“Your word is good enough for me, ” Billy Martin tells an umpire in an Oakland A’s “BillyBall” commercial from the 1980s.
For three seasons, BillyBall electrified the Coliseum.
When a baseball team moves to another city, the popular culture around it moves with it. And then almost inevitably fades.
In the 1980s, no one was bigger in Oakland’s popular culture than Billy Martin. Today, as the A’s get into what could be their final season in Oakland before slinking off to Las Vegas, let’s stop for a moment and remember 1980 to 1982, the incandescent three years that Billy managed the team. He raged in the press, intimidated his players, kicked dirt upon and chest-bumped umpires until he was finally charged with assault.
All the while, Rich Silverstein and I were writing the A’s advertising campaign. The timing could not have been more perfect.
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Let me back up.
In the early ’70s, the Oakland A’s had won three World Series, but in 1979, they lost 108 games and averaged an anemic 3,787 fans per contest. Triple-digit crowds were not uncommon. In the emptiness, you could hear the players talk to each other on the field. Owner Charlie Finley, who had pioneered the designated hitter, white spikes and even tried to get Major League Baseball to play with an orange ball, was getting desperate.
In the early days of 1980, just before Finley was forced to sell the team in a very public divorce, he took a big swing and hired Billy to be manager of the A’s.
Billy had some success managing the Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers but was repeatedly fired for insubordination and “differences with management.” He went on to win a World Series with the New York Yankees but feuded with owner George Steinbrenner, benched slugger Reggie Jackson on national TV and was fired a shocking total of five times — once for punching out a marshmallow salesman.
So it was that, in 1980, Martin was at A’s spring training in Phoenix for the first time when my partner Silverstein and I met with A’s management to discuss their new advertising. We groaned inside as they talked a lot about how the Coliseum was now “the place to be.” It was clear that, whatever we did, it should probably not include crazy Billy.
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We went back and told this to our forbidding boss, the legendary Ogilvy & Mather creative director Hal Riney, who looked like Ernest Hemingway and didn’t suffer fools. He also didn’t know much about baseball. But that didn’t prevent him from wading in.
“They don’t want to use Billy?” he said. “What else have they got?”
“Not much,” I said. “Billy is a famous bad boy but he has the players cranked up, playing a really aggressive brand of baseball — stealing lots of bases, stealing home, weird pickoff plays, taking the extra base, even the hidden ball trick. People are excited. Ralph Wiley at the Oakland Tribune calls it Billy Ball.”
“Billy Ball?” Riney said, putting out a cigarette. “Well, that’s your campaign right there.”
We quickly cooked up a series of commercials that likeably played against type:
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Billy runs out as if to contest an umpire’s call, but affably retreats (“Your word is good enough for me. If you say he went around, he went around. My mistake, my mistake.”).
Billy appears at the ticket booth and goads a fan into maniacal screams of support (“OK, OK. We’ll give you a tryout” as Billy hands him a ticket.).
An older woman in Billy’s childhood neighborhood of west Berkeley remembers him as “a shy child who was polite to everybody” (her husband leans into the camera frame, “Mother doesn’t remember too good anymore”).
Silverstein ended each spot with a diamond vision kind of dazzle of lights that said “BillyBall” (we put the words together) as an announcer said, “It’s a different brand of baseball.”
Despite some reservations, we found ourselves at spring training to shoot the commercials. We were introduced to Billy himself on the field of Arizona State University. He smelled like bourbon. It was 9 a.m.
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Nevertheless, for me, it was a seriously exciting baseball moment. Billy was still lean and sinewy, wolf-like, his face all leathery from years in the sun. I found myself gushing.
“It’s so funny,” I said to him. “I grew up as a Red Sox fan and my dad taught me to hate the Yankees, especially you.”
As the words were coming out of my mouth, a little voice in my head said, “Are you kidding? You just told baseball’s Number One Nut Job that you hate him!”
After a second, Billy just smiled and said, “Isn’t baseball great?” and walked off.
Billy was terrific on camera, a natural. He actually cared about whether he was funny and gave his players permission to join in.
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The campaign was an enormous hit, written and talked about throughout the sports world. Although athletes had been used to sell beer and Coke, this was perhaps the first time athletes were used to humorously sell athletes.
The atmosphere at the Coliseum was suddenly electric. BillyBall was up in lights, even planted in flowers in the left field stands. Attendance quadrupled in two years. Every time Billy came out of the dugout, the crowd went wild.
The A’s went all the way to the playoffs in a strike-shortened 1981 season. It was magical. Somehow, it was always magical around Billy.
Nevertheless, sometime in 1982, I got a call from a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner. She said Billy had just been fired. After a tough loss, he had reportedly taken a bat to a few urinals.
Of course he had.
A few years later, he was killed when a truck he was in overturned at the foot of his driveway. There may or may not have been beer nearby.
Will this legend fade here in Oakland? You know what? Maybe not.
I miss him.
Jeff Goodby is a self-described baseball sap and co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco.
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