Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (59 page)

It was an incredible spring. I was in terrific shape, worked harder than anybody in camp, pitched 13 scoreless innings—and was
released!
I had suspected things might be difficult back on the first day when farm director Henry Aaron told the press I was there only because the owner invited me. Henry hasn’t been a fan of mine since we were on the Dick Cavett show together and he attacked my book and then admitted he hadn’t read it.

Strangely, after I was cut, I didn’t panic or get angry as I might have in the past. Instead, I felt calm and somehow in control. What’s hard to believe is that I was feeling this way because of what I was getting in the mail. Every other day I’d receive a letter from Paula which contained, among other things, some fables and poems she would make up. Her letters were not only warm, but very educational. The stories were simple but their effect on me was profound. And she seemed to sense exactly what I needed to know.

One of her fables was about a group of people watching three men challenged by the ocean waves. The first man angrily tried to stop the waves with his fists, flailing about until he drowned. The second man stubbornly built elaborate barricades which the water eventually demolished. The third man sat and thought for a while. Then he carved a wooden board which he took into the ocean and used to ride the waves, dipping and swaying, using the force of the water to his advantage. The people thought this was remarkably clever and elected him their king.

And this was
before
I got released. When Aaron gave me the bad news I didn’t argue or complain. I told him very nicely that I respected his judgment but if he didn’t mind I was flying to Atlanta that afternoon to speak with Ted Turner. After a friendly chat, in which I compared the baseball establishment to the yachting establishment, Ted smiled and said he would find a place for me.

Let me say a word here about Ted Turner, the maverick baseball owner who gives other mavericks a chance. In person, this guy is hard to believe. For one thing he doesn’t act like a millionaire yachtsman who owns two sports teams and the world’s first 24-hour cable news television network. He’s a regular guy who you’re likely to catch walking down the hall wearing jeans and a work shirt and a railroad engineer’s hat.

And Ted will talk to anybody. At the ballpark, instead of sitting in some sky box like the other owners, Ted sits down by the dugout and shoots the bull with the fans. In this high-pitched voice that sounds like Rhett Butler with a head cold, he’ll talk about any subject from military preparedness (he’s for it) to the high cost of third basemen (he’s against it). But he listens to people and he remembers their names. If a fan or an usher comes by with a good idea Ted will write it down and promise to do something about it. And he will.

The only other baseball man who comes close to Turner in imagination and spirit is former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, the original maverick who sat with the fans in the bleachers. And their rustic personal styles are also similar. When Veeck told me I had earned a shot at his Knoxville farm team he was sitting on the grass in spring training massaging the stump of his peg leg. “If you dust off old junk sometimes you come up with a gem,” he told me as he squashed a lighted cigarette butt into a knothole on the wooden peg.

The Braves decided I could pitch batting practice for their AAA farm team in Richmond, Virginia. This was like Br’er Rabbit getting thrown into the briar patch. The Richmond pitching coach was my old friend Johnny Sain, who also happens to be the best teacher in baseball. (Astute readers will not be surprised to learn that John is in the minors. In the coaching business, loyalty to the manager is more important than ability. The best qualification a coach can have is to be the manager’s drinking buddy. John drinks milk shakes and is loyal to pitchers.)

For five weeks I threw batting practice waiting for somebody to get a sore arm, but it never happened. What did happen was that the Atlanta Braves came to town for an exhibition game against their top farm team. And Ted Turner said I should pitch for Richmond. This generated considerable laughter among the Richmond players, including myself. I hadn’t pitched in a game since spring training and the Braves were a month into their season with four guys batting over .300. Not only that, but my pitching arsenal consisted of an uncertain knuckleball and a little sinker that was only two weeks old.

But I had a few things going for me that nobody knew about. Like, I understood how to get out of my own way. It’s hard to explain but as it applies to pitching, it means that instead of thinking about the mechanics of the knuckleball, as I had been doing, I thought about nothing and just let it happen. I had forgotten that my unconscious knew a lot more about pitching than my conscious.

I got this strange idea about pitching from a book about archery sent to me by someone who knew nothing about either sport. Along with her letters, Paula was now sending me books, one of which was
Zen and the Art of Archery
. This was a helluva pen pal. She wrote me letters and I called her on the telephone. We were starting to have some long conversations.

