Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (29 page)

I had a long talk with Marty Pattin on the bus. He’s had a tough, interesting life. He’s from Charleston, Illinois, and his mother and father were separated when he was a baby and he was shipped off to live with his mother’s folks. He was still a junior in high school when his grandfather died, so he moved into a rooming house and tried to work his way through the rest of high school. It was then he met a man named Walt Warmouth who helped him get through school—not only high school but college. Warmouth owned a restaurant, and Marty worked there and got his meals there, and every once in a while he’d get a call from the clothing store in town and be told he could pick out a suit and a bunch of other stuff and it was all paid for. They never would tell him who had paid, but Marty knew anyway. “The guy was like a father to me,” Marty said. “And not only to me. He must have sent dozens of kids through school just the way he did me.” Marty has a masters degree in industrial arts, and when he can he likes to help kids. That’s why he signed up for the clinic.

What a terribly lonely life Marty must have had. Hell, it was a traumatic experience for me just going away to college and living in a dorm with a bunch of other kids. And here’s Marty, still in high school, living in a rooming house. Not only that, but he goes on to become an All-American boy, complete with all the good conventional values. Like he was telling the kids at the clinic that sure it was difficult to throw a ball well or be a good basketball player. It was difficult to do a lot of things, but that they were all capable of doing a lot of difficult things if they were willing to work hard and practice. I guess he ought to know.

I also thought that what these kids need is not a half-hour of conversation with some big-name guy who’s just passing through. What they need is day-to-day attention from people like Marty’s grandparents and Walt Warmouth and full-time workers in the ghettoes. And once again I wished I had the guts to chuck baseball and go out and do something for somebody besides myself. And getting mad at myself for
not
being able to do it, I look around for somebody else to blame and I decide, what the hell, one less goddam bomb and we could have somebody working full time in every one of those sixteen playgrounds in Washington they sent us famous athletes to.

It wasn’t a half-hour after I got back from Washington that the phone rang in our room. It was Gabe Paul telling Gary Bell that Marvin Milkes wanted to see him.

“Rooms, what do you think it’s going to be?” Gary said as he got dressed.

I told him it must be something about the Players’ Association. I told him it might be that they found out I was writing a book and they wanted to check with him on how it was coming along. I told him that maybe Milkes was lonely and just wanted somebody to talk to. But we both knew.

Gary was gone only fifteen minutes. When he opened the door he said one word. “Chicago.”

To the White Sox, for Bob Locker.

He sat on the edge of the bed and I could see the thoughts racing through his mind. How do I move? What do I do with my car? Who’s on that club? Any friends? It’s like, I suppose, when you’re wounded. You don’t know where you’ve been hit and you have to sit there a minute and feel around to find out just how seriously you’ve been hurt.

“One good thing,” Gary said after a while. “Woody Held is over there. My old roommate.”

He thought for a while, then he said, “We just bought a big TV. I’ll have to call Nan and tell her to try to bring it back to the store. We sure as hell can’t haul it clear across the country.”

You worry about the damnedest things.

It didn’t come as any big shock. Gary hadn’t been pitching well and the papers had a lot of rumors about a trade. But I felt particularly close to Gary, because we were roommates and because we spent time together—our wives too—when we were at home. Another thing. Gary was my link to most of the other players. Despite my efforts to be one of the boys, the fact that I was Gary’s roommate is what helped most. Whatever the reasons, I felt awkward, empty, not knowing what to say.

Gary took the bus to the ballpark with the team so he could pick up his equipment and say his goodbyes. There was a lot of kidding, of course. That’s what you’re supposed to do when a guy gets traded. There was a sort of stunned tension underneath, though, because, as Mike Hegan says, “Gary’s the kind of guy who’s good for a club even when he’s not pitching well.”

It was still before game time when Gary lifted his big equipment bag and walked down that long corridor from the visiting clubhouse in Baltimore to where the cabs unload. I watched him all the way. He didn’t turn back once.

