The Legend of Billy Martin: Baseball’s Lone Ranger

The beginning of baseball season feels altogether different this year for long-suffering Texas Rangers fans, whose team, at long last, sits atop the realm of the national pastime as the defending World Series champion.

The obstacle course of land mines the Rangers had to go through to make the history many doubted they’d ever see required the aid of nothing less than the influence, if not the hand, of a merciful, gracious, and slow-to-anger God.

There are few other explanations for this seemingly hexed franchise whose infield dirt was intermixed with some sort of bad voodoo that was suspected of derailing a great season in a catastrophic fashion that closely resembled the spectacular demise of the Hindenburg.

With the steadying hand of Bruce Bochy, a maestro directing the orchestra from his managerial perch, the Rangers extinguished all the fires, kept the ship afloat, and went on to do the once unthinkable.

It was clearly the best season in franchise history, a history that goes all the way back to 1961 with the second iteration of the Washington Senators.

“Up until last October, I’d always said the ’74 season was the best season in Rangers history,” says Randy Galloway, the original Rangers beat reporter for the Dallas Morning News who went on to become the area’s leading sports pundit and observer in Fort Worth and Dallas as a columnist for the Morning News and Star-Telegram. 

“I don’t know if people believed it, mainly because if you weren’t there, maybe you didn’t appreciate it, if you were too young, or didn’t live here. Whatever, but I’ve always said ’74 season was the best season in Rangers history. Now, it’s the second best.”

What was going on in the year 1974, other than the debut of Arthur Fonzarelli?

The Super Bowl at Rice Stadium. The Harry Hillaker-designed F-16, built in Fort Worth, takes flight. “Blazing Saddles.” Idaho’s Snake River Canyon proves too much for Evel Knievel, who escapes the ultimate sacrifice. Watergate. Richard Nixon, still the only U.S. president to resign his office, is out; Gerald Ford in. 

And it was also the year the Texas Rangers franchise in Arlington was saved. One of the worst teams in all of baseball in 1972 and 1973, the little ol’ Rangers rose from baseball’s ash heap to make what could not be described as anything other than a mystical run at perhaps baseball’s greatest dynasty, the Oakland A’s, who went on to win the 1974 World Series, the organization’s third consecutive championship.

The Rangers were different from the previous two seasons, make no mistake. They traded for right-hander Fergie Jenkins, the 1974 Comeback Player of the Year who finished second in the race for the AL Cy Young Award. Mike Hargrove, a native Texan from the Panhandle, was the AL Rookie of the Year. Another very promising rookie made his debut, catcher Jim Sundberg. 

One guy who had been on the roster had a breakout season. Jeff Burroughs won the AL MVP. 

That was the same Burroughs who was at the center of some attempted corrupt dirty dealings three years earlier. Charlie Finley, the owner of the A’s, who had considered a move to Arlington only four years before, tried to hold his vote to move the Rangers from Washington to North Texas for ransom. He would vote for owner Bob Short to move the Senators to Arlington only if the Senators agreed to trade him Burroughs.

What was this, Washington politics?

Finley’s vote would have been decisive since one owner was absent. Angels owner Gene Autry had been hospitalized after falling ill. Owners in favor of a team in Texas went to the hospital to get a proxy vote from Autry, who happily signed off.

Arlington, and Fort Worth and Dallas, finally had its baseball team, saved by The Singing Cowboy. 

It’s not a stretch to say that without 1974, there never would have been a Texas Rangers championship in 2023. They likely would have moved. And their savior this time around was another cowboy, the manager, perhaps the most enigmatic personality ever to roam a professional sports sideline in DFW and with the most exceptional aptitude for his job. 

Billy Martin was a baseball savant, that there is no doubt, despite his philosophy being at complete odds with the way the analytic nerds watch and play the game today. Today’s game would drive Billy to drink … more.

Toward the end of 1973, with Billy having been made a free agent after being fired in Detroit, Short went out and got him. That was the same season the Rangers languished for a second season since relocating. Fans had largely turned them off. The David Clyde debut that season was made only because Short was desperate to fill seats and pour beer. 

Underfunded and underwater and looking to identify a local buyer — or an out-of-town buyer who might move the team — Short, who, as one put it, “was losing his ass,” needed a shot in the arm.

No one infuses a team with a passion for living, for better or for worse, quite like sparkplug Billy Martin, whose nose for the game of baseball was equaled only by his self-destructive shortcomings.

