Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (35 page)

Mike was concerned when one of the reporters wrote that he and I play chess on airplanes and sometimes carry the board out of the plane and into the bus without dropping a single piece. He didn’t think it helped our images any.

Tonight my knuckleball was so good it was getting by the catcher in the bullpen and going out onto the field.

After the game I was shaving, as it happens, right beside Joe Schultz. “Looks like your knuckleball was jumping all over the place tonight,” he said.

“It was a good one,” I said. “As good as it was three weeks ago. Lately I haven’t been able to throw it that good.”

“Why not?” Joe said.

“Well, I kind of lost the feel of it in my hand, but tonight…”

At that point Joe Schultz turned his back and walked away.

Jerry Stephenson, who was also shaving, took note of this and said, “Boy, he was really interested.”

“Yeah, that’ll teach him to start a conversation with me.”

It all reminded me of Charlie Maher, my baseball coach at Western Michigan. He was upset when I signed a professional contract and had to drop off the team. When I went back to school after my first season, I ran into him on campus and he said, heartily, “How are you doing, Jim? What kind of year did you have?”

“Not too good,” I said. “I broke the thumb of my pitching hand and didn’t get to throw all summer long.”

And he said, “Good, good. Have a nice fall here in school,” and walked away.

By threatening to quit, Mike Marshall has blackmailed the club into sending him to Toledo rather than Vancouver. (Toledo is near his home, although not nearly as pretty as Vancouver.) Mike willed us his secondhand English racing bike, so we’ve added it to our collection, which includes a Gary Bell bedroom lamp.

One nice thing about the whole business. Marshall’s basic faith in the way the game is run remains unbroken. He gives this illustration. When Joe Schultz told him he was being sent to Vancouver, Mike said, “What about another major-league team? Isn’t anybody interested in me?”

Schultz: “We asked waivers, and nobody wanted you.”

So Marshall went to see Marvin Milkes and said he was quitting.

Milkes: “We just can’t let you go like that. We paid $175,000 for you. We’ve got to get something for you. Isn’t there something we can work out?”

Marshall: “Why don’t you just sell me to some other club?”

Milkes: “Well, we’ve had feelers. But they haven’t been for the right price. We couldn’t let you go at the waiver price.”

Now, some people would call that a contradiction. Others might call it a lie. Mike Marshall called it baseball.

One of our jocko things is to mince around like a fairy, which is pretty funny sometimes, especially while wearing baseball underwear. There is something hilarious about a lumpy, hairy guy trying to act like a queer while wearing the things we wear under a baseball uniform. Take my word.

After a while some of the guys began to walk up to each other and pretend to kiss on the lips. In fact one of them would put his hand on the other’s face and kiss the back of it. If you did it fast, it looked like a real kiss.

Then it began to spread. As a gag, of course. You’d be walking down the aisle of a bus and all of a sudden a guy would clamp his hand over your mouth, kiss the back of his hand and continue on down the aisle. It was quite a game. And Gary Bell was a big one for it. So were Mike Hegan and Don Mincher.

Then we got a little drunk on a bus one night and the guys started kissing without bothering to put their hands up. And then
that
became a joke. We’d kid about how many guys had kissed other guys and then there was this little club, and only guys who had kissed and been kissed could be members. At one point I was standing in the clubhouse and John Kennedy came over and said, “Hey, c’mere, Jim, I got to tell you something. A secret.” And he puts his face up close to mine and the next thing I knew, kiss! I was a club member. Everybody broke up. Eventually there were, I believe, at least a dozen guys in the club.

On our flight from Oakland to Kansas City, Wayne Comer, who had had a few beers, leaned down over Don Mincher, who was playing cards, and kissed him on the cheek. Wetly. Mincher whirled around and punched him on the jaw, knocking him down and into the aisle. It struck everybody as funny that Mincher, a member of the club, should suddenly get so uppity with a guy we all knew he was very friendly with.

“Wayne, I just had enough,” Mincher said. “And I had to haul off and punch you.”

Comer was still lying in the aisle feeling his jaw. “Well, that doesn’t make you a bad person,” he said.

