Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (38 page)

Somewhat abashed, I said, “Well, I’m getting some swimming lessons for my little boys.”

And she said, “That’s all right. You’re really not missing much anyway. The American League’s getting slaughtered.”

Back to the salt mine. Once again I’m the forgotten man of the bullpen. Used three pitchers in the game, and even Fred Talbot, who’s in the starting rotation, was asked to warm up. And I never got a call.

This gave me lots of time to chat with Pagliaroni. He told me about the first talk he had with Marvin Milkes when he came over from the Athletics. The last thing he did in Oakland was break a finger. So when he came to us he had to go on the disabled list. And Milkes said to him: “Now, Pag, I know you were a player representative over there and I know you worked on the salary problems we’ve had and I know you’re going to have to be on the disabled list. But I want you to know you’re still going to be receiving your full salary.”

This is pretty funny, because they
had
to pay him, even though he was on the disabled list, maybe
especially
because he was on the disabled list.

It’s like when the Yankees sent me to Syracuse. I remember Houk saying, “Now, you’ll be getting the same salary,” and I felt rather grateful until I discovered they
had
to pay me the same salary. It was in the contract.

If you want to know what aspect of the moon landing was discussed most, in the bullpen it was the sex life of the astronauts. We thought it a terrible arrangement that they should go three weeks or more without any sex life. Gelnar said that if those scientists were really on the ball they would have provided three germ-free broads for the astronauts.

Word is that Greg Goossen, who was with us in spring training, will be up to replace Mike Hegan when he goes into service for two weeks. Goossen is a burly guy with kinky blond hair and looks like a bouncer in an English pub. He also is a flake. And Ranew said to Pagliaroni, “Goossen ought to be assigned to Bouton.” Okay, I’ll take him.

Pag had a good story about Goossen. He remembered sitting in a bar with him and the Goose was putting them down pretty good. “Don’t you have a game tomorrow?” Pag said.

“Yeah, we got a game,” Goossen said.

“You’re drinking a little heavy, aren’t you?”

“You know something?” Goossen said. “I found I can’t play if I feel good. I’ve got to have a little bit of a hangover to get the best out of me.”

Got a letter from Jerry Stephenson. Says that God is alive and surfing in Waikiki. He also said that he had a marvelous final conversation with Milkes. He complained that he hadn’t had an opportunity to pitch and Milkes said he’d blown two starting opportunities.

“When were those?” Jerry asked.

“You were going to start the night it rained,” Milkes said.

“I know,” Jerry said. “When was the other one?”

“When your wife had a miscarriage and you had to leave the club for three days.”

The next best thing about the way things broke was that on the very day he was sent down, Jerry and his wife had moved into a new apartment. That afternoon they had to move out. “We felt groovy moving all that stuff,” Jerry wrote. “By the end of the day we were working very well together as a team.”

O’Donoghue was on the airplane flying east with Don Mincher and Joe Schultz, who were going to the All-Star game, and said Joe was feeling hardly any pain when he left the plane and was mumbling his two favorite words—shit and fuck—in all their possible combinations.

Tony Conigliaro was the subject for discussion at the pregame meeting.

“Curve him away,” O’Donoghue said.

“Yeah, he’s got a blind spot out there,” Brabender said.

And Sal Maglie said, “Don’t challenge him.”

That’s just the kind of thing Tommy Davis loves to pick up on. “Sal, what do you mean by ‘Don’t challenge him’?”

And Sal said, “Well, don’t throw him a fastball down the middle. You got to spot it.”

Like a great work of art, Sal Maglie is priceless.

It’s still hard to get used to playing baseball again after the All-Star break. Three days off reminds you how much tension you live under playing baseball every day. During the break Harmon Killebrew can’t get you. Reggie Jackson can’t get you. It’s peaceful. Like looking up at Mt. Rainier. That’s the great thing about our ballpark. When a home run hit off you disappears over the fence, your eye catches a glimpse of the majesty of Mt. Rainier and some of that bad feeling goes away.

Great thing happened today. Police arrested a twenty-two-year-old blonde who had climbed a tree outside our clubhouse and was peeping in at us in the shower. A female beaver-shooter.

