Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (17 page)

I always thought about society at the time. In the 1970s, referencing my color with the word “boy” was no big deal to people. Today, he’d be fired. The mores of the world were what they were. Things hadn’t caught up. It was the way of the world. He could call me “boy,” but if I spoke out, as a black man, I was the troublemaker. I was supposed to feel lucky that I was in the league. I should have been glad to have been there.

People knew what happened in that meeting. I mentioned it to people. I told Fran, and I told some of the writers. It came out in the media that he called me “boy.” But nobody called on the Yankees to fire Martin. Instead, it was my problem.

People forget, but I went back out and played that Sunday afternoon. I remember I hit three balls hard off Fergie Jenkins, but all right at somebody. That’s the way that whole series went up there.

They clobbered Ed Figueroa, hit another five home runs. They had
sixteen home runs in three games, which was some kind of record. They outscored us by 30–9.

But somehow it was all my fault for letting Jim Rice take that extra base. In an inning when the Red Sox didn’t even score.

Afterward, Figueroa called out the whole team. He accused everybody of drinking too much, playing cards all the time in the clubhouse. He was really accusing Martin of not running a tight locker room. Figueroa was mad; you had Dent thinking of jumping the team—it was starting to get through that maybe it wasn’t all me. Maybe the trouble with the team had to do with somebody else as well.

We went to Detroit after Boston, and by that time the Boss had had enough. The way I heard it—through Fran—was that George came to Detroit planning to fire Billy right then and there. He was going to give his job to Dick Howser, who a little later became a terrific manager with the Yankees and the Royals. Billy would’ve been gone, but Dick wouldn’t take the manager’s job out of loyalty to Billy, who had hired him as a third-base coach.

After that, they managed to piece it together again. Gabe talked to Billy, and he talked to George. Fran Healy was talking to everybody, soothing everyone’s feelings. He was used, really, as the person to communicate with me, from management on down.

What I was told was that they didn’t think they could fire Billy because then it would look like I was running the team. They were afraid of what the fans might think if they fired Billy. Hmm-hmm. Nineteen seventy-seven. Think that would happen today?

You think about it now, it’s crazy. You’re managing a team, you show up looped for a meeting with the GM, half an hour late, then you challenge your star player to a fight and direct a racial slur toward him … you’re going to end up in rehab. At best. Chances are you’re going to be fired. Today, people try to clamp down on that sort of behavior.

But in 1977, with the Yankees, Billy Martin just went on managing.

S
OME OF THIS
, when I look back now, I just have to laugh. I got through it, and I lie down at night now and I think, “Boy, I have had a great life.” Some of these experiences that I’ve had were extremely interesting. I’m glad for all of the people I’ve had to share them with. Even the difficult times, they were special, when I think about them now.

But at the time, it was tough to get through. Those weeks right after what happened in Boston were the worst part of the season for me. It was the worst time I’d had in baseball. I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through without my dad, my brother Joe, Gary Walker, Fran, and a local friend in town, Tony Rolfe. I could not have done it alone. Gary Walker called every day and kept talking about building character. I told him I had enough character, I didn’t want any more!

It became very clear that almost everybody—not only in New York, but all around the country—was on Billy’s side. The day after the Boston series, we arrived in Detroit for a nationally televised game against Mark “the Bird” Fidrych, who had been their rookie sensation the year before, famous for talking to the baseball out on the mound. There must’ve been nearly fifty thousand people there, and when Billy went out to give the umps the lineup, he got a standing ovation. Another trump card.

I knew what that meant. I knew Billy was still popular from when he managed the Tigers. But it was a message as well. He was going to be the hero, I the goat. (What was it, racial, social, me? Who knew? It didn’t make sense.)

And from then on, it was like that everywhere. Boos for me, cheers for him. Didn’t matter where we went. Billy was the hero. Whenever he put his head out of the dugout, they would cheer him.

Whenever I went out to right field, they would boo. I got booed all around the league.

