Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

Page 257

Billy Martin – Four of Five Years

William Mark Pennington, writing over 20 years after Martin's death, explained; "Billy was beloved because he represented a traditional American dream; freedom. He lived independent from rules. He bucked the system. ... He told his boss to shove it. Often." The biographer complained that Martin, in the era of video clips and ESPN, has now been reduced to a caricature; the man who kicked dirt on umpires, battled with Reggie Jackson in a dugout, and who was forever being hired and fired, something that ignores a record of achievement both as player and manager.

He further noted; "There was never a more prideful Yankee. Or a more complicated one."

Baseball historian Bill James wrote; "I suppose one could say

the same about Billy Martin or about Richard Nixon. ... Had he not been so insecure, he could have resisted the self-destructive excesses which gradually destroyed him."

Pennington, who covered the Yankees as a newspaper reporter from 1985 to 1989, described Martin as "without question one of the most magnetic, entertaining, sensitive, humane, brilliant, generous, insecure, paranoid, dangerous, irrational, and unhinged people I had ever met." Peter Golenbock, who co-wrote Martin's autobiography, said of him; "But because Billy was an