Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  Autograph? I smiled. “Sure, if I can have a date after the game tonight.”

  “Okay, sign here.”

  I got a hit and made a nice running catch in the outfield, which she commented on afterward as I led her to the T-Bird. We made out in the front seat until the parking lot emptied. Then I suggested we get in back, she agreed and—wow! Right in! Wet and warm! My first piece of ass was so easy! So sweet! I’d never been all that interested in sex before—beyond my five fingers—and suddenly I was kinda interested. As I drove her home afterward, I thought, yeah, that was nice, really nice, but, shit, playing baseball’s just as nice, even nicer. In fact, fucking couldn’t compare with playing baseball.

  The only bad things about Auburn were: (1) I got homesick in about forty-eight hours and took to calling my mother every day or so thereafter; and (2) the haunted house where I lived. Linz and another player, Russ Serzen, had rented this place that had about seventeen rooms for sixty dollars a month. The price was right, but the squeaks and groans and strange noises that rang through that place were unnerving. The house was out in the sticks where it was dark as hell, and the front door was jammed, so we had to stumble around to the back every night. The back door wouldn’t lock. We never knew who we might find inside.

  “There’s a prowler around, Joe,” Linz told me, “but don’t worry. He’ll get Russ and me before he gets to you, because we sleep in the two downstairs bedrooms. You have your choice of any of the upstairs rooms.”

  Phil, who was from Maryland, showed me the switchblade knife he kept under his pillow. I had come from Brooklyn completely unprepared. But after my first night in that spook house, I slept with a bat beside my bed. My third night there I jumped out of bed and grabbed it. Either someone was in my room or he was trying to get in the window from the porch roof outside. A scratching, banging noise had wakened me. I squeezed the bat in my hand and tiptoed to the light, which was above the string hanging in the center of the room. It was an overcast night, pitch dark outside, and I couldn’t see a thing until I managed to grab the string. I flicked on the light and saw a stick dangling inside my window from a line that went down the outside of the house. Then I got it—that line ran down to Phil Linz’s hand.

  “You no good sonofabitch!” I yelled, running down the stairs waving the bat over my head. They started roaring.

  After the Auburn season, I went home until the instructional school began, then I drove off to St. Petersburg. On the way, I kept passing these boat dealers. I began slowing down when I saw one coming up so I could look at the neat-looking speed boats. I started imagining myself behind the wheel of one. I started imagining myself skiing behind one. I stopped at the next dealer and bought one. Hell, I was on my way to Florida, which has water around most of it. The dealer attached a trailer hitch to my T-Bird, and I told him to just stow the water skis, life preservers, and the rest of the gear I’d bought in the boat.

  Needless to say, when I pulled up to the Yankees’ headquarters, management didn’t waste a great deal of time informing me that they’d never had a ballplayer—much less a rookie with all of sixteen games’ experience—report to them towing a boat. They gave me twenty-four hours to sell my virgin craft, but I didn’t understand why they had to get so excited about it. Damn landlubbers.

  There was no faulting my performance on the field, my desire to do well. Steve Souchock, who ran the instructional school and who became a good friend, liked my arm, my speed afoot, my quick bat, and the fact that I never stopped hustling. He didn’t like some of the foolishness I got involved in. But we’d always done a lot of fooling around in my neighborhood, and I was hyper, I had so much nervous energy to burn up.

  After about a week of working out, another young guy named Rich Barry—who was a helluva pitcher and half crazed—and I stayed late to have a catch. There was a huge water tower by Miller Huggins Field, with a catwalk running around it about three hundred feet from the ground. We started arguing about who had the stronger arm, Rich or I, so we got a bucket of baseballs and went out to see who could throw a ball up onto the catwalk. Each of us threw eight or ten balls and they all landed on the catwalk. In the midst of this, Steve Souchock walked up behind us.

  “You guys having fun?” he yelled. “Maybe ruining your arms trying to hit a goddamn water tower? What the hell’s wrong with you two?”

  “We just wanted to see if we could do it, Skip,” I said.

  “Wonderful,” said Souchock. “Those balls cost three dollars apiece. Now who’s gonna climb up there and recover them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The grounds keeper?”

  “No.”

  “The water-tower keeper?”

