Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (34 page)

“It was a high pitch,” Lopez said.

“No. If he doesn’t swing, it’s in the dirt,” McNertney said.

“It was right there,” Lopez said, holding his hand out thigh-high.

End argument.

(Cater, by the way, has the reputation of being able to figure out his batting average to four decimal places on his way down to first base. He’s almost as quick as I am figuring out my ERA.)

The second guess is so ingrained in baseball that you can almost call it a first-guess second guess. First a manager will say, “For crissakes, if a guy can’t hit the curve ball, keep throwing the damn thing until he proves to you he can hit it.” Of course, there’s a logical converse. You keep throwing the curve ball to a guy and eventually he
will
hit it. And immediately you hear, “Jesus, you can’t keep throwing a guy the same thing. He’s bound to hit it.”

Everybody has stories about that kind of thing. Jerry Stephenson says that over on the Red Sox when Billy Herman was the manager and there was a debate about how to pitch to a hitter, Herman would say, “Fuck him. Give him good stuff.”

And that’s the catch. You have to have it. And if you do, pitching isn’t at all complicated.

Checking out of the hotel, Wayne Comer called for a bell captain to send up a bellhop to pick up his bag. There was no bellhop around, and no bell captain either. So Don Mincher, who happened to be standing there, picked up the phone. When he heard it was Comer, Mincher said, “Now wait a minute. It’s about time you guys started carrying your own bags down. All you prima donna cocksuckers are alike, always wanting people to do things for you. Why the hell don’t you carry them down yourself?”

Comer didn’t even splutter. He slammed down the phone and carried his own bags.

Oakland

In the clubhouse meeting yesterday on the Oakland Athletics Sal Maglie said about Reggie Jackson, “Once in a while you can jam him.”

I could just see the situation. Reggie Jackson up. Pitcher throws one high and inside, perfect jam pitch. Jackson leans back, swings and puts it into the right-field bleachers. And Sal screams from the bench, “Not now, goddammit, not now!”

Fred Talbot says that after listening to Sal in these meetings he’s decided what kind of pitcher he must have been. “A mother,” Talbot said. “A real mother.”

Mother Maglie also said in the meeting that one way to handle Jackson was not to throw him any strikes. So Jackson hit three homers in the game, and after each one someone said, “There’s one of those goddam strikes.”

After Reggie Jackson’s third home run, O’Donoghue said, “I’d have to plunk the man.”

And I said, indignantly, “John, how the hell can you throw at the guy? He’s just doing his job. He has no comeback at you if you get him out. So why should he have to risk getting injured just because he’s successful?”

“I wouldn’t mean to hurt the guy,” O’Donoghue said. “I don’t mean throw at his head. Just let him know that he should have some fear up there.”

“What if you hit him in the kneecap or something?” I said. “You don’t know how good your control is going to be. What if you hit him in the ankle? Or how do you know you’re going to hit him just hard enough in the ribs so that you don’t break something?”

John’s jaw got tight. And he said, “Look, I don’t want to argue about it. So we’ll leave it at that.”

How come nobody wants to argue with me? Can it be because I’m always so right?

Today I asked Joe Schultz for a start. I sat down with him on the bus and told him that I could help the team better if I started. I said I felt that being the ninth man on the pitching staff and being used as the mop-up man didn’t help the team much. I reached into my pocket to show him my statistics and Joe Schultz said, “Aw shit. I don’t want to see any statistics. I know what’s going on out there just by watching the games.”

“All right,” I said. “I just wanted to show you that I’ve only walked one man in the last 16 innings and only three in the last 21.”

“I know you’ve been getting it over.”

“That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Well, okay, Jamesy,” Joe Schultz said.

Steve Hovley broke up the clubhouse today when he undressed to get into his uniform and underneath his dress shirt he was wearing a Seattle Pilots T-shirt with his name and number on the back. Almost everybody just laughed, but some guys seemed upset—like Fred Talbot and Merritt Ranew.

Out in the bullpen Ranew said to me, “You think Hovley’s a pretty smart guy?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Do you think wearing a Seattle Pilots T-shirt has anything to do with common sense or intelligence?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, do you think it’s very intelligent to wear something that isn’t proper?” Ranew said.

