Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (2 page)

What’s interesting is that while the content of sports books has changed,
the process
for writing them remains the same. Where before a jock mouthed platitudes into a tape recorder for a few hours, now he tells raunchy stories into the recorder for a few hours. Sensationalism has become a substitute for banality. We’ve gone from assembly-line gee-whiz books to assembly-line exposés.

And people tell me I started it all. Sigh.

In spite of everything, I’m glad I wrote
Ball Four
and not because of the money or notoriety it has brought me. I’m glad I have it for myself. Here, presented forever in one place, are all those memories from a special time in my life. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I’ll just open the book and read whatever is on that page. I almost always laugh out loud, not because I’m funny, but because the ballplayers are funny. People sometimes ask me if I made up all those stories and I tell them of course not. I can’t write that well. I just quoted other people.

In 1969 I thought it would be a good idea to write a book and share the fun I’d had in baseball. The notion that it would someday change my life never occurred to me. Before I tell you about that in Ball Five and Ball Six and Ball Seven you should probably read
Ball Four
. It follows, along with the editor’s foreword and the introduction, exactly as it was thirty years ago, unchanged except for typos and minor factual corrections.

But these concerns were far outweighed by my longing to immortalize this colorful cast of characters. Particularly the Seattle Pilots players who seem to have been sent to that expansion team for the express purpose of being in
Ball Four
. It’s as if somebody had said, “This team’s not going to win any games, but if someone writes a book it’ll be a great ball club.”

What is the attraction of the Seattle Pilots? I think the fact that they existed for only one year has made them special. Unclaimed by town or franchise, the Pilots are like the Flying Dutchmen, doomed to sail aimlessly without a harbor.

Or, as the decades pass, more like Brigadoon, the enchanted village that comes alive every hundred years. The Pilots played just one magic summer, then disappeared, existing now only in the pages of a book.

I can’t even say this book was my idea. I’d known Jim Bouton since he first came up with the Yankees, was familiar with his iconoclastic views and his enthusiastic, imaginative way of expressing them, and it occurred to me that a diary of his season—even if he spent it with a minor-league team as he had the season before—might prove of great general interest. As usual, he was ahead of me. “Funny you should mention that,” he said when I first brought it up. “I’ve been keeping notes.”

Bouton talked into his tape recorder for more than seven months. Our typist, Miss Elisabeth Rehm of Jamaica, N.Y., did herculean work to keep up with the flood. There is nothing inarticulate about Jim Bouton. Before the season ended Miss Rehm had typed the equivalent of 1,500 pages (about 450,000 words) of double-spaced Bouton. From the beginning there was, fortunately, great rapport between us. I quickly found I did not need to spend a lot of time with Bouton pulling truth and anecdotes out of him. They were there, in abundance, starting with the very first tape from Arizona. We spent no more than five days together all season.

It may seem odd in an effort of this sort, but there were no disagreements between us. From the first we shared the opinion that the only purpose to adding to the huge volume of printed material that had been produced about baseball, was to illuminate the game as it had never been before. We resolved to reveal baseball as it is viewed by the men who play it, the frustrations and the meanness as well as the joy and the extraordinary fun. The difficulty is that to tell the truth is often, unfortunately, to offend. Bouton never flinched. It was not our purpose to offend, of course, but if in the process of telling the truth we did, so be it.

We had to make a decision, too, about the use of language. There is earthiness in baseball clubhouse language. To censor it, we felt, would be to put editorial omniscience between the reader and reality. Besides, we were not aiming this book at juveniles. Rate it X. The only thing we left out was repetitiveness.

The hardest part of editing Bouton’s 1,500 pages was deciding what to leave out. There was so much that was so good, so incisive, so funny, that the choices were most difficult. In the end I managed to take it down to about 650 pages. The final cut, to about 520 manuscript pages, was made by both of us at the very last. We spent eighteen hours a day together for weeks, cutting, editing, correcting, polishing. There were arguments sometimes and frayed nerves, and we came to know each other in that special, complicated way that people who have worked very hard, very closely on a project they consider important come to know each other. I’m not sure how Bouton feels about it, but I believe I came away a better man.

L
EONARD
S
HECTER
           

New York City, January 1970

I’m 30 years old and I have these dreams.

I dream my knuckleball is jumping around like a Ping-Pong ball in the wind and I pitch a two-hit shutout against my old team, the New York Yankees, single home the winning run in the ninth inning and, when the game is over, take a big bow on the mound in Yankee Stadium with 60,000 people cheering wildly. After the game reporters crowd around my locker asking me to explain exactly how I did it. I don’t mind telling them.

I dream I have pitched four consecutive shutouts for the Seattle Pilots, and the Detroit Tigers decide to buy me in August for their stretch drive. It’s a natural: The Tigers give away a couple of minor-league phenoms, and the Pilots, looking to the future, discard an aging right-handed knuckleballer. I go over to Detroit and help them win the pennant with five saves and a couple of spot starts. I see myself in the back of a shiny new convertible riding down Woodward Avenue with ticker-tape and confetti covering me like snow. I see myself waving to the crowd and I can see the people waving back, smiling, shouting my name.

I dream my picture is on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
in October and they do a special “Comeback of the Year” feature on me, and all winter long I’m going to dinners and accepting trophies as the Comeback Player of the Year.

I dream all these things. I really do. So there’s no use asking me why I’m here, why a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old man who has lost his fastball is still struggling to play baseball, holding on—literally—with his fingertips. The dreams are the answer. They’re why I wanted to be a big-league ballplayer and why I still want to get back on top again. I
enjoy
the fame of being a big-league ballplayer. I get a tremendous kick out of people wanting my autograph. In fact, I feel hurt if I go someplace where I think I should be recognized and no one asks me for it. I enjoy signing them and posing for pictures and answering reporters’ questions and having people recognize me on the street. A lot of my friends are baseball fans, as well as my family and kids I went to school with, and I get a kick out of knowing that they’re enjoying having a connection with a guy in the big leagues. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.

Like someone once asked Al Ferrara of the Dodgers why
he
wanted to be a baseball player. He said because he always wanted to see his picture on a bubblegum card. Well, me too. It’s an ego trip.

I’ve heard all the arguments against it. That there are better, more important things for a man to do than spend his time trying to throw a ball past other men who are trying to hit it with a stick. There are things like being a doctor or a teacher or working in the Peace Corps. More likely I should be devoting myself full-time to finding a way to end the war. I admit that sometimes I’m troubled by the way I make my living. I
would
like to change the world. I
would
like to have an influence on other people’s lives. And the last time I was sent down to the minor leagues a man I consider my friend said, only half-kidding, I guess, “Why don’t you quit and go out and earn a living like everybody else, ya bum ya?”

I was piqued for a moment. But then I thought, what the hell, there are a lot of professions that rank even with baseball, or a lot below, in terms of nobility. I don’t think there’s anything so great about selling real estate or life insurance or mutual funds, or a lot of other unimportant things that people do with their lives and never give it a thought. Okay, so I’ll save the world when I get a little older. I believe a man is entitled to devote a certain number of years to plain enjoyment and driving for some sort of financial security.

You can always be a teacher or a social worker when you’ve reached thirty-five. That gives me five more years and I’m going to use them all. You can’t always be a major-league baseball player. There are only a certain number of years—and I know how few they are—in which you can play baseball. And I think you can be a better teacher if you
have
played baseball, if only for the fact that the kids will listen to you more. I think I’ll have more value at
anything
I do later on for having been a baseball player. I believe that, foolish as it is, Stan Musial has more influence with American kids than any geography teacher. Ted Williams is better known than any of our poets, Mickey Mantle more admired than our scientists. Perhaps I can put my own small fame to work later on.

