Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (67 page)

Of course there were the occasional humiliations. Like the time I was resting on a table in the locker room before a game and heard a visiting-team player who had just arrived ask where I was. “He’s taking a nap,” said one of my teammates. Not the kind of thing that strikes fear in your opponent. Then there was the occasional home run ball I’d have to autograph after the game. I’d sign it, “To Jason, nice home run*, Jim Bouton.” Then underneath that I’d write, “*aluminum bat,” to put things in perspective.

The Twilight League games were played at Bleeker Stadium, a concrete-and-wood WPA relic from the 1940s. I pitched for the Heflin Builders, which morphed into Mama’s Pizza when the sponsor changed. Occasionally scouts would come to the games with their notebooks and stopwatches. I knew they weren’t looking at the old right-hander, but I sometimes fantasized about what might happen if I really got my knuckleball going. I wasn’t the best pitcher in the league but I wasn’t bad either, armed with the knuckler and a few games under my belt.

To keep in shape I’d throw an orange rubber baseball against the wall down in our basement, which is pretty big. I marked off sixty feet, six inches, and drew a box on the cement for a strike zone. Then I set up a series of baffles with leftover plywood so the ball would bounce straight back to me without veering off into the furnace or the stairs. For twenty minutes a day I’d be down there throwing against the wall, imagining a hitter with a bat in his hands. That was the challenge: trying to find a little bit of the magic that had worked so well in my prime.

I’d come upstairs soaking wet, ready for the shower.

“Had a good one today,” I’d say to Paula, who had to listen to all those thumps against the wall. “I think my motion’s coming back!”

“Really?” she’d ask affectionately. “How terrific
were
you this morning, sweetheart?” Then she’d kiss the tip of my sweaty nose. Just wait until I win a few games, I would think to myself, and I get invited to pitch for a local professional minor-league team.

Paula actually came to about half the games. And not just to make sure I didn’t fall asleep on the drive home. She liked sitting in the stands and listening to the comments of people who didn’t know who she was.

“How old
is
he?” someone would ask.

“Pretty old,” some old guy would say. “I saw him pitch when I was a kid.”

If I pitched well, people would say, “How does he
do
it?” If I pitched poorly, the same people would say, “He should quit and give the younger players a chance. What’s he trying to prove?”

What
was
I trying to prove? I’m not sure exactly. Maybe I was trying to stay young, ward off my own mortality, or just feel connected to my past. All I knew for sure was that it was fun, and that it seemed worth doing for that alone. Every once in a while someone would mention the last line in
Ball Four
.

In any case, I was looking forward to the 1997 season. After having pitched Mama’s Pizza into the playoffs the year before, I had ended on a disastrous note by blowing an eight-run lead in a regional tournament. That was something I couldn’t ever remember having done before in my life, pro or amateur. I couldn’t wait until the next year to prove it was just a fluke.

I was in excellent shape after building a stone facade on the back of the house the previous fall and working out all winter. Just to make things interesting, and get some extra innings, I decided to pitch for
two
teams—Mama’s and the Saugerties Dutchmen, a well-known independent team from the Hudson Valley. It mattered little that when the Dutchmen’s skipper, twenty-seven-year-old Kiko Romaguera, was told I’d be trying out, he had said, “I never heard of him.” The doubts I had lived with that winter would be banished in the spring.

And I would do it in Cooperstown, New York.

It was early May. The Dutchmen were playing the Otsego Macs at legendary Doubleday Field, just behind the Baseball Hall of Fame. The very same field I had played on with the Yankees back in 1965 when we beat the Philadelphia Phillies 7–4 in the annual Hall of Fame exhibition game.

It’s about a three-hour drive from our home, across the Hudson River, and through the Catskill Mountains to Cooperstown. Paula and I had left at nine in the morning for a mid-afternoon game, which was scheduled to begin as soon as the twelve o’clock game ended. Doubleday Field was rented out like a catering hall. We arrived in plenty of time for me to relax and take a nap.

This was my kind of game. It was springtime; I had always done well in the spring. It was a beautiful stadium. The sun was shining. The crowd was buzzing. I was as ready as I could possibly be.

And I never got past the second inning.

I don’t even remember exactly what happened anymore. The first inning was a fiasco, and it went downhill from there. It began with some walks and a few wild pitches, degenerated into a series of line drives and cannon shots, and culminated in an assortment of mammoth blasts. A late arriver might have thought he’d stumbled into the fireworks display.

This is where the old credentials can really hurt you. Out of respect, Kiko was reluctant to come out to the mound and remove me from the game. I never had a chance to use Fred Talbot’s great line, “What kept you?”

It wasn’t just a case of not finding my rhythm. The knuckler was moving, it just wasn’t moving sharply enough. It was like a balloon up there, floating instead of jumping. There was no pop, no bite. In spite of all those workouts I just didn’t have the arm strength anymore. I had reached a new, and lower, plateau in my life. I wasn’t simply getting older. I was getting old.

When you’re twenty-seven, a bad outing is just a bad outing; chalk it up to a lack of preparation, inexperience, or just give credit to the other team. When you’re
fifty
-seven, however, a bad outing becomes an embarrassment. “Get him out of there. Put him out of his misery.” It’s funny how, with a few swings of the bat by guys named Justin or Tyler, you can be transformed from a guy who just loves to play into a self-deluded old man.

