Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  “Get him out of here, Joe,” Stevie said. “Because if he doesn’t leave, I’m going to.”

  I picked the lock with a hairpin, opened the door, and Cockeye went bounding in. He jumped right up on Dominic’s chest—because he was used to sleeping on that bed when Dom was out—and stood there wagging his tail. With every wag, a dozen hairs fell onto Dominic. When I stopped laughing, I told him he had to find his own place. He took an apartment in a building around the corner that was owned by a woman he knew.

  I was still as jealous as ever, and I kept checking up on Stevie at the Playboy Club. Any time she’d go home to Kansas City to visit her mother and stepfather, I’d worry. Her stepfather, Jim Shipley, was a helluva guy. I’d been hunting with him a couple of times and really enjoyed his company. He also liked to go out evenings, and any time Stevie would visit, they’d bounce around. I’d call her at three o’clock in the morning, and her mother would say, “Stevie’s not home yet, Joe.”

  “Not home—at this hour?”

  “Well, she’s out with her father.”

  “What do you mean, out with her father? Everything in Kansas City closes at two in the morning. Look, Mrs. Shipley, have her call me when she gets home. I don’t care what time it is. It’s important.”

  I’d sit there waiting . . . three-thirty, four o’clock, four-thirty, five o’clock . . . worrying. Who is she really with? At five-thirty, Stevie would call.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “We went to an after-hours place.”

  “With your father? Who are you shitting?”

  All of a sudden, Jim would come on the phone. “Joe, she was with me. Be cool.”

  “Oh, everything’s all right, Jim. I wasn’t really worried.”

  In November, when it was apparent that the lounge was on its way out, I called John Holland to find out how I fitted into the Cubs’ plans for 1973. If at all. He was noncommittal, but he said that Whitey Lockman would be in the office in a few days and that I could come by and talk to him. I did.

  “I was just thirty-two last month,” I told Lockman. “I’m in good shape. I don’t run around at night any more, my legs feel good. And I can still outhit half the guys in this league. I know it.”

  “You don’t have to sell me on the fact that you can still play baseball, Joe,” he said. “I know what you can do. You can help us if you want to. But do you want to? Do you still want to play baseball, Joe? You’ve got a lot of things to prove to a lot of guys on this club. You’ve got to convince everyone that you’re going to play ball and not quit in the middle of the season.”

  “Let me show you in spring training,” I said. “I’ll show you and everyone else what I’m going to do this season. I really want to get back. I really want to play.”

  I went to spring training to prove that I could still play exceptional baseball. I didn’t do any clowning around at the Cubs camp in Scottsdale, Arizona. No kidding at all. Just hustle on the ballfield. When the exhibition games started, Lockman put me with the B team, which was made up entirely of utility men. I hit with this team, trained with it, and traveled with it to road games. It shocked the shit out of me, made me angry. But I held my tongue. I knew Lockman was testing me, and I knew I could hit my way back onto the regular squad.

  I ran hard, and hit the ball hard. After three weeks with the B team, though, I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I went to Lockman.

  “Why are you doing this to me, Whitey?” I said. “What are you trying to prove?”

  He stared into my eyes. “I’m getting trouble from you already?” he said.

  I turned away. “Just forget about what I said, Whitey. I don’t want to get into any arguments.”

  I kept hitting well, and all of a sudden Lockman started me at first base with the regulars. I got three hits. He kept me with the regulars, and in the next week I got two or three hits every game. I hustled. I kept my mouth shut. I batted .400 in spring training and won the regular job at first base.

  Lockman played Jim Hickman at first against most left-handed pitchers, but that was all right. I understood. I planned to hit so well against righties that I’d force the manager to play me against every kind of pitching.

  When the season opened, I came out swinging, and the line drives were zinging off my bat. Lockman sat me down against lefties, but I was patient. I felt good. There was plenty of time. I’d show him.

  Then, before a game against the Cardinals, the lineup card was posted and I wasn’t on it. I checked the Cards’ starting pitcher, and saw it was Scipio Spinks, a right-hander. I let out a yell in the clubhouse.

