Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (18 page)

So I got permission to work out with the Pilots. I felt terribly awkward in the clubhouse and I saw that the guys also felt funny about me being there. They had these strange looks on their faces, and I felt I had a rare and communicable disease.

Driving over to the park I thought about what I would say to them. “They made a mistake, realized it and asked me to come back.” But nobody would believe that. Or if I was going to pitch batting practice, I could have told them that Sal and Joe decided that I hadn’t been mean enough and I was going to show them how many guys I could knock down. But it was raining and there was no batting practice. So I ran in the outfield and threw to McNertney for about twenty minutes and to Larry Haney for fifteen. I threw strictly knuckleballs, which is what I’m going to be now, a knuckleball pitcher and nothing else. My wife was right. No more kidding myself, no more trying to bring along four or five mediocre pitches. I’m all through listening to managers and coaches about how much or how little I should be throwing.
I’m in business for myself
. As long as there’s going to be no special protection for me, I’ve got to make all my own decisions. Sal always wanted me rested in case I had to pitch eight innings of relief, which I never did. So now I’m going to throw as much as I think I have to.

There was a meeting before the game with Minnesota, which I did not, of course, attend. Gary Bell filled me in. They were going over the Twins’ lineup—it’s a tough one—and the conversation went about like this:

“Pitch him high and tight.”

“Hell, he’ll hit that one over the left-field wall. You got to pitch him low and away.”

“Pitch him away and he’ll go to right field on you.”

“I don’t know about all of that. I do know you got to curve him.”

“Oh no, he’s a hell of a breaking-ball hitter.”

Finally, Sal Maglie: “Well, pitch around him.”

When the meeting was over, Gary added up the pitch-around-hims and there were five, right in the beginning of the batting order. So according to Sal Maglie, you start off with two runs in and the bases loaded.

It’s like the scouting reports we used to get on the Yankees about National League teams. We’d get the word that this guy couldn’t hit the good overhand curve. Well,
nobody
hits the good overhand curve. In fact, hardly anybody throws the good overhand curve. It’s a hard pitch to control and it takes too much out of your arm.

And the word on Tim McCarver of the Cards was that Sandy Koufax struck him out on letter-high fastballs. Which is great advice if you can throw letter-high fastballs like Koufax could.

Anyway, I guess Gary didn’t pitch around enough of the Minnesota hitters because they bombed him out in the first inning with three runs. We lost it, 6–4—I mean
they
lost it. There were several relief pitchers in the game and I could have sworn I saw Joe Schultz waving for his knuckleballer, but he was already gone to Vancouver.

One of the reasons I’ll probably be playing baseball for the next few years is that I really don’t have a career waiting for me outside. I’d find it hard to work for some big company. I’m not a nine-to-five type. I have a vague hope I might be able to work into television or politics somehow, and my friend Jim Jacobs and I have talked about making films. Jim, who once was the world’s greatest handball player, has done great things with old fight films and we’ve talked about working up a baseball film and possibly films on other sports. But I’m not ready for that yet.

The only thing I’m involved in now is that real-estate venture. My brother Pete handles the business during the season, but there’s really not much more than bookkeeping to it, since we do all the buying and selling when I’m home. Even so, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that would ever keep me occupied full time. So I’m a baseball player. A Seattle Pilot—pardon, a Vancouver Mountie. A Vancouver goddam Mountie.

I listened to the Pilots game over the radio and wouldn’t you know it, I found myself rooting for them. When the Yankees sent me down all I wanted was for them to get mashed. Even now I hope they finish lower in their division than the Pilots do in theirs. I can’t explain it, but that’s what I feel. The only bad thing I wish for the Pilots is that they get into a lot of high-scoring games; win them, but need pitching help.

Got a letter today from two girls who were members of my fan club. They’d read the article in
Signature
about us adopting Kyong Jo and wanted to congratulate us and wish me luck with my new team. I really liked that fan club. I enjoyed being a big-league player and having people recognize me and having little kids get a charge out of meeting me. I remember what it was like when I was a kid and what a thrill I got just watching Willie Mays climb out of a taxicab. So the fact that I had my own personal fan club (would you believe an annual dinner and a newspaper called
All About Bouton
?) always pleased me. Of course I realized how old I’m getting and how quickly time passes when I heard that one of the fan-club members was in Vietnam. It just doesn’t seem right that a member of my fan club should be fighting in Vietnam. Or that anybody should be.

