Dugout Days : Untold Tales and Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Career of Billy Martin

Legendary baseball manager Billy Martin was well-known for his abrasive spirit and after-hours barroom brawls. But it was on the field that Martin's genius for leadership took shape. His record for taking over undistinguished teams and instilling in them the aggressiveness and confidence needed to win championships will never be equaled. When he left the game, Martin left behind a proven model for success--one that can be applied to today's winner-take-all corporate battleground.

Dugout Days is the first thorough examination of the leadership strategies of Billy Martin. Setting aside the controversies that Martin's take-no-prisoners attitude often ignited, this book concentrates on the man--how he won and why the lessons from his championship legacy transcend the game of baseball.

High-energy stories and original interviews with the men who played for and with Martin--and learned from him--provide insights that resonate in today's competitive business arena, including:

* The importance of mentors in grooming passionate and effective leaders
* The necessity of building bonds, earning respect, and showing loyalty
* Techniques for melding a group of disparate individuals into a cohesive unit and for pushing them to new heights of achievement
* How adopting a high-energy, fast-acting, values-driven approach can vanquish the competition
* The importance of loving what you do in the equation for lasting success.

Dugout Days presents a great perspective on the legendary manager/player. DeMarco has interviewed scores of former players and teammates, lending the book a firsthand quality often missing from biographies, especially those in the sports field. Furthermore, the subject inherently adds some value to the equation, as Martin was an intriguing figure within one of sports' legendary franchises.

From a business perspective, I consider Dugout Days better than most. (I generally am skeptical of the "business" book genre.) Whereas most other offerings pass off common sense observations as platitudes on how to succeed, etc., Dugout Days demonstrates a few key points with actual situations, how they were handled and what the results were. There is no sense of "stretching" to prove a point, thereby avoiding the bloat to which business writers succumb.

I highly recommend the book for any baseball fan.


Portrait of a Relentless Competitor   June 14, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

According to the subtitle, DeMarco provides "untold tales & leadership lessons from the extraordinary career of Billy Martin" and indeed he does. I am among those who saw Martin play for the New York Yankees and I later followed his career as a Major League manager of several different teams, including one in Texas where I now live. He always fascinated me. DeMarco draws certain appropriate comparisons between Martin and George S. Patton. Indeed, many of the same qualities which explain Martin's success in the dugout and Patton's success on the battlefield help to explain why both had so many problems elsewhere.

Consider first Martin's and then Matt Keogh's explanation of "Billyball": "Just give me a little room, I'm going to take advantage of it. What the hell. When you're a leader, you have to lead. That's when you stick your neck out. Leaders ar not followers. They are innovators. They are gamblers. They're not afraid to take a chance, not afraid to fail....Billyball is nothing more than just aggressive, old-fashioned baseball where you're not afraid to make a mistake...forcing the opposition to make mental and physical mistakes. Going against the grain. Going after them all the time...Force the other team to execute perfectly...Always looking for an opportunity out there to create something. But get it quick. Right now. Not two innings from now." Now consider what what one of his former players, Matt Keough, has to say: "A definition of Billyball would be: What we did equaled making them worry. Talk about spitters and all that. stuff -- the whole thing was to create anxiety. And when you create anxiety, you beat 'em. That's all it was. He generated a tremendous amount of anxiety, because no one wanted to look stupid."

Especially the younger members of teams which played "Billyball" under Martin's leadership usually performed above their talent levels. They developed a swagger, a brawler's mentality, and a hatred of losing. Meanwhile, the values and principles which drove Martin the player and manager suggest why he was fired eight times and divorced three times as well as why he initiated so many heated arguments which often resulted in a fight with an individual or a brawl involving both teams. According to DeMarco, Martin "was a great leader, but like General George Patton and General Douglas MacArthur, he was not a great employee." Indeed, Martin eventually (and inevitably) shredded every welcome mat which greeted him when he first assumed the manager's position with a series of teams which include the Minnesota Twins, the Detroit Tigers, the Texas Rangers, the New York Rangers, the Oakland Athletics, and finally once again the New York Yankees whose owner George Steinbrenner hired and fired him five different times. Martin seems to have been most effective when entrusted with relatively inexperienced and less-talented players, players more inclined to be deferential to him, although a few of his World Champion Yankee teams are among the best during the last 30 years.

