Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (45 page)

He said I’d get plenty of work. Then he began talking about the team, and how it was so young, and that they thought they could win the whole thing, and that I could be a big help because Gladding had 26 saves and needed someone to back him up. “Listen,” he said, “if you get your nose out of joint, don’t go popping off. You know what I mean? You just come to me first.”

Another thing Spec Richardson said was, “Now I want to be honest with you.” As soon as a general manager says that, check your wallet. It’s like Marvin Milkes telling you, “We’ve always had a nice relationship.” The truth is general managers aren’t honest with their players, and they have no relationship with them except a business one.

I called home, but nobody was there. The bus to the ballpark left at three, and when I got there the equipment man told me my number would be 44. I asked if there was any chance I could get 56. He said he didn’t think so, that all our pitchers have numbers in the 30s and 40s. He said I’d have to talk to Richardson or manager Harry Walker if I wanted to change the rule. I said I was sure they wouldn’t want to be bothered with something so small, and he said, “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

Oh no I wouldn’t.

I hadn’t been on the bus two minutes when the players started warning me about Harry Walker, Harry the Hat. Before the day was over, half the club had whispered into my ear.

“Don’t let Harry bother you.”

“Harry is really a beauty.”

“Harry’s going to scream. He screams all the time. He’s going to scream at you. Try to keep from laughing if you can.”

“Half a dozen guys have wanted to punch him.”

“When he starts shouting at you, restrain yourself and be patient. After a while you’ll learn to understand him and live with him.”

“We’ve all adjusted to him, and you can, too.”

After I put my uniform on, Harry Walker motioned me to his office, Harry Walker sat me down, and—for the next half-hour, solid—Harry Walker talked.

He said the way you recover from a sore arm is to throw in the outfield as he’d done a long time ago when he used to throw the ball 400 feet and stand at the foul line in Pittsburgh and throw the ball over the roof of the right-field stands. And he said that he came back twice after hurting his arm and now he knew that people have to learn to reach a little bit further back and try harder. And he knew I had a sore arm and there was no reason why I couldn’t come back and have a great, whole new career, first getting my slider back, then my fastball.

This reminded him that he was the manager when Jim Owens had a whole new career and that baseball had given him—Harry Walker—everything he’s got and baseball can be a wonderful thing and he’d rather be a manager than President of the United States because he doesn’t have all the President’s worries and he gets to travel first-class just like the President does.

He said he has twenty-five guys to worry about, and they have only one guy to worry about. He said that everybody tries to get along and we all have our bad days and we just have to pull together and this team has the best spirit he’s ever seen and this is good experience for them to go through a pennant race because next spring they’ll all go to spring training together.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

All the time I was itching for him to get around to talking about the knuckleball. I know I’ve got to tell him I’m going to throw it 100 percent, and I figure maybe I’ll get an argument. So finally he stops long enough for me to bring it up and I tell him that I throw it all the time, no matter what the situation is, unless a pitcher’s up and I’m 3 and 0 on him.

“I’d hate to see you throw a knuckleball 3 and 2 to a guy like Maxvill, if the bases are loaded and a walk means your ballgame,” he said.

I agreed. “In a situation like that, if the winning run was on third base I’d make him hit the ball. What I want to get across is that I’m not throwing curves and sliders and fastballs and changes, not only because I can’t throw them, but because I can’t spend time on them and pay proper attention to my knuckleball too.”

I told him I was still learning this pitch and that there were going to be some days when it wouldn’t be any good. But I had to throw it a lot, before and during games. He said that was fine with him, I could do whatever I wanted.

It looks like I’ll be able to get along with Harry the Hat. Even if I’m the only one.

There are rules on this club too. Harry said it’s $100 if you’re out more than two-and-a-half-hours after the bus gets back to the hotel. Some players say they were hit for $499, a dollar below the figure that is classified as a grievance a player can take to the Commissioner. Also, the word is that Harry doesn’t like to see you walking through the lobby with a young woman, even if she’s your cousin or aunt or sister. I’ll have to check out about good-looking moms. I have one.

