Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (70 page)

And not far from the checkout lanes, a Sicks’ Stadium display case features photographs and memorabilia of the Seattle Raniers. The only Pilot item is a photo of Don Mincher with the caption: “Don Mincher, Pitcher.” It never ends.

While Seattle’s Safeco Field lacks the charm of Sicks Stadium, it certainly holds more people. A few of them recognized me standing on the field before the game. They would smile and wave and then nudge the child sitting next to them and point in my direction. What were they telling the kids, I wondered. “You see that man down there? He once had his spikes nailed to the floor.”

Before I threw out the first pitch I went over to the Mariners’ dugout to say hello to manager Lou Piniella, who was almost a Pilot until he was traded in spring training to the Kansas City Royals. We laughed at the first sight of each other, and the notion that we were together in Seattle under circumstances neither of us could have predicted in 1969.

I asked Lou if he remembered the day Joe Schultz told him he’d been traded.

“Sure,” said Lou, “I’ll never forget it. Joe called me into his office and said, ‘Lou, you’re gonna have to pound Bud somewhere else.’”

There should be a statue of Joe Schultz in front of the Anheuser-Busch Inc. headquarters.

I’m sixty-one years old, but in my mind, I’m forty. I turned forty a few years ago when I couldn’t get amateur hitters out with my knuckleball. Before that I was twenty-eight. I had turned twenty-eight when I couldn’t throw my fastball past major-league hitters and had to resort to the knuckler. Before that I was nineteen. I was never in my thirties.

I judge my age in baseball years, but I don’t live as a former baseball player. My scrapbooks are stashed in the basement, my trophies are still in boxes. I enjoy my memories, but I don’t live in the past. I go there only when someone else brings it up or when I occasionally open
Ball Four
to get a laugh from Joe Schultz or one of the players.

Laughing is important. Laughing, and paying attention to the details, and appreciating things. As I’ve learned to live with loss, I’ve also learned to make the most of whatever time I have left, because life is so fragile and we never know when it will end or what awaits us, if anything, when it’s over. So I’ve become a major appreciator of things, large and small.

Right now I’m appreciating a very small person named Georgia Grace, born to Lee and his wife, Elaine, on April 12, 2000. My first grandchild. There is nothing like the joy and wonder of holding a newborn baby. And fear. When they handed Georgia to me in the maternity ward I was afraid I was going to drop her; she was too tiny for my arms and too big for my hands, and with her wobbly head I wasn’t sure how to get hold of her. But she sure smelled good. That new-baby smell.

Now Georgia is three months old and grabbing onto my pinkies with her tiny fingers and lifting herself up off my lap. I pretend I’m playing “soooo big,” but I’m really strengthening her hands and forearms.

You need a good grip to throw a knuckleball.

One day I was cruising the web and came upon a treasure trove of Seattle Pilots lore on a site developed by a fan named Mike Fuller. It turns out there are a whole lot of Pilots junkies out there who post letters and photographs and chat with each other on this site. Mike even has an updated Where Are They Now? section on the Pilots. There’s another guy named Charles Kapner who may be the world’s greatest collector of Pilots’ memorabilia. Most of the photos in the back of this book were supplied by Charles. There’s also a fellow named Shawn Collins who has a
Ball Four
site in case anyone’s interested. I’ve never met any of these gentlemen, but I’d be happy to link you to their web sites from
jimbouton.com
if I can ever figure out how to set it up.

Maybe one day I’ll post the original notes from
Ball Four
which I discovered in a box down in the basement. Except that they’re a little hard to read because they were scrawled on spiral notebook paper, hotel stationery, popcorn boxes, ticket stubs, scorecards, bar coasters, air sickness bags, and whatever else was handy at the moment. Ancient scribblings of a lost tribe.

It’s not an overstