Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (25 page)

Intellectually, I can understand Schultz’s thinking. He has a lot of confidence in Segui, who was a top reliever last year, and O’Donoghue is his left-handed relief man and does pretty well against left-handers. Still, it gets me angry when the phone rings and it’s not for me. After a while I cool off and think how I would have felt about the position I’m in now while I was with Vancouver, or in spring training, when I wasn’t sure I was going to make the team. Also, the team is managing very well without me. We’re playing heads-up ball. The guys on the bench are alive, and when the other team makes a mental error we take advantage of it right away. We’re hitting the hell out of the ball, and we’re even getting the breaks, which is part of it too. Besides, California is losing a lot of games, and what I see again in the crystal ball is third place.

What I also see in my crystal ball is that I’m the only guy in the big leagues who may finish behind his team. I was so embarrassed tonight I wanted to go off and join a monastery. We had the voting for player rep. Bell handled the meeting so well that it was impossible not to vote for him. Good for him. He’ll enjoy driving the free car this summer, at least until he’s traded.

The team doesn’t take voting for player rep seriously. If it did Mike Marshall would have been elected. He’s the most qualified guy on the club; bright, well read, knows a lot about the pension plan and is just the man for persistence and the paperwork. (Like he handled the shipping of our cars without a hitch and no fuss.) Except that he wasn’t even nominated, because the vote for player rep is more of a popularity contest.

Which doesn’t say much for me. Don Mincher, Tommy Harper and I were nominated for assistant. Tommy got six votes, Mincher got seventeen. I got one. I couldn’t even break my Yankee record. I shudder to think what would happen if I wasn’t trying to be one of the boys. I seem to be bearing up well under all of this. Inside, though, I’m a mess.

On the way to the ballpark tonight Ray Oyler, sitting in the back of the bus during a bumpy ride, discovered an erection. He promptly offered to buy the bus from the driver.

My pal Sal told me tonight that I was throwing too damn many pitches in the bullpen. He clocked me last night, he said, and I threw 180, which is like a game-and-a-half, and I never even got into the game.

When I tried to explain again that the knuckleball is not like other pitches he looked over my shoulder into the setting sun and said, “Yeah, no more throwing in the bullpen unless I tell you to warm up.”

“Look, Sal, can’t we talk this over?”

“No,” he said striding off. “If you want to talk it over, talk to Joe.” Fuck you, Sal Maglie.

I walked directly into Joe’s office and told him I needed to throw a lot in the bullpen and that if he needed me for five or six innings early in the game that was fine, because I wasn’t throwing until late in the game.

So Joe said, “All right.”

“All right, I can throw on my own out there?”

“All right, I’ll talk to Sal about it.”

I saw Sal and Joe talking on the field a few minutes later, then Sal came over to me in the outfield and said, “It’s exactly what I said to you before. You just got to cut down on your throwing in the bullpen.”

I could feel my neck getting red. “When I talked to Joe he seemed to think I could throw on my own whenever I felt I needed it.”

“Oh yeah, you can throw on your own,” Sal said. “But just watch it and make sure you’re ready to pitch if we need you.”

Here’s how Mike Marshall got into his most recent trouble. He was taken out of the ballgame in Boston the other night after giving up a grand-slam home run to Carl Yastrzemski. He told the writers that he should have finished the game. What he meant, of course, was that he should have been good enough not to give up the home run and good enough to hang in there. His remarks were interpreted as criticism of Joe Schultz for taking him out of the game. So pretty soon it got around the clubhouse that Mike was on the manager for something that was his own goddam fault and I ended up explaining that Mike had been misinterpreted. But the players were not anxious to give Mike the benefit of the doubt. Now Mike’s in trouble with the newspapermen, the guys and probably Joe Schultz. Can’t anybody around here understand English?

In the bullpen Talbot revealed an awful truth about Joe Pepitone. He has two different hairpieces. He’s got a massive piece, which he wears when he’s going out, and a smaller one to wear under his baseball cap. He calls it his game piece. On opening day he was wearing his game piece and hadn’t put it on very well. So when he was forced to take his cap off, there it was, sitting on his head all askew. He was so embarrassed he tried to hide his head in the shoulder of the guy standing next to him. Kiss me, Joe baby.

