Five times George Steinbrenner hired Billy Martin to manage the Yankees, and five times it ended in tears, firings or both. It remains the most combustible partnership in baseball history - and for a while, it worked better than anything since.
DID YOU KNOW?
After Martin resigned in July 1978, the Yankees announced at Old-Timers' Day - five days later - that he would return to manage in 1980. The Stadium crowd's ovation shook the place. He actually came back a year early, in 1979. And then three more times after that.
Before he was "Billy Martin, five-time Yankees manager," he was Billy the Kid, the scrappy second baseman on the 1950s dynasty clubs. Martin made the catch that saved the 1952 World Series - racing in to snag a bases-loaded popup in Game 7 - and hit .500 with 12 hits in the 1953 Series against Brooklyn. Nobody who shared a field with him doubted his feel for winning baseball. It was everything else that got complicated.
Five Stints, One Chair
Steinbrenner, two years into his ownership, gave Martin the Yankees job on August 1, 1975. Martin delivered the 1976 pennant and the 1977 championship - surviving a season-long public feud with Reggie Jackson that peaked with their near-brawl in the Fenway Park dugout on national television. If you have read our account of the Bronx Zoo years, you know Martin was not a character in that story. He was its co-author.
It ended the way it always ended. On July 23, 1978, after weeks of sniping, Martin told reporters what he thought of Jackson and Steinbrenner: "The two of them deserve each other. One's a born liar; the other's convicted." He resigned in tears the next day.
And then the truly Yankees part happened: they brought him back. Again and again. 1979. 1983 - the year of the Pine Tar game, when Martin's protest erased George Brett's go-ahead homer at the Stadium until the league office restored it. 1985, when he won 91 games with an MVP season from Don Mattingly. 1988, for 68 games. Each stint produced winning baseball. Each ended with Steinbrenner reaching for the trapdoor.
Why George Kept Calling
It is easy to laugh at the merry-go-round, but it misses the point. Steinbrenner kept rehiring Martin because Martin's teams won, immediately and unmistakably. He did the same trick in Minnesota, Detroit, Texas and Oakland - "Billyball," they called it on the West Coast - making bad teams good before the friction burned it down. The Boss could not quit the winning. Billy could not quit the fight.
The Yankees retired his number 1 in 1986, while he was still very much in the picture. The plaque reads, "There has never been a greater competitor than Billy." At the dedication, Martin said, "I may not have been the greatest Yankee to ever put on the uniform, but I was the proudest." He died in a car accident on Christmas night, 1989, at 61.
Say what you will about the chaos. In the Steinbrenner era's defining relationship, both men kept choosing each other. That tells you everything about what the Yankees were - and why the rest of baseball could not look away.
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Sources: Wikipedia (Billy Martin biography and managerial record) · SABR BioProject (Billy Martin) · New York Times (July 25, 1978, "Martin Resigns") · Society for American Baseball Research (Pine Tar game account)
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