Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (47 page)

“You going to write a book?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Someday I might get to be President and want to write a book about my life.”

Owens sniffed. “We haven’t had any flaky Presidents so far, and I doubt if we’ll have any in the future.”

Owens may not be much on Presidents, but I think I’ll like him as a pitching coach. He thinks rather like Johnny Sain.

“You just can’t tell some guy he has to throw a slider,” Owens says. “That’s what they did to me. I had a helluva overhand curve when I first came up and they told me I had to throw a slider. So I worked on the slider until I lost my overhand curve. That taught me never to take a young pitcher and force him to come up with a new pitch. I give them their own head.”

That’s just fine with me, Jim baby, especially since every time I try to throw a slider my elbow feels like an alligator is biting it.

Drinking rules: They’re different on the Astros. You’re allowed to drink at the hotel bar. With the Pilots you were not allowed to. I suppose this goes back to Casey Stengel, who said, “You can’t drink at the hotel bar, because that’s where
I
drink.” Billy Martin and Dave Boswell can tell you what happens when managers and players drink in the same bars. Still, it seems more adult to be able to have a beer at the bar of your own hotel.

The other difference is airplanes. With the Astros you’re allowed the same two drinks as all the other people aboard. With Seattle you could drink only beer. You could have 143 beers and get sloshed out of your skull, but you were not allowed to enjoy a cocktail before your meal.

The Marvin Milkes bellhop story has finally hit
The Sporting News
. It quotes Brabender as saying that Milkes spends more time in the lobby than the bell captain. I wonder if Milkes will call him in for a grilling like I got. Doubt it. Brabender just won his tenth game. Besides, if Brabender gets angry he’s liable to crush his spleen.

The football season is almost upon us, so I got to thinking about some basic differences in the two games for the players. Baseball players play so many games it’s impossible to get emotionally high for any one of them. Football players get all gung-ho in the locker room. They chant and shout and jump up and down and take pills and hit each other on the helmet and shoulder pads and spit and kick and swear and they’re ready to go out and bust some heads. If a baseball player got that emotional, he’d go out swinging hard—and miss. I think baseball is more of a skill sport than any other. Hitting is the single most difficult feat in sports. Second most difficult is preventing hitting. That’s why Milkes bugged me when he’d say things like, “If some players don’t perform the way they’re supposed to, there’s going to be some changes.” I think we did perform the way we were supposed to. It was Milkes who missed. He’s the one who chose the ballplayers. Did you ever hear a general manager say, “It looks like I’m not as good at picking talent as I thought I was. I guess I’ll take a $10,000 cut”?

Yes, Virginia, baseball players watch the scoreboard. Is Cincinnati changing pitchers? Is Seaver really shutting out San Francisco? Who’s No. 37 for St. Louis? It’s really exciting. Today Atlanta got beat, San Francisco got beat, Cincinnati won and we could have been no worse than four games out of first and only two behind Los Angeles and San Francisco. But we blew the ballgame. We had a 4–2 lead going into the ninth and we wound up losing 6–4. I can see why this club was desperate for another relief pitcher.

So I play an interesting game. I try to project my performance with Seattle onto this club. Those 24 games I came into without so much as giving up a hit. Not one
hit!
Suppose I’d done it here? Suppose my mother and father had never met?

No false sorrow in the clubhouse after that one. Only real sorrow, and a lot of it. Losing a ballgame so suddenly is like being punched in the stomach. You’ve counted it as a win and you’ve subtracted a full game from the teams that have lost—then
poof
, it’s gone. So there was no food right away in the clubhouse, and when I asked why I was told that once, after a game like that Harry came in and tipped the table over and threw food all over the place. So after tough games, there’s a cooling-off period before the food arrives.

Okay, so we’re in fifth place and there are four teams that have a better chance. But we’re not out of it. That’s the way you have to look at it. Especially when it’s true.

Trade: Tommy Davis to Houston Astros for Sandy Valdespino. Welcome, Tommy. It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Old-Timers’ Day today and naturally Harry Walker got into the game. For the Astros it was both hilarious and chastening. It was hilarious because the guys gave Harry the business. Everything he’d ever yelled at them, they yelled at him.

