Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (43 page)

I’m telling Talbot and Comer about El Bodegon in Washington and Talbot says, “If Bouton recommends a restaurant, you can be pretty sure they got some good Communist dishes.”

Talbot says to Hovley: “Hey Hovley, some of the guys are starting to talk about your hair.” He pauses. “And I’m one of them.”

Then he turns to me. “You know, writing notes like that, Bouton, it’s worse than whispering.”

Talbot and Ranew get into a deep discussion about the South.

Ranew is from Georgia and Talbot is from Virginia. Talbot started it because he said that all the guys from the South are dumb.

“Well, where the hell are you from?” Ranew says, because he knows the answer.

“I’m from the north part of the South,” Talbot says.

“It’s better down where I live than it is where you are,” Ranew says.

“Everything but the people,” Talbot says. “The people are dumb.”

I can’t resist. I get into the discussion. “It’s true, Merritt,” I say. “What other state in the union has a governor that never even finished high school?”

“The reason they got this guy Lester Maddox,” says Talbot, “is because he’s so dumb. That’s what they need to talk to all the dummies they got down there. They’d never understand a guy from Yale or Harvard or one of them colleges.”

Ranew scratches his head. “I still think the South is better where I live.”

“How can you compare which part of the country is better?” Talbot says. “I say mine, you say yours. How can you compare?”

“Why doesn’t Bouton do some research on it tomorrow in the library and come back with some figures for us?” Ranew says.

“Nah, let’s do it right here,” Talbot says. “All right, let’s start. How many dummies you got down there?”

By this time there is a lot of general laughter. I’m not prepared to explain why.

“I tell you one thing,” Ranew says. “We got better-looking guys down where I am.”

Talbot is shocked. “Better
looking?
” he says. “For crissakes, look at yourself. You’ve got hair like a sissy.”

It’s not a felicitous description. Ranew has his hair styled in the modern mode. It is not unattractive. Talbot wears his in an old-fashioned crew cut.

“Look at you,” Talbot says, moving in for the kill. “You use hair spray and go to a goddam beauty parlor.”

“With that hair
you’ve
got,” Ranew says, “you could use a little beauty parlor yourself.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Talbot says. “I don’t walk around with hair spray and I don’t look like a goddam sissy and I don’t squat to piss, either.”

Now the laughter has turned against Ranew and he is searching desperately for a counter. One can almost hear the file cards in his head fluttering.

“You know what you look like, Talbot?” Ranew says. “You look like a perch, a goddam perch.”

“A
perch?
” Talbot says. “What the hell do you mean, a perch?”

“Well, you look like a perch,” Ranew says. “Your head is square, you have hardly any nose at all, your eyes bulge out and you look like some kind of fish.”

Now the laughter has turned on Talbot.

“But I don’t look like a goddam sissy,” he says.

I am afraid he is defeated.

That’s not the funniest. The funniest is what happened to Ray Oyler. He was warming up Locker and caught a sinker right on the cup. It didn’t even hit the ground first. Ding-dong! He went down on all fours and crawled around that way for a while. Then he limped into the dugout and vomited.

The boys were hysterical. We were getting beat a ballgame and we were
laughing
. Joe Schultz laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses, dry his eyes and hide his head in a warm-up jacket.

Big meeting before the game to discuss proposed items for negotiations in the player contract after the season. Mincher started it by saying, “Listen up, everybody.” I once had a sergeant who said, “Listen up, everybody.”

And Talbot said, “Hey, Bouton, no notes during the player-representative meeting.”

I started jotting down some notes anyway in the hope that someone would confiscate them: “One bunch of carrots, loaf of bread, half-dozen eggs.” No one tried. Foiled again.

The big topic was the reserve clause. There is some thought that we should try to eliminate it, or at least limit it. Joe Schultz led off the discussion by saying: “Boys, the reserve clause is the one thing you can’t fool with. It’s the foundation of this game. If you get rid of it we’re all out of business. And I’m serious.”

Contrary to popular belief the reserve clause is not a single paragraph (although its single intent is to bind a player to one club for as long as he lives or until his contract is disposed of). There is a whole set of rules which covers things like options, waivers, severance pay, moving allowance, etc. Many of these rules could be amended without upsetting the structure of the game.