The game was great too, largely because J. Bouton recorded his second win of the season. I started warming up when the score was 3–0 against us. That’s still too close to put me in. It was 5–0 with a runner on when I got the big call. I needed one hitter in that inning and got him, mowed them down 1–2–3 in the next inning and, of course, came out for a pinch hitter. Only this time it was when we were in the process of scoring six runs. The big hit was a three-run homer by McNertney. The final score was 8–5. Locker got the save and I got a pat on the ass from Sal Maglie.

Another infielder got racked up during the game. Ron Clark collided with George Scott of the Red Sox and had thirteen stitches taken in his lip. Ron’s a tough, gutty little ballplayer. He has a baby face, two tattoos on his arm (one says “Mother” and the other is of a black panther), smokes big cigars—and when he has thirteen stitches in his lip he drinks beer out of the side of his mouth.

Greg Goossen played his first game and went 3 for 3, including a tremendous line-drive home run into the left-field seats.

I love them, one and all.

We were talking about Bill Valentine, one of the umpires who was fired, ostensibly for being incompetent but actually, we all believe, because he was involved in trying to form an umpires’ union. What we remembered about him is that he was one of the few umpires who would call Mickey Mantle out on borderline pitches. “Every umpire would give Mickey the benefit of the doubt,” O’Donoghue said, “but every time I threw a pitch that nicked the corner on him, Valentine would call it a strike.”

The whole Yankee team hated him for that.

The last time Marty Pattin had a bad game—and he’s had about eight in a row now—he came charging up the runway to the clubhouse breaking things on the way. He kicked over a couple of garbage cans and crashed the door into the clubhouse. So today Talbot said to him, “Marty, what are your plans if you don’t win tomorrow?”

Fred and I hung a hangman’s noose in Pattin’s locker, but he didn’t need it. He pitched well, leaving the game after eight innings with the score 1–1. He didn’t break up anything on the way back to the clubhouse.

We went twenty innings before losing it. I pitched two scoreless innings, the tenth and eleventh, which means I had another chance to win. It may also mean that I’ll get into more games at crucial points. But if it takes twenty-inning games to do it, I’m still nowhere.

Talbot has finally been able to talk about that fellow Dubois who won that $27,000 on his home run. “Never made a nickel out of it,” Talbot said. “They flew me out to Gladstone to go on four different radio shows. I went for the ballclub and they didn’t pay anything either.”

“Didn’t Dubois offer you anything at all?” I said. “What did he say to you?”

“He asked for the bat,” Talbot said. “He wanted to have the bat I hit the home run with as a souvenir. And when the whole thing was over it ended up costing me $2.75 for parking.”

A bit of clever baseball strategy tonight by Joe Schultz. We’re down 4–2 in the ninth against the Senators. Two out, man on second, Frank Howard is the hitter. Howard should be walked. But if Bob Locker, who’s pitching, walks him he will now have to pitch to a left-handed hitter, Mike Epstein. This won’t do. So O’Donoghue, a left-handed pitcher, will be brought in. In which case the Senators will pinch-hit for Epstein, bringing in a right-handed power-hitter, like Brant Alyea, and we’re stuck. O’Donoghue will have to pitch against him because the rules say he must pitch to at least one hitter. But Schultz was ahead of everybody. He brought in O’Donoghue just to walk Howard. Sure enough, they brought in Alyea to face O’Donoghue. So Joe took out O’Donoghue and brought me in. I struck Alyea out on three super knuckleballs.

As so often happens in this great game we play, all the strategy went for nothing. We lost 4–2 anyway. At least I was in a position to win a game, though, and Hegan could have tied it up in the ninth with a home run, but just missed.

At the pregame meeting, when Frank Howard’s name came up, Joe Schultz said, “Look, whatever you do, don’t let him beat you. Don’t give him anything good to hit. Throw it outside to him. Christ, I don’t mean on the corner, either. He’ll hit that pitch right out of here. Throw it a foot outside. Hell, he’ll swing at those.
Somebody’s
been getting him out. The bastard’s only hitting .305.”

Joe looked around at the laughing faces, smiled and said, “So whatever you do, don’t let him beat you. I’d rather walk him.”

