The pressbox at Yankee Stadium is arranged in an open area behind the plate on the mezzanine level. Halfway through the final game of the series—Bibby salvaged the only win with a two-hit, fourteen strikeout effort—I got hit in the back of the head with a rock. I turned around, staring into the crowd behind the press area and attempting to locate the son of a bitch throwing the rocks when … kabam … a chunk of concrete that must have weighed fifty pounds fell from the bottom of the deck overhead and shattered between me and Harold McKinney. If the mass had landed one foot to either side, Harold’s head or mine would have been squashed. I heard a moan from the fans in the mezzanine. They were, I guess, disappointed that nobody was killed. Some of them would probably demand their money back.
Bob Fischel, who had been the Yankees’ vice-president in charge of PR and media relations for probably forty years and wore those circular wire-rimmed glasses like Woodrow Wilson’s, heard the crash like everybody else and came trotting over. Fischel was grinning like Robert Young on a Sanka commercial and said, “Don’t worry. No problem. That stuff’s been happening all the time lately.”
An hour or so later, when I walked out of Yankee Stadium and was still alive, it occurred to me that I had just replaced Lou Gehrig as the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Chapter 13
My favorite passage in The Grapes of Wrath depicts a conversation involving a couple of filling-station-pump jockeys on Route 66 in New Mexico. They had just finished providing full service to the Joad family, which was headed west to golden California.
“Jesus, what a hard looking outfit.”
“Them Okies? They’re all hard looking.”
“Jesus, I’d hate to start out in a jalopy like that.”
“Well, you and me got sense. Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a helluva lot better than gorillas.”
If the author, John Steinbeck, wished to produce an account of American life in the summer of 1973—at least the version that my colleagues and I were experiencing—that might be accomplished by substituting “baseball writer” for “Okie.” With the regular season four-and-a-half months old and no end in sight, travel with the Rangers was starting to take on the aspect of riding on a wagon train to Destination Unknown. “Well, this beats shootin’ rivets at the bomber plant,” Randy Galloway, the Dallas Morning News baseball guy, used to say. One night, during a two-hour rain delay in Chicago, he said it about seventy-five times.
Galloway probably could not fully appreciate what life was like inside the bomber plant. I could. A part-time position in the sports department at the Fort Worth Press was my first employment experience that didn’t entail a mop, a hoe or a shovel … and where everyone on the crew wasn’t humming “Old Man River.” Immediately prior to becoming a media whiz I was steam-cleaning floors at a General Motors assembly plant, a job that even a John Steinbeck Okie wouldn’t take.
So why the carping about the baseball chore? OK. For one thing, not too many baseball writers were seen driving around in what was known in Texas as a fancy Eye-talian sports car. And their wives didn’t wear fine furs and Cartier jewelry, because if they did, they’d look out of place working their customary double-shifts as “salad girls” at the Mexiteria.
But the money wasn’t the big rub either. The baseball reporter, unlike the guys covering city hall, could at least draw a small bundle of cash in expense money before heading out on a ten-day road swing and then dash over to the credit union to plunk down a car payment.
There was one task that made the job a real ordeal. For twenty-three games I was supposed to take my turn in the barrel and carry out the duty of what was known as “the official scorer.” That diabolical aspect of the baseball writer’s call of duty amounted to one living color 3-D hemorrhoid.
As such, I was to be the arbiter of what was a base hit and what was an error, along with other intricately detailed matters that are associated with the vital statistics of the game. And there is no other activity known to man for which statistics are as vital as they are for major-league baseball.
After each game the official scorer must also complete a ledger sheet that would stagger a senior accountant of Price Waterhouse. The numbers on that document account for every put out, assist, broken bat, belch, yawn and whatever else happened from first pitch to last of every game. The ledger sheets were to be promptly mailed to the American League office, where they were entered on the sacred parchment of the major-league annals and laid to rest throughout eternity in the mausoleum of statistical lore/bore.