Out was Whitey Herzog, then a young up-and-comer who had made his name in the sport as an excellent eye for young talent. Building and developing young talent was something the cash-strapped Rangers needed. 

Herzog would go onto a Hall of Fame career with Kansas City and St. Louis, where he won three National League pennants and the 1982 World Series. Joe Burke, the Rangers GM who said he’d fire Herzog over his dead body, was also fired. Burke, who was unemployed for figurative days before being hired by Kansas City, hired Herzog the next season. 

“The complaint was, and I may have even asked the question, ‘You’re firing Whitey Herzog? This looks like a great young manager,’” Galloway says. “And Short said, ‘I’d fire my grandmother to hire Billy Martin.’

“Billy’s brilliance overall as a manager was the best. Just the best. But Billy’s demons were just some of the worst. Those didn’t surface a lot within the team in 1974, but we saw moments for sure, and they would be off-the-field moments. Billy wears thin, as brilliant, and I do use that word again, as he was as a baseball strategist. A lot of it had to do with the alcohol.”

Billy, a disciple of Leo Durocher’s adage that “nice guys finish last,” also had a history.

In his first big-league managerial job in 1969, Martin led the Minnesota Twins to an 18-game improvement from the year before and a division title. 

He was fired after that one season.  

In 1971, after sitting out the previous season, Martin took over the Detroit Tigers, who won 91 games in their first season under Billy, 12 games better than the 1970 season. The Tigers won a division title in 1972.

However, Billy was fired in 1973. He had been suspended for ordering some of his pitchers to throw spitballs.

“It was a breakdown on company-policy matters,” said Jim Campbell, the Tigers general manager. “There were misunderstandings. From foul line to foul line, he did a good job. I cautioned Billy about making comments about the commissioner, the league president, and club executives.”

Mike Shropshire, a Star-Telegram beat reporter who covered the team, wrote in his quite funny Seasons in Hell: The Worst Baseball in History: “Persons who actually knew Billy Martin were also certain that wasn’t the case. They suspected his dismissal in Detroit was likely due to what the engineers at Three Mile Island would one day refer to as an ‘incident.’”

The “incidents” were almost always a result of a dispute about power structure within the organization. Billy’s fallouts with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner over who was calling the baseball shots are as fabled as Bunyan’s blue ox.

The same happened here, the last straw a dispute over a John Denver song. You can’t make this stuff up. 

“He loved Texas,” says his son Billy Martin Jr., today still a resident of Arlington. “He so embraced the Western culture. That’s where he started wearing cowboy boots for the rest of his life. I mean, talk about fun, walking down the streets of New York with my father when he had boots and a hat on. Cabbies would be driving by, opening their window, screaming, ‘Give them hell today, Billy!’”

Billy gave ’em hell like no one else, with all due respect, Harry Truman. 

At a Sunday doubleheader in Milwaukee in 1974, as recalled by Shropshire, when Martin took out his lineup card for the pregame meeting with Brewers manager Del Crandell and the umpires, he announced to Crandell that “your pitcher threw at our shortstop four times yesterday. So I’m telling you now that your shortstop” — rookie and future Hall of Famer Robin Yount — “will be going down today.”

A beanball conflict had been declared and, sure enough, one ensued. 

Rangers pitcher Pete Broberg sent a high, hard one at Yount’s chin. The Brewers retaliated. Billy got a three-game suspension from the American League’s kingpin, Lee MacPhail, the league president.

Billy’s specialty, on and off the field, was making things happen. More likely, making all hell break loose.  

“I loved playing for Billy,” says Tom Grieve, who before a career as a team executive and broadcaster played for the Washington-Texas franchise from 1970-77. “He was a players’ manager. I loved his intensity, his competitiveness. We always felt — at least I did — that all things being equal on the field, that we would win because our manager was better than the other team’s manager.”

Lenny Randle, remembered in infamy for beating up Martin’s successor, Frank Lucchesi, told Billy biographer Peter Golenbock, author of Billy biography Wild, High and Tight: The Life and Death of Billy Martin: “Playing for Billy was the most fun I ever had in baseball. It was terrific. I remember squeezing [bunting in a runner from third] in three games. There was a man on third, get him in, bunt. Billyball. You did the little things to win games. You’d steal a base or hit-and-run, or you’d steal a sign from the catcher while you were on base and pass it to the hitter. Billy taught us strategy, the scientific approach to baseball. A lot of managers don’t teach that, and it’s the difference between winning and showing up.”