“What’s wrong with wearing a Seattle Pilots T-shirt?” I said.

At this point, I couldn’t hold back and started to laugh.

Ranew sort of waved at me and walked away.

Another Hovley story. He was standing by the clubhouse man’s tobacco shelf opening up a can of snuff. (Just wanted to try it, he said later.) Joe Schultz walked by wearing nothing but a towel around his waist and hollered out, “Hey, men, look who’s dipping into the snuff.” Then he grabbed a paperback book out of Hovley’s pocket. It was Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
. Schultz held the book up in the air and said, “Hey, men, look at this! What the shit kind of name is this?”

By this time there was a group of guys around him looking at the book like a group of monkeys might inspect a bright red rubber ball. Schultz read off the back cover—a sentence anyway—until he got to the word “nihilism.” “Hey, Hy,” Schultz said to Hy Zimmerman, “what the hell does ‘nihilism’ mean?”

“That’s when you don’t believe in nothing,” Zimmerman said.

Whereupon Schultz, shaking his head and laughing, flung the book back at Hovley, hitched up his towel and strode off, amid much laughter.

If Hovley weren’t 9 for 20 (.450) since he was called up I’d figure him to be back in Rochester in a matter of days.

Afterward Hovley said that this was, of course, anti-intellectualism at work, but that he didn’t mind since he counted himself as anti-intellectual too—that is, if by “intellectual” we meant the academic community. Academic people bore him, Hovley said, and that while he wouldn’t choose to spend all his free time with Joe Schultz, he rather enjoyed the company of players.

And Mike Marshall pointed out that Joe’s act might have been more a tactic than an expression of his real feelings about college types. “You have to keep in mind that Joe’s goal is to keep a loose clubhouse and that he uses this as a device to make people laugh,” Marshall said. “I’d be careful not to put him down as merely a buffoon.”

Well, I don’t know. If it
is
an act, he’s finding it awfully easy to play.

Kansas City

What could be better than a Fourth of July doubleheader in Kansas City? Anything up to and including a kick in the ass. Kansas City gets hot like few places get hot. The temperature was in the 90s and the humidity was in the 90s and most of us were in a blue funk. Fred Talbot, one of today’s starters, was complaining louder than anybody about the heat on the bus, so when we got to the clubhouse a lot of guys came by to say a few words.

“Got to pace yourself today, Fred.”

“Don’t think about the heat, Fred. Just go out there and go as long as you can.”

“Boy, it sure is a hot one today, Fred.”

“Fred, why does it have to be you pitching on such a hot day?”

Finally Fred shook his head from side to side and said, “I knew I should have gone to college.”

Joe Schultz announced that there were a lot of places in Kansas City that were off-limits because they were hangouts for gamblers. We expected to hear about three or four names. There must have been twenty-five. “Christ, you can save $900 just by drinking in the hotel bar,” Ray Oyler said.

What he meant was that the hotel bar is forbidden to us at a penalty of $100. But if we got caught in one of those off-limit places, it would cost $1,000.

It came as no surprise today that Ron Plaza said, at least twice, “Good day to work, men.”

It was a terrible day to work. With one pitch I undid all the good work I’ve been doing for weeks. I gave up five earned runs in a big one and one-third innings. I couldn’t get my knuckleball over. I felt uncoordinated on the mound, and I threw one to Gene Oliver with the bases loaded that spun, and he knocked it over the center-field wall. On the bus some son of a bitch asked me if it was the longest home run I ever gave up.

It doesn’t seem right that my ERA should have jumped back to 3.75 from 2.95 after only one and one-third innings. I felt so damn depressed after the game that I immediately forced it all out of my mind—all of it. What did you say my name was?

When Joe Schultz came to the mound to take me out of the game I was so angry with myself that all I could think to do was stand there and shout obscenities at the scoreboard. I still don’t know if Joe said anything to me or not. I know he waved for a pitcher from the bullpen. The rest was all one dirty word.

Joe was cool enough not to get angry at me or think I was screaming at him. He knew I was just blowing off steam and let me go ahead and do it. There are managers who wouldn’t have been so cool.