It was heartbreaking at times. Every stadium in the league, it was “Reggie sucks.” And that was the polite version. Whole ballparks chanting that. I got booed at home as well. Any little article that came out and was negative, they would boo me more.

I felt alone so much. The fans just beat me down. And the media did their best to pile on. It was brutal. Papers all over the country joined in.

Billy knew it, too. After the game in Detroit, he was going around telling the press about the hand he got: “Wasn’t that super? I’ll bet George just loved to hear that.” Rubbing it in. George and Gabe Paul were having problems with him as well. They’d lost control of Billy. George had flown up to Detroit intending to fire him, but he didn’t when Howser refused to take the job.

So Billy stayed and I prayed. And George ended up staying to give us one of his football pep talks before the game. He came into the locker room and told us, “You guys are a finger snapping away from firing your manager.”

That was the first we knew for sure Billy
wasn’t
fired. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was in a whirlwind with what was going on from day to day, with being the why and the what for, and the reason why he was going to be fired, and then he’s not. I was in an emotional knot. It was too big of a deal for me while I was just trying to play. At that time of year, I was just starting to get a little better.

George came right out and said, “I think this ball club is prejudiced against certain individuals on the ball club.” He didn’t come right out and say it was a black-white thing, but it was implied that he meant me. I was impressed and felt good about his awareness and sensitivity. It showed compassion that I didn’t know he had.

The great thing about George Steinbrenner was he really didn’t care who you were. If he didn’t like you, it didn’t matter what you looked like. He just wanted the Yankees to win.

He told us that everybody in every other city was gunning for us, and they wanted to see us fall apart. We had to pull together. Then we went out and lost, on
Monday Night Baseball
. I drove in the only run we got off the Bird. But then in the seventh I tried to dive for a ball Mickey Stanley hit, and I lost it in the glare from the Tiger Stadium lights. He got a double out of it, and they scored what stood up as the winning run soon after.

At the end of the inning, I was so upset with myself I ran right through the dugout and into the clubhouse. I looked so bad even Billy and Dirt Tidrow, who never much liked me either, came back to see if I was okay. A rare moment of consolation. I said after the game, “Man, that’s the worst I’ve ever felt on a ball field. I ought to quit. Give up.”

I didn’t give up. I never really thought about giving up. But that’s how bad I was feeling. That’s how much Billy and the whole situation were starting to affect me.

Instead, I went out there the next day, got two hits, and drove in a run, though we lost again. The day after that, we were leading, 7–2, got down, 10–7, but I had two more hits and drove in the winning runs with a double to help break our slide.

That’s the way you have to play the game of baseball. You have to answer the bell every day. I watch the players we have on the Yankees today and try to explain to people the admiration I have for guys like Jeter, and Cano, and Teixeira. For Andy Pettitte, and Sabathia, and the great Rivera. They answer the bell every day. Tired or not. Can’t get sick, don’t get toothaches. Upset stomachs. No days off.

A couple years ago, the Yankees played thirty-six games in thirty-seven days, I think. They’d leave New York and go to Toronto. Then they’d leave Toronto and go to Chicago. After Chicago, they went to Texas. They flew home, got in at five in the morning, got up at two or three in the afternoon. Which means your “off day” is really four in the afternoon until ten at night, because you have to play the next day.

It’s a degree of difficulty that’s not understood by the public or the fans. It is understood by the players, how hard it is. Guys who
think baseball and play baseball from February to November. Every day, all day.

You know, you’re supposed to pray every day, all day. You have choices. In baseball, you play every day, all day. And you don’t have choices.

You develop a different bond, a different relationship with the people and the players you hang with. You’re with these guys for 162 games, thirty-five days in the spring, the postseason. For more than two hundred days a year, you’re in this environment that becomes an extension of family. Relationships become strong. Look at Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte, Posada. They will be lifetime friends. Same with me, Bando, Holtzman, Rudi. Same with Randolph, Guidry, Piniella, Goose. Regardless of how far the friendship goes, you still develop great respect for players like Munson, Nettles, Lyle, and others, when you play with them. Over the years, you learn to respect great talent.

