Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius

by Bill Pennington, Scott Waxman

Overview

  
The definitive biography of one of baseball’s most celebrated, mercurial, and misunderstood figures 
   
Billy Martin is a story of contrasts. He was the clutch second baseman for the dominant New York Yankees of the 1950s. He then spent sixteen seasons managing in the big leagues, and is considered by anyone who knows baseball to have been a true baseball genius, a field manager without peer. Yet he’s remembered more for his habit of kicking dirt on umpires, for being hired and fired by George Steinbrenner five times, and for his rabble rousing and public brawls. He was combative, fiery, intimidating, and controversial, yet beloved by the everyday fan. He was hard on his players and even harder on himself. He knew how to turn around a losing team like no one else—and how to entertain us every step of the way.
 
Now, with his definitive biography Billy Martin, Pennington finally erases the caricature of Martin. Drawing on exhaustive interviews with friends, family, teammates, and countless adversaries, Pennington paints an indelible portrait of a man who never backed down for the game he loved. From his shantytown upbringing in a broken home; to his days playing for the Yankees when he almost always helped his team find a way to win; through sixteen years of managing, including his tenure in New York in the crosshairs of Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin made sure no one ever ignored him. And indeed no one could. He was the hero, the antihero, and the alter ego—or some combination of all three—for his short sixty-one years among us.
  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544022096
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	04/07/2015
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.00(d)
Lexile:	1040L (what's this?)

About the Author

BILL PENNINGTON is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times. A former syndicated columnist, Pennington was a beat writer who covered much of Billy Martin's tenure with the New York Yankees. A fifteen-time finalist and six-time winner of the Associated Press Sports Editors' annual writing award, Pennington lives with his family in Warwick, New York. This is his fourth book.

Read an Excerpt

1

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” Billy Martin said.

He was in second grade.

Billy did this every Friday in 1936, entering the confessional of St. Ambrose Church to sit before the same priest, Father Dennis Moore. Like most second-graders, Billy did not actually have that many wrong deeds to tell Father Moore about. To what could he possibly confess?

Failing to honor his mother and father? Billy did not talk back to his parents. For one, he did not know his father, who left his mother when Billy was an infant. And he did not dare cross his mother, who ruled her household with an iron fist—a representation that was more than figurative. Jenny Martin knew how to throw a punch. Everyone in the family had seen with their own eyes her prowess in a fistfight, with women, and men.

Would little Billy confess to stealing?

In the gritty, crowded, downtrodden streets of West Berkeley where Billy lived, there was almost nothing to steal. California in the Great Depression was indeed a Garden of Eden, “a paradise to live in or see,” as Woody Guthrie sang in a ballad of the era, but no one would ever sing the praises of Billy’s neighborhood. He lived in one of the hundreds of tiny homes crammed against the East Bay docks across from burgeoning San Francisco. The tightly spaced West Berkeley houses were scruffy, set back just ten feet from busy, unkempt streets. They were homes without lawns and with tattered backyard fences. Factories and fish-canning plants towered over the neighborhood and seeded the sky with a smoky haze. The smell of the processed seafood filled the streets.

Two miles east of the water, the verdant hills of greater Berkeley climbed, a setting dotted with two-story middle-class homes and princely estates belonging to the administrators, professors, and staff from the nearby University of California at Berkeley. The roads in those shady hills were lined with flourishing fruit trees, graceful sequoias, and ponderosa pines. These were homes spread across spacious lots, leaving room for front and back yards and a driveway for the family car. There was a steady breeze off the water, and except when it was foggy, their view was San Francisco and the shimmering distant harbor—so long as they did not look down at the roughly square mile of West Berkeley dreariness below them.

No, Billy Martin didn’t steal. Only if you count some of the cooked crabs kitchen workers left to cool behind Spenger’s Fish Grotto, the roomy seafood restaurant near the docks. But that truly was not stealing. The Spenger’s workers, who had walked the few blocks from their West Berkeley homes, left the crabs out on purpose, knowing it was a furtive way to help feed the neighborhood.

