BOOK REPORT

The Last Yankee: The Turbulent Life of Billy Martin by David Falkner

The Last Yankee: The Turbulent Life of Billy Martin by David Falkner

Introduction

This book is the first full biography of the most controversial baseball figure of our times, Billy Martin, by the highly acclaimed author of The Short Season and Nine Sides of the Diamond. Falkner uncovers the real Billy Martin as he was known to those who loved, hated, hired, and fired him and those who made him a larger-than-life figure. The story of Billy Martin: everywhere he went he brought his unique spark of energy and aggression; everywhere he went he built an immediate winner; everywhere he went he got fired.at heart he was a true professional baseball man, the perfect product of the game of the fifties. The author paints a full and thorough portrait of the demons inside Martin and how they exploded out.

Discussion

The Last Yankee is an extraordinary book. Reading it, I even forgot to hate the Yankees. It doesn't just recount Martin's baseball career but tries to account for his whole "turbulent life." In a review of several books about Ted Williams in the third issue of Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Social Policy Perspectives, Larry Gerlach takes Michael Seidel to task for the limitations of his biography of Williams: Any study of Williams the ballplayer that does not focus primarily on the inner man will come up far short of the mark. Baseball was Williams' narrow focus, and for writers to take him on his own terms is understandable. It is also inexcusable. True, Williams is a formidable challenge. Obsessively private, he loved to talk about hitting or fishing but refused to discuss his personal life. Still, Seidel chose not to pursue the kind of research necessary to flesh out Williams' life. The archival research is thin, and correspondence and telephone conversations with former players are no substitutes for in-depth personal interviews. Seidel's is the best life of Williams published to date, but it is a Texas League single. The Splendid Splinter still awaits his biographer (115). It's my impression that Billy Martin has found his in David Falkner. What makes The Last Yankee extraordinary is the primary focus on the inner man.

What does the title of the book, The Last Yankee, mean? Falkner speaks early and often throughout the book of Martin's desire "to create himself." Billy Martin always, according to Falkner, had an idea of who and what he wanted to be and acted in terms of that rather than in terms of the realities of the situation. This accounts for both his achievements and his limitations. Falkner speaks early in the book of "Billy's tendency to create his own legend rather than coming to grips with his own complicated experience" [1]. Towards the end of the book Falkner describes him as "a legend wherever he went" with a wife who "was interested every bit as much as Billy was in creating him" ...