THE Martin meltdown began with the usual epithet-laced rantings in the early innings of the fourth and final game of the 1976 World Series on October 21 and ended with a dramatic detonation in the top half of the ninth, when the Yankees’ forty-eight-year-old
manager picked up a foul ball and hurled it in the direction of home plate umpire Bill Deegan.
A predictable chain of events ensued. After being ejected from the game, which was virtually unheard of in the World Series, Billy Martin stormed out of the dugout and let loose a ferocious tantrum. Neck veins bulging, jaw clenched, he was eventually coaxed off the field. Passing back through the dugout before disappearing from public view, he delivered a swift kick to the bat rack. Martin’s anger soon turned to shame—not at his behavior but at being swept by the Cincinnati Reds. He retreated into the trainer’s room, which was off limits to the press corps, to sob inconsolably.
Over the course of the series he’d used every excuse, from the chilly temperatures of the night games (so scheduled to keep the TV advertisers happy) to the plastic grass of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, an affront to his old-fashioned sensibilities. Now, curled up on the floor beneath the cold metal training tables, Martin was left alone with his crushing sense of disappointment—that is, until his boss, George Steinbrenner, barged in to berate Martin for embarrassing him.
Martin eventually emerged, bleary and broken, clutching a cup of scotch. A reporter asked, unnecessarily, if he’d been crying. “Yes. I’m not ashamed of it,” Martin answered. “I’m an emotional guy … It hurts my pride, my ego, I guess, to lose like this.” It hardly needed to be said. Alfred Manuel “Billy” Martin’s desperate desire to win, to avoid losing, was already legendary.
It was, for the most part, the product of a lifetime of enduring slights, real and imagined. Even the moment in 1949 when he first became a New York Yankee, in retrospect one of the great moments of his career, was marred by what he took to be a sign of disrespect. He was, at the time, a bony young man with a big nose and jug ears, a second baseman for the Oakland Oaks. Upon hearing a roar from the crowd, he glanced upward and caught sight of a blimp overhead.
The news was wrapped around the electronic ticker: BILLY MARTIN SOLD TO YANKEES. “I was kind of mad when I found out the rest,” Martin remarked later. “Oakland was paying me $9,000. When I went to the Yankees the next year they only gave me $6,000. But I knew I’d make it in New York.”
Others weren’t so sure. Martin was just a throw in on a larger deal for a highly touted outfielder named Jackie Jensen. The Yankees already had two second basemen, Jerry Coleman and Snuffy Stirnweiss. And what did they want with a runty banjo hitter like Martin, anyway? During Martin’s first Yankees’ camp in 1950, Casey Stengel hit him eighth in an exhibition game. “Next thing, you’ll have me batting behind the batboy,” Martin fumed. Opening day at Fenway Park the dead-end kid slapped a double in his first big-league at bat, then a bases-loaded single—in the same inning. (“Listen you,” Martin told one reporter afterward, “the name’s Billy, not Alfred, like you wrote it up. Don’t forget it.”)
Yet down to the minors he went. “I’ll make you pay for abusing me like this!” a red-eyed Martin shrieked at the Yankees’ general manager, George Weiss.
A month later Martin was back in New York, this time to stay. He bunked with a couple of other rookies at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, right around the corner from the stadium, so he could get to the ballpark early for extra batting practice. He peppered his coaches with questions and hollered like hell from the dugout. Before long, he’d scratched his way into the starting lineup. It helped that Martin had already endeared himself to Casey Stengel, who managed Martin—“that fresh kid who’s always sassing everybody and getting away with it”—back in Oakland in ’48. (During infield practice Stengel would cock his head and scorch a grounder at Martin. Martin would scoop the ball up, flash Stengel a limp wrist, and then throw it back to him.) In New York the writers had soon taken to calling Martin Casey’s Boy. Martin, who had never known his father, called Stengel old man.
