Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (55 page)

Right after the book came out I heard from a few old teammates. Tommy Davis sent me a note which started off with, “Hello, Big Mouth.” Tommy said that he was offered four movie contracts. “After reading your book, everybody thinks I’m some kind of actor.”

Jim Pagliaroni dropped me a line saying that he loved the book and if they ever made a movie out of
Ball Four
he wanted to play himself. Pag said he would be perfect for the part of a “deranged, perverted, moral degenerate, iconoclastic, loving husband and father.”

They never made a movie from
Ball Four
but it did become a TV situation comedy. It was on the CBS network in the fall of ’76 before it was mercifully cancelled after five weeks. The show was created by me and a couple of friends: television critic Marvin Kitman and sportswriter Vic Ziegel. We wanted “Ball Four,” the TV show, to be like “M.A.S.H.,” only in a locker room. Instead it turned out more like “Gilligan’s Island” in baseball suits. The story was all about a mythical team called the Washington Americans. We were first in the American League and last in the hearts of our countrymen, according to the Nielsen ratings.

The characters for the sitcom were loosely drawn from people in
Ball Four
. We had a tightfisted general manager and a pain-in-the-ass coach. We also had a big strong guy named Rhino who couldn’t wear contact lenses “because if he blinked he’d break them.” Rhino was from a small town in Wisconsin where, “we only talk for awhile, then we start to hit.” To make the show as realistic as possible I suggested we get the guy who inspired the character, Gene Brabender. After a few calls we located Bender in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where he was fishing. I felt sorry for the fish.

So Bender flew into New York and it was good to see him again. I assured him it was a small speaking part and all he had to do was look big. He did a good job, too, but surprisingly, he didn’t look right for the part. It’s funny, but on stage in front of the cameras, Bender looked smaller and somehow vulnerable, not as fearsome as I remembered him in the Seattle Pilot clubhouse.

The part went instead to former Oakland Raider football player Ben Davidson, who turned out to be the best character in the show. Brabender flew back to Wisconsin where he owns a dairy farm. Unfortunately, Bender was in and out of New York so fast we didn’t have time to talk about anything. I wanted to kid him about the time he nailed my shoes to the floor.

A few years after the book came out I had lunch with Marvin Milkes, of all people. Not only that, but Marvin invited
me
—and
he
paid! This was when I was a sportscaster and he was the general manager for a hockey team called the New Jersey Golden Blades. Marvin told me he liked the book because it helped open a few doors for him. He said wherever he goes, people ask him if he’s the Marvin Milkes in
Ball Four
.

Then, believe it or not, Marvin offered to pay me the $50 for that Gatorade I bought years ago. Of course I didn’t accept, but we had a good laugh about it. The last I heard Marvin was working for a soccer team in Los Angeles. I made no connection between Marvin’s recent generosity and the fact that the Golden Blades went bankrupt.

What about the rest of my teammates, I wondered. What were they doing now? To find out, I hired a researcher to help me track them down. Locating the Seattle Pilots, in particular, was not an easy task. The team had existed for only one year and, it turns out, nobody wants to claim them. The Milwaukee Brewers disdain their Seattle origins and the people in Seattle only care about the new Mariners. The old Pilots are orphans, a team without a city.

One of the Pilots, John O’Donoghue, was impossible to find. We reached his mother by telephone, and she said he was in another country on business but she didn’t know what country or what business. Sounds like old John might be working for the CIA. Like the team he once played for, he just disappeared without leaving a forwarding address.

The Pilots left town but Ray Oyler didn’t. Made to feel welcome for the first time in his career by the existence of the Ray Oyler fan club, Oyler bought a home in Seattle. Today he works in town as a salesman, a local hero without a team.

I got a chuckle out of Steve Barber’s new job. He owns a car care center in Las Vegas. He has a bunch of cars all lined up getting cortisone shots, whirlpool massage, and diathermy treatment.

Dooley Womack, for whom I was once traded, is a carpet salesman in Columbia, South Carolina. I got a funny letter about Dooley just the other day. It seems that an all-night disc jockey in Syracuse, New York, asked his listeners recently, “Who or what was, or is, a Dooley Womack?” Some of the more interesting responses were: a guided missile, a computer, a famous sunken ship, a mixed drink, a New Wave rock ‘n’ roll band, the first Polish astronaut, an old car like the Edsel, a former Miss America, one of Captain Hook’s pirates, a comic strip character, a type of dance, a CB term, a gospel singer, or one of Howard Hughes’ airplanes. After about 30 minutes somebody called in to say he was a ballplayer. I like to think that
Ball Four
added to Dooley’s fame.

THE DEVIANT

The aftermath of the book hasn’t all been fun. I got a hint that some players might not like it shortly after it came out. Someone calling himself an ex-teammate sent me a newspaper clipping critical of
Ball Four
. There was a note scrawled across it, which said that my writing would, “gag a maggot.” I can’t be sure, but I think it may have been Fred Talbot. Who else could have come up with the maggot line?

And there have been a few unpleasant encounters, like the one with my main man, Joe Schultz. A year after the book came out I was a sportscaster from New York covering spring training in Florida. Before a game one day I spotted Joe Schultz, then a Detroit Tiger coach, hitting fungos to some infielders. I hadn’t spoken to Joe in almost two years. Naturally, I had to go over and say hello.

I half expected him to tell me I was throwing too much out in the bullpen. Instead, he said he didn’t want to talk to me, that he hadn’t read my book, but he’d heard about it. When I tried to tell Joe that he came off as a good guy, Billy Martin, the Tiger manager at the time, who’s a bad guy, came running across the field hollering for me to get the hell out (this was before Martin wrote
his
tell-all book). Because I’ve grown accustomed to the shape of my nose, I got the hell out. The sad part is that I never had a chance to invite Joe to go out and pound the ol’ Budweiser.

Billy Martin probably never read the book, either, but like Joe and many others, he believed the book was somehow a bad thing. The most incredible thing to me about the book has been the overwhelming negative reaction by so many players and coaches. What’s more, they’re still angry, even though the books that have come after mine make
Ball Four
, as an exposé, read like
The Bobbsey Twins Go To The Seashore
.

Why so much anger? It couldn’t have been that I said Mickey Mantle hung out in bars. Last time I flipped on the TV there was Mantle, in a bar, bragging about how much beer he used to drink. He can’t even make up his mind which beer he likes best.

It couldn’t be that I said Whitey Ford used to scuff up the baseballs to make them do tricks on the way to the plate. In his own book, Whitey recently went into even greater detail about how he used to doctor the balls. Maybe these guys are mad because they wanted the stories for
their
books.

There had to be some explanation for the intensity and longevity of baseball’s collective anger toward me. And I think I know now what the answer is; a behavioral scientist explained it to me.

In any human group, family, tribe (or baseball team), there are norms—shared expectations of behavior. Any member who deviates from these norms calls into question the basic values of the group. And groups don’t like to have their basic values questioned. It makes them
nervous
.

A famous rule of major-league baseball is posted on every clubhouse wall: “What you say here, what you do here, let it stay here, when you leave here.” I broke that rule, which makes me a deviant, sociologically speaking. Studies have shown that in order for rules to exist, deviant members must be punished by the group. This is usually done according to the following criteria: The more primary a group is felt to be by its members, the more violent the punishment will be. (Many players think of baseball as family.) The less status a deviant member has, the less tolerant the group will be toward him. (If Mickey Mantle had written
Ball Four
he would have gotten away with it. A relief pitcher on the Seattle Pilots has no business being a deviant.) In addition, the more authoritarian a group’s personality is, the less tolerant it will be toward a deviant. (This explains about the Commissioner and the owners.)

However, I am happy to report that while the deviant shakes everybody up, he performs valuable functions for the group. For one thing, the deviant relieves tensions by acting as an acceptable outlet for group frustrations (very helpful in baseball where only a few can play at the top, and of those, only half do well at the other half’s expense). Second, the deviant helps the group unite in times of uncertainty and change. If group members can’t agree on important issues (salaries, contracts, free agency, etc.), at least they can be united against the deviant. Third, uniting against the deviant by asserting common ideals gives group members the reassurance of a solid front and strengthens their sense of worthiness (especially important to men making large sums of money playing a game).

Of course, I didn’t plan to be baseball’s resident deviant but I’m glad to help out. It’s the least I can do for a game which has given me so much pleasure. I still serve in that capacity, probably because I’m doing such a good job. Somehow though, I don’t think I’ll get a plaque from the Commissioner.

THE COMMISSIONER

Bowie Kuhn still hasn’t forgiven me for not apologizing when
Ball Four
first came out. I remember he called me into his office, which was decorated in Early Authority—paneled walls with pictures of presidents and a large desk between two American flags. The Commissioner said he was going to do me a big favor. He said he knew that I realized I had made a terrible mistake and all I had to do was simply sign a statement he had prepared. The statement said, in effect, that the book was a bunch of lies and it blamed everything on my editor, Lenny Shecter.

When I politely told the Commissioner what he could do with his statement, he turned a color which went very nicely with the wood paneling. He then spent the next three hours extracting a promise that I would never reveal what went on at our meeting. The sanctity of the clubhouse is exceeded only by the sanctity of the Commissioner’s office.

Observers of the Commissioner, over the years, may wonder where he gets his arrogance. I think the problem lies with his title “Commissioner of Baseball.” The guy thinks he’s the ruler of an entire sport. But since he is hired and paid by the owners and not the players or the fans, he should more accurately be described as the Person in Charge of Protecting the Financial Interests of the Twenty-Six Business Groups which Make Profits from Baseball.

And speaking of money, you may be wondering what I think about these enormous salaries being paid to players today. Aside from thinking I was born too soon, here’s how I feel: A million dollars a year is a lot of money to get paid for hitting a ball with a stick. Based on contribution to society, ballplayers are grossly overpaid. Teachers, policemen, and firemen should get more money. But we live in a society that says a man is worth what someone else is willing to pay him. Is Robert Redford worth three million dollars a picture? Is Barbra Streisand worth five million dollars a song? Evidently somebody thinks so. In baseball, the income is there; the only question is who’s going to get it. My position is that while the players don’t deserve all that money, the owners don’t deserve it even more.

The irony is that if the owners hadn’t abused the players so badly, we wouldn’t have gone out and hired Marvin Miller and the players wouldn’t be free agents today. If the owners had just doubled the minimum salary, say to $14,000, and given us some extra meal money, we would have been more than content to let things ride. Most ballplayers had no idea what kind of money they could be making. I remember sitting in the Yankee clubhouse while the player representative asked each of us what we thought the minimum salary should be. This was when it was $7,000. The players were all saying numbers like $8,000, $9,000, or $10,000. When it came to me I said $25,000 and everybody just laughed.

Now, thanks to Marvin Miller, the laugh is on the owners. Marvin showed the players how to become free agents and the owners are showing the players how much they’re worth.

Since they can’t use the reserve clause anymore, the owners are looking for the next best way to hold down salaries. (What good is having a monopoly if you can’t make enormous profits?) That’s what the “compensation” issue is really about. If a team that signs a free agent is required to compensate the team he came from, free agents won’t be worth much. That’s why there is likely to be a strike over the issue and if there is a strike, public opinion will be important.

Which is where the Baseball Commissioner comes in. Besides censoring books, it’s the Commissioner’s job to go around telling the fans, the media, the Congress, and anyone who will listen that the owners are losing money and that free agency will destroy “competitive balance” leading to bankruptcy, cancer, jock itch, and the end of the Free World as we know it.

The Commissioner has forgotten his humble beginnings. Twelve years ago, when the owners were looking for a new Commissioner, they met at an airport hotel near Chicago so they could fly in and out in a few hours. But instead of taking a few hours, the meeting lasted all day and half the night because different cliques of owners promoted their own man, each of who was viewed as a threat by the other owners. After about a thousand cups of coffee, and maybe half as many ballots, they gave up and went home without selecting a Commissioner.