Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (11 page)

But it was needless worry. Dick Baney, who started and was told to go as far as he could, got nailed early. Four runs in four innings. Stafford came in for two innings and looked terrible. So I was in there in the seventh.

I started off great. I gave the first guy all knuckleballs and got him on a grounder. To the next guy I threw five beautiful knuckleballs. He missed the first two for strikes. Then he fouled three of them off and I figured now I’ve got him. He must be expecting another knuckleball, because every knuckler I threw him was knuckling better than the one before. Surely he isn’t looking for a fastball.

I looked in for the sign and the catcher was thinking the same thing. So I cranked up and gave him a fastball, hoping to sneak it by him, and he snuck it over the left-field fence. Tommy Davis, my friend, once again lost sight of the ball when it went behind a cloud. I hate to think how far he might have hit it had we not fooled him so badly.

After the game Sal said I’ll probably pitch again tomorrow, which means they now must be thinking of me as a short-relief man. I’d like to pitch an inning or so the day after tomorrow because that’s when we play the Giants. I was always a Giants fan when I was a kid and I’d like to pitch against Willie Mays so I can tell my brother what it feels like. Whenever we played stickball as kids we’d take turns being the Giants and Dodgers. I pitched to Willie Mays hundreds of times, only it was my brother, batting right-handed even though he was left-handed so he’d look as much like Willie as possible. Now I’d like a shot at the real thing, with a baseball instead of a rubber ball. I think it will be a fair match. Both of us are near the end of our careers. He’s had a few more lucky years than I have, but we’re both over thirty and that’s a great equalizer.

Whitey Ford always said that the way to make coaches think you’re in shape in the spring is to get a tan. It makes you look healthier and at least five pounds lighter. Following Ford’s postulate I was sitting on the bench in the sun while Baney was pitching. This gave me an opportunity to listen in on the pearls of Sal Maglie and Joe Schultz, who were also getting some sun. These pearls are of a special kind, absolutely valueless at best, annoying enough to upset your concentration at worst. For instance, a big hitter was up with two men on base and as Baney looked in for the sign, Joe Schultz hollered, “Now get ahead of this guy.” And Sal hollered, “Get something on this pitch. He’s a first-ball hitter.”

And just as he cranked up to throw, somebody (I couldn’t tell who) yelled, “High-ball hitter. Keep the ball down.”

If he takes all this advice Baney has to throw a strike at the knees with Chinese mustard on it. What the hell, if you could throw that kind of pitch every time you wanted to you wouldn’t need any coaching. Christ, you’d have it made.

But Baney isn’t Superman. He got behind. Ball one, low in the dirt.

The next piece of advice was, “Got to get ahead now. Nothing too good.”

“Nothing too good” means don’t throw it down the middle and “got to get ahead” means don’t throw him a ball. In other words, hit a corner.

Of course, he still has the other advice ringing in his ears. So now he’s supposed to hit a corner, low on the knees, with a hard fastball. This is wonderful advice. Ball two. Ball three.

“Got to come in there now, but not too good.”

That’s really beautiful advice. Especially with a good hitter up there who may well be swinging at 3 and 0. Sure enough, Baney threw a good fastball—belt high. It got hit into center for a double and two runs. And as the ball went out there Sal shook his head and said, sadly, “Too high, too high.”

How many inches are there between the belt and the knee? How many pitches can you control to that tolerance? How many pitching coaches are second-guessers? Answers: Eighteen inches. Very few. Most.

And this kind of bullshit goes on during most ballgames. The same things are said over and over in the same situations. They all come to the same thing. They’re asking you to obey good pitching principles; keep the ball down (most hitters are high-ball hitters), don’t make the pitch too good (don’t pitch it over the heart of the plate), move the ball around inside the strike zone and change speeds (keep the hitter off balance), and get ahead of the hitter (when you have two strikes on a hitter and two balls or fewer, you may then throw your best pitch as a borderline strike and the hitter will have to swing to protect himself).

This is the essence of the battle between the pitcher and the hitter, and it doesn’t do any good to yell this kind of advice to a pitcher in a crisis situation. He knows it as well as he knows his name. But pitching coaches use shouted advice as protection. If they shout enough advice they can’t be wrong.