And Tommy Davis couldn’t resist saying, “Skip, the last time we did that, Mike Epstein beat us.”

Which is why I love Tommy Davis.

Dropped by to see Marvin Milkes about the Gatorade. I saw him sitting at his desk, but his secretary said he wasn’t in. In that case, I told her, she better call the cops because there was a guy at his desk impersonating him. Not only that, he was wearing one of his sports coats.

I was rewarded with a dirty look and an audience with himself. Milkes said he still hadn’t made a decision about the Gatorade, hadn’t even tasted it yet. But he wanted to talk to me about something else. He got up, closed the door and got very sincere. At first I couldn’t imagine what he was getting at. “We’ve always had a good relationship,” he said, turning on his big smile. Milkes has two faces he wears for players. He has this serious face and suddenly, as though he has remembered that he has to show he’s your friend, he breaks into this dazzling smile. At first you think it’s a real smile, then you realize that it’s coming on at the wrong time, out of phase. He’s not smiling because he’s friendly. He’s smiling the way he switches on his toaster. “Sometimes we have different points of view, but we’ve always gotten along fine and we’ve done a lot for you,” he went on, wearing his sincere look now. “I stuck with you last year. I told Joe Adcock to use you and that I thought you had potential as a major-leaguer, and we paid you a major-league salary last year even though you were a minor-league ballplayer. I had confidence in you and you wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been for me. That’s why I’m very upset to find out that you think that I’ve been a detective with this club, a gumshoe.”

He looked so sincere and so sad I could feel a large tear welling up in my eye. How could I be so rotten?

“Now, you have to realize that a general manager’s life is a lonely one, particularly when we’re on the road,” he continued. “I like to stay up at night and be around people. I don’t like to sit in my room all night. Today, with the streets the way they are, you can’t just walk around anymore. That’s why I sit around the lobby and enjoy a cigar.

“But I don’t check up on players. I don’t fine players. That’s not my job. I might tell the manager that somebody’s staying out too late and it’s making the club look bad, but I wouldn’t fine a player myself. That’s why I was disappointed to hear what you were saying about me.”

“Who said I’ve been talking about you, Marvin?”

“I hear from people in Los Angeles and various writers. Through the grapevine. This kind of thing upsets me.”

“Are you talking about the story in the Los Angeles
Examiner?
”

“Yeah,” he said. “Now, that’s a funny story. I read it myself and thought it was funny. And if the guy that told the story had come in and said to me, ‘Marvin, I just meant that story as a joke,’ I would have said, ‘I enjoy a joke as much as anybody else,’ and I would have forgotten about it. But I understand that you called a writer about it.”

“Yes, I called Bud Furillo,” I said. “But not to give him the story.” I explained the purpose of my call and recounted what Furillo had said.

“Well, that’s what he told me,” Milkes said. “He called and said he would print a retraction because he knew it didn’t happen. I said, ‘Hell, don’t print a retraction. It’s not that important.’ And as far as you’re concerned in this thing, the only thing I care about is what you do out there between the lines. I know you do imitations and you give speeches and I’ve heard some of the people on the Yankees say you’re kind of crazy and silly and I was told, ‘You got stuck with one there.’ But I tell them, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if he gives me a hundred percent on the field, I’m going to use him. I’m judging him strictly as a ballplayer.’ You hear all kinds of things through the grapevine. Bouton is this and Bouton is that. Hell, I don’t even listen. I just got done reading a story by you in
Sport
. That’s the kind of story I’m sure you could call controversial. [It was an account of the work I did in Mexico City during the Olympics. I went there for the American Committee on Africa, which was working to keep South Africa out of the Games.] If that’s the way you feel, it’s fine with me. That’s completely apart from my judgment of you as a ballplayer. If you give me a hundred percent you can write or say anything you want.”

I never believed that for a minute. Especially since I had found out that he’d fined Talbot and Oyler, possibly among others, for breaking curfew. But what I said was, “Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared it all up. And I hope it’s clear to you that I did not call a writer to give him that story and that the only reason I called was so it would be understood that none of our players were responsible.”

“Okay,” he said. “It’s all forgotten.”

I didn’t believe that either.