On May 10, 1978, in front of the second largest crowd in the history of Parker Field (they were standing in roped-off sections of the outfield), I got out of the way and let my knuckleball do its thing against the Atlanta Braves. In the seventh inning I left the game to a standing ovation with a 3–1 lead, having struck out seven of the big boys, including Jeff Burroughs (.416), the National League’s hottest hitter. It was my greatest night ever in a baseball uniform. My reward was a contract with their AA farm team in Savannah, Georgia. I had made it to the next plateau.

Mesmerizing the Atlanta Braves was unexpected, but it was nothing compared to what was happening with the rest of my life. I was feeling happy and peaceful for the first time in longer than I could remember.

Was it possible to fall in love through the mail with a college professor you met at a department store? I wouldn’t believe a movie like that. Maybe I’m old fashioned but it seemed to me that before a guy fell in love he ought to have spent at least three days with that person. Which is how it happened that Paula Kurman, Ph.D., came to be sitting in the wooden bleachers in Charlotte, North Carolina, wearing basic silk and pearls. That was the weekend my teammates stopped kidding me about blue-haired old ladies.

Being a trained observer, it did not take Paula very long to grasp the significance of baseball. “Obviously,” she said, “one of the cardinal rules is: When in doubt, spit. Everybody spits. It’s like punctuation.” She was also very adept at picking up the signs. “I’m not sure what it means,” she said, “but whenever the ball is not in play, somebody grabs his crotch.”

And she made some other fascinating discoveries. Because she didn’t know enough about baseball to watch the game as a fan, Paula watched the things she did know about, like nonverbal behavior. She noticed that each pitcher went through his own series of mannerisms before every windup and, what’s more, that minute differences in this routine appeared to be connected to the success or failure of the pitch. In any case, she said, it was clear that the totality of a pitch began many moments before the windup. Of course, it may be a few years before baseball takes advantage of this information. I can just hear pitching coaches saying, “O.K., men, let’s go to work on those mannerisms.”

I was learning new ways to win games without even picking up a ball and new ways to feel about myself as a person. It was a very enlightening summer.

And it was a lot of fun. The Savannah Braves were the youngest team in the league but I felt more at home with them than I ever had with the Yankees, the Pilots, or the Astros. Once the players got used to me I became the team guru. I was the fountain of wisdom on everything from pitching and finances to careers and love lives. I’d sit around my room at night with guys like Roger Alexander and Stu Livingstone; we’d make some popcorn on my hotplate, and have a few beers and shoot the bull. It was a kind of closeness which had been impossible for me to achieve years ago. At age 39 I was finally one of the boys. It was late in coming but it was sufficient.

We had a great manager named Bobby Dews. Bobby also happened to be 39 years old and going through a few changes of his own. He used to be a wild man. The players told stories about the time he got ejected from a game and took third base with him on the way out. Which made a lot more sense than the time he kicked dirt on home plate and broke his toe. When I played for Dews at Savannah he had calmed down a lot. I asked him why. “I finally got to the point where I felt confident and didn’t have to bluff anybody anymore,” he said. “Then I got to know some umpires and found out that a couple of them were actually human.” At the end of that summer Bobby got called up to the major leagues. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

It was a helluva ballclub, too. What the Savannah Braves lacked in ability we made up in spirit. One night we lost a game in Knoxville, Tennessee, 17–1, got on a bus and drove all night to Montgomery, Alabama, and kicked their ass 10–2. The memories of those bus rides will be with me forever. We’d play poker by flashlight on the back of the bus ’till three o’clock in the morning and then stagger into a truck stop four hours later for breakfast.

It was a wonderful summer but it was not without a great deal of pain. My wife and I decided to separate.

This was a major and frightening step into the unknown for both of us. Aside from the hurt of ending a 15-year relationship, there were all those questions. What would it do to the kids? Would they think they were from a broken home, or would this be called a rearranged family network? What would our family and friends think? We hardly talked about our problems to each other much less discussed them with others. And we had this public image of togetherness, reinforced by
Ball Four
, which increased the pressure to keep up a facade. And finally, was this the right decision for the two of us? Should we stay and try to work it out and maybe settle for some compromise, or would a clean break heal quicker? Whether we had guessed right or wrong, only the future would tell.