Pepitone took to wearing the hairpieces when his hair started to get thin on top. And the hair he still has is all curly and frizzy when he lets it grow long. So he carries around all kinds of equipment in a little blue Pan Am bag. Things like a hot comb, various greases and salves, glue for the hairpiece, hair-straightener—and even a hair-dryer. He carries it wherever he goes, on the buses to the park, on airplanes. You never see him without that little blue bag. At any rate, one day Fritz Peterson and I, a bit bored during a game we were winning about 6–2, went into the clubhouse and filled his hair-dryer with talcum powder. Then we cleaned it up, left it where he had and went back to watch the game. By this time it was 6–3, and then they tied it up and we lost it, 7–6, in extra innings. And one of the reasons we lost is that Pepitone struck out in a clutch situation.

So everyone was tired and angry and upset and you could hear a pin drop in the clubhouse, because after a loss that’s the way it’s supposed to be. After a while Pepitone came out of the shower and turned his hair dryer on.
Whoooosh!
Instant white. He looked like an Italian George Washington wearing a powdered wig. There was talcum powder over everything, his hair, his eyebrows, his nose, the hair on his chest. Of course, everybody went crazy. Loss or no, they all laughed like hell. To this moment, Pepitone never knew who turned on the powder. He always thought it was Big Pete Sheehy. Wrong again.

Gary Bell was hit again tonight, four runs in less than five innings. I relieved him with two on and two out and got Paul Casanova to pop up. They pinch-hit for me in the next inning, so I had a total outing of one-third of an inning.

In the clubhouse Gary was sitting in front of his locker sucking up a beer and I told him to hang in there.

“Rooms, my career is over,” he said. “The Big C has got my arm.”

“Besides that, how’re you feeling?” I said.

“I feel fine,” he said. “This is my fifth beer.”

Ranew tells me that Vancouver sent Bob Lasko to Toledo, which is another Triple-A team in the International League. It burned me up because here’s Lasko, a guy with ten or eleven years in professional baseball, most of it in Triple-A, bouncing around all over the country, playing for three, four, five different organizations in thirty or forty different towns, all without his family, and now, in the twilight of his career he gets a chance to play in his own home town and he gets sent to Toledo.

There’s no justification for this. No one can tell me there wasn’t another pitcher they could have sent to Toledo instead. I bet no one even realized Vancouver is home to Lasko. So one day, if Lasko ever makes it in the big leagues and has a good year, the owner will scream bloody murder if he tries to get an extra thousand in salary.

Don Mincher goes up to people and asks for a cigarette. When they give him one he pulls out a pack, puts the cigarette into it and puts it back into his pocket. Then he walks off.

There is often homosexual kidding among the players. Tonight Ray Oyler combed his hair forward and started mincing around the clubhouse, lisping, “Hello, sweetheart,” or “C’mere, you sweet bitch.” Then Gary Bell said, “Ray, you convinced me. You really are queer.” And Ray said, “Well, it doesn’t make me a bad person.”

Cleveland

Flying in to Cleveland last night I thought about life in this great American city and decided that if you were going to crash on a Cleveland flight it would be better if it was an inbound flight.

Jose Cardenal was in center field fixing the legs of his tight pants and Talbot recalled the time in winter ball when Cardenal refused to play for three days because his uniform wasn’t tight enough.

Joe Schultz had a short meeting before the game and said that we have enough ability to win a lot of games if we just used our common sense out there, just used our heads. So I went out and played like I had left my head back in the hotel room. You wouldn’t think it was possible for me to play dumb baseball, considering my charm, intelligence and good looks. But I played dumb baseball.

The first inning was fine. I came in with the bases loaded and one out and got Cardenal to hit a one-hopper right back to me for the DP, pitcher to catcher to first base. That’s good. What I did in the next inning was bad.