According to bylaws set down by God knows who—the Continental Congress, probably—the official scorer must be a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America who sees a minimum of 100 big-league games a season. Which means the baseball writer must do some traveling to be certified as the official scorer, and in Texas there weren’t very many of those who could qualify. My portion amounted to twenty-three games that I was assigned to score at Arlington Stadium. I told Harold McKinney that I didn’t want to do it.
“You have to,” he said. “Besides, the league pays you fifty dollars a game to score.” I calculated that twenty-three games at fifty a game might translate into a weekend of fulfillment in New Orleans in the off-season. But I had already witnessed the angst and grief that characterized the day-to-day drudge of the official scorer.
The sportswriter could, in the public print, suggest that a player’s job skills were insufficient for the major leagues and receive no reaction from the player himself. The players all said that they never read the papers and most of them probably didn’t. The writer could accuse a player of engaging in perversions too weird to be listed in a criminal forensics textbook and that player might, if sufficiently oiled, even cheerfully acknowledge the comments. But if the same player thinks you, as official scorer, might have stiffed him out of a base hit, you can anticipate most sincere threats to life and limb.
The act of ruling on a hit or error can never affect the outcome of a game, like the “safe” or “out” rulings of an umpire. But it should be remembered that the majority of the ballplayers were most keenly absorbed in the progress of their individual stats. Whether his team was winning or losing games was often of secondary concern. If a player was robbed, in his personal judgment, of a base hit, then his batting average might read .258933 instead of .258934 at the end of the season. Ever wonder what ballplayers might actually be thinking about while they sit hour after hour in the dugout sucking on sunflower seeds? Many at least are pondering how that final digit in his batting average might round off at the end of the year. Enough change in the digits added, of course, to dollars plus or minus.
Another unfortunate feature was that unlike the umpires, the official scorer had twenty-four hours to change his mind on a call. In other words, if the scorer could be convinced or coerced into believing a call was indeed horseshit, the scorer could reverse himself. Which meant that the scorer was continually exposed to endless heartfelt, emotional appeals from the men on the field. “You’re stuck way up there in the pressbox. You’ve got a crappy angle and can’t see those plays the same way we see them,” was the conventional argument. “So what do you want me to do? Cover the game from second base? I didn’t invent the goddamn system, ya know,” was the conventional reply.
Now, late in the season, the complaints against scoring rulings would be louder and more persistent. That was because many of the players had entered what they termed their annual “salary drive.” With most of the pennant races already determined, many teams would be bringing in untested talent from the minors in the dying weeks. So this was a good time for the regulars to inflate their stats in hopes of gaining a little leverage at contract time in the off-season.
Actually, in the three seasons that I endured the trauma of acting as official scorer, only one encounter became really
acrimonious. It involved Pat Dobson, who was pitching for the Yankees. Because I did not charge New York first baseman Chris Chambliss with an error on a bad-hop grounder, the world spun a couple of degrees off its axis and the resulting tidal wave killed a billion people in Bangladesh. But more importantly, the scoring decision stuck Dobson with a couple of earned runs that looked unsightly on his stat sheet. The names that Pat Dobson called me are not usually associated with honorable conduct or normal human sexuality. Because of the play in question, Dobson came away with a loss instead of a win. But that earned-run average was Dobson’s primary source of concern.
This interchange led me to ponder a couple of philosophical issues. First—since I could not locate any salary checks in my name that carried the signature of Pat Dobson, I wondered why he thought I might be even minutely concerned about the state of his fucking earned-run average. And second—I wondered what kind of grown man would desire to hang onto a job where he had to put up with crap like that.
As a final insult, it had also been ordained that for the sake of appearance the official scorer should not consume alcohol during his term on the hot seat. Instances had been reported over the years in which an official scorer was seen facedown by the sixth inning, the kind of scenario that might be regarded as bad form in the modern era. Thus, my beverage caravan from the pressroom lounge to my seat in the pressbox would be discontinued for the final twenty-three home games. What next? Mandatory chapel? Scoring presented yet another annoyance. Since the scorer’s obligation naturally involved concentrating on the game, I was distracted from working on my self-help account of my baseball travels fancifully entitled Men Are From Fort Worth, Women Are From Bakersfield.
