Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (31 page)

And once at a father-and-son banquet, a kid with long hair got up and asked me what I thought about long hair and sideburns. The man sitting next to the kid was obviously his father and he just as obviously didn’t like the long hair. So I said that the thing that disturbs me about long hair is not the fact that suddenly a whole lot of kids in this country decided to let their hair grow, but that a whole nation of adults would let it disturb them to the point where they were ready to expel otherwise excellent students from school simply because of their long hair. I got a big cheer from the kids. The parents sat there with clenched teeth resolving never to invite Jim Bouton again.

It turns out that Pagliaroni is a telescope buff. He has a 300-power telescope at home with which he not only explores the heavens but shoots a little beaver. The only problem shooting beaver with a 300-power telescope, he says, is that the image comes in upside down. He says it’s very tough looking through the telescope while standing on your head.

Getting on the bus to go from the Biltmore Hotel to Yankee Stadium, O’Donoghue said, “Well, boys, here we start our tour of the funny farm.” He meant the streets of New York.

Ray Oyler shouted out of the bus to a long-haired guy on the street. “Don’t you feel there’s something itching you all over?” He got a very big laugh in the back of the bus.

Since we were in New York, the talk turned to sex (the talk also turns to sex in the eleven other American League cities). It was decided that the most interesting offbeat milieu for sex was a tubful of warm oatmeal. So Mike Hegan promptly leaned out of the bus and hollered to a girl walking by, “Hey, do you like oatmeal?”

Larry Haney read a selection from the
New York Post
, a story by Vic Ziegel. “Today Mel Stottlemyre goes after his seventh victory,” Ziegel wrote, “and Gene Brabender goes after whatever the Gene Brabenders of the world go after.”

Ray Oyler: “Hey Bender. That guy just shit all over you.”

Brabender: “Will someone point out that fucker to me?”

Pagliaroni: “He must never have seen you in person, Rooms.”

Footnote: Brabender beat Stottlemyre 2–1.

Fifth inning and we’re down 3–2. Bases loaded, nobody out. I’m warmed up. I get the signal. I climb into the golf cart that will take me to the mound. Yankee Stadium, and my heart is thumping under my warm-up jacket. It feels like a World Series. As the cart rolls along the clay track in left field I hear the fans saying, “Hey, that looks like Bouton.” “Yeah, it is Bouton.” My public.

They were out there before the game. When our bus pulled up there must have been 20 kids there chanting, “We want Bouton, we want Bouton.” The guys on the bus said I must have been a big man in this town. I said yeah, modestly.

The infield is in as I start to pitch. The knuckleball is working. I get Ken Johnson, the pitcher, on a ground ball to Tommy Harper. But instead of going home with the ball, he goes to second and a run scores. Roy White pops up. Jerry Kenney grounds out. End threat. None out, bases loaded and they got only one run. Not bad.

In the next inning there are three fly balls, by Bobby Murcer, Joe Pepitone and Horace Clark. Two innings, no runs charged to me. I rated it an excellent performance. Almost as good, we went on to win the game 5–4. Fritz Peterson said afterward I should have been given credit for the win because when the Yankees got only one run out of that situation, the game was turned around. Fritz Peterson is a nice man.

One day Joe Pepitone inserted a piece of popcorn under his foreskin and went to the trainer claiming a new venereal disease. “Jesus Christ, Joe, what the hell have you done?” the doctor said. Pepitone didn’t start laughing until the doctor had carefully used a forceps to liberate the popcorn.

Today in the visiting dugout at Yankee Stadium, Joe Schultz said to nobody in particular: “Up and at ’em. Fuck ’em all. Let it all hang out.”

I pitched against one hitter in the game, Jimmy Lyttle. Struck him out on five knuckleballs. Nothing to it.

I wonder how the Yankees feel now about picking up Johnson.

On the plane from New York to Milwaukee, where we play the White Sox a game tomorrow, the stewardesses (we call them stews) were droning about fastening seatbelts. “Fasten your seatbelt,” Fred Talbot said. “Fasten your seatbelt. All the time it’s fasten your goddam seatbelt. But how come every time I read about one of those plane crashes, there’s 180 people on board and all 180 die? Didn’t any of them have their seatbelts fastened?”

