Billy Martin leaves Yankees

Anybody who has ever sat in on Question Time in the British House of Commons knows that the fun of it, for the outsider, if I may use a rather cold-blooded word, the fun of it is the way questions of earth-shattering importance, like 'Is it true that Uganda is going to get a nuclear bomb?' alternate with questions like 'Should members of Parliament be required, in the interests of the taxpayer, to bring their own napkins for meals in the House?'

The last time I was there, some angry man got up to ask if the Treasury, or perhaps the chief cashier of the Bank of England, would explain why ten shilling notes got dirtier in the pocket than pound notes and what was he going to do about it? This was immediately followed by a question to the Prime Minister about some rumoured mutiny on a ship of the Mediterranean fleet. And after that, a North countryman directed the attention of the Home Secretary to an outrageous violation of human civil liberties in a village in Yorkshire. 

It seems that a policeman, out for information about some petty thief, had knocked on the door of a law-abiding citizen at the unearthly hour of 9 p.m. when all good Yorkshire families, as we know, are asleep and snoring. The Home Secretary promised to look into it. 

Well, the question before the House is whether to give priority to the question of test-tube babies or the equally world-shattering news that Billy Martin, the manager of the New York Yankees baseball team has been fired. On the whole, I think we'll postpone the test tube and stay this time with Billy Martin since 'he'll no come back again' and his dismissal illustrates a principle of American life which it took Charles Darwin 40 years to discover, whereas it has taken only about 20 years to fertilise a human egg outside the womb and legions of women everywhere are now madly assuming that the thing is an accomplished fact and that, from now on, test-tube babies can be ordered up like frozen peas. 

All right! Mr Billy Martin is/was the manager of the Yankees and last year the Yankees won the national championship which, by a pardonable extension of patriotism is known as the World Series, just as to Britons, the British Open Golf Championship is known always, and only, as THE Open. 

For a couple of years now, Mr Martin has been having a running feud with the owner of the Yankees, one George Steinbrenner. He's also had another running feud with one of the Yankees' star players, Reggie Jackson. Well, to put it roughly, the owner had noticed for some time, along with about three million Yankee fans, that off the field, the personal relations between the Yankee players were about as harmonious as those between monkeys locked in a barrel and the relation between Mr Martin and the star, Reggie Jackson, bore a striking resemblance to the relation between a cobra and a mongoose. 

To put it mildly, Mr Martin and Reggie Jackson hadn't spoken to each other for a year or more and this, as any high school captain knows, does not lead to a happy team. But more important, it doesn't lead to a winning team. Early in this season, the Yankees took a terrible beating in game after game, from their hated rivals, the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees and the Red Sox have something of the traditional affection for each other that exists in cricket between Lancashire and Yorkshire. 

Well the principle I mentioned earlier is no more or less than that of the survival of the fittest. The American amendment to Darwin is that the fittest must not only survive but go on beating the daylights out of everybody in sight. So that when the Yankees lost all but one of their games against the Red Sox, it seemed that Mr Martin was not long for his job. But then the Yankees met another healthy enemy, Chicago, and beat them five times in a row. At an airport on the way home from this triumph, Mr Martin might have been expected to be in a glow of pride. He was in a glow of rage. It seems that in one of the games, Reggie Jackson had flouted Mr Martin's instructions. And here, let me as simply as possible, say how. 

Both American football and baseball do not yield their secrets to the uninstructed onlooker. As well tell a baby he loved watching a chess match. What makes American football an incomprehensible bit of rough-housing to a stranger is his assumption that what's going on is an instinctive riot. On the contrary, American football is outdoor chess with shoulder pads. Everything that happens – a pass, a feint, a tackle, a fake throw – has been memorised, rehearsed, chalked up on blackboards, and drawn from precedents as old as the Ruy Lopez opening the Indian Defence or Plessy versus Ferguson. 

Baseball is kinder to the casual spectator. He knows at least that the idea is to hit a ball between the fielders – better, over their heads and out to the stadium clock – and run round three bases and come home to score a run. But one of the great pleasures of watching baseball and now, especially, on television, is watching the manager down in a dugout, off the field and then watching a close-up of the pitcher and noticing the little gestures of his partner, the catcher, or wicket keeper if we must. 

