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Summary
Summary
The New York Times b estseller . " The sprawling, brawling, no-punches-pulled narrative Martin deserves . . . one of baseball's epic characters." --Tom Verducci, bestselling author of The Cubs Way
Even now, years after his death, Billy Martin remains one of the most intriguing and charismatic figures in baseball history. And the most misunderstood. A manager who is widely considered to have been a baseball genius, Martin is remembered more for his rabble-rousing and public brawls on the field and off. He was combative and intimidating, yet endearing and beloved. In Billy Martin , Bill Pennington resolves these contradictions and pens the definitive story of Martin's life. From his hardscrabble youth to his days on the Yankees in the 1950s and through sixteen years of managing, Martin made sure no one ever ignored him. Drawing on exhaustive interviews and his own time covering Martin as a young sportswriter, Pennington provides an intimate, revelatory, and endlessly colorful story of a truly larger-than-life sportsman.
"Enormously entertaining . . . Explores the question of whether a baseball lifer can actually be a tragic figure in the classic sense--a man destroyed by the very qualities that made him great."-- The Wall Street Journal
"Bill Pennington gives long-overdue flesh to the caricature . . . Pennington savors the dirt-kicking spectacles without losing sight of the man."-- The New York Times Book Review
"The hair on my forearms was standing up by the end of the fifth paragraph of this book's introduction. I knew Billy Martin. I covered Billy Martin. But I never knew him like this."--Dan Shaughnessy, bestselling author of Reversing the Curse
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this definitive biography, New York Times columnist Pennington (The Heisman) portrays former New York Yankees manager Billy Martin as a baseball man of superior knowledge, albeit one who battled demons his entire life. Martin was killed in a traffic accident on Christmas Day, 1989-a sad ending for a 61-year-old California native who spent 12 seasons playing second base for seven Major League Baseball teams. From 1969 to 1988, he also managed five pro teams. Remembered for his tenacity on the field, Martin also liked to kick dirt on umpires' shoes and run trick plays. But he became even more famous off the field for his fiery temper, blatant philandering, and massive alcohol consumption. Numerous books about Martin already exist, including two by the man himself. But Pennington, a Yankees beat writer in the 1980s who witnessed several of the incidents recounted here in animated detail, was able to accomplish something that no other author has: he interviewed all four of Martin's wives. A motley cast of baseball Hall of Famers, including Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Rod Carew, Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Tommy Lasorda, and Earl Weaver, make appearances in this must-read for fans of the great American pastime. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Former Yankee beat writer Pennington takes on the endlessly complex subject of baseball player and manager Billy Martin, now more than 25 years after his death in an automobile accident outside his farm near Binghamton, New York. That Martin was a skilled baseball tactician, perhaps (as Elias Sports Bureau opines) the best manager ever, is a common opinion (and Pennington offers convincing substantiation); that he was a deeply flawed human being, a brawler, and temperamental drinker is even more widely accepted. Pennington analyzes the ongoing conflict that was Billy Martin including his relationships with equally complex individuals such as George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson from all sides (Billy's varied career is covered chronologically, but it's the Yankee years, however sporadic, that matter) and with balance and impressive depth. He thus provides what is likely to be the definitive profile, which, as such, belongs in most library sports collections, especially those where Yankee fans cluster.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THEY WERE BOTH All-Star Yankee infielders, won five championships apiece in their playing days, and have yet to be elected to baseball's Hall of Fame (though one of them is surely on his way). Derek Jeter and Billy Martin share this much - and little else. Jeter was the game's ice-cold ambassador. Martin, who may be the only manager to have thrown dirt at an umpire, was anything but. Jeter's self-effacing persona positioned his success front and center. Martin's histrionics nudged his achievements offstage, madness overshadowing the method. In "Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius," the New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington gives long-overdue flesh to the caricature. Billy was born Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., in hardscrabble West Berkeley, Calif. Abandoned by his womanizing father, Martin was raised by his strong-willed, diminutive mother, Jenny, for whom, one daughter recalls, "swearing was like breathing." When he wasn't scrapping, the young Martin could be found playing baseball at James Kenney Park, the neighborhood's "oasis of refinement." Friends marveled at his dawn-to-dusk dedication. Bill Rigney, an All-Star infielder with the New York Giants, never forgot the dogged youngster: "He wasn't like the other kids. . . . He wasn't just passing the time or showing off." Martin's senior season in high school established a familiar pattern. He hit .450 and earned all-county honors, but he was kicked off the team for fighting. Later in life, Martin considered the punishment the "most unfair thing that could have happened." The lesson, sadly, had gone unlearned. Martin soon caught on with the Idaho feeder squad of Casey Stengel's Oakland Oaks (or, the minor league of the minor leagues). The Oaks owner, Brick Laws, sought contractual safeguards against Martin's "misbehavior." Martin refused. Laws gave in, unaware of just how raw his new recruit was. Martin was asked to wear a suit for the trip to Idaho Falls, but said he didn't own one: "My family took my only suit and used it to dress my uncle in his casket last year." Here, as elsewhere, Pennington knows when to give Martin the floor and when to raise an eyebrow. He tells us that Martin's sister scuttled the additional claim that his only suitcase had been pawned. Martin progressed to the Oaks in 1947, and Stengel's "Nine Old Men" (echoing the nickname of the Supreme Court) became "Eight Old Men and the Kid." The 1948 Oaks clicked, going 111-74, good for the Pacific Coast League title. In the off-season Stengel was hired to manage the Yankees. The following October, they acquired Martin, reuniting mentor and protégé. Martin wasn't