Today, 50 years later, Billy’s friends are advocating for his induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame as a manager. They have a strong case. 

Billy won 1,253 games against 1,013 losses. He won two American League pennants and a World Series with the New York Yankees. He also won five division titles, including one each with the Twins and Tigers. 

Conversely, his teams might have achieved more except for his self-destructive character traits, which all manifested in empty bottles. Billy’s ego — and insecurities from growing up poor and without, and all that goes along in a dysfunctional family — seemed to grow bigger and bigger as he got more and more into his cups. 

“Billy didn’t have a problem drinking,” Galloway says. “He had a problem stopping. And his problem was, it only took two or three beers, certainly three beers, and Billy was rolling. He couldn’t hold his alcohol, but he didn’t stop drinking it. And that’s where the problems really came in. And I’ve been in bars with him a couple of times where somebody would come by and say, ‘Billy, you really got a horseshit team.’ Just saying something to piss him off. I guess it was that Old West thing of trying to piss off the sheriff. But Billy would just kind of, ‘Hey, get lost, f---head.’”

Now, if they didn’t “get lost,” all hell might break out. 

Growing up, Billy loved team sports, particularly baseball, but, as Golenbock said, “What he enjoyed most as a young boy was fist-fighting. It was a skill he learned from his mother.”

Billy grew up in Oakland, born Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., named for his father who abandoned the family very early. His mother always referred to senior as that “jackass.” His Italian grandmother called him “Bellisimo” or “Bellino,” which became his name, “Billy.”

“It was Jenny who taught him that life was a struggle and that to earn the respect you deserved you had to use your fists,” Golenbock wrote in Wild, High and Tight. “It was from her that he learned that a strong right hand was the most satisfying way to solve disputes. Said Jenny, ‘I’ll tell you, when I would hear anyone say anything about me, I wouldn’t ask twice. I’d start swinging. I beat up three or four ladies. Why? Because as soon as they said something about me I didn’t like, I’d hit them.’ 

“‘One time we had a neighbor who was picking on Tudo [her oldest son by a previous marriage] because Tudo hit his kid, or so he said. The guy grabbed Tudo. I ran out and shoved the guy. I told him, ‘I’m his father. I’m his mother. Now you’re going to have to fight me.’ … And he and I went at it. When he picked up some dirt and threw it in my face, that made me madder. And I really beat the hell out of him. He didn’t give me a scratch, nothing. He went home, and the next day I found out the guy had been in the war, and they were poor, so I sent food over there.’”

Billy was his mother’s son. His mother was also no fan of authority, another trait clearly passed down. It would be to no one’s surprise that Billy “adored” Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who, as Golenbock wrote of Billy, “stood up to that pansy Harry Truman.”

“She was really hard on him,” says Billy Martin Jr. “She would say this to him regularly, ‘You look just like the jackass that broke my heart and left me.’ Which if you really sum up my father makes a lot more sense if you know that. He never truly felt like he fit in.”

His mother remarried and more children followed. 

“My father never said the N-word. Ever. One day, I heard one of his coaches tell a joke … this is when he’s in Oakland. Dad saw that look on my face like, ‘Oh, crap, I’m not supposed to say that.’ He walked over and put his arm on me and said, ‘He didn’t mean it like that.’ I said, ‘OK, I see that. How come I’ve never heard you say that word in my life?’

“I stumped him. That was the only time Dad walked around for a minute without answering me in that second. And he said, ‘I guess because I was like them.’ Because if you were Italian or Irish in the ’30s and ’40s. Pretty much the same, right? And he goes, ‘It hurt. Those were fighting words for me. I don’t ever want to make anybody feel that way.’”

While playing for the Yankees, Billy Martin Jr. says, Billy and Mickey Mantle would always stay on the bus with Elston Howard, a Black player not allowed in some locales in the South. 

“They didn’t get all political about it,” Martin Jr. says. “Somebody asked him, ‘Why didn’t you guys go in?’ ‘Because we’re Ellie’s bodyguards. We stay with him.’”

As a player, Billy played for the Yankees from 1950-57. Hitting low in the order primarily as a second baseman; Billy was a career .257 hitter. He was a member of six World Series teams, including champions in 1950, ’51, ’52, ’53, and ’56. In the postseason, he was a career .333 hitter with five home runs and 19 RBIs.

Billy was that guy every championship team needed. He’d do all the little things. He’d stick up for players. He’d literally fight for his teammates. 

