THE SHORT LEASH

Author

Matthew Garringer
August 30, 2023

Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The daily newsletter that loves baseball as much as much as Mike Trout loves his dog.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s story is about one of baseball’s all-time toxic relationships.

Over the years, George Steinbrenner hired and fired Billy Martin five times.

At a certain point, it became a running joke.

There’s one thing they had in common though: they both loved to win.

Billy got hired the first time in ‘75 after CBS sold the Yankees to George a couple of years earlier.

The team signed Reggie Jackson in ‘77, who had won three World Series rings with the Oakland A’s in previous years.

Billy and Reggie were quickly at odds.

In June of ‘77, Robert Ward of Sport Magazine put out a quote from Reggie that became instantly infamous.

“This team, it all flows from me. I’m the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and Munson, but he can only stir it bad”

Thurman Munson certainly didn’t like that, and Billy Martin was irate.

One week later, Martin, pulled Reggie from a game in the middle of an inning for his lack of hustle.

The two exchanged words in the dugout, and had to be restrained from kicking the shit out of each other.

Through all the turmoil, New York still won the World Series in ‘77.

The next year, Billy learned that Steinbrenner wanted to trade him to Chicago for Bob Lemon, who was the White Sox manager at the time.

Soon after, this quote appeared in the papers.

"They deserve each other - One's a born liar; the other's convicted."

Billy Martin

That got Billy fired for the first time.

The Yankees signed Bob Lemon to manage the squad through the ‘79 season.

Less than a week later, the team announced that Billy would be coming back in ‘80 to manage again.

It was a pretty strange move at the time, but Yankee fans loved it.

Lemon wasn’t getting the job done, so they brought Billy back in the middle of the ‘79 season, but after Thurman Munson passed away it pretty much decimated the team’s morale.

That off-season, Billy got into a fight with a marshmallow salesman (more on that another day), and lost his job again.

In ‘83 and ‘85, Martin was hired again, but he was fired in the off season.

He came back for a fourth time to replace Yogi Berra in ‘85, but after losing the division he was fired again.

Then, of course, there was his fifth and final stint as the Yankees manager.

He only managed the club for 68 games before being canned again.

And as crazy as it sounds, Steinbrenner told Billy that he wanted him to come back for a sixth time in ‘90.

Unfortunately, Martin never got the chance because he was involved in an alcohol-induced car accident that took his life.

To this day, Billy is one of the top 50 winningest managers in MLB history.

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WEBGEM WEDNESDAY

STRANGE NAMES

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why? Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

This is not a nickname.

That’s right, this dude’s actual birth name was Welcome.

Aside from that though, we don’t really know much about him.

He only played in three games during the late 1800s, and even though it looked like his performance was solid, he never played in the Major Leagues again.

After that he pretty much disappeared.

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