Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (13 page)

My wife actually believes that it’s possible, through concentration, to transfer strength from one person to another. She believes that during the game she transferred her strength to me and I pitched well. She is, of course, a nut.

A revelation about Joe Schultz. Mike Hegan has been hitting the hell out of the ball and at this point is to the Seattle Pilots what Mickey Mantle was to the Yankees. Today he was hit on the arm by a fastball, and when Joe got to him and said, “Where’d you get it, on the elbow?” Hegan said, “No. On the meat of the arm, the biceps.”

“Oh shit, you’ll be okay,” Joe said. “Just spit on it and rub some dirt on it.”

Hegan couldn’t move three of his fingers for an hour. But it didn’t hurt Joe at all.

Riding beck to Tempe I had a beautifully serene feeling about the whole day, which shows how you go up and down an emotional escalator in this business. It was my first really serene day of the spring and I felt, well, I didn’t care where the bus was going or if it ever got there, and I was content to watch the countryside roll by. It was desert, of course, with cactus and odd rock formations that threw back the flames of the setting sun. The sun was a golden globe, half-hidden, and as we drove along it appeared to be some giant golden elephant running along the horizon and I felt so good I remembered something Johnny Sain used to talk about.

He used to say a pitcher had a kind of special feeling after he did really well in a ballgame. John called it the “cool of the evening”, when you could sit and relax and not worry about being in there for three or four more days; the job done, a good job, and now it was up to somebody else to go out there the next day and do the slogging. The cool of the evening.

Of course, there’s the converse. If a pitcher doesn’t do well, he has three or four days to contemplate his sins. A hitter is back in there the next day, grinding his teeth and his bat. Still, I was feeling so good that I began to think about pitching against the Yankees, and what it would be like going back to Yankee Stadium and facing them. I had all four of my pitches working today, and I had good control, and I thought how much fun it’s going to be to get back to the Stadium and toy, really
toy
with them. They haven’t even seen my knuckleball. It could really be a picnic.

I think coach Eddie O’Brien is going to prove a gold-plated pain in the ass. He must think he’s Frank Crosetti or something, because when I reached into his ballbag he said, “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to count the laces,” I told him. “And then I’m going to juggle it.”

Later on O’Brien noticed some of the guys were eating sunflower seeds in the bullpen. “Hey, none of that,” he said. “No eating in the bullpen.”

“Not even sunflower seeds, Eddie?”

“Nothing. Not even sunflower seeds.”

Eddie O’Brien will have to be clued in on what happens in the bullpen. Maybe the way to cure him is to make him head of the refreshment committee.

Ran my long foul-line-to-foul-line sprints in the outfield and kept myself going by imagining I was Jim Ryun running in the Olympics: I’m in the last fifty yards and I’m going into my finishing kick and thousands cheer. If I’m just Jim Bouton running long laps very little happens. Let’s see. Here’s the World War I flying ace….

Bill Stafford and Jimmy O’Toole got their releases today. Stafford hopes to hook on with the Giants (I don’t see how) and O’Toole is shopping around. I’ve had some big discussions with O’Toole. His father is a cop in Chicago and was in on the Democratic Convention troubles. I’d been popping off, as usual, about what a dum-dum Mayor Daley was and O’Toole said hell, none of those kids take baths and they threw bags of shit at the cops, and that’s how I found out his father was a cop. Even so, I feel sort of sorry for him because he’s got about eleven kids (I should feel more sorry for his wife) and he seemed a forlorn figure as he packed his stuff. I told him good luck but somehow I didn’t get to shake his hand, and I feel bad about that.

It’s funny what happens to a guy when he’s released. As soon as he gets it he’s a different person, not a part of the team anymore. Not even a person. He almost ceases to exist.

It’s difficult to form close relationships in baseball. Players are friendly during the season and they pal around together on the road. But they’re not really friends. Part of the reason is that there’s little point in forming a close relationship. Next week one of you could be gone. Hell, both of you could be gone. So no matter how you try, you find yourself holding back a little, keeping people at arm’s length. It must be like that in war too.

Tucson

On my way to the park today I passed the Vancouver practice field and spotted Sheldon over there playing pepper. It gave me a sinking feeling. There but for the grace of the knuckleball go I. Not that it still can’t happen. I still may not fit in with Schultz’s plans. What we need is a left-handed pitcher, starter or reliever, and I can see a trade for one. But where does an aging right-handed knuckleballer fit in? Vancouver?

I know I felt differently after those good three innings yesterday, but I’m already tossing around in my mind how I’ll react if I’m sent down. I’ll take it calmly, see, and say to Joe, “Skip, I know you’ve got a lot of things on your mind and you didn’t really have the chance to give everybody the amount of work that would have helped them the most. But I don’t want to be a problem. I’ll go to Vancouver and do a good job there and expect to be called up after a month of the season goes by.”

On the other hand, would that be the best approach? Maybe I could talk him out of it. Maybe I could get a couple of more chances to pitch and then he’d wind up cutting somebody else.

There’s a third possibility. Maybe right now, at this very moment, I’ve got the team cinched. Dream city.

Jake Gibbs of the Yankees once ordered pie a la mode in a restaurant and then asked the waitress to put a little ice cream on it.

A sportswriter came up to Darrell Brandon today and asked him where he thought the club would finish. “Where did Joe Schultz say?” Brandon asked.

“Third,” the reporter said.

“Put me down for third too,” Brandon said.

Obviously I’m not the only worried guy in this camp.

We had dinner with Gary and Nan Bell and he said that if he could pick a place to play it would be Boston. He said he didn’t like Cleveland because Gabe Paul would interfere in his personal life. (Nobody interferes in Gary Bell’s personal life, not even his wife.) But Boston was money paradise. He said guys with 12–12 seasons there would automatically get a $5,000 raise.

I’d heard that about Boston. The year Dick Radatz had his big year was the year I won 21. We both had two years in the big leagues and we were both young phenoms. While I was trying to get $20,000, a $9,000 raise, Radatz was going to $41,000. Radatz told me that at a banquet and said that if he’d really battled them he could have gotten $45,000 or $50,000. I absolutely refused to believe him. But Bell said it was true. Good grief, $41,000! The bastards were
stealing
my money.

Marvin Miller is coming around tomorrow to hand out some checks for promotions the Players’ Association was paid for. So everybody was busy reminding everybody else not to tell the wives. We get little checks for a lot of things, like signing baseballs, which are then sold. In our peak years with the Yankees we were getting around $150 for signing baseballs. It’s all pocketed as walking-around money. The wives don’t know about it. Hell, there are baseball wives who don’t know about the money we get for being in spring training, or that we get paid every two weeks during the season. John Kennedy, infielder, says that when his wife found out about the spring money she said, “Gee whiz, all that money you guys get each week. How come you’ve never been able to save anything?” And John said, “We just started getting it, dear. It’s a brand-new thing.”

Joe Schultz asked Wayne Comer, outfielder, how his arm felt. Comer said he wasn’t sure, but that every time he looked up there were buzzards circling it.

Tommy Davis has been having trouble with his arm too, which was why he was playing first base when I came into the game against the Indians with runners on first and third and one out. Second and third, really, since before I drew a breath the guy stole second. Rich Sheinblum, outfielder, rookie, was up and I threw two curve balls to him for a 1-and-1 count. He missed a knuckleball and then hit a one-hopper hard and deep to first. I covered and got Sheinblum, and when the guy tried to score from third I nailed him with a strike to home plate. Two thirds of an inning. Another perfect Bouton day.

One of the dumb things I do sometimes is form judgments about people I don’t really know. Case history: Jack Hamilton, pitcher, Cleveland Indians. He was with the Angel organization last year and played with me in Seattle, which is where I got to know him. Before that I played against him in the minors and considered him stupid, a hard-throwing guy who didn’t care whether or not he hit the batter. In the majors I figured him for a troublemaker because he used to get into fights with Phil Linz. Nobody fights with Phil Linz.

Then, when Hamilton hit Tony Conigliaro in the eye a couple of years ago and put him out for the season, I thought, boy, this guy is some kind of super rat. But when I played with him in Seattle I found he was just a guy like everybody else, honestly sorry he’d hit Conigliaro, a good team player, a friendly fellow who liked to come out early to the park and pitch batting practice to his kids. All of which made me feel like an ass.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown almost was sunk tonight. Unsinkable is what we call Laurie, our youngest. She’s only three, but a tough little broad. This spring alone, for example, she’s been bitten by a dog, hit in the head by a flying can of peas and had nine stitches sewed into her pretty little head. Nothing puts her down. Tonight, though, the kids were playing in the bedroom and suddenly we heard shattering glass followed by Laurie crying. Seems her head had made contact with a jalousie, resulting in broken glass and a bit of blood. The reason she had made such violent contact is that Kyong Jo had pushed her, and the reason he had pushed her is that I had told him to. I told him to push her because little girls are very often pests to little boys and the best way to get rid of little girl pests is to give them a gentle push. Only it’s not supposed to result in blood, and poor Kyong Jo was severely chastened. He had this look of terrible shame on his face. Fortunately little Laurie wasn’t hurt much. No stitches were required and we were able to reassure both her and Kyong Jo. After all, she
is
the Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Tempe

Six cuts today. You walk into the clubhouse and you see a guy packing his bag and you both try not to look at each other. Most guys won’t pack until they know everybody is busy on the field, but sometimes you surprise somebody in there and it’s always awkward.

Steve Hovley was one of the six. He was able to smile and say it came as no surprise to him and that Vancouver is a very nice town.

I was surprised to see Merritt Ranew get cut. He’s been hitting well and we’re short of left-handed hitters. Very strange.

Got another flash from Eddie O’Brien today. I had a minor eye infection and was wearing dark glasses in the bullpen and O’Brien said, “What’s with the shades?”

“I’m having trouble with my eyes.”

“Well, I don’t think you should be wearing shades down here.”

“But, Eddie baby, the doctor says I have to. Do you want I should get a note from him?”

“Well, if the doctor says so…”

Yuma

Our first big road trip today to Yuma, Arizona, and we did what ballplayers do at the start of every trip—stand around the airport, inspect the threads and make funny comments; like, if a guy is wearing a turtleneck that’s too big for him, “Who gave you that turtle-neck, Bronco Nagurski?”

You can start fights if you get on a guy about something meaningful, like race or religion. But you can kid a guy about his clothes, or about the way he looks. We couldn’t decide, for example, whether Sal Maglie looked more like an Indian chief or Mafia enforcer. But we didn’t tell him.

Me: “If you’re a customs official would you check Maglie’s bag?”

Bell: “I’d strip him to his shorts.”

Then there was Gabe Paul, Jr.’s haircut. Worst haircut I ever saw. It was military all around, except on top, where it was kind of new left. Ugh. Ray Oyler’s comment was, “Hey, Gabe, where’d you get that nice razor cut?”

Today Joe Schultz said, “Many are called, few are chosen.” He said it out of the clear blue, several times, once to Lou Piniella. Said Lou: “Is that a bad sign?” I said I didn’t know. But I did. And it was.

Would you believe that we were playing a ballgame in Yuma, the winter home, as they say, of the San Diego Padres, which is a place you pass through on the way to someplace else, a place that doesn’t even have a visiting clubhouse, so that we had to dress on the back of an equipment truck, and in the middle of a game before about twelve people, one of them yelled at us, “Ya bums, ya!” I mean, would you believe it?

Although we won the game Joe Schultz wasn’t impressed. There were a couple of minor dumb plays, so Joe had a meeting on the bus. One of the things he was upset about was that one of the guys asked, “Who do we play tomorrow?”

Said Joe: “Boys, if you don’t know who you’re going to play you don’t have your head in the game.”

The guy who asked the question was Lou Piniella, and now he knows what Joe meant by “Many are called, few are chosen.” Goodbye Lou.

Still, at the end of the meeting I wanted very much to say, “By the way Joe, who
do
we play tomorrow?” But I’m not pitching all
that
well.

Today Joe Schultz also said, “Put your hat on.”

He said it to me.

Five minutes later Eddie O’Brien came over and said, “See, what’d I tell you? Put your hat on.”

You would think that managers have too much on their minds to notice things like that. But they don’t. I know, for one example, that Al Lopez hated Bob Shaw because he was blond and handsome and used to keep his hat off as much as possible so the girls in the stands could get a good look. And one day Lopez called out of the dugout to him, “Shaw, I see you with a different broad every night. You must be a lousy lay.”