Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (53 page)

Tried to get Marvin Milkes again. No soap. Next time I’m going to make it a collect call and say that Bowie Kuhn is on the line.

Well, one more time. And this time his secretary took the call and said she knew all about the problem and that there were two doors involved and I had not been billed for the door that was pulled off its hinges, just the door I’d broken.

So I explained that there was no way I could have caused $88 worth of damage, because all I did was pull a bit of molding away from the door and the clubhouse man said he fixed it and it didn’t cost anything.

She said she’d tell Mr. Milkes.

Lost another close one to the Braves tonight 2–1. Tom Griffin was the loser. On the airplane to Cincinnati I asked him what he thinks when he’s out there on the mound struggling through a rough inning. “I think to myself, ‘If I can just get out of this inning, if I can just get away alive, I’ll be all right.’”

Which is about what I do. Particularly this year, when I don’t have a good knuckleball and am at their mercy. I think to myself, “I know you’re going to nail this next one. Please hit a line drive at somebody. Please.” All I want to do is get back into the dugout and get myself together.

Harry gave it to us after this one. He waved all of us into a corner of the clubhouse so he could be sure he had our attention and lit into us. “You guys aren’t bearing down,” he said. “You say you are, but I don’t buy that bullshit. You can’t be as horseshit as you look out there. You guys look like Tom Thumb.”

This fractured us. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing straight out. We’ve been called things in the clubhouse before. A lot of managers say their players look like Molly Putz out there. But never Tom Thumb.

“You couldn’t knock anybody’s hat off,” Harry said. “You look like you’re going downhill on a scooter.” By then it was almost impossible to hold back. Shoulders were shaking, heads were disappearing under sweatshirts, no one could look at anybody else. “And I don’t want any bullshit on that airplane tonight. I don’t want anybody playing the fool. If you’re going to play like you’re down, you better act like it.”

Then he said, “You used to have some pride in yourselves, but it’s gone.”

The guys say this was a fairly mild Harry Walker exhibition. He didn’t throw any food or kick over any stools and, said Blasingame, “When he’s really pissed there are a lot more ‘fucks’ in there.”

Larry Dierker said that when Harry had these meetings at the beginning of the season the guys would huddle together in a corner, really scared. After a while, though, all they could do was giggle.

Dick Williams has been fired as manager of the Red Sox. I think that when a team wins a pennant the tendency is to give too much credit to the manager and when a team loses the tendency is to blame him too much. I don’t think Dick Williams was that good a manager when the Red Sox won the pennant. I think there was a right combination—a lot of things falling into place at once. I don’t believe that Gil Hodges is as bad as Hawk Harrelson makes him out to be in his book, nor do I think he’s as great as he seems to be with the Mets right now. The Mets are putting it all together this year and Hodges just happens to be there at the right moment.

In the dark of the airplane Doug Rader was saying that he feels he’s living out of time and out of place. He thinks he would have been much happier as a Tahitian war lord, or even a pirate. And Norm Miller said, “I think I would have made a good pirate too. I wonder if there have ever been any good Jewish pirates?”

We also talked about the expressions we used in high school. Things like “Get bent,” which was meant to put a guy down. Or if somebody said, “Are you taking Louise to the dance,” you had to say, “Fuckin’ ay I am.” Doug had one I never heard: “You ’bout a cool sucker, Bill.” I guess that meant you were cool. But “eat a hodgy” must have been nationwide, because Norm was saying “eat a hodgy” out on the coast while I was saying it in Bloom Township High in Chicago Heights.

John Wilson, the sportswriter, was pretty loose on the plane tonight and we got to talking about Don Wilson.

“What’s the matter with Wilson?” he said.

“His arm is bothering him.”

“No, no, no,” Wilson said. “You’ve seen him pitch. How can your arm be bothering you if you can go five, six innings? It’s only after that that he blows up. How can that be his arm?”

“He’s out there on guts,” I said. “It hurts him, hurts like hell, but he’s doing the best he can.”

“No, that’s not it,” Wilson said.

“Then, what is it?”

