Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (7 page)

I asked one of the sportswriters if Joe Schultz had said anything about the way I threw today and he said, “Yeah.”

“Well, what?”

“He said, ‘It’s too early to tell.’”

My reporting late has made this the first spring I’ve ever been behind anybody getting into shape. Usually I’m ready to pitch in the early games, but it looks like I’m not going to be ready here. It’s quite different from my last spring with the Yankees in 1967. I was really impressive, right from the beginning. I led the club in innings pitched with 30, and I gave up the fewest hits, fifteen, and no homers and only two or three extra-base hits. My ERA was .092, which means less than one run per game, and in one stretch I went nine innings without giving up a hit. At the end of spring training a newspaper guy said to Houk, “Wow, didn’t Bouton have a great spring?” and Houk said, “You can’t go by that too much. He always has a good spring.” (The spring before I was 1–3 and had a 5.10 ERA.)

Another thing about that spring. This was after I’d pitched about 25 marvelous innings. Houk sat next to me in the dugout and told me, very confidentially, “You know, you’re having a helluva spring, a better spring than Dooley Womack, and I think you’re just the man we need in the bullpen.”

What I wanted to say was: “I’m having a better spring than
who? Dooley Womack
?
The
Dooley Womack? I’m having a better spring than Mel Stottlemyre or Sam McDowell or Bob Gibson.” That’s what I
should
have said. Instead I just sat there shaking my head. He could’ve knocked me off my seat.

Instead he sold me to Seattle. Okay, so I had a lousy year there. That still doesn’t mean Houk knew it all the time. You can make a lousy pitcher out of anybody by not pitching him. I’ll always believe that’s what Houk did to me. Besides, there’s no way the Yankees can justify getting rid of a twenty-nine-year-old body for $12,000, and before the season is over I’m going to remind a lot of people that they did.

Steve Hovley and I had a discussion about Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking. We agree it’s a crock. Steve said it was like feeding false data into a computer. There comes a day when you realize you’ve been building a false sense of confidence and then it all breaks down and the dream is smashed.

I think that kind of thing happened with the Yankees. Houk used to tell us we were going to win the pennant,
we were going to win the pennant
. Then June rolled around and we knew we
couldn’t
win the pennant, but instead of trying for second or third everybody threw in the towel and we finished ninth.

We might be building ourselves up to that kind of fall with this club. Everybody is saying we’re going to be great. There’s a difference between optimism and wishful thinking.

Not only did I have some tenderness in my elbow today but Sal told me I’ll be pitching in the exhibition game Sunday. The tenderness will go away, but how am I going to pitch Sunday? I’m not ready. I haven’t thrown to spots yet. I haven’t thrown any curveballs at all. My fingers aren’t strong enough to throw the knuckleball right. I’ve gone back to taking two baseballs and squeezing them in my hand to try to strengthen my fingers and increase the grip. I used to do that with the Yankees, and naturally it bugged The Colonel. The reason it bugged The Colonel is that he never saw anybody do it before. Besides, it wasn’t his idea. “What are you doing?” The Colonel would sputter. “Put those baseballs back in the bag.”

Immediately Fritz Peterson would pick up two baseballs and start doing the same thing. One day Fritz got Steve Hamilton and Joe Verbanic and about three or four other pitchers to carry two balls around with them wherever they went. It drove The Colonel out of his mind.

The following spring Fritz was removed as my roommate. The Colonel kept telling Fritz not to worry, that pretty soon he wouldn’t have to room with “that Communist” anymore. And Fritz would say, “No, no, that’s all right. I
want
to room with him. I
like
him. We get along great.”

And The Colonel would say, “Fine, fine. We’ll get it straightened out.”

So one day Houk called me into his office and said, “Jim, we’re switching around roommates this year. I think it will be good for everybody to have pitchers with pitchers, catchers with catchers.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m already rooming with a pitcher.”

“Well, we want young pitchers to room with young pitchers, and since you’ve been with the club so long, we feel you deserve a single room. It’s a status thing. Whitey and Mickey have single rooms, and we thought you should too.”

I said that was fine with me and if he wanted Fritz to room with a young pitcher I’d take a single room.

Then Houk called Fritz in and said, “Bouton deserves a single room and you wouldn’t want to stand in his way, would you?” Fritz said he wouldn’t, so they put him in with Dooley Womack, young pitcher. He was three months younger than I.