  “No.”

  I was beginning to sweat. “We’ll get a kid—”

  “Bullshit! One of you two get your ass up there and get those balls. Right now! I’ll wait.”

  Rich and I “choosed” to see who had to go up. He threw out two fingers and called “evens.” I threw out two fingers and started climbing—three hundred feet straight up a narrow little ladder. About three-quarters of the way to the top, my eighteen years passed before my eyes and I saw the story in the papers: “Joe Pepitone, young major-league prospect, died suddenly today. He fell off a water tower.”

  I closed my eyes, made it to the catwalk, and threw down the balls. When I got down, Souchock wasn’t finished with us. “Instead of reporting with everyone else tomorrow at ten o’clock, you guys be here in uniform at eight-thirty. You’re going to do a little running.”

  The next morning when we got there, I knew we were dead. The only other player present was Jack DePalo, a guy from New York who loved to run and who could run all day. Even then, as a skinny kid, if I ran three laps around the field, I needed oxygen. Souchock made us run—with that maniac DePalo pacing us—150 wind sprints. “And if you quit, you start all over tomorrow,” he said. “Get going.”

  We were still running when the other players showed up. I was dying on my feet, thought my chest would burst, and through my bleary eyes I saw DePalo up ahead, gliding along as if we’d just started. I hated the sonofabitch. The other players cheered-jeered as Rich and I staggered through the last sprint. His hands went to his knees, and he stood there gasping, the sweat streaming off him. I fell to the ground. Souchock came over and said, “Pepitone, get in the outfield and shag flies.”

  If I’d had the strength, I would have bit his ankle.

  Rich Barry was from California, and he was wacky over fast cars. We hung out together, and every Friday we’d go to a local auto dealer, say our parents were coming down for the weekend, and ask if we could borrow a car. Certainly, they’d say, what kind would you like? Rich would say, “A Corvette,” or some other sports car. We had to go to a different dealer every time, because we raced around so much we always returned the car with bald rear tires.

  One Saturday we picked up a Corvette at nine in the morning and were racing all over the place before practice. All of a sudden we realized it was ten-thirty—we were thirty minutes late for the workout and ten miles from the ball park! Rich got us there in about eight minutes, and as we approached we saw that the big gate to the field was open and that everyone was working out. Rich raced straight through the gate, right onto the field, and skidded about twelve feet to a stop, leaving a cloud of dust behind us and steam shooting out of the radiator. We hopped out of the car, ran into the locker room and changed, ran back out buttoning our shirts, and all the other players were on their knees in a circle around home plate bowing to us and chanting, “Hail, the almighties are here.”

  Souchock fined us a hundred dollars and said, “One more trick like that and we’re sending both of you home. Got it?”

  “Yes, Skip.”

  I swore I wouldn’t be late again, and I wasn’t. But Rich Barry liked to have fun as much as I did, and the two of us together meant not only laughs but trouble. He had a hopped-up Chevy he liked to keep finely tuned, and we hung around a local speed shop quite a bit.
We got to know the owner real well and liked to kid around with him. Then Rich came up with this brilliant idea one day. He got two masks, two toy pistols that looked like the real thing, and decided that we would pull a fake holdup of the speed shop, just for laughs. The owner would get a kick out of it.

  We walked in, masks on, guns out, and said, “This is a holdup! Turn around and lean against the wall!”

  The trouble started when a passerby looked in the window and flagged down a police car that happened to be driving by. Two cops ran in with drawn guns, followed within seconds by the occupants of two other squad cars. They snapped handcuffs on us, pushed us up against the wall. We yanked off our masks and said, “Wait a minute, we can explain! This is all a joke!”

  The cops didn’t think so—even after the shop owner identified us. We had to call Steve Souchock, who was forced to come down and verify that we were players in the Yankee organization. Otherwise we would have gone to jail. Souchock just shook his head, like he didn’t know what to do with us. I guess it was a good thing that we had shown some ability on the ball field.