What else could Billy confess to? Cursing? Taking the Lord’s name in vain?

His mother, who, unlike her five children, did not go to confession, had that commandment cornered, splicing profanities into virtually every sentence.

“Swearing was like breathing to my mother,” said Billy’s sister Pat Irvine. “She didn’t leave room for anybody else to swear. And if one of us swore, we’d get the back of her hand across our face anyway.

“So we did not swear.”

What else for Billy to confess then?

There was nothing of note, and in the dark of the confessional, Billy would instead strike up a conversation with Father Moore. He was never shy, always at ease with adults even as an eight-year-old. He had a crooked mouth and bad teeth, but he flashed his smile easily, and Father Moore, like others in the neighborhood, enjoyed being around the little boy who lived at 1632 7th Street, next to the house his grandmother moved to near the turn of the century. Billy most often regaled the priest with tales of the games he played at Kenney Park, just ten blocks away. There was basketball, swimming, diving, football, boxing, table tennis, and, of course, Billy’s favorite, baseball. Father Moore, seated deep in a quiet corner of St. Ambrose’s white concrete cathedral, heard about them all.

And when Billy was done talking about sports, the priest would ask about school and Billy’s friends. And only then would Billy talk about being embarrassed to wear the same clothes to school when some classmates clearly had a closetful of choices. He talked about being ridiculed for his overly large nose and jug ears, knowing that other kids called him “Pinocchio” behind his back. They made fun of his dungarees, which were frequently marked with grass stains and dirt—the evidence of his nonstop play at Kenney Park. But he wore them every day anyway. They were the only pants he had that fit.

While there was always food on the table at home, Billy said he knew his stepfather, Jack Downey, had to work two or three jobs to produce enough money for a household of six and he worried for him. There never seemed to be enough money to go around in a neighborhood where few of the adults had gone to school past eighth grade.

His mother had no car and had to walk everywhere, and Billy said he wanted a car. In fact, he wanted a big car someday, like the ones he had seen in the Berkeley hills. The kids from the crowded, flat, and uninspiring streets of West Berkeley called the well-dressed people they saw striding up and around the hills “the Goats,” a term still uttered in West Berkeley today and still delivered with a familiar disdain.

Billy wanted a car like the Goats had. And he wanted their clothes. And he wanted the money to go to the movies every day of the week if he chose. And he wanted his own bedroom, even if he did not mind sleeping with his aging grandmother, who had helped raise him since birth.

But as Father Moore related in a newspaper interview nearly twenty years later, “Life had already made Billy most vulnerable.” And that unnerved the priest.

“There was an insecurity, a lot of the kids from West Berkeley had it,” Moore said of Billy. “It’s the worry that you might some day have nothing. It was the idea, a constant fear, that it could all be taken away at any moment.”

But Father Moore also said that little Billy Martin had a plan. He knew the only way to get all the things he wanted was to work his way out of grimy West Berkeley. And at eight years old, Billy already knew that his way out was going to be baseball.

The greatest baseball team in the world in 1936 was the New York Yankees, the team of Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Tony Lazzeri, and Red Ruffing. Beginning in 1936, the Yankees won six of the next eight World Series and were runners-up in a seventh. It was a team that was a continent and seemingly a civilization away from 7th Street’s foundationless, rough-hewn houses, but Billy told anyone who would listen that he was going to be a New York Yankee.

“He told me he would play professional baseball in New York,” Father Moore said.

Billy told his best friend, Ruben de Alba, the same thing.

“We’d be walking down the street and Billy would say, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees someday,’” de Alba said seventy-six years later as he sat in a Bay Area assisted living facility. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure, Billy.’ I kind of laughed it off. You know, like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever you say, Billy.’