Old Chicken Colonel Turner was a master at this. He’d sit in the dugout and shout to Stan Bahnsen, “Now, keep the ball down, Bahnsen,” and Stan would throw a letter-high fastball that would get popped up into the infield and The Colonel would look down the bench and say, “The boy’s fastball is moving. The boy’s fastball is rising.” Two innings later, same situation, the very same pitch, home run into the left-field seats. The Colonel looks up and down the bench and says very wisely, “Got the ball up. You see what happens when you get the ball up?”

Then you’d get a weak left-handed hitter up in Yankee Stadium and somebody would throw him a change-up and he’d hit it for a home run into the short porch and The Colonel would say, “You can’t throw a change-up to a left-handed hitter, boys. Not in this ballpark.” A week later a guy would throw the same pitch to the same kind of hitter and the guy would be way out in front and The Colonel would say, “Change-up. One of the best pitches in baseball. You can really fool the hitter with it.”

Whatever the result, The Colonel always knew the cause. And in the little world of baseball, he is not alone.

Merritt Ranew hit a pinch-hit home run that tied the game up in the ninth inning. He got a very cold reception in the dugout. The reason is that nobody wants to play extra innings in a spring game. It happened that we scored two more runs in the inning and won it, but it was a narrow escape and nobody was very happy with Ranew. By coincidence I have a soft spot in my heart for extra-inning games in the spring and believe that every player—at least every player who doesn’t have the team made—should feel this way. I made the Yankee ballclub in an extra-inning spring game.

This was in 1962, and I wasn’t even on the roster. They asked me to pitch the ninth inning of a game against St. Louis when we were behind by a run. We tied it up in the bottom of the ninth, so I wound up pitching five scoreless innings and lost it on an unearned run. But four days later I got to pitch in another game, and then two more, and I made the club. If I’d pitched only one inning in that first game they might never have taken another look. In fact, all the scrubeenies pray for extra innings in the spring. Or at least they should.

Tempe

We lost an 8–5 ballgame today and I did my part, giving up two runs in a single inning. There was a triple on an ankle-high knuckleball (I hate triples off ankle-high knuckleballs), and then Tommy Davis lost a fly ball in the sun and it fell for a double.

When I was a kid I might have run out there and kicked him in the shin. I actually used to do that. I would stop the game and scream at a kid if he made an error, and everybody hated me for it. In recent years, though, I’ve turned full circle. I may say to myself, “Ah, Tommy, you should have had that,” but I go out of my way to show absolutely no reaction. I don’t pick up the resin bag and slam it down, and I don’t kick dirt, and I don’t stare out at the player.

The reasons are selfish. First of all, people think terrible thoughts about you when you do that kind of thing, and I don’t like people to think terrible thoughts about me. Secondly, you get on a player that way and he may miss the next play too. So I say nothing.

While warming up to come into the game I was wondering if my wife was in the park. I enjoy playing baseball better when I know there are friends or family watching. It’s a bit of hot dog in me. I got a special kick when my parents and my brothers used to come to a ballgame because it seemed like I was putting on a special performance just for them. I’ve pitched some of my best games when I knew I had left a lot of tickets for my countless admirers. The longest game in the American League was played in Detroit a few years ago. I pitched the last seven innings for the Yankees in a 22-inning game and there were fifteen Bouton passes sitting up there behind the dugout, all relatives of my wife. I really think I did better because I knew they were there. Sometimes, when I know there are no friends or family present, I pretend they’re home watching on television, thousands of them. You take your ego trips, I take mine.

Lost the game today, so we had a chance to prove we could be more silent than thou. After a loss the clubhouse has to be completely quiet, as though losing strikes a baseball player dumb. The radio was blaring when we came into the clubhouse and Joe Schultz strode the length of the room, switched it off and went back to his office. After that you could cut the silence with a bologna sandwich. The rule is that you’re not supposed to say anything even if it’s a meaningless spring-training loss. Feeling remorse has nothing to do with it. Those who did poorly in the game and those who did well, even those who didn’t play, all are supposed to behave as if at a funeral.

