This Day in Yankee History (Impulsive ‘Boss’ Fires Livid Yogi)

Apr. 29, 1985—After promising as late as spring training that he would let Yogi Berra manage the New York Yankees for the entire season, principal owner George Steinbrenner abruptly fired him before the first month had even ended.

The cause was not misconduct, a breakdown in relations with players, or defiance of the man the media had nicknamed “The Boss,” but a 6-10 record following an 87-75, second-place 1984 finish.

Berra’s replacement, Billy Martin—hired for the fourth time—didn’t produce the desired result, either, going 91-54, good for an overall 97-64 season—leaving the Bronx Bombers second once again in the American League East division. Forget about a pennant, the minimum that the Boss expected: Martin couldn’t even get the team into the playoffs.

Though Berra did not express anger initially (“He’s the boss, he can do what he wants”), at some point his dismissal began to gnaw at him. It wasn’t until years later that his grievance was aired: after 30 years with the organization, he felt that Steinbrenner owed it to him to deliver the bad news himself rather than to entrust the dirty job to General Manager Clyde King.

And so, the Yankee great—a Hall of Fame catcher, coach, and manager beloved by teammates, players, and fans—vowed to boycott all Yankee-related functions for as long as Steinbrenner remained in charge of the organization.

Fourteen years passed before Berra relented. In the process, he accomplished something remarkable: He became perhaps the only employee in the Steinbrenner Era to get the better of the Boss.

With each passing year—even with the team winning World Series again after a decade without even being in the playoffs—Steinbrenner suffered a public-relations embarrassment for his cavalier treatment of the most visible remaining link to the DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty.

At last, with Yankee radio announcer Suzyn Waldman as a diplomatic go-between, the standoff concluded with Steinbrenner showing up at the opening of the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Montclair, NJ. All the way over from the Bronx to the museum, the owner had never looked so nervous, an associate recalled later, according to this 2015 article by the New York Times’ Harvey Araton.

But in a short meeting behind closed doors, Berra got what he wanted: an apology.

Think of it: a powerful man forced to travel abjectly to the turf of the one who had brought him to heel. How often does that happen?

Quite apart from the shabby treatment of the lovable Berra, was his removal warranted? Did the results justify it? To both questions, I would answer no, for these reasons:

*The three most important Yankees that year—Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, and Rickey Henderson—were, at that point, still not at full strength because of injuries. In other words, this team had not yet started to fire on all cylinders, but it would do so shortly—if only Steinbrenner had given it a chance. In short order, they were about to become an offensive powerhouse this season.

*One complaint that Steinbrenner had voiced about the squad in the past few weeks—a “lack of discipline” on the field—was spurious. In addition to the three players mentioned previously, this Yankee team featured veterans like Don Baylor, Ken Griffey Sr., Ron Guidry, and Phil Niekro. Motivation and self-discipline were not problems for this group.

*The removal continued to destabilize a team in desperate need of a calming influence. This was the 12^th managerial change since Steinbrenner had taken over the club in 1973. The players liked and got along with Yogi.

*Speaking of “destabilizing,” Martin was about to fall into familiar habits. Martin favored a fast, aggressive style of play that had become known as “Billy Ball.” But sometimes his non-traditional style of play could backfire. That’s what happened late in the year, when he sent third baseman Mike Pagliarulo to the plate to bat right-handed, late in a crucial September game against the Detroit Tigers—even though “Pags” was not a righty, or even a switch-hitter. The move failed. Worse, as Steinbrenner’s carping predictably picked up again, the alcoholic Martin got into one of the barroom fights that had come to mark his career as player and manager, this time with his own pitcher, Ed Whitson. While Martin ended up with a broken ulnar bone in his right arm, his inconsistent but high-priced starter came away with a broken rib and fractured hand.

