Happy Playing Billyball

By B.J. Phillips

Oakland's A's are the smash hits of a season that has started with a bang

In the beginning, there was no baseball. But ever since, there have been few beginnings as good as the start of a new baseball season. It is the most splendid time in sport, in part because baseball is about the only sport left--now that football players report to training camp before the Fourth of July, and hockey players start skating in Indian summer--that still has a time and is true to it. The national pastime arrives with spring and holds almost as many promises. Veterans may hope for renewal of their glory, rookies for finding a place in that special sun, the big leagues.

Every batter can expect to hit .300, every pitcher to win 20 games. Of course, springtime hopes die of heat exhaustion in August. The pitcher who has lost his stuff is unlikely to find it, and the lifetime .262 hitter will, in late summer, fight a slump to salvage .250. Last year's losers will probably be this year's as well.

But all that does not matter now. It is springtime. Indeed, it is one of the most special springtimes in memory, one that has offered astonishing achievements to savor--deeds both grand and humiliating.

Baltimore's batting craftsman, Ken Singleton, went into May with a .471 average, 25 hits in 53 at bats, including at one point ten hits in a row. The average of Kansas City's George Brett, who chased .400 into the final week of the season last year: .208. The Houston Astros, with the National League's best pitching staff in 1980, managed to win just seven of their first 19 games in 1981, while giving up 50 runs. That was two more games than a pudgy 20-year-old marvel for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Fernando Valenzuela, won all by himself (see box). But then, Valenzuela gave up only one run in his 45 innings. His team won 14 of its first 19. Oh joy! Chicago's Cubs lost ten in a row. Oh boy!

But none of this compares with the feat of Oakland's incredible A's. They are launched upon a revival that is, in truth, a resurrection. They set a modern major-league record for consecutive victories at the start of the season: eleven straight.-- They tied another record by winning a total of 18 games in April.

As April came to a close last week, Oakland players were at the top in nearly every category of baseball achievement.

Pitcher Mike Norris was the American League's first five-game winner and Matt Keough was just behind him at 4-0. Keough also led the league in strikeouts (24), followed by Mike Norris (23). Leftfielder Rickey Henderson, who broke Ty Cobb's American League record for stolen bases last year with 100, was off to a swift beginning with 16 steals and led the league in runs scored with 21. Rightfielder Tony Armas topped three lists: home runs, 7; RBIs, 22; total bases, 56.

The Oakland pitching staff is baseball's best. The five starters (Norris, Langford, Keough, Steve McCatty, Brian Kingman) turned in 17 complete games in 21 starts--so many that the team's relievers worked a total of only 11% innings. One forlorn reliever, Bob Owchinko, did not throw a single pitch that counted. The A's team earned-run average was a minuscule 1.89. Nobody scored more than four runs a game against them (their three losses were by scores of 3-2, 3-2 and 3-1) and their opponents' batting average was .182.

Oakland's record would be impressive if it belonged to the 1927 New York Yankees. The astonishing truth is that it is held by virtually the same team that, two seasons ago, was the worst in baseball. But there is one huge difference, a stormy, unpredictable figure with fire in his eyes and victory on his mind, Alfred Manuel ("Billy") Martin.

In 1979 the A's won 54 games and lost 108. They were the tatterdemalion remains of Charlie Finley's once noble dynasty (World Series champions in 1972-74), and cheap enough to fit their owner's pinchpenny budget. The A's were not worth going to watch, and nobody did. The average attendance that year was 3,984. They were not even worth booing; when a player muffed a popup, the fans laughed instead.

It was a sad end to one of baseball's most colorful and innovative franchises. Finley was one of the first proponents of the designated hitter. He tried out orange balls. He brought a mule into the ballpark as a mascot, installed a mechanical rabbit to bring baseballs to the umpire. He gave the game the garish doubleknit uniforms that became commonplace. He harassed his managers by telephoning strategy to the dugout, yet installed a 16-year-old fan as vice president. For all his buffoonery, Finley was as shrewd a judge of talent as any in the sport since Branch Rickey. Roll the names over in the mind: Jackson, Rudi, Bando, Hunter, Fingers, Blue. But he lost them all, and others, because he was unwilling to pay them well. Toward the end, he ordered that his players' half-fare airline coupons be collected as they stepped off the planes from road trips.

Finley tried to sell the team for years.

The A's were all but moved to Denver in 1979 when a threatened lawsuit over Finley's lease with the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum halted the sale. During that time, he ran the franchise down to the material left in his hardscrabble farm system and went through every manager out of captivity, some of them twice. Then, five months before he was to find a hometown buyer for his team, he brought in Billy Martin, a 51-year-old Bay Area boy, to manage his sinking ball club.