What Martin lacked in talent he made up for in grit. The same determination that had propelled this juvenile delinquent out of the sandlots of a dirt-poor, fatherless childhood near the docks of Berkeley—his grandmother had floated over from San Francisco with all her household possessions on a raft—drove him to overachieve as a big leaguer. After getting plugged in the face by a fastball near the end of his career in 1959, he started bailing out at the plate. Whenever he came up, he’d tell himself, loudly enough for the opposing team to hear: “Stay in, stay in, stay in.” But Martin kept pulling out. So during batting practice he put on a wool warm-up jacket and instructed the pitcher to throw him a bag full of “bow ties,” balls that were hard and inside. There he stood, his olive skin stretched tight across his face, his dark eyes narrowed in concentration, willing his uncooperative body into submission as one pitch after another buzzed beneath his chin.
In the field Martin never lost focus. During batting practice he would study the infield grass to see how aggressively he needed to charge slow rollers. Once the game was under way, he’d watch each batter’s feet for a sense of which direction the ball was likely to go. He hated wearing sunglasses during games, so he trained himself to follow pop flies out of the corners of his eyes to reduce the risk of losing them in the sun.
Martin turned double plays as ferociously as anyone who had ever played the game, and his disproportionately long arms came in handy when he was pivoting on the bag and whipping the ball across to first. He tagged runners so they stayed tagged, and he wasn’t above swiping his glove across their jaws if he felt they deserved it. Sitting next to Ty Cobb at a banquet in San Francisco, Martin told the dyspeptic old-timer that if he had played during his era, Cobb would have come sliding into second spikes high on him only once: “After that, you wouldn’t have had any teeth.”
He was just a .250 hitter—and 75 percent of his hits were singles—but Martin got his knocks when they mattered most. A 1956
profile in Sports Illustrated labeled him “The Damnedest Yankee of Them All.” In his six full years with the team, 1951 to 1956, the Yankees won five pennants. Only once did they fail to make it to the World Series: 1954, the year that Martin did a brief tour in the army. His lifetime World Series batting average was a gaudy .333, but his most memorable series moment came on defense. With the bases loaded and two out in the seventh inning of the final game of the 1952 series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, Martin streaked toward home from the edge of the infield, his cap disappearing behind him as he charged, to spear a windblown pop fly at his shoe tops. Somehow, Martin had sensed that the Yankees’ first baseman, for whom it should have been a routine play, had lost track of the ball.
Martin would have done anything to avoid losing, but winning came at its own cost. In short, his emotional makeup was not equal to the pressure, external or internal, of playing so far above his head.
When Martin first broke into professional baseball, his boyhood priest, Father Dennis Moore, who had supplied Martin’s impoverished family with baskets of food, prayed that he’d get some wise counseling. “Life had made him most vulnerable,” Moore once said. The priest’s prayers went unanswered. Martin fought insomnia, hypertension, and what was then known as acute melancholia. His churning stomach kept him from eating for long stretches. What he did eat, he’d often puke back up. Martin tried to cope, popping sleeping pills and drinking bottomless glasses of scotch, but nothing could quite cure the distemper. “The guys who are happy playing ball are those who can adjust to the nuthouse they have to live in,” Martin told Al Stump for a 1956 story in The Saturday Evening Post, a rare profile that got at the essential darkness beneath Martin’s “peppery” exterior. “Some of us can. Some can’t. I’ve never been able to get a good steady grip on myself in this racket.”
Instability bred truculence. Martin’s fists always seemed to be finding someone’s face. “The Bible says you should turn the other cheek,” Martin once said, “but God couldn’t have known anything
about baseball.” Baseball brawls are famously harmless affairs marked more by frenzied flailing than real combat. Not when Martin was involved. Most notoriously, he pulverized a mentally ill Red Sox rookie, Jimmy Piersall, beneath the stands at Fenway. When Piersall was institutionalized for a nervous breakdown a month later, even Martin was embarrassed. His only defense, he remarked, was that he was just a step ahead of the men in the white coats himself.
Martin lived in constant fear of having everything taken away from him, and his paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified. He wasn’t going to be able to fight off the younger, more talented players forever. What’s more, it was no secret that Weiss, a wealthy German-American from Greenwich, Connecticut, figured the unstable, bellicose Martin for a bad influence on the team’s biggest box-office draw, Mickey Mantle. (Martin was convinced that Weiss had hired detectives to trail him.)