While he was at bat:

“Take a shot at left field, Harry.”

“Just stroke it up the middle, Harry.”

“Go to right field, Harry.”

He takes a strike. “Jesus Christ, right down the middle, Harry.”

“Just punch at it, Harry.”

“Make sure you get your pitch, Harry.”

“Step out on him, Harry.”

Of course, Harry hung in there, stroked it up the middle and got a base hit, just as he tells everybody else to.

While he was on first base:

“You got to break up two, Harry.”

“Make sure you get a good jump, Harry.”

“Don’t get too far off the bag, Harry.”

“Watch out for the pick-off, Harry.”

Sure enough, there’s a ground ball to the infield and Harry flies into the shortstop and breaks up the double play, a perfect slide.

“Son of a bitch,” said Doug Rader, “every time we have an Old-Timers’ game Harry gets a hit up the middle and breaks up the double play.”

We lost again. Jesus Christ,
we lost again
. That’s eleven out of seventeen. It doesn’t seem possible to have it all slip away so fast.

Harry didn’t throw anything. Instead he told Don Wilson what a helluva game he’d pitched. “Go get ’em tomorrow, boys,” he said. “We’ll be all right.”

He sounded just like Joe Schultz.

Norm Miller was doing the broadcast bit in the fourth inning when Joe Morgan came back to the dugout after missing a big curve ball for strike three.

“Joe, Joe Morgan, may I have a word with you?”

“Sure, Norm, how’s it going?”

“Fine, Joe, fine. We wanted to ask you about that pitch you missed. What was it?”

“Norm, that was a motherfucking curve.”

“Can you tell our listeners, Joe, what’s the difference between a regular curve and a motherfucking curve?”

“Well, Norm, your regular curve has a lot of spin on it and you can recognize it real early. It breaks down a little bit, and out. Now, your motherfucker, that’s different. It comes in harder, looks like a fastball. Then all of a sudden it rolls off the top of the table and before you know it, it’s motherfucking strike three.”

“Thank you very much, Joe Morgan.”

Tommy Davis says that the day I left, Joe Schultz had a meeting in the clubhouse to discuss the rumors that he would not be back next season and he broke down and cried. “It was a sad and touching scene,” Tommy said.

Davis also said that the talk around the club was that I wasn’t traded just to get two players, but because Marvin Milkes wanted to get me off the ballclub. The rumor did not explain why.

Gatorade?

Upon a promise from me that I’d never tell, Tommy Davis revealed that the man who had nailed my shoes to the clubhouse floor, tore the buttons off my sweatshirts and pulled my jockstraps out of shape was Gene Brabender. I have kept my word. I have not told a soul. Until now.

My wife watched her first game in the Astrodome and found the fans oddly reserved. They sit there very quietly unless the scoreboard tells them to say something, like “Charge!” or “Go! Go! Go!” So when Mike and Dave started yelling, “We want a hit,” people turned around to look at them.

I thought I’d climb a few golden stairs today, so I dropped in on Spec Richardson and, speaking over the blare of Billy Graham pouring out of the office radio, I told him my tale of woe. I told him I’d lost a lot of money on the deal—at least $1,000 moving my family, etc.—and that when I signed a contract for $22,000 with Seattle it was on the basis of not knowing whether I’d be able to pitch in the majors. I said I accepted the $22,000 with the thought that if I stayed in the big league for the whole season I would go in and ask for an increase. I was just about to do that, I said, when I was traded and wound up having to
spend
money. I also said I knew that Spec would want to be fair.

Yes, indeed, he said, he wanted to be fair. He said that he certainly would help me with my hotel bill here and that he’d see if anything else could be done. He said if I did the job for him I wouldn’t have to worry.

So right away I started worrying.

We’re staying in the motel section of the Astroworld Hotel, paying $20 a day for $40 worth of rooms. Both rooms are filled with double beds, which doesn’t give us much running-around room. But there’s a swimming pool right outside the door and a nice playground nearby. In order to cut down on the high price of room service we’ve rented a little refrigerator and have breakfast and lunch in, simple things like cold cereal and sandwiches. I know a lot of the players would laugh at the idea of a refrigerator, but there’s a matter of values involved. Like one spring in Ft. Lauderdale I hired a car for a dollar a day. It was a terrible car, with no muffler and a missing door, and I took some abuse because of it. But it’s not a matter of being cheap; it’s a matter of what you want to spend your money on. In Florida we stayed at a great hotel rather than some crummy apartment. I’d rather pay for that than for a fancy rented car.