Unlike bowlers in cricket, pitchers don't deliver any ball that comes into their heads. They are under close instruction from the manager. He tells them what sort of ball to deliver, when to send four wides in a row and make the batter walk to first base. Television now allows you to see the manager sniff or turn his head to one side in the dugout. This is a signal. You then see the pitcher massage the ball or tug at the peak of his cap or rub his thigh or, in some other way, signal back to the manager that he's understood, also, to forewarn the catcher which of a half-dozen types of balls are coming up. And there are similar, sly, long-distance, silent instructions to the batter. 

I won't go into the technicalities of Reggie Jackson's act of civil disobedience but, at that airport on the way home from Chicago, Mr Martin revealed that in one game he had signalled to Jackson to hit away and Jackson ignored the order and bunted. This was the last straw. Mr Martin, who doesn’t like the owner, said about him and Jackson, 'they deserve each other'. The owner fired him, or rather Mr Martin resigned in floods of tears in the middle of the season. 

Now I introduced the sad figure of Mr Billy Martin as a prime example of the American belief in many more fields than sport – that if your team starts losing, the manager is out. There is, as many of you know, an American magazine devoted to the structure and life of big business called Fortune and, from time to time, there are profiles of coming men, particularly of young men who've risen fast and have just been made the president of some mighty corporation in steel, automobile, textiles, foods, whatever, and they're shown in all the sap of their success – firm-jawed, piercing-eyed, vibrant, manly, smiling slightly. 

Very rarely are they men who worked their way up the ladder a step at a time. They usually have bounded at a leap from district sales manager to national sales manager and then – boom! – the president of the corporation is fired and the new man is at the helm. Great things are expected of him because he's just done great things. He proposed a new model of a motorcar which has sold like hotcakes. He invented a revolutionary method of packaging frozen food, he invented, say, containerisation. 

I always feel sad when I see such pictures and read such pieces. They make me think of the old American maxim, 'from shirtsleeves, to shirtsleeves in three generations' and remind myself that in our time it has been amended to 'from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation'. Such men are thought of by everybody, by journalists, by businessmen, by gossip columnists, by Marxists, as the enviable, or loathsome, heroes of the capitalist system. We assume that they will drive a Rolls, hunt or shoot on a country estate, take holidays in Acapulco, occasionally rent a private jet. What very few people seem to stop and consider is that the pinnacle of their success is very shaky, that the pinnacle is actually created to be shaky. 

In other words, the system handsomely rewards the profit maker but the new man's survival is tied to the colour of the ink on the bottom line. So long as it's black, he may keep his Rolls, his estate, his exotic holidays, but let it appear in red and in America, at least, all these baubles are in jeopardy. Private enterprise is often made out to be an anti-social system of giving profits to the top guys willy-nilly. But no profits, out goes the top guy! This is the American rule. 

Dr Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winner, goes further. He calls it 'the universal truth of business. A private business,' he says, 'that undertakes an unsuccessful experiment has no choice. It recognises its mistake or goes bankrupt unless it can get government to subsidise it. That is why the loss component of the profit and loss system is far more important than the profit component.' 

In other words, if you can't take the heat, a losing streak for the Yankees, the failure of some new gadget or marketing device, stay out of the kitchen, and get employment with a government or other bureaucracy. For it's the great comfort of being part of a bureaucracy that, like a subsidised college boy, you're not paid by results. Or as Dr Friedman puts it, 'Government bureaucrats may be just as perceptive as private entrepreneurs, just as wise, just as original in deciding what projects to undertake. But there is no mechanism for ending unsuccessful experiments. Instead, they tend to be expanded to bury small failures in a large failure.' And they stay on. Maybe not as the big bug but as deputy bug. 

So spare a tear for Billy Martin who didn't aim at becoming a drone in the office of the baseball commissioner but aimed at running a winning team for ever. And, when it lost, he was to blame. So, he had to go.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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