Martin walked into the clubhouse early in spring training 1980, looked his callow collection of players in the eye and, in a fiery oration, told them: "You are going to be winners. You're good enough to win and I'm going to show you how." What a joke. Only Billy Martin would have been crazy enough to believe it. But then. Billy Martin's entire life has flown in the face of the odds. Dad was a Portuguese fisherman from Hawaii, Mom an Italian from West Berkeley. His grandmother took one look at her daughter's newborn son and pronounced him "bellissimo." Though his ears and nose were huge for his head, the description stuck, and he became known as "Billy."

He grew up a tough kid in a tougher neighborhood during the Depression. The price of failure was written in defeated faces on the breadlines, so a boy learned to hate losing. He also learned to use his fists, especially when the kids called him by his other nickname, "Banana Nose." One day his mother heard that there might be another woman in her husband's life. Mrs. Joan Downey, now 79, recalls with undiminished pride: "I went over and beat the hell out of her. I came home, took all his clothes and threw them out on the street. Then I took a hand mirror and I broke every window in his car." His father drove off in what was left of it, never to return. She also says: "If I were manager, I'd be tougher than Billy, for Christ's sake."

Baseball in those days was a lot like the streets: survival required guile and a mean streak. A pitcher was not fined for throwing a brush-back then. Fights on the field and waist-high slides were common. It was the perfect game for a street fighter.

He learned from the oldtimers, going to workouts with players from the Class AAA Oakland Oaks when he was still in high school. Cookie Lavagetto, who had won fame as a Brooklyn Dodger, was his roommate when he joined the Oaks in 1948 and Casey Stengel was the manager. From them he learned to scratch the most from his rather limited skills. A year after Stengel went to the New York Yankees, he brought the brash kid up to the big team.

As a Yankee, Martin was a minor light among some of baseball's greatest stars. Joe DiMaggio cheered him from the on-deck circle when he took his first major-league at bat. His roommates through the years were Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Mickey Mantle. "He wasn't a good player," recalls Mantle. "He had to hustle his ass off to stay on the team." Martin did become a good clutch player, a lifetime .257 hitter who came through when it counted: in five World Series, he averaged .333, winning the Series M.V.P. in 1953 after hitting .500.

More important, he sat at Stengel's side, learning the game from one of its managerial geniuses. Says Martin: "Stengel provided the psychology. [Dodger Manager] Charlie Dressen showed me brilliance. He didn't know how to communicate with people, though, and I learned from that too. [Yankee Coach] Frankie Crosetti was an astute observer of the game. He taught me how to act. Cookie Lavagetto gave me warmth. But I think I manage like I played."

The Yankees traded him in 1957 after a brawl at New York's Copacabana nightclub. His career rapidly declined, and he wandered through six teams in five years. Then Martin was hired by the Minnesota Twins as a coach in 1965 and became manager four years later.

In eleven years as a manager with five separate teams (Minnesota, Detroit, Texas, Yankees, Oakland), Martin has always improved his teams' fortunes.

Indeed, he has taken faltering teams near the top wherever he has been. Then, inevitably, he would clash with the front office. Just as inevitably, his bosses answered his challenge by firing him. Tigers Hall of Fame Outfielder Al Kaline tries to explain Martin's kamikaze past: "I think it's his desire to win. He thinks he can do it better. He wants to give advice on the scouting, tell the minor league managers what to do, and he goes a little bit too far." Says Yankee Owner George Steinbrenner, whose differences with Martin constituted a four-year national soap opera until the two parted for good in 1979: "I'm happy he's in a situation now where he has complete latitude. That was never going to be the case with me." Counters Charlie Finley: "He's the best manager in baseball."

At 52, Martin shows the effects of his hard-hitting life. His face is weathered by time and his troubles. His most prominent features now are the eyes, darting to take in every scrap of action on the field. They are dark, with haunted circles that reveal his anguished inability to give up on a game, even long after it has ended. As a manager, Martin does not go gently into the night: "When I leave here to drive home, I think about the game the whole way. When I drive in the next day, I'm still thinking about the game." His chief form of relaxation, however, is still a post-game drink. He keeps a chilled bottle of vodka in the refrigerator next to his desk.

Currently in the middle of divorce proceedings with his second wife, he has remained close to his daughter Kelly Ann, 29, and son Billy Joe, 17. There is another generation, a granddaughter Evie, 2. "She calls me 'Grandpa,' " Martin says with uncharacteristic softness.

