Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  So Joe said, “All right.”

  “All right, I can throw on my own out there?”

  “All right, I’ll talk to Sal about it.”

  I saw Sal and Joe talking on the field a few minutes later, then Sal came over to me in the outfield and said, “It’s exactly what I said to you before. You just got to cut down on your throwing in the bullpen.”

  I could feel my neck getting red. “When I talked to Joe he seemed to think I could throw on my own whenever I felt I needed it.”

  “Oh yeah, you can throw on your own,” Sal said. “But just watch it and make sure you’re ready to pitch if we need you.”

  Here’s how Mike Marshall got into his most recent trouble. He was taken out of the ballgame in Boston the other night after giving up a grand-slam home run to Carl Yastrzemski. He told the writers that he should have finished the game. What he meant, of course, was that he should have been good enough not to give up the home run and good enough to hang in there. His remarks were interpreted as criticism of Joe Schultz for taking him out of the game. So pretty soon it got around the clubhouse that Mike was on the manager for something that was his own goddam fault and I ended up explaining that Mike had been misinterpreted. But the players were not anxious to give Mike the benefit of the doubt. Now Mike’s in trouble with the newspapermen, the guys and probably Joe Schultz. Can’t anybody around here understand English?

  In the bullpen Talbot revealed an awful truth about Joe Pepitone. He has two different hairpieces. He’s got a massive piece, which he wears when he’s going out, and a smaller one to wear under his baseball cap. He calls it his game piece. On opening day he was wearing his game piece and hadn’t put it on very well. So when he was forced to take his cap off, there it was, sitting on his head all askew. He was so embarrassed he tried to hide his head in the shoulder of the guy standing next to him. Kiss me, Joe baby.

  Pepitone took to wearing the hairpieces when his hair started to get thin on top. And the hair he still has is all curly and frizzy when he lets it grow long. So he carries around all kinds of equipment in a little blue Pan Am bag. Things like a hot comb, various greases and salves, glue for the hairpiece, hair-straightener—and even a hair-dryer. He carries it wherever he goes, on the buses to the park, on airplanes. You never see him without that little blue bag. At any rate, one day Fritz Peterson and I, a bit bored during a game we were winning about 6–2, went into the clubhouse and filled his hair-dryer with talcum powder. Then we cleaned it up, left it where he had and went back to watch the game. By this time it was 6–3, and then they tied it up and we lost it, 7–6, in extra innings. And one of the reasons we lost is that Pepitone struck out in a clutch situation.

  So everyone was tired and angry and upset and you could hear a pin drop in the clubhouse, because after a loss that’s the way it’s supposed to be. After a while Pepitone came out of the shower and turned his hair dryer on. Whoooosh! Instant white. He looked like an Italian George Washington wearing a powdered wig. There was talcum powder over everything, his hair, his eyebrows, his nose, the hair on his chest. Of course, everybody went crazy. Loss or no, they all laughed like hell. To this moment, Pepitone never knew who turned on the powder. He always thought it was Big Pete Sheehy. Wrong again.

  Gary Bell was hit again tonight, four runs in less than five innings. I relieved him with two on and two out and got Paul Casanova to pop up. They pinch-hit for me in the next inning, so I had a total outing of one-third of an inning.

  In the clubhouse Gary was sitting in front of his locker sucking up a beer and I told him to hang in there.

  “Rooms, my career is over,” he said. “The Big C has got my arm.”

  “Besides that, how’re you feeling?” I said.

  “I feel fine,” he said. “This is my fifth beer.”

  Ranew tells me that Vancouver sent Bob Lasko to Toledo, which is another Triple-A team in the International League. It burned me up because here’s Lasko, a guy with ten or eleven years in professional baseball, most of it in Triple-A, bouncing around all over the country, playing for three, four, five different organizations in thirty or forty different towns, all without his family, and now, in the twilight of his career he gets a chance to play in his own home town and he gets sent to Toledo.

