Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (10 page)

Speaking of hands, there’s the story of the player who was sound asleep on an airplane when suddenly it ran into some turbulence. He woke up and promptly threw up. But just before he messed all over himself he managed to reach up and catch most of it in his hands. The guy sitting next to him, with perfect aplomb, turned to him and said, “Good hands.”

I’m not sure I’m going to like Don Mincher. I keep hearing that big southern accent of his. It’s prejudice, I know, but every time I hear a southern accent I think: stupid. A picture of George Wallace pops into my mind. It’s like Lenny Bruce saying he could never associate a nuclear scientist with a southern accent. I suppose there are people in baseball who are as turned off by my northern accent, and I’ve often thought that the best way to get through professional baseball is never to let on you have an education.

Well, Mincher was talking about going to see a Johnny Cash show, and I imagine when he talks about Johnny Cash it’s like the Negro players talking about James Brown. Lots of times in the clubhouse you’ll have a radio on and every once in a while it gets switched back and forth between a soul-music station and a country-western station. If you’re going good you get to hear your kind of music. In the Yankee clubhouse, western music dominated. In the Horace Clark Memorial Lounge you heard the music from the Virgin Islands and soul music. In the trainer’s room, where Mickey Mantle was king, you’d hear the Buck Owenses and Conway Twittys.

Went to the rodeo with the family, and when they played “The Star-Spangled Banner” Mike said, as he does every time he hears it, “Dad, they’re playing the baseball song again.”

We were toasting marshmallows in the backyard and I was sharpening a stick to put through the marshmallows when I sliced off most of the tip of my left thumb. I went to the clubhouse to have it repaired. Someone saw the ugly slice and immediately a crowd formed, as it always does when something gory is on exhibit. We like to say about ourselves—we baseball players—that we’re ghouls. I remember one time it was standing room only in Ft. Lauderdale when Jake Gibbs got hit on the thumb and they had to drill a hole through his nail to relieve the pressure. I had a front-row seat myself. The drill boring through the nail started to smoke and when it hit paydirt Jake jerked his hand and the drill was ripped out of the trainer’s hand and here’s Jake’s hand waving in the air with the drill still hanging from the hole in his nail. One of the great thrills of the spring.

Looking at Steve Barber doing his jumping-jacks during calisthenics I realized that his pitching arm is all bent and much shorter than his right arm. That’s from throwing curveballs. It’s almost as deformed as Bud Daley’s arm. Bud, who had polio as a boy, pitched for the Yankees for a while. The polio left him with a crook in his right arm. It didn’t bother him, even when the players would make fun of it. Sometimes there would be twenty-five guys in front of the dugout, all of them catching the ball with a crooked arm.

When I told Barber he looked like Bud Daley, he laughed and said, “Yes, but Daley didn’t have to pitch with that arm, only catch.”

Barber was in the diathermy machine again today and then looked pretty good in batting practice. I’ve been taking aspirin. My arm hurts and I didn’t do as well pitching BP as Barber. Maybe there’s something to that diathermy machine.

The only thing I think of these days when I go out to pitch is how my arm feels. My concern used to be about how my curveball was breaking and whether I could get the fastball over. Now I think about my arm. Hell, once the hitter gets up there I can always make adjustments and find something to throw him. But if your arm hurts, that’s it.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with my arm. I ask what the hell I ever did to it. I ask why won’t it do for me what it used to do in the old days. I whisper lovingly to it. Remember ’64? Remember ’63? Wasn’t it fun? Things could be like that again. Just one more time, one more season. It never listens.

When I was shaving today, a rookie beside me reminded me of how old I am for this game. His name is Dick Baney; he’s a young kid and has a great fastball. I hate him. “Hey, I wrote you a fan letter that you never answered,” he said.

I thought, hell, he’s so young, it might be true. “When did you write it?” I asked.

“When I was about six,” he said.

If there’s one thing I hate it’s a smart-ass rookie. I know a lot about smart-ass rookies. I was one myself. The guy I got on when I came to the Yankees was Jim Coates. Actually he got on me first. He’d say, “Get a few years in the big leagues before you pop off.” Or he’d get on me about my number being too high. And I’d get on him about being so skinny. One time in the trainer’s room, I asked him if those were really his ribs or was he wearing a herringbone suit. That one drove him up the wall.