Right now, the fact is that I love the game—love to play it, I mean. Actually, with the thousands of games I’ve seen, baseball bores me. I have no trouble falling asleep in the bullpen, and I don’t think I’d ever pay my way into a ballpark to watch a game. But there’s a lot to being
in
the game, a lot to having those dreams.

A lot of it is foolishness too, grown men being serious about a boy’s game. There’s pettiness in baseball, and meanness and stupidity beyond belief, and everything else bad that you’ll find outside of baseball. I haven’t enjoyed every single minute of it and when I’ve refused to conform to some of the more Neanderthal aspects of baseball thinking I’ve been an outcast. Yet there’s been a tremendous lot of good in it for me and I wouldn’t trade my years in it for anything I can think of. If you doubt me, take a look at my fingertips; I’m growing calluses on them.

So what follows, then, is not so much a book about Jim Bouton as it is about what I’ve seen and felt playing baseball, for a season, up and down with an expansion team, and for what has been for me so far, a lifetime.

I signed my contract today to play for the Seattle Pilots at a salary of $22,000 and it was a letdown because I didn’t have to bargain. There was no struggle, none of the give and take that I look forward to every year. Most players don’t like to haggle. They just want to get it over with. Not me. With me, signing a contract has been a yearly adventure.

The reason for no adventure this year is the way I pitched last year. It ranged from awful to terrible to pretty good. When it was terrible, and I had a record 0 and 7, or 2 and 7 maybe, I had to do some serious thinking about whether it was all over for me. I was pitching for the Seattle Angels of the Pacific Coast League. The next year, 1969, Seattle would get the expansion Seattle Pilots of the American League. The New York Yankees had sold me to Seattle for $20,000 and were so eager to get rid of me they paid $8,000 of my $22,000 salary. This means I was actually sold for $12,000, less than half the waiver price. Makes a man think.

In the middle of August I went to see Marvin Milkes, the general manager of the Seattle Angels, and the future general manager of Pilots. I told him that I wanted some kind of guarantee from him about next year. There were some businesses with long-range potential I could go into over the winter and I would if I was certain I wasn’t going to be playing baseball.

“What I would like,” I told him, “is an understanding that no matter what kind of contract you give me, major league or minor league, that it will be for a certain minimum amount. Now, I realize you don’t know how much value I will be for you since you haven’t gone through the expansion draft and don’t know the kind of players you’ll have. So I’m not asking for a major-league contract, but just a certain minimum amount of money.”

“How much money are you talking about?” Milkes said shrewdly.

“I talked it over with my wife and we arrived at a figure of $15,000 or $16,000. That’s the minimum I could afford to play for, majors or minors. Otherwise I got to go to work.”

To this Milkes said simply, “No.”

I couldn’t say I blamed him.

It was right about then, though, that the knuckleball I’d been experimenting with for a couple of months began to do things. I won two games in five days, going all the way, giving up only two or three hits. I was really doing a good job and everyone was kind of shocked. As the season drew to a close I did better and better. The last five days of the season I finished with a flurry, and my earned-run average throwing the knuckleball was 1.90, which is very good.

The last day of the season I was in the clubhouse and Milkes said he wanted to see me for a minute. I went up to his office and he said, “We’re going to give you the same contract for next year. We’ll guarantee you $22,000.” This means if I didn’t get released I’d be getting it even if I was sent down to the minors. I felt like kissing him on both cheeks. I also felt like I had a new lease on life. A knuckleball had to be pretty impressive to impress a general manager $7,000 worth. Don’t ever think $7,000 isn’t a lot of money in baseball. I’ve had huge arguments over a lot less.

When I started out in 1959 I was ready to love the baseball establishment. In fact I thought big business had all the answers to any question I could ask. As far as I was concerned club owners were benevolent old men who wanted to hang around the locker room and were willing to pay a price for it, so there would never be any problem about getting paid decently. I suppose I got that way reading Arthur Daley in
The New York Times
. And reading about those big salaries. I read that Ted Williams was making $125,000 and figured that Billy Goodman made $60,000. That was, of course, a mistake.