If I could pitch so badly in
my kind of game
, what hope was there for the regular games? In all my years playing amateur ball, this was only the second time that I felt I was spoiling the game for my teammates. The first was that tournament game I had blown to end the previous season. It was a terrible feeling. And I didn’t want to feel it again. So at age fifty-seven, I retired for good. I should have quit at my uniform number—fifty-six.

That’s fifty years of baseball since I started playing as a kid in Rochelle Park, New Jersey. Half a century!

Nothing ever stopped me from playing ball.

Until I stopped myself.

It was a long ride home, where we had one of those milestone conversations. Paula talked about the significance of my decision; she understood that this was not a small thing for me. I focused on the lighter aspects; no more wicked come-backers in dimly lit ballparks. No more wondering what rain might be doing to a pitcher’s mound somewhere.

And I seemed to be okay about it.

Until two weeks later, when I went down to the basement to get something, and I spotted my baseball glove sitting on a stool, with the orange rubber ball in the pocket, like they were waiting for me to play with them again. Suddenly, Puff the Magic Dragon popped into my head and I could feel the tears starting to come. So I went to find Paula because I don’t like to cry when she’s not holding me.

Instead of pitching, I’m dancing now.

That’s ballroom dancing, as in fox-trot, tango and waltz, not to mention swing, rumba, cha-cha, two-step, salsa, and whatever other new dance comes along that Paula finds out about. Granted, it doesn’t involve a ball—except in the name—so why would I be interested? Because, as Paula so eloquently communicated to me, dancing is a sport. There are competitions. You can beat other people.

Well, okay then.

We had started back in 1993, shortly before Hollis’ marriage to the Dutchman Gert Jan van der Hoeven. (He has two brothers, Robert and Paul; she has to marry the one whose name takes practice.) Anyway, Paula didn’t want us (read
me
) to be embarrassed on the dance floor. So we took a few lessons at a local Fred Astaire Dance Studio in New Jersey. And we (read
Paula
) liked it so much we continued to take lessons even
after
we thrilled and amazed everybody at the wedding.

The trick to learning how to dance at those chain studios, we discovered, is to pay for private lessons, which are five times more expensive but twenty times faster. Then what you have to do is pick out a few dances that you want to learn and insist on focusing on only
one
of those dances at each lesson so that you can lock it in. Otherwise, they’ll try to teach you a tiny fraction of a dozen different dances at each lesson, that you can never remember, so it takes years of lessons before you get to be any good, which is the whole idea. So if it turns out that you like it, negotiate a package of private lessons and
don’t sign any contracts
.

A big problem with beginners is that the woman is often the better dancer, but the man is supposed to lead, ballroom dancing being an old-fashioned enterprise. So what happens is that women try to lead the men into initiating the proper steps.

This was a big problem for Paula and me until we got some marvelous advice from Pierre Dulaine of the American Ballroom Theater: “The man’s job is to lead, and the woman’s job is to follow his mistakes.” Precisely! We are now working on the part about the funny looks whenever I do something weird.

The best thing to happen to our dancing, and one of the best things in our lives, was to meet Marge Champion—of Marge and Gower dance-team fame—also known as America’s Dancing Sweetheart. On the classic movie channel, Marge is the one with the huge smile, doing all the tricky steps in those Broadway musicals from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. In person she’s a nuclear-powered icon, performer, arts activist, board member, world traveler, mother, grandmother, and dear friend.

As the best ballroom dancer to have pitched for the Yankees—as far as anyone knows—I’m often featured as Marge’s dance partner at local fund-raisers. I’m like the talking dog; it’s not that the dog speaks well, it’s that he speaks at all. Before Marge and I do our number we have to practice in order to look smooth, but more important, so that I don’t hurt Marge. Ballroom is not your basic grab-ass dancing, but moving-across-the-floor dancing. Done right, it’s like flying. My job is to keep from plunging us into a nosedive.

Sunday, June 21, 1998.

The phone rang at eight in the morning. I picked it up.

“Happy Father’s Day.”

“Thank you, David,” I said.

“Did you see
The New York Times
this morning?”

“The Times?”
I said. “No, we haven’t been down to the general store yet.”

“Well, there’s something you have to read,” he said.

“We’ll get it later,” I said. “We just woke up.”

“I think you should read it now,” David insisted.

“We’ll read it after breakfast,” I said. “Whatever it is can wait.”

“No, it can’t,” he said. There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll read it to you myself.”

Mystified, I motioned for Paula to pick up the other phone.

“It takes up half the page,” said David. “There’s a big picture of you and Mickey Mantle and another smaller picture of you… and Laurie.”

I felt a familiar ache in my chest.

“The headline is,” said David, “‘For Bouton, Let Bygones Be Bygones’.”

This made no sense. I hadn’t spoken to any reporters lately.

“Then there’s a smaller headline,” said David, who was having difficulty speaking. “It says…” David seemed to be choking back tears.

“It says…,” continued David, “‘Son’s Wish on Father’s Day… Is to See Dad and Yogi Stand with Old-Timers.’”

Son’s wish?

“By… Michael Bouton,” said David.

Michael? When did he do this?
The New York Times?
I was too stunned to process it.

Then David began to read his brother’s letter over the phone, haltingly at times, as follows: