‘Billy Martin’: Baseball’s brawling bad boy
The eternal return of baseball season invites a special nostalgia for a time when the game’s greats didn’t seem like the hothouse athletes of today so much as a national register of regular guys. Tall, short, skinny, fat: Baseball legends came in every shape, like the rest of us, yet managed to awe us with their unlikely mastery of a sport that has more facets than a well-cut gem.
In most cases, they were rough diamonds — on the diamond — and few came rougher than Billy Martin, as chronicled in Bill Pennington’s new biography, Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius.
From his hardscrabble Italian-American origins in West Oakland, Calif., Martin broke in as a second baseman for the New York Yankees in the 1950s and wound up managing the Yankees, and other teams, in the course of 16 stormy seasons.
Martin’s time was marked by on- and offfield fisticuffs, much drinking, multiple divorces and a lot of winning. He famously kicked dirt at uncooperative umpires, feuded in the dugout with Reggie Jackson, and got along, it seemed, with no one.
He was complicated and conflicted (he even suffered a nose job to tame his ethnic snout), his dark side coexisting with a likability and charisma that made him a fan favorite. He knew the intricacies and psychology of the game better than most, and he could outmanage the likes of Casey Sten- gel, Tommy Lasorda, Joe Torre and Sparky Anderson.
Remarkably, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hired and fired him five times as manager in the 1970s and ’80s. (Martin died in 1989 at age 61 in a pickup truck accident just outside his home in upstate New York.) It amounts to a big, sprawling, story of a big, brawling life, and no one has a better purchase on it than Pennington, The New York
Times scribe who knew Martin well after covering him closely for five years as a Yankees beat writer.
Inevitably, Pennington’s admiration for his subject makes Billy
Martin somewhat hagiographic — Billy’s endearing humanity is always front and center, suggesting saintly struggle. But Pennington’s thorough reportage doesn’t shrink from Martin’s flaws, insecurities and downright bad behavior.
Rightly or not, he tends to blame baseball as much as the man: “There was free booze in every clubhouse in the country. ... The whole bunch of them were Mad Men before ... television writers created Mad Men.”
And so Billy Martin rollicks along with a cast of characters to make even a casual fan mistyeyed as Martin carouses with the likes of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford, and does battle on the field against New York’s other, greater second baseman, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
And just as the movies made hay with biopics about the immortal Robinson, it may be time to lighten — and darken — the screen with a Billy Martin film. Pennington’s book is surely the stuff of a Hollywood home run.