Sure enough, at the beginning of the ’57 season Martin lost his job to a twenty-one-year-old rookie, Bobby Richardson. Six weeks later, on May 15, he went out to celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday with a few teammates. After dinner at the chic steak house Danny’s Hideaway and drinks at the Waldorf-Astoria, they made their way to the Copacabana to catch Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 2 a.m. show. The table of Yankees was soon exchanging heated words with a bowling team from the Bronx. In the tangle that ensued, a forty-year-old delicatessen owner was knocked out cold. YANKEES IN DRUNKEN NIGHTCLUB BRAWL, blared the next day’s banner headline in the New York Mirror. Martin reportedly didn’t throw the punch, but he wasn’t going to rat out the Yankee who did. Weiss now had the excuse he needed.
There was a month to go before the trading deadline, and Martin twisted in the wind for its duration. On June 15, with the midnight deadline just a few hours away, the Yankees were in Kansas City playing the Athletics. Absent from the lineup, a fidgety Martin walked out to the bullpen to watch the game, hoping somehow that
if Weiss couldn’t find him, he couldn’t trade him. The bullpen phone rang in the sixth inning, and Martin was summoned to the clubhouse. The Yankees’ farm director, Lee MacPhail, delivered the news: The next day he should report to the other dressing room. He had been traded to lowly Kansas City.
Martin drank late into the night with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, then returned to his hotel room and sobbed until sunrise. The following day he debuted at second base for the A’s. In the eighth, Ford, on the mound for the Yankees, signaled to his old pal to expect a curve, then hung a slow, fat one over the middle of the plate. Martin sent it into the left field bleachers on a line. It was small consolation. “I was running around the bases and I wasn’t even happy,” Martin reflected later. For seven years he refused to speak to Casey Stengel, whom he blamed for failing to protect him from the Yankees’ brass.
A few weeks later the A’s were in the Bronx playing the Yankees. The archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman, was at the game, and he called Martin over to speak with him during batting practice. Cardinal Spellman asked Martin how he liked Kansas City. “Oh, just fine, your eminence,” he answered. A few minutes later Martin was back behind the batting cage, waiting for his turn. “How do I like it in Kansas City?” he muttered. “I wanted to ask him, ‘How would you like it in Kansas City?’”
After an uninspired hitch with the Athletics, Martin knocked around the big leagues for several more years. As he bounced from one flagging franchise to the next, his arrival was almost always accompanied by the expectation that his famous intangibles—“pride, fortitude, and aggressiveness,” as Dick Schaap described them in Sport magazine in 1959—would transform the club into a contender. They never did. Martin played hard, but his mediocre skills deteriorated rapidly, and he never really got over the trade. “I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t get my heart into it,” Martin later reflected. “From then on I was through. It was all downhill.”
When the Minnesota Twins cut Martin in 1962, they offered to keep him on as a scout. Martin jumped at the chance. He was gradually promoted through the club’s ranks and in the summer of ‘68 was named manager of its Triple A affiliate, the Denver Bears. The team was 8-22 when Martin took over and 65-50 when he left. His performance earned him a one-year contract for the ’69 season with Minnesota’s sleepy big-league club. “He will be either the greatest or the worst manager in the majors,” the Twins’ president, Calvin Griffith, said ominously as the season opened. For his part, Martin guaranteed the baseball fans of Minnesota the most exciting summer of their lives.
They got it. Martin managed the game just as he had played it: personally, emotionally, intensely. Before games he’d take infield among his men. During games he’d bound out onto the field almost every inning—his right hand jammed into his back pocket, just like his mentor, Casey Stengel—either to issue an instruction to a pitcher that could just as easily have been communicated from the bench or to argue a call, which he usually did with his jaw an inch away from the umpire’s nose. More than once the scene ended with Martin getting the heave-ho and then kicking red clay all over the umpire’s trousers. He was a micromanager who shifted fielders, called pitches, and forbade even his fastest men to run without his permission. Most managers enjoy engaging in postgame analysis, getting the chance to explain to the writers why they did this or that. Martin guarded his strategic decisions like state secrets: “What do you want? The whole country to read it, for chrissakes?” At night he’d routinely violate baseball’s unwritten prohibition against bending elbows with the help. (No one knew this rule better than Martin. After all, he’d heard Casey Stengel repeat it at the start of every year: “One thing I want understood—I do my drinkin’ at the hotel bar. Stay out of it.”)
