Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (41 page)

Talking about Yastrzemski not hustling recalled one of the great non-hustlers of all time, Roger Maris. Rodg always went to first base as though he had sore feet. If he hit a home run it didn’t matter, of course. But every time he popped up or hit a routine grounder, it would take him a half-hour to get to first base—if he got there at all. He’d often just peel off halfway down and head for the dugout.

So Houk would call a meeting and he’d say, “Boys, it doesn’t look good if we don’t run the ball out. I want everybody to show some hustle out there.”

And Maris would go out there and damned if he wouldn’t do the same thing all over again. I could never believe Ralph’s patience. I know Maris was sensitive to what was written about him in the papers, and I don’t know why Houk didn’t just blast him to the reporters. But he never did. And Maris continued to loaf.

Johnny Sain quit or was fired today. I’m amazed. Also not surprised.

Going into the last of the eighth we’re ahead 5–4. O’Donoghue, who has relieved Brabender, has pitched three good innings. Now they get a couple of hits off him and he’s lifted for John Gelnar. This isn’t too bad a choice. Gelnar was knocked out in his last start, but his relief pitching hasn’t been bad. Except he’s hit this time and now the score is 5–5 and Gelnar’s out.

Who comes in, Bouton? Nope. Steve Barber. We lose 7–5.

Because I have nobody else to talk to I ask Eddie O’Brien, “Eddie, what the hell is going on out there?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie O’Brien says. “I can’t figure it out either.”

Well, maybe I can. Maybe I’m about to be traded to the Senators. They can’t finish first, but they can finish second. I still think I have a chance to be a hero someplace.

I try, but it remains most difficult to convey the quality of the banter in the back of the bus. There is zaniness to it, and earthiness, and often a quality of
non sequitur
that I find hilarious. Have an example from our trip to the Washington airport.

Greg Goossen: “Hey, does anybody here have any Aqua Velva?”

Fred Talbot: “No, but I gotta take a shit, if that’ll help.”

I’ve had some thoughts on what separates a professional athlete from other mortals. In a tight situation the amateur says, “I’ve failed in this situation many times. I’ll probably do so again.” In a tight situation the professional says (and means it), “I’ve failed in this situation and I’ve succeeded. Since each situation is a separate test of my abilities, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t succeed this time.”

Then there is also the case of the professional player who is not professional enough. He goes on a fifteen-game hitting streak and says, “Nobody can keep this up.” And as the streak progresses, his belief in his ability to keep it alive decreases to the point where it’s almost impossible for him to get a hit.

The
real
professional—and by that I suppose I mean the exceptional professional—can convince himself that each time at bat is an individual performance and that there is no reason he can’t go on hitting forever.

Is that clear? If it is, perhaps you ought to check with your doctor.

Cleveland

I’m still trying to decide why I haven’t been in more ballgames in crucial situations and all I can do is agree with Hovley that it’s because they think I’m weird and throw a weird pitch. I need a new image. What I ought to do is take up chewing tobacco and let the dark brown run down the front of my uniform and walk up and down the dugout with a slight, brave limp and tape on my wrist and say things like, “goddammit” and “shit” and “let’s get these guys.” Then, instead of being weird, I’d be rough and tough.

I think I’d do it, except I can’t stand the thought of all that brown down the front of my uniform.

We may not be winning a lot of ballgames, but we’ve got a lot of spirit. In fact we might have the best “around the horn” in the league. You throw the ball around the horn—catcher to first baseman to shortstop to second baseman to third baseman—after an infield out, and you do it with a lot of élan. We get better at it all the time.

Pitched two more innings in another losing cause. We were down three runs when I came in and down three when I came out. The only problem I had was with Home Run Baker, a new Cleveland kid who’s been hitting vicious line drives all over the place. This time he hit one right back at me and the only way I was able to avoid certain death was to perform a perfect veronica. Olé.

I also struck out Hawk Harrelson and Duke Sims. Double olé.

Called Mike Marshall. He’s alive and well and pitching in Toledo. He’s 3–1 and sticking to his no-plan plan, the one Sal Maglie said wouldn’t do. Mike said that Bennie Borgmann, the scout, asked him what the problem was, that he had heard there was some personality difficulty. Mike said he didn’t know of any. The next day Borgmann talked to Jack Tighe, the manager, and was told “Mike’s fine. Gives me 100 percent. You just leave him alone and let him do it his way and he’ll be all right.”