  There’s no justification for this. No one can tell me there wasn’t another pitcher they could have sent to Toledo instead. I bet no one even realized Vancouver is home to Lasko. So one day, if Lasko ever makes it in the big leagues and has a good year, the owner will scream bloody murder if he tries to get an extra thousand in salary.

  Don Mincher goes up to people and asks for a cigarette. When they give him one he pulls out a pack, puts the cigarette into it and puts it back into his pocket. Then he walks off.

  There is often homosexual kidding among the players. Tonight Ray Oyler combed his hair forward and started mincing around the clubhouse, lisping, “Hello, sweetheart,” or “C’mere, you sweet bitch.” Then Gary Bell said, “Ray, you convinced me. You really are queer.” And Ray said, “Well, it doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  MAY

  23

  Cleveland

  Flying in to Cleveland last night I thought about life in this great American city and decided that if you were going to crash on a Cleveland flight it would be better if it was an inbound flight.

  Jose Cardenal was in center field fixing the legs of his tight pants and Talbot recalled the time in winter ball when Cardenal refused to play for three days because his uniform wasn’t tight enough.

  Joe Schultz had a short meeting before the game and said that we have enough ability to win a lot of games if we just used our common sense out there, just used our heads. So I went out and played like I had left my head back in the hotel room. You wouldn’t think it was possible for me to play dumb baseball, considering my charm, intelligence and good looks. But I played dumb baseball.

  The first inning was fine. I came in with the bases loaded and one out and got Cardenal to hit a one-hopper right back to me for the DP, pitcher to catcher to first base. That’s good. What I did in the next inning was bad.

  With one out (Alvis struck out on a knuckleball), Hawk Harrelson doubled down the left-field line. No complaint, he hit a pretty good knuckleball. Then there was a little bouncer in front of the plate. Instead of settling for an out at first, I tried to get Harrelson going into third. I didn’t have much chance of getting him and made a bad throw besides. So instead of two out and a man on third, I’ve got runners on first and third, one out. Larry Brown then hit one into right for a single, Harrelson scoring. The other runner was headed for third and the throw from right field was wild, over third and into the dugout. It shouldn’t have mattered, because I should have been over there backing up the play. Instead I stood on the mound watching, like it was a John Wayne movie, while the second run scored and Brown went all the way to third.

  I got the next two hitters and was unscathed in the following inning. I rate the performance fair because I got away with no runs in a bases-loaded situation. But there is no excuse for playing such dumb baseball.

  MAY

  24

  Fred Talbot invited me out to dinner with his roommate, Merritt Ranew, after the game. It’s a sign that we’re living through a reincarnation with the Seattle Pilots. I found myself enjoying their company. Could I have been wrong about Talbot? Me, Jim Bouton, wrong?

  I had planned to ask Joe—or my pal Sal—if I could start the exhibition game Monday against Spokane, but today I noticed that Gary Timberlake is around. He said he’d been called up to pitch the exhibition game. He was with our double-A team. He’s going to fly from Cleveland to Seattle, pitch against Spokane and then go back to the minors. I guess they want to look at him. I mean they know what I can do. Or do they?

  Steve Barber started the game tonight and pitched four innings, giving up two runs. He was taken out when his arm stiffened up. The situation was discussed in the bullpen.

  Bell: “His next start wil
l probably come next July.”

  O’Donoghue: “Or later.”

  Me: “Depending on how his arm feels.”

  MAY

  25

  At the pregame meeting the discussion was about how to pitch to Alvis. Ron Plaza pointed out to Mike Marshall that the way we play him will depend on how he’s pitched. And Marshall said he didn’t know yet. “I have to wait until I get out there,” he said.

  If no one else understood what he meant, I did. The way he pitches to any given hitter depends on how he feels at the moment, what his instincts tell him.

  This was just one more reason to count him as a weirdo. And yet there’s nothing weird about it at all.

  Take something that happened in the 1964 World Series (when young fireballer Jim Bouton won two games). Bill White, left-handed hitter, good power, is the subject. I usually throw left-handers a lot of change-ups, but his first three times up I threw him none. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. Fourth time up I struck him out—on a change. The next day the quote from White in the papers was: “I waited all day for that change-up and he never threw it. Then I gave up looking for the damn thing and started looking for the fastball and here it came.”