“But he wasn’t kidding. He would turn to me and say, ‘Listen, you wait and see. I’m going to come back here and remind you of this when I’m playing for the Yankees.’”

Father Moore, meanwhile, had less time for the wild dreams of the second-grader in his confessional. The priest eventually decided that while Billy’s aspirations were admirable, they were also driven in part by jealousy. Was not one of the commandments “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house” (or field)?

Father Moore ordered Billy to clean the church pews as penance. And Billy did. Father Moore then said he would see Billy at Sunday Mass. And Billy would be there. He even woke his cousins who lived in the neighborhood to accompany him.

“I’d be asleep and Billy would be tapping on my bedroom window telling me and my brother, Nick, to get up and go to church,” remembered Mario DeGennaro, whose mother was the sister of Billy’s mother. “My house was just a couple of blocks away and he’d come get me, badgering me until I went with him.”

Editorial Reviews

In Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius…Bill Pennington gives long-overdue flesh to the caricature…Pennington knows when to give Martin the floor and when to raise an eyebrow…In Billy Martin, Pennington savors the dirt-kicking spectacles without losing sight of the man.

The New York Times Book Review - Maxwell Carter

03/23/2015
In this definitive biography, New York Times columnist Pennington (The Heisman) portrays former New York Yankees manager Billy Martin as a baseball man of superior knowledge, albeit one who battled demons his entire life. Martin was killed in a traffic accident on Christmas Day, 1989—a sad ending for a 61-year-old California native who spent 12 seasons playing second base for seven Major League Baseball teams. From 1969 to 1988, he also managed five pro teams. Remembered for his tenacity on the field, Martin also liked to kick dirt on umpires' shoes and run trick plays. But he became even more famous off the field for his fiery temper, blatant philandering, and massive alcohol consumption. Numerous books about Martin already exist, including two by the man himself. But Pennington, a Yankees beat writer in the 1980s who witnessed several of the incidents recounted here in animated detail, was able to accomplish something that no other author has: he interviewed all four of Martin's wives. A motley cast of baseball Hall of Famers, including Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Rod Carew, Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Tommy Lasorda, and Earl Weaver, make appearances in this must-read for fans of the great American pastime. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Energetically reported and skillfully written, the book is enormously entertaining. Without pretension, it explores the question whether a baseball lifer can actually be a tragic figure in the classic sense—a man destroyed by the very qualities than made him great."
—The Wall Street Journal


“Through interviews with Martin’s long-silent widow, his son and others who knew and played with and for him, we get a complete picture — womanizing, drinking, fighting and the rest.” 
—New York Post
 
“Sprawling…thorough research.” 
—Chicago Tribune
 
“It's all here, copiously reported, including interviews with more than 200 people, many of whom have since died, making this a one-of-a-kind work.” 
—Newsday
"All the notable moments are here...Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin's motley life." 
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW 

"Martin’s life was a rollicking one, and as with the life, so with the book. Pennington’s take is great fun, and the author’s drive to talk to everyone who may have known Martin—from the most arrogant star to the humblest bartender—is impressive." 
—BookPage  

"A motley cast of baseball Hall of Famers, including Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Rod Carew, Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Tommy Lasorda, and Earl Weaver, make appearances in this must-read for fans of the great American pastime." 
—Publishers Weekly

"[Pennington] provides what is likely to be the definitive profile, which, as such, belongs in most library sports collections, especially those where Yankee fans cluster."
—Mark Levine, Booklist 

 
"His study of Martin is comprehensive and detailed, offering the reader rich details on his early years and his time as a player for several teams...Pennington expertly combines material from his subject’s personal and professional life, leaving the impression of a complicated and flawed but unforgettable man." 
—Library Journal
“Two words of advice: read this. Bill Pennington not only writes the sprawling, brawling, no-punches-pulled narrative Martin deserves, but also deftly illuminates the humanity of one of baseball's epic characters.”
—Tom Verducci, bestselling author of THE YANKEE YEARS (with Joe Torre)
 
