Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (8 page)

Mesa

Today Joe Schultz said, “Men, you got to remember to touch all the bases.” The occasion was a meeting after our glorious 19–4 victory in which one of the guys on the Cleveland club missed third base and was called out. So the lesson for today was “Touch those bases. Especially first.”

A couple of things about spring training. Mike Ferraro, an infielder, was with the Yankees last spring. Bobby Cox got a big winter buildup and was supposed to have the third-base job there, but Ferraro had such a hot spring (sportswriters voted him the Yankees’ outstanding rookie; he hit .351, Cox hit .186) they had to start the season with him at third. They let him play eleven games and when he didn’t burn down any buildings they benched him and sent him to Syracuse. He feels that they never intended to use him at all but were embarrassed into it and were not unhappy when he didn’t do well.

Then there was Duke Carmel. He was supposed to be the second coming of Joe DiMaggio, and they really gave him a good shot. But he didn’t hit in Ft. Lauderdale, and I remember Whitey Ford saying to him, “Well, Duke, it looks like you just can’t hit in southern Florida.” We made a trip to Tampa and he didn’t hit there either. “Well, Duke, it looks like you’re just not a Florida hitter,” Whitey Ford said. Then we played a few exhibition games in the South and Carmel didn’t get a hit. “Well, Duke,” Ford said, “it looks like you just can’t hit south of the Mason-Dixon line.” When the season started it turned out Duke couldn’t hit north of the Mason-Dixon line either, and finally he was sent down when he was about 0-for-57. If they hadn’t wanted him to make it so bad they never would have held on to him that long. But they’d spent all winter building him up. And they’d built up Bobby Cox the same way. They wanted Cox to make it, not Ferraro.

The other thing is a story Johnny Sain once told me. Sain is not only the greatest pitching coach who ever lived, he’s a man who tells the truth. And what he says, believe it or not, is that sportswriters actually play a part in deciding who’s going to make the team. Sain said he sat in on many meetings where the performance of the individual player hadn’t changed, but there had been two or three articles written about him and immediately the coaches and management tended to look at him in a new light. Sain says if there’s not a lot of difference between players, the job will go to the guy who seems to be getting the most attention in the newspapers. Power of the press.

Tomorrow I’ll be pitching three innings or less against Oakland, and I’m a little worried. My fastball isn’t ready yet and my knuckleball is just marginal. Yet, as several people have pointed out to me, I need to accumulate some good statistics to throw at them when spring training is over. I can’t say, well, I’ve been working on my knuckleball all spring and that’s why I got clobbered.

My wife reminds me that I never got clobbered in Seattle when I was first working on my knuckleball and she suggests I go with it all the way. I give her opinion a lot of weight. We were both freshmen at Western Michigan when we met and all she would talk about was baseball. When I told her I was going out for the freshman team, she said, “You don’t have to do that because of me.”

I didn’t tell her it wasn’t because of her. And then, when she first saw me pitch she said, “That’s a big-league pitcher if I ever saw one.” So she’s a hell of a scout. Knuckleballs. Hmm.

I’ve had some pretty good advice from my family. My dad especially. He helped pick the college I went to and got me into it. My services as a pitcher were not exactly in great demand. I pitched a no-hitter in my senior year in high school but I was only 5–10 and 150 pounds. My dad got a look at the Western Michigan campus, fell in love with the beauty of it, thought I’d love the baseball stadium and had me apply. I didn’t hear anything for a long while, but my dad was real cool. He took a bunch of my clippings—all six of them—had copies made and sent them to the baseball coach there, Charley Maher. He wrote, “Here’s a fellow that may help our Broncos in the future,” and signed it “A Western Michigan baseball fan.” A week later I was accepted.

It was my dad’s cool that got me the bonus from the Yankees too. I’d been playing with an amateur team in Chicago in the summer of 1958 and nobody noticed me much until I pitched two good games in the tournament at the end of the season. I mean scouts would walk up to me and ask where they could find a player, but it was always somebody else. After those two games, though, the scouts were buzzing around me, wanting to take me to dinner, and there were a lot of rendezvous in cars and a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and it was all a big thrill to me.

