Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (9 page)

Nowadays, guys wouldn’t think twice if somebody came on the team after getting a big free-agent contract. Today’s player understands the timing, of having your option year and getting the money in your turn. Back then, many guys didn’t understand that.

Just like every other free agent, I had played out my option and taken my risk. If I had blown out my knee or something before I signed a new contract, that would have been too bad for me. I would have been out of luck. That’s just the risk I took—and that’s just how a marketplace works.

Reporters would write things about how I was a lightning rod, or I was always the center of controversy, but I don’t really understand that. Why, because I took the opportunity any ballplayer—or any writer—would have taken?

What’s more, almost everyone on the Yankees got a raise when I came on the team. Almost all of the holdouts, George ended up giving them bigger contracts. So you could say in the end I helped every one of them get more money. How did that make me the bad guy?

The situation with Thurman was even more tricky, thanks to the press.

When I came on the team, Thurman reminded Mr. Steinbrenner that he’d promised him he would always be the highest-paid player
on the club. George was as good as his word: He raised his salary to the same as I was getting in straight salary.

But Thurman thought he should get the deferred money and the bonus money I was getting, too. He was even upset that I got a Rolls-Royce and he didn’t. He had his reasons and his promises.

When George wouldn’t pay him the extra money, he started talking about buying out his contract or wanting to be traded. Then George got mad and wouldn’t go to a dinner in Thurman’s honor. It got to be a tangled situation, and I could sympathize with both men. But again, I was uncomfortable that I should be in the middle.

I felt it was the press that kept me there. Right from the beginning, all they wanted to write about was how Thurman and I weren’t getting along—when they weren’t writing about how Billy Martin and I weren’t getting along. And if they couldn’t find enough to write, it seemed they would drum up things to create controversy.

The very first day I was in camp, they asked me how I got along with Thurman. I told them, “I don’t know him.” I told them, “Why do you want to write about that?”

I could see what they were trying to do, but I didn’t see why they should. What did they mean, how did I get along with Thurman? We’d never played together. When Gene Tenace came on as a catcher on the A’s, nobody asked me how we got along. Why wouldn’t we just get along like two great pros on the same team, trying to win a championship?

In fact, from what I knew, Thurman was one of the guys very much in favor of me coming to the Yankees. What I heard was that he told the Boss, “George, if you’re going to get a free agent, go get the big S.O.B. in Oakland. That’s what we need.”

Thurman wanted the power. He understood it. He wanted a player he thought could get the team over the top and help win a World Series. George talked to his players, especially Thurman and Lou Piniella, and that’s what they both told him.

But right from the start, the writers were trying to make something between us. They wrote a story that was in
The Bronx Is Burning
. That first day of spring training, I wanted to go hit in the batting cage before I did my running, and Thurman came in as the captain and said, “Hey, you have to run first, that’s how we do it here.”

And then, supposedly, I went over his head and appealed to Dick Howser, our third-base coach at the time, and asked him if I could hit first. And Dick supposedly said yes, and that made Munson mad, and it was all downhill from then on.

Makes for a nice story, doesn’t it? Matches with what my personality was—or, I would say, what they
made
my personality out to be.

Thing was it never happened. It couldn’t happen. You don’t do anything on your own on a team. You can go out early and work on things. But if the team runs, everyone runs.

If the team does exercises, everyone does exercises.

And you don’t hit first. You always do your stretching and your exercises first, before you hit. You hit in groups, too. And I never hit in the first group anyway.

That was just a conversation that Thurman and I never had. It was just a way of clowning me.

But that wasn’t going to be the worst of my worries on the New York Yankees.

I
DIDN
’
T KNOW
Billy Martin. I didn’t know much about him. I didn’t know who he liked and what he didn’t. I just think Billy was out of control.

I know that Billy was a drinker. I really think that if he didn’t drink, he’d have been a different person. But what his motives were, why he disintegrated at different stops along the way, I don’t know. I never knew him, is how I’d say it.

