[14] When Martin reached Berkeley High School, which he attended from 1942 to 1946, he was dressed worse than many students from the more upscale housing east of San Pablo Avenue, but gained acceptance through sports, especially baseball, raising his batting average from a poor .210 as a sophomore to an outstanding .450 as a senior.

[16] Within weeks of the tryout, an infielder for the Oaks' Class D affiliate, the Idaho Falls Russets, was injured, and Stengel recommended that team owner Brick Laws sign Martin.

Later in the season, Duezabou was replaced with Cookie Lavagetto, a fellow infielder and former Dodgers star who was able to help Martin with fielding and advise him on what to expect in the major leagues.

[32] He was among those younger Yankees players, including Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle, who reported in February 1950 to a pre-spring training instructional camp in Phoenix to work on fundamentals under Stengel's eye.

Martin scored a crucial insurance run in the Yankee victory, evading the tag from the catcher, Roy Noble, and after the game was singled out for praise by Giants manager Leo Durocher.

[41] All three runners would most likely have scored had the ball dropped, giving the Dodgers the lead going into the eighth inning; Martin biographer David Falkner called the catch "one of the great moments in World Series history".

[31] With Martin's growing reputation as a fighter, opposing players often slid into second base hard, hoping to injure him: Stengel stated, "Billy's being hit with the hardest blocks this side of a professional football field.

"[43] There had been congressional investigations into whether athletes and others were given preferable treatment to avoid conscription and, in early 1954, Martin was drafted into the army, his renewed request for a hardship discharge denied.

[44] During the 1956 season, Weiss began to hint to the media that Martin was a poor influence on his fellow players, especially on his roommate, Mantle, with whom he often caroused until the early hours of the morning.

[47] Weiss warned Martin before the 1957 season to avoid trouble,[48] and the infielder did nothing to aid his own cause by injuring both himself and Mantle (the reigning MVP) in an intentional collision between their golf carts as they played a round on a Florida course during spring training.

Although it was fellow Yankee Hank Bauer who was accused of throwing the first punch, Martin believed that Weiss would blame him, and as the trade deadline of June 15 approached, his foreboding and tension grew.

Despite the two AL expansion teams, the Seattle Pilots and Kansas City Royals, having vacancies,[67] and expressing interest in hiring Martin, he stated that his loyalty was to the Twins, who had had another disappointing season.

At home for Game Three, Martin was expected to start star pitcher Jim Kaat but instead chose Bob Miller, who was knocked out of the box in the second inning, and the Twins were eliminated.

[74] Other events during the season, such as the fight with Boswell and Martin kicking former US vice president Hubert Humphrey out of the locker room when he tried to visit after a Twins loss also embarrassed the team.

He made it clear that he was going to run the team his way, and his clubhouse tirades for poor play even during spring training were reported in the media and concerned Detroit management.

Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the presidential peace candidate who had become chums with Billy when he managed the Twins, came to [1975 Rangers spring training in] Pompano Beach and stayed a week.

A district judge from New Orleans who had known Martin from God could only guess where arrived at Billy's springtime cavalcade of thrills, claiming that he was in town "looking for a little keister for Easter".

One day later, on July 20, after Martin ordered the public address announcer to play "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" during the seventh inning stretch instead of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (as Corbett had instructed), he was fired.

Aggressive baserunning, plus bench jockeying that may have caused Royals third baseman George Brett to make two crucial errors, helped New York win Game One, but Kansas City won two of the next three.

[118] When the Yankees lost six of the first eight games of the 1977 season, Steinbrenner called separate meetings with the players, the manager and the press, and told Martin that he had better get the team to turn things around or he could expect to be fired.

Golenbock noted, For the rest of the season Billy Martin would have to spend the majority of his time worrying about the egos of George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson rather than concentrating on managing his team.

[134] The events of 1977 placed Martin among the most prominent New York celebrities, a status he would keep until his death, as headline writers would refer to "Billy" without fear of readers misunderstanding who was meant.

[168] Jackson had departed for the California Angels, but other Yankees from Martin's earlier tenures remained, such as Randolph and Ron Guidry, and the team had added strong players like Dave Winfield and Don Baylor.

"[174] With an MVP season from Don Mattingly and a strong effort from Rickey Henderson, who had been acquired by the Yankees, the team played well throughout the summer, coming to within a game and a half of the division-leading Toronto Blue Jays on September 12.

[204] According to Jimmy Keenan and Frank Russo in their biography of Martin for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), "He played the game hard and made no excuses for the way he handled himself on or off the field.

"[210] Jaffe suggested that the person Martin was most akin to was not any other baseball manager, but Hernando Cortez, the conquistador who burned his own ships after arriving in Mexico, forcing his soldiers to conquer or die.

"[211] Pennington believed that Martin was very much a person of his times: "In the age of several round-the-clock ESPN channels, the ceaseless chatter of sports talk radio, and omnipresent smartphone cameras, Billy could not exist.

[223] On May 24, 1986, on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, co-host Martin was "fired" by executive producer Lorne Michaels for being "drunk" in a skit, slurring his lines.

"[227] The biographer complained that Martin, in the era of video clips and ESPN, has been reduced to a caricature: the man who kicked dirt on umpires, battled with Reggie Jackson in a dugout and who was forever being hired and fired, something that ignores a record of achievement both as player and manager.

[229] Pennington, who covered the Yankees as a newspaper reporter from 1985 to 1989, described Martin as "without question one of the most magnetic, entertaining, sensitive, humane, brilliant, generous, insecure, paranoid, dangerous, irrational, and unhinged people I had ever met".