  If I’d been required to come up with a pregame plan on how to pitch White, I’d have committed myself to throwing him the change and I would have thrown one early in the game and he’d have clobbered it. But nobody was asking me to stick to a plan and, I think instinctively, I did the right thing.

  It may have been the last time.

  MAY

  26

  I’m trying so hard to be one of the boys I’m even listening to country music. And enjoying it. The back of the bus is the country-music enclave, and most of the players are part of it. So far, though, we’ve not been able to swing over city boys like Tommy Davis, Tommy Harper and John Kennedy. I think we’ll get them in the end, though. Maybe with a bull fiddle.

  Back at the hotel, Gary and I talked about the relationship between country and city guys on a ballclub, which is intertwined with the relationship between whites and blacks. There are lots of walls built up between people, and I pointed out that if I’d never roomed with Gary I would still think, “Oh, he’s just a dumb Southerner.” So probably the solution is to have people live together. I mean we still disagree about a lot of things—religion, politics, how children should be raised—but because we’ve been able to talk about these differences, spend so many hours together, we’ve been able to at least understand them. How’s that for a solution? Put people together in a hotel room in Cleveland.

  Getting on the airplane in Cleveland we ran into the Kansas City Royals. There was a lot of conversation because we’re both expansion teams and a lot of us have been rescued from the same junk pile. The funniest line was about Moe Drabowsky. They said he was sick on the bus the other night and puked up a panty girdle.

  MAY

  27

  Seattle

  It’s been a great trip for the Seattle Pilots. We took two out of three in Boston, Washington and Cleveland, and since we won three straight before we left home we’re now only two games under .500 and I’m beginning to think we might have a shot at the divisional title. Of course, we’d need a little help. Maybe a small air crash involving the Minnesota and Oakland clubs. Nothing serious. Just a few broken arms and legs.

  We’ll know better after this next series. The Baltimore Orioles are in town. Which reminds me of a cartoon I once saw. It showed a little boy forlornly carrying a glove and a bat over his shoulder. “How’d you do, son?” his father asks. “I had a no-hitter going until the big kids got out of school,” the kid says.

  Another round of musical lockers today. John Gelnar was called up from Vancouver and Darrell Brandon was outrighted to Tucson. Brandon didn’t take it very well. I was sitting next to him when Eddie O’Brien said, “Joe wants to see you.”

  “Oh, oh,” Brandon said.

  “Can’t be that, Bucky,” I said. “It’s the wrong time.”

  When he came out of Joe’s office he said, “Tucson. They outrighted me to Tucson. Boy, this just kills me. What am I going to tell Liz? She just got up here and we just got settled in and now we’ve got to move again.”

  At that moment I happened to look across the room—and there was Steve Barber getting his road uniform refitted. I guess he wants to look good while sitting in the diathermy machine. “You son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “You’re the guy who won’t go down in order to help the club. Instead you hang around here, can’t pitch and now other guys are sent down because of you.” I got tremendously pissed off just thinking about it.

  Talbot and I got to talking about Houk in the bullpen and we agreed that sometimes the man is 99 percent pure bullshit. “I was 0 and 8 last year,” Talbot said, “and he came around to tell me he was taking me out of the rotation, not because I was pitching bad but because he thought the club was pressing too much behind me.” That’s called having smoke blown up your ass.

  I tried to let Joe know that I haven’t been pitching much lately. “I sure could use a workout,” I said.

  And Joe Schultz said, “If you need a workout go down to a whorehouse.”

  Second best suggestion of the day. Going over the hitters it was decided that we should pitch Frank Robinson underground.

  Ray Oyler (dubbed Oil Can Harry because he always looks as though he had just changed a set of rings) hit a home run into the left-field corner that must have traveled all of 305 1/4 feet. “As soon as I hit it, I knew it was out,” he said. They have named the spot after Greenberg Gardens. They’re calling it Oil Can’s Corner.