Later, I heard a lot of things about what he was going through back then, when I came to the team. His marriage had broken up; his daughter was in jail down in Colombia. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. I don’t think many on the team knew that about his daughter—ever. Billy never
let
anybody know that. (I do know he was lucky to have had a great son, Billy junior.)

I don’t even think that Billy Martin had any personal dislike toward me. At least I didn’t know why he would. I heard he was very upset that he wasn’t part of my acquisition—that he didn’t get to be part of the decision. But that’s just not how it’s done with most teams; it wasn’t done that way with the Yankees—especially with the Boss running things. It was going to be mostly his decision.

You see it with the Yankees today. The manager has some input; his opinion’s respected. But it’s the front office, it’s the general manager, who makes most of the final decisions as to who’s the best fit. That’s just the way it is … The final say belongs to the owner of any team. That’s one plus one equals two—that simple. That’s the golden rule.

Billy didn’t want me on the team. He wanted Joe Rudi, or maybe later Bobby Grich, because they needed a shortstop. I could respect
that. They were great ballplayers. He wanted somebody who fit into his idea of the team, and I could respect that, too.

The teams that always fit best for Billy were the ones where it was about him. He always wanted teams that ran a lot, bunted a lot, so he could direct that. They called it “Billy-ball” for a reason.

Throughout his career, he was always best with young teams, unknown teams. Underperforming teams. He would turn them around. The minute those teams were expected to win, the minute they had some other big personalities, he had problems. Remember what he did to the incredible young pitching staff he had in Oakland from 1980 to 1982? All those great young arms: Mike Norris, Matt Keough, Rick Langford, Steve McCatty, Brian Kingman. He had them throw all those complete games … and by 1982, their careers were all but finished. He just chewed up their arms.

The spring of 1977, Billy had a problem with lots of players. Somehow, everything seemed to involve me.

Billy Martin was mad at Gabe Paul and George Steinbrenner because they didn’t get who he wanted and because he felt George was interfering with the team. All spring training, Billy was feuding with them. He’d yell at Gabe. He had a screaming match with George because the Boss wanted Billy to travel on the team bus. They had a fight because George wanted him to play every spring training game to win, especially against the Mets. Billy ripped his office phone right off the wall one time because George called down to yell at him after a bad loss. (George could never understand why we didn’t win every game!) “We’re the best team, why don’t we win every game?”

Billy told the writers that spring, “Without me [Billy], they could win, but there would be a lot of problems.” Billy was going to be the mediator of all of our problems?

Uh-huh.

I admit I had misread Billy. In October 1976, after my offer had been turned down by Baltimore and I became a free agent, I did some broadcasting work for ABC Sports during the playoffs and the World Series, which the Yankees were in. I enjoyed watching them play, and I said, “I could play for that man”—meaning Martin.

He just looked like a scrappy kind of guy who you would want on your side. We had the same sort of mentality, I thought, in terms of
being willing to do anything we could to win a ball game. I related to him socially, because I understood that he was part Portuguese. His middle name was Manuel, and his father came from the Azores, part of the nation of Portugal, which made him part Latino, like me. He even grew up in Berkeley, not far from where I lived and played for so many years for the A’s.

It befuddled me that we never had an alliance. It looked to me like it would be a good fit in those 1976 playoffs. Martin looked to me like a scrappy guy in the mold of a Weaver or a Lasorda, and he had the reputation of being a player’s manager. I thought we would get on well. I never had an inkling, before I signed with the Yankees, that he might have a problem with me.

You see, the whole winter after I signed, in 1976–77, I never heard from Billy Martin. Not a phone call. Not the standard thing a manager says: “Hey, Reggie, welcome to the team. I look forward to seeing you in spring training. We have a chance to win. Last year we got close. This year, with some new acquisitions, we can go a little further down the road. Be in shape when you get there, and I look forward to seeing you.”

Wouldn’t have been so hard. That would have been a nice scoop of ice cream to serve to the new kid. But all right, I didn’t really care.