When I got home at about nine o’clock my mom and dad were playing bridge with some friends, and when I walked in the door I said, “Dad, you’re not going to believe it, but I pitched the best game of the tournament and the scouts want to sign me. Dad, they’re talking about real big money.”

My dad looked at his cards. “Two no trump,” he said.

He didn’t really believe me. Then the phone rang and I said, “Dad, that’s a scout on the phone, I know it is. What should I tell him?”

“Tell him $50,000,” he said. “Three spades.”

He still didn’t believe me. I went over to the phone, and sure enough it was a scout from Philadelphia. “My dad says $50,000,” I said. The scout said, “Fine. We want you to fly to Philadelphia and work out with the team.”

That ended the card game.

I flew to Philadelphia, and it was great. I met Robin Roberts and Puddin’ Head Jones and a lot of the other players. And they put me up at the Hotel Warwick, which had these leather-padded elevators that impressed me tremendously. I ordered a $10 meal, including three or four appetizers and a giant filet mignon. But I felt kind of guilty because all the time I was in Philadelphia it rained and I didn’t get a chance to throw a single pitch. I went home and never heard from them again. For a long time I worried that it was because I spent so much on that meal.

I also went to Detroit, and I remember meeting Al Kaline and seeing Ted Williams smack five in a row into the upper deck in batting practice. I threw on the sidelines for the Tigers and all they would offer me was $10,000. I went home and talked it over with my dad and we decided the money the scouts had been talking was all a lot of baloney. Hardly any of the other clubs were interested anymore. I was discouraged, disappointed.

So my dad went to work on a form letter. “My son Jim is prepared to sign a major-league contract by Thanksgiving. If you are interested, please have your bid in by then.” He sent the letter to about half the major-league clubs. The only club we fooled was the Yankees.

Jerry Coleman came out to talk to us, and my dad was careful to have baseball-team letterheads strewn around as if we were up to our ears in offers. Coleman authorized the local scout, Art Stewart, to go up to $30,000, and it was laid out this way: I’d get a $5,000 bonus, $5,000 a year in salary over the next three years, and I’d get the remaining $10,000 if I made it to the major leagues. It came to $10,000 a year—if I made it. A lot of bonuses weren’t as big as they sounded.

But I was happy and my dad and I threw our arms around each other and congratulated each other on how smart we were to pull such a fast one on the New York Yankees. As it turned out I spent those three years in the minors and did make the Yankees, which means they made a pretty cheap investment. In recent years I’ve been kidding my dad about having sold me short in the first place and how a really astute father would have been able to get me at least $50,000 or $60,000.

Tempe

Before the game today Rollie Sheldon was talking about old-timers. It’s a funny thing, but athletes have improved tremendously through the years in every sport where performance can be objectively measured—track and field, swimming, etc. Yet in other sports, especially boxing and baseball, there are always people who say the old-timers were better—even unmatched. I don’t believe that, and I was very interested when Sheldon pointed out some figures in the Hall of Fame book. Like, old “Hoss” Radbourne, who played before the turn of the century. He pitched the last 27 games of the season for his team and won 26 of them. Old Hoss was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 168 pounds. Some hoss! Pony is more like it.

Some of the other heights and weights in the book were great. Wilbert Robinson was 5–9 and 215 pounds. Can you imagine what he looked like? Which reminds me of what Johnny Sain used to say on Old-Timers’ days: “There sure is a lot of bullshit going on in here today. The older they get the better they were when they were younger.”

Pitched my three innings today and gave up two runs. I consider it a good outing, however. I struck out the first hitter I faced on four pitches, all knuckleballs. (Don’t ask me who he was; hitters are just meat to me. When you throw a knuckleball you don’t have to worry about strengths and weaknesses. I’m not sure they mean anything, anyway.) I noticed again that I throw a better knuckleball in a game than I do on the sidelines. Maybe because the juices start flowing.

I gave up only one hit, a line-drive single after I got behind on the count to Danny Cater—2 and 0 on knuckleballs. I had to come in with a fastball and he hit it pretty good. The only other well-hit ball was off a knuckler, but it was on the ground and went for an out.

