Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius

 

Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius – Bill Pennington

This is probably the best sports biography I’ve ever read. It’s certainly the most detailed. Author Bill Pennington is a former beat writer that covered the New York Yankees, and I’ve learned that these guys are usually the best when it comes to writing about the game of baseball.  After all, they did (or still do) it for a living, and they’re also privy to an awful lot of information that the public doesn’t possess.

As the subtitle of this book states, Billy Martin was definitely flawed, and he was definitely a genius.  Unfortunately, whereas he was a genius when it came to knowing and managing the game of baseball, he was pretty much flawed in everything else in his life.  The ratio isn’t always obvious since Billy was pretty much involved in baseball throughout his whole life.  As long as he had a uniform on (he played on 7 teams, and managed a total of 5), life was overall good. So the alcoholism, constant brawling, and multiple failed marriages tended to get somewhat dismissed as being a tad irrelevant within his very active life.

After the preliminary “early childhood” part of this biography, we see what makes Billy tick as a young ball player.  He was never the type of player that overwhelmed lovers of statistics when reading a box score, but his personality more than made up for this. He had an infectious personality that made his teammates love him and his opponents loathe him. During the 1950s, we also read an awful lot about his off the field carousing with teammates such as Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, yet the author mainly keeps the nightlife stories PG-13 rated.  Of course, the times were different, and when ballplayers lived a hard nightlife during this period in history, the understanding was that the antics were kept out of the sports page and out of the public’s view.  In addition to Billy’s wild lifestyle, there are several fights he gets into with opponents during his playing career as well.  It’s somewhat ironic that some of the nastiest brawls that he would engage in would somehow lead to everlasting close friendships with this one-time adversary. A strange man indeed.

As you would expect, the best parts of the book are once Billy becomes a Major League manager. We read about how astute Billy is when it comes to knowing the idiosyncrasies of every player and every situation during the game. We also read how studied he is of some of the more obscure rules of the contest (who could ever forget the “pine tar” incident?)  If we’re honest, Billy Martin was a great manager. His personality, though, seems to always get him in trouble. He seems to lose his managerial jobs quite frequently.  Before he wears his ubiquitous Yankees jersey, he first manages the Minnesota Twins, the Detroit Tigers, and then the Texas Rangers.  Throughout these stints, he never falls below second place in the divisional standings. Since these were the days before the Wild Card was introduced to the sport (the author writes too much about this fact throughout the book; one of my minor grievances), a lot of Billy’s teams are somewhat forgotten in the annals of popular sports history. We’re reminded that these teams may have been better remembered at they had a chance and made to the playoffs as many teams do today.

Then he starts managing the New York Yankees. If you’re reading this book review and are somewhat a fan of the Yankees, can you recite how many times Billy was hired and fired as the New York Yankees manager by the irascible owner George Steinbrenner within a 13-year timeframe?  I couldn’t.  In fact, I even lost track while reading the book.  Every time you turn the page it seems as though Billy is hired, fired, or hired away from his manager job for a “special role” for the ballclub.  It’s a bit much.

In fact, it does become wearisome reading this book after a while. This isn’t the author’s fault. He’s telling it like it was. It’s just we get tired of the constant patterns and episodes that seem to replay over and over again. Every time the cycle begins anew for Billy Martin, it seems we read that:

Billy is rehired to manage the Yankees
Billy drinks a lot
Billy’s wife is mad at him because he spends too much time with his girlfriend
Billy’s girlfriend is mad at him because he spends too much time with his wife
Billy fights with his players
Billy drinks more
Billy gets in fights with strangers in bars
Billy fights with players on other teams
Billy fights with George Steinbrenner
Billy drinks even more
Billy fights even more
Billy is fired as manager of the Yankees
Billy misses baseball
Billy is rehired by George
Billy drinks and drinks and drinks

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I should also point out that the author never paints Billy as some sort of obnoxious monster, but I thought he treated his subject matter with more kid gloves then he deserved. I guess we must remember that once Billy was managing the team (any of his teams) he was widely loved by the fans of that team and most of his players. And he mostly won, which is the point after all.  I still can’t honestly say that I admired the man, nor I would have wanted to live his life in his shoes no matter how popular he was.  There’s more to life than baseball. 

Well, sadly that probably wasn’t true for Billy Martin.