As a player Martin had checked the lineup every afternoon half expecting to find that he’d been left off it. As a manager he wanted his players to live with the same uncertainty. He was more than
happy to platoon his biggest stars to help get the message across. If that star was also a pet of one of the know-nothing suits in the front office, so much the better.
Martin led the Twins to a division title, drew a record 1.3 million fans to Metropolitan Stadium, and forever endeared himself to the Twin Cities. He also blasted the front office—“the second-guessing sonsabitches”—for mishandling a promising minor leaguer, decked the team’s traveling secretary in the lobby of a hotel in Washington, and ordered Vice President Hubert Humphrey to get his ass out of his dressing room.
But nothing quite compared with the scene that unfolded one night at the Lindell AC, a popular Detroit saloon where Martin and a number of Twins had gathered to drink on a road trip. One of Martin’s pitchers, Dave Boswell, had refused to run laps after the game that afternoon, and the team’s pitching coach, Art Fowler, sat down next to Martin and told him as much. Boswell came over after Fowler left and let Martin know he was going to kick Fowler’s ass for snitching on him. From here the details grow sketchy, but the undisputed facts are these: Martin pummeled Boswell, who had a good three inches and twenty pounds on his manager, so severely that the doctor in the emergency room assumed that the pitcher had been attacked by someone wielding a pipe. (Boswell said later that he’d been pinned by a few of his teammates while Martin went to work on him.) To Martin, it was just part of the job. “I like to treat my players as men,” he once remarked, “but sometimes they act like little boys and little boys have to be slapped down.”
Griffith couldn’t get rid of Martin quickly enough. “Prior to hiring him, realizing his explosive personality and his inexperience as a manager, I had numerous meetings with him to set policy and guidelines,” he said. “I feel he has completely ignored our understandings.”
Martin’s firing drove the people of Minnesota into a foul fury.
Bumpers were plastered with “Boycott the Twins” stickers, and screeds poured into the Minneapolis Star, including one signed by 218 fans renouncing the team in protest. More than a few letters were addressed to Griffith himself. “In my judgment,” wrote one outraged Twins’ fan, “history will record your decision on Billy Martin along with decisions that were made by Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, and Napoleon, when they took it upon themselves, in defense of their own egos, to determine what was good for all the people.” A Teamsters’ chapel, a natural constituency for Martin, threatened to cancel its season tickets. More surprisingly, though Martin had not a liberal bone in his body, his anti-Establishment, stick-it-to-the-man persona made him a cause célèbre among local campus radicals. At an anti–Vietnam War protest at the University of Minnesota, shaggy-haired demonstrators wore “Fuck Griffith” buttons and chanted, “Bring back Billy.” “It’s an out-and-out revolt by the Minnesota baseball fans,” reported The Sporting News. “They feel they have been robbed of their loveable, scrappy, outspoken, toe-stomping Italian leader.”
A year later Martin was back in baseball, this time as manager of the Tigers. Again, he improved the team’s sagging fortunes dramatically, bringing home a divisional flag in his second season. Again, he inspired fierce loyalty among fans. Again, he quarreled with the front office and was ultimately fired. Martin managed baseball teams well, the joke went; he just wasn’t very good at managing himself. The Orioles’ Earl Weaver later put it in starker terms: “Billy understands baseball, he just doesn’t understand life.”
The Texas Rangers picked Martin up near the end of the ’73 season. In the winter he pushed the club to sign Ferguson Jenkins, a tall right-hander who was coming off a dismal year with the Cubs. At the end of spring training Martin elevated an unknown twenty-four-year-old named Mike Hargrove from Class A ball. Jenkins won twenty-five games and was named Comeback Player of the Year; Hargrove
hit .323 and was voted Rookie of the Year. Having transformed the team with the worst record in baseball into an 84-76 club, the first winning season in franchise history, Martin was voted Manager of the Year.
