Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (40 page)

Clubhouse speech by Joe Schultz. “Boys, I guess you know we’re not drawing as well at home as we should. If we don’t draw fans, we’re not going to be making the old cabbage. I’m in this just as much as you are. We’re all in it for the same thing. I’m going to lay it right out on the barrelhead. We got to win some games so we can draw some people.

“Oh yeah, and for you new guys, Brunet, it’s two-and-a-half hours after a ballgame. That’s curfew.”

Tommy Davis started to giggle, and pretty soon everybody was laughing and looking at Brunet, and then he joined in and the whole thing became absurd. I mean, the idea of Brunet coming in two-and-a-half hours after a game is ridiculous.
Nobody gets
in that fast, except maybe McNertney.

Carl Yastrzemski was recently fined $500 for loafing, and I’ve been keeping an eye on him. Sure enough, he hit a ball to second base today and loafed all the way to first. I’m afraid Yastrzemski has a bit of dog in him. Always did, and people around baseball knew it all the time. When things are going good, Yastrzemski will go all out. When things aren’t going so well he’ll give a half-ass effort. But he’s got so much ability that the only thing you can do is put up with him.

I asked a few of the Red Sox if they thought he deserved the fine and I thought they would defend him. But they said, “He deserved it all the way.”

We took the second-straight game from the Red Sox tonight. We were losing 4–2 when I came in with the bases loaded. I threw one pitch and we were out of the inning with a double play. Then we came from behind to win it. I enjoyed my contribution.

Today I didn’t make any contribution and I was furious. We had a 4–2 lead going into the ninth and then came the trouble. Before it was over, O’Donoghue and Locker were bombed, the game was lost 5–4 and I, the very man who had gotten two out with a single pitch the day before, remained in the bullpen, warming up.
Warming up!
for goodness sakes.

Among the annoyed was Jim Pagliaroni. “If they’re not going to use you in a situation like this,” Pag said, “why the hell do they warm you up?”

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

Ray Oyler contributed a key ninth-inning error to the loss and spent a long time after the game facing his locker, drinking beer and playing genuine sorrow. The clubhouse was routine morgue and four sportswriters were trying to ask Oyler about the error—in hushed tones, of course. Newspapermen are required to play the sorrow game too, although why they should care, I can’t imagine.

O’Donoghue, surveying the scene, said, “Goddam vultures. Hanging around waiting for the meat to dry.” And Tommy Harper said, “What the hell do they need quotes for? They all saw the play.” And Don Mincher said, “Miserable bastards.” And Jim Bouton said, to himself, “Aw shitfuck.”

On the bus from the airport to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington we passed a huge government building that had a bronze plaque on the front announcing it had been “erected in 1929.” And Greg Goossen said, “That’s quite an erection.”

Hovley and Goossen were put in the same room again, so I assumed I’d been put in with Barber again and switched keys with Goossen. Then I went to Gabe Paul and told him Hovley and I wanted to room together again. And he said, “Well, I’ve got you in a room by yourself this trip.”

It’s interesting that they’d rather pay for a single room than have me room with Hovley. Just like the Yankees. They must think whatever it is I have that they don’t like is catching.

I didn’t tell Paul about the switch. Let him find out himself.

Hovley, Pagliaroni and I closed out the evening on the roof for a little beaver-shooting. We didn’t get many good shots in but we kept trying. And Hovley said, “This is like fishing. All you need is a couple of nibbles to keep you trying.”

O’Donoghue wound up his time in Boston screaming at the kids who lean out of the stands and throw things into the bullpen and at the mob of them that collects outside Fenway Park demanding autographs. O’Donoghue has a very low kid threshold.

He’d have hated me as a kid. I remember once at a Giant game in the Polo Grounds I took the top of a Dixie cup and scaled it down onto the field during the game. I couldn’t believe how far it went—clear out to the infield. It landed halfway between the mound and home plate. I was scared when I saw it was actually going to drop onto the field and I looked around to see if anybody had noticed me throwing it. Johnny Antonelli, who was pitching for the Giants, walked off the mound, bent down, picked it up and put it in his back pocket. I got a huge kick out of that. Imagine, Johnny Antonelli picking up the cover of my Dixie cup.