Good ballgame tonight. Justice and the Houston Astros triumphed 7–6 in eleven innings. It was a team effort all the way because we were down 5–0 almost before the game started. My own contribution was one scoreless inning followed by one near-disaster. Vic Davalillo led off the inning with a double off a fastball that I shouldn’t have thrown. Joe Torre walked. Mike Shannon hit a line drive off a knuckleball that would without doubt have separated me from my head if I hadn’t deflected it with my arm, a matter of blind, instinctive self-preservation. It not only raised a big welt on my wrist, it knocked in a run and me out of the game. I told Harry I wanted to stay in, but he said, “No, no. If this was a close game I’d leave you in. But I want to save you for the future.”

I think Harry was just trying to be nice.

Some more thoughts on getting along with baseball players. The other night after the game we had our usual great spread of food: spaghetti and meatballs, fried chicken, steaks. It really does make a fellow proud to be an Astro. I had a steak in one hand and a glass of milk in the other and Curt Blefary said, “Hey, Bulldog, what’s with the milk? Why aren’t you drinking beer?”

Rather than tell him the truth—that I’d rather drink milk—I said I had a bad stomach and had to drink milk. Now, why would I do that? Because I want to be one of the boys. I really do, just the way I did in Seattle. I think I failed there, but that doesn’t mean I have to fail here. I feel embarrassed at telling a lie. But me drinking milk in the clubhouse is like a guy walking into a western saloon, pounding on the bar and demanding a sarsaparilla.

A $37 C.O.D. package arrived today from a photographer in Detroit. In it were 100 color photographs of me in a Seattle Pilots uniform. Just what I needed. Anybody who wrote a letter requesting an autograph prior to my being traded to Houston will get one of those marvelous photos. Also, anyone else who wants one, just send a stamped self-addressed envelope.

Today there was a clubhouse meeting. The guys wanted to get together without Harry and the coaches. Johnny Edwards, one of the team leaders, told us that we had to keep busting ass. Edwards said he was disturbed to hear guys talking about next year. He said that’s bad. He said we shouldn’t write ourselves off. He said we got to win it this year. The consensus was that we weren’t going to let Harry Walker bug us; if necessary we could finish two games ahead of the manager.

Me, I think the reason the club has done as well as it has is Harry Walker. I’m told he can be a pain, but a ballclub like this needs a Harry Walker. It’s a club that probably didn’t believe in itself, having finished so poorly last year and having started out 4 and 20 this year. So Harry drives and harasses, reminds everyone how to run the bases, how to hit the ball, to watch for this, watch for that, and keeps everybody agitated and playing better baseball.

Right after the meeting I asked Tommy Davis how come he hadn’t said anything. “Look, you and I have been through this kind of thing before,” he said. “And maybe we could have said something that would have been helpful. But I feel that before I say anything I should do something to help the team.”

Interesting that even a Tommy Davis should hesitate to say anything until he’s proved himself with a new team. It seems like a nice, modest thing. What it means, really, is that nobody wants to say anything until he’s going good. And when he’s going good, nobody wants to tell him he’s wrong. So we have a tendency to substitute batting average or ERA for brains. The converse is also true. When you’re going bad there is no dearth of guys waiting to jump on you with both feet, even if you’re right.

On September 1, rosters can be expanded from twenty-five to forty players. This means there are a lot of eager young players around. Mine is named Bob Watson. He’s a young catcher who thinks it will help his career if he learns to catch the knuckleball. “Yeah, put that knuckleball on me,” he says.

Heh, heh, heh.

Willie Mays was standing at the batting cage. I stuck my hand out, “I’m Jim Bouton.”

“Oh sure,” he said. “Jim Bouton. I know you.”

“You’ve always been one of my heroes,” I said. “When I was a kid, my brother and I always used to go up to the Polo Grounds to watch you play.”