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For now, at least, he fights only to win baseball games. In Oakland, where the dazed young players of that first spring training under Martin promptly soared to a 1980 record of 83 wins and 79 losses and finished second to the Kansas City Royals in the American League West, they call such on-field combativeness Billyball. (The club features the term in television commercials and commissioned a song about it, sung to the tune of the Coasters' 1959 hit, Charlie Brown: "It's sneaky, but it's fun/ Billyball ...") But it is really just old-fashioned baseball the way a scrapper learned to play it. When talent is in short supply, be certain the fundamentals are sound: never miss a cutoff man, do not botch a rundown. If there is no home-run hitter in the lineup, maybe even steal home. If there are no hitters in the bottom half of the lineup, put on the double steal. Bunt to get on base.
Hit behind the runner. Force the action.
In short, simply manufacture something that you do not naturally deserve, that blessed thing—a run.
Atypical Billyball rally does not rattle the fences; it sends dirt flying in the infield. In one game against Seattle, for example, Henderson led off the first inning with a walk, then stole second. An out and then he stole third. The pitcher, thoroughly rattled now, walked Designated Hitter Cliff Johnson, who, naturally, stole second.
Both men scored on Catcher Mike Heath's single. The line score: two runs on one hit. (On opening day against Minnesota, Oakland even went so far as to pull off one of the oldest scams in baseball: the hidden ball trick.) These were things that the A's, unevenly tutored by Finley's revolving-door managers, had not been able to do. After his opening exhortation last spring, Martin quickly saw how far his young charges had to go: "I kept saying to everybody that there's talent here, but they thought I was trying to put them on. I saw that they needed direction. They didn't know anything about baseball. Period. The outfielders weren't backing each other up. They didn't know how to line up for a relay or make a rundown. They didn't know how to bunt, or when." The teaching of a new style began.
Martin's most conspicuous success has been with his pitching staff. Finley had a collection of strong young arms, but they had been left to develop without guidance. Martin explains: "The pitchers didn't know how to pitch. They were all throwers. Consequently, they were all losers."