People are always asking me if it’s true about stewardesses. The answer is yes. You don’t have to go out hunting for a stew. They stay in the same hotels we do. Open your door and you’re liable to be invited to a party down the hall. They’re on the road, same as we are, and probably just as lonely. Baseball players are young, reasonably attractive and have more money than most men their age. Not only that, baseball players often marry stews—and the stews know it.

Baseball players are not, by and large, the best dates. We prefer
wham, bam
, thank-you-ma’am affairs. In fact, if we’re spotted taking a girl out to dinner we’re accused of “wining and dining,” which is bad form. It’s not bad form to wine and dine an attractive stew, however. A stew can come under the heading of class stuff, or table pussy, in comparison with some of the other creatures who are camp followers or celebrity-fuckers, called Baseball Annies. It is permissible, in the scheme of things, to promise a Baseball Annie dinner and a show in return for certain quick services for a pair of roommates. And it is just as permissible, in the morality of the locker room, to refuse to pay off. The girls don’t seem to mind very much when this happens. Indeed, they seem to expect it.

In Chicago there’s Chicago Shirley who takes on every club as it gets to town. The first thing she does is call up the rookies for an orientation briefing. She asks them if there’s anything she can do for them, and as the ballplayers say, “She can do it all.” Chicago Shirley says that Chicago is a great place to live because teams in both leagues come through there. She doesn’t like to miss anybody.

Milwaukee

In the Milwaukee clubhouse there’s a sign that reads: “What you say here, what you see here, what you do here and what you hear here, let it stay here.” The same sign hangs in the clubhouse in Minneapolis. Also, I suppose, in the CIA offices in Washington. If I were a CIA man, could I write a book?

Steve Barber has been placed on the disabled list, although there’s nothing wrong with his arm, just a little stiffness. The three weeks on the list will give him a chance to work it out.

Pitched an inning-and-two-thirds against the White Sox and gave up one hit, no runs, no walks. There was one strikeout. That’s three good outings in a row since I last wanted to commit suicide. This might be a good time to ask Joe Schultz for a start again. He may not be much for the underprivileged, but I’ll try anyway.

Chicago

More examples of how easy it is for this veteran right-hander to get into trouble. Yesterday a clubhouse meeting interrupted a chess game Mike Marshall and I were playing and during it we both stole glances at the board. Pretty soon, Ron Plaza was giving us some hard stares. Afterward I found out that when I didn’t show up in the outfield quick enough for Crosetti after the meeting, he sent Plaza down to the clubhouse to see if I was still playing chess.

And today, I managed to let it slip my mind that we were playing a two-night doubleheader. I strolled out to catch the bus at a quarter to five and no bus. Panic set in. All I could think was that we were playing another game in Milwaukee and how the hell would I get there in time. I dashed back to my room for my itinerary, and that, of course, explained it all. So I got to the park at five-thirty, a half-hour before game time, and this time they weren’t quite so friendly about it all. Hegan tried to help. “Quick, dress in your locker,” he said, “and maybe they won’t notice you’re late.” It didn’t work, largely because when O’Donoghue spotted me in there he said in a loud voice, “Well, look who’s here.” Then Talbot, trying to be funny, stood in front of my locker with his hands on his hips and said, “Where in the hell have
you
been?” I made shushing motions at him but he said, “I’m telling.” And he pranced down to where the coaches were sitting and said, “Hey, Sal, was Bouton out there during infield practice?” With friends like Fred Talbot I’m not sure you need any enemies.

Mike Marshall asked Merritt Ranew to catch him a while in the bullpen and in no time the phone was ringing. It was Sal Maglie telling him never, never,
never
to throw without permission. Later on Marshall heard Sal telling Ranew never to warm up any pitcher unless instructed to do so by Sal himself. Then Ranew must have said something about the way Marshall had been pitching, because Sal said, “He always looks good in the bullpen.”

I’m not the only one who gets into trouble. But this business about asking permission to throw sounds ominous for the knuckleballer.

One of Marty Pattin’s friends or relatives from downstate Illinois sent him a big box of cookies and he put them out on the table before the game. “Let’s get to these cookies,” Joe Schultz said. “They came all the way from southern Illinois.”

