Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (50 page)

No scoreboard action tonight because everybody was playing in the West and I had to sit and watch us lose to Atlanta 4–3. But as Harry Walker said on the bench, if we can take two out of three here we’ll be in good shape.

It sure has been a long time since I’ve taken baseball games this seriously.

It’s been more than two weeks since I was traded, and I still haven’t received my $900 travel allowance from Seattle. I understand that Valdespino and Dooley Womack both got their money here before they left. It’s interesting that when I owed the club $6.48 in incidental expenses at one of the hotels, I got two reminders in four days and then it was taken out of my paycheck.

My joke these days is about Julio Gotay, who scrounges about a dozen passes to every game. His friends are legion all over. The line is that as soon as Joe Schultz hung up in Baltimore after telling me I was traded, the phone rang and it was Gotay. He wanted to know if he could use my passes in St. Louis that night.

Larry Dierker vs. Phil Niekro. Second of this crucial three-game series. My first crucial series in years. It turned into one of those mean, tough ballgames that you try to win even while you’re sitting on the bench. At one point I was standing in the dugout when Harry put the pitchout sign on and I thought, damn, if they look over here and see all of us standing up, they’ll know there’s a play on. So even though I was dying to watch, I turned around and sat down on the bench. It was more neurotic than sensible.

I can’t stand the tension of these games. Poor Larry Dierker had a no-hitter going into the ninth inning and hung in there until the top of the thirteenth. We pinch-hit for him, scored two runs and then Gladding came in. They belted him all over the lot, so Blasingame came in and walked in the winning run. Heartbreaker.

I felt terrible for Dierker. Every inning he got up he knew he not only had to get them out in the bottom of the inning, he had to get them out the
next
inning too. It’s like climbing a mountain, struggling to the top, then realizing there are two more peaks to climb. And then we go and lose.

It was a tremendous performance by Dierker, and at the end he never said a word. After pitching like that and getting zero for it, he just sat there in the locker room, listened to the game go down the drain and never once so much as flinched. Which is why Paul Richards, when he was with Houston, said of Dierker: “He’s a cold-blooded, fish-eyed son of a bitch.” He said it with approval.

Me watching Niekro pitch was like a young artist inspecting his first Picasso. I examined him very closely. His knuckleball seems to wobble up there, moving three or four times in a small pattern. Wilhelm’s swishes up to the plate in swinging arcs. My knuckleball gets up there in a bigger hurry and breaks more sharply and erratically, but only once. When it’s working, I mean.

I think my knuckler has more potential. Nevertheless, I can see why he’s more successful than I am. For one thing, he has the knuckleball down to where he can count on it always jumping around. He throws very few that spin on him. This gives him time to concentrate on other aspects of his game. He has a pretty good fastball, and a great pick-off move. Me, I still get real wild with the knuckleball, my fastball isn’t that good, and never will be, and I have a lousy pick-off move. I like to think, though, that I’m at a stage where Niekro was two or three years ago. All I need is a little time.

Game was over about eleven-thirty and we got back to the hotel an hour later. There’s a day game tomorrow and we were in bed when the phone rang at 2:15 A.M. It was Buddy Hancken, the coach.

“Norm, are you in?” he says to Miller again.

Norm, in his pajamas, said, “Yes, but I’m getting ready to go out again.”

“You better not. Spec’s on a tear.”

At 2:45 A.M. the phone rang again. Now we’re trying to fall asleep.

“Norm, who’s your roommate?” It’s Hancken again.

He knows, and Miller knows he knows. But he tells him anyway. “Bouton.”

“Is he in?”

“Of course. Do you want to talk to him?”

“No, I’ll take your word for it.”

Big of him. I mean, a lot of guys would have insisted on talking to me, checking me out, asking me something personal, like my social security number.

“What’s going on?” Miller said. “You know you already called me once.”

“The shit’s hit the fan.”

Anyway, because of the two phone calls we decided to stay up an extra fifteen minutes. One small step for freedom.

Norm Miller has announced to all the people in our room that he will not play baseball on Jewish holidays. “But Norm,” I said, “just last week you were telling me that you look down on organized religion and that you don’t observe any of the religious holidays. What makes you suddenly religious?”

