I don’t like Billy Martin. I never have, I probably never will.
I don’t find him charming. Or funny. Or interesting at all. I think that he’s a mean-spirited, drunken bully who has a Napoleon complex. If you like him, you’re probably a Yankees fan and an old one at that. That’s okay, we all root for our laundry; especially the players who wore that laundry when we were kids.
That being said, if your franchise needed a shot in the arm and wanted to be respectable, you needed Billy Martin to manage your ballclub. Whether it was with the Twins, the Tigers, the Rangers or the Yankees--aside from New York--weren’t very good before Martin took over the corner office. Through force of will and baseball brilliance Martin turned all of these teams around. Then he burnt out and was fired.
The same was true with the Oakland Athletics.
Dale Tafoya’s “Billy Ball” is a story about Billy Martin and the Oakland Athletics of the early 1980s. The Athletics of the late 70s were bad. Like really bad. So bad that no one was coming to their games. They were a shadow of their three-time World Series Championship teams of a few years prior and they weren’t drawing flies.
A’s owner Charles O. Finley was angry that free agency had come into Major League Baseball. Ge was angry that his star players wanted to be paid what they were worth. And he was especially angry that no one told him how great he was every minute of every day. So yeah, Finley was a monumental asshole too. After moving the Athletics from Kansas City to Oakland in the late 1970s, Finley thought that it was time to move again. He set his sights on selling the team to investors from Denver.
But first he needed to improve the club, while keeping expense down.
This is the impetus for him to hire the Oakland-bred Martin. By this point in his life, Martin was kind of a persona non grata around baseball due to an offseason fist fight he got into with a travelling marshmallow salesman in a bar. Most baseball people thought that Martin was brilliant, but that he was way too radioactive.
Finley didn’t care.
The Oakland Athletics of the early 1980s were a fascinating team. After some awful years, things were starting to look up. They had a terrific outfield with rookie Rickey Henderson in left, Dwayne Murphy in center and Tony Armas in right. Their infield was fine—they prided themselves on not making mental or physical errors and hit well enough. Once Billy was named manager, the whole team played like Martin: they stole bases like crazy (including home a bunch of times), they always took the extra base, they bunted and hit behind runners, were fundamentally sound and just became giant pains in the ass to play against.
In a sense, they played like their manager’s personality.
But that wasn’t what was so fascinating. What was unique about the Oakland Athletics of that time was the amount of complete games that Martin’s starters through. Mike Norris, Ray Langford, Steve McCatty, Matt Keough and Brian Kingman threw 93 complete games in 1980, 106 in 1981 before crashing down to Earth with 37 in 1982. This last number was due to a few things: one, 1982 Spring Training was wacky for the A’s with Martin demanding to see every player in the organization at once. This meant that major leaguers were giving up innings and reps to minor leaguers so they never had a chance to fully stretch out and get ready for the season. And two, with two years of blatant overuse the pitching staff’s arms were about to fall off.
Martin felt that his bullpen sucked and needed to ride his starters for as far as he could until they fell apart. He did that. And then the pitchers fell apart. While it can be argued that it was smart that Martin relied so heavily on his starting staff, they were the only players who could pitch. But it could also be argued that he destroyed the careers of five young pitchers who could have been good throughout most of the 1980s. Instead, they were husks of themselves for the rest of the decade. He bled that resources dry and didn't give a damn about tomorrow.
Once he gets the story to Oakland, Tafoya does a good job of telling the tale of Martin and his Athletics. He walks through Martin’s hiring, his relationship with his players, the sale of the A’s by Finley to the Walter Haas and his family and the overall triumphs and ultimate crash landing of Martin’s three seasons in Oaktown. While I enjoyed this book a lot, I think that it could have been copy edited a bit better. There were a few mistakes, a lot of repetition and some grammatical syntaxes that sometimes made the narrative hard to follow. For example, I don’t think that Tafoya meant this but when talking about Martin's family tree, he wrote that Martin’s grandfather landed in San Francisco after taking a raft over to the city from Italy.
Which, if true, I mean Wow, that’s your next book.
But like a rookie hurler in his first game, the book settles down and the mistakes become less and less. Tafoya definitely did his homework and his research into the club is tremendous, and that’s when I started to enjoy the book more. While I will never be a full-blown Billy Martin fan, I came to respect the guy and can understand why he was always a hot property no matter how many bridges he burnt at his previous job.
So congratulations Dale, because of you I dislike Billy Martin a little bit less than before I started this book.
I was sent Billy Ball free to review and comment on. This did not have any effect on my review.