With Billy Martin, he was something else. He was something I hadn’t encountered yet in my career. I’d always had managers who were master psychologists or at least able to go with the flow of a team. To make sure it kept running smooth, to keep out distractions.

Billy
was
a distraction on his own. If nothing else, he was always trying to get into your head, all the time. To play some kind of game, to prove something, I don’t know. I didn’t want to pay attention to all the nonsense that was going on out there, to what the fans thought, or the writers. To play baseball at this level, and to do it as well as you can every day, you
have
to tune the negatives out. But Billy made it almost impossible.

To give you an example, after we pulled out the last game of the Detroit series, we came back home to play Boston again, and I had to go out to get my eyes examined. This came from the front office and from Billy, after I lost that ball in the lights. It befuddled me, but I went and got a full exam anyway.

We were five games down to Boston by then, and we couldn’t afford to get down much more, even that early, against a team like the Red Sox. They were threatening to run away and hide. They’d just smoked
Baltimore, four straight. They were getting great pitching, and you couldn’t keep them in the park. Coming into Yankee Stadium, they’d hit thirty-three home runs in their last ten games, which was another record.

I guess their success was based on more than just me playing Jim Rice too deep.

They were starting Bill Lee again in the first game, and I couldn’t wait to get out there. I was five for nine against Lee that year, with two home runs. Despite everything, I’d been slowly working my way into a groove at the plate, driving in runs almost every game. I was psyched.

Then, an hour before the game, Billy takes my name off the lineup and writes in Roy White’s. He told the press that he was worried my eyes were still dilated. From the eye exam he and the front office wanted me to get. The eye exam I had the day before.

The joke was on me. He’d set me up real nice. Of course, he never asked me if my eyes were dilated. He didn’t have time to do that. He didn’t even have time to tell me, man-to-man, that I was out of the lineup for the biggest game of the year so far, just let me read it off the lineup card there in the dugout.

I’d heard, however, that he had time to sneak a dead mackerel into Bill Lee’s locker.

I was so mad when I saw the lineup change I just threw my bat down and walked out into the outfield so I wouldn’t say anything to the writers. I even forgot my glove. But that was all right, I was learning. I was just going to keep my mouth shut and take whatever that man had to give out.

I know Gabe Paul and George were not happy with it. In the second inning, Gabe sent the club doctor down to examine my eyes. He confirmed that, somehow, after thirty-six hours, they were no longer dilated. Gabe then had to call down to Billy in the dugout and tell him explicitly that I was available.

That’s how crazy things could get on a ball team run by Billy Martin. The general manager has to send the team physician down to examine a star on the team during the biggest game of the year so far and confirm he’s all right … so the manager won’t lie about not
playing him to the press. I’ve never heard of anything else like that happening in the whole history of the game.

But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything, even though Billy insisted on starting Catfish that night and I knew his arm was killing him. Martin knew it, too, but he put him out there anyway. Catfish was a great, great pitcher, and Billy was treating him like that. That would come back later, too, because nothing ever did go away for good on the Yankees. But for the time being, I just sat on the bench and kept my mouth shut.

The game was entertaining. That was when I first understood how Boston–New York games were like a war. There was nothing else like that then, and there still isn’t today. I’d seen it in Boston. I heard the stuff they yelled at me out in right. In center, Mickey Rivers had to put on a batting helmet; they were throwing so many metal objects at his head. Somebody threw a smoke bomb in the outfield.

It was like that in Yankee Stadium as well. All sorts of stuff being thrown on the field, fans from the two teams getting into fights. It was wild, like some kind of soccer match down in South America more than a baseball game.

Catfish was a gamer. He pitched about as gutsy a ball game as I’ve ever seen that night. He went all the way to two outs in the ninth before they had to pull him, and he only gave up five hits. Trouble was three of them were homers, and we were down, 5–3. Bill Lee
wasn’t
hurting, but—what a surprise—he came up short in a big game and didn’t make it out of the fourth inning.