Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (5 page)

Joe Schultz stopped by again to say a kind word. I noticed he was making it his business to say something each day to most of the guys. He may look like Nikita Khrushchev, but it means a lot anyway. I’m sure most of us here feel like leftovers and outcasts and marginal players and it doesn’t hurt when the manager massages your ego a bit.

I was moved up from last to next-to-last, and then to second, for my five minutes of batting practice, and I’ve decided there’s no significance to the position. My arm feels good; no pain, no problems. Every once in a while I let a fastball fly and it comes out of my hand real easy and seems like it took no effort. I can almost hear a voice in the back of my mind whispering, “You can go back to it, you can find it, you can find your old fastball and you’ll be great again.” Of course, I’ve heard that siren song in my head before and I’ve won a total of fourteen games in the last four years. So I’m going to stick with my knuckleball. I’ll probably throw it 90 percent of the time, and if my other stuff comes around for me, I’ll probably cut it down to about 40 or 50 percent. But I’ve got to remember that if it wasn’t for my knuckleball I’d probably be back in New Jersey, raising chickens or something. Remember, stupid, remember!

One of the problems is that the hitters hate to hit against my knuckleball in batting practice. They don’t like pitchers to work on anything out there. They want you to lay it in there and let them smash it over the fence. So I compromise. For each seven swings they get, I give them two or three knuckleballs.

Gerry McNertney (now there’s one of the great names in baseball) was catching me today, and when I threw a knuckler that didn’t do much I hollered in to him, “Is it better than Wilhelm’s? Is it? Huh?”

Nert caught Hoyt Wilhelm when they were with the White Sox and he tried to be kind. He laughed and said, “Not bad, not bad.” I asked Nert about Wilhelm’s knuckleball and he said one of his problems was that he was throwing it about three-quarters because he didn’t have the strength to come with it straight overhand anymore. He is, after all, at least forty-six by his own admission. Nert said it was only effective when he came straight over. “You seem to be throwing straight overhand all the time,” he said, “and you should have success with it.”

Things are looking up. Right now I’m thinking that I can do anything—start, relieve, be a long man or a short man. Or all of them together, every day, because the knuckleball doesn’t take anything out of your arm. It’s like having a catch with your sister. I’m starting to get that old fire in my stomach again.

There are some things I ought to explain about the knuckleball. I was about thirteen years old the first time I threw it. I was very little at the time, the littlest and skinniest kid in the neighborhood, but I could play ball. At least I could hit and run. Although I had a good arm, I couldn’t throw very hard. So when I saw a picture on the back of a cereal package explaining how to throw the knuckleball, I thought I’d try it.

There was a picture of Dutch Leonard and a picture of how he held the ball, and about a paragraph explaining it. The knuckleball isn’t thrown with the knuckles, of course. It’s thrown with the fingertips, and the principle is to release the ball so that it leaves all the fingertips at the same time without any spin on the ball. The air currents and humidity take over and cause the ball to turn erratically and thus move erratically.

Wilhelm was doing pretty good with the Giants at the time, and that was another reason to try it—except that my hand was so small I couldn’t hold the ball with three fingers like everybody else did. I had to hold it with all five. I still do. It’s kind of freaky, I guess, but as a result I throw it harder than anybody else. Anyway, it took about a week before I could get it to knuckle at all. I remember once I threw one to my brother and hit him right in the knee. He was writhing on the ground moaning, “What a great pitch, what a great pitch.” I spent the rest of the summer trying to maim my brother.

I used the knuckleball all the way through high school and college, about 50 percent of the time. I might have been the youngest junkball pitcher in America. After a couple of years in the minors, however, I started to get bigger and stronger and started to overpower people with my fastball. So I phased the knuckleball out.

I never really used it again until 1967. My arm was very sore and I was getting my head beat in. Houk put me into a game against Baltimore and I didn’t have a thing, except pain. I got two out and then, with my arm hurting like hell, I threw four knuckleballs to Frank Robinson and struck him out. The next day I got sent to Syracuse. Even so, it wasn’t until the last part of the next season that I began throwing it again. The idea that you’ve lost your regular stuff is very slow in coming.