The Yankees traded Martin away to the Kansas City A’s in 1957 after a notorious brawl at the Copacabana Club. Six Yankees and a bowling group were involved. Martin was fingered as the troublemaker, though he reportedly hadn’t thrown a punch. The club, however, wasn’t about to get rid of Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, or Hank Bauer.

Billy never got over the trade. And didn’t talk to Casey Stengel for years, says his son.

“He didn’t fight for him like he should have.”

Brash Billy Martin came into spring training in 1974 with a bold, assured vow for a team that had just lost 103 games. 

“In one of his first clubhouse meetings,” recalls Tom Grieve, who before a career as a team executive and broadcaster played for the Washington-Texas franchise from 1970-77, “he said, ‘I didn’t come here to watch this team improve. I didn’t come here to make you a .500 team. I came here because we’re gonna win. Anybody who doesn’t want to be here or believe that come to my office, let me know, and I’ll make sure you’re not here tomorrow.’

“When he was done, I remember looking at Jeff Burroughs, and I said, ‘Whoa, this guy has never seen us play if he thinks we’re going to win.’”

Short was desperate for something good to happen. He wanted — no, needed — to sell the team. Not surprisingly, no one wanted this version of “The Bad News Bears” who couldn’t draw spectators.

Short gave Billy complete control over the team, including all personnel decisions.

And something good did happen. 

The Rangers opened the season losing two of three to the World Champion A’s. Slightly more than 21,000 showed for Opening Day. A number closer to 17,000 for the next day, and Game 3 brought out a more typical number of 13,000 fans. The Rangers went into the All-Star break two games under .500 after beating the Red Sox at Arlington Stadium, 2-1, in front of 11,770.

Shortstop Toby Harrah was the only Rangers representative at the All-Star Game in Atlanta. 

The Rangers, however, went 10 games over .500 in the second half, nipping at the heavily favored frontrunners, Oakland, all along the way. 

“Who were the dynasty teams? [Cincinnati’s] Big Red Machine, the ’27 Yankees. You can go up now to the late ’90s Yankees,” Galloway says. “I never saw the ’27 Yankees, but I tell you what, the Oakland A’s in the early ’70s may have been better than all of them. But there’s the Texas Rangers, of all teams, chasing and causing some concern. They had the A’s, and they had cut the A’s lead in the division at one point to, like, three games. They were just playing their ass off, man.”

The 1974 season is best remembered for what happened in Cleveland’s “10-Cent Beer Night.” A crowd of 23,000 came out to watch Cleveland and the Rangers. And, of course, indulge in 10-cent beers. 

What could possibly go wrong?

In the top of the second inning, a fan climbed from the stands and appeared to stagger into the on-deck circle near Cleveland’s dugout. 

“This was a large female fan, and she exposed her breasts to the crowd,” Shropshire wrote in Seasons in Hell. “The mood of the evening was clearly in place. … After the seventh-inning stretch, the playing field was the place to be. The primary point of entry was an area near the right-field foul pole. Many stopped by to say hello to Jeff Burroughs, the Rangers right-fielder, who looked like a campaigning politician glad-handing a procession of workers at the factory gate.”

One player called the intrusions people pouring on the field like ants. 

“When the game reached the bottom of the ninth inning,” Shropshire wrote, “the temperament of the crowd became strikingly like that of Billy Martin when he reached his hour of belligerence in the cocktail lounge.”

Rangers outfielders were now being bombarded with bottles, rocks, golf balls, and other debris. Someone tried to snatch Burroughs’ glove. Burroughs shoved the intruder and then chased him back over the right-field wall. 

The Rangers ran onto the field to defend Burroughs, carrying bats. Billy led the way. Cleveland players were on the field, too, fighting off their own fans.

The chief of the umpiring crew called the game. Cleveland forfeited. 

Said Billy: “They tried to reason with the fans and then laid a couple out when they wouldn’t listen.”

“Of course, Billy would pay box-seat prices to witness a production like that,” Shropshire concluded.

Executives of the Cleveland Indians, naturally, laid the blame of the fiasco on one person.

It wasn’t the Beer Night promotion, said an Indians executive vice president. It was Billy. Billy started throwing gravel and “shooting our fans the finger, and when he led his men out of the dugout, that was when matters got out of hand.” 

Someone might have pointed out, Shropshire said, that Billy was probably throwing gravel and shooting people the finger at his First Communion. That’s not the stuff of inciting a riot. That’s just Billy.

