Billy Martin
| Billy Martin | |||
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Martin with the Yankees in 1954
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| Second baseman / Manager | |||
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Born: May 16, 1928 Berkeley, California |
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Died: December 25, 1989 (aged 61) Johnson City, New York |
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| MLB debut | |||
| April 18, 1950, for the New York Yankees | |||
| Last MLB appearance | |||
| October 1, 1961, for the Minnesota Twins | |||
| MLB statistics | |||
| Batting average | .257 | ||
| Home runs | 64 | ||
| Runs batted in | 333 | ||
| Games managed | 2,267 | ||
| Win–loss record | 1,253–1,013 | ||
| Winning % | .553 | ||
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As player
As coach As manager |
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| Career highlights and awards | |||
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As player
As coach
As manager
Alfred Manuel "Billy" Martin (May 16, 1928 – December 25, 1989) was an American Major League Baseball second baseman and manager. He is best known as the manager of the New York Yankees, a position he held five different times. As Yankees manager, he led the team to consecutive American League pennants in 1976 and 1977; the Yankees were swept in the 1976 World Series by the Cincinnati Reds but triumphed over the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games in the 1977 World Series. He also had notable managerial tenures with several other AL squads, leading four of them to division championships.
Martin had a distinguished playing career in the 1950s, highlighted by his years with the Yankees during which he performed at a high level in appearances in the World Series. He was also selected for the American League All Star team in 1956. In these years his infamous propensity for fisticuffs became established, both on and off the baseball field.
As a manager, Martin was known for turning losing teams into winners, and for arguing animatedly with umpires, including a widely parodied routine in which he kicked dust on their feet. However, he was criticized for not getting along with veteran players and owners, burning out young pitchers, and for having an addiction to alcohol. During the 1969 through 1988 period as a manager, Martin totaled 1,253 victories with a .553 winning percentage.
Martin was born Alfred Manuel Pesano, Jr. to Alfred Manuel Pesano, Sr. and Joan Salvini "Jenny" Pesano in Berkeley, California. He was of Portuguese and Italian descent, as his father was a native of the Azores and his mother was born to a large Italian family in California. Alfred, Sr. abandoned the family eight months later; for this reason, Jenny always referred to Alfred, her second husband, as the "jackass." (She had been married before to a native Italian named Donato Pisani, whom her family arranged her to marry, and later married a singer named Jack Downey and took his name; the marriage lasted until Jack's death many years later.) Eventually, Jenny changed the family name to "Martin." He began being called "Billy" after his grandmother (Joan's mother) started calling him "Bello" (Italian masculine for "beautiful"; Martin said in his autobiography Number One that she would also call him "Bellitz,", a dialectical version of the same word). As Martin grew up in West Berkeley his mother took careful notice not to let her son know his actual name, not wanting him to know he shared the same name with Alfred Pesano. In fact, such careful care had been taken to hide Martin's birthname from him that he didn't find out until entering junior high; on his first day in Seventh Grade, while the teacher took attendance, his teacher called on "Alfred Martin" and young Billy thought she had skipped over him.
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Wikipedia