Wilson pointed to his head. “Maybe it’s all up here,” he said. “Maybe he’s a mental case.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “After all the games Wilson has been in, suddenly he’s a mental case? Here’s a guy that has over 200 strikeouts, a guy who pitched a no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds, a proven big-league pitcher, and suddenly he’s a mental case? Suddenly he’s afraid to pitch against the San Diego Padres?”

That’s the same kind of thinking I ran into on the Yankees. This was in ’65. My arm hurt and I tried to throw through it. I thought that if I kept throwing, it might strengthen and the pain would go away. And people would ask, “If your arm hurts, how can you go out there and throw?” Dammit, you
can
throw. It’s just a question of how much it’s going to hurt and how effective you’re going to be. Granted I shouldn’t have been out there. But I didn’t realize that until later. I thought I could work it out by pitching. And people began to say after a while that I had a mental problem. Hell, I had a sore arm. It’s hard for people to understand how your arm can hurt when it doesn’t hurt them to watch you throw.

Baseball player’s description of Cincinnati: “Horseshit park, horseshit clubhouse, horseshit hotel, lots of movies, nice place to eat after the game, tough town to get laid in.”

We had to wait for an hour-and-a-half at the airport because there were no taxis and our bus didn’t arrive on time. It was three in the morning, but that’s no excuse. And do you know that all you can hear at the Cincinnati airport at three in the morning are crickets? Goddam
crickets?
While we were standing there Larry Dierker said, “This city isn’t a completely lost cause. Look, they’ve got one of those computer IQ games.” So we walked over, dropped a couple of quarters in and discovered the machine was broken.

Cincinnati

I got into my seventieth ballgame tonight. We were ahead 3–1 in the seventh and I got called in with two out and runners on first and second. Pete Rose up. Real clutch situation. I throw two knuckleballs for balls. Edwards calls for a fastball and I shake him off. Rose is just going to rip my fastball. I know it. So I throw a knuckleball for a strike, another knuckleball for a foul ball, a third for strike three and strut off the mound.

Then we have a long inning and I hate it. I feel like I ought to go down to the bullpen and get some throwing in. I’m not throwing my super knuckler. Sure enough, I go out there and give up three straight singles. They don’t splash me against the fences but they hit sharp grounders. So Harry takes me out and says, “Well, you can’t get them all the time.”

I know, I know.

Fred Gladding came in, stopped them cold, and we won. He’s been having his problems for the last month or so, but tonight we all called him “Ace.”

After the game Pete Rose told a reporter that he never expected a knuckleball on 2 and 0. I think I’m wising up.

Persistence is its own reward. I called Marvin Milkes’ secretary again. She said the whole thing had been straightened out. Milkes had put a check in the mail for $88. Oh boy. Wonder what caused the change of heart. Could it be that Milkes read Larry Merchant’s column in the
New York Post
the other day, which was the first public revelation of the fact that I’m writing a book about this season? Could it?

Norm Miller, who is married to an Italian girl, says he likes the idea of the bar mitzvah. He said he didn’t have one. His brother did and Norm was jealous. “A bar mitzvah,” he said, “is like signing for a bonus.”

I looked like Tom Thumb on my first pitch in the game tonight. Tony Perez hit a knuckleball over Norm Miller’s head and Norm could have caught it if he’d climbed over the fence and ran across the street. The fact that I struck out the next two guys didn’t ease the pain.

It was a painful evening all around, especially for Jack Billingham. He and Dierker were scheduled to pitch the doubleheader and he asked Jim Owens which game he was pitching. “You pitch against Maloney,” Owens told him.

“But he’s their best pitcher,” Billingham said, figuring that honor should go to Dierker.

“I know, I know,” Owens said. “That’s why you’re pitching against him.”

The idea is to win three more games and finish over .500. So you throw Billingham up as a sacrifice to Maloney, a guy you’ve got to figure on shutting out to beat, and let Dierker win his game. Sure enough, Maloney beat Billingham 3–0 with a one-hitter. We got three runs for Dierker in the second game. Unfortunately they scored four off him and we lost 4–3. Nice doubleheader.