  After that caper, Rich and I decided that it would be to our mutual benefit to keep some space between us, so I started hanging out more with Phil Linz. Several days later, Phil and I stopped at a drive-in restaurant after practice. Right behind us came these two fine-looking young chicks. We struck up a conversation and suggested that the four of us do something together. After some chatter, the girls agreed. “Great,” I said, then I headed for the men’s room and signaled Phil to follow me. I was still skinny Joe Pepitone at the time, and I was always getting stuck with the dingiest-looking girl in this kind of circumstance. I really dug the blond with the large hazel eyes who said her name was Barbara Kogerman. She’d said she had lived in New York until her family moved to Florida a few years before, and I figured that gave us something to talk about. I didn’t have a whole lot of good lines with girls at this time.

  It turned out Phil liked Barbara best, too. So we flipped a coin to see who paired off with her. I won. Then we went to a driving range to hit some golf balls. I put a ball on my tee, looked over, and saw Phil bending down by his chick’s tee. Did he drop something? I wondered.

  “Aren’t you going to line up the balls for me, Joe?” Barbara said.

  “Is something wrong with your back?” I asked her. Actually, I was embarrassed. I’d never seen anyone set out golf balls for a girl before. I didn’t want to admit my ignorance. “God gave you a back like mine that bends, so bend it.”

  Nevertheless, we got on very well, and I was smitten by the girl, liked being with her. I dated her every chance I had until the instructional school ended. I couldn’t get her off my mind when I went home to Brooklyn, either. I returned to Florida before spring training to see Barbara. I needed a girl at this time, someone to hold on to besides my mother. The bad shit was still swimming around in my head in the depths of the night, and being with Barbara seemed to help. We were not sleeping with one another, but I didn’t care about getting laid as much as I did about just being with someone I could relax with, have fun with.

  While I was seeing Barbara and waiting for the minor-league spring training camp to open, I asked permission of the Yankees to work out at Miller Huggins Field with the regulars. They had already started getting in shape, and Casey Stengel was the manager. I was six feet, one inch tall then and still weighed 140 pounds. I don’t think the Yankees had ever before had a player as skinny as me. The uniform they gave me was so big, it flapped. But that wasn’t why everyone was laughing at me. The uniform was number 69. Guys kept kidding me about it, and I’d smile back, but I didn’t know what the hell they meant until someone told me.

  Stengel was beautiful. He called me “Pepperone” and talked to me a mile a minute for about ten minutes one day. Then he had me sit next to him in the dugout during an intrasquad game.

  “Watch this Mr. Skowron around first base, Pepperone,” he said.

  I had been watching him, and Skowron moved like a dump truck. “Casey, I’m an outfielder,” I told him, “but I can play first better than that.”

  So I was watching the game, enjoying myself sitting there next to the legendary Casey Stengel in the Yankee dugout, and the next thing I knew Casey was snoring. His head slid over and leaned on my shoulder. I was afraid to move, afraid I’d wake him up and get him annoyed with me. Then my shoulder started to go to sleep, and I thought, Oh, shit. Maybe his snoring will wake him soon.

  Suddenly there was a low line shot hit to first base. Skowron scooped it up on one hop, threw to second to get the lead runner, then stretched to catch the return throw for a double play. At that instant, Casey’s head popped up off my shoulder and he said, “Now, did you see how Mr. Skowron did that?” I said to myself, Holy shit, this guy is a genius—he sees in his sleep!

  VII

  “One of your goddamn ballplayers stole my elevator!”

  In 1959 I was moved up to Class C ball, playing with Fargo-Moorhead in the Northern League, my first full season as a pro. I was disappointed in my batting average, .283, but I led the league in doubles with 35, had 12 triples, and 14 home runs. I was satisfied.

  That fall I went back to the instructional school in St. Petersburg, only this time I stayed out of trouble with Souchock. Clete Boyer—the Yankees’ regular third-baseman, who was at school to work on his hitting—Rich Barry, and I went out quite a bit and did a lot of kidding around in the locker room. I always did a lot of kidding, because I always had this tremendous need for people to like me.

  But one day I did the wrong thing with Clete after he’d struck out four times in a game. As he came out of the shower, I squirted him with a Pepsi. He hit me a helluva punch in the arm. It really hurt. I got annoyed and rapped him back. And he landed a punch on my jaw that knocked me right into my dressing cubicle. I was half conscious. The next thing I knew he was pulling me up, apologizing. “It’s all right, Clete, all right,” I said, shaking my head and trying to focus my eyes. I had double vision for three days. I had no idea he was that strong. When we became teammates a few years later, and I’d put on about 30 or 35 pounds, I used to kid him, “Come on now, man. I haven’t forgotten that shot you gave me in Florida!” I’d dance around him and he’d laugh. He was a real sweetheart, a good guy.

