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Like Him or Not, He Was a Baseball Man

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A friend of mine once described Billy Martin as a mouse who wanted to grow up to become a rat.

Not a very Christian thing to say about a man, but not too far from the mark, either.

Billy Martin will best be remembered for punching a pitcher (Jim Brewer) in the face, for getting into a fight with another pitcher (Ed Whitson) that left Billy with a busted arm, for getting tanked a couple of times too many and for getting hired and fired as manager of the New York Yankees like clockwork.

Martin even turned his alcohol habit and nasty temperament into a moneymaker, in endorsements for low-calorie beer. He let George Steinbrenner stand right next to him, art imitating life, and make a big joke out of: “Billy, you’re fired.” Kind of pathetic, when you think about it.

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There used to be a knickknack on Steinbrenner’s desk at Yankee Stadium--a large golden numeral, the number “1.” Maybe it’s still there. This was a reference to the boss himself, and not to the jersey number that his spitfire of a manager wore on the field of play. This was a reference to the boss from the boss.

Right next to this novelty item was a plaque that bore the philosophy: “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell Out of the Way.”

Their names are to be eternally linked, Martin’s and Steinbrenner’s, but it was Billy who meant so much more to the game of baseball itself. He was a hustling, eager-beaver second baseman by trade, born Alfred Manuel Pesano on May 16, 1928 in Berkeley, who batted .257 over an 11-year major-league career, playing for the Yankees, Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

He was a star, but never a Star. That much he knew. When the Hall of Fame archives-keepers found out that Martin happened to have in his possession the last bat that Joe DiMaggio ever used in the big leagues, they asked him to donate it to Cooperstown. Martin agreed, with one proviso: “I want you to put a tag on the bat that says I donated it.”

“Why?” he was asked.

“Because that’s the only way I’ll ever get in there,” Martin said.

He punched out only 877 hits, and never hit even as high as .270 over the course of a full season. But he punched out just about everything else--time clocks, teammates, opponents, fellow stool occupants in saloons, even a marshmallow salesman from Minnesota once. He mixed it up with Brewer on a pitching mound and with Whitson in the hallways of a hotel. He’d fight anybody, anywhere, anytime.

This should hardly be his epitaph, but it’s not too far off the mark, either.

Billy Martin was the butt of jokes, though rarely to his face. Some of them he enjoyed when he heard them. Like the one about him going hunting for the first time with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. The way the story went, Mantle and Ford pulled a practical joke on Martin, telling him that a stubborn farmer had refused them permission to hunt on his land. The punchline was Mantle’s: “By the time we stopped him, Billy had shot two cows and a pig.”

To this day, not everybody is convinced that this story is apocryphal.

Martin could certainly be a pleasant presence in person. We spent some time together in his office once or twice, quiet times during his stormy reigns in New York, and more than once he asked me to double-check to see if we might possibly be related, since his mother’s surname was the same as mine. I assured him we were not. I never checked. I just assured him that we were not.

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Around two weeks ago, I read that Martin’s mother had died. It was the first thought I had given him in some time, in fact the first public mention of his name in some time.

The way Lou Piniella, Dallas Green and so many others have stepped before the pin-striped executioner with the “NY” on his hood, I suppose we’ve all been waiting for Billy Martin to turn up again as Yankee manager. One day, when Steinbrenner invited a few people over to witness the “resignation” of Dick Howser as manager, a clearly uncomfortable Howser was asked what advice he would give his successor, Gene Michael.

“To have a strong stomach and a nice contract,” Howser replied.

To his credit, I guess, Billy Martin always did have these necessities. He knew baseball, and he demanded much of his players. The knocks against him as a strategist tended to be that he overworked his starting pitchers and played favorites, but more often than not, wherever he was managing, Martin got the most from what he had. He won division titles in Minnesota, Detroit and Oakland as well as New York, don’t forget.

I found a quote from him Christmas night, upon learning of his death.

“Out of 25 guys, there should be 15 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,” Martin said during his managing days. “My job is to keep the last two groups from going the wrong way.”

Billy Martin made some enemies, made some friends, made some contact, made some errors, made people evaluate and re-evaluate him before he was done. He led. He followed. And he never got out of anybody’s way, including his own. Some go quietly. Billy Martin did not.

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