But then I heard that he expected
me
to call
him
when I signed, and he was offended that I didn’t. I surely missed that side of it. It seemed like he could work anything up into an insult.

He didn’t come to the press conference when my signing was announced in New York. George was there; Thurman was there. But that was all right, too. I didn’t really even notice that Billy wasn’t there, with all the commotion and thinking about how the Jackson family was going to be better off.

I mentioned at the press conference how George was so positive and how he was the reason, along with my agent, Gary Walker, that I came to New York. Billy decided to take that as a slight, too. I heard he said to Fran Healy and to a couple of his friends, “I’ll show him who’s boss.” When I heard that, I thought, “Wow.”

I don’t know where that came from, but I didn’t think too much about it. Then I started to hear he was telling people, “We won without him. We don’t need him”—meaning me, of course. He was telling
people that he thought Nettles and Munson and maybe some other guys would be disturbed by my presence.

Later, I was told that he was in the Hotel St. Moritz coffee shop in New York the same time I was or something like that and that he didn’t come over to say hi. I don’t know—I certainly don’t remember being there when he was. I didn’t assume anything about that. To me, that was just the papers stirring up trouble. But somehow all the stuff they played up in the press started to become reality.

Before I came to New York, I never thought much about Billy Martin as a manager. I never thought about him being a good guy or a bad guy. I only knew what I thought watching him manage in the 1976 playoffs, that he was a scrappy-type guy.

What I overlooked was that he got into a fight with a couple of players and sucker punched a couple of guys. Dave Boswell in Minnesota. I heard Billy hit him when he had his hands in his pockets. I heard that Boswell’s pockets were torn when they picked him off the floor. But I never thought about any kind of confrontation with him. Just didn’t enter my mind.

I didn’t think of him much as a field manager. In my career, I played for some of the great managers of the time. Dick Williams. Earl Weaver. Tony LaRussa. I played for Gene Mauch, I played for Dick Howser, Bob Lemon. And Billy Martin would not come up ahead of any of those guys. Not as a clubhouse leader, not as a field manager.

The trouble was that he lied to people. That was his history. He lied to the general manager; he lied to the owner. He lied to players all the time, which was a big reason why he wore out his welcome. That first spring I was on the Yankees, one of the writers, Steve Jacobson, told me he saw Billy in his office telling Fred Stanley, “Don’t worry, you’re my shortstop.” The very next day, Steve said, he was up in the front office, screaming at Gabe, “You gotta get me a shortstop!”

Every stop he made, he’d bring along his combination pitching coach and drinking buddy, Art Fowler. Goose Gossage said he didn’t think he ever saw a day when Art’s eyes weren’t bloodshot. The pitchers
didn’t like him. Most of the pitchers thought he was a second-guessing guy, always second-guessing the pitches they made once they got back to the dugout.

Billy was much the same, though he used different tactics. When I first came over to the Yankees, I was told that Billy was the kind of manager who would crucify you in the dugout when you made a mistake on the field but then wouldn’t say anything once you got back in the dugout.

That would change.

I know it will sound crazy now, but when I got to spring training, I still thought I was going to get along well with Billy. Wow, I thought that! We were both a little
outspoken
.

But there was a big stumbling block with that right from the start.

I was standing near the bat rack early in spring training, and I heard some of the worst anti-Semitic remarks and jokes directed at one of our own players. This went on far too often. When this player was pitching and doing well, he was “the great lefty.” When he wasn’t, it was the name of his ethnic group and religion, “the Jew.”

I was raised in a Jewish community in Pennsylvania, Cheltenham, and I was very comfortable with Jewish people. My whole life, I gravitated toward them, because I thought that as minorities they had an experience with bigotry and social ostracism similar to what blacks went through in the United States—one that was just as severe.

I was upset because first of all these remarks hurt my teammate, who knew about them but didn’t want to cause a distraction that might hurt the team. Billy Martin wouldn’t pitch him if he had any other choice. When we look at the records, it was pretty obvious. He didn’t pitch. I always wondered why. He just sat there and accumulated rust.