The Yankees thought I was a bad influence on Fritz. They had some funny ideas about bad influence. What I did bad was talk to newspapermen and talk around the clubhouse about things that were on my mind, politics sometimes, and religion. That’s breaking the rules. The word was around: Don’t talk to the newspapermen. Hell, baseball
needs
the newspapermen. So I broke a rule. But suppose you break the rules about staying up late and getting drunk. That’s okay. It may hurt the team, but it’s better than talking to newspapermen. You figure it.

As for teaching Peterson to do the wrong things, the only thing I ever taught him was how to throw that change-up he uses so effectively. And he still enjoys giving me the credit.

We were sitting around the clubhouse and I asked Sal the Barber about the days when he pitched for the Giants against the Dodgers. He said yeah, he’d never forget those days. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said. “When I pitched against the Dodgers I didn’t care if it was the last game I ever pitched. I really hated that club. If I could’ve gotten that feeling every time I pitched I’d have been a lot better pitcher.”

I’ll have that feeling at least a couple of times this year. When I pitch against the Yankees.

Steve Hovley sidled over to me in the outfield and said, “To a pitcher a base hit is the perfect example of negative feedback.”

Sal Maglie said he hadn’t seen me working on my breaking ball, and he’s right, because I haven’t. So tomorrow I’ll have to work on that too. Damn, I can’t believe the games are starting so fast. Tomorrow’s the first game and I don’t even know who’s pitching. Still, it will be kind of exciting to see how we do. I guess starting out with a new team is sort of like setting out to discover America. Sort of.

Gary Bell is nicknamed Ding Dong. Of course. What’s interesting about it is that “Ding Dong” is what the guys holler when somebody gets hit in the cup. The cups are metal inserts that fit inside the jock strap, and when a baseball hits one it’s called ringing the bell, which rhymes with hell, which is what it hurts like. It’s funny, even if you’re in the outfield, or in the dugout, no matter how far away, when a guy gets it in the cup you can hear it. Ding Dong.

At a pre-workout meeting Joe Schultz told us to learn the signs or it would cost us money. This is a lot different from Houk’s theory. Houk’s method was to be as nice to us as possible and if you missed a sign he would alibi for you. You could miss them all year and he would never get angry. I guess he figured that someday you’d come to like him enough to start paying attention to the signs. But the Yankees sure missed a lot of signs. Even when we were winning.

Okay, boys and girls, tomorrow is my birthday and I’ll be thirty years old. I don’t feel like thirty. I look like I’m in my early twenties and I feel like I’m in my early twenties. My arm, however, is over a hundred years old.

Had our first spring-training game, the first real test for the shiny new Seattle Pilots. Today was the day. This was it. For keeps. The big one. Against Cleveland. Greg Goossen was the designated pinch hitter under the experimental rule that allows one player to come to bat all during the game without playing in the field. “Are they trying to tell me something about my hands?” Goossen went around saying. “Are they trying to tell me something about my glove?” And after that he became the first Seattle Pilot to say, “Play me or trade me.”

I was watching the game today for some signs of what kind of team we’re going to have this year. There were lots of them, but I’m still not sure. Like we gave up two runs in the first inning on the first four pitches and I thought, “Oh, oh. Move over, Mets.” But in our half of the first we scored five runs and we went on to get nineteen in the game. I couldn’t believe it. I think the people in Seattle will now start believing we have a good team. And, my God, maybe we do. We scored all those runs without Tommy Davis, or Don Mincher or Rich Rollins. Or Jim Bouton, for that matter.

I’ve started slowly tossing the real big overhand curve ball that once made me famous. I also threw the knuckleball to Freddy Velazquez and was gratified when McNertney came over with the big knuckleball glove and asked Velazquez if he could catch me for a while. Still can’t believe I’m pitching day after tomorrow, although mentally I’ve started getting ready—I mean I’m getting scared. I love to pitch when I’m scared. Of all the big games I’ve had to pitch in my life—and I’m including high school games that were just as big to me as any major-league game—I always did my best work when I was scared stiff. In fact, if I’m not scared for a game I’ll create some critical situations in my mind. Like, I’ll pretend it’s a World Series game and that it really counts big. I told Fritz Peterson about how I felt about being scared and one day before I was going to start a game he came over and whispered in my ear, “If you want to see your baby again, you’ll win today.”