We were kidding in the bullpen about how many greenies the Reds must have been taking during this pennant race and just then there was a ball hit into short right that Pete Rose made a great diving run at and caught on a short hop. “Five more milligrams and he’d have had it,” Tom Griffin said.

At this time of year, unless you’re in a pennant race, what you really think about most is going home. So the story was told in the bullpen about Umpire Ed Runge and Frank Lary, pitcher. It was the last game of the season, probably 1960, and Frank Lary had booked a three-o’clock flight although it was a two-o’clock game. Of course, he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. Right before the game started Lary said to Runge, “Hey, Ed, I’ve got a three o’clock plane to catch home. See what you can do about getting me out of this ballgame.” Runge said he would.

On the first pitch of the game Runge calls a strike and Lary, standing on the top step of the dugout, yells, “Hey, Runge, what the hell kind of call is that? You trying to make a quick getaway?”

And Runge points a finger at him and says, “You’re out of the game.”

“Thanks,” Lary said. And he left.

The other thing you talk about in the bullpen this time of year is sex. You talk about sex at all other times of the year too. Ballplayers don’t exactly admire the sex habits of the human baseball player. They say things like, “If I ever catch my daughter hanging around ballplayers…” or, “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m never going to let my daughter go to a ballgame.”

Anyway, this is about something that happened last year here in Cincinnati. Rader and Miller were out strolling one evening and noticed in the window of a cosmetic shop a vibrating device called, as they recall, a “Personal Vibrator.” To their twisted, sex-wracked minds it looked, of course, like nothing but a vibrating phallus.

The next morning they were at the store bright and early, only to discover that Blasingame and Lemaster were already there. “I’ll take all of them,” Blasingame said, leering evilly at the salesgirl and pointing to the vibrators.

“Now, wait a minute,” Rader said. “You can’t have them all. Norm and I have got to have at least one each.”

Out of the kindness of his heart, Blasingame let them each buy one. And he bought the rest.

That night he called a clubhouse meeting. “Pay attention, men,” he said, “especially you married men.” And he proceeded to make a speech describing graphically the marvelous uses to which these vibrators could be put. “You married men,” he said, “this little device will revitalize your sex life at home.”

And he sold every single vibrator, purchased at $4.98, for $10. The demand was greater than the supply.

“Say, Norm,” I said. “You happen to remember where that cosmetic shop is?”

We had the pleasure today of knocking the Reds out of the race. We beat them 4–3 and they were mathematically eliminated. Tough. A newspaper guy here wrote that Houston always knocks off Cincinnati and then rolls over and plays dead for Atlanta. Silly, of course. We try to win all our games. Against some teams trying isn’t enough.

Instead of our usual running in the outfield we were running pass patterns, Jim Owens at quarterback, against pass defenders. The idea was to see who could work the most intricate patterns and who could fake who out of whose jock strap. Harry Walker made us stop. “I hate to spoil your fun, boys,” he said. “But we better knock it off. Crissakes, if Dierker gets hurt, we’re all out of a job.”

Harry was probably right. There is a pecking order in the major leagues which goes like this: owner, general manager, super star, manager, established player, coaches, traveling secretary, trainer, clubhouse man, marginal player. That’s Harry down there under super-star Dierker. In Seattle that was me down there under the clubhouse man.

I was warming up late in the ballgame when Jim Owens came out and said, “It doesn’t look like it’s breaking real good.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get Gladding up.”

Now this makes sense. I tried to get the idea across in Seattle that there should be some sort of relationship between how a guy looks in the bullpen and how he does on the mound. The conundrum is that often there is
no
relationship. Except that with the knuckleball, if I haven’t got it in the bullpen I’m not likely to when I get out on the mound.

I’m reminded of Mike Marshall asking Joe Schultz what to do if he didn’t have it in the bullpen and Schultz just walking away.

Bed check—with four games left in the season? I suppose that at the end of the season they’ll hand out chastity belts for use at home over the winter.

Although we’d lost again I was lighthearted as I set off to spend a day with my family in Michigan on the way out to Los Angeles for the final series of the season. No bed check tonight.

Sudden thought. Suppose somebody told Johnny Sain to conduct a bed check. He’d tell them to take the phone and stick it up their receivers.