"The hair on my forearms was standing up by the end of the fifth paragraph of this book's introduction. I knew Billy Martin. I covered Billy Martin. But I never knew him like this. Congrats to Bill Pennington for the definitive work on baseball's flawed genius.''
—Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe columnist and bestselling author of FRANCONA (with Terry Francona) and SENIOR YEAR
 
“Billy Martin has been dead for 25 years? Wow. That means there's a generation or two that know nothing about this character of baseball characters, this incandescent ballplayer/manager/jerk/sweetheart, this irrepressible brawler with a grand mind for the game. Bill Pennington cures all that  with 'Billy Martin, Baseball's Flawed Genius.' This is a terrific tale about a roller coaster life. Pour yourself a cocktail and enjoy. The descriptions of the fistfights alone are worth the price of admission.”
—Leigh Montville, bestselling author of TED WILLIAMS, THE BIG BAM and EVEL
 
“It has been easy to think of Billy Martin as a cartoon--one created by the media and abetted by the man himself. But he was a great American, as important to understanding our game, and our nation, as Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio. You'll never think of Billy Martin in the same way again, thanks to Bill Pennington's masterpiece of a biography.”
—John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball
 
 

From the Publisher

03/15/2015
There's a famous video of Hall of Famer George Brett charging angrily out of the dugout after his two-run home run was invalidated by the umpire. Known to baseball fans as the "Pine Tar Incident," it occurred owing to the eagle-eyed observation of Billy Martin, the legendary manager and player whose attention to detail on the field was unparalleled. Despite this, Martin is more remembered for his cantankerous personality and his short fuse—that, and for being fired by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner multiple times. Reconciling the two sides of Martin—the brilliant baseball mind and the irascible loudmouth—is no easy task, but New York Times sportswriter Pennington (On Par; The Heisman) is more than capable of doing so. His study of Martin is comprehensive and detailed, offering the reader rich details on his early years and his time as a player for several teams, most notably the Yankees. Most of the book's focus, however, is on Martin's service as a manager, and in particular his experience at the Yankees' helm. Pennington expertly combines material from his subject's personal and professional life, leaving the impression of a complicated and flawed but unforgettable man. VERDICT Baseball fans of all ages will thoroughly enjoy this lengthy but well-paced biography.—Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

Library Journal

★ 2015-02-11
A sympathetic examination of the fiery player and manager Billy Martin (1928-1989), who could dazzle between the lines but whose life outside the stadium was often boozy, libidinous, and rudderless. Earlier in his own career, Pennington (On Par: The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide, 2012, etc.), now a sportswriter with the New York Times, covered the Yankees during one of Martin's five terms as manager under owner George Steinbrenner. The author even witnessed one of Billy the Kid's late-career barroom brawls. As he notes, Martin, slated to return for his sixth stint as manager in 1990, was killed in an accident in his pickup truck on Christmas night—an accident the author both begins and ends with, devoting many pages to the controversy about who was driving that night, Martin or his friend William Reedy (who survived). Pennington interviewed myriads for this comprehensive work—from kings to commoners. Among the latter was a housekeeper at the end of Martin's life, a woman who tried to make Billy more accurate at the urinal. Although he focuses principally on Martin's professional career, Pennington also explores his family background in California, his lifelong problems with drinking, his fondness for fisticuffs (he would invariably swing first), his inability to be faithful to his wives (he was married four times), his cluelessness with money, and his celebrated feuds with Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, and others. All the notable moments are here—Cleveland's Ten-Cent Beer Night, the dugout fracas with Jackson, the spats with umpires (the dirt-kicking and -throwing), the firings and rehirings. As the author shows, Martin could charm as well as disgust and disappoint, and Pennington argues that although his record merits the Hall of Fame, his erratic behavior has kept him outside. Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin's motley life.

Kirkus Reviews