Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  Piniella is a case. He hits the hell out of the ball. He hit a three-run homer today and he’s got a .400 average, but they’re easing him out. He complains a lot about the coaches and ignores them when he feels like it, and to top it off he’s sensitive as hell to things like Joe Schultz not saying good morning to him. None of this is supposed to count when you judge a ballplayer’s talents. But it does.

  Besides, Schultz has his problems. They’re named Tommy Davis, Wayne Comer, Jose Vidal and Jim Gosger, and somebody has to go. I’m sure that whoever is sent down will be the best of them.

  The fellow I feel rather sorry for is Rollie Sheldon. His record is about the same as mine, except he’s got fewer walks, and I’ll wager he’s wondering why I’m still here and he’s getting the message. All I can think is that my knuckleball made me a better bet, a stick-out among the mediocrities. Of course, a couple of poor performances by me and Joe Schultz will be telling me I don’t have to worry either.

  I was also rather sad about Claude “Skip” Lockwood. Hate to lose a funny man. The other day we were talking about pitching grips in the outfield (it was the day after I’d been mildly racked up by a couple of doubles) and Lockwood asked me, “Say Jim, how do you hold your doubles?”

  About a week ago Lockwood said, “Hey, the coaches are calling me Fred. You think it means anything?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Charley,” I told him.

  And today he came over and said he was a little confused, that he didn’t know which field he was supposed to be working on. He said he guessed things were getting better for him. “Last week I didn’t know who I was. Now all I don’t know is where.”

  I should point out that the Lockwood case is a perfect example of what happens to a guy who reports an injury. He was scheduled to pitch in one of the first two exhibitions but came up with a sore arm. Four days later he went to Sal and said he felt fine. This was almost two weeks ago. He still hasn’t pitched. When he asked Schultz about it the dandy manager said, “I didn’t want to take a chance with your arm.”

  That’s a crock of crap. What it amounts to is having a reason to cut a young guy. If you can cut him for some reason other than his pitching it’s just that much easier on your psyche. Decisions, decisions.

  It’s also why, when you ask Steve Barber, while he’s sitting in the diathermy machine, if he’s having trouble with his arm, he says, “No, no. I’m just taking this as a precautionary measure.”

  Sure enough, after the two workouts today on the two fields, the Grim Reaper struck. Five or six of the guys who were told not to worry this morning were cut this afternoon. Sheldon, Goossen, Lockwood, Bill Stafford and a couple of guys I don’t know.

  As I drove home after the game I passed the Vancouver practice field and saw Goossen working out at first base. He’s hard to miss, with his blocky build and blond, curly hair, working without a hat. I was already missing him and the nutty things he does and I thought here’s a field that’s only about fifty yards away and yet it’s really hundreds of miles away, the distance between the big leagues and Vancouver. Those guys all work out at different times, change in different locker rooms, listen to different coaches. They moved into a different world when they got cut from the big club. There were no tears, no sympathy, no farewells and no handshakes. And no one goes down to that field to tell Goose to hang in there. One day he’s here and the next he’s gone. It happens every day and it’s a reality to all of us, yet I can’t help thinking how strange it is. There should be more fanfare when a guy leaves, more goodbyes, more hang-in-theres. And once in a while maybe we should stop when we drive by the practice field and give Goose a wave and let him know we still like him and that he’s still alive.

  MARCH

  22

  There was a notice on the bulletin board asking guys to sign up to have their cars driven to Seattle. Price $150. The drivers are college kids. I think I’d prefer Bonnie and Clyde. I say this because I remember college and how I drove an automobile in those days and I would not have hired me to drive my car. Still, a lot of guys put their names on the list—very tentatively.

  Baseball players’ words to a beautifully tender song (actually overheard in the clubhouse division): “Summertiiiime, and your mother is easy.”

  Steve Hovley was dancing to a tune on the radio and somebody yelled, “Hove, dancing is just not your thing.”

  “Do you mind if I decide what my thing is?” Hovley said.

  So I asked him what his thing was. “I like sensual things,” he said. “Eating, sleeping. I like showers and I like flowers and I like riding my bike.”

  “You have a bike with you?”

  “Certainly. I rent one. And I ride past a field of sheep on the way to the park every day and a field of alfalfa, and sometimes I get off my bike and lie down in it. A field of alfalfa is a great place to lie down and look up at the sky.”

  I sure wish Hovley would make the team.

  When I got to the ballpark this morning I ran into Frank Kimball, one of the young catchers. He was standing under the eaves in order to keep out of the pelting rain, his soggy equipment bag beside him. I knew, but I asked anyway. “What’s up?”

  “I just got sent down.”

  “Too bad. When did you find out?”

  “They did it chickenshit. They told me in the office when I went to get my paycheck.”

  “You mean Joe didn’t tell you?”

  “No. And when I went back to him to ask him what the story was he said he was sorry, he forgot to tell me.”

  Eccch.

  I haven’t been pitching very well and I think that as a result my sideburns are getting shorter. Also, instead of calling Joe Schultz Joe I’m calling him Skip, which is what I called Ralph Houk when I first came up. Managers like to be called Skip.

  I’m scheduled to pitch in the doubleheader they have scheduled tomorrow. I’ll be at Scottsdale to pitch against the Cubs and a good outing by me could clinch a spot on the staff—maybe. What I’ve got to concentrate on this time is control and throwing other pitches besides the knuckleball. Whatever Sal Maglie says, Jim Bouton does. I’ll impress the hell out of him with my curve and fastball and I’ll just use the knuckler to get them out.

  MARCH

  23

  Scottsdale

  We lost a heartbreaker in the tenth, 7–6, but my heart wasn’t broken. Indeed, I counted it as a pretty good day. Sorry about that, folks. I pitched three innings, gave up two hits and no runs and was ahead of most of the hitters. I used a good mixture of fastballs, overhand curves, change-ups and knuckleballs. Take that, Sal Maglie.

  Going in to pitch those three innings I told myself that it was life or death, that everything depended on the way I pitched, that my dad was extremely interested in how I did and I would be calling him after the game. It was a good psyche job. Not only did I give up no runs, I popped up Ernie Banks and I popped up Ron Santo, both on knuckleballs. After each inning I looked up at my wife in the stands and we exchanged smiles, and in the last inning I pounded my hand into my glove in triumph and when I looked up at her she was as happy as, in the immortal words of Harry Golden, a mouse in a cookie jar.

  My wife actually believes that it’s possible, through concentration, to transfer strength from one person to another. She believes that during the game she transferred her strength to me and I pitched well. She is, of course, a nut.

  A revelation about Joe Schultz. Mike Hegan has been hitting the hell out of the ball and at this point is to the Seattle Pilots what Mickey Mantle was to the Yankees. Today he was hit on the arm by a fastball, and when Joe got to him and said, “Where’d you get it, on the elbow?” Hegan said, “No. On the meat of the arm, the biceps.”

  “Oh shit, you’ll be okay,” Joe said. “Just spit on it and rub some dirt on it.”

  Hegan couldn’t move three of his fingers for an hour. But it didn’t hurt Joe at all.

  Riding beck to Tempe I had a beautifully serene feeling about the whole day, which shows ho
w you go up and down an emotional escalator in this business. It was my first really serene day of the spring and I felt, well, I didn’t care where the bus was going or if it ever got there, and I was content to watch the countryside roll by. It was desert, of course, with cactus and odd rock formations that threw back the flames of the setting sun. The sun was a golden globe, half-hidden, and as we drove along it appeared to be some giant golden elephant running along the horizon and I felt so good I remembered something Johnny Sain used to talk about.

  He used to say a pitcher had a kind of special feeling after he did really well in a ballgame. John called it the “cool of the evening”, when you could sit and relax and not worry about being in there for three or four more days; the job done, a good job, and now it was up to somebody else to go out there the next day and do the slogging. The cool of the evening.