  “What the fuck is going on here? I’m swinging good. I’m hitting the ball. What the fuck is this?” I started toward Lock-man’s office.

  Ron Santo grabbed me and said, “Wait a minute, baby. This is what it’s all about. This is the true test. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” I said, heading for my locker. “It’s not right, but I get it. I’m okay now.”

  Another right-handed pitcher started against us the following day, I couldn’t wait to see the lineup card. My name was on it. I drove in five runs that day, and in the locker room afterward, Santo came by. He was singing, “What a Difference a Day Makes.”

  I smiled and said to myself, Up yours, Whitey Lockman. I’ll win this job full time whether you know it or not.

  A month later I was still being platooned, because I couldn’t get in a hitting groove when I was sitting down every second or third game. I had thirty hits in twenty-eight games for a .268 average, three home runs, and eighteen RBIs. Not great, but by no means terrible, either.

  The last two of those thirty hits came in Philadelphia on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May. Since I was no longer banging around at night, I had dinner that evening and went back to my hotel room to watch television. About eight o’clock the phone rang. Oh shit, I thought, somebody wants to have a drink or something, and I don’t feel like it.

  I picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

  The guy on the line didn’t identify himself, simply said, “You just got traded.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said, and hung up on the wise-ass.

  The phone rang again. “Joe, this is Whitey Lockman. I wasn’t kidding. You’ve been traded to the Braves. I think it’s best for you, best for everyone. The Braves really want you, and I think the change will help you a lot. Eddie Mathews is anxious for you to report to Atlanta as soon as possible. I think he plans to play you regularly at first base.”

  “Great,” I said, and hung up.

  But I didn’t feel great. The writers came by and told me the Cubs hadn’t gotten a lot for me—a minor-league first baseman named Andy Thornton, and an “undisclosed” amount of cash. They asked me how I felt.

  “It’s all part of baseball,” I said. “I’m part of baseball, and I go where the game sends me. I’m disappointed because I like Chicago. I was having a fair year and we were winning. I think the Cubs are going to do it this year.”

  I just hoped I could beat them every single time they played the Braves. I was hurt and pissed off inside. I felt way down in my gut that this would have been my best year. I finally knew all the pitchers, I concentrated on every pitch, I could make all the plays on the bases and in the field, and I really wanted to prove something. Then the assholes dump me. I’d fucked it up in the past—I’d fucked it up so many times I couldn’t count them—but they’d fucked it up this time. The Cubs had a shot at the pennant, and they gave away the only solid first-baseman they had. Fuck them. Fuck me.

  I went back to Chicago for a couple of days to be with Stevie, and to think. The Braves’ general manager, Eddie Robinson, called. I told him I’d report to Atlanta on Tuesday, that I had to straighten out a few personal things. I talked to Stevie, who was still working at the Playboy Club, and she said she’d go with me to Atlanta if I wanted her to. I sure as hell wanted her to. Í told her I’d go first and find us a place to live.

  The Atlanta ball park
was a nice stadium to hit in, and Eddie Mathews turned out to be a beautiful guy, easy to talk to, honest with you, no bullshit. All the Braves were nice, a good bunch of guys. But in less than a week, I’d had it with major-league baseball. I was hitting all right: four singles in eleven at-bats. I just didn’t have any feeling for the game, and I asked myself, What the hell am I doing this for when I’m totally uninvolved? I wanted to be with Stevie. As soon as she got here, though, the team would have to go off on a road trip. Stevie and I wouldn’t be together. I’d leave the one person I had tremendous feelings for, to do something I had no feeling for. I had to be crazy to do that.

  I went to Mathews and told him it had nothing to do with him or the Braves but I was quitting. He tried to talk me into staying, as did the general manager, Eddie Robinson. He said the club would take care of all my bills if that was what was bugging me. I told him that wasn’t it, that I wasn’t in much debt now, that I just didn’t have any feeling for baseball any more, and I wasn’t going to help the club a whole lot if I wasn’t motivated. I also said that if I stayed, I thought I would go out of my mind. I would have to put on one hell of an act to play. And I was getting too old for any more phony bullshit.

  I told the press, “My decision is final I’m tired of the hassle of moving and establishing myself in another town. I’m tired of this kind of baseball, and I want out. I hate the Cubs for trading me the way they did. I busted my ass for them this spring, then they trade me. I just wanted to prove something to those bastards, then I decided proving something wasn’t worth the price I’d have to pay.”

  On the flight to Chicago, I got down, deeply depressed, which wasn’t surprising. I was finished with major-league baseball. There was no going back this time. I’d quit before, but every other time I knew that I could return when I wanted to, that some team would want me. I’d put an end to that option this time. Three quits is out. No team would sign me now, because there was no guarantee that I would stay with it, that I wouldn’t abruptly take off. I couldn’t give any guarantees. But now I wondered, What was I going to do for a living?

  When Eddie Robinson had asked me that, I’d told him that I might consider playing in Japan. He’d said that he would make inquiries of the teams there. I started thinking about Japan seriously now. I sure as hell didn’t feel like playing any more baseball in the major leagues, even if I was asked to. Hell, the Braves wanted me to. There were just too many bad vibes for me in the majors, vibes that went far beyond all the bullshit in the game, which was bad enough. What was worse—what was the heart of the matter—were all those wasted years that were flashing through my head now. It was just too hard to be around the game, because it only made me think about what I could have been, what I should have been.

  In twelve years in the majors, I had hit 219 home runs. I should have hit closer to 400. Much closer. In twelve years in the majors, my batting average was .258. It should have been closer to .298. Much closer. All I had had to do was take care of myself a little bit, have even a minuscule regard for my body, and concentrate about ninety percent of the time, instead of the fifty percent of the time which I did. I had spent most of those twelve years letting talent alone carry me along, making so little real effort myself that now all I was left with was guilt. That seemed to be my only real goal in life: to see just how much guilt I could accumulate, drag around. Escape, escape, escape . . . and pile up the guilt. Well, I’d worked hard at accumulating it. I’d earned every bit of it. And, after all these years, the bill collector in my head was one very tough dude to dodge.

  When I got home, I thought about Clete Boyer, my old Yankee teammate. He had quit the Braves and gone to Japan two or three years ago. He was still playing over there, so it must be a pretty good deal. It gave me something to think about. Getting out of this country might be a damn good thing for my head. I called Eddie Robinson to tell him I was definitely interested in Japan if I could make the right deal.

  A few days later he called to tell me the Tokyo Yakult Atoms of Japan’s Central Professional League had made me an offer. I thought the salary was low. He called me with a better offer, but I told him I thought we could do better. The third offer I couldn’t refuse: a $70,000-a-year contract for two seasons, and the club would pay for my housing in Japan. Wow!

  “Stevie, quit your job and pack your bags,” I told her. “Your Number One fliend is taking you to a velly fine place. Banzai!”

  One sportswriter wondered how long it would take me to get oriented over there. I had my fingers clossed.

  XXIII

  “Joe no play: shitty in pantsy.”

  On the way to Japan, Stevie and I stopped in Brooklyn to see my family. Through all the years I’d been playing ball, every time I came home, my grandfather would call me in and give me a lecture. “Hey, Giuseppe,” he’d say, “when are you gonna stop fooling around? Your mamma, she worries about you so much. You fool around with all these girls, and you no swinga the bat so good.”

  “Who do you want me to fool around with—guys?” I’d say.

  “Sometimes I think it be better you fool around witha guys,” he’d say. “Maybe it make you hit better.”

  Now Vincent Caiazzo was ninety years old, but he was still incredibly sharp, a truly amazing man. This time when I stopped by, he called me in and said, “I’m not gonna give you no lecture. I just wanna tell you two things. First, I wanna wish you all the good luck in the world, from my heart. I wish you show all the bums that’s here, the Yankees and all of them, that you great, that you should be play in this country.” He shook his fist.