One time my brothers and I and a friend decided that the way to catch foul balls in left field at the Polo Grounds was to have a net and stick it out over the stands at the proper moment. We constructed this big net, put a twelve-foot pole at the end of it and we were in business. We soon found, though, that we couldn’t catch anything smaller than a flying barnyard in it. So we practiced and practiced and after a while we felt confident enough to take the net up to the Polo Grounds. On the train a lady asked us what we were going fishing for. We said baseballs. She gave us a funny look.

At the park we were refused admission. There was a rule they just made up: no nets. So we retreated to plot strategy. We decided to walk in one behind the other, net at our sides (away from the ticket taker, of course) and coats hiding the net and pole. It worked perfectly. Except for one thing. We didn’t catch a single baseball.

Washington

Possibly because we finally all understood thoroughly by now that this club is going nowhere, the guys are very loose. Today, for example, everybody in the clubhouse is listening to Cal Tjader or somebody like him, keeping time by banging clothes hangers on chairs and John Donaldson, who is so skinny we call him Bones, puts two baseballs under his uniform shirt in order to get a set of shoulders, and towels around his middle so he has a belly, and he pulls his pants up so he looks like an old-time ballplayer, and he goes through the silent-film baseball-player routine in time to the music and everybody is having a great time.

“Hey, Mike,” I say to Mike Hegan. “I wonder what this club would be like if we were fighting for a pennant.”

Mike promptly puckers up his lips, sucks his cheeks in, pulls his legs together, presses his buttocks together with his hands and walks around the room as though he had been dipped in concrete. “Very tight,” he says.

Eddie O’Brien continues working at being one of the boys. He didn’t even call Marty Pattin for reading a magazine in the bullpen. And when I’m warming up in the bullpen he stands about fifteen feet behind the catcher in order to intercept any wayward knuckleballs. Come to think of it, everybody has been nice to me lately. Well, almost everybody. Plaza lets me take new baseballs out of his ballbag. Sal Maglie actually
smiles
at me. (Shudder. When the friendly undertaker starts smiling he may know more than you do.) I even get the feeling that if I talked to Joe Schultz he’d listen. Maybe (drool) I’ll ask for another start.

That’s what I say, and sometimes that’s what I feel. Then there’s a game like we had today. We lost it 10–3, which isn’t the point. What is the point is that Brunet, who started, had a 2–0 lead, and as soon as he got into a little trouble, the phone rang in the bullpen. I grabbed my glove because I knew it had to be me. It was for Barber and Pattin.

They warmed up and Barber got called. Bang, we’re losing 4–2. Then Pattin, and it’s 6–2. Again the phone rang, and again I grabbed my glove. This time they wanted O’Donoghue. He got clobbered too. Now the score is 10–3 in the eighth and the phone rings again. This time I don’t reach for my glove. But it’s for me. So I warm up and pitch the ninth. One guy gets on with a single, another on an error. Nobody hits the ball good and I’m out of the inning. This doesn’t change the score, which remains 10–3.

I’m saving up all my statistics for my next year’s salary drive. I can just see Marvin Milkes when I whip them out. He’ll say the same thing Charlie Brown said to Lucy.

“Charlie, I kept statistics on our team last season,” Lucy says, “and they say something. There were 57 ballgames played, 57 ballgames lost; 3,000 runs scored by the opposition, 2 runs scored by our team, 900 walks given up by our team and…”

And after a while, Charlie Brown says, “Lucy, tell your statistics to shut up.”

Steve Hovley and I spent the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art. Hovley said he had to check to see if Van Gogh’s paintings were dry yet.

Took Hovley to my favorite Washington restaurant after the game, El Bodegon. He’s been hitting the hell out of the ball and I thought we should celebrate. We had margaritas before dinner and Hovley remarked that before this year he’d
never
had a drink of any kind. But in Louisville he decided to do some testing. So he had a bourbon. Then he tried a Bloody Mary. Then a martini. Then a mint julep. All in the same evening. He said it was very interesting. He also said he had no hangover. I believe most of what Steve Hovley says.

Hovley was particularly interested in the flamenco guitarist at El Bodegon. He says he can’t decide whether to play winter ball or stay home and learn to play the guitar.

