Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  Later, Blasingame was told he’d been fined $500. I can’t believe it. But I do.

  I’ll tell you why I believe it. Because Blasingame hasn’t won any games this year and because he walked in the winning run the other night. And the baseball tradition is if you’re going bad on the field you’re in trouble all over.

  Dierker tells this story. Last year he and Danny Coombs, pitcher, were three hours late for curfew in New York and staggered into the hotel holding each other up. Spec Richardson was in the lobby. As they listed by him, Dierker slurred, “How’re you doing, Spec baby?”

  The next day Coombs was fined $100 for blowing the curfew and Dierker was fined $200 for being drunk. The premise was that Dierker was the only one who said anything, so he was the only one who could be accused of being drunk.

  The payoff is that the $100 was taken out of Coombs’ pay, but the $200 was never deducted from Dierker. It must have been that they felt the threat alone was enough punishment for Dierker. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that Dierker is a twenty-game winner and Coombs is a marginal relief man. Could it?

  Fines and suspensions don’t change the score. We lost again today, 3–2, a sweep. Denny Lemaster was the loser. Rico Carty hit two home runs off him. One of them was a two-run job in the last of the eighth and wiped out our 2–1 lead.

  Note about Rico Carty. He doesn’t trust banks. He also doesn’t trust the clubhouse valuables box. So that big lump you see in his back pocket during baseball games is his wallet.

  I looked up Niekro before the game tonight and asked if he usually threw so many fastballs. He said he didn’t, but that his arm felt too strong when he started pitching and that when his arm is strong he’s unable to throw a good knuckleball. So he threw more fastballs to tire his arm out.

  They have bedsheet banners in Atlanta too. They say REBEL. Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn’t they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old.

  Doug Rader, the third baseman, may be a good-looking cat, but I’m afraid he might be too tight for a pennant race like this. Right after he hit a soft pop-up that sent the second baseman back on the grass, he came into the dugout and said to me, “How far did that last one go?”

  “All the way out behind second base,” I said.

  “It’s all in the wrists,” he said.

  SEPTEMBER

  15

  San Diego

  On our trip from Atlanta to San Diego we had a stopover in Dallas at Love Field. There’s a huge statue of a Texas Ranger in the terminal and it’s inscribed: “One Riot, One Ranger.”

  It reminded me of an incident when I was playing baseball in Amarillo. There were about five or six players having a drink at a table in the middle of this large, well-lit bar, all of us over twenty-one. Suddenly, through the swinging doors—Old West fashion—come these four big Texans, ten-gallon hats, boots, spurs, six-shooters holstered at their sides, the works. They stopped and looked around and all of a sudden everybody in the place stopped talking. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them said, “All right, draw!”

  They spotted us ballplayers and sauntered over, all four of them, spurs jangling, boots creaking, all eyes on them.

  “Let me see your IDs, boys,” one of them says.

  I don’t know what got into me, but I had to say—I had to after that entrance—to these obvious Texas Rangers, “First I’d like to see your identification.” I said it loud.

  He rolled his eyes up into his head in exasperation and very slowly and reluctantly he reached for his wallet, opened it and showed me his badge and identification card. I gave them a good going over. I mean a 20-second check, looking at the photo and then up at him. Then I said, “He’s okay, men.”

  Then, of course, we all whipped out our IDs, which showed we were all over twenty-one, and the Texas Rangers turned around and walked out, creaking and jangling.

  We laughed about that for weeks.

  I find it curious that of all the things Dallas could have chosen to glorify in the airport, it chose law enforcement. The only thing I know about Dallas law enforcement is that its police department allowed a lynching to occur on national television. Maybe the statue should have been of a group of policemen at headquarters, with an inscription that read: “One Police Department, One Lynching.”