The important thing is to let the manager and coaches know you feel bad about losing. I’m sure they believe that if you look like you feel bad about losing then you’re the type who wants to win. So you go along with the little game. And they played this game real hard with the Yankees when I got there, but every once in a while Phil Linz, Joe Pepitone and I would giggle about something after a losing game and we got some pretty nasty stares from the old guard.

This was what was behind the famous Phil Linz harmonica incident. It was in 1964, when Yogi Berra was manager, on a bus ride from Comiskey Park to O’Hare airport in Chicago. It was hot, we were tied up in Sunday traffic, we’d blown a doubleheader, we’d lost four or five in a row, we were struggling for a pennant and tempers were short. Linz was sitting beside me, stewing because he hadn’t played, and all of a sudden he whipped out a harmonica he’d bought that morning and started playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The reason he played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was that it was the only song he knew how to play. He really played very respectfully and quietly, and if “Mary Had a Little Lamb” can sound like a dirge, it did.

Yogi, who was sitting in the front of the bus, stood up and said, “Knock it off.”

Legend has it that Linz wasn’t sure what Berra said, so he turned to Mickey Mantle and asked, “What’d he say?”

“He said play it louder,” Mantle explained.

Linz didn’t believe that. On the other hand he didn’t stop. In a minute Yogi was in the back of the bus, breathing heavily and demanding that Linz shove that thing up his ass.

“You do it,” Linz said, flipping the harmonica at him. Yogi swatted at it with his hand and it hit Pepitone in the knee. Immediately he was up doing his act called, “
Oooooh
, you hurt my little knee.” Pretty soon everybody was laughing, even if you’re not supposed to laugh after losing, especially a doubleheader.

And that was really all of it, except that I should point out that in the middle of it all Crosetti stood up and in his squeaky voice screamed that this was the worst thing he’d ever seen in his entire career with the Yankees.

Ray Oyler was racked up at second base by Glenn Beckert of the Cubs, and when he came back to earth he was heard to call Beckert a son of a bitch. This is not on the same order as motherfucker, but he didn’t have a lot of time to think.

It has become the custom in baseball to slide into second base with a courteous how do you do, so when somebody does slide in hard everybody gets outraged and vows vengeance. A few years ago Frank Robinson slid into Bobby Richardson with murderous aplomb and the Yankees were visibly shocked.
How could he do that to our Bobby
?
We’ll get him for that
. Actually this was a National League play and the Yankees simply weren’t used to it.

Before the game, Joe Schultz asked me how the old knuckleball was coming along and I said fine. I was ready to pitch. Indeed, I added, it was my opinion that if a knuckleball pitcher got himself into proper shape he could probably pitch every day because the knuckleball takes almost nothing out of your arm. I was about halfway through this little speech when I noticed that Schultz was staring over my shoulder into the blue, blue sky. If I had said I just cut my grandmother’s throat from ear to ear, he would no doubt have said, “Fine, fine.”

Managers don’t like to be told who should play and who shouldn’t, and who should be a starting pitcher and who shouldn’t, and when Joe started feeling I was telling him I should be a starter he turned me off. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have just lathered my face.

Phoenix

Two talks today from my main men, Schultz and Maglie; one okay, the other terrible.

Schultz said we weren’t in shape and that we were making physical mistakes that we wouldn’t if we were—in shape, I mean. (I’m not sure I understood that.) But then he obviously felt he’d hurt our feelings and tried to take it all back. “Shitfuck,” he said, using one of his favorite words (“fuckshit” is the other). “Shitfuck. We’ve got a damned good ballclub here. We’re going to win some games.”

I agree. I don’t see how we can avoid it.

What Schultz is afraid of, I guess, is that we might get down on ourselves and then, well, the losing might never stop. Baseball players are a special breed for getting down on themselves. When they do, it’s look out below.

The meeting with Maglie was disappointing, largely, I guess, because he was my hero when I was a kid and I expected a lot out of him. Also because he didn’t get along with Dick Williams, the Boston Red Sox manager. I count that as a good sign because managers, being what they are, often don’t get along with coaches who have something on the ball. I thought Sal Maglie might turn out to be another Johnny Sain. Afraid not.