Tonight Comer got his revenge. Mincher was on the postgame radio show because he was the hero of the game. He hit a three-run homer in the first inning, and we won 3–1. The moment Mincher came into the clubhouse, Comer, who by this time was wearing only a jock strap, dirt and no teeth, ran across the room with an insane gleam in his eye, leaped on Mincher’s back and kissed him on the ear.

This time Mincher didn’t punch him.

Had a spot of trouble with Ranew in the bullpen tonight. He warmed me up when Schultz ordered that I get up early in the game. But later on, when I got up to throw on my own, he let me know his heart wasn’t in it. He stuck his glove up at every pitch and if the ball went into it, fine. Otherwise it bounced off and he had to go after it. And he took his time chasing it. If I have to wait a minute or more between pitches I’m not getting anything out of it, and he knows it.

Another gimmick he uses is to throw the ball back to me erratically so I have to scoop it out of the dirt or jump into the air. Or he’ll steam it into me until my hand hurts.

The fact that I hurt Pagliaroni’s thumb the other day, added to Ranew’s obvious reluctance, makes it hard for me to ask anybody to catch me. It’s part of the reason, probably, the knuckleball has been so in and out.

Studying my statistics today I note that in the last fifteen days, I’ve pitched a grand total of six-and-a-third innings. That’s an even bigger reason for being in and out. My statistics scream out that I have to work to be effective. But I’m not getting the work. Not even in the bullpen.

Not only that, but Jerry Stephenson is getting a start. Now, I like Jerry, but he was just called up from Vancouver, where he had an 0–3 record and an ERA of 4.78. Here’s a guy released by the Red Sox, picked up as a free agent, does poorly in the minors, gets called up and is handed a start. Who’s going to get the
next
start? Ray Oyler?

There’s a promotion they run here in Seattle called “Home Run for the Money.” If a listener has his name drawn, he is assigned a certain hitter. If that hitter hits a home run in the right inning, the listener wins the jackpot. Sometimes there are several thousand dollars in it. And if the right hitter hits a grand-slam homer at the precise moment required, there is a $25,000 bonus.

It so happened that,
mirabile dictu
, Fred Talbot hit a home run with the bases loaded tonight. And thus a man named Donald Dubois, who lives in Gladstone, Oregon, won $27,000. The applause in the stands had not yet died down when it was decided in the bullpen that tomorrow morning Fred Talbot would receive a telegram from Donald Dubois of Gladstone, Oregon, thanking him for his Herculean efforts and telling him that a check for $5,000 was in the mail as a token of esteem and friendship. Since the telegram was my idea, I had to send it. We agreed that my identity would be revealed only under penalty of death.

I checked in with Marvin Milkes tonight and offered to go up to Vancouver and start a game there during the All-star break. I explained about how little I’d been pitching and said I’d like him to see what I could do as a starter, even if it was in the minors.

So Marvin Milkes said, “I don’t know if we could guarantee about bringing you back.”

I said the first thing that came to my mind. “What?”

“Your coming back would depend on a lot of things; how you did when you were down there and our situation here with this club at the time. We have roster problems. It’s not always easy to get rid of a guy, to make room on the roster.”

All of a sudden I got the feeling that I was being sent down, was asking to be brought back up and was being told, “Sorry, kid.” And here I was
volunteering
to go to the minors so that I would, in the long run, help the club. I mean, if it worked, they’d have another starting pitcher. And all Milkes could think of was obstacles.

“Have you talked to Joe about starting?” Milkes said.

I was shocked. Milkes was here last year when I had such success starting. You’d think he would have remembered that, talked to Joe about it. Nothing. Nobody talks to anybody around here.

Another example. I went to Sal today and said, “Sal, I’ve only pitched six innings in fifteen days, and if possible I’d like a little extra time warming up. So if you think we’re getting into a situation where you might need me, give me a quick call so I can get a head start.”

And Sal said: “What if we need you in a hurry?”

With the Angels in town I took the opportunity to chat with Ed Fisher and Hoyt Wilhelm. I asked Fisher about the curse of inconsistency. “Everyone has the same problem,” he said. “Hoyt has it and I have. I’ll pitch for three weeks and it’ll be going real good for me and then for ten days I can’t throw one worth a damn and they hit me all over the place.”

