Major League Baseball

Yankees' controversial, colorful Billy Martin died 25 years ago in Christmas accident

Published Dec. 25, 2014 12:13 p.m. ET

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Billy Martin was a New York Yankee. He personified the Bronx Bombers --  colorful, controversial, a fighter, battler, scrapper.

Martin played with the team for parts of seven years of his big league career, a second baseman on some of the great teams.

He then managed the Yankees and managed to create one of the great reality soap operas with owner George Steinbrenner.

Martin was hired, fired, hired, fired ... a revolving door that never seemed to end.

Billy and George were pop culture before pop culture was fashionable.

He managed the team on five different occasions, although it seemed like many more to those who were enamored with the Yankees.

In 1986, the Yankees retired Martin's No. 1 and dedicated a plaque in his honor. It reads: There has never been a greater competitor than Billy. Martin told the crowd, "I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform, but I am the proudest."

And then, on Christmas Day in 1989, Billy Martin was dead at 61.

Martin was killed in an automobile accident. A friend, Bill Reedy, was driving Martin's pickup truck and it crashed during an ice storm near Binghamton, New York.

Here's a look at Billy Martin and how he is remembered a quarter-century  later.

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