Sal the Barber came over to me today and said, “You’re looking smoother than I remember seeing you in the last few years. You’re getting your body into it now. I remember thinking that you were using up your force before you even released the ball and looked as though you never released it the same way twice.”

That made me feel pretty good. Then Bob Lemon, manager of the Pilots’ Triple-A Vancouver club, came over and said, “Hello, Bill,” and Mike Ferraro, an infielder, hollered while I was pitching, “Fire it in there Bob.” Thanks a lot, Hank. Thanks a lot, Sam.

Tommy Harper, who’s an infielder listed as an outfielder on the roster, reported today. He’s certain to make this team, along with guys like Barber, McNertney, Gary Bell, Mike Hegan, Ray Oyler, Don Mincher, Rich Rollins and Tommy Davis. Harper just got out of the Air Force and they asked him if he wanted to re-up, as they call it. They told him he could come back for two years and they’d make him a staff sergeant. And he told them, “I wouldn’t re-up for two years if you made me a general.”

We had sliding and pick-off drills today and I noticed a lot of the guys having trouble. Lasko was standing next to me during one of them and said, “Hey, I thought this was a simple game.”

It’s tough in these drills to perform like you should perform because you’re much better off in athletics if you do things instinctively. I suppose that’s what they mean when they say baseball isn’t a thinking man’s game. If you have to think about it, you tend to do things mechanically rather than naturally.

I’ve always felt there were three kinds of athletes. First, there’s the guy who does everything instinctively and does it right in the first place. I think Willie Mays is that kind of guy, and so was Mickey Mantle. I don’t think these guys can articulate what they’re doing, they just know what to do and they go out and do it. I put Yogi Berra in this category too. I remember Yogi standing around the batting cage trying to explain hitting to some of the guys and he started to talk about his hands and his legs and he couldn’t make himself clear. Finally he said, “Ah, just watch me do it.”

Second, there’s the athlete who’s educated. If they’re pitchers they try to figure out the mechanics of rotation and the aerodynamics of the curve ball. If they’re hitters they try to figure out force and velocity in relation to weight. Jay Hook comes to mind. He was a pitcher with an engineering degree from Northwestern University. He had all the tools: big, strong, good stuff. But he was always too involved with the mechanics of pitching. Ballplayers often say, “Quit thinking, you’re hurting the club.” I really believe you
can
think too much in this game, and Hook always did.

The third kind is the one who is intelligent enough to know that baseball is basically an instinctive game. I like to think that’s me. So what
I
do, kiddies, is work hard, stay in shape, practice—then, once I’m on the field I let my instincts take over. Also, I don’t smoke.

Euphoria: Bob Lemon called me by my right name.

Now a few hundred words about Frank Crosetti, coach. Cro, as we fondly call him, is fifty-eight years old, bald as an egg and, we all assume, rich as Croesus. We assume he’s rich because he’s always checking the stock tables and because between 1932, when he began to play for the Yankees, and 1968 when he left as a coach, he had pulled down some 23 World Series shares in addition to his considerable salary. And no one has noticed him spending very much of it. In addition, starting at age fifty, he elected—possibly through foolishness, more likely through greed—to collect his player pension. When the pension was raised by a considerable amount—only for those who had not yet started to draw on it—Cro sued to get the higher rate. He lost, but I haven’t noticed any holes in his shoes.

I have to give him credit, though. He’s out there every day, his beady little eyes shining, not an ounce of fat on him, taking calisthenics with all us kids and never missing a beat; jumping-jacks, pushups and everything. Another thing he does is get up every morning at 6:45 a.m. and take a long, pre-breakfast stroll. When he was with the Yankees, once in a while he’d run into some of us coming back from a night on the town. We’d try to get by with a “Good morning, Cro, nice day.” I doubt he was fooled. There was even some suspicion that Cro was turning in reports on the hours some players kept, although it has never been confirmed and must be considered a rumor.