  On the bus from the airport to the hotel in San Diego it was a dark and tired time, and all you could see was the lighted ends of cigarettes. It was quiet, except for a few mumbled conversations. Then suddenly there was this loud scuffling in the back. A fight between Jimmy Ray, called Stinger (of course), and Blasingame. Foolishness. The Stinger was pretending he was talking a girl into coming up to his room and the Blazer took exception. What he’s really upset about is the way he’s pitching and that $500 fine and he decided to take the Stinger’s monologue personally.

  We broke them up quickly enough. What impressed me, though, was the way the guys reacted when a coach tried to get into it. Buddy Hancken started to move toward the back but Curt Blefary, Jimmy Wynn and Joe Morgan stood up and blocked his way and his vision. So the coaches and manager don’t know who’s involved. “Get the hell up to the front of the bus where you belong,” Lemaster said to Hancken. “Stay out of this thing.”

  Hancken is the kind of coach who enjoys his work. He’s always the one who asks on the bus, “What time tonight, Harry? What time?” He’s also the guy who checks the Exergenie list and your pockets for baseballs you might be accidentally taking off the field.

  A lot of coaches would make very good prison guards.

  Jim Owens: “Hey, are you going to use names in that thing you’re writing?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “Christ, be careful. I remember the story Sports Illustrated did on the Dalton Gang. [This was a group of high-flying Philadelphia Phillies. Owens was a member in good standing.] We thought it was going to be a real nice spread. They took pictures and everything. Then they did a hatchet job on us.”

  “Weren’t you the guys who sued?”

  “Yeah, and we’d have gotten a helluva lot more money if one of the guys hadn’t attacked a maid a week before the trial.”

  There was a play in yesterday’s game that would have been funny if it weren’t so bad. We were leading 2–1 at the time and Jimmy Wynn’s on second. With two out Blefary hits a clean single to right, certain to score Wynn except that Wynn rounds third, gets halfway home, then realizes that he hasn’t touched third. So back he goes, tags it and again sets sail for home. Naturally he’s thrown out at the plate. All we have on Blefary’s perfect scoring single is a third out. So today Blefary was grousing to Joe Morgan about the RBI he lost on the play. “For crissakes, Helen Keller could have scored from second base on that hit. If I was a black man he’d have scored.”

  “If you were a black, it would’ve been a home run,” Morgan said.

  I found the plane ride from Atlanta to San Diego interesting because of a long discussion I got into with Leon McFadden, infielder, black, Doug Rader, infielder, white, and Scipio Spinx (now, there’s a name), pitcher, black. McFadden was talking about the first time he ever ran into prejudice. He’d grown up in Los Angeles in a mixed neighborhood and never had a single racial encounter until he was a baseball player in Georgia. The team bus stopped at a restaurant and all the players piled in. The man behind the counter asked McFadden if he’d like to come back and eat in the kitchen.

  “I really didn’t think anything about it at first,” McFadden said. “I thought maybe they had another room in the back, someplace more comfortable. It just didn’t register. So I said, ‘No thanks, I’ll sit here.’”

  He was soon enlightened by the manager.

  “I was angry. I had a package of crackers in my hand and I just threw them down, walked out and sat in
the bus.”

  After a while his teammates came out, bringing him food, and he got angry at them for that. “I realized later that they were just trying to be nice to me. But when that kind of thing happens, you don’t think straight. I was so hurt and so angry I could feel the tears in my eyes. I didn’t know whether to cry or punch somebody.”

  McFadden said that incident marked him. For the first time in his life he began to view white people with anger and suspicion. And as he grew older he saw more and more things. Even on this team. “We’ll be riding on the bus and we’ll pass a couple of Negro girls in the street and one of the white players will say, ‘Hey, Mac, there’s a soul sister for you.’ Now, why do I have to have any special interest in a black girl? And why can’t he be just as interested in the black girl? And why can’t I be interested in a white girl?”

  Another thing he resents is the way ballplayers describe other players. They’ll say, “He’s that colored first baseman, or the colored catcher.” They never say, “He’s that white first baseman.”

  My own thinking on that is that black is certainly an identifying characteristic, and that no one should be upset to be identified as black. But McFadden is quite right to be annoyed that no one is ever identified as white.