Sitting at the table at the time was one of the young clubhouse boys, and he was reading a high school biology book. Joe peered over his shoulder for a while and then said, “Hey, Bouton, this is something that might interest you. A book about human tissues. Real scientific. Hey, look, they even got a picture of a cunt.”

As we stood there, laughing helplessly, he added, “And don’t forget, boys, pound those cookies into you.”

John Kennedy flew into a rage at Emmett Ashford over a called strike and was tossed out of the game. Still raging, he kicked in the water cooler in the dugout, and threw the metal cover onto the field. Afterward we asked him what had gotten into him. He really isn’t that type. And he said, “Just as I got called out on strikes, my greenie kicked in.”

One of the guys asked Curt Rayer if he had any greenies available and he said no, he wasn’t allowed to dispense them. “But I’d like to know who’s taking them.” This confirmed the feeling that Curt is selling information.

John McNamara, the equipment manager, is the sort who gets along well with ballplayers, but he’s been told—warned in fact—not to hang out with us. I guess they think we can be easily corrupted, although I suspect we could corrupt Mac quicker than vice versa. Anyway Mac was standing in the hotel lobby the other night and Curt said, “Where you going, Mac?”

“To bed,” Mac said.

Ten minutes later the phone rang in McNamara’s room. It was Rayer. “Just wanted to see if you made it to your room all right,” Rayer said.

The only thing that makes any sense, Mac said, is that Curt was checking up to see if he’d sneaked out with any players.

Also checking up on us, we’re certain, is Marvin Milkes personally. The other night Talbot and Oyler came in a little while after curfew and there was Marvin in the lobby. “Good evening, Marvin,” one of them said, cool.

“Good evening,” said Marvin, just as cool. “See you in Seattle.” Which means fine city.

Had dinner with Mike Marshall in a place called Cafe Bohemia. It’s one of the few restaurants in America that serves what can accurately be called exotic food—like lion, tiger, hippopotamus and elephant steaks. Also buffaloburgers, which is what Mike had. I ordered elk steak. In the next room there were the coaches. Mike and I speculated on what Eddie O’Brien would order. I said a steak—beefsteak. Marshall said fried chicken. We were both right. He ordered lamb chops.

We got to talking about Marvin Miller. Pag said that when he was the player rep in Pittsburgh John Galbreath, the owner of the club, had a heart-to-heart talk with him about Miller. Galbreath said Miller would be bad for baseball.

“It just shows how out of touch these guys are,” Pag said. “After his long heart-to-heart talk I had to tell him it was too late. Miller had already been signed.”

There had been, by the way, a concerted effort to stop the players from hiring Miller. The St. Louis players were told by the front office, for example, that of all the candidates for the job Miller would be the worst choice. They voted for him unanimously.

My own mind was made up about Miller when Joe Reichler put his arm around me and solemnly warned me to be “very, very,
very
careful about this guy Miller.”

Then there’s this. Soon after Miller was elected to run the Players’ Association, Joe Cronin, president of the American League, put his arm around him and said, very earnestly, “Young man (Marvin was forty-nine), I’ve been in this game a long time now, and I’ve learned something that I want you to think about. Players come and players go, but owners will be here forever, and don’t forget it.”

Locker said he understood very well why the owners get so mad at Miller. He said it was because Miller never lets up. “If he has a point he jumps on them with both feet and never gets off,” Locker said.

I couldn’t help saying that was fine with me. I told Locker that Miller isn’t doing any more than any lawyer would do in the same situation and that the problem was not Miller, but the owners, who were so used to having things their way, getting away with technicalities, pushing things on us, that they were now affronted when all Miller was doing was his job. I’m not sure he understood.

Pag also said that he nurses a grudge against Bowie Kuhn, our new Commissioner. He remembers when Kuhn was the owners’ rep and when we submitted a proposal to raise the minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000, he waited six months before he answered. And then it was at a meeting and what he said was, “Oh yes, we’ve heard something about that. Just what are the details?”

Okay, so he was the owners’ Marvin Miller. Now I’m glad
we
got one.