my favorite manager of all time…

I often find Managers and coaches more interesting than players so this book might be right up my alley.

As far as Martin he managed the A’s when I was very young and while I saw several games that he managed my 7 year old brain wasn’t exactly breaking down his strategies and managerial acumen.

I really came of age while watching Tony La Russa manage the A’s and I feel pretty lucky about that as I think he’s a great manager and a very interesting person.

if not just to find out if Tommy Lasorda really is a complete buffoon. Though this brief audio clip is quite endearing:

Don’t listen to this if you don’t like the f-word

or if you have man or woman love for Kurt Bevacqua.

According Wikipedia, Bevacqua was the “1975 Joe Garagiola/Bazooka Bubble Gum Blowing Champ.”

It sounds way too much like the standard-issue stuff you hear about teams that “came to play”. He talks about Hernan Cortes for 2 paragraphs, but never once asks questions like, “Did Billy Martin actually understand something about stealing home that other managers didn’t understand? Did he know something special about pitching that helped guys like Keough and McCatty and Langford succeed beyond what people thought they could achieve (and was that thing he taught them related to the spitball?)? Did Martin, who hit a lot of HRs in his career for a small middle-infielder, teach hitters like Rickey to hit more HRs?”

Instead, Jaffe just keeps repeating his point about Martin’s fire to win, etc. Here’s probably the most irritating paragraph in the piece:

There is nothing quite like having a lunatic boss to cause employees to reach deeper within themselves. No one wanted to face a hostile Billy Martin in the dugout. Tellingly, almost all of the Twins’ wild base running came in the first half of 1969. Carew’s last home plate steal came in Minnesota’s 19th game. Once Martin had installed the desired mindset in Minnesota, there was no need to run the risky home plate steals. For the rest of the season opponents played back on their heels, wondering what Minnesota would do next.

First, what’s the evidence for that last assertion? Did opponents make more errors against the Twins than against other teams? Did the Twins’ actual runs-scored exceed their (component-based) runs-created? And when Jaffe asserts that Martin didn’t need to try to steal home once the “mindset” had been established — again, did Martin actually say this in 1969? Or is Jaffe just making an unfounded inference because the only thing he really has to say about Martin is that he wanted to win more than anyone else? If I had to hazard a guess, I’d hypothesize that the Twins stopped stealing home…because after stealing home 10 times in the first month of the season or whatever it was, other pitchers stopped pitching out of the windup with a Twins runner on 3rd.

To put it bluntly: we really don’t need a new book on managers to tell us that Billy Martin was crazy, incredibly driven and competitive, and fond of stealing home and overworking pitchers. Everyone already knows all of that. But there are lots of other red-ass, aggressive managers, many of whom were complete failures, none of whom were as successful as Billy. And there are lots of managers who burn out pitchers, but don’t get them to pitch as well as Martin did. I’d be really interested in a systematic analysis of what Billy did for a team: what happened to the teams to make them so successful while he was there? did the teams improve because Billy had an eye for talent and knew which players to play? did they improve because he taught his players how to hit HRs, or steal home, or throw spitters?

There have got to be lots of other interesting questions to ask about Billy Martin, who was pretty much one of a kind. Maybe a manager could actually use some of what Billy taught or did without having to, you know, be a rageaholic drunk. Unfortunately, Jaffe seems so interested in coming up with new ways to say that Martin was driven and crazy that he never bothers asking any interesting questions or providing any insights about him.

is the pine tar incident. Not only was Billy smart enough to wait for the perfect moment to call for an inspection, but Brett’s reaction made it historic, as well as historically funny.

this is the transcript from 1986 when Billy hosted with Anjelica Huston.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/85/85rmono.phtml

I cant find the video, but this episode was great!

One of the first things he did was to tell his players that they were good and they could win, but nobody has taught them to win. The ironic thing was the Finley despised Martin, but knew he could make the team a winner, and make the club more valuable as Finley wanted to sell the club due to his divorce.
    79 was a dismal season, 54-108. Billy took the same team to a 83-79 season, and it was thrilling. I was lucky enough to see it and it was a blast, you just never knew what was going to happen, but it was going to be exciting. 81’ was a blast, except for the strike, Billy could have been elected mayor of Oakland. The first round of the playoffs against KC, we killed them, with the apex being game 3 in Oakland. I was there, the place was rocking, more so than I saw before or since. If it was not for Billy, the A’s would be in Denver, it was that close.
     After spring training in 1980 the vans carrying the equipment stopped, and called Charlie Finley, do we go to Oakland or Denver….it was Oakland.