“I play on a Jewish holiday and go 0 for 5 against Niekro and the next day I go 0 for 4 and that’s it,” Miller said. “I’ll never play on Jewish holidays again.”

The guys were laughing about last night’s phone calls. Like when Hancken asked Tommy Davis if he was in, Tommy said, “No. I’m out chasing broads.”

Ron Willis was in the coffee shop at 2:15. According to club rules he didn’t have to be in his room until 2:30, but Richardson walked over to him and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting to order,” Willis said alertly.

“Go to your room,” Richardson said. “I’m going to call you on the telephone.”

He went to his room and sure enough, the phone rings.

“You’re suspended,” Spec tells him. “Don’t suit up. Call Harry in the morning. He’ll tell you what to do.”

Willis had some trouble sleeping. In the morning he called Harry.

“Don’t know anything about it,” Harry says. “I’ll see you at the ballpark.”

So in the clubhouse later, there was Willis, sitting with his baseball shirt on and no pants. “The manager told me to dress,” he said, “and the general manager told me I was suspended. I don’t know what the hell to do. So I’ll stay halfway until I get further instructions.”

The other day Wade Blasingame’s girlfriend visited him in his room. He’s single, of course. Soon Spec called him on the telephone and told him to get that girl out of his room. Fifteen minutes later he was down there in person, telling the girl she ought to be ashamed of herself and to get the hell out of the room.

Later, Blasingame was told he’d been fined $500. I can’t believe it. But I do.

I’ll tell you why I believe it. Because Blasingame hasn’t won any games this year and because he walked in the winning run the other night. And the baseball tradition is if you’re going bad on the field you’re in trouble all over.

Dierker tells this story. Last year he and Danny Coombs, pitcher, were three hours late for curfew in New York and staggered into the hotel holding each other up. Spec Richardson was in the lobby. As they listed by him, Dierker slurred, “How’re you doing, Spec baby?”

The next day Coombs was fined $100 for blowing the curfew and Dierker was fined $200 for being drunk. The premise was that Dierker was the only one who said anything, so he was the only one who could be accused of being drunk.

The payoff is that the $100 was taken out of Coombs’ pay, but the $200 was never deducted from Dierker. It must have been that they felt the threat alone was enough punishment for Dierker. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that Dierker is a twenty-game winner and Coombs is a marginal relief man. Could it?

Fines and suspensions don’t change the score. We lost again today, 3–2, a sweep. Denny Lemaster was the loser. Rico Carty hit two home runs off him. One of them was a two-run job in the last of the eighth and wiped out our 2–1 lead.

Note about Rico Carty. He doesn’t trust banks. He also doesn’t trust the clubhouse valuables box. So that big lump you see in his back pocket during baseball games is his wallet.

I looked up Niekro before the game tonight and asked if he usually threw so many fastballs. He said he didn’t, but that his arm felt too strong when he started pitching and that when his arm is strong he’s unable to throw a good knuckleball. So he threw more fastballs to tire his arm out.

They have bedsheet banners in Atlanta too. They say REBEL. Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn’t they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old.

Doug Rader, the third baseman, may be a good-looking cat, but I’m afraid he might be too tight for a pennant race like this. Right after he hit a soft pop-up that sent the second baseman back on the grass, he came into the dugout and said to me, “How far did that last one go?”

“All the way out behind second base,” I said.

“It’s all in the wrists,” he said.

San Diego

On our trip from Atlanta to San Diego we had a stopover in Dallas at Love Field. There’s a huge statue of a Texas Ranger in the terminal and it’s inscribed: “One Riot, One Ranger.”

It reminded me of an incident when I was playing baseball in Amarillo. There were about five or six players having a drink at a table in the middle of this large, well-lit bar, all of us over twenty-one. Suddenly, through the swinging doors—Old West fashion—come these four big Texans, ten-gallon hats, boots, spurs, six-shooters holstered at their sides, the works. They stopped and looked around and all of a sudden everybody in the place stopped talking. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them said, “All right, draw!”