*If Martin was overrated as a manager, Berra was underrated. Martin’s insistence on complete games by his starters effectively killed on the best young rotations in baseball when he managed the Oakland A’s following the 1981 season. He might have produced immediate improvements for the teams he managed, but the gains were temporary, as he exhausted the patience of owners and players alike. On the other hand, Berra had already managed two pennant-winning teams that probably shouldn’t have even made it that far. In 1964, he had managed a proud but aging team of Yankee sluggers to the seventh game of the World Series before they fell to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1973, with Rusty Staub—a productive but not traditional cleanup hitter—batting fourth, he took the Mets to the World Series, too—even knocking off the powerful Cincinnati Reds in the playoffs before falling to the Oakland A’s in the Fall Classic.

With his 10 championship rings, Berra had long been loved by Yankee fans not just as an important contributor to the team’s success but also as a colorful character famous for malapropisms—sometimes real, sometimes invented by others—that became known as “Yogisms.” His often basic, awkward communication skills led sportswriters particularly to underestimate his knowledge of pitchers and feel for the game.

But the long cold war with Steinbrenner enhanced the respect with which he was held. For years, it had been the pugnacious Martin who had garnered sympathy for his fights with the owner, even though it had often been manifested in boorish, self-defeating antics.

But, by standing stubbornly on principle without acting out, it was now Berra who had become an object of sympathy, as well as a stand-in for anyone who had to endure a bumptious, bullying boss. When the dust had settled, though no longer working on baseball, he had become the beloved elder statesman of the Yankees, a position he retained until his death 10 years ago.

(The image accompanying this post, of Yogi Berra in 1984, was made available by the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)

Quote of the Day (Zach Helfand, on the Umpire’s Strike Zone)

"For many years, an umpire’s strike zone was like an extension of his personality. Some umpires were literalists, uncompromising. Some preferred expediency; their boundaries were enormous. No matter who was working, when it rained suddenly everything was a strike. [Joe] West, the record-holding umpire, is a burly man with a Carolina drawl who moonlights as a country singer and used to pal around with Merle Haggard. He told me one umpire described the old standard for learning the strike zone as ‘You call them strikes until someone goes, “Hey!”’ Another of his friends liked to say, ‘The strike zone is like a television set, and every now and then you need [Hall of Fame Baltimore Orioles manager] Earl Weaver or Billy Martin’—the Yankees’ volatile manager in the seventies and eighties—'to come out and adjust the knob.’ Martin once sent an umpire a Christmas card that read ‘I hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday season.’ On the inside, he wrote, ‘Because you sure had a horseshit summer.’ Video evaluation has reined in some quirks, but the strike zone still changes measurably depending on the score, the team batting, and the pitcher’s race.”— Zach Helfand, “Invasion of the Robot Umpires,” The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2021

You can be forgiven for thinking that in this offseason, San Francisco Giant manager Gabe Kapler might be sorely tempted to pull a Billy Martin and send Gabe Morales an unpleasant holiday greeting.

The first-base umpire did little to slow down—and, I’d wager, much to accelerate—the movement towards the video-evaluated decisions chronicled by Helfand in his New Yorker piece. In Thursday night’s deciding game of the Giants-L.A. Dodgers NLDS playoff series, Morales sent Wilmer Flores and the rest of the Giants to an aggravated, sorrowing postseason by calling a third, game- and series-ending strike on the first baseman.

Most of the rest of the civilized world believes that Flores checked his swing. That sentiment was not undercut in the slightest by Morales' feeble post-game explanation of his decision. ("I don’t have the benefit of multiple camera angles when I’m watching it live. When it happened live, I thought he went, so that’s why I called it a swing.")

The call certainly short-circuited any chance that Flores could have kept the rally alive long enough to tie the score, or maybe win the game. No amount of talk about how it was a game for the ages will salve the wounds of Giant fans.

Forget about masks, chest protectors, and leg guards: During a game, an umpire’s best equipment are ear plugs, so he won’t tune out insulting references by managers and fans to his ancestry. After a game, he is well advised to avoid any electronic medium that talks endlessly about the contest and his role in it.