As indicated previously, the bulk of the material in this book is provided by 33 people who either played with or for Martin or were in some other way closely associated with him. All duly acknowledge Martin's flaws -- and some speak frankly about having been personally abused by Martin -- while suggesting (to a degree of agreement which surprised me) that Martin was also an uncommonly sensitive, thoughtful, loyal, generous, and (believe it or not) spiritual, if not precisely religious person. They knew him well, both in and out of the dugout; I knew of him only from a great distance and was almost wholly dependent upon how he was portrayed by the media.

Near the end of his book, DeMarco includes some insightful comments by Paul Stoltz, author of The Adversity Quotient: "So many entrepreneurs and leaders have some of Billy's profile -- a nontraditional path, childhood adversity, being made fun of or ridiculed, and an uncompromising track record of relentlessness. This is the high AQ [Adversity Quotient) Climber profile. These people can really irritate....Thank God! Without them, this world would be far less interesting and rich. It is It is the Climbers who shape whatever game they are in. Once the wounds are healed and the hurt feelings mend, we remember the Climbers most fondly and admiringly for the impact they have had and legacy they left." The 33 provide "untold tales" and DeMarco suggests several "leadership lessons." Read the book and then take your own measure of Alfred Manuel Martin.


I'm Being Generous with Three Stars   May 14, 2001
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I guess the main reason this book was written was to provide a more balanced account of Billy Martin. He certainly had a number of people who didn't care for him and a number of derogatory stories have been told about him. This book relates experiences about people such as Willie Horton, Paul Blair, Rod Carew, Mike Heath, and others who had positive experiences regarding Billy Martin. Any manager has individuals who can tell both positive or negative stories about them so Martin would not be unique in this respect. I find Billy Martin to be an interesting individual to read about in baseball, but I found the book to have pretty much the same people commenting on him throughout. It is not a story of his life, but one that is told by those having positive experiences with him. I buy baseball books to save for my baseball library, but if I had the chance to do it again, this book would have remained in the bookstore. I found it to be repetitious and boring at times.


Don't judge a book (or man) by it's cover!   May 13, 2001
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

DeMarco goes against coventional wisdom and appeals to the less visable side of the reading audience....the virtuous side! It's so easy to capture us with the picture of a man which the dotors of spin have firmly established....whether true or half true (which is another way to say false!) But Demarco elects not to take the easy way out. He goes to those who knew Billy personally and I'm not talking about a handful of cronnies but, rather, fourty plus former players and fellow managers. What we get for the more than hundred hours of interviews and research is the truth about Billy Martin....The GOOD, the BAD, and the UGLY. However with the previous writters appealing to our ever hungry, "give me the dirt side", DeMarco focouses more on the former....the good. Much to my surprise and my "already spun" perception of this man, I found there was a great leader and,even more surprising, a soft side to this tough guy....a tremendous giver to the underdogs of life and an amazing spiritual side that was very real! I highly recomend this book for personal consumption you will be pleasantly surprised once you get past Billy's "cover". Well done DeMarco!


High-Octane Leadership   May 7, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is a fascinating look at Billy Martin that works on two levels. First, it shows how Martin rose to the tops of the baseball managing ranks through his passionate love of the game. From his apprenticeship at the side of Casey Stengel through his later wanderings with second-rate teams, Martin was learning the game inside out so that when the opportunity came to manage, he was ready. Second, the book shows how Martin unleashed his knowledge as a manager. Through conversations with many of Martin's players, the author shows how Martin worked one on one with his players to inspire their best, and then fit those players together at the team level to orchestrate some amazing seasons. Players from the "Billyball" teams in Oakland (like Mike Heath and Mike Norris) and the "Turnaround Gang" in Texas (like Toby Harrah and Lenny Randle) offer fasicnating pictures of a man full of confidence, bravado, and knowledge, willing to do ANYTHING to win a ballgame. He created opportunities for success and pumped up his overachieving players to attack those opportunities. Billy's raw, energetic confidence emerges very clearly. Martin was certainly a fascinating character and leader, and that's readily clear in "Dugout Days".