Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

Page 303

Pennington, "under Billy's tutelage, Henderson became the best leadoff hitter and base stealer in the history of Major League Baseball." Many in baseball were surprised to find the A's only two games behind the heavily favored Kansas City Royals at the end of May. The A's finished second in the AL West with an 83–79 record. Although they were 14 games behind the Royals, the 29 game improvement was enough to garner Martin a Manager of the Year award. Attendance at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum rose by over 500,000, a 175% increase, enabling Finley to sell the team at a better price.

The new owners, the Haas family, owners of Levi Strauss, were inexperienced in baseball. They gave Martin the additional title of player development director, with complete authority over the baseball side of the operation; effectively making him his own general manager. Martin brought his aggressive style of play,

which was dubbed "Billyball" by a sportswriter early in the 1981 season. The name stuck; the A's later trademarked it. The A's were at 20–3 - .870, in early May, Martin appeared on the cover of “Time Magazine,” and the five man rotation was on the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Steve McCatty, and Brian Kingman had a cumulative ERA of 1.42. In 1980 the pitching staff threw 94 complete games, far and away the most in the American League, in part because Martin did not