Martin pushed his men to play over their heads, much as he had. He expected a level of intensity that was difficult, if not impossible, to sustain over a 160-game season. He shortened the careers of numerous pitchers, giving them the ball on three days’ rest and keeping them in games with their pitch counts soaring. Martin’s management style didn’t please everybody, nor was it intended to. “You hire twenty-five players. Fifteen of them are for you a thousand percent. Five are probably undecided and probably five don’t like you,” he said. “The secret is to keep that last five away from the undecided so you’ll have twenty going for you instead of fifteen against ten.”
Still, he was a brilliant tactical manager, a fact that even those who loathed him are apt to concede. “I didn’t like the way he treated his players, myself included,” says Ken Holtzman, who pitched for Martin in New York, “but as a field manager, in terms of the X’s and O’s, he was the best.”
Martin, who had been known as Billy the Kid in his playing days, liked Texas. The gunslinging swagger suited him. He even started wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots and adopted a Southern drawl. The team’s owner, Brad Corbett, set Martin up with a membership at a fancy golf club in Fort Worth. When he and his old pal Mickey Mantle nearly ran over Ben Hogan in a golf cart, Shady Oaks cut Martin loose. So did Corbett, in late July 1975. “He’s the easiest guy in the world to work for … as long as you just do it his way,” Corbett said. Martin of course took a different view. “I was the perfect guy to be crucified,” he said, after smashing the five-hundred-dollar wristwatch that Corbett had given him for Christmas. In six years he had saved three teams and been fired three times.
Martin was licking his wounds when Bernie Tebbetts tracked him
down fishing for trout in Colorado. Tebbetts worked for a man named Gabe Paul who worked for a man named George Steinbrenner.
At the time, the Yankees had not won a pennant since 1964, an eternity in Yankees years. A generation of New Yorkers was growing up thinking the Mets were the city’s winning team. Such were the club’s softening fortunes that when a Cleveland-based syndicate led by George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from the Columbia Broadcasting System in early 1973, it actually paid a few million less for the franchise than CBS had nine years earlier. At the time of the purchase, Steinbrenner had made it clear he had no intention of involving himself in the day-to-day affairs of the ball club. “We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned,” he told The New York Times. “We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”
A different reality soon emerged. Even after Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball in the fall of 1974 for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s ‘72 presidential campaign, no one doubted that he was behind the team’s aggressive personnel moves. Most notably, in the run-up to the ’75 season, the Yankees traded Bobby Murcer for the quick and powerful Bobby Bonds and signed Catfish Hunter, one of the best control pitchers in the game, to a five-year three-million-dollar contract. Hopes soared; hopes sagged. With two months left to play in the 1975 season, the Yankees were ten games behind the Boston Red Sox. Steinbrenner decided it was time to sacrifice his manager, Bill Virdon.
Tebbetts made Martin an offer that should have been easy to refuse: seventy-two thousand dollars a year, the same amount he had earned in Texas, plus a contract crammed full of onerous clauses. One prohibited him from criticizing the front office. Another stipulated that he could be fired, without pay, for failing to make himself
available to management. He’d be on parole, and he hadn’t even been arrested. Steinbrenner was familiar with Martin’s gift for turning players and fans against a team’s management, but he was sure he could break him. He started by calling Martin to tell him this was a one-time offer. If he wanted to manage the Yankees, now was his chance. Martin signed.
Steinbrenner quietly flew Martin and his wife, Gretchen, into New York and stashed them away in a midtown hotel under a fake name. For dramatic effect, he wanted the announcement made on Old Timers’ Day, which was still a couple of days away.
On August 1, 1975, Bill Virdon managed his last game for the New York Yankees. The following day, a steamy one in New York, Billy Martin rode out to Shea Stadium, where the Yankees were subletting space while their own ballpark in the Bronx underwent extensive renovations. The faded pennants and championship flags of a bygone era had been dragged out of storage and draped over the outfield fences for the occasion.
