“Look. It’s not like I’m playing den mother to a bunch of winos. Just about everybody on this team has played his guts out,” added Herzog, “and that’s what has to concern a manager. You gotta wonder when your team is giving it the old 110 percent effort and their record’s still 45-86.”
On the surface, the project of elevating this franchise to respectability seemed overwhelming. Jim Russo, one of the leading scouts in the game, had surveyed the Rangers’ major-league roster, looked at the reports as to what was available in the farm system and told me, “I don’t see how they can be .500 even four or five years from now. Pitching is the name of the game and, well …”
I asked Herzog about the scout’s evaluation and he simply grinned. “I’ve got a catcher in AA, Jim Sundberg, playing at Pittsfield in the Eastern League, who’s better than anything we’ve got on this roster. He’ll start here next season and will stay in the big leagues for fifteen years. Bill Madlock down at Spokane will play third base for us next year and bat .325.”
That sounded nice. So who was going to pitch? Nobody needed to tell Whitey Herzog that his staff had topped the majors in one category: in late August, the Rangers had used fifteen different starting pitchers. At times it seemed as though Whitey were auditioning extras for Charlton Heston’s latest Bible movie. Of those fifteen, the Rangers could count on exactly one, Jim Bibby, for any kind of stability in the coming season.
“Well, you can’t put this in the paper because it’ll queer the deal, but when we dumped the B-e-e-g Boy on the Cubs,” Herzog said, “we made another little transaction that’ll be announced in the off-season. Ferguson Jenkins is burned out at Wrigley Field and the Cubs are kind of burned out on him … so Fergie’s gonna be a Ranger next year. Got him cheap, too. They’re giving up AJ [Alex Johnson] and Vic [centerfielder Vic Harris]. Vic’s a nice player but he’ll never hit much.”
Herzog wore an everything-is-under-control look. “The wind has been blowing out at Wrigley Field a lot this year and I hear Fergie is getting a little weird.” Whitey laughed. “He’ll like it in Arlington next year. And he’ll win twenty-five games, too.”
Whitey was a prophet in one aspect. Ferguson Jenkins would win twenty-five games for the Rangers. But due to circumstances that Herzog had not yet foreseen, while Fergie was holding up his end of the proposition, Whitey would be coaching third base for the California Angels.
Chapter 14
The East Coast media in particular was snapping at Spiro Agnew’s trousers leg. According to all the papers and TV newscasts, the vice-president was accused of all manner of malfeasance: tax fraud, bribery, conspiracy, driving on the wrong side of the road.
Julie Nixon Eisenhower was in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, throwing out the first ball at the Little League World Series. Her father couldn’t make it, being preoccupied with some distracting affairs back in the capital. President Richard Nixon appeared on television in late August and delivered a speech in which he said he had now determined, for sure, that he had been “misled” by some of his “subordinates” and, having concluded that, declared that it was now high time for Congress and the media to “end the obsession with Watergate so that I can return to the urgent business of the nation.”
The President had perhaps been moved by the inspiring words of Eddie Fisher … “count your blessings.” The real success stories in American life repeat that passage to themselves every day. It triggers an attitude that keeps men like Jim Merritt on a major-league payroll. So what if this was a major-league team that was poised to rank with a handful as one of the most feeble of all time? Jim Merritt had a plan and he was about to light a single candle rather than curse the darkness.
“I’m scheduled to pitch the first game of the double-header on Sunday. If I win, make sure to come down to the clubhouse between games because I’ll give you a fucking good story.” Merritt told me this on a flight to Cleveland where the Rangers would play a weekend series.
Merritt, in fact, was one player on the team that the sportswriters generally regarded as somebody who belonged in the big leagues. Certainly his battle-weary left arm was not the weapon that it was when Merritt won twenty games with the 1970 Reds. That didn’t matter (not with the Rangers, at least) because he looked and acted the part of the big leaguer. Unlike certain Rangers, Merritt gave the impression that he knew his way around in The Show.