My life was changing and I felt somehow older, without feeling old. Whatever was happening inside my head produced terrific results on the mound. I pitched a one-hitter, a two-hitter, and a thirteen-inning shutout, pitching in a-hundred-degree heat after all-night bus rides and with two days’ rest. In three months I had won twelve games and pitched the league’s least experienced team to a division championship. In September the Atlanta Braves called me up to the major leagues. I had made it to Emerald City.

THE BIG LEAGUES

When I walked into Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, I was floating as if in a dream. How large it was compared to the tiny stadiums I’d been playing in for two years. When I got into my uniform with my old No. 56 on it and went out to the field, I could feel my heart pounding under my shirt. And what a feeling it was standing on the mound listening to the national anthem, waiting to pitch my first game. I felt like I was standing on top of Mount Everest. I thought to myself how lucky I was to experience this twice in the same lifetime.

My first pitch to Dodger second baseman Davey Lopes was a called strike and the crowd cheered. Four pitches later, with a full count, Lopes struck out swinging on a dancing knuckler and the crowd roared. I felt like Rocky. After I got the next two hitters on easy outs, I ran to the dugout and threw my arms up in a victory salute. In the fourth inning the Dodgers broke up my perfect game, my no hitter, and my ballgame by scoring five runs. But the day was more important than the game and it had been extraordinary fun. I laughed a lot—until I read the newspapers the next day.

“He showed me nothing,” said Lopes. “Nothing.” “It was a circus,” said Reggie Smith. “It was like batting against Bozo the Clown,” said Rick Monday. “The Commissioner should investigate this,” said Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson. “We’re in a pennant race. Bouton should have to pitch against the Giants and Reds, too.”

Incredible! Sparky was losing a pennant, so I understood about him but why were the Dodgers so angry? My phone was ringing off the hook from reporters wanting to know what I thought. I didn’t know what to say except that I felt sorry for the Dodgers who were obviously suffering from sun stroke.

In his next game, Bozo the Clown beat the San Francisco Giants, 4–1. The pennant-contending San Francisco Giants. It would have been 4–0, but I threw a double play ball into centerfield. After the game, reporters asked me if I won because it was windy. I said that was it. The wind blew hot dog wrappers around the field and the batters couldn’t see the ball. I had won my first major-league game since July 11, 1970. I couldn’t wait for the reviews.

“Next time I’m going to bring up my little boy to bat against him,” said Bill Madlock, who was hitless in two at bats. “It was the most humiliating experience of my life,” said Darrell Evans, who had a pop fly double in three at bats. “He was terrible,” said Mike Ivie, who was hitless in three at bats. I almost forgot who won the game.

Johnny Sain told me later I had revolutionized the sport by inventing a new way to judge baseball ability. Results in a game didn’t count anymore. You just ask the opposition what they think.

Maybe the hitters were confused by how I got them out. Players today don’t mind being outmuscled, but they hate being outsmarted. It’s a macho thing. When Atlanta relief pitcher Gene Garber ended Pete Rose’s hitting streak in 1979 by getting him out with a change-up, Rose got mad. He said Garber should have “challenged” him with a fastball. I used to challenge the hitters when I was young. Now I couldn’t, of course, but more significantly, I didn’t have to. That summer I felt more in control on a pitcher’s mound than I ever have in my life. All the stuff I needed was inside my head.

It wasn’t my lack of speed which threw them off, as the hitters claimed. All season long these guys clobber batting practice pitchers (usually old coaches) who throw the ball even slower than I do. No, what mostly did them in was their own conviction that they ought to be knocking this old sportscaster out of the box in the first inning. I understood that the duel between pitcher and hitter was a relationship and I was able to use their anger to my advantage. By feeling instead of thinking, my body chose the proper pitch, speed, and location. All I had to do was execute. It’s like bullfighting, where the bull knows the fighter is out there but he can’t quite get ahold of him.