July 25 – The Boss to Billy: Get it Together
- Sal Maiorana
- Jul 25, 2017
- 3 min read
NEW YORK – Rain washed out the second and final game of what was supposed to be a quick two-game set with Kansas City, and the Royals were none too happy. They felt the Yankees called the game far too early, and the conspiracy theory they offered was that George Steinbrenner wanted to provide his team a day off after all the craziness of the past few days, a mental health day if you will.
Several days later, the Royals officially filed a protest with the American League office demanding that the game be cancelled and not made up so that they would avoid having to come back to New York to play a single game on the makeup date, Aug. 29. That protest was denied.
Whether this was Steinbrenner’s doing or not is unknown, but the day off provided him an opportunity to avoid being labeled “A no comment guy” regarding the Billy Martin saga.
Steinbrenner hadn’t said anything publicly over the weekend when Martin appeared to be on thin ice. He had gone on record weeks earlier saying, “I know it’s going to be hard for people to believe, but I will have nothing to do with a decision on Billy. That decision will be made by Gabe Paul and whatever he recommends is fine with me.”
No one actually believed that, though, so with no game to cover, and the voracious New York media needing to fill multiple column inches, an audience with the Boss was requested to clarify the situation, and Steinbrenner gladly complied in order to get his side of the story out.
He reiterated that Paul would make the call on Martin, but he also admitted he wasn’t happy with how Martin had handled himself in recent weeks. Nor was he pleased by the way Martin had been deflecting the blame for the team’s middling results by saying things like, “I can’t play for them.”
“It’s the old Harry Truman line - the buck stops here,” said Steinbrenner. “If a general is leading an army and a tank turns the wrong way, can the general say, ‘I wasn’t driving the tank?’ Performance is the yardstick for every guy that takes a manager’s job. Martin should forget trying to make a martyr out of himself. We’ve been through this three times already. He seems to love being a martyr. We’ve come to a time when we must demand an accountability of what Martin says and does.”
The day before, when he met with reporters in the morning before Paul called him to say his job was safe, Martin had made reference to how difficult managing this particular Yankee team had been with all the clashing egos. He hinted that if he were to be fired, his replacement would be faced with quite a daunting task.
“I don’t think I would want to be the manager stepping into this job,” he said. “Managing in the dugout is easy, it’s the clubhouse that’s the problem. I could win 150 games in the dugout, but the clubhouse is killing me. Everybody wants to hit someplace else in the batting order. That’s why I picked that batting order out of the hat that day – to show them that it didn’t make any difference where you hit if you hit. You’re not going to make them all happy.”
Steinbrenner didn’t appreciate those words, either.
“I bet you he’s said that before,” he said. “It’s the manager’s job to resolve clashes in the clubhouse. It’s his job to motivate the team and make them perform. I’m not out to get Billy Martin. That’s a copout. That’s a lot of crap. It’s a copout, but it’s not new. When is somebody going to have enough intelligence to say, ‘We had this in Detroit, Minnesota and Texas, maybe the guy’s in the wrong profession?’”
OK, given all that, Steinbrenner was asked why he hired Martin in the first place. “I thought because it was the Yankees, his love of the Yankees, and that the fourth time might make a difference,” he said. “Look, there’s no sword hanging over his head. We’re not thinking in terms of change, we’re thinking in terms of winning with Billy Martin.”
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