Martin hid out in the clubhouse and waited nervously for his name to be called as the rest of the old-timers—Mantle, Ford, DiMaggio—ambled out of the dugout, doffed their wool caps, and lined up along the first base line. Much to Martin’s chagrin, Steinbrenner had insisted that his new manager, a lifetime .250 hitter, be announced last, a position traditionally occupied by one of the true greats. Martin, by now dizzy with anticipation, finally trotted onto the field in his old uniform, No. 1. After eighteen years in the wilderness, Billy Martin was back in New York. He looked about the same at age forty-seven as he had in his twenties, only he was skinnier, a little more hunched, and he wore a mustache—“that mustache of recent vintage that gives him the look of a rather shopworn Mississippi riverboat gambler,” as the New York Post’s Jerry Tallmer described it a few days later.
The crowd roared, but Martin was fixated on the smattering of boos; the quiet, steady man whom he was replacing was not unpopular.
“They’re booing right now,” Martin said to himself, “but before I’m through everyone will be cheering.”
Martin, who was neither quiet nor steady, decided to use the remainder of 1975 to take the measure of his men both on and off the field, to identify the crybabies and “alibi Ikes.” But first he needed to make his expectations clear, and he did after his second day at the helm: “If you play for me, you play the game like you play life. You play it to be successful, you play it with dignity, you play it with pride, and you play it aggressively. Life is a very serious thing, and baseball has been my life. What else has my life been? That’s why, when I lose a ball game, I can’t eat. Sometimes I can hardly sleep. If you’re in love with the game, you can’t turn it on and off like a light. It’s something that runs so deep it takes you over.”
Over the following eight weeks Martin designated several players for trade, including Bonds, who’d spent the better part of the year fighting knee problems. A revered figure in San Francisco, Bonds had never felt at home in New York. With a few games to go, long after the Red Sox had clinched the pennant, he told Martin to scratch him from the lineup because his leg was bothering him. “No man’s going to tell a manager whether he’s going to play or not.” Martin quietly fumed. Bonds’s fate was sealed. At Martin’s urging, he was soon placed on the trading block. ‘Just wait ’til I get them for a full year,” Martin kept telling the team’s director of publicity, Marty Appel, as the ’75 season wound down.
In April 1976 the Yankees came home to the South Bronx. It was, more or less, the same place that the team had left two years earlier, but it bore no resemblance to the South Bronx in which Martin had played twenty-three years before that. Back then the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, the Grand Concourse, had been known as New York’s Champs-Elysees (with Yankee Stadium as its Arc de Triomphe). Now metaphorists referenced Dresden, not Paris, when describing the area. The old Concourse Plaza Hotel, a stately building of red brick, had been shuttered after a brief and ignominious
run as a welfare hotel. The South Bronx itself was losing ten square blocks, or five thousand housing units, a year to arson fires. Rows of private houses, apartment buildings, and small businesses had been gutted, leaving only blackened hulks in their wake. In the area surrounding the stadium, more than twelve hundred buildings had been abandoned. Empty lots were covered with shoulder-high weeds. Ten blocks from the ballpark, an unfinished five-million-dollar low-rise housing development, abandoned for lack of funds in 1972, was a thriving heroin den. When Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the first Harlem bureau chief of The New York Times, visited the Samuel Gompers Vocational-Technical High School in the South Bronx, she was confronted by charred classrooms and broken blackboards. Students passed around a bottle of wine during class. “It’s very difficult to generate enthusiasm,” one teacher told her, “when you feel everything is terminal.”
Amid this wreckage was the newly renovated Yankee Stadium, not the blue and alabaster bauble of yore, but a concrete fortress, battleship gray, with an anachronistic ring of white wooden trim running across the top of its bleachers, a little touch of Norman Rockwell on this otherwise bleak canvas. Mayor Lindsay had sold the twenty-five-million-dollar renovation to taxpayers as “the centerpiece of another New York City neighborhood renaissance.” Six years and a hundred million–plus dollars later, it was instead a powerful symbol of misplaced priorities, an outsize admission of urban failure. “It was Lindsay,” explained one official in the comptroller’s office. “First he got us pregnant, and then an abortion would have cost too much money.” Mayor Beame, who had inherited the stadium fiasco from Lindsay, did what he could to distance himself from it; he was conspicuously absent from the grand reopening festivities. WAS THE STADIUM WORTH IT? New York magazine asked rhetorically in a photo essay on the debacle.