  Of course, there’s the converse. If a pitcher doesn’t do well, he has three or four days to contemplate his sins. A hitter is back in there the next day, grinding his teeth and his bat. Still, I was feeling so good that I began to think about pitching against the Yankees, and what it would be like going back to Yankee Stadium and facing them. I had all four of my pitches working today, and I had good control, and I thought how much fun it’s going to be to get back to the Stadium and toy, really toy with them. They haven’t even seen my knuckleball. It could really be a picnic.

  I think coach Eddie O’Brien is going to prove a gold-plated pain in the ass. He must think he’s Frank Crosetti or something, because when I reached into his ballbag he said, “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to count the laces,” I told him. “And then I’m going to juggle it.”

  Later on O’Brien noticed some of the guys were eating sunflower seeds in the bullpen. “Hey, none of that,” he said. “No eating in the bullpen.”

  “Not even sunflower seeds, Eddie?”

  “Nothing. Not even sunflower seeds.”

  Eddie O’Brien will have to be clued in on what happens in the bullpen. Maybe the way to cure him is to make him head of the refreshment committee.

  Ran my long foul-line-to-foul-line sprints in the outfield and kept myself going by imagining I was Jim Ryun running in the Olympics: I’m in the last fifty yards and I’m going into my finishing kick and thousands cheer. If I’m just Jim Bouton running long laps very little happens. Let’s see. Here’s the World War I flying ace….

  Bill Stafford and Jimmy O’Toole got their releases today. Stafford hopes to hook on with the Giants (I don’t see how) and O’Toole is shopping around. I’ve had some big discussions with O’Toole. His father is a cop in Chicago and was in on the Democratic Convention troubles. I’d been popping off, as usual, about what a dum-dum Mayor Daley was and O’Toole said hell, none of those kids take baths and they threw bags of shit at the cops, and that’s how I found out his father was a cop. Even so, I feel sort of sorry for him because he’s got about eleven kids (I should feel more sorry for his wife) and he seemed a forlorn figure as he packed his stuff. I told him good luck but somehow I didn’t get to shake his hand, and I feel bad about that.

  It’s funny what happens to a guy when he’s released. As soon as he gets it he’s a different person, not a part of the team anymore. Not even a person. He almost ceases to exist.

  It’s difficult to form close relationships in baseball. Players are friendly during the season and they pal around together on the road. But they’re not really friends. Part of the reason is that there’s little point in forming a close relationship. Next week one of you could be gone. Hell, both of you could be gone. So no matter how you try, you find yourself holding back a little, keeping people at arm’s length. It must be like that in war too.

  MARCH

  24

  Tucson

  On my way to the park today I passed the Vancouver practice field and spotted Sheldon over there playing pepper. It gave me a sinking feeling. There but for the grace of the knuckleball go I. Not that it still can’t happen. I still may not fit in with Schultz’s plans. What we need is a left-handed pitcher, starter or reliever, and I can see a trade for one. But where does an aging right-handed knuckleballer fit in? Vancouver?

  I know I felt differently after those good three innings yesterday, but I’m already tossing around in my mind how I’ll react if I’m sent down. I’ll take it calmly, see, and say to Joe, “Skip, I know you’ve got a lot of things on your mind and you didn’t really have the chance to give everybody the amount of work that would have helped them the most. But I don’t want to be a problem. I’ll go to Vancouver and do a good job there and expect to be called up after a month of the season goes by.”

  On the other hand, would that be the best approach? Maybe I could talk him out of it. Maybe I could get a couple of more chances to pitch and then he’d wind up cutting somebody else.

  There’s a third possibility. Maybe right now, at this very moment, I’ve got the team cinched. Dream city.

  Jake Gibbs of the Yankees once ordered pie a la mode in a restaurant and then asked the waitress to put a little ice cream on it.

  A sportswriter came up to Darrell Brandon today and asked him where he thought the club would finish. “Where did Joe Schultz say?” Brandon asked.

  “Third,” the reporter said.

  “Put me down for third too,” Brandon said.