The fan club started in 1962 when these two kids—George Saviano and Al Gornie—came to me and asked if they could start one. I told them to cool it until I did something. I didn’t want them to waste a lot of time and energy on someone who might not be around too long. Of course I talked to them. I figure that’s part of the game. Besides, I enjoyed it.

Not everybody agrees. I was a big New York Giant fan when I lived in New Jersey as a kid and then we moved to Chicago. I used to go to all the Cub—Giant games out there. And I remember once leaning over the dugout trying to tell Al Dark how great he was and how much I was for him and, well, maybe get his autograph too, when he looked over at me and said, “Take a hike, son. Take a hike.”

Take a hike, son. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Anyway, it’s become a deflating putdown line around the Bouton family. Take a hike, son.

Having made the move to Syracuse a couple of times and then to Seattle and now to Vancouver makes me a member of a not-very-exclusive club. Us battered bastards of baseball are the biggest customers of the U.S. Post Office, forwarding-address department. I’ve seen letters chasing guys for months, years even. Sometimes you walk into a clubhouse and there’s a letter on the table for a guy who was released two years ago. A guy like Rollie Sheldon still has mail coming to him in Yankee Stadium, and once they start forwarding, it can be a year before it catches up.

One of Gary Bell’s parting lines about me was, “Here comes the guy who opened and closed a checking account in three days.” True. We have taken the money out of our Seattle account and will deposit it in Vancouver. But we’re optimistic. We’re leaving a few dollars in the Seattle account in case I get called up later this summer. I should say
when
I get called up.

Tacoma

There’s nothing like walking into a minor-league clubhouse to remind you what the minors are like. You have a tendency to block it. It was cold and rainy in Tacoma when I went there to meet the Vancouver club and the locker room was shudderingly damp, small and smelly. There’s no tarpaulin on the field, so everything is wet and muddy and the dirt crunches underfoot on the cement. The locker stalls are made of chicken wire and you hang your stuff on rusty nails. There’s no rubbing table in the tiny trainer’s room, just a wooden bench, and there are no magazines to read and no carpet on the floor and no boxes of candy bars. The head is filthy and the toilet paper is institutional-thin. There’s no bat rack, so the bats, symbolically enough, are stored in a garbage can. There’s no air-conditioning and no heat, and the paint on the walls is peeling off in flaky chunks and you look at all of that and you realize that the biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and Triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.

There’s no end to the humiliation. The kid in the clubhouse asked me what position I played.

The Vancouver team never got to the clubhouse because the game was called off before they left the hotel. So the uniforms never got there and I sat around in my underwear feeling sorry for myself. Whitey Lockman, the Tacoma manager, passed through and I told him I had just seen his most famous double, the one he hit before Bobby Thomson’s home run in 1951, on television again. He enjoyed being reminded.

I went out to work in my long underwear with a warm-up jacket over the top and I thought to myself, “Damn, I wish somebody could see me out here being this conscientious—Whitey Lockman maybe, or a scout.” If they only knew how hard I was willing to work and how much I was willing to sacrifice they’d know I’ll make it back and that they ought to buy my contract now, at a bargain price. If I have a good year I’m not going to forgive these other ballclubs who passed me up. Even the Mets had a shot. They didn’t even nibble.

Tonight I told Bob Lemon that I’d made a tactical mistake this spring in trying to do too much and that what I wanted to do from now on is what I did at the end of last summer—throw knuckleballs. I told him I also wanted to work out a program of throwing on the sidelines before the game for about ten minutes even if I’d be pitching a lot in the games. The idea is to maintain the feeling you need to throw the knuckleball and at the same time prevent the arm from getting too strong. If it’s strong you have a tendency to bring it through too fast and you impart spin to the ball.