I asked Eddie O’Brien to catch me for a while tonight in the bullpen. Again he refused, and again I got pissed off. Ranew is developing a bone bruise on his hand. Also, I hit him on the knee the other night, so I hate to ask him to catch me. He had to for a while because I warmed up to go into the game. It was one of those safe games—we were behind 10–0. I pitched one inning, threw eight knuckleballs, seven of them for strikes. I struck Buford out on a beauty that went right over the plate, then broke outside. Got the next two guys on a pop-up and soft grounder. After the game no one came over and said I’d been throwing too much.

That was a lot of day today. I’m not sure I can take many like that.

I grabbed myself by the seat of the pants this evening and marched myself into Joe Schultz’ office. “I want to talk to you about my throwing program, Joe,” I said. I didn’t wait for him to say anything, but plunged ahead. I told him I knew Sal Maglie was telling him I was throwing too much, but that my arm didn’t get tired throwing the knuckleball and the more I threw it the better it got.

“You mean I can use you every day?” Joe said.

I thought he knew that. “Hell yes,” I said. “You can use me every day and twice on Sunday. But I’m not trying to tell you how to pitch me. All I’m saying is I need to throw.”

“Listen, don’t worry about Sal,” Joe Schultz said. “I let a lot of the stuff Sal says go in one ear and out the other. Don’t worry about it. Do whatever you have to do to get ready.”

I could’ve kissed him. I mean there’s a man who understands a lot better than I ever suspected. But then he said, “The problem with your knuckleball is that sometimes you can’t get anybody out. You’re not throwing it for strikes enough.”

“Gee,” I said boyishly, “I’m surprised to hear you say that. Since I came back from Vancouver there’s only been one time I couldn’t get anybody out. And that was the other day in Seattle. One bad outing, and I’ve had fifteen good ones. So far I’ve come in with fifteen runners on base and none of them have scored. And I’m not walking that many guys.”

I think I convinced him.

“Well, you’re doing a good job for us,” Joe Schultz said. “If you weren’t I’d have called you in here. You’ve helped the team. I’m pleased.”

He wasn’t going to let me off without some kind of lecture, however. About a week or so ago I’d been warming up for what seemed like an hour and finally put my jacket on and sat down. “Crissakes, don’t sit down out there,” Sal Maglie had told me. “It looks horseshit when you come into the game.”

“But I was ready to pitch,” I said. “I didn’t have to throw anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sal said. “Even if you just stand there with the ball in your hand it looks better.”

Well, looks count, I decided. Now I was going to get it from Schultz anyway.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “For crissakes, when you’re warming up in the bullpen and it’s in the middle of an inning you might get called in, don’t sit down. Crissakes, it looks terrible. Real horseshit.”

“Sal told me that,” I said. “It was real horseshit. I won’t do it anymore.”

If I let it go now, I thought, this whole thing will have been wasted. He’ll think of it as a time when he called in that joker Bouton to tell him not to sit down in the bullpen when he’s supposed to be warming up. So I shifted gears. “About Eddie O’Brien,” I said, then quickly explained to him that the catchers were beginning to hurt and that O’Brien seemed like a natural solution. Only he kept saying it wasn’t his job.

“Can he catch the damn thing?” Joe Schultz asked.

I said he seemed to catch it okay when we played catch in the outfield. And what the hell, if he misses it, who cares? Wouldn’t we rather have him get hurt than Ranew or Pagliaroni?

“All right. I’ll talk to Eddie about it,” Joe Schultz said.

I can’t wait.

During batting practice the Orioles sneaked into our bullpen—word is that it was Eddie Watt and Pete Richert—and deposited three goldfish and a little black fish into our water cooler. They looked very pretty swimming around in our drinking water.

This was in retaliation for Brabender and O’Donoghue going into
their
bullpen the other night and depositing their benches on the roof of their weather shed.

Everybody thought this was all very funny except Eddie O’Brien. “Guess what he said to me,” Talbot said. “He said we ought to protest this game to the Commissioner because how could we use the bullpen with fish in our water cooler?”

“He wasn’t
serious
,” I said.

“Oh yes he was,” Talbot said. “He was until he saw us all laughing. Then he tried to make out he was kidding. But he was serious as hell.”

O’Donoghue told a story about the best pep talk a manager ever delivered. This was at Columbus in the International League and Don Hoak was the manager. “Boys, I’m just going to say one thing to you,” he said at a clubhouse meeting. He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and up where everybody could see them. “I want to remind everybody that you’re just this far away from big-league pussy.”

A young girl asked one of the guys in the bullpen if he was married. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not a fanatic about it.”

Mike Marshall said he learned something important tonight. He went to Curt Rayer, the trainer, and asked him to put some hot stuff on his arm. “I think it’s a little tired,” Marshall said.

It wasn’t two minutes later that Rayer was in Schultz’s office telling him that Marshall had a tired arm. It was good information. I mean, you know there’s always a pipeline on a club. The trick is to find out who it is. When Johnny Keane was manager of the Yankees his spy was Vern Benson, the coach. We called him “Radar” because he always seemed to have an ear in our conversations. O’Donoghue says that in Cleveland it’s George Strickland, the coach, who is called Pipeline.

And when I talked to my wife tonight she said the last time the wives got together one of the coach’s wives (my wife insists we don’t tell which) said some things she probably shouldn’t have—namely that Curt Rayer was the guy on the club who was telling Milkes and Schultz which guys stay out late and which guys fool around and which guys spend a lot of time in the trainers room. She also said that there were a couple of deals on the fire, one of them involving Comer and the other Ray Oyler. Now I sort of understand how Milkes and Schultz feel. It’s nice to have your own pipeline.

Detroit

I asked Eddie O’Brien if he’d talked to Joe Schultz recently.

“Yeah,” he said. “And I’m not going to be catching knuckleballs. It’s not my job.”

I was dumbfounded. “Did Joe say that?” I said. In moments of tension my voice has a tendency to rise. I must have sounded like a girl with a short skirt in a high wind.

“Well, I talked it over with the coaches and they agreed that I’m not going to be able to keep my head in the game and check on what’s happening in the field and be able to answer the telephone in a split second if I’m spending all my time catching that goddam knuckleball.”

“You didn’t talk to Joe,” I said.

“Well, for a minute. He said I could do whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t let it interfere with my job. And I think catching knuckleballs would interfere with my job.”

“What job is that?” I said gently. “You haven’t
got
a job. All you do is go over to that ballbag and hand everybody a ball and then you sit there and watch the game. When the telephone rings you jump up and tell somebody to warm up. That’s your whole goddam job. A monkey could do your job.” And as I talked I got angrier. There was a corner of my mind that calmly told me to shut up, but I was able to ignore it. I was having too good a time. “You know what you do on this club?” I continued. “More harm than good. You get guys pissed off at you and you don’t contribute a thing.”

“We’ve got trained, professional catchers here,” O’Brien said. “They’re here to catch and that’s their job. I’ve got my own job and I’m going to do it and that’s the way it’s going to be for as long as
you’ll
be around.”

“Oh boy, a threat,” I said. “But I got news for you. You’re not going to be here too long yourself. You just better hope one of these catchers doesn’t get hurt. Because if he does, it’s going to be your ass.”

After the game Sal said, “Joe wants to see you in his office.” He meant me.

“Oh, oh,” said Brabender, who was standing next to me. “What do you think it is, J.B.?”

“I don’t know, Bender,” I said.

“I bet you O’Brien went in and told him,” Talbot said. Fred was there during my talk with O’Brien, and I’d felt bad about that. Some things should be said in private, but baseball isn’t a very private game.

When I walked into his office, Schultz gave me a dirty look.

“What’s this about you getting on O’Brien?” he said.

“Joe,” I said sincerely, “I’ve been trying for some time now to work out an arrangement so that the two catchers don’t have to catch my knuckleball as often as I have to throw it. They don’t like to catch it and I don’t blame them. O’Brien should be catching it and he’s trying to get out of it.”

“Jim, you got to learn to get along with the coaches,” Joe said. “If you got any problems with them, you come to me.”

“I didn’t want to bother you, Joe,” I said. “That’s why I tried to deal through Eddie. You got enough things on your mind without being bugged about who’s supposed to warm up what pitcher.”

It was at about this point that Joe Schultz started to smile. I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling with me or laughing at me.