Unlike certain Rangers, Merritt did not shop at Hot Sam’s Men’s Wear in Detroit. Unlike certain Rangers, Merritt did not order a cup of Everclear with his breakfast. Unlike certain Rangers, Merritt did not travel with a “fart machine” that consisted of a metal washer and rubber band that, when activated against the plastic surface of the chair at the gate of some airport, would make a foul and disgusting noise that old women found unsettling. So when Jim Merritt said that he might have a meaningful post-game announcement, I believed it would be something worthwhile.
Besides, now I had something to look forward to, since this, after all, was the dreaded Cleveland weekend. Dick Bosman, already an ex-Indian, had been traded back from the Rangers to Cleveland in May and had taken the news gallantly. “There’s a bright spot to this,” Bosman pointed out at the time. “When you’re playing for Cleveland, at least you don’t have to come in there on the road.”
As stated earlier, anybody facing a life sentence of summertime in Texas should never complain about the opportunity to escape to a place where the temperature at midnight might creep beneath 110. From a societal view-point, some might argue that the state of Ohio was substantially more advanced than Texas; it was, after all, in the same summer of 1973, I believe, that the environmentally sensitive Ohio legislature voted to add the pink plastic flamingo to its list of endangered species.
Also, it had been reported that civic-minded citizens wanted to reignite the Cuyahoga River as part of Cleveland’s Fourth of July celebration. Unfortunately, it was raining and they couldn’t get it lit. A Rangers pitcher did voice one complaint: “I made the mistake of trying out a Mexican food restaurant in Cleveland. The food wasn’t so bad but a rat crawled up on my plate and started fucking my enchilada.”
It becomes so easy to get sucked into all of the negativism. For some reason I wrote in the paper that “a few thousand fans stopped by Municipal Stadium en route to the shores of Lake Erie, where they go to watch the fish die.” Even if that had been the case, the view from the lakefront had to be more picturesque than the Rangers’ onstage performance. Clobbered by the Indians on Friday night. Stomped again on Saturday afternoon. Ken Aspromonte, the Indians manager, said that if his team had played like that in the first half of the season it would now be neck-and-neck with the Orioles in the AL East. If they played every game against the Rangers, hell yes they would.
Yearning for a drastic change of scenery, I avoided the Rangers’ postgame Saturday gathering at the Hairy Buffalo Club in suburban Rocky River and, instead, rode a commuter train out to Shaker Heights to take in a movie, Last Tango in Paris, that was getting some interesting reviews. Pitching coach Chuck Estrada rode out there with me and when it was over we both agreed that Marlon Brando had gotten laid more times in that movie than the entire Rangers traveling party had in the last two years.
On the train back to the hotel I started to ask Estrada about what sort of mystery announcement Jim Merritt was planning for his postgame comments the next afternoon if he won. But I decided not to. Estrada might not have been briefed on whatever it was that Merritt was planning and I didn’t want to spoil his surprise.
Back in the Hollenden House Hotel, the Rangers media forces were assembled in the lounge where, once again, a political debate was in full flower. Burt Hawkins, the traveling secretary, was defending President Nixon’s recent address to the nation and Harold McKinney expressed other opinions.
“Get on with the urgent business of the nation! Urgent business!” McKinney was screaming. He waved the front section of that day’s edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Just look
at this story, buried in the back of the section of this Republican rag!” Harold probably had no way of knowing whether the Plain Dealer was Republican or not and his description of the paper as a “rag” was ironic, I thought, for someone employed by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. But that was not the point here. “Look here!” McKinney demanded. “Thanks to the fact that Nixon gave the Turks a bunch of money to burn away all the poppy-fields, there’s now a worldwide shortage of codeine! And then he stands up there and talks about urgent business.”
The mystic effects of bottled imports from the Scottish Highlands had carried Harold’s mind away to a special place and being a damned fool, I decided to join him there rather than go to the room and prepare for the following afternoon’s double-header.