  “The second thing I wanna tell you is to take these,” he handed me two dimes. “Before you go to Japan, I wanna you to go down to the butcher shop and buy youself two pounds of brains and put them in you head.”

  We arrived in Tokyo on June 19. We were met by a delegation from the Yakult Atoms bearing bouquets of roses. “Will you look at this,” I said to Stevie. “They know how to treat a star over here!”

  I was presented with my own personal interpreter, an Italian-Japanese named Luigi Ferdenza. He took us to our apartment, a nicely furnished two-bedroom place in which I couldn’t wear platform shoes without banging my head in the doorways.

  We went out to dinner that night, and I discovered that I was going to have all kinds of trouble communicating here. Like, how many times can you say, “Ah so”? And “hari-kari” didn’t get me anything in the restaurant except a dirty look. The food was fine, but the bill was not. What seemed like an awful lot of yen written on the bottom of the bill, translated into an awful lot of dollars: eighty-six of ’em. I could see that I was going to lose weight in Japan.

  On the way back to our apartment, we stopped for a drink in a typical bar. We had one drink apiece. The bill was eight dollars.

  “Stevie,” I said as we left, “we’re in trouble. We can’t afford to eat or drink in this country. We are making seventy thousand dollars a year, and we will have to starve and walk around with dry mouths in order to keep any of it.”

  Luigi Ferdenza, a nice, pleasant kid, picked me up the next morning and took me to the ball park. He introduced me to the manager and several players, none of whom spoke English. This was going to be a weird experience, I thought. The Japanese teams are allowed to carry only two American ballplayers. Arturo Lopez, a Puerto Rican who was born and raised in New York City and who used to be on the Yankees with me, was the other American. Thank goodness I had someone I could talk to other than Luigi.

  The Yakult Atoms were owned by a company that made an orange drink that tasted like the Creamsicles I used to eat as a kid. Thick and sweet. You drank one, and it made you so thirsty you had to have another. The man who owned the company that owned my new team was one very clever businessman. While I changed into my baseball uniform, I drank six of those insidious orange drinks.

  When the game started, I felt rumblings in my stomach. When we came into the dugout for the bottom of the second, I had the runs. “Luigi,” I said, “where is
the bathroom?”

  He led me into the clubhouse and pointed at a door. “Through there.”

  I went through the door, and all I saw inside was a line of holes in the floor, with rolls of toilet paper set beside each hole. “Luigi,” I yelled, “hurry!” He came running in. “Somebody stole all the toilet bowls!”

  “Joe,” he said, “there are not toilets in Japan. You have to pee in that hole, that’s all.”

  “Luigi, I have to shit. How the hell do I manage that?”

  “Just squat over the bowl,” he said. “It’s not hard. You’ll get used to it.” He went back into the clubhouse. “Hurry up. I’ll wait for you.”

  I pulled down my pants, squatted, and almost tilted back into the hole. I got my balance and—“Goddamnit!”—I had diarrhea. I had it all over my legs. Those rotten orange drinks. But, Christ, I thought, Luigi said I’ll get used to this. Are all Japanese bombardiers, or what?

  “Luigi!” I called, and he came hustling back in. At least I liked his style, if not his toilets. “Tell the manager I won’t be able to play any more today. I shit all over myself.”

  “What? What am I supposed to tell the manager?”

  “Christ, Luigi, just look at me. You’re the interpreter. Say, ‘Joe no play: shitty in pantsy.’”

  “Be serious, Joe. Clean up and I’ll get you new pants. Hurry up.”

  I hurried, changed, and made it back to first base for the next inning. I made a nice play in the field, but I didn’t help the Atoms at bat. I went o-for-4. I was surprised at how good the Japanese pitching was. As good as a lot of major-league pitchers in America. I was also surprised at how out of shape I was. I sure needed some extra batting practice.