  Obviously I’m not the only worried guy in this camp.

  We had dinner with Gary and Nan Bell and he said that if he could pick a place to play it would be Boston. He said he didn’t like Cleveland because Gabe Paul would interfere in his personal life. (Nobody interferes in Gary Bell’s personal life, not even his wife.) But Boston was money paradise. He said guys with 12–12 seasons there would automatically get a $5,000 raise.

  I’d heard that about Boston. The year Dick Radatz had his big year was the year I won 21. We both had two years in the big leagues and we were both young phenoms. While I was trying to get $20,000, a $9,000 raise, Radatz was going to $41,000. Radatz told me that at a banquet and said that if he’d really battled them he could have gotten $45,000 or $50,000. I absolutely refused to believe him. But Bell said it was true. Good grief, $41,000! The bastards were stealing my money.

  MARCH

  25

  Marvin Miller is coming around tomorrow to hand out some checks for promotions the Players’ Association was paid for. So everybody was busy reminding everybody else not to tell the wives. We get little checks for a lot of things, like signing baseballs, which are then sold. In our peak years with the Yankees we were getting around $150 for signing baseballs. It’s all pocketed as walking-around money. The wives don’t know about it. Hell, there are baseball wives who don’t know about the money we get for being in spring training, or that we get paid every two weeks during the season. John Kennedy, infielder, says that when his wife found out about the spring money she said, “Gee whiz, all that money you guys get each week. How come you’ve never been able to save anything?” And John said, “We just started getting it, dear. It’s a brand-new thing.”

  Joe Schultz asked Wayne Comer, outfielder, how his arm felt. Comer said he wasn’t sure, but that every time he looked up there were buzzards circling it.

  Tommy Davis has been having trouble with his arm too, which was why he was playing first base when I came into the game against the Indians with runners on first and third and one out. Second and third, really, since before I drew a breath the guy stole second. Rich Sheinblum, outfielder, rookie, was up and I threw two curve balls to him for a 1-and-1 count. He missed a knuckleball and then hit a one-hopper hard and deep to first. I covered and got Sheinblum, and when the guy tried to score from third I nailed him with a strike to home plate. Two thirds of an inning. Another perfect Bouton day.

  One of the dumb things I do sometimes is form judgments about people I don’t really know. Case history: Jack Hamilton, pitcher, Cleveland Indians. He was with the Angel organization last year and played with me in Seattle, which is where I
got to know him. Before that I played against him in the minors and considered him stupid, a hard-throwing guy who didn’t care whether or not he hit the batter. In the majors I figured him for a troublemaker because he used to get into fights with Phil Linz. Nobody fights with Phil Linz.

  Then, when Hamilton hit Tony Conigliaro in the eye a couple of years ago and put him out for the season, I thought, boy, this guy is some kind of super rat. But when I played with him in Seattle I found he was just a guy like everybody else, honestly sorry he’d hit Conigliaro, a good team player, a friendly fellow who liked to come out early to the park and pitch batting practice to his kids. All of which made me feel like an ass.

  The Unsinkable Molly Brown almost was sunk tonight. Unsinkable is what we call Laurie, our youngest. She’s only three, but a tough little broad. This spring alone, for example, she’s been bitten by a dog, hit in the head by a flying can of peas and had nine stitches sewed into her pretty little head. Nothing puts her down. Tonight, though, the kids were playing in the bedroom and suddenly we heard shattering glass followed by Laurie crying. Seems her head had made contact with a jalousie, resulting in broken glass and a bit of blood. The reason she had made such violent contact is that Kyong Jo had pushed her, and the reason he had pushed her is that I had told him to. I told him to push her because little girls are very often pests to little boys and the best way to get rid of little girl pests is to give them a gentle push. Only it’s not supposed to result in blood, and poor Kyong Jo was severely chastened. He had this look of terrible shame on his face. Fortunately little Laurie wasn’t hurt much. No stitches were required and we were able to reassure both her and Kyong Jo. After all, she is the Unsinkable Molly Brown.