A Heady Mix: Booze and Baseball

By Tom Callahan

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and alcohol. Home runs, strip joints, barroom brawls and Billy Martin. It seems the drug cloud of the past two or three seasons has finally lifted, and the grand old game is itself again, in stitches over another Martin episode, 40 stitches this time, around the left ear. A recounting of his baseball career is more than just a primer for an emergency room. It's an argument for wholesome depravity.

Though Martin had a few early scraps with Clint Courtney, Billy Hunter, Jimmy Piersall, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella, they were as preliminary as Jack Dempsey's first fights under the name Kid Blackie. In the Ring book, Martin's official record begins in 1957 at New York City's Copacabana nightclub, where Yankee Teammates Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer and Johnny Kucks were toasting Martin's 29th birthday at the same time that a Bronx man named Edward Jones was celebrating the end of the bowling season.

By most accounts, Bauer was actually the one who broke Jones' nose. But the outfielder's alibi was compelling. "Hit him?" shrugged Bauer, batting .203 at the time. "Why, I haven't hit anybody all year." Only the humble pitcher Kucks was impressed by the $1,000 fines handed down a few days later in Cleveland. "Do you know if there is a good nightclub in this town?" Berra asked the writers. But only Martin was truly blamed. He was traded to Kansas City.

In 1960 Martin socked Cubs Pitcher Jim Brewer solidly enough to inspire a $1 million lawsuit. "How does he want it?" Billy asked, starting to get into the spirit of the thing. "Cash or green stamps?" By the end of the '60s, Martin was an itinerant manager batting out minor club officials and bespectacled traveling secretaries with either hand. Outside a Detroit bar, he flattened one of his own players, Dave Boswell, and began moving up through the ranks of bantamweight sportswriters and marshmallow salesmen to unidentified phantoms.

"I should have punched his lights out, I should have punched his lights out," Martin once seethed behind the desk as a gaggle of reporters standing around his Yankee Stadium office looked at one another strangely. "I know how I'd do it too. I'd say something, he'd say something. I'd say something, he'd say something. He'd take a swing. There you are. Self-defense."

With a bloody loss at the hands and feet of Pitcher Ed Whitson in 1985, Martin was plainly on his way to Palookaville. But the beating or bouncing he took two weeks ago at a Texas topless bar came close enough to his 60th birthday, and near enough to the Copa, to seem to make a full circle. Mantle was even there a little earlier, still leering at 56. The funniest line was Martin's: "I guess I can't go anywhere anymore," as if he had been at midnight Mass. The saddest was Yankee First Baseman Don Mattingly's unintentional uppercut: "Who would hit a 60-year-old man? That's like beating up your grandfather."

During spring training, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth quietly tried to talk to Martin about his drinking. But alcohol and baseball have always had a charmed association. Beer is practically a synonym for the sport. Hockey scrapes Drunken Driver Pelle Lindbergh off the highway, while basketball and football shake their heads at Chris Mullin and Tommy Kramer. But baseball literally cheers for hangovers. In Mel Allen's day at the Yankee mike, home runs were "Ballantine blasts." Now the St. Louis Cardinals do their rallying to the Budweiser jingle played incessantly on the Busch Stadium organ.

The father of a beer belch that could knock down every drop of loose water in the locker-room shower was, of course, Babe Ruth. "When the Babe left the train for the ball park," relates Pete Rose, as if Rose were not only alive then but could still smell the yeast, "he would remind the porter to have the bathtub full of beer by the time he returned." Rose got the story straight from Waite Hoyt, the late pitcher and alcoholic, who along with Third Baseman Joe Dugan was a pallbearer at Ruth's funeral in August 1948. "I'd give $100 for a cold beer," Dugan whispered to Hoyt, who murmured, "So would the Babe."

Don Newcombe, the old Brooklyn pitcher, estimates, "On the championship team of '55, I guess the Dodgers had seven or eight abusive drinkers, including me. In society, we don't take alcohol too seriously. In sports, we laugh at it. It's all one big Lite-beer commercial." He's an alcohol counselor now, and the counselors have a pretty good pitching rotation. "I never really knew what it was like to pitch a sober inning," says Ryne Duren, the Yankee reliever of the early '60s. "When I was with the Yankees in the mid-'70s," says Sudden Sam McDowell, "they hired a baby-sitter to stop me from drinking. All that did was make it a challenge."

Last month, on the same day he was fired as Baltimore manager, Cal Ripken Sr. pleaded guilty to drunken driving, a familiar Oriole road that Earl Weaver had swerved down before him. A manager is scarcely a manager if his nose has never required batteries. Tommy Lasorda, who for insurance reasons has removed the beer keg from his Dodger Stadium office, tells some funny stories about the huge consumers he has managed -- not including the ones who had to take time to dry out, like the young pitcher Bob Welch. Interestingly, Newcombe had approved of Lasorda's office tap. "It kept the players from grabbing six packs to go," he says. "Now I wish the Dodgers would stop selling alcohol in the stands after the fifth inning."

Responding to a spate of hooliganism in 1985, 18 of baseball's 26 teams (including the Dodgers) have closed their bars after the seventh or eighth ^ inning, twelve have instituted nondrinking "family" sections, and a few have decreased the alcohol content of the beer and banned carry-ins. In Baltimore the unofficial Oriole mascot, beer-bellied Cabdriver Wild Bill Hagy, ceremoniously tossed his cooler off the upper deck in protest. "While it may have a number of social causes," says National League President Bart Giamatti, "fan unruliness cannot be separated from the issue of excessive use of alcohol. I have no data, but I would say that more problems occur and more human damage is done because of excessive drinking than because of drugs."

Only three major league teams are owned by brewers or distillers -- St. Louis, Toronto and Montreal -- but all of them are in the business. "It's not a question of winking at drinking," says American League President Bobby Brown when asked if baseball ever thought of altering the association. "If you had your druthers and you could paint some utopian society, you might start thinking about things like that."

For the players, drinking after the game is like chewing and scratching during it: it's baseball. "A couple of beers," Mets Pitcher Dwight Gooden shrugged shortly after he left a drug center last year. "I know the people at Smithers tell you to stay away from everything -- beer, whiskey, chewing tobacco, everything. But beer's not a problem with me." The Padres, Dodgers, Pirates, Angels and White Sox have yanked all the alcohol out of the clubhouse. Padres Reliever Goose Gossage reacted like Hagy and is now with the Cubs. "Poor Babe Ruth," Gossage grumbled. "He couldn't play today." Sure he could. But at least off the field he would have a harder time leading the league.

With reporting by Lawrence Mondi/New York