Cro’s a coach like every other coach, except his twin fortes are saving baseballs (he’s a strong company man) to the point of jumping into the stands after them, and chasing photographers off the field. He’s the self-appointed photographer-chaser of the Western world. If a photographer should just happen to step into fair territory during practice, there’s Cro, screaming from the other side of the field, “Hey, what’re you doing? Get off the field!” He’s got this high, squeaky voice, and when he was with the Yankees half the club was able to imitate it. So at night, when we’d be getting on a bus and you couldn’t see individual players, Cro would get aboard and somebody would yell in his voice, “Hey, for crissakes, get the hell off the bus. What’re you photographers doing on the bus?”

Don’t get the idea that I consider Cro a lovable old man, butt of little jokes but a heart of gold. Like most coaches he’s a bit of a washerwoman and sometimes a pain in the ass. I had an odd run-in with him when I was with the Yankees. The unwritten rule on the club was that if a pitcher was knocked out of a game early he could dress and watch it from the stands if he wished, just so long as he was back in the clubhouse after the game—in case the manager had a few nasty words to say to him. On this day we were playing a doubleheader and my wife, Bobbie, was up in the stands with the kids—I have three now, Michael, five, Kyong Jo, four, and Laurie, three. I got knocked out early and decided to dress and watch the rest of the game in the stands with my family. After the game I’d get back into uniform for the second game.

Crosetti, who was coaching at third, spotted me in the stands and told The Colonel that I was in my street clothes and looked like I was about to go home. So The Colonel, who loved to get this kind of information, told Big Pete to go up into the stands and get me. At first I thought Big Pete was kidding, but when I found out he wasn’t I was burned up.

I got into my uniform and, when the game was over and Cro came into the clubhouse, I went over and told him to keep his big nose out of my business, that he was a goddam busybody and should have been watching the game instead of me. So he yelled back at me and I yelled back at him—bright, clever things that little boys yell at each other, and all of a sudden he jumped up and started punching me.

Now,
there’s
a dilemma. I don’t want to get hit, even by the skinny old Cro. At the same time I don’t want to hit
Frank Crosetti
, for crissakes. So I sort of covered up and started backing off. Besides, I couldn’t help it, I was laughing. At that point my friend Elston Howard, quickly sizing up the great dangers involved, came running over, threw a body block at me and knocked me down. I picked myself up, went over to my locker and sat down. I should have let it go at that. Instead I hollered over to Cro again to keep his nose out of my business and this was when Houk came over and said if I said one more word he’d knock me right off my goddam stool.

I didn’t say another word. And that was the end of it, except you may be certain it was all recorded in my file, in red ink.

Hectic day for personal affairs. We moved out of the motel we’d been staying in where it cost us about $135 an hour and into a two-bedroom apartment. Nice place, heated swimming pool and all. Packing, loading, unloading, unpacking—the life of a ballplayer. It’s one of the pains in the neck. On the other hand it’s exciting, in a way, moving around, seeing new places.

The family loves it in Arizona. We’ve taken a few rides out into the desert and looked at the cactus and the beautiful rock formations, and the kids are excited about the weather getting warm enough so they can use the pool. Kyong Jo, the Korean boy we adopted, is doing great with his English. Every once in a while he’ll burp and say, “Thank you.” But he’s getting the idea.

Got a big day tomorrow. Ten minutes of batting practice. I think I’ll use the Johnny James (former Yankee pitcher) theory of batting practice. Under this theory you imagine you’re in a game and you move your pitches around on the hitter, dust him off, throw sliders, the works. The hitters hate it. But it helped Johnny James make the team, at least for a while.

When I was a kid I loved to go to Giant games in the Polo Grounds. And a little thing that happened there when I was about ten years old popped into my mind today. There was a ball hit into the stands and a whole bunch of kids ran after it. I spotted it first, under a seat, and grabbed for it. Just as I did, a Negro kid also snatched at it. My hand reached it a split second before his, though, and I got a pretty good grip on it. But he grabbed the ball real hard and pulled it right out of my hand. No complaint, he took it fair and square. I thought about it afterward, about what made him able to grab that ball out of my hand. I decided it had to do with the way we were brought up—me in a comfortable suburb, him probably in a ghetto. I decided that while I
wanted
the baseball, he
had to have it
.