Borgmann was impressed and asked Marshall if he wanted to go back with Seattle. He said no, not as long as there was no change in the situation there.

We go home after tomorrow night’s game. It’s commercial all the way with a layover in Chicago. Which means we’ll get home at four-thirty in the morning local time, but actually about seven-thirty body time. This is done so we can spend all day with our families. It’s also done to save a night of hotel expenses. Me, I’ll be home with my family, but I’ll be in bed all day, sleeping.

Steve Barber suggested to Sal Maglie that he send Brabender home a day early so that he wouldn’t miss a night’s sleep. Brabender opens for us against Baltimore. And Sal said, “The last time we did that the guy went only two-and-two-thirds innings. So we’re not going to do it anymore.”

I don’t remember what that’s called in logic, but the fallacy is: B follows A. Therefore A caused B.

Steve Hovley went down with an inside pitch tonight and took first base. I asked where the ball hit him and he said it didn’t hit him at all.

“You sure went down to first like you’d been hit,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what you have to do,” Steve said. “You have to jump up, throw your bat aside and start down to first as if everybody in the ballpark could see the ball hit you. This intimidates the umpire.”

Ray Oyler in the back of the bus: “Boys, I had all the ingredients for a great piece of ass last night—plenty of time, and a hard-on. All I lacked was a broad.”

Beat Cleveland 5–3 and it was a struggle all the way. Brunet fell three runs behind early but managed to hold on. The reason he was able to hold on is that every time he had a couple of men on base, Fred Talbot yelled at him, “C’mon, fat boy, regroup out there.”

There was a lot of grousing about the flight home. We had a three-hour wait after the game was over and then an hour-and-a-half wait in Chicago. If we had a charter flight we could have gotten in to Seattle at about twelve-thirty instead of four-thirty. The ballclub argues that it costs too much money to charter a plane and generally we just shrug and figure, well, it probably does.

There was a United Airlines man along on the trip, so I said to him, “Just out of curiosity, what does it cost to fly a team like this from Cleveland to Seattle on regularly scheduled flights?”

He said he couldn’t give me an exact figure, but if he had to approximate, he’d say $5,200, give or take a few hundred. And what, I asked, would it cost to charter a jet to fly from Cleveland to Seattle?

“I couldn’t give you an exact figure,” he said. “But I can tell you that it costs $6,200 to charter a plane from New York to Seattle. So if you could get a plane out of Cleveland, it would be a little bit less, probably around $5,900.”

Naturally I promptly told Mincher that the only difference between a charter flight and commercial was $700. Just as naturally, Mincher goes to Gabe Paul and says, “What’s the story, Gabe? We found out that there’s only a $700 difference between charter and commercial. And we don’t think the ballclub should be stingy with that kind of money. They should get the guys home at a decent hour.”

“I don’t know where you got your figures,” Paul said.

“Bouton got them from the United Airlines man,” Mincher said. Just then the man came along down the aisle, and when Minch told him what the argument was about, he backed off. “I didn’t give any exact figures,” he said.

“You tell Mincher that there’s a hell of a difference,” Paul said. “Tell him.”

“Oh yeah,” the guy said. “The numbers are real big. I don’t know exactly what they are, but there’s a hell of a difference.”

Mincher stalked off. Later on he came over to me and said, “What the hell are you trying to tell us about $700?”

I told him the way I got my information and said, “Why would I make those numbers up?”

“Well, somebody’s lying in this deal,” Mincher said.

“It’s not me, Minch.”

“No, I don’t think it’s you,” Minch said. And he went away mad.

The country western music got a big workout in the clubhouse after the win. There are four or five different tape-players around and they make quite a racket. One of the favorites is “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog.” Gene Brabender knows all the words to that one. Another is, “Happy Birthday, Joe Beam.” It starts out, “They’re hanging Joe Beam today…” Seems that Joe Beam killed eleven guys before he was twelve and they said he was an “unruly boy.” And right at the end, when they hang him, they break out into “Happy Birthday, Joe Beam.”

Breaks us up.

Seattle

Today Joe Schultz said to John Kennedy, who just had the cast taken off his knee: “How’s your old hinge, John?” Joe Schultz also said, “The starters here will be Brabender, Segui, Talbot and Brunet.” When he said Talbot I winced, and Talbot caught it and said, “Eat your heart out, Bouton.”