merely fulfilling his childhood dream of playing major league baseball in New York, he was joining one of the sport's great dynasties. The Yankees would be World Series champs from 1949 to 1953. Martin's roommates alone would win more than half the decade's American League Most Valuable Player awards - Phil Rizzuto (1950), Yogi Berra (1951, 1954, 1955) and Mickey Mantle (1956, 1957). Driving hard on the field and off, he grew especially close with Mantle and the pitcher Whitey Ford. The convivial group came to be known as the "Three Musketeers." Martin, who wore jersey No. 1, embodied the team's "elemental purpose," which was winning. His fearless attitude and heads-up catch in Game 7 of the 1952 World Series - Mantle called it the "greatest" he had ever seen - endeared him to teammates and fans alike. The general manager, George Weiss, wasn't quite as enamored, even as the Yankee front office was being celebrated: Weiss was named the Sporting News Executive of the Year four times (not 10, as Pennington writes). The infractions of the other Musketeers were overlooked, but Martin, whose statistics never reflected his value, didn't have their lee-way. In 1957, his involvement in an altercation with patrons at the Copacabana, an upscale New York supper club, sealed his fate. (Berra's recollection was: "Nobody did nothing to nobody.") Weiss traded him the next month to the Kansas City Athletics. Martin played for five other teams before retiring with the Minnesota Twins at age 32. When he returned to manage the Twins in 1969, he resumed his itinerant course. Despite winning the division in three of his first four managerial stops, he wasn't able to go three seasons without either resigning or being fired - sometimes both. With Martin came not only triple steals and wily objections to the use of pine tar, but also dirt-shrouded ejections and barroom brawls. His five headline-grabbing stints with the Yankees, beginning in 1975, were extravagant testimony to life under Billy Martin. As Graig Nettles, the team's third baseman, cracked: "Some kids want to play big-league baseball, and other kids want to run away and join a circus. I'm lucky; I get to do both here." And then there were Martin's headlong personal affairs. He was married four times - settling down wasn't in his nature. His seasons with the Yankees have been more than ably covered. Jonathan Mahler's "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning" (2005) conjured New York in 1977 through its culture, politics and irresistibly dysfunctional Yankee team. Roger Kahn's "October Men" (2003) followed the 1978 season and a 14-game comeback-for-the-ages, clinched by Bucky Dent's go-ahead home run in the playoff tiebreaker against the Red Sox. Pennington's treatment of these years is every bit as good, particularly Martin's soap operatic relationships with George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson. How will Martin be remembered? He was, by turns, one of baseball's finest minds and an alcoholic "desperado." He chaffed and charmed, fought and philandered. His family scarcely knew what to make of him. In the late 1980s, his daughter, Kelly Ann, recalled her own daughter's cartoonish perception: "When people ask Evie what her grandfather does, she used to say that he kicks dirt on people. Now she just says, 'He gets fired.'" In "Billy Martin," Pennington savors the dirt-kicking spectacles without losing sight of the man. MAXWELL CARTER writes frequently on popular culture for the Book Review and other publications.
Kirkus Review
A sympathetic examination of the fiery player and manager Billy Martin (1928-1989), who could dazzle between the lines but whose life outside the stadium was often boozy, libidinous, and rudderless. Earlier in his own career, Pennington (On Par: The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide, 2012, etc.), now a sportswriter with the New York Times, covered the Yankees during one of Martin's five terms as manager under owner George Steinbrenner. The author even witnessed one of Billy the Kid's late-career barroom brawls. As he notes, Martin, slated to return for his sixth stint as manager in 1990, was killed in an accident in his pickup truck on Christmas nightan accident the author both begins and ends with, devoting many pages to the controversy about who was driving that night, Martin or his friend William Reedy (who survived). Pennington interviewed myriads for this comprehensive workfrom kings to commoners. Among the latter was a housekeeper at the end of Martin's life, a woman who tried to make Billy more accurate at the urinal. Although he focuses principally on Martin's professional career, Pennington also explores his family background in California, his lifelong problems with drinking, his fondness for fisticuffs (he would invariably swing first), his inability to be faithful to his wives (he was married four times), his cluelessness with money, and his celebrated feuds with Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, and others. All the notable moments are hereCleveland's Ten-Cent Beer Night, the dugout fracas with Jackson, the spats with umpires (the dirt-kicking and -throwing), the firings and rehirings. As the author shows, Martin could charm as well as disgust and disappoint, and Pennington argues that although his record merits the Hall of Fame, his erratic behavior has kept him outside. Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin's motley life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
There's a famous video of Hall of Famer George Brett charging angrily out of the dugout after his two-run home run was invalidated by the umpire. Known to baseball fans as the "Pine Tar Incident," it occurred owing to the eagle-eyed observation of Billy Martin, the legendary manager and player whose attention to detail on the field was unparalleled. Despite this, Martin is more remembered for his cantankerous personality and his short fuse-that, and for being fired by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner multiple times. Reconciling the two sides of Martin-the brilliant baseball mind and the irascible loudmouth-is no easy task, but New York Times sportswriter Pennington (On Par; The Heisman) is more than capable of doing so. His study of Martin is comprehensive and detailed, offering the reader rich details on his early years and his time as a player for several teams, most notably the Yankees. Most of the book's focus, however, is on Martin's service as a manager, and in particular his experience at the Yankees' helm. Pennington expertly combines material from his subject's personal and professional life, leaving the impression of a complicated and flawed but unforgettable man. VERDICT Baseball fans of all ages will thoroughly enjoy this lengthy but well-paced biography.-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.