Coach Mel McGaha told me first off that as soon as I get on the field I’m to take five wind sprints across the outfield, just to loosen up. Everybody does it, not only pitchers. After
that
, the pitchers run. Hoo boy. In Seattle six sprints across the outfield was it for the pitchers. I’m going to have to start building up my legs. Maybe Johnny Sain was wrong. Maybe I
can
run those pitches over the plate.

I asked Harry Walker if I could watch the first inning from the dugout to get a look at the hitters and he said, hell, I didn’t have to go down to the bullpen until the fifth. I’m the long man, but they don’t plan on needing me until then. In Seattle the long man had to be in the bullpen when the game started.

Larry Dierker, who pitched the first game, has tremendous stuff. I can’t believe how young he looks, like a high school kid. He made me want to look in a mirror for wrinkles. Doug Rader, the third baseman, has an interesting face: curly red hair, big smile, looks half-Jewish, half-Italian. You look at him once and you figure he’s your friend. Wade Blasingame, pitcher, is the mod dresser on the club. He looks like a Latin lover and smokes a long thin cigar. Norm Miller is one of the club characters. He’s called Jew, and doesn’t mind. Before the game, Miller was doing the radio-broadcaster bit, interviewing Ron Willis, relief pitcher. “How does the team look to you this year, Ron? How about Gary Geiger? He’s doing a fine job this year in right field, isn’t he?” Geiger is sitting right there. “No,” Willis says. “No, no, no. He’s doing a brutal job. Just brutal.”

“Thank you, Ron. Now tell us about the pitching situation.”

“No, I won’t tell you about the pitching situation.”

“Then to what do you attribute the success of the team this year?”

And Willis says, in a voice loud enough to carry the whole bench, “Oh, of course, Harry Walker. No doubt about it. Harry Walker is the reason for the success of this team.”

Harry never turned a hair.

It was exciting to sit out in the bullpen in an Astro uniform in beautiful Busch Stadium with people, real live people, 27,000 of them, in the stands. It was like a goddam World Series. Dierker was losing 1–0 in the eighth when Harry called down and told me to loosen up. Me and Fred Gladding. I guessed Gladding was going in if we tied it or went ahead, and I’d go in if we remained behind, which we did. I went in to pitch the last of the eighth. The knuckleball was a doll. An easy one-hopper back to me, a pop fly to first base, then I struck Del Maxvill out on a 3-and-2 knuckleball. Edwards did a fine job catching it. He dropped a few, but none of them got by him to the screen.

When I sat down on the bench, Leon McFadden, the infielder, sat down next to me and said, “A 3-and-2 knuckleball? Man, you were giving those guys some
shit
out there.” I told him I’d pay him later.

Jim Owens, the pitching coach, wanted to know how come I threw a 3-and-2 knuckleball. I told him that first time around I want to earn a little respect. I want everyone to know that I’m liable to throw that pitch in any situation—3 and 2 or 3 and 0. And I want to do it right off in situations that aren’t too crucial. It wouldn’t have hurt much to walk Maxvill. But I want them to know that they can’t count on getting the fastball.

Still, we lost 1–0.

I still haven’t talked to Bobbie. I had tried to call before the game and got the babysitter. She said Bobbie had taken Mike and Dave to see
The Sound of Music
. I told the sitter not to tell her I’d been traded, that I’d call between games. And then I thought, “Good grief, she’ll put on the Seattle game and hear it on the radio.” As it turned out, she didn’t. She read it in the paper when she got home. “Oh good,” she said to herself. “A picture of Jim.” That’s how she found out.

She said she was excited and happy for me and we arranged to talk on the phone again and make plans for her to join me. She was happy to hear that I’d already pitched my first successful inning for the pennant-contending Houston Astros.

We won the second game 4–2 with two runs in the ninth. Julio Gotay got a pinch single with the bases loaded. After what I’d been watching and playing with, this looks like a super team, especially the double-play combo—Joe Morgan and Denis Menke are only great.

It was hard for me to feel part of it. It was weird sitting there trying to cheer for guys I didn’t know. Hey, come on, let’s get a hit, No. 14; you, the tall fellow, what say you get on base for us; lean into one, there No. 7.

I got to learn the names of these guys.

On the bus back to the hotel I was treated to several stanzas of “Proud to Be an Astro.” There’s a printed songsheet and all rookies get a copy. The song is sung with great gusto—to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”—in the back of the bus and Harry Walker doesn’t seem to notice. Sample verses:

Johnny Edwards says that the most popular verse is the last one.

Back at the hotel I ran into Dooley Womack. He’d sent out his laundry and was waiting for it to come back before he joined the Seattle club. He made me feel a little better about the deal. He said the Astros gave up a minor-leaguer in addition to him, and he understood the Pilots were expecting some cash too. He didn’t know how much.

Dooley told me he was making $25,000. So here I am making $22,000 and I’m traded for a guy making three thousand more, another player and cash. By rights I should be able to go in and demand at least $3,000 on the spot. Fat chance. But I’m going to think about it.

Curt Blefary invited me up to Jimmy Wynn’s room, where some of the guys were sitting around, talking about the games and having a few drinks. Blefary, Wynn, Don Wilson and I. A few of the other guys drifted by and left. At two-fifteen the phone rang and Wynn answered. It was Mel McGaha, the coach, and Wynn said, “Mel, I’ll tell you who’s here, so you don’t have to bother calling their rooms.”

And McGaha said, “I don’t want to know who’s there. Tell them to go back to their rooms right now.”

“That’s it, men,” Wynn said. “Curfew. It’s not Mel’s fault. He’s got a job to do.”

Plans. Bobbie and the kids are flying to Houston to join me on Sunday, the thirty-first. We’ll live in a hotel for the ten-day home stand and then she’ll fly to Chicago to go to her brother’s wedding in Allegan, Michigan. She’ll stay with her folks until the end of the season, except she may be able to join me for a few days in Cincinnati near the end of September. We’re having our car driven from Seattle to Michigan by a schoolteacher and his wife who advertised in the paper. It will only cost us about $75 for gas. The air fares are murder, but what the hell, it’s only money.

Today Don Blasingame was wearing a blue bellbottom suit, blue shirt, a blue scarf at his throat and was smoking a long thin cigar, brown.

“Little boy blue,” Fred Gladding said, “come blow my horn.” And everybody on the bus went “Oooooh.” Blasingame feigned indifference.

Back-of-the-bus story about spring training: A lot of times during the exhibition season you change your clothes in the hotel because there are no clubhouse facilities. So you go down to the lobby in your shower slippers, carrying your spikes in your hand. On this day we’re told, Joe Torre of the Cardinals swears, his roommate, already leaving with his spikes in his hand, picked up a girl in the corridor and in a matter of moments, had talked her into his bed. The quote from Torre: “The last thing I remember seeing was my roommate screwing this broad and all he had on was his baseball socks and shower slippers.”

The Astro game is mock anger. It’s a teasing humor that can be quite funny even if it’s directed at you. It goes like this:

Tom Griffin pitched a gutsy game. He’d been having trouble with his arm and at the start of the game he looked like he was just pushing the ball up there. Bob Gibson was firing seeds for the Cards, and I thought, “Forget it. It’s all over.” The first two Cards got on base and I covered my eyes. But Griffin hung in there and wasn’t taken out until the tenth—and then for a pinch hitter—with the score 1–1. He was sore when Harry took him out. “I’m trying to win a ballgame here,” Harry said.

We scored four runs in the tenth and won 5–1. Now the guys gave Griffin the business.