At least the Yankees were finally winning. As his team dominated its division, Martin’s prediction came true: The fans were cheering
him. During the golden fifties, the dynastic era in which Yankees didn’t strain—didn’t need to strain—a sweat-soaked Billy Martin had thrived despite his cockiness, scrappiness, and unseemly hunger to win. In the seventies, a very different time in the life of the ball club and its city, he flourished because of them. In September, Steinbrenner gave him a three-year contract extension. Beneath the surface, though, Martin’s inner demons continued to torment him. As the wins piled up, the stakes mounted, and the prospect of losing became that much more sickening. Martin, who was always skinny, was now more gaunt than ever. Over the course of the ’76 season, he shed 20 pounds from his six-foot frame, dropping to a mere 154. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, which had first appeared during his playing days, deepened.
The 1976 American League play-offs, New York versus Kansas City, went the distance. The decisive game five was played on a chilly October night in the Bronx. The Royals jumped out to an early lead, but the Yankees came back and pulled ahead. Then, in the top half of the eighth, George Brett’s three-run home run knotted the game at six, where it remained until the bottom of the ninth. The Yankees’ first baseman, Chris Chambliss, was due to lead off the inning, the start of which was delayed for five minutes while the grounds crew cleared the field of the glass bottles that had been raining down from the stands for much of the game. Chambliss finally dug into the left-hand side of the batter’s box and sent the first pitch he saw, a waist-high fastball, over the fence in right-center.
Now, bedlam. Before Chambliss arrived at first base, a torrent of fans had poured out onto the field. By the time he reached second, one had taken the bag out of the ground; Chambliss had to touch it with his hands. Weaving in and out of the growing crowd between second and third, he was knocked down repeatedly. One fan tried to take his helmet. Approaching third, Chambliss decided he’d had enough. He made a wide turn around the bag and headed for the dugout, which was already spilling over with fans, including Cary
Grant, whom Steinbrenner had brought down from his box for the postgame celebration. The Yankee players pushed through the crowds to find teammates to hug. For his part, Martin was busy recruiting a detail of cops to escort Chambliss back onto the field so he could touch home plate.
The brand-new ballpark was in tatters. Huge chunks of turf were uprooted, every base had been stolen, and the field was littered with garbage, from newspaper shreds to empty bottles of Hiram Walker brandy and Jack Daniel’s. The Yankees had won their first pennant in twelve years.
The National League champions, the Cincinnati Reds, were favored to win the ’76 World Series. Martin was, at least outwardly, unfazed: “I don’t care what Pete the Greek says,” Martin remarked, referring to the prominent oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek. “I never met a Greek who was a smart baseball player.” But Martin’s run was over. The Yankees dropped the first two games in Cincinnati. After losing game three in the Bronx, Martin threatened to give one wisecracking reporter “a good asskicking.” He was coming unglued. By the time he exploded in the fourth and final game, few were surprised.
The grotesque tableau was imprinted on Martin’s memory, and to make matters worse, he and his second wife, Gretchen, a former airline stewardess and the belle of her sorority at the University of Nebraska, split up shortly after the season ended. He spent the winter of ’76–’77 alone in the Hasbrouck Heights Sheraton in New Jersey. Most afternoons found him listening to Jim Croce or sitting curled over a drink in a dimly lit watering hole, idly running his finger around the rim of a glass of scotch. When he wasn’t replaying the World Series in his head or entertaining dark thoughts about what Steinbrenner was up to across the river, he was worrying about his teenage daughter from his first marriage, who’d been thrown in jail in Colombia after being accused of trying to smuggle cocaine out of the country in her panty hose. “I’d like to kill the sons of bitches who sent her down there,” thought Martin.