Has there ever been a more complicated person in baseball than Billy Martin? Charming and brilliant, sensitive and prone to anger, Martin rose from a rough neighborhood in the Bay Area to the top of the sports world — but spent his adult life struggling to stay there.
A consistently winning manager now recognized as an ahead-of-his-time tactician, Martin is best remembered for his many stints working for Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. But his legacy is far more complicated than the headlines of the 1970s Bronx Zoo, as New York Times journalist Bill Pennington demonstrates in the new biography Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius.