  Then Doug Rader had some interesting comments on Curt Blefary. Curt has a good relationship with at least three of the Negro players. He rooms with Wilson and he’s always playing cards with him and Morgan. Because of that, McFadden said, there are guys on the club who are afraid not to like him. “It would be healthy if you could say, ‘Curt’s just not my kind of guy,’ without having to be afraid that you’ll be considered racist,” Rader said.

  Nothing works that way, of course. Around baseball you are what people think you are. Like Doug Rader said that white players often call him “nigger lover” as a result of his friendship with McFadden. Or they say, “You’re just like one of them,” whatever that means.

  McFadden said he frequently runs into players who are friendly, pat-on-the-back types but who, as soon as they’re in a group of white players will start throwing “n’s” around. “N” is black code for “nigger.” “You realize they’re only putting up a facade when they’re around you,” McFadden said. “As soon as they think there are no black guys around they start dropping “n’s” all over the place.”

  Doug Rader said it happened to him all the time. Even though white players know how he feels, they drop “n’s” on him and all he can do is get up and walk out.

  Maybe the best attitude to have is Dick Gregory’s. He called his autobiography Nigger, dedicated it to his mother and reminded her that when people said “nigger” now, they were just promoting his book.

  My wife suggested that I might save some money at the Astroworld after she left if I had a roommate. She had noticed that Tommy Davis was living at the hotel alone and thought maybe he would like to save some money too. So I asked him. He said he’d think about it.

  Even though we’re friends, there was this moment of awkwardness. Maybe Tommy Davis doesn’t want to room with anybody. Maybe he doesn’t want to room with me, but wouldn’t mind a different white guy. And he might have wondered if I was trying to prove something. I wondered if he wondered. The tiny tension was there. Too bad.

  I think I should explain here that I too have gone through a difficult learning process. When I was in high school I was certain—with all the snobbish certainty of youth—that I would never let my daughter marry a Negro, nor would I like to live next door to a Negro family. What I know now is that life is a lot more complicated than that.

  Lost our fifth straight game today 5–3 to the San Diego Padres. I pitched two scoreless innings, but the game was gone by that time.

  If you could disappear from embarrassment I wouldn’t have been available.

  Coming out to the bullpen just before the game began, in front of thousands of empty seats, I took off my hat, made a deep bow and generally behaved as though I was being acclaimed by millions. Then I looked up and all I could see was San Diego uniforms. “What are you guys doing in our bullpen?” I said. Of course I had it all wrong. I was in their bullpen, act and all. I felt like a goddam clown.

  SEPTEMBER

  16

  Doug Rader and I agreed over breakfast that Harry Walker is a good man. One of the things Doug gets a kick out of is when Harry strikes a batting pose in the coffee shop or some other unlikely place to explain how he used to get base hits all the time. He’s always giving out useful information. And how many managers are able to go over to a player and say, “Listen, I handled it wrong. I’m sorry”? Harry is.

  Another impressive thing about Harry is this blazer he wears. It has his family crest on the breast pocket. Contrary to rumor, it’s not an open mouth emblazoned on a field of wild verbiage. I know because I checked.

  I had a chat with Spec Richardson about how the club came to make a deal for me. He said he’d been talking to Seattle about Tommy Davis and mentioned he could use some pitching. And Milkes said, “How about Bouton?” Spec said he hadn’t had any reports on me, but he took a chance.

  Anonymity is pitching in fifty-seven ballgames and finding out that no one knows.

  Norm Miller says that it has long been his ambition to sit in a laundry bag. He thinks if he did, and pulled the string tight over his head, it would be very quiet and peaceful.

  Norm and I came down to the lobby and spotted Ron Willis sitting in a lobby chair. At the same time we noticed a most attractive young girl standing nearby. So naturally we walked over to have a chat with Willis.

  “How come the only time someone comes over to talk to me is when there’s a pretty girl around?” Willis said.

