They Took Different Routes, but Both Will Be Given a Salute

Baseball lost two of its most visible figures last year, Commissioner Bart Giamatti and former manager Billy Martin. Baseball historian Warren Goldstein contrasted the two for Newsday:

“Italian-Americans both, they had little in common--just baseball and death in the final months of the decade. Still, their anomalous lives remind us of the extraordinary richness and power of the game they both loved more than any other.

“For all his triumphs as a player and manager, in his soul Billy Martin never left his childhood’s West Berkeley streets, where his fists starred in the gang fight operettas. When you watched him on the dugout steps, you felt a consistently unsettling super-concentration. His was, Roger Angell wrote years ago, the face ‘of a man up an alley when the knives have just come out.’

“Giamatti, hearty and grandiloquent, lived in a different Italy: that of the Quattrocento, of Renaissance poetry and Yale Clubs and elegant salons. Billy Martin lived in saloons when he wasn’t in uniform.

” . . . Baseball lets us have it both ways. Even more, it doesn’t let us choose--it demands that we have it both ways, that we salute A. Bartlett Giamatti and Billy Martin.”

Add Martin: What chance does Martin have of being elected to the Hall of Fame?

Bob Broeg, former sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and an influential member of the Veterans Committee, said: “Undoubtedly, his name will be discussed, but I don’t quite see him as a Hall of Famer. He was a volatile, aggressive, often winning manager, but I take a dim view of managing as an entree to the Hall of Fame. I wish they just took players. Managers like Casey (Stengel) are the notable exception.”

Hall of Famer Charlie Gehringer, 86, another member of the committee, said: “He certainly wouldn’t go in as a player. And I don’t think a manager is that important. If you have a good team, anybody can manage them.”

Trivia time: On Jan. 3, 1920, Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold pitcher-outfielder Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000, plus a $350,000 loan. The loan was used to produce what Broadway hit?

Board stiff: Hall of Fame defensive lineman Art Donovan, in “Fatso” by Bob Drury, on today’s NFL players: “Show me a quarterback today, and I’ll show you a surfer. They got a bunch of beauties now. This guy Troy Aikman that Dallas drafted--they gave him $11.2 million before the guy ever threw a pass in the NFL. But he’s like the rest of them. . . . He and (John) Elway and (Joe) Montana--they all look like they should be on the Pacific Ocean, hanging ten.”

Unfriendly skies: San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen writes that when a Continental Airlines flight out of Newark, N.J., was two hours late recently, the pilot told the passengers, “The Los Angeles Raiders made such a filthy mess of this aircraft that it took us two hours to clean it.”

Well, almost the same: Chicago Blackhawk defenseman Doug Wilson: “If a concert pianist thinks of every key he is going to hit, he’s in trouble. Same in hockey. When you start thinking instead of reacting, then you’ve got problems.”

On a roll: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that a Kingman, Ariz., real-estate developer, Richard Tomlin, is selling toilet paper bearing the likeness of Phoenix Cardinal owner Bill Bidwill. Proceeds are going to a charity.

Trivia answer: “No, No, Nanette.”

Quotebook: Pittsburgh guard Craig Wolfley, after the Steelers’ 26-23 overtime upset of the Houston Oilers: “What can you say? We’re a lump of coal that, under pressure, became a great diamond.”