And when we were going over the hitters a lot of the comments consisted of: “He likes the ball over the plate.”

Let’s see, now. When the ball is over the plate isn’t that what the umpires call a strike?

Also, there seemed to be a lot of first-ball hitters in the crowd. Brooks Robinson, Don Buford, Paul Blair, all first-ball hitters. One day I want to hear somebody say, “Good third-ball hitter. Likes to hit that third pitch.” Then I’ll have learned something.

At the end of the meeting Joe Schultz said, “Anybody got anything else to say about this club?” And in a very low voice, I said, “Pretty good ballclub.”

And Joe Schultz said, “Well, hell, let’s go beat the shit out of them. Fuck ’em. They ain’t no different than anybody else.”

He was right. They beat us too. The score was 2–1. Gene Brabender pitched a helluva game.

I was warming up in the bullpen when a fan leaned out and said, “Hey Jim, how do you pitch to Frank Robinson?” I told him the truth. “Reluctantly,” I said.

Billy Williams just got called up. He was on the Seattle Angels club with me last year when it was Triple-A. He’s played
eighteen
years of minor-league ball. He’s a good-hitting outfielder. He should have had a better shot but I think he’s one of those Negroes who wasn’t quite good enough to be a star and wound up a good minor-leaguer.

The situation of the Negro in baseball is not as equitable as it seems. He still has to be better than his white counterparts to do as well. I recall a story Mike Marshall told about a guy in the Detroit Tiger organization named Ike Brown, who hit .300 for a number of years in Triple-A and was the International League All-Star third baseman for a couple of years. He drove in a lot of runs too, but he was never even invited to spring training by the Tigers. Mike says the fact that he was black must have had a lot to do with it. “How many Negroes on the Detroit club?” Mike said. “Earl Wilson, Gates Brown and Willie Horton. Two stars, and Brown is the best pinch hitter in the business.”

This brings up a point. There are a lot of Negro stars in the game. There aren’t too many average Negro players. The obvious conclusion is that there is some kind of quota system. It stands to reason that if 19 of the top 30 hitters in the major leagues are black, as they were in 1968, then almost two thirds of all the hitters should be black. Obviously it’s not that way. In the case of the Tigers, the fact that only three of their players are black is no less astonishing.

Joe Sparma and Al Kaline have a company that runs baseball clinics around the country. They line up the players to run the clinics and pay a thousand dollars for three mornings of work. It sounded like an unbelievable deal in the letter I got. They wanted me, Ray Oyler, Wayne Comer and two or three other guys. We wanted to know what the next step would be, so we asked Ray Oyler, because he’d played with the Tigers, to call Kaline or Sparma and check. This was about two weeks ago. Tonight I asked Oyler what he’d found out.

“I called Sparma twice,” he said. “I wasn’t able to get him.”

“Oh,” I said.

Consider this. There’s quite a bit of money involved and Ray Oyler, one of the boys, the man everybody likes, the “in” infielder, makes two phone calls, and gives up. Zero. On the other hand, Mike Marshall arranges to have a railroad car to ship our automobiles from Tempe to Seattle. It takes a lot; phone calls, letters, a lot of organizing. But Oyler is okay and Marshall is a weirdo.

A good word about Sal Maglie. Lately he’s been calling down to the bullpen to have me warm up even when I’m not going to get into the game. It makes it easier for me to get a catcher.

It’s been nippy these last evenings and my fingers have felt a bit wooden. It’s not freezing, of course, but the temperature gets down to about 55. So I’ve been using a handwarmer.

Talbot: “What the hell do you need a handwarmer for? Dammit, it’s only 60 degrees.”

Pattin: “Oh, he’s just got to be different. You know him.”

Bouton: “Marty, why don’t you go feed your gopher?”

I was sorry I said that. Although Marty has been giving up a lot of home runs lately, it’s not the kind of thing you mention. He got into the game and gave up two more, which made me feel bad. What made me feel worse was me getting into the game and giving up three runs in two innings. It was a terrible performance. I was wild as hell. I kept telling myself it was because I hadn’t been pitching enough and I was angry at Joe, then I got angry because the score was 10–2 against us when he put me in, and when the ball would come back from the catcher I’d slap my glove at it. So instead of thinking about pitching and how to get the ball over the plate I was thinking about being angry. Did I say I loved this game?