Mike Marshall and I started rooming together when we got to Kansas City, and in the room tonight we got to talking about the special pressures that are on ballplayers. We wondered what it’s like for a guy when baseball is his whole life and he has nothing else, no financial security, no job or profession to fall back on, no real interests. We talked about Fred Talbot saying, “I should have gone to college,” and decided that, yes, the pressures on him are worse than the pressures on us.

I know that a guy like Gary Bell felt that pressure all the time. He’d say things like, “Rooms, tomorrow we go to a bookstore and buy some of those real-estate books.” Or, “Rooms, if you were in my shoes, what kind of job would you start looking for?” And then, sometimes, after a bad game, he’d sit in the back of the bus with five or six beers in him and he’d mumble to himself, “I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit.”

But he did.

Steve Barber says he was watching me closely while I was pitching and thought I’d speeded up my motion too much and that my arm was dragging behind the rest of my body. He thought that if I slowed down I’d be able to get the proper release on the ball. As soon as I could I dashed out to the bullpen and asked Eddie O’Brien to catch a few knuckleballs. He said sure.

This is a new Eddie O’Brien. Since our big blow-up he’s become a pussycat. He still doesn’t warm me up during the game, but he’s been great about catching me at other times and seems to be making an effort to do all the little extras. He even eats candy in the bullpen. No one has called him Mr. Small in a month.

Anyway I concentrated on a slow, easy motion—and, son of a gun, Barber was right. I threw about ten knuckleballs and every one of them jumped all over the place.

Then I got called into the game. The first thing that leaps into your head when you’ve been going bad is, oh Christ, here we go again. You have to lick this, get it out of your mind or you really
will
go again. Fortunately I was able to get two good innings in. At least now I won’t be walking out to the mound with the taste of failure in my mouth.

Today Sal walked over to me, picked up a baseball and showed me the grip he remembered Hoyt Wilhelm using for his knuckleball when he was with the Giants. Here it is, midseason, and that was the first time Sal Maglie said anything constructive to me about pitching. In all this time he’s never said anything about my grip, my motion or my release. Zero. Since he seemed interested, I suggested he keep an eye on me when I was pitching and if he thought I was speeding up my motion to let me know. He said he would.

Bat day in Kansas City. All the kids get free bats. Makes it very bad for beaver shooting because there are too many kids, too many bats and not enough beaver. John Gelnar brought a pair of binoculars out to the bullpen and we took turns looking into the stands. Then somebody said that we better not let the umpires catch us with binoculars in the bullpen—they’re liable to think we’re stealing signs. And I said, “No. If we explain we’re shooting beaver, they’ll understand.” And they would. If there’s a baseball universal, that’s it.

Pagliaroni says that one of the great things about Gene Brabender as a pitcher is that he’s big enough to intimidate hitters with his size. “He looks like if you got a hit off him,” Pag said, “he’d crush your spleen.”

Flying home from Kansas City we ran into a storm and were bouncing around in the air like a knuckleball. Pagliaroni and I started singing “The Lord’s Prayer.” “Our Father who art…” Suddenly Brabender, who was sitting in front of me, turned around, kneeled on his seat facing us, and, with neck flaming, shook a finger and said, “Now, look. No more of that. I don’t go for that stuff, and I’m serious.”

When Gene Brabender is serious, everybody is serious. We stopped singing.

After the storm Brabender turned around again and said, “Hey, J.B., I’m sorry I got mad. But that really scares me, especially when it’s about the Big Man.”

“Bender,” I said, “it didn’t scare you nearly as much as you scared me.”

Right before the plane landed, the guys were telling stories about how much we’d been getting on the road. And as we were getting ready to leave the plane and dash into the loving arms of our waiting wives, Pagliaroni said, very loud, “Okay, all you guys, act horny.”

Seattle

Mike Marshall was sent to Vancouver today. I’m having very bad luck with roommates.

I feel a little funny about him getting it because I know his wife warned him right from spring training about getting too closely associated with me. Not that she doesn’t like me, but she knew my reputation and was worried about guilt by association. Now he rooms with me three days in Kansas City and gets cut.