They spotted us ballplayers and sauntered over, all four of them, spurs jangling, boots creaking, all eyes on them.

“Let me see your IDs, boys,” one of them says.

I don’t know what got into me, but I had to say—I
had
to after that entrance—to these obvious Texas Rangers, “First I’d like to see
your
identification.” I said it loud.

He rolled his eyes up into his head in exasperation and very slowly and reluctantly he reached for his wallet, opened it and showed me his badge and identification card. I gave them a good going over. I mean a 20-second check, looking at the photo and then up at him. Then I said, “He’s okay, men.”

Then, of course, we all whipped out our IDs, which showed we were all over twenty-one, and the Texas Rangers turned around and walked out, creaking and jangling.

We laughed about that for weeks.

I find it curious that of all the things Dallas could have chosen to glorify in the airport, it chose law enforcement. The only thing I know about Dallas law enforcement is that its police department allowed a lynching to occur on national television. Maybe the statue should have been of a group of policemen at headquarters, with an inscription that read: “One Police Department, One Lynching.”

On the bus from the airport to the hotel in San Diego it was a dark and tired time, and all you could see was the lighted ends of cigarettes. It was quiet, except for a few mumbled conversations. Then suddenly there was this loud scuffling in the back. A fight between Jimmy Ray, called Stinger (of course), and Blasingame. Foolishness. The Stinger was pretending he was talking a girl into coming up to his room and the Blazer took exception. What he’s really upset about is the way he’s pitching and that $500 fine and he decided to take the Stinger’s monologue personally.

We broke them up quickly enough. What impressed me, though, was the way the guys reacted when a coach tried to get into it. Buddy Hancken started to move toward the back but Curt Blefary, Jimmy Wynn and Joe Morgan stood up and blocked his way and his vision. So the coaches and manager don’t know who’s involved. “Get the hell up to the front of the bus where you belong,” Lemaster said to Hancken. “Stay out of this thing.”

Hancken is the kind of coach who enjoys his work. He’s always the one who asks on the bus, “What time tonight, Harry? What time?” He’s also the guy who checks the Exergenie list and your pockets for baseballs you might be accidentally taking off the field.

A lot of coaches would make very good prison guards.

Jim Owens: “Hey, are you going to use names in that thing you’re writing?”

“Once in a while.”

“Christ, be careful. I remember the story
Sports Illustrated
did on the Dalton Gang. [This was a group of high-flying Philadelphia Phillies. Owens was a member in good standing.] We thought it was going to be a real nice spread. They took pictures and everything. Then they did a hatchet job on us.”

“Weren’t you the guys who sued?”

“Yeah, and we’d have gotten a helluva lot more money if one of the guys hadn’t attacked a maid a week before the trial.”

There was a play in yesterday’s game that would have been funny if it weren’t so bad. We were leading 2–1 at the time and Jimmy Wynn’s on second. With two out Blefary hits a clean single to right, certain to score Wynn except that Wynn rounds third, gets halfway home, then realizes that he hasn’t touched third. So back he goes, tags it and again sets sail for home. Naturally he’s thrown out at the plate. All we have on Blefary’s perfect scoring single is a third out. So today Blefary was grousing to Joe Morgan about the RBI he lost on the play. “For crissakes, Helen Keller could have scored from second base on that hit. If I was a black man he’d have scored.”

“If you were a black, it would’ve been a home run,” Morgan said.

I found the plane ride from Atlanta to San Diego interesting because of a long discussion I got into with Leon McFadden, infielder, black, Doug Rader, infielder, white, and Scipio Spinx (now, there’s a name), pitcher, black. McFadden was talking about the first time he ever ran into prejudice. He’d grown up in Los Angeles in a mixed neighborhood and never had a single racial encounter until he was a baseball player in Georgia. The team bus stopped at a restaurant and all the players piled in. The man behind the counter asked McFadden if he’d like to come back and eat in the kitchen.

“I really didn’t think anything about it at first,” McFadden said. “I thought maybe they had another room in the back, someplace more comfortable. It just didn’t register. So I said, ‘No thanks, I’ll sit here.’”