Me & Billy: A tale of espionage
Billy Martin knew how to root out a cheater: He’d designate a batboy to look for corked bats in the opposing dugout. That batboy was me.
When the A’s suspected the Astros were cheating they went straight to Major League Baseball to lodge a complaint. Decades ago, when the irascible Billy Martin was managing Oakland and he thought an opponent was breaking the rules, he took matters into his own hands.
Or, more precisely, he’d sometimes put them in the hands of the A’s visiting team batboy.
Martin, who spent a lifetime teetering on his own path between right and wrong, certainly wasn’t averse to engaging the lowest of low-level personnel in a high-stakes game of espionage. Anything to win was everything to him.
There’s no doubt how Martin would have reacted if he were still alive and managing during the Digital Age, and he suspected nefarious activity from someone like the Astros.
“He would have tried to catch ’em himself and use it against them,” said his son, Billy Martin Jr., a sports agent and director of baseball operations for the Texas Airhogs baseball team. “That’s exactly what he would do.”
Still, it would be wrong to suggest Martin didn’t have his own ways of scheming — legally or otherwise
— for a competitive edge. “Trust me, my father tried to steal signs,” Martin Jr. said, without elaborating on his father’s tactics during a celebrated 16-year managerial career.
Martin went to some stunning lengths during the 1982 season to root out potential wrongdoing on the other side of the diamond in Oakland, including devising a plan with a batboy to catch one of his biggest adversaries, Reggie Jackson.
It was the batboy the A’s provided for visiting teams who alerted Martin that Jackson, then with the Angels, was traveling with a corked bat.
I know this because I was that batboy. And revealing the hubristic slugger’s secret to Martin led to one of the most harrowing nights of my teenage years.
I didn’t have much to do with Billy Martin. If he ever knew my name I’m sure he soon forgot it — not that it makes him a bad guy, because he surely wasn’t. We’d occasionally smile and nod to each other while saying hello well before games as we passed one another in the maze of Coliseum passageways. But as the other team’s batboy, I technically worked for and spent the majority of my time with the Angels, Red Sox, Yankees or whichever American League team happened to be in town.
Yet, like most everyone who drew a check from the Oakland A’s those days, an important aspect of my job was not to upset Billy, who pretty much had the final say on whatever went on at the Coliseum.
(I learned this the hard way once after I gave a high-five to Milwaukee’s Ben Ogilvie when the Brewers hit back-to-back-to-back homers. My batboy counterpart with the A’s immediately raced over and said “Billy’s really pissed! You can’t high-five guys. He said to tell you to knock that (stuff) off!”)
Partly because of Billy, but mostly because of my own curiosity while talking with equipment managers and some players around the league, I learned how to recognize bats that were corked. If I found corked bats, the understanding was I needed to somehow alert Martin. During my parts of six seasons working for the A’s in the 1980s, I found corked bats belonging to four different American League players — some used them in batting practice, but only one guy used a corked bat in a game while in Oakland.
At the risk of ruining the story’s suspense, Reggie Jackson wasn’t the guy who used a corked bat in a game. But therein lies the catch.
Naturally, Martin was delighted to hear about the doctored bat Reggie brought to town for that August series. He and Reggie had what was often a tumultuous relationship while working together with the Yankees and he relished the thought of catching Jackson breaking a rule.
After a brief, nerve-wracking meeting with Martin to determine which signal I would give him if Reggie brought out the corked bat during the series, my angst began. I was terrified of not immediately determining if Reggie was going to use his black Adirondack 302 Big Stick bat with the tell-tale signs of tiny incisions and a slightly elevated mass of after-market glue on top. Would Reggie notice me, standing three steps away from the on-deck circle, peering at the end of his bat?
As a small child growing up just three miles from the Coliseum while Jackson was an Athletic, I would sometimes be awakened by late-night fireworks triggered by Reggie’s home runs. And here we were, years later, and his bat was still keeping me awake at night.
After the first two games of the four-game series, though, it was clear to me Reggie was playing by the rules — he only brought the corked bat out during batting practice. So each time Reggie came up I made sure I wasn’t inadvertently giving Billy “the signal” Jackson was carrying an illegal bat. I was mostly relieved the would-be drama would soon end.
Then, in the final game of the series as Jackson strode to the plate in the sixth inning, amid the murmur from the crowd of more than 37,000 came the unmistakable high-pitched sound of Billy yelling “Time!” as he started shuffling toward home plate. I was aghast. Wait. Did I give the signal? I didn’t think I had my arms outstretched across the backstop to alert Billy, but now I wasn’t sure. In vain, I tried to catch Billy’s attention while shaking my head as if to indicate no, Reggie wasn’t cheating.
It was too late.
Within seconds Billy and Reggie were yelling at each other at the plate while home plate umpire Jerry Neudecker was trying to pry the bat from Reggie’s hands to inspect it. Neudecker spent a good five minutes trying to find signs of corking, which he only would have seen had he gone to the bat rack and pulled out one of Jackson’s other bats.
The bat may have been clean but I felt dirty. I couldn’t believe the surreal scene in front of me and I tried to convince myself I wouldn’t wind up getting fired because of the chaos that ensued.
Still frazzled about Reggie’s bat, I managed to get a message to Billy right after the game to say I was sorry about the mix-up and, if I did, I didn’t mean to send him a signal. Thankfully, an hour later came word back from Billy that I had done nothing wrong. As it turned out, Billy “just wanted Reggie to know I know about the bat.”
Billy told a different story to reporters that night. “I could care less if Reggie or any of the Angels are using corked bats,” Martin said.
Two weeks later, I was asked to see if another A’s opponent was up to no good. A frustrated Martin suspected some Detroit pitchers were cutting baseballs but didn’t know how. Guess who got talked into doing some investigative work while spending the night in the Tigers locker room.? Billy theorized Tigers catcher Lance Parrish may have been rubbing the ball against something sharp on his catcher’s gear before throwing it back to the mound.
Not wanting any part of the hassle, I quickly checked the gear and thankfully found nothing. Or, maybe if there was something sharp, I didn’t want to bother knowing about it?
That wound up being the last time I had to deal with any covert actions. Billy Martin was let go at the end of the A’s disappointing 1982 season that saw them lose 94 games after enjoying a renaissance the year before during the “Billy Ball” explosion.
But Martin was far from done keeping tabs on other teams’ players. He returned to manage his beloved Yankees the next season, and while scouring baseball’s rule book Billy stumbled on what he felt was the ultimate trump card: the pine tar rule.
Martin kept a list of players whose pine tar extended more than the allowed 18 inches up the bat handle, and Royals star George Brett was a prime offender.
“He literally had that one in his pocket for a long time,” Billy Jr. said. “And he waited for the perfect moment to say something.”