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine yelled out on behalf of her beloved Mets, “Hey ump, I’m blind, and even I can tell that was a ball!” Her taunt provoked much appreciative laughter and cheers at Shea Stadium back then. I suspect that from now on, more than a few Giant fans would echo her.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven’t guessed, comes from Bull Durham, with Kevin Costner’s catcher Crash Davis being tossed from the game for arguing a call by an ump.)

This Day in Yankee History (Fired Martin Rehired, in Old-Timers Surprise)

July 29, 1978—Only four days after “resigning” as manager of the New York Yankees, Billy Martin, wearing his familiar Number 1, waved happily to 46,000 fans at Old Timers Game, basking in his surprise introduction as the team’s skipper for the 1980 season. It was the most flabbergasting event of his tempestuous decade-and-half relationship with principal owner George Steinbrenner—but by no means his last.

The ouster of Martin had been a year and a half in the making, after the Yankee skipper began to chafe at the notion of co-existing in the same dugout as recently signed slugger Reggie Jackson. Tensions exploded as the Bronx Bombers lost ground to the archrival Boston Red Sox, Jackson ignored Martin’s signs while batting, and the manager, after several drinks at an airport bar, told sportswriters, "The two of them deserve each other - one's a born liar [Jackson], the other's convicted [Steinbrenner]."

At the height of the Martin-Steinbrenner mess, a New York sportswriter speculated that the manager had failed to keep The Boss’ First Commandment: I am the Lord Thy Owner; thou shalt not have any strange owners before me. The object of the baseball deity’s wrath was that “convicted” line, a thinly veiled reference to Steinbrenner’s short suspension from baseball because of illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign.

The price of that offense for Martin: banishment from the team and the job that meant everything to him.
("When you start talking about firing him as manager of the New York Yankees, you might as well stab him with a knife," remembered reliever Sparky Lyle.) His replacement: the far more mild-mannered Bob Lemon, an act that Steinbrenner had been threatening for awhile.

Well, that, clearly, explains why Steinbrenner forced Martin out. But why did he want to bring him back? Part of it may have been a desire to placate irate fans, but three other elements in his complex character might have played a role.

1) Steinbrenner's desire to look magnanimous—and, on occasion, to be magnanimous. Had Steinbrenner not made his dramatic announcement, the highlight of the day would have been Roger Maris’ first appearance in an Old Timers’ Game—an event he had shunned for years because of his shameful mistreatment by the team’s prior management in the Sixties. Steinbrenner’s assiduous wooing back into the Yankee fold spoke well of the owner’s better instincts.

2) Steinbrenner’s desire for vindication. Meeting with Martin two days after the firing, Steinbrenner insisted that, to get his job back in 1980, Billy had to admit to something he had previously, adamantly denied: that he had even made the statement that got him fired. (Another point that Steinbrenner requested—that Martin seek help for his drinking—somehow fell by the wayside. Martin died in an alcohol-related auto accident 11 years later.)

3) Steinbrenner’s flair for the dramatic. After all, Martin had been brought back originally to the Yankees on Old Timers’ Day in 1975. Steinbrenner simply hated to have anything else taking the focus away from his team. Martin, whatever his faults, would put fans in the seats, for sure.

4) Steinbrenner's impulsiveness. The Yankees' principal owner couldn't abide waiting, whether for a World Series, first place in a division or simply an advancement on prior standings. He wasn't only prepared to fire someone, but to call the person back.Years later, he revealed to writer Marty Noble that, if the Yankees hadn't begun to respond quickly to Lemon, he would, instead of sticking to the master plan--kicking Lemon upstairs to GM in 1980, as Martin took over--have rehired Martin for the final weeks of 1978. (He acknowledged that a similar thought ran through his mind in 1996, the first year of Joe Torre's run with the team, when he might have sounded out just-fired Buck Showalter.)