And Wilhelm said: “You know you can throw a bad one once in a while if you’re throwing a lot of good ones. But you can’t throw two or three bad ones in a row. Sometimes when I go out there I throw just about every one of them good. At other times it’s just nothing. And I get hit. It takes a lot of work and a lot of concentration. It’s that delicate a pitch.”

Fisher came in to relieve tonight and got clobbered (in fact Talbot hit the grand-slam off him). And when I came in I pitched two scoreless innings, striking out three. Like Fisher said, that’s the way it goes.

Freddy Talbot believes.

The telegram read: “Thank you very much for making our lives so happy, Mr. Talbert. We feel we must share our good fortune with you. A check for $5,000 will be sent to you when the money arrives.” (I thought it was a clever touch to misspell his name.)

As soon as he read the telegram, Talbot called over his faithful roommate and asked him to step outside. “You know anything about this, Merritt?” he said. “You think it’s a joke?”

“Looks legitimate to me,” Ranew said, biting his lip to keep from laughing.

On the bus to the airport for our trip to Minnesota, Talbot showed the telegram to Ray Oyler. “You think it’s for real?” Oyler said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Talbot said. “If one of the guys had done it, he wouldn’t have misspelled my name.”

“That’s right,” Oyler said. “And what are you going to do with the money?”

“I think I’ll buy that boat I always wanted, one with a 95-horse-power motor. I’ll tell my wife I won it in a raffle. Otherwise she’ll want me to put the whole $5,000 in the bank. And whatever you do, Ray, don’t tell the writers about it. If they put it in the paper I’ll have to pay income tax on it.”

Ray promised he wouldn’t tell.

Because we were rained out in Seattle, Jerry Stephenson did not get his start.

“How do you feel about missing your start tonight?” I asked.

“My one start?” he said. “You mean my one big chance?”

“Right. And how do you feel about the fact that you were going to get this one big chance with only one-third of an inning pitched in the last six weeks?”

“Oh, I’ve pitched more than that,” Stephenson said. “Actually I have a total of two-and-two-thirds innings.”

“Only two-and-two-thirds?” I said. “In six weeks? Has anybody said anything to you? Has this situation been discussed?”

“Nope,” Stephenson said. “I’m just happy to be here. I’ll take whatever they give me. If they took off my hat and shit in it, I’d put it right back on my head and say thanks.”

I think he means it. I’ve felt that way myself.

But it can’t be too good for Stephenson that they called up Dick Baney today. He’s the right-handed pitcher who almost made the club this spring.

Minneapolis

There was a grave meeting before the game in Minnesota tonight. Joe Schultz had a clipping from the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, a story by Bud Furillo. The story said that the Seattle ballplayers, upset at the way Marvin Milkes sat in the lobby at around curfew time, checking bodies, had gotten together and had Milkes measured for a suit. Milkes was very pleased at the idea, until the suit arrived. It was a bellhop’s uniform, with thirty-eight brass buttons. There were two pictures with the story: one of Milkes, the other of a bellhop.

It was a terrific story in every respect but one. It wasn’t true. However, the possibility of fitting Milkes with such a suit
had
been discussed in the bullpen. And something like that gets around.

“Now this kind of thing is bad not only for the general manager,” Joe Schultz said, “it’s bad for the whole organization. This may sound funny, but things like this can get turned around. If Marvin Milkes has to sit in the lobby and check, the wives might start wondering who’s staying out late and what they’re doing.”

“And that’s bad,” Ray Oyler said.

“We can all tell our wives it’s McNertney he was checking on,” Tommy Davis said.

Everyone laughed. McNertney is thirty-two, single, and rumor has it he’s never been kissed. He spends all his spare time oiling his fishing rods and thinking about hunting in the winter. He hasn’t got time to stay out late.

But Joe Schultz was serious. “Whoever gave out this story is a no-good cocksucker, I’ll tell you that,” Schultz said. “And I’m going to find out who it is.”

At that point I felt a lot of eyes on me. Maybe I’m supersensitive, but it did seem that almost everybody checked me in case I was showing the white feather of guilt. And, of course, after the meeting, Fred Talbot said, loudly, as though he were kidding, “All right, Bouton, what’d you give them the story for?” In this kind of situation I’m always guilty until proven innocent.