  “Ron, you’re getting a complex,” Miller said. “You didn’t even give us a chance to speak to you.”

  “No, it’s no complex,” Willis said. “Bill Henry is the only one who actually sat down here and talked to me. Everybody else is here to check that girl out.”

  “Listen, Ron,” Miller said. “I’m your friend. I’m trying to help you. You’re a sick person. You need help.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that Norm would be a sick person too if he were traded from St. Louis in mid-season and did nothing since but pitch batting practice and be threatened with a suspension for sitting in the coffee shop.

  Has anybody noticed that we haven’t won a game since we ate that chicken á la king?

  Jim Owens says he’d like to see me in the starting rotation. He agrees that the knuckleball is far from ideal for short relief. But so far Harry still thinks he needs me more to relieve than to start. “I’m still plugging for you,” Owens said. Bless him.

  A friend of mine named Lou Kramberg is friendly with a scout in the Chicago Cubs organization. It was still early in the year when Kramberg called this scout and told him about me: that I was getting in a lot of ballgames, pitching effectively, but not accumulating much of a record. He said I was a hard worker, a good battler, that I field my position well and could pitch under pressure. Just what the Cubs needed. The scout told him no, that the word on me is that I’m a clubhouse lawyer.

  Two losses to San Diego makes it six in a row, and Rader decided to do something about it. “Can you drown yourself in the shower?” he asked.

  He went up on his toes and put his mouth to the shower nozzle. It looked as though the water was coming out of his ears. Some guys just can’t take this pennant pressure.

  SEPTEMBER

  17

  San Francisco

  Curt Blefary doesn’t like being platooned. So this is him on Harry Walker. “Look, he doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke. He’s not my kind of man.”

  It was great coming back to Candlestick Park. I hadn’t been there since the World Series of 1962. The odor of the clubhouse was strangely familiar, and I remembered where all the guys had their lockers and the table in the middle of the room loaded with ten dozen baseballs for us to autograph.

  This was my rookie year and I rememb
er Whitey Ford hurt his arm and I was going to have to pitch the seventh game, except that it rained for five days in a row and Ralph Terry was able to come back and win the final game 1–0 when Willie McCovey hit a screaming line drive off him and Bobby Richardson caught it for the final out. And I remember the police escorts we had wherever we went, sirens screaming. Great year for a rookie.

  “It was a terrible year,” Tommy Davis said. “The Dodgers should have been in that Series, not the Giants.”

  Except that they lost to them in a playoff. Can’t be a great year for everybody, I guess.

  Maybe we’re not out of this thing yet. We beat the Giants 2–1. Larry Dierker won his twentieth and I saved it with two innings of hitless relief. I shook everybody up by walking a couple of guys right away, but they hit only one ball out of the infield on me, a pop-up that Norm Miller made a nice running catch on. It was a good game because we stopped our losing streak and we beat Gaylord Perry. When I came off the mound, Harry threw his arms around me and said, “Attaboy, this was a real big win.”

  I felt good about the whole thing until twelve-fifteen, which is when I came into the hotel. Buddy Hancken was in the lobby.

  “Go to your room,” he said.

  “What?” I said, thinking fast.

  “Curfew,” he said. “Twelve-o’clock curfew.”

  When I got up to the room Norm Miller said, “They called, they called.”

  “What time?”

  “Well, they called at eleven.”

  “But the curfew is twelve.”

  “I know. They called at eleven and asked if you were here. I said you weren’t. Then they called again at twelve and I told them you were in the bathroom. I asked if they wanted to talk to you and they said no, they’d take my word.”

  “Who called?”

  “Buddy Hancken.”

  Poor Norm. I wonder if they’ll fine him for lying.

  SEPTEMBER

  18

  The Giants clobbered us 9–3. Denny Lemaster got knocked out in the first inning and that was it. We have only fourteen games left and we’d have to win all of them to accomplish very much. It’s not possible. We’re out of it now. Ah, shitfuck.