With one out (Alvis struck out on a knuckleball), Hawk Harrelson doubled down the left-field line. No complaint, he hit a pretty good knuckleball. Then there was a little bouncer in front of the plate. Instead of settling for an out at first, I tried to get Harrelson going into third. I didn’t have much chance of getting him and made a bad throw besides. So instead of two out and a man on third, I’ve got runners on first and third, one out. Larry Brown then hit one into right for a single, Harrelson scoring. The other runner was headed for third and the throw from right field was wild, over third and into the dugout. It shouldn’t have mattered, because I should have been over there backing up the play. Instead I stood on the mound watching, like it was a John Wayne movie, while the second run scored and Brown went all the way to third.

I got the next two hitters and was unscathed in the following inning. I rate the performance fair because I got away with no runs in a bases-loaded situation. But there is no excuse for playing such dumb baseball.

Fred Talbot invited me out to dinner with his roommate, Merritt Ranew, after the game. It’s a sign that we’re living through a reincarnation with the Seattle Pilots. I found myself enjoying their company. Could I have been wrong about Talbot? Me, Jim Bouton, wrong?

I had planned to ask Joe—or my pal Sal—if I could start the exhibition game Monday against Spokane, but today I noticed that Gary Timberlake is around. He said he’d been called up to pitch the exhibition game. He was with our double-A team. He’s going to fly from Cleveland to Seattle, pitch against Spokane and then go back to the minors. I guess they want to look at him. I mean they
know
what I can do. Or do they?

Steve Barber started the game tonight and pitched four innings, giving up two runs. He was taken out when his arm stiffened up. The situation was discussed in the bullpen.

Bell: “His next start will probably come next July.”

O’Donoghue: “Or later.”

Me: “Depending on how his arm feels.”

At the pregame meeting the discussion was about how to pitch to Alvis. Ron Plaza pointed out to Mike Marshall that the way we play him will depend on how he’s pitched. And Marshall said he didn’t know yet. “I have to wait until I get out there,” he said.

If no one else understood what he meant, I did. The way he pitches to any given hitter depends on how he feels at the moment, what his instincts tell him.

This was just one more reason to count him as a weirdo. And yet there’s nothing weird about it at all.

Take something that happened in the 1964 World Series (when young fireballer Jim Bouton won two games). Bill White, left-handed hitter, good power, is the subject. I usually throw left-handers a lot of change-ups, but his first three times up I threw him none. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. Fourth time up I struck him out—on a change. The next day the quote from White in the papers was: “I waited all day for that change-up and he never threw it. Then I gave up looking for the damn thing and started looking for the fastball and here it came.”

If I’d been required to come up with a pregame plan on how to pitch White, I’d have committed myself to throwing him the change and I would have thrown one early in the game and he’d have clobbered it. But nobody was asking me to stick to a plan and, I think instinctively, I did the right thing.

It may have been the last time.

I’m trying so hard to be one of the boys I’m even listening to country music. And enjoying it. The back of the bus is the country-music enclave, and most of the players are part of it. So far, though, we’ve not been able to swing over city boys like Tommy Davis, Tommy Harper and John Kennedy. I think we’ll get them in the end, though. Maybe with a bull fiddle.

Back at the hotel, Gary and I talked about the relationship between country and city guys on a ballclub, which is intertwined with the relationship between whites and blacks. There are lots of walls built up between people, and I pointed out that if I’d never roomed with Gary I would still think, “Oh, he’s just a dumb Southerner.” So probably the solution is to have people live together. I mean we still disagree about a lot of things—religion, politics, how children should be raised—but because we’ve been able to talk about these differences, spend so many hours together, we’ve been able to at least understand them. How’s that for a solution? Put people together in a hotel room in Cleveland.

Getting on the airplane in Cleveland we ran into the Kansas City Royals. There was a lot of conversation because we’re both expansion teams and a lot of us have been rescued from the same junk pile. The funniest line was about Moe Drabowsky. They said he was sick on the bus the other night and puked up a panty girdle.

Seattle

It’s been a great trip for the Seattle Pilots. We took two out of three in Boston, Washington and Cleveland, and since we won three straight before we left home we’re now only two games under .500 and I’m beginning to think we might have a shot at the divisional title. Of course, we’d need a little help. Maybe a small air crash involving the Minnesota and Oakland clubs. Nothing serious. Just a few broken arms and legs.