After the game Bobbie and I were at a party with Gary Bell and his wife and Steve Barber and his. Gary’s wife, Nan, said she’d been anxious to meet me since she’d read in the Pilot spring guidebook that some of my hobbies were water coloring, mimicry and jewelry-making. “Everyone else has hunting and fishing, so I figured you must be a real beauty. I mean, jewelry-making?” said Nan. “Make me some earrings, you sweet thing.”

Then we got to talking about some of the crazy things ballplayers do. Nan told a story of the time she called Gary on the road to check on a flight she was supposed to catch. She called him at 4:30 A.M., his time, and his roommate, Woodie Held, answered the phone and said, without batting an eyelash, that Gary was out playing golf. And Nan shrugged and said, “Maybe he was.”

My wife and I burst out laughing when Gary asked me if I’d ever been on the roof of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. The Shoreham is the beaver-shooting capital of the world, and I once told Bobbie that you could win a pennant with the guys who’ve been on that roof. “Pennant, hell,” Gary said. “You could stock a whole league.”

I better explain about beaver-shooting. A beaver-shooter is, at bottom, a Peeping Tom. It can be anything from peering over the top of the dugout to look up dresses to hanging from the fire escape on the twentieth floor of some hotel to look into a window. I’ve seen guys chin themselves on transoms, drill holes in doors, even shove a mirror under a door.

One of the all-time legendary beaver-shooters was a pretty good little left-handed pitcher who looked like a pretty good little bald-headed ribbon clerk. He used to carry a beaver-shooting kit with him on the road. In the kit there was a fine steel awl and several needle files. What he would do is drill little holes into connecting doors and see what was going on. Sometimes he was lucky enough to draw a young airline stewardess, or better yet, a young airline stewardess and friend.

One of his roommates, a straight-arrow type—Fellowship of Christian Athletes and all that—told this story: The pitcher drilled a hole through the connecting door and tried to get him to look through it. He wouldn’t. It was against his religion or something. But the pitcher kept nagging him. “You’ve got to see this.
Boyohboyohboy
! Just take one quick look.” Straight-arrow finally succumbed. He put his eye to the hole and was treated to the sight of a man sitting on the bed tying his shoelaces.

One of the great beaver-shooting places in the minor leagues was Tulsa, Oklahoma. While “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played you could run under the stands and look up at all kinds of beaver. And anytime anyone was getting a good shot, the word would go out “
Psst
! Section 27.” So to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner” an entire baseball club of clean-cut American boys would be looking up the skirt of some female.

Beaver-shooting can get fairly scientific. I was still in the minor leagues when we discovered that if you stuck a small hand mirror under a hotel room door—especially in the older hotels, where there were large spaces between the door and the floor—you could see the whole room just by looking at the mirror. This was a two-man operation: one guy on his hands and knees looking at the mirror, the other at the end of the hall laying chicky, as they say. We usually sprinkled some change around on the floor so you’d have a reason being down on it if anybody caught you.

Spot a good beaver and you could draw an instant crowd. One time in Ft. Lauderdale we spotted this babe getting out of her bathing suit. The louvered windows of her room weren’t properly shut and we could see right into the room. Pretty soon there were twenty-five of us jostling for position.

Now, some people might look down on this sort of activity. But in baseball if you shoot a particularly good beaver you are a highly respected person, one might even say a folk hero of sorts. Indeed, if you are caught out late at night and tell the manager you’ve had a good run of beaver-shooting he’d probably let you off with a light fine.

The roof of the Shoreham is important beaver-shooting country because of the way the hotel is shaped—a series of L-shaped wings that make the windows particularly vulnerable from certain spots on the roof. The Yankees would go up there in squads of 15 or so, often led by Mickey Mantle himself. You needed a lot of guys to do the spotting. Then someone would whistle from two or three wings away, “
Psst
! Hey! Beaver shot. Section D. Five o’clock.” And there’d be a mad scramble of guys climbing over skylights, tripping over each other and trying not to fall off the roof. One of the first big thrills I had with the Yankees was joining about half the club on the roof of the Shoreham at 2:30 in the morning. I remember saying to myself, “So this is the big leagues.”