Nobody noticed it in the tumult surrounding the Yankees, but the balance of power between the Bosox and Yankees was beginning to shift. The Bombers found themselves down by 14 games on July 19, but already the Red Sox had, quietly and insidiously, begun to give away their huge lead because of a four-game losing streak that ended the same day as the Yankee announcement. In August, as what turned out to be an 88-day New York newspaper strike took hold, the Yankees’ Lemon began the ritual of filling out the lineup card and simply letting his talented team play. A pennant race for the ages was about to begin, one that Yankee fans would celebrate--and Red Sox fans abominate--for years to come.

Quote of the Day (Billy Martin, on Being ‘Baseball’s Bad Boy’)

“I've got the reputation for being baseball's bad boy and I don't deserve it. But I think I'd make a good manager. For one thing, I know how to handle men. That's the secret of managing. For another, I know enough about the game, not fundamentals, but executing. I think I could get the most out of players with common sense and psychology. I'm fiery enough that I'd have their respect. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever get the chance and there's nothing in the world that can change that." –Billy Martin, onetime New York Yankees second baseman (and future manager), quoted in Baseball Digest, June 1961

Somehow, I doubt that my maternal grandparents get much eternal rest in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y. It’s mostly because of two other residents of that final resting place who, if they are anything like what they were in life, are kicking up a ruckus. One was Babe Ruth; the other, Billy Martin, born on this date (as Alfred Manuel Martin) in 1928 in Berkeley, Calif.

Both Yankees had troubled childhoods, growing up almost feral on the streets of their cities, with fathers effectively out of their lives. They managed—barely—not to get into worse trouble as adults because of their talent for baseball. Each, wildly undisciplined off the field, wanted desperately to manage once their playing days were done. Despite fearing that his reputation as “baseball’s bad boy” would get in the way, it was Martin, not the Sultan of Swat, who got the chance to manage—and then some: five times with the Yankees alone.

Martin, unlike Babe Ruth, possessed only average skills as a player, but he raised the level of his game in the post-season. While only batting .257 in 11 big-league seasons, he hit .333 in the World Series. "If liking a kid who will never let you down in the clutch is favoritism, then I plead guilty," Casey Stengel said of his team’s sparkplug. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the one year that the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series during Martin’s playing days was 1954, when he was serving in the military.)

I have a theory that, in his managerial stints with the Bronx Bombers, Oakland A’s, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins, Martin was the closest that the modern age has come to the fiery skipper of baseball’s New York Giants, John J. McGraw. The link between the two was Martin’s manager with the Yankees—and the closest he ever came to a father figure--Stengel—who, as a part-time assistant to McGraw, learned much that he would put into practice on his own. 

McGraw loathed what he saw as the change (instigated by the coming of Ruth) toward power hitting and away from the “Scientific Baseball” of pitching and craftiness that he preferred. Even as he installed Reggie Jackson as his cleanup hitter in the last several weeks of the 1977 season (a move that carried the Bombers to the pennant), Martin resented the attention that came the slugger’s way. 

In his autobiography, longtime manager Tony LaRussa described Martin as a baseball genius but tortured soul. On the plus side of the ledger for the on-again-off-again Yankee skipper: his use of pitchers (most notably, of course, in Oakland in 1981, when his entire young staff of righthand starters experienced shortened careers as he relied on them for complete games). When he wasn’t exhausting arms, he was exhausting patience levels. While his teams invariably improved immediately under his tutelage and prodding, at least some players would begin to tune him out—and, before long, fights would break out, and he’d be out of a job.

In Martin’s favor: an ability to outwit opponents, to engage his players and fans in not just exciting, but daring baseball. His clashes with some players--Jackson, Ed Whitson, Dave Boswell--were legendary. Others, however--Rod Carew, Willie Randolph, Thurman Munson, Willie Horton among them--swore by him.

The tempestuous Martin’s life ended characteristically, in a one-vehicle accident following Christmas Day carousing with a friend. He saw so much about himself--his fiery temperament, persuading players to execute the fundamentals--but never learned how to apply "common sense and psychology" to his own case.