’s oldest juvenile delinquent become increasingly ludicrous with each of his incarnations as the Yankees’ manager. But does the farce of Martin’s movable fiasco allow us the freedom to laugh?

Or does the sorrow and rage deep inside this man stop us with its darkness?

The Cross Keys Contretemps of 1986, when Martin followed Ed Whitson from bar to hotel room to parking lot in Baltimore, screaming for a rematch, until the huge pitcher broke Martin’s arm, was somber enough.

Now that Martin has given new meaning to the phrase “thrown out of a bar on his ear,” we can only hold our breath awaiting his next disaster. Will he get heaved out the side door of a topless bar in the a.m. by bouncers after he’s started a fight by punching a patron in a men’s room? Will he walk into the lobby of the team hotel at 3 a.m. looking like Banquo’s ghost, covered with 40 stitches’ worth of his own blood?

Oh, you say that’s already happened? Even now, it’s hard to believe.

Just as it is hard to believe that, a couple of weeks later, Martin picked up two handfuls of dirt and threw them on a young umpire. So soon, Billy? As you go down in the maelstrom, they say the spin gets tighter and tighter.

At every hour we await dispatches on the next installment of this cheap soap. Richie Phillips, lawyer for the umpires union, has already closed out the June balloting for yahoo of the month by bragging that his American League umps will dispense with due process, probable cause, freedom of speech and, who knows, perhaps search and seizure, too, by ejecting Martin instantly on any pretext to retaliate for his sandbox stunt.

“For Martin to stay in the game, he’s going to have to behave like an altar boy,” said Phillips after a conference call Friday with all seven AL crew chiefs. “He’s going to have to fold his hands, shut his mouth and that’s it. Otherwise, he’s going to be ejected, ejected, ejected. Every time for the next couple of weeks that he comes out of the dugout, he’ll be ejected. Then we’ll review the situation.”

When all Martin had to do to gain universal sympathy was clam up, naturally he decided to pop off. Pundits were lined up around the block to say that Phillips’ hot air was arrogant, asinine and in character. But Billy had to go them one better. After a full day of “no comment,” Martin said he’d sue the umps for something or other and that he’d be his normal obnoxious self on the field whenever it suited him.

To what depths can Martin drag this latest best-out-of-99-falls bout with adult authority? In retrospect, punching a marshmallow salesman or trying to loosen Reggie Jackson’s dentures in the dugout seems like the stuff of Martin’s innocent youth. We long for the days when Martin would sucker-punch one of his own pitchers in a bar or deck an elderly club official. Then, he was Billy the Kid, wild and mean, devious and smart, but possessed of tough street strength.

Now, the venues for his disgraces get seedier, his opponents seem even less worthy and, these days, it is usually Martin who visits the hospital. The cowards who once feared him now line up to take a shot at a scrawny 60-year-old who goes everywhere with a steamship trunk full of troubles strapped to his back. Even Martin’s old bodyguard-coaches look exhausted.

All the enmity that Martin has fairly earned--and no man in baseball since Leo Durocher can match him for soul-deep enemies--is now returning on the waters to swamp him when he can least defend himself. Even the umps, baseball’s least enfranchised entity, think they can gang up on him.

Someday, somewhere, something’s going to happen to Martin, or he’s going to do something to somebody that’s not funny. Bet on Billy as victim. It’s his pattern. The worst he ever seems to dish out is a schoolyard punch in the mouth. In return, he receives a kind of public pain and humiliation that etches itself in his face with each new shame. Like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Martin seems headed somewhere and we want to be far away when he arrives.

Martin has reached a point where even his managing skills--and he’s very good, in a narrow short-term sense--can’t protect him. His current Yankees couldn’t play better in their dreams, and may play worse in reality as the summer wears on and the pitching wears out. Yet Martin is bunkered, even in his own dugout.

Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, like a third-grade teacher at recess, Tuesday ordered both Martin and the umpires to “stop it and stop it now.” Or he will make them all write on the blackboard. In the past, grade-school discipline and lectures from Principal George haven’t altered Martin’s behavior a whit. He acts cherubic until he figures out how to put his next cherry bomb in a mailbox.

Nothing wears worse than a bad-boy act with age. For years, when Billy the Kid punched a pitcher or took on a guy in a strip joint, his foe went down in a heap. Now, he’s Billy the Old Coot and they laugh at him and let the bouncers do their job. Once, when Martin kicked dirt on an ump, that was the end of that. Now, he’s told to sit in his own dugout, like the brat in class, with his lips buttoned.

It would all be funny and fitting, and extremely easy to ignore, if we could just be sure that the remaining chapters of Martin’s story would be equally insignificant and amusing.