From an award-winning New York Times sports columnist, the definitive biography of one of baseball's most celebrated, mercurial, and misunderstood figures--legendary manager and baseball genius, Billy Martin

In the early 1970s, the Oakland Athletics became only the second team in major-league baseball history to win three consecutive World Series championships. But as the decade came to a close, the A's were in free fall, having lost 108 games in 1979 while drawing just 307,000 fans. Free agency had decimated the A’s, and the team’s colorful owner, Charlie Finley, was looking for a buyer. First, though, he had to bring fans back to the Oakland Coliseum. Enter Billy Martin, the hometown boy from West Berkeley. In Billy Ball, sportswriter Dale Tafoya describes what, at the time, seemed like a match made in baseball heaven. The A’s needed a fiery leader to re-ignite interest in the team. Martin needed a job after his second stint as manager of the New York Yankees came to an abrupt end. Based largely on interviews with former players, team executives, and journalists, Billy Ball captures Martin’s homecoming to the Bay area in 1980, his immediate embrace by Oakland fans, and the A’s return to playoff baseball. Tafoya describes the reputation that had preceded Martin—one that he fully lived up to—as the brawling, hard-drinking baseball savant with a knack for turning bad teams around. In Oakland, his aggressive style of play came to be known as Billy Ball. A’s fans and the media loved it. But, in life and in baseball, all good things must come to an end. Tafoya chronicles Martin’s clash with the new A’s management and the siren song of the Yankees that lured the manager back to New York in 1983. Still, as the book makes clear, the magical turnaround of the A’s has never been forgotten in Oakland. Neither have Billy Martin and Billy Ball. During a time of economic uncertainty and waning baseball interest in Oakland, Billy Ball filled the stands, rejuvenated fans, and saved professional baseball in the city.

A biography of Billy Martin, the controversial manager who has been hired and fired more than anyone else in major league baseball.

Description: David Falkner, highly acclaimed author of The Short Season, pens the first full biography of one of the most controversial baseball figures to date, Billy Martin. Falkner uncovers the real Billy Martin as those who loved, hated, hired, and fired him knew him to be, revealing how Martin cam to be a larger-than-life figure.

“A funny, revealing, Ball Four–like romp through mid-seventies baseball” from the longtime sports columnist and author of The Last Real Season (Booklist). You think your team is bad? In this “disastrously hilarious” work on one of the most tortured franchises in baseball, one reporter discovers that nine innings can feel like an eternity (USA Today). In early 1973, gonzo sportswriter Mike Shropshire agreed to cover the Texas Rangers for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, not realizing that the Rangers were arguably the worst team in baseball history. Seasons in Hell is a riotous, candid, irreverent behind-the-scenes account in the tradition of The Bronx Zoo and Ball Four, following the Texas Rangers from Whitey Herzog’s reign in 1973 through Billy Martin’s tumultuous tenure. Offering wonderful perspectives on dozens of unique (and likely never-to-be-seen-again) baseball personalities, Seasons in Hell recounts some of the most extreme characters ever to play the game and brings to life the no-holds-barred culture of major league baseball in the mid-seventies. “The single funniest sports book I have ever read.”—Don Imus “The locker-room shenanigans of a lousy team of the 1970s.”—Publishers Weekly

A legendary New York Yankees PR man offers readers an inside look at one of baseball’s greatest teams. Starting as a college student sorting Mickey Mantle’s fan mail and rising to become the youngest director of public relations in baseball history, Marty Appel offers a unique behind-the-scenes memoir of life with the New York Yankees from 1968 to 1977. Appel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with both the benchwarmers and the superstars of the past and present, from tempestuous owner George Steinbrenner and his equally tempestuous manager Billy Martin (whom Howard Cosell once called “a beleaguered little pepperpot”) to Hall of Famers like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, and Reggie Jackson. With a new chapter bringing the story up-to-date, as well as changes and milestones in the game he loves, Marty Appel paints a hilarious and poignant portrait of the Yankees. “[Appel’s] love of baseball shines through here, and Yankee fans will lap up his humorous stories of Yankee greats and not-so-greats.” —Library Journal “A poignant account of a fan turned public relations executive working for baseball’s most glamorized team.” —Baseball America