When I arrived at the park on Sunday, about ten minutes before the start of the first game, a rare assembly in excess of 20,000 was gathering in that enormous grandstand and the fellows with the rightfield drums were already feverishly expressing what I supposed they deemed as their First Amendment right to free speech. Too late, I discovered that this double-header had the discomfort potential of that frightful afternoon in Milwaukee—Bernie Brewer Day—seven weeks previous. After reflecting on the words of a popular bumper sticker of the time, I thought, “If this is really the first day of the rest of my life, then pass the hemlock, please.” In the meantime, it would be necessary to maintain a pulse rate until the completion of the first game, at least, since the readers back home needed to learn about Merritt’s major announcement.
The first batter Merritt faced in the first inning, Buddy Bell, rapped a simple two-hopper that Jim Fregosi picked up cleanly at third. But his throw to first sailed over Jim Spencer’s head by a good five feet. “There goes his perfect game,” Harold McKinney said. “There is no such thing as a perfect game in Cleveland,” Randy Galloway responded.
Although that opening play was characteristic of the Rangers, it was not what was customarily expected of Fregosi since he had been transferred into Whitey’s menagerie. For some peculiar reason, though, Fregosi was laughing out loud and, on the mound, Merritt also appeared clearly amused.
The next three batters for the Indians went quietly, though, and so it was for the rest of the game. Merritt pitched a three-hit shutout, effectively silencing those menacing outfield drums while the agony within my cranial regions diminished to a point just below the danger zone. Now marginally coherent, I marched down to the Rangers’ clubhouse in hopes that Merritt, as promised, would deliver something beyond the usual post-game winning-pitcher jive.
Merritt was waiting in front of his locker. “I am announcing today,” he began, “that I am officially coming out of the closet.” Then Merritt reached inside his locker and produced a tube of K-Y jelly, a well-known lubricant sometimes used to enhance acts that some practitioners preferred to keep back in the closet. Initially, I didn’t catch on to what Merritt was perpetrating here and momentarily panicked. “Not that!” I was thinking. Remember, this was 1973.
No. It wasn’t that. Jim Merritt was coming clean and confessing that his three-hit shutout against the Indians was accomplished mostly with a new pitch that he called his “Gaylord Perry slider.” He had smeared the lubricant on the back of his neck and “elsewhere on my uniform” for the purpose of throwing a pitch that had been outlawed in organized ball since the early Thirties. A pitcher who makes the spitball or greaseball correctly operational will moisten the fingertips of his pitching hand. The customary spin on the pitched ball is then altered and aerodynamics cause the ball to dip at a sharp angle just as it reaches the plate.
Throwing an effective spitball, like buying off a judge, is not always as easy as it might appear. “It’s like any other new pitch. You can’t just start using it and have instant success,” Merritt said. If confession is good for the soul, it’s even better for newspaper baseball stories, and Merritt’s was improving by the second. “So the last time the Indians were in Texas, I went to Gaylord Perry, asked him about certain mechanics, and he gave me a few valuable tips … how to hold the ball differently and so forth.
“Then I experimented with it in that last home stand against the Orioles. We were losing 14-1 when I got into the game and I thought that was a good place to see if the thing worked. The Orioles hit it pretty good … but not Cleveland today.” Merritt was beaming. He couldn’t have been more pleased if someone had told him he’d just been traded to the Dodgers.
But why was Merritt now going public with his declaration? “I’m not doing it to make the umpires or anybody else look bad,” Merritt said. “It’s just that three or four pitchers are using a spitball or a greaseball and having success with it. So I am just admitting that I did something today. So make it legal for everybody or illegal for everybody. Maybe next year it will be legal.”
The Bernie Brewer incident back in Milwaukee was a good story for Texas Rangers purposes, but it did not gain any national attention. What Jim Merritt was doing here stood out as something altogether different. One year ago this time, Merritt was pitching for the Reds AAA farm team at Indianapolis in the American Association. Life beyond the major leagues had not agreed with him, and Merritt did concede that the addition of a K-Y greaser to his repertoire of pitches might forever prevent future work assignments in the corn belt. “I never thought about [a greaseball] before this season. But I was getting desperate and this could mean my career.”