He’d lisp at me when I was going in to pitch. “Is she going out and try it again today? Is she really going to try today?”

And I’d say, “Yeah, Coates, I’m going out there and hammer another nail into your coffin.”

Another time I said, “Hey, Coates, you endorsing iodine?”

And he said, cautiously, “Why?”

“Because I saw your picture on the bottle.”

We had a visit from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn today. The visit was preceded by the usual announcement from the manager: “All right, let’s get this thing over with as quickly as we can.” What it really means is: “Okay you guys, you can listen. But don’t ask any questions.”

The commissioner said that baseball is a tremendous, stupendous game and that it didn’t need any drastic changes; that we simply needed to improve our methods of promotion. One of the things that none of us should do, he said, is knock the game. He said if we were selling Pontiacs we wouldn’t go around saying what a bad transmission it has. In other words, don’t say anything bad about baseball.

He said he was pleased with the settlement that had been made with the players but he felt there was too much bitterness in the dispute. I felt there was an unspoken warning there to be careful of things we said that could be interpreted as bitterness toward the owners. Imagine being bitter toward the owner of a baseball club.

Kuhn also talked about the integrity of the game and how he felt it’s one of the only sports that the average fan knows in his heart is completely honest. (I wonder what the football, basketball and hockey people would say to
that
.) I’m not sure all fans feel that way, but I really don’t think there is any gambling at all inside baseball. I may be naive, but I don’t think there’s any gambling, or any intentional passing along of information.

Kuhn got a nice round of applause and nobody asked any questions. Then he left with Joe Reichler, the Commissioner’s personal caddy. Commissioners come and go, but Joe will always be with us. Some guys were made to be permanent caddies.

All of which for some reason reminds me of one of our bullpen occupations: choosing an All-Ugly Nine. Baseball players are, of course, very gentle people. If we happen to see some fellow who is blessed with a bad complexion we immediately call him something nice, like “pizza face.” Or other sweet little things like:

“His face looks like a bag of melted caramels.”

“He looks like he lost an acid fight.”

“He looks like his face caught on fire and somebody put it out with a track shoe.”

Some famous all-uglies are Danny Napoleon (“He’d be ugly even if he was white,” Curt Flood once said of him); Don Mossi, the big-eared relief ace on the all-ugly nine (he looked like a cab going down the street with its doors open); and Andy Etchebarren, who took over as catcher from Yogi Berra when the famed Yankee receiver was retired to the All-Ugly Hall of Fame.

Lost to Arizona State 5–4 yesterday, and would you believe that Joe Schultz and Marvin Milkes are steaming? In fact one of the pitchers who was taken out of the game got cut today—Bill Edgerton. He figured to get cut because he was one of the five or six guys who were asked to move their lockers to the visiting-team locker room. Of course, they were told it had nothing to do with their ability or status, just that some guys had to move. By coincidence, most of them were cut today. The only one I was really interested in was Greg Goossen, whom I’d come to like, mainly because he had the ability to laugh at himself.

That’s what Milkes and Schultz should have done about losing to Arizona State—laugh. Or at least not take it so damn seriously. Except they probably think that the fans and writers are going to draw a lot of conclusions about a game like this and, alas, they’re probably right. You can’t educate everybody about baseball in two weeks.

Lou Piniella has the red ass. He doesn’t think he’s been playing enough. He’s a good-looking ballplayer, 6–2, handsome, speaks fluent Spanish and unaccented English. He’s from Tampa. He says he knows they don’t want him and that he’s going to quit baseball rather than go back to Triple-A. He says that once you get labeled Triple-A, that’s it. I suggested to him that this wasn’t the year to quit because the Seattle people were bound to make mistakes in their early decisions and I thought there would be a shuttle system between Vancouver and Seattle and that guys who didn’t stay with the club the first month might be called up real quick. But he said he was going to quit anyway and force them to do something. And since he cost $175,000 in the expansion draft he figures they’d rather make a deal for him than lose him altogether. He’s probably right. A lot of decisions in baseball are based upon cost rather than ability. Cost is easier to judge.