Perhaps it was the heat. Or maybe just the stage of the season. Or the phase of the moon. No matter the cause, we got into an insane argument in the bullpen. It was a chicken-egg thing and it went like this: Can a pitcher get more strikeouts in a high-scoring game because he faces more hitters?

I said no. I said it didn’t matter how many hitters you faced, that you could get only 27 outs in a nine-inning ballgame, and that the ratio between strikeouts and other kinds of outs would not change. Brabender and Pagliaroni thought differently. They said if you faced 100 hitters, you had a lot more chances to strike somebody out than if you faced only 27 or 28. And as he talked, Brabender got hot, and Brabender getting hot is like Old Faithful erupting. So I tried to cool him off. “Gene, you’ve got to learn that when you argue with somebody it’s not a personal thing,” I said. “I may disagree with you, but I still like you. I just think you’re wrong. And that’s no reason to get angry.”

“I’m angry because you won’t accept facts,” he said.

“Well, I don’t think it’s a fact,” I said. “I think what I say is a fact and that you won’t accept it. But I’m not angry at you because of it.”

“You know something?” Brabender said. “You’re lucky. Where I come from we just talk for a little while. After that we start to hit.”

I felt lucky indeed.

The whole argument seemed to irritate Marty Pattin. “Who wants to listen to all that stuff?” he said. “Why can’t we just sit here and watch the ballgame?”

Poor Marty. It’s not that he has no soul. It’s just that he’s been getting bombed lately.

Ran into Jack Mann, who is the author of
The Decline and Fall of the Yankees
. Vic Ziegel of the
New York Post
had asked me to review the book for his column, and when I did he refused to run it. He said I was so hard on the Yankees it would get me into trouble. As things turned out, it couldn’t have done me any more harm.

Mann had recently written a piece for the Washington
Daily News
about being mugged by three young men in a park. He said that he believed he understood what motivated the kids and that he felt no hatred toward them. The young men were black, but Mann revealed this only under pressure. His point was that their color was irrelevant—that is, the point of the story was that it would be a better world if indeed it were.

I tell this story because it reminded me of something that happened to Mike Marshall in Cleveland. He was roughed up by a pack of about fifteen kids. When it was all over the police had great difficulty dragging out of him the fact that the kids were black. He didn’t think it should make any difference either.

There was a difference, though—in Mike’s pitching. The injuries he received fighting the kids off seemed superficial. Nevertheless, it was at precisely this point that he went from being our best pitcher to our worst.

Brant Alyea came up to me today and said that Ted Williams was asking about me.

“What was he asking?” I said. “About what kind of person I was?”

“Oh shit no,” Alyea said. “What difference does it make what kind of person you are? We’re all just merchandise anyway. He wanted to know whether you were in tight with the Pilots and whether they considered you in their plans for the future.”

“It’s obvious from the way they’re using me that they don’t consider me in their plans,” I said. “So tell Williams I can probably be had right now for a song, maybe a short medley.”

Right after that, Bob Short, the owner of the Washington club, came by and Alyea introduced me to him. I congratulated him on the fine job he was doing in Washington and he said that I was doing a pretty good job myself. I said I was glad he’d noticed.

What a beautiful day. Imagine playing for Teddy Ballgame. That’s what he calls himself, in his autobiography too. What isn’t generally known, except around the comfortable confines of the ballpark, is that he thinks of himself as “Teddy Ballgame of the MFL.”

That’s the Major Fucking Leagues.

Pagliaroni told a story about Joe Brown, the general manager of the Pittsburgh club. Brown called a meeting of the players and said, “Boys, we’re fighting for the entertainment dollar. We have to learn to get along with the fans and get along with the writers. And we have to be more colorful as ballplayers.”

That very night the Pirates got into an extra-inning game and Pagliaroni scored the winner in the fifteenth. “I come around and I touch home plate,” Pag said, “and as I run toward our dugout I take a big slide, feet first, all the way into it.”

The next morning there was a call from Joe Brown. “What the hell were you doing out there?” Brown said. “What are you, some kind of clown?”

And Pagliaroni said, “I was just competing for the entertainment dollar, Joe.”