On a typical night, the routine at Arlington Stadium worked like this: The official scorer sits at the far left end of the pressbox next to Burt Hawkins, who handles the pressbox PA. A batter hits a grounder past the pitcher up the middle. The shortstop gets a glove on the ball but can’t make the play. The scorer turns to Burt Hawkins and says either “base hit” or “E-6,” meaning an error on the shortstop. Since the unwritten criteria in rendering such judgments is that these guys are major leaguers who are amply compensated for making tough plays, you tell Hawkins “E-6” and Hawkins gets on the pressbox PA and says “E-6.” About five seconds later, way out atop the leftfield stands on the huge scoreboard shaped in the outline of the state of Texas, the notation E-6 appears in lights up in the Panhandle portion of the state, right around the community of Dumas.
Twelve seconds later a phone rings in the pressbox. Someone wishes to speak to the official scorer. This would be the batter, calling from the dugout. The message is always the same: “MOTHER FUCKER! HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU CALL THAT AN ERROR? YOU’RE STEALING FOOD OUT OF MY BABY’S MOUTH. AARRRGGGHHH!”
Almost always the source of the phone call in the dugout will be the batter. The fielder involved in decisions like that rarely carps. Nobody pays that much attention to fielding averages. Golden Glove awards are nice but they don’t get you the bucks a 300-plus batting average does or a 30-plus homerun season does. It was ironic, by the way, that the top-echelon players with all-star credentials rarely if ever phoned the pressbox. The man on the telephone would usually be hitting .235. The only other party known to protest over a scorer’s ruling was none other than the Chicago broadcaster Harry Caray, who would burst into the writers’ section of the pressbox to complain.
So naturally I looked forward to my personal initiation as official scorer with the same enthusiasm I’d felt a week earlier when I’d sat in Dr. Horne’s office waiting to have two wisdom teeth yanked out. The first night proceeded without difficulty, with no plays that might challenge the keen intuitions of the scorer—until the eighth inning. The Orioles, now asserting themselves in a late-season push that would separate Baltimore from the rest of the pack in the AL East, were in town and the Birds were leading the Rangers by about six runs, surprise, surprise.
In the eighth, a Rangers batter hammered a hard shot right down the third base line. By the time Brooks Robinson made his patented lunge, the ball was already past him and into leftfield. Since I’d been told that the big leaguers were supposed to make the tough plays, I figured Brooks Robinson should make all the plays, shouldn’t he? Hell, I’d seen a picture of Robinson actually making that same play on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he turned the 1970 World Series into a one-man show.
I looked at Burt Hawkins and said, “E-5.” Wheel What a power trip! Brooks Robinson will think twice before he lets another one like that slip past him in Texas, by God.
After the game, I was confronted in the Rangers clubhouse by one of the catchers, Ken Suarez. “Were you the scorer tonight?” he said. I nodded.
“Jeez … what happened to you in the eighth inning?” Suarez demanded. “Have you got a tank of laughing gas up there, or what?” My response to Suarez was, word for word, what Spiro Agnew had said that very same afternoon when news reports had surfaced that the vice-president of our country was being investigated for accepting kickbacks while governor of Maryland. “Those charges are false and scurrilous and malicious … damned lies!” That’s what Spiro told the media and that’s what I was telling Ken Suarez.
“Well, that call you made giving Brooks Robinson an error was brutal,” Suarez said. It occurred to me now that he was absolutely right, since the batter was not even Suarez but his competition for the catcher’s job, Rich Billings. “I mean,” said Suarez, “Billings has been going bad and if anybody ever needed a break it was him. You really screwed him on that call.”
Like most of the players in the summer of 1973, Billings was sporting mutton-chop sideburns and looked like someone in a Matthew Brady photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. And, like some of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, a lot of these Rangers looked like they should perhaps go somewhere and get a chest X-ray.