  I spent most of my free time with Barbara, because I was in love. Or I thought I was in love. I turned nineteen on October 9, 1959, and I was finally starting to fill out a bit. I began to look a little less like a robin, but I was still very much a baby, mentally and emotionally. We were engaged to be married in December.

  It seemed like the thing to do at the time, just what I needed. Until the night before the wedding, when the first doubts arose in my mind. Naturally, I didn’t heed them. Barbara and I had never made it in all the time we’d been going together. No balling whatsoever. It was just a lot of hugging and kissing and getting excited and going home and playing with myself. She said she was a virgin and that we should wait, and that was cool with me.

  But the night before the wedding, I was staying at the Kogerman’s house, and when it got late and her parents went to bed, I snuck into Barbara’s room. We started kissing and fondling and panting and—what the hell—we’d be man and wife in a few hours. I forced it, and the next thing I knew was great disillusionment.

  “What about this?” I said to her. “You said you were a virgin.”

  “I am,” she said. “I used to do a lot of horseback riding.”

  I didn’t sleep much that night; I lay there thinking, Should I marry this girl? Then I realized how silly I was. There were ways to lose a hymen other than through sex, and I didn’t believe Barbara would lie. I was in love with Barbara, who was so pretty, so nice. I needed her.

  The next day we were married, and I felt great. But in no time at all there were problems. We lived with her parents initially, waiting for spring training to start. They had liked me when we were going together, always welcomed me, seemed to enjoy talking to me. Then
we lived with them, had a few normal newlywed disagreements, and her parents turned against me. They treated me as if I weren’t there.

  One day we had an argument; Barbara walked out of our room, went downstairs, and told her parents. When dinner was served, nobody called me down to eat. I finally went down, walked into the dining room, and they were clearing the table. “How come you didn’t call me?” I asked them. Nobody said a word. Nobody even looked at me. Shit, I was a kid, I was alone, I had a problem, and I had nobody to talk to. I went out and called my mother, my best friend, and told her what they were doing to me. She told me to be patient, everything would work out, just relax.

  Relax! The next day they still weren’t talking to me. But I hung around downstairs waiting for dinner. When it was served, I sat at the table, and still none of them said a word to me. The meal was spaghetti, but nobody passed it to me. I half stood, leaned over, and reached for it myself. As I was serving myself, Barbara’s mother broke the silence toward me.

  “Don’t eat all the spaghetti,” she said. “We’ve got to save some for the dog.”

  I just sat there, choking up. Then the tears started pouring down my face. I jumped to my feet, picked up the bowl of spaghetti, and dumped it over Mr. Kogerman’s head. “Take your daughter and shove her up your ass!” I yelled, and ran out of the house.

  I drove to a motel near the ball park, and I thought I was going to literally crack up, go out of my mind. I was shaking all over.

  That night Barbara and her mother knocked on the door to my motel room. I opened the door, and Barbara hugged me and apologized. Mrs. Kogerman apologized. I said to her mother, “I don’t want your apology. I just want you out of here, out of my room. And Barbara stays here with me—away from you—or I’m leaving for good.”

  Mrs. Kogerman left, Barbara stayed, and we got it together.

  After a good spring training, I was skipped a classification to A ball in i960 and assigned to Binghamton, New York, in the Eastern League. Barbara and I rented a nice little place there, and for the first couple of weeks I hit well. Then I got scared and couldn’t hit anything—my average kept falling and falling. I’d never seen a slider before, and I’d never faced so many young fast-ball pitchers who were wild, or so many veterans who threw at you to intimidate you. They’d throw the first pitch right at your head, the second one at your belly, and scare the shit out of you. I started bailing out against left-handers, then against everyone. I thought they were trying to kill me. I spent all my time getting away from the ball. And if you don’t stand in there, you can’t hit. I didn’t keep my eye on the ball, didn’t maintain my balance, my normal stride, into the ball.