The Rangers’ pursuit of the impossible — actually catching the A’s — died on the vine. They were mathematically eliminated after being swept in a doubleheader to the Chicago White Sox. Still, it was a feat that would seem to call for some sort of consolation “attaboys.”

Billy would go on to win AL Manager of the Year for the job well done, but Billy wasn’t concerned about any attaboys or commendations. 

“You know who cost us the pennant? That f---ing little David Clyde, that’s who,” Martin told Shropshire on the plane ride back to Arlington. “Put that in your gawddamn newspaper.”

The plane ride got even more interesting as Billy, already into his cups, had more to say. He wasn’t pleased about the players’ wives club that the wife of the Rangers public relations director Burt Hawkins had dreamed up. Or at least Billy thought it was her idea. 

According to Galloway, who was on the plane but didn’t witness the, ahem, incident, Billy, who, again, had been imbibing, told Hawkins to “shut your wife up.” Hawkins stood up to Billy and demanded he never “cuss my wife.” Hawkins reached back to swing, but Billy got him first. 

It was a commotion — an incident — to say the least.

“Billy said, ‘I never cussed his wife. I just said, please tell your wife we don’t need a women’s club,’” Galloway says. 

That explanation seems as improbable as, say, Biden and Trump dining together at Reata. 

According to Seasons in Hell, a hellbent Hawkins told players that, “If that little c***sucker doesn’t apologize, then I’m going to ownership and tell them they can stick this job up their ass.”

A contrite — and sober Billy — did apologize the next day. Billy survived that incident.

Short finally was able to find a buyer for his team. Brad Corbett of Fort Worth and a group that included Amon Carter Jr. purchased the team during the 1974 season. For the first time since the Rangers moved to Arlington, the team drew more than one million fans, some 500,000 more than in 1973.

“[Corbett] and my father just loved each other at first,” Martin Jr. says. “They really hit it off at first.”

At one point, Martin was even quoted as saying, “I think I’ll stay here the rest of my career.”

Not surprisingly, the honeymoon didn’t last. 

Much of the falling out had to do with control. Billy now had three bosses: Dr. Bobby Brown, team president; Dan O’Brien, the general manager; and Corbett. Soon there was what was described as “constant snarling” between the front office and the manager.

One reporter wrote that Billy smashed his $500 wristwatch, a Christmas present from Corbett, against the wall of his manager’s office, after an argument.

There were incidents, too. 

Corbett had bought Billy a membership to Shady Oaks Country Club. For years, it was rumored that Billy and Mickey Mantle had almost run over Ben Hogan with a golf cart. 

However, something happened. Billy told Shropshire that he had been kicked out of the club. 

“‘Look at this,’ he said in his office one day as he showed me a delinquent food and drink tab of more than $3,000 from Shady Oaks. ‘How in the hell do they expect me to go out there and pay that bill if I am no longer welcome on the premises?’”

In the end, it was a song performed by John Denver, the pride of Arlington Heights High School, that did in Billy in Texas. 

Billy wanted Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” as the song for the traditional seventh-inning stretch. Corbett mandated that it be “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” 

It was his team, after all. 

According to Bill Pennington’s 2015 biography, Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, on July 20 of the 1975 season, during which the Rangers underwhelmed, Martin called the press box between innings. Umpire Ron Luciano, who had walked over to the Rangers dugout for a drink of water, confirmed the story in his autobiography. “Billy was saying, ‘I don’t care what the owner says, play the gawddamn John Denver song.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. Billy’s yelling, ‘I better hear “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”’ And he slams the phone down.”

The very next day, Corbett swung his axe. The Rangers’ Billy Martin era was over. 

It was the most Rangers ending ever. 

“Billy was by far the best manager I ever played for,” says Grieve. “He was a fearless manager. He didn’t care what the owner thought, what the sportswriters thought, what the fans thought. He was going to manage the game the way he wanted.

“It’s also not far-fetched, looking back, to wonder if Whitey Herzog was given five or six years to manage the Rangers, short term, we would have suffered. But long term, it would have been exactly what we needed to become a contending team.”

Says Galloway, laughing through parts: “The bottom line on the story is, as good as Billy was and the ’74 season was, what we knew, what we found out, in retrospect, and it didn’t take this long, it took about 10 years … the worst mistake they ever made was firing Whitey Herzog in 1973 and bringing Billy in to start with despite the ’74 season. 

“That’s, by the way, kind of the Rangers for a lot of decades. There’s all kinds of contradictions, and all of them bad.”