Now that the cut-down season is here we’ll soon be talking of deaths in the family. At least that’s what we did with the Yankees. When a guy got cut we’d say he died. Fritz Peterson would come over to me and say, “Guess who died today.” And he’d look very downcast and in the tones of an undertaker read the roll of the dead.

A player who wasn’t going well was said to be sick, very sick, in a coma or on his deathbed, depending on how bad he was going. Last year when I was sent to Seattle, Fritz asked me what happened and I said I died.

“You can’t die,” Fritz said. “You’re too good to die.”

Like Mae West once said, goodness has nothing to do with it.

On the Yankees the Grim Reaper was Big Pete. Once he whispered in your ear that the manager wanted to see you, you were clinically dead. I remember toward the end of one spring training, Don Lock, an outfielder with a pretty good sense of humor (he needed it, having spent a lot of years in the Yankee chain trying to break into an outfield of Tom Tresh, Mantle and Maris), barricaded his locker. He hung sweatshirts across the top, crossed out his name, piled up his gloves and shoes in front to form a barrier, then snuggled inside the locker holding a bat like it was a rifle, and fired it at anybody who came near. It was good for a few laughs, but in the end the Grim Reaper got him anyway.

Another way Big Pete would let you know you had died was by not packing your equipment bag for a road trip. There would be a packed bag in front of every locker except yours. Rest in peace. It’s kind of like, “All those who are going to New York City, please step forward. Not so fast, Johnson.”

When I warm up tomorrow I’ll be trying to recreate in my mind an abstract feeling I get when I’m throwing well. It can’t be explained. It’s a
feeling
, the feeling you get when you’re doing something right, a sort of muscular memory. I find the best way to arrive at this feeling is to eliminate all other thoughts and let my mind go blank. Sometimes, when you can’t find this feeling while you’re warming up, panic sets in. It’s one of the reasons I like to use a double warm-up. The interval between the two warm-ups gives me a chance to think about what I did and to see if I can’t make some corrections.

If this sounds insane, it may be.

Scottsdale

Had a long chat with Steve Hovley in the outfield. He’s being called “Tennis Ball Head” because of his haircut, but his real nickname is Orbit, or Orbie, because he’s supposed to be way out.

Hovley is anti-war and I asked him if he ever does any out-and-out protesting in the trenches. He said only in little things. For instance, when he takes his hat off for the anthem he doesn’t hold it over his heart. I feel rather the same way. The whole anthem-flag ritual makes me uncomfortable, and when I was a starting pitcher I’d usually be in the dugout toweling sweat off during the playing of the anthem.

We agreed we’re both troubled by the stiff-minded emphasis on the flag that grips much of the country these days. A flag, after all, is still only a cloth symbol. You don’t show patriotism by showing blank-eyed love for a bit of cloth. And you can be deeply patriotic without covering your car with flag decals.

Hovley said he didn’t mind being called Orbit. “In fact I get reinforcement from it,” he said. “It reminds me that I’m different from them and I’m gratified.”

What’s different about Hovley is that he’ll sit around reading Nietzsche in the clubhouse and sometimes he’ll wonder why a guy behaves a certain way. In baseball, that’s a revolutionary.

I must say, though, that things are changing. When I first came up with the Yankees, there was intolerance of anybody who didn’t conform right down the line—including haircut and cut of suit. But as the old-timers disappear, there seems to be more freedom, more tolerance.

Hovley and I got to talking about the strange relationship between baseball managers and players, and the fact that players seldom talk to managers about anything. “I ran into Joe Schultz in the shower the other day,” Hovley said, “and suddenly we were all alone. I really didn’t know what to say to him. The only thing I could think to say was, ‘Who’s going to play third this year?’ or ‘How many pitchers are you going to take north?’ So when he said, ‘Hi, Steve, how are you?’ I said, ‘Fine,’ and immediately started lathering up my face so I wouldn’t have to talk to him anymore.”

I was shocked when I got to the ballpark today—figuring I was going to be the starting pitcher and go five innings or so—to be told by Sal that I was the third pitcher and that I’d only go one or two innings. Immediately my mind started churning. Does this mean I’m being put on the shelf? I’ve heard that last-two-innings talk before in my career and it always means, “See you later.”