AT Royals Stadium the following afternoon, not long before the Yankees were scheduled to take the field for their pregame cuts, Billy Martin summoned his backup catcher, Fran Healy.
Poking his head into the manager’s office, Healy, who’d been to the plate sixty-seven times all season, wasn’t expecting to be told to be ready to play. He wasn’t. Martin had an even more surprising request: “I’m sitting Reggie tonight, and I want you to tell him.”
“I’m not telling him, you tell him,” an incredulous Healy replied. “You’re the manager.”
“I don’t want to tell him.”
“Why don’t you have one of the coaches tell him?” Healy asked.
“They don’t want to tell him.”
Healy pulled up a stool in front of Reggie’s locker and told him.
Martin headed out to the dugout, took a seat on the top step, and informed the newsmen that Paul Blair, his late-innings defensive specialist, would be starting in right field. This time there were no winking references to Reggie’s hyperextended elbow. The three-million-dollar slugger wasn’t hitting for “spit” (as the papers wrote it), and he was butchering balls in the outfield. “If I played him and he dropped a ball that cost us the game, I wouldn’t forgive myself for the rest of my life,” Martin said. “I don’t like to do this bastard thing, but if I don’t do what’s best for the club, I shouldn’t be manager.”
It was an act either of noble courage or of sadistic insecurity. An unconvincing argument could be made that starting Blair was the best thing for the club. Reggie was in the grip of a one-for-fourteen postseason swoon, and he looked about as surefooted as a beery weekend softballer on the artificial turf. What’s more, he did have trouble with that night’s pitcher, the left-handed junk baller Paul Splittorff. In fifteen at bats against Splittorff during the regular season, Reggie had picked up just two hits, a double and a home run.
But Martin never put much stock in stat sheets; number crunching, to his mind, was for managers who didn’t trust their baseball instincts. More likely, the only calculus that Martin made was this one: If the Yankees won without Reggie, he would be vindicated. If the Yankees lost, well, he was going to be fired anyway.
Batting practice started, and Reggie, burning, remained in the locker room. Eventually he emerged and gave a disingenuously stoic interview to Howard Cosell, admitting that he was disappointed but adding—you could almost read the humiliation on his face now—that it had taken “guts” for Martin to sit him.
As the newspapermen stalked Reggie, hoping for a more honest comment, another bomb was ticking away. The Yankees’ leadoff hitter, Mickey Rivers, was holed up in the trainer’s room refusing to get dressed. He’d been having problems with his wife all year. Earlier in the season she’d reportedly chased him from their apartment in New Jersey up to the stadium and then repeatedly smashed into his car until a parking lot attendant intervened. Now she had racked up a huge shopping bill in their Kansas City hotel, and the front office was refusing to advance Rivers the money to cover it.
Rivers was eventually coaxed out, and the game got under way. By the end of the first the Royals’ George Brett had slid into third spikes high, and the two benches had cleared.
The Royals took an early lead against a worn-out Guidry, who had pitched nine innings just three days before, and Martin quickly replaced him with Mike Torrez. The score was 3–1 Royals after three innings, and then the two teams started matching zeros. Every now and then NBC would advance the subplot, pointing a camera at the best-paid man in baseball history sitting on the bench in a warm-up jacket. No one believed it would end like this.
It didn’t. In the eighth the Yankees mounted a rally, and Reggie got his chance. With one out and runners on first and third, Martin called on him to pinch-hit for the team’s designated hitter, Cliff Johnson. The Royals’ closer, Paul Bird, was on the mound. Reggie took
ball one and then fouled off a pair of fastballs. Now Bird tried to sneak a slow curve by him. Reggie lunged, chipping the ball into center field for a run-scoring base hit, pulling the Yankees within one.
They won it in the ninth. The unlikely hero was Reggie’s replacement, Paul Blair. Most baseball scouts believed that Blair had never really recovered from a cheek-shattering beaning a few years earlier and that he was at his most tentative when facing right-handed power pitchers, such as Dennis Leonard, who was brought in to finish the game for the Royals. Martin stuck with Blair anyway. After spoiling a good fastball and a couple of diving sliders, he caught a pitch on the bat handle and looped it toward shallow center for a base hit. Roy White followed with an eight-pitch walk. Mickey Rivers singled to drive home the tying run, moving White to third in the process. Willie Randolph finished it with a sacrifice fly.
Most of the nation’s sports editors chose one of two images to illustrate their game stories: a first-inning photograph of Royals’ third baseman George Brett on all fours, with Yankees’ third baseman Graig Nettles’s foot embedded in his chest, or a postgame shot of the Royals’ five-foot-four-inch shortstop, Fred Patek, sitting alone in the dugout, head in hands, his pants torn from a nasty spiking. Goliath had apparently defeated David. As one Kansas City Tîmes columnist wrote, “Truth doesn’t prevail. There is no justice.”
In the locker room after the game, Billy Martin, for whom victory always tasted more like vindication, went looking for Steinbrenner with a full bottle of champagne. “That’s for trying to fire me,” Martin said, after sneaking up on his boss and soaking him from behind. Steinbrenner, a protective raincoat over his navy blazer, wheeled around. “What do you mean, try?” he said, half grinning. “If I want to fire you, I will.”
Paul Blair hugged Munson and thanked him for working with him on protecting the outside part of the plate. “Yeah,” Munson said, “the beachball can’t stir the fuckin’ drink, but he can teach you how to hit.”
A few lockers away Reggie ended his short-lived experiment with stoicism. “Can I explain what it meant?” he blurted, reflecting on his bloop single to a few writers. “I can’t explain it. I can’t explain it because I don’t understand the magnitude of Reggie Jackson.” Not that he had forgiven Martin. On the team’s charter plane a few hours later, Reggie sat alone in silence.
Martin was several rows up, listening to country music on a cassette recorder and wondering if any manager had ever gone into his second consecutive World Series still fighting for his job.