  Sitting in the bullpen it suddenly occurred to me that no one had said anything about Brandon being sent down. Not a word. It didn’t seem right to me. A guy shouldn’t be forgotten that quickly. At the very least we should have burned a candle.

  MAY

  28

  Bobbie and I were talking about our plans for this fall and discussed the possibility of buying a trailer and taking a slow trip cross-country. On the other hand, we might ship the car, fly home and spend some time up at Cape Cod. Or we might wait until December and go sit on a warm island someplace. And why shouldn’t we go to Europe?

  What it all boils down to is money. If I get a raise next season we could afford to do any of these things. But if I have a bad season and they don’t like this book, I may not even get a contract. So we decided that what I probably should do is get them to give me a contract at the end of this season, before they know about the book. Of course, the kind of contract I get will depend on what kind of season I have, and so all of it—plans, trips, contract—boils down to my knuckleball.

  I had another Crosetti pulled on me tonight. When I was with Vancouver, the baseball coach at the University of Oregon called me and asked if I would talk to one of his kids about the knuckleball. I said sure and arranged to see the kid in Tacoma. As it happened I got called back by the Pilots and he had to come down to Seattle. Now this is a rainy night, the tarpaulin is on the field, there’s nobody in the stands and it’s an hour-and-a-half before game time. I’ve got this kid standing behind me while I’m throwing on the sidelines and here comes an usher to tell me I can’t have an unauthorized person on the field. I explained what I was doing, but the usher said that Mr. Crosetti had sent him out and that the kid would have to leave. I gritted my teeth and told him that the kid was staying and if Cro didn’t like it he could come over and tell me himself. He never did.

  Jim Pagliaroni joined the club tonight and is going to be a welcome addition. He was describing a girl that one of the ballplayers had been out with and said, “It’s hard to say exactly what she looked like. She was kind of a Joe Torre with tits.” This joke can only be explained with a picture of Joe Torre. But I’m not sure any exist. He dissolves camera lenses.

  Joe Schultz was put away by Earl Weaver of the Orioles tonight. We had a two-run rally going when Weaver came out of the dugout and pointed out that we were hitting out of ord
er. Seems that Joe had made out two lineup cards and given the umpires the wrong one. Weaver, who spotted it right away, let us hit until we got something going and then we had to call it all back. Since we lost the game 9–5, and since there was no telling how many runs we might have scored that inning, Joe’s face was very red indeed. I don’t think he’ll be telling us to keep our heads in the game again very soon.

  Pitched one inning tonight and the greatest hitters in the American League were at my mercy. I struck Frank Robinson out on four absolutely hellacious knuckleballs; Boog Powell swung at two and missed for another strikeout, and Brooks Robinson popped up. The way that ball was moving, it’s almost impossible for anyone to hit it solidly. They’re at my mercy, I tell you.

  Of course, since we were behind I was taken out for a pinch hitter after my inning. Which means I’m still just a mop-up man. Maybe when the doubleheaders start piling up they’ll give me a start. I can’t wait.

  MAY

  30

  I almost missed a ballgame today. It was Friday and I assumed we were playing our usual night game. I planned to spend the afternoon with the family at an art museum and I was lying around in my pajamas reading stories to the kids at one-thirty when the phone rang. It was Gary Bell.

  “Where the hell are you?” he said.

  “Where the hell are you?” I countered cleverly.

  He told me. I flew in eight different directions, and the kids were scurrying around looking for my shoes and socks, and my wife was running after a shirt, and I felt like Dagwood Bumstead going to the office in the morning. I arrived at the ballpark at one-forty-five, fifteen minutes before game time, only two hours and forty-five minutes late, having missed running, batting practice and infield practice.

  Almost to a man the guys were nice about it. I had a big grin on my face when I walked into the clubhouse and got a round of applause, and a lot of the guys told me they were glad I could make it today. Except Fred Talbot, who waved a little Yankee at me. “Jesus Christ, eleven years in baseball and you don’t know whether it’s a day game or night game.”