It has been suggested that baseball adopt an option rule like pro football’s. Instead, I propose that we keep the one-way contract we currently play under and use it as a public relations lever to change some of the more repugnant aspects of the clause.

The football option rule gives only the illusion of freedom. A football player is required to sign a two-year contract, that is, one year plus an option for the next. At the end of the first year of his contract, he may elect to announce that he is playing out his option. In which case he is required to play only one more season, and the team may, if it wishes, cut his salary by twenty-five percent. At the end of the option year he theoretically becomes a free agent and can sell his services to the highest bidder. Except that there is a rule that requires his new team to give his old team “equal value.” What this amounts to then, is a trade. So the only right a football player has is to demand to be traded. We can do that too. Only it’s not a demand, it’s a plea.

One rule change I suggested was to have a player receive some kind of bonus when he got traded so that the owners wouldn’t feel free to trade guys just to give them a change of scenery. Make it expensive to trade and they’ll only do it when they have to.

Another thing that should be done, I said, is to take into consideration the amount of time a man has spent in the minors. If he’s had only two years or so in the minors, $10,000 isn’t bad to start with. But if a guy has been in the minors for five, seven, ten years or more, a guy who’s in his 30s and has a wife and kids, it’s unconscionable to start him at $10,000. What made me think of this was talking to Billy Williams the other day. I said he didn’t have to tell me if he didn’t want to, but I was curious about the kind of money he’d been making in the minors.

“I was making $1,300 a month,” he said. That’s for a five-month season.

“What did you make last year?”

“Last year I made $1,100 a month, and the year before I was under a thousand.”

And this was his eighteenth season in the minors. “Did they sweeten up that $1,300 when they called you up?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, they sweetened it.”

“How much?”

“I’m making $10,000.” (That’s a
rate
, or $1,666 a month.)

“What’s so sweet about that? They
have
to pay you that.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I guess they have to.”

It made me sad, and mad.

Finally there was a debate about severance pay. If a player is released in the middle of the season he gets thirty days pay. But if he gets released in spring training, actually at the end of it, he gets nothing. I suggested he get ninety days pay, on the grounds that he should get paid for spring training, plus severance. I was voted down. The other guys said we should ask for only thirty days after spring training and sixty days during the season. And what I say is, it doesn’t hurt to ask for more than you expect to get. Don’t be afraid to climb those golden stairs.

Sitting in the bullpen tonight it seemed as if I’d never given my little bullpen lecture. The guys were coming over to tell me stories and I felt right back in the swing of things. I guess Mike Marshall was right. It doesn’t hurt to apologize.

We scored a run in the ninth, which meant we had just enough runs to lose 4–3. I think that’s six in a row now and we’re in fifth place. Nobody talks about it, except Joe Schultz.

Gene Brabender sometimes walks around bellowing “cowabunga!” So I threw some trivia at him. “Bender, who first said ‘cowabunga’?”

This upset Marty Pattin. He’s never understood the importance of trivia. “Who the hell cares who said ‘cowabunga,’ for crissakes?” Pattin said.

“This is vital stuff, Marty,” I said.

I gave Bender time, but he actually didn’t know who said ‘cowabunga’—even after I told him the line was “Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob.” Poor fellow. It was, as almost everyone knows, Chief Thunder Thud on the “Howdy Doody” show.

It cost me a dollar to the pitchers’ fund because I didn’t back up third base the other night. The play was at second, so the fine wasn’t altogether fair. I think they enjoy taking my money. The play got the talk around to how we backed up plays in high school, and I remembered that when I was a kid I didn’t trust anybody else to make a play. I used to run into the outfield for relays and throw the ball home. Sometimes I’d even call the shortstop off a pop fly if I didn’t think he was a very good fielder. Which reminded Talbot that high school was great. “In those days I’d pitch, bat fourth and hit .400,” he said.

Not me. Even in high school I batted ninth. I knew at an early age I’d never be a hitter. Like I said, pitching’s easier.