Like the man in Fort Worth who had recently accidentally killed himself with his own shotgun “burglar trap,” Merritt at least now had the satisfaction of knowing it worked. “The only misfire came on Fregosi’s throw in the first inning,” Merritt explained. I realized now why Fregosi thought his throw to first base, which nearly floated into orbit, was so hilarious. “Half the ball was loaded up,” Fregosi said. “I thought about calling up the official scorer and asking him to charge Merritt with the error instead of me.”
Sonny Siebert, scheduled to start the second game for the Rangers, stopped at Merritt’s locker and asked to borrow the magic tube. With Merritt’s marvelously self-styled exposé, it was altogether necessary to venture into the clubhouse of the home team and extract some reaction from the man known and revered throughout the game as Mister Grease … Gaylord Perry himself. Upon hearing of Merritt’s post-game comments, yes, Perry was surprised and, no, he was not happy.
“I remember Jim Merritt coming to me in Texas and asking me about, uh, certain pitches,” said Perry. “I don’t remember exactly which ones. Down in Texas, I don’t ever throw a greaseball. It’s so hot there and you sweat so much, you never have to.” Perry went on to say that he thought Merritt was “very foolish” for making the disclosures that he had … “considering the way he pitched.” Perry didn’t actually say so, but he felt that a more prudent man, given Merritt’s mastery of the over-the-counter pitching enhancements, would have kept matters to himself. And nobody would doubt that Perry was an honest man. A tobacco farmer in North Carolina, Perry would tell me on a future date that some agronomist told him his land offered ideal growing conditions for marijuana, but “I just won’t plant the stuff,” he said.
Throughout baseball, official reaction to Merritt’s gambit varied sharply. Speaking of marijuana, Boston’s Bill “Spaceman” Lee came out strongly in favor of Jim Merritt and what he was attempting to accomplish. (Lee later would be the first big leaguer to publicly admit marijuana use.) “I don’t smoke it, but I do sprinkle it on my pancakes.” Lee said that “if they’re going to make a grand jury case out of this, I hope every pitcher who has experimented with it [a greaseball, not marijuana] will come forward and admit it,” Lee said. “Almost every pitcher I know has tried something like that when he’s going bad.”
The next day, in Baltimore, Merritt would learn that league president Joe Cronin did not share some of the enthusiasms expressed by others over his actions in Cleveland. Cronin announced that Merritt would draw a fine … “although the league has no positive evidence that an illegal pi
tch was used except [Merritt’s] own admission.” Cronin added that Bill Lee was being fined $250 for popping off like he had.
Merritt appeared relieved by the results. “I hadn’t checked the rule thoroughly,” he said, “and while I do not particularly care to part with my money, it turns out that I could have been suspended and that the game could have been forfeited.” True, it would appear here that AL president Joe Cronin was a man of immeasurable capacities of empathy, leniency and mercy. Had Cronin chosen to exercise his option of forfeiture, the Rangers would have completed the 1973 season with 106 losses instead of 105.
So thanks to the ingenuity of Jim Merritt and the advanced technological techniques at the K-Y laboratories, the Rangers were once again giving us amusements that extended well beyond the commonplace. Now in Baltimore for another three-game series, the Orioles were riding a fourteen-game winning streak that had left the Tigers, Red Sox and Yankees gasping, collapsed and hopelessly beaten for any type of further competition for the AL East title. But most space in the local papers was devoted not to Earl Weaver and the almighty O’s but rather Whitey Herzog and his greaseballing Rangers.
Then, in front of a crowd in Memorial Stadium that included the entire plebe class from Annapolis, the Rangers ended the Orioles’ fourteen-game winning streak, 5-3, and ended Dave McNally’s personal seventeen-game streak against the Rangers-Senators franchise in the process.
“I wonder,” said Whitey Herzog after the game, “if anybody could have possibly calculated the odds of us winning tonight … bucking one seventeen-game streak and another fourteen-game streak, and pitching a guy who managed to find a way to shoot himself in his pitching hand … Can you imagine the odds?” Yes, Charlie Hudson was back.
Seasons in Hell Page 13