Day 19: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Ballad of Billy and George: The Tempestuous Baseball Marriage of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner"
The author: Phil Pepe
How to find it: Globe Pequot Press, 272 pages, $24.95
Where we'd go looking for it: The publisher's website has it, as does Powell's online store.
The scoop: Any time you can get the word "tempestuous" in a book title, it's got some zing.
Pepe, the Yankees' beat writer from 1961-64, and again from '71-'84, also wrote the book "BillyBall" with Martin long ago, so he's able to cultivates past conversations with the late skipper, as well as Billy Martin Jr., Reggie Jackson, Ron Guidry, Sparky Lyle, Goose Gossage, Bucky Dent, Clete Boyer, Graig Nettles, Lou Piniella, Clyde King and Gene Michael.
No Steinbrenner? Not even Oliver Platt?
What you weren't able to cull from ESPN's "The Bronx Is Burning" miniseries, here's more in print that goes prior to (when Steinbrenner hired him in '75) and after the 1977 Yankees season (up until Martin's death in 1989), covering the five times Steinbrenner hired and fired him.
The book publishers say Martin and Steinbrenner "were compared to Mutt and Jeff, Hatfield and McCoy, and even Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: two stubborn and driven men whose on-again off-again partnership entertained the nation for two decades." Next time I see Liz Taylor, I'll think "stubborn, driven man."
How it goes down in the scorebook: Manager ejection.
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