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

Michael DeMarco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

The first behind-the-scenes look at the leadership skills of Billy Martin - and how they apply in today's high-stakes business environment. These include: the importance of mentors; the necessity of building bonds, earning respect and showing loyalty; techniques for melding a group of disparate individuals into a cohesive unit; and how adopting a high-energy, fast-acting, values-driven approach can vanquish the competition. This is the first thorough examination of the leadership strategies of Billy Martin, one of the most successful managers ever at turning teams around. It presents high-energy stories and original interviews with the men who played for and with Martin -and learned from him. These tales provide insights that resonate in today's competitive buisness arena. Baseball fans should love to read never-before-published anecdotes about Billy Martin. Controversy surrounds Billy Martin to this day - sports-oriented businesspeople will be curious to discover the "bright side" of the man.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Over the course of his 20-plus years as a baseball manager, Billy Martin became as well known for his on-and-off-field brawls as he was for his winning teams. However, Martin remains the only baseball manager to transform two teams the Texas Rangers and Oakland As from being 100-plus-game losers one season into league champions the next. DeMarco, a management consultant and lifelong Yankee fan, believes that Martin's abilities as a teacher and mentor have been undervalued because of the attention paid to his drinking and his turbulent relationship with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. At the core of the author's premise is that on today's cutthroat global playing field, the corporations that win are those that are driven by passionate, focused leaders. DeMarco asks readers to put aside any biases against Martin and to focus instead on the qualities that made him a winning manager and baseball icon. In chapters following the course of Martin's career, DeMarco summarizes key leadership skills (e.g., building a team of talented and dedicated players, putting yourself in your followers' shoes, getting the public on your side), reinforced by recollections from the many baseball legends, including Rod Carew, Ray Negron, Willie Horton, Phil Pepe and Mickey Rivers, whom he interviewed. However, while his premise has validity, DeMarco fails to link examples of Martin's success with the corporate world, and, frankly, it's hard to imagine today's business leaders looking back to Martin's career for insight. In the end, the book is more a celebration of Billy Martin's baseball genius than a management guide, but as such DeMarco's book pales beside Wild, High and Tight by Peter Golenback and Martin's autobiography written with Phil Pepe. Agent, Marty Appel.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Management consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers and former college baseball player DeMarco examines the leadership strategies taken from the extremely colorful if checkered managing career of former Yankee great Billy Martin. The book is built around short, easily digestible chapters full of paragraph-length italicized quotes from teammates, friends, and foes. Although much of Martin's life story is told here from Mantle-era player to his managing successes with the Oakland A's, Texas Rangers, and New York Yankees it is not a substitute for a good biography; the business motivational theme is paramount. The chapters revolve around such topics as getting to the top, organizational dynamics, and managing campaigns. Readers may want to compare this work with another book about another baseball character most would agree was less self-destructive than Martin: Pat Williams and Michael Weinreb's Marketing Your Dreams: Business and Life Lessons from Bill Veeck, Baseball's Marketing Genius (Sports Publishing, 2001). This book will circulate well in New York-area libraries and libraries with strong business or sports collections. Paul Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814405614
• ISBN-13: 978-0814405611
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,078,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't judge a book (or man) by it's cover!, May 12, 2001

By 

NPM (Lancaster, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dugout Days : Untold Tales and Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Career of Billy Martin (Hardcover)

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!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So that's how Billy did it!, April 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Dugout Days : Untold Tales and Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Career of Billy Martin (Hardcover)

This book was a very satisfying read. As a baseball fan, I know Billy Martin's legacy of drinking and other troubles. What I also know is that Billy Martin was a very successful player and manager. What Michael DeMarco does in this book is provide an in depth analysis of Billy Martin's baseball and leadership tactics. Instead of focusing a great amount of attention of barroom brawls and fights with George Steinbrenner, DeMarco focuses on how Martin built winning teams using accounts from his former players. What other Billy Martin books only hinted at, Dugout Days analyzes in great depth. Amazingly to me, DeMarco demystifies Martin's success, and resolves the apparent paradox between Martin's problematic personal life and his extremely successful managerial career. I am a baseball fan reading this book, but the book is also marketed as a leadership guide. At first, I wondered how Billy Martin's career could have any relevance to the business world, but after reading the book, I found there is a wealth of pertinent information in there for any leader in any field. DeMarco does not cite specific examples of the usage of Billy Martin tactics to the business world, but the applicability of Martin's management techniques are readily apparent, especially (believe it or not) in the ways in which he worked one-on-one with his players, alternately using compassion, anger, and humor according to what might best motivate a certain personality to play his best. In fact, I wish some of my bosses used some of his management techniques! This book definitely made me re-think my interactions with the younger staff members at my own work. The bottom line is this: if you love either real inside baseball analysis or studies of what made one man great at what he did, this book is for you. If you are looking for tabloid trash about the personal failings of a famous man, you would do best to look elsewhere.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of a Relentless Competitor, June 13, 2001

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dugout Days : Untold Tales and Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Career of Billy Martin (Hardcover)

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.