Alfred Manuel Martin, aka Billy Martin, would get a kick out of this: His grandson, Billy Martin III, wants to become a baseball umpire. Baseball fans who remember the feisty original Billy Martin know he was anything but a friend of umpires, and may recall Martin getting face to face with umps whose calls he disagreed with, even kicking dirt on their shoes—and often getting tossed.
Author Leigh Montville (“Ted Williams” and “The Big Bam”) dubbed Martin an “incandescent ballplayer/manager/jerk/sweetheart … [an] irrepressible brawler with a grand mind for the game.”
But there’s a lot people don’t know about the famous New York Yankees manager, who was hired and fired five times in that role.
His son, Billy Martin Jr., was referred to as Billy Joe by author Bill Pennington in “Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius.” According to the book, published in 2015, in the 1977 season “Billy Joe went to all the home games with his father and often went on the road with the Yankees. It was an enjoyable time for him, running around in Yankee Stadium wearing a miniature replica of his father’s number 1 jersey and spending days and nights with a father he had not seen regularly since Billy took the Yankees job in 1975.”
What an adventure that must have been for a 13-year-old boy.
“There was