And Lemon said, “You throw any pitch you want and you throw it as often as you want and set up any working program you want. It’s all up to you.”

Gee, how am I going to handle all that responsibility?

For me, one of the savers of being in the minors is that it makes me an underdog. I like to be an underdog. I’ve always been the guy who never was the big phenom but that came out on top unexpectedly. When I was a kid—my brother and I and a couple of other kids—used to challenge eight guys to basketball games, two against one. Often we’d win and the other guys just couldn’t believe that four could beat eight. The answer is that the underdog role is fun to play, and easy, because there’s no pressure. You’ve got nothing to lose.

I enjoy the fact that my high school (Bloom Township HS, Chicago Heights) has decided to award a trophy that is given every year not to the guy who is the best, but to the one who shows the most desire and works the hardest. The trophy is called the “Jim Bouton 110 Percent Award.”

Not that you can’t carry that sort of thing too far. In 1959, I guess it was, I weighed 150 pounds and decided I should put on a lot of weight in order to throw a better fastball. So I ate. I ate a lot. I ate five meals a day, all very rich. In six weeks I put on 30 pounds and wrecked my stomach permanently. I don’t have an ulcer, but there’s an inflammation that won’t quiet down, and I have to take Maalox every day. The fastball went, the stomach stayed.

How much running should a pitcher do? The idea, of course, is to be in good physical shape. However, it’s quite possible to be both out of shape and a good pitcher. As Johnny Sain says, “You don’t run the damn ball across the plate. If running did it, they’d look for pitchers on track teams.” It’s one of the reasons he’s such a popular pitching coach.

There are pitchers who tell you that they’ve played for men who made them run miles a day and some who made them run hardly at all and that it never made any difference in their pitching. Personally, I’ve never been out of shape, so I wouldn’t know.

The problem for a long-relief man is that he doesn’t want to tire himself out before a game in which he may pitch eight innings. But if he doesn’t run and then he doesn’t pitch, he very quickly is out of shape. A short man can stay in shape just pitching. And then there’s Mickey Lolich, who doesn’t look like he’s in shape to do anything but pitch. One of the nice things about baseball is that there are no rules you can’t break.

Had a talk with Bob Tiefenauer about his knuckleball and he said he’d recently gotten a good tip from Ed Fisher. He says that when you’re pitching with the wind at your back (which is very bad for the knuckler) you throw the ball harder. This seems to keep it out ahead of the wind and it knuckles pretty good. Tief says it sounds crazy, but there’s logic to it and it seems to work. I’ll have to remember that.

I’ve been thinking about my options in life these days. There aren’t many. If I do poorly here I could easily be dropped. I don’t think they want to pay $22,000 to some guy to pitch Triple-A. On the other hand I could be sold or traded, or brought back to Seattle. I don’t think they want me back there, though, or Schultz wouldn’t have said that about a lot of clubs needing pitchers. I see by the box scores that a lot of pitching staffs are getting bombed. It’s a lot different than last year.

Washington lost 6–0, and I wonder if they can use some pitching help. I sure would like to be with a club in the East, because if there’s anything I want to do before I’m through it’s win a few games in Yankee Stadium, and being with Washington would give me some extra shots at them. If this sounds like a grudge, it’s only because it is.

Got my first inning of pitching in for the Vancouver Mounties and I was only super. We were leading 15–3 when Bob Lemon asked me if I wanted to pitch an inning. I said sure and went in to pitch the ninth. I struck out the first hitter on four knuckleballs. I struck out the second hitter on five knuckleballs. And I really wanted to strike out that third guy because striking out the side is the kind of thing that gets back to the big club. But the third hitter grounded out on a 1-and-2 knuckler. Still, it was almost too easy.

Corky Evans was the catcher. He’s a good, enthusiastic kid. He caught me in the bullpen when I warmed up and he’ll be catching me on the sidelines before the games. He’s so enthusiastic he actually jumps around and says happy things when one of our guys gets a hit. In fact the first time he jumped up and started cheering I looked around to find out what had happened. All that happened was we got another one of about twenty hits. So at least he won’t be grumbling about having to catch my knuckler.