In the three innings I walked two, committed an error (hit Bert Campaneris in the head trying to throw him out at first), was hurt by a passed ball (a real good knuckler that broke in on a right-handed hitter, went off McNertney’s glove and back to the backstop) and a couple of sacrifice flies. Two unearned runs. So the old ERA starts off at zero.

In the shower room, Maglie told me he felt I needed my other pitches to set up my knuckleball. He also said he didn’t want me to become strictly a knuckleball pitcher and that I should work on my curve, fastball and change-up. “Even if you don’t throw it for a strike, just show it to them and let them know you have it,” he said. I was glad to hear that from Sal. No matter what Bobbie says, I don’t want to abandon myself completely to the knuckleball. I can still hear that lost chord.

Mesa

Game called on account of rain. So we sat around the clubhouse and shot the shit. We’re still in the process of feeling each other out. Because we’re all sort of strangers there are no old, smoldering problems. Mostly we know each other only from playing against each other. Ray Oyler was saying that here Gary Bell is lockering next to him and for the last eight years Ray’d been screaming across the field at him, “Hey, sweetheart. Where’s your purse, you big pussy?” Ray says it’s all very strange.

The only guy here I ever hollered at was Jim Gosger. He was always just a marginal player with the Kansas City A’s but he would hit me like he was Ted Williams. I used to scream at him, “What the hell are you doing hitting me? You’re not good enough.” And he’d say what hitters always say, even if you get them out. “Can’t understand how you get anybody out with that shit you throw!”

There are days, I suppose, when we are both right.

Little Mike asked me today when I would be pitching for the Seattle Angels and I had to tell him it wouldn’t be the Angels, it would be the Pilots. He got used to Angels last year when Seattle was a minor-league affiliate of the California Angels. It’s been rough on Mike. First it was the New York Yankees and then the Syracuse Chiefs, and just when he was getting used to Syracuse it was the Yankees again, and then the Seattle Angels, and now the Seattle Pilots. And let’s hope it won’t be the Vancouver Mounties. I’ve got to make this club and stay here all year if only so my son will know where his dad’s working.

Saw a diagram of Sicks’ Stadium (named after beer baron Emile Sicks) in Seattle today, and the power alleys—where the sluggers put away knuckleballs that don’t knuckle—are 345 feet. Yankee Stadium is over 100 feet deeper in left-center and over 60 feet deeper in right-center. No doubt about it, I’m going to be a threat in old Sicks’.

Tempe

Knuckleball to the rescue today. I pitched batting practice, and when I was warming up my elbow hurt on every pitch—except the knuckleball. It was impossible for me to get loose. So I gave each hitter three nothing fastballs and two knuckleballs, and the knucklers were really jumping. Afterward Sal came over and said, “It was really moving today.” That’s the first comment he’s had on the knuckleball. Maybe I can make him a believer.

I guess it wasn’t too good for my elbow, though. When I got through pitching it felt like somebody had set fire to it. I’ll treat it with aspirin, a couple every four hours or so.

I’ve tried a lot of other things through the years—like butazolidin, which is what they give to horses. And D.M.S.O.—dimethyl sulfoxide. Whitey Ford used that for a while. You rub it on with a plastic glove and as soon as it gets on your arm you can taste it in your mouth. It’s not available anymore, though. Word is it can blind you. I’ve also taken shots—novocain, cortisone and xylocaine. Baseball players will take anything. If you had a pill that would guarantee a pitcher 20 wins but might take five years off his life, he’d take it.

Reminds me of the dumb things I used to do when I was in high school. The idea in those days was that when your arm was overworked and inflamed you put heat on it. It is exactly the wrong thing to do. We did it anyway. First Atomic Balm, which is just about what you’d expect from the name. You wore that stuff in the shower and let the hot water run on it, as hot as you could stand it. Then there was this stuff called Heet! I’d paint that all over my arm and I’d lie on my bed in agony. Sometimes I actually burned off a layer of skin. Now
that’s
dedication.

A couple of things about sore arms. When I was throwing the kind of fastball that made my hat fall off people would ask me, “Jesus, doesn’t it hurt? It looks like your arm’s going to come off.” I thought it was a silly question because it felt just fine. But now when I try to throw that way it feels like all those people told me it should feel. It feels like my arm’s going to come off at the shoulder.