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.

 

 

This Day in Baseball History (Mel Ott Sets Runs-Scored Record)

August 4, 1934—Slugger Mel Ott scored six runs in a game, a record he would tie 10 years later, and help the New York Giants overwhelm the Philadelphia Phillies, 21-4.

Recently a friend piqued my interest in the squad that has recently taken a back seat to the other three major-league teams in the Big Apple over the years (the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Mets). 

He informed me of a project sponsored by the Yankees, Mets, Jets, San Francisco (baseball) Giants and New York (football) Giants--all former tenants of the fabled Polo Grounds--to restore the last remnant of the baseball Giants' glory days: the John Brush Stairs, which lead from a park to the former stadium site.

Ott is not only emblematic of the early greatness and later eclipse of this team, but also a fascinating case study, in and of himself, of the nature of enduring fame in the national pastime.

Before writing this post, the following facts, for no apparent reason, stuck in my mind about Ott:

* He accumulated 511 homers over the course of his career;

* He had an unusual swing, with his right leg kicking upward before he made contact. Nevertheless, the results of the odd motion were impressive enough that his first manager, John J. McGraw (a skipper otherwise distinctly unenamored by the lure of the long ball), warned associates in the organization (including Casey Stengel) not to mess with it.

* He died in an auto accident in 1958 (a terrible year for baseball legends in that regard—the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Roy Campanella was involved in a devastating car crash that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life);

* More than 35 years after his untimely demise, he was still receiving letters, postmarked New York, with no return address but sealed with a lipstick print on the back of the envelope, from a woman known only as “Mary”, dividing bemused observers into two camps over her identity: either a lady who never really knew the slugger, or one who knew him extremely intimately.

* He was the last refuge of lazy crossword puzzle-makers who needed two three-letter words to fill out their work.

I wondered why I hadn’t read or heard more about Ott. Before the steroid era, after all, 500 HRs were nothing to sneeze at. So, I began reviewing the possibilities for why his prominence has dimmed somewhat over the years.

Maybe he didn’t have the chance to star in the offseason, I thought at first, or play a crucial role in a pennant race, as Carl Yastrzemski did in 1967, when every one of his Triple Crown statistics were needed to push the Boston Red Sox to the World Series.

But that turned out not to be the case—Ott played in three World Series from 1933 through 1937, batting .295. In 1936, he practically carried the Giants to the postseason singlehandedly, driving in 18% of the team’s runs.

Maybe, I thought again, Ott’s talents were one-dimensional, largely offensive-oriented. But that turned out to be even more incorrect than my first assumption: he recorded 26 outfield assists in 1929, and thereafter opposing players learned never to take advantage of his arm again.

So why has Ott—so famous in 1944 that, in a nationwide vote by war bond holders, he outpolled Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jack Dempsey, and Joe Louis as the greatest sports athlete of all time—been treated as something of an afterthought by today’s sports aficionados, even those based in New York? Herewith, some hypotheses:

* Ott’s persona paled next to the far more distinctive ones created by his contemporaries: larger-than-life Ruth, tragic Gehrig, all-around talent DiMaggio, hitting-obsessed Ted Williams.
His playing field affected retrospective evaluations. Baseball historian Bill James noted that 60% of Ott’s homers occurred at the Polo Grounds. People talk about the “short rightfield porch” of Yankee Stadium, but the 296 feet from home plate to the right-field foul pole had nothing on the 258 feet along similar lines at Coogan’s Bluff.

* At the same time, much of his early career coincided with the “dead ball era” of baseball. In one way, this benefited the Giants, and particularly ace Carl Hubbell, but it restrained the offensive totals of Ott, who never surpassed the 42 homers he hit in 1929 at age 20.

* He was given an entirely inadequate nickname. Any player worth his salt, if he wants to be remembered, needs a terrific nickname: The Babe, The Yankee Clipper, The Iron Horse, The Say-Hey Kid, The Splendid Splinter. Even 1970s reliever Al Hrabosky, for heaven’s sake, got “The Mad Hungarian.” And Ott’s? “Master Melvin.” That moniker was meant to evoke his naivete and precocity (he played his first big-league game at age 17 and, like fellow Cooperstown legends Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, never played a day in the minors). Instead, it sounds awfully close to “Milquetoast Melvin.” If I’d been him, I would have gotten a halfway decent PR firm to plant at least a good nickname with the press, something to evoke either his value to the team (“Magnificent Melvin” or “Melvin the Magician”) or the size of his homers (“Monstrous Melvin”).

* He was a helluva nice guy—perhaps too much for his own good. The fans loved Ott. So did owner Horace Stoneham, who named him player-manager in 1942. But after several seasons in which his teams kept finishing out of the running, Stoneham fired Ott as skipper, replacing him with the recent manager of the odious Brooklyn Dodgers: Leo Durocher, a man who, watching Ott and his squad in 1946, came out with the following (or something close to it): "Nice guys finish last."

I can’t quite end with Leo the Lip getting the last word. So, you say, Durocher won three pennants, while Ott won none. Let’s look at Durocher’s record more closely: How many of those pennants were won honestly? Only two—that we know of, anyway.

The most famous of Durocher's pennants—1951, with the Giants—did not come as a result of his between-the-lines strategizing, we now realize.

For more than a century, baseball fans thrilled to the “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff”—the Giants’ improbable comeback from 13 1/2 games back on August 11, 1951, that climaxed with Bobby Thomson’s walkoff homer against Dodger reliever Ralph Branca. 

Little did fans know (though many in the game’s cognoscenti—including the redoubtable Jackie Robinson—suspected) that the Giants benefited from an elaborate electronic apparatus that enabled them to steal signs and flash them to their players. (The story was confirmed definitively in 2001 by The Wall Street Journal's Joshua Harris Prager.)

Imagine if, only 32 years after the “Black Sox” scandal, baseball had gotten caught up in another scandal that damaged the reputation of the summer game.

I’ll take “Master Melvin” over “Leo the Lip” any day of the week.