Billings was sitting on a stool in front of his locker, smoking a cigarette and appearing perplexed. He presented the general appearance of a man who could not make up his mind whether he wanted to go get some Mexican food or climb a light tower in the outfield and jump off. I walked up to Billings and said something like “it has been, uh, suggested, er, that I might have, um, made a bad call on that ball in the eighth inning and—”
Billings cut me off. “Didn’t you see that batting average they flash on the scoreboard when I come up to hit?” he said. “It’s .169 and that says it all. When you’re batting .169 this late in the year you don’t go whining to the official scorer … you consult a hypnotist. Know any good ones?
“Last year, I hit about .292 and had the best average on the team. This year I can’t buy a hit and that means that with the contract I get next year I not only won’t be able to buy a hit, I won’t be able to buy a pack of cigarettes. I don’t know what in the hell is wrong. I’ve tried everything. I’ve taken extra batting practice. Sometimes I’ve taken no batting practice. I’ll bet I’ve tried two dozen different bats this year. Nothin’ works,” Billings said.
With that soliloquy, Billings put forth a candid appraisal of his season of discontent and, while doing so, encapsulated a summer’s worth of frustrations for the whole team. Billings had uncomplainingly served as sort of the poster boy for the wayward Rangers, baseball’s unorthodox franchise, from the beginning. None other than Denny McLain, who had worn a Rangers uniform for about fifteen minutes before being traded in the spring of 1972, had cautioned writers to “watch out for Billings. He’s as crazy as I am.”
I decided to compose a story on the demise of Rich Billings. Any topic would do, actually, at this point of the season. For a team that could traverse the long season, wire-to-wire, in last place, the 1973 Rangers had put forth some rare theatrics for the benefit of the struggling journalist. On an irregular basis the Rangers’ act had been one to rival Abbott and Costello.
But now it was getting late and the fatigue factor seemed to lurk everywhere. Players walked about like zombies. Nobody w
as threatening to throw any more no-hitters. The novelty of David Clyde was beginning to wear off. Most of the baseball fans around North Texas mostly now remember Clyde as a one-start wonder.
David Clyde, in fact, had been sent forth from the trenches and directly into the face of enemy fire on a twice-a-week basis over the span of a month and a half and had pitched as consistently well as just about anybody in the American League. His record coming into this late home stand was 4-4, with more innings pitched than base hits given up and a solid two strikeouts for every one base-on-balls ratio. In his last three starts at Arlington, though, a seven-inning winning effort against the Yankees had been sandwiched between a couple of disastrous appearances.
Suddenly the Kid was on estranged terms with his curve-ball. Once he finally started to overthrow his breaking pitch, it just sort of packed up and moved away, never to be seen again. The Orioles and the Red Sox had chased Clyde after a couple of innings, and his most recent start at Arlington attracted only 9,000 paying customers.
The writers no longer had the B-e-e-g Boy to put on display for comic relief, either. Rico Carty was a Cub now. The Rangers had put Carty on waivers, and Chicago had claimed him for $20,000. Reports that the Cubs had also thrown in a new hot-water heater for Bob Short’s guest house in Minneapolis were unsubstantiated.
So a story about Rich Billings seemed as good as any. I found Whitey in his office, buck-naked and blow-drying his hair. Years later, when he won a World Series managing the Cardinals, Herzog wore his hair in a classic flat-top, but with the Rangers in 1973 he sported a much fuller, Conway Twitty look. In 1973, Whitey could have found work as a tent evangelist.
“I got no complaints with Billings,” Whitey said, responding to my inquiry. “You don’t give up on somebody who’s busting his butt every night. Sometimes I might get on Toby Harrah’s case. There have been nights when I wonder if Toby might not have been in some kind of accident as a kid and paralyzed from the neck up. But that kid’s got great instincts for the game and will be a helluva player someday. In most aspects, he already is.
Seasons in Hell Page 12