During the ballgame last night, Brunet was watching carefully as Mickey Lolich warmed up. “Hey, you know something?” Brunet announced. “Lolich is fatter than I am.” He then proceeded to shout the things that have been used to put him down over the years: “Hey, fatso” and “One man to a pair of pants out there.” Fat man’s revenge.

It seems awfully late in the season to be learning things about my knuckleball, or rather, my pattern of knuckleball pitching, but the process goes on. Sometimes I’m a little slow.

I got into the game in the eighth inning with the score tied 6–6.
Tied!
I took the count to 3 and 1 on Mickey Stanley, then got a fastball by him for 3 and 2. Full of overconfidence now, I gave him another super Bouton fastball, with smoke on it, and he hit it out of the park with fire on it.
Pow
.

The rest went fairly well. Tresh tried to bunt on me. I made the play myself and when I went to put the tag on him, he decided to knock the ball out of my hand. So I decided to tag him in the face. We both went down and I was left with a good deal of satisfaction and a stiffening leg. Baseball is a strenuous game for men my age. However, I was pleased when Tresh had to leave the game because his back was bothering him.

No hard feelings, understand. If I’d said to him as he was getting up, “How are Cherie and the kids?” he’d have said, “Fine, and how’s Bobbie?”

Anyway, after Tresh I struck out Willie Horton and Al Kaline—and what I learned on this late August day was that I should not have thrown Stanley any fastballs. Even if I’d walked him, so what? All season long I’ve been telling myself, “If you’re going to get beat, don’t get beat throwing a fastball.” And I did it again. My definition of a knucklehead is a man who doesn’t learn from experience. So just call me knucklehead. Not only that, my record is now 2 and 1.

Pep talk by Joe Schultz before today’s game with the Indians. “I know you guys have been reading in the paper that we’re supposed to finish third this year. If this is putting pressure on anybody, forget it. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on anybody.”

He also talked about the possibility of getting fired. “I try to manage the best way I know how. I don’t know who’s going to be managing this club next year. I don’t know if I’ll be hired or fired or what. There’s been rumors in the papers that I’m not going to be back, and I know one thing—whatever happens I’m going to be boss to the end of this year. Some of you may not like me. It doesn’t matter. You’re out there to do a job when your name’s on that lineup card. You go out there and do the job because you got to do it for yourself. I don’t expect you guys to do anything for me. Hell, whoever heard of everybody liking a manager anyway? Think of some of the managers you’ve known. There’s damn few of them that everyone liked, and if they did, sometimes they all go down the drain together. As far as next year goes, I don’t know what it’s going to hold, but we’re all in this together and I’m going to be boss right down to the end of the season.”

Actually, I’ve heard no complaints about Joe. I think he’s the kind of manager everybody likes. And we’re all going down the drain together.

This was Tommy Harper Night and Joe made him rehearse his speech for us before the game. Tommy got up and said, “’Preciate it. Thanks.”

Tommy needs only two more stolen bases to break the American League record and on his Night only 6,000 fans showed up. It’s not a good sign for the future of baseball in Seattle. We draw a little better when we’re winning, which means the fans have taken this third-place finish talk seriously. We’d all be better off if they came to see us because we played exciting baseball—like tonight. It was damned exciting, especially for me. We were down 8–4 when I went into the game in the ninth. I throw two knuckleballs to Tony Horton and he misses them both by a foot. The third one spins a bit, so he knocks it out of the park, so it’s 9–4 instead of 8–4. I strike out the next two guys on six knuckleballs and get the third on a pop-up, so I’m feeling pretty good about the whole thing. And what happens? So we score four runs in the last of the ninth and have two runners on before losing 9–8. So if I don’t give up the home run it’s a tie ballgame. And so it goes.

The best gift Tommy Harper got on his Night was from Dewey Soriano: a trip to Hawaii for him and his wife. Greg Goossen said he didn’t think that was much. “Soriano sent me to Hawaii, too,” he said. “Of course, I went there as a Vancouver Mountie.”

Tommy said they wanted to surprise him by having his mother fly up from Oakland. It would have been a great surprise, except for one thing. United Airlines sent the bill to his house the day before.