Martin is a walking advertisement for his three western-wear boutiques--a sartorial taste acquired from that small-town Oklahoman, Mantle. Off duty, the manager sports hand-tooled lizard boots and wide-brimmed hats, making him the unlikeliest bandy-legged urban cowboy of them all. He lives quietly with a woman friend in an East Bay apartment. Nowadays, he spends less time in bars--and less time in fights. Martin has had his share of them. Outside a bar with one of his own players (Twins' Pitcher Dave Boswell, 1969), in a bar with a Reno sportswriter (1978), in a Bloomington, Minn., bar with a marshmallow salesman (1979), anywhere.

For now, at least, he fights only to win baseball games. In Oakland, where the dazed young players of that first spring training under Martin promptly soared to a 1980 record of 83 wins and 79 losses and finished second to the Kansas City Royals in the American League West, they call such on-field combativeness Billyball. (The club features the term in television commercials and commissioned a song about it, sung to the tune of the Coasters' 1959 hit, Charlie Brown: "It's sneaky, but it's fun/ Billyball ...") But it is really just old-fashioned baseball the way a scrapper learned to play it. When talent is in short supply, be certain the fundamentals are sound: never miss a cutoff man, do not botch a rundown. If there is no home-run hitter in the lineup, maybe even steal home. If there are no hitters in the bottom half of the lineup, put on the double steal. Bunt to get on base.

Hit behind the runner. Force the action.

In short, simply manufacture something that you do not naturally deserve, that blessed thing--a run.

Atypical Billyball rally does not rattle the fences; it sends dirt flying in the infield. In one game against Seattle, for example, Henderson led off the first inning with a walk, then stole second. An out and then he stole third. The pitcher, thoroughly rattled now, walked Designated Hitter Cliff Johnson, who, naturally, stole second.

Both men scored on Catcher Mike Heath's single. The line score: two runs on one hit. (On opening day against Minnesota, Oakland even went so far as to pull off one of the oldest scams in baseball: the hidden ball trick.) These were things that the A's, unevenly tutored by Finley's revolving-door managers, had not been able to do. After his opening exhortation last spring, Martin quickly saw how far his young charges had to go: "I kept saying to everybody that there's talent here, but they thought I was trying to put them on. I saw that they needed direction. They didn't know anything about baseball. Period. The outfielders weren't backing each other up. They didn't know how to line up for a relay or make a rundown. They didn't know how to bunt, or when." The teaching of a new style began.

Martin's most conspicuous success has been with his pitching staff. Finley had a collection of strong young arms, but they had been left to develop without guidance. Martin explains: "The pitchers didn't know how to pitch. They were all throwers. Consequently, they were all losers."

Martin's pitching coach and longtime drinking buddy Art Fowler smartened up the staff--and there have been charges that he moistened them up as well. The A's remarkable pitching record, critics protest, has been aided by some slippery business. A team does not suddenly reduce its ERA from 4.74 in 1979 to a league-leading 3.46 last year, it is argued, without putting a little something extra on the ball. Claims Minnesota First Base Coach Karl Kuehl: "They're getting it off their foreheads and the umpires don't have the guts to do anything about it." One baseball insider asserts that Kuehl's charge is only half true. "Matt Keough keeps it in his glove. Mike Norris keeps it in his crotch. Steve McCatty and Rick Langford are the ones who keep it on their foreheads. It's grease, a salve. They all load the ball up and it makes them good. It helped turn them around in one year." Something turned Oakland's pitchers around. Keough went from 2-17 in 1979 to 16-13 , last year.

The A's pitchers angrily deny any such scurrilous allegations. Charges Norris: "I wouldn't throw that pitch. I'd get kicked out of the game." McCatty: "They've never proven it and they never will." Keough: "How do they know?" Langford: "Accusations don't bother me. I don't throw one." The speculation, true or not, is just the kind of edge that Martin likes to exploit. Says he: "I love it. I hope they keep thinking we do it, because it screws them up, ruins their concentration." This year Martin introduced another ploy: white long-sleeved sweatshirts, which make it harder for opposing batters to see the ball. Martin: "If it will give me an advantage, I'll use it."

But guile and grease, relays and rundowns are only a part of a manager's game. More difficult is instilling in a pitcher the wholly implausible belief that he can throw a ball past a hitter, or to convince a batter that he can hit a ball traveling 90 m.p.h. A good manager can impart confidence in myriad ways: leaving a pitcher in the game to work his way out of trouble, letting a batter swing away on a 3-0 count, praising on the bench, and doing the dressing down in private. Says Baltimore's Earl Weaver, the winningest manager in baseball today: "If a person can get to the subconscious, then he is going to get a lot more adrenalin flowing or a lot more out of the human body than it might be capable of. I don't know if it is through actions or words or what, but Billy has the ability to pass that on to his players."

On the evidence of his past, Martin will, in the end, develop a love-hate relationship with the Oakland players who nearly worship him now. Says Texas Catcher Jim Sundberg: "He could chew you out one minute and build you up the next. He got so mad at me one game that he was going to send me to the minors. The next night he was telling me I was as good as Bill Dickey. He made losing absolutely miserable." New York's Graig Nettles, whom Martin managed in the minor leagues and at Minnesota: "Guys can go their whole career and not know what it takes to win. You learn that from Billy right off the bat." Kansas City's Larry Gura, an ex-Yankee, has another view: "I saw many players with ability sent down to the minors because Billy didn't like them."

Al Kaline perhaps comes closest to the truth: "One thing he does better than anybody is handle the little guys, the litlle second baseman or shortstop who doesn't hit much. He makes little guys feel better. He makes them play better. All the little guys get recognition playing for him."

Guys like Billy Martin. One of the paradoxes he took away from those Oakland streets was the conviction that he is a little guy, schemed against by owners and general managers, unjustly treated by umpires and fans. He is a vulnerable fall guy for every barroom bully. The smooth charmer who can be dangerous when he drinks. The profane martinet who always wears a gold cross on his cap ("I want kids to know I'm a Christian. Not a born-again Christian. I was baptized a Catholic"). Says Veteran Manager Bill Rigney: "He's always had to prove something to himself. He can snap like that. But that's the man. You get all of him when you get him."

He once explained his brutal beating of Dave Boswell: "I didn't want to hurt him, but when you're fighting a bigger man, the most important thing is to make sure he doesn't hurt you." Boswell is 6 ft. 3 in., but Martin stands a good 5 ft. 1 1/2 in. himself. His genius as a manager may lie in a basic misperception of himself. He thinks he's 5 ft. 6 in., and he wants to be a big guy, a winner. So he will drive himself and his teams to any length to prove that they are not little guys.

That is what he has taken back to his home town. He has convinced an Oakland team without much of a bullpen and an infield so unimpressive that Martin must platoon eight players to fill four positions that they are world-beaters. He has taught his young players, some of whom have to wrap bubble gum around their chaw of tobacco, a few oldfashioned, spit-in-your-eye baseball tricks and set them to thinking of a championship. The A's victories have come at the expense of relatively weak opponents, though by week's end they had defeated the mighty Yankees twice and raised their record to 20-3.

Still, it is, as they say, a long, long way from May to September, and Martin's prodigies may not be able to keep up the pace. They dismiss such doubts, insisting that their strength--mastery of the game's fundamentals--is the most durable of all assets. He has also brought them the swagger of a man whose playing days were spent with immortals and who has managed teams to four division titles, two American League pennants and one World Championship. Says Third Baseman Gross: "The first thing he did was give us credibility with his record and reputation."

And, lest they forget, he taught them how to fight. The A's also lead the league this season in brouhahas, having participated in three bench-clearing brawls already. There were two dustups with the Seattle Mariners--not to mention Martin's catching their groundkeepers marking off oversize batters' boxes in hopes of gaining an advantage against Oakland's curve-ball pitchers. The most recent fight, a free-for-all with the California Angels last week, was a rarity in baseball battles: it had a second round. Not satisfied with the eighth-inning on-field action (in which Angels Catcher Ed Ott's spikes sliced through Martin's shoe), the players went at it again in the tunnel beneath the stands when the game was over, Martin ended up holding California Pitching Coach Tom Morgan by the throat and shoving his head against the wall.

California Manager Jim Fregosi pulled the two apart. "Jimmy did right," a briefly chastened Martin said later.

"Coaches shouldn't fight. There's no excuse for it." A pause, and then a look of relish. "I was gonna punch Morgan out."

Did you hear that, Oakland? Billy's back.

The demons that have always driven him have not been stilled. May the Lord have mercy on the big guys, wherever they are. --By B.J. Phillips. Reported by Edward I. Adler/New York and Paul A. Witteman/Oakland

* The 1955 Dodgers, 1962 Pirates and 1966 Indians won ten in a row. Pittsburgh and Cleveland collapsed and finished off the pace; Brooklyn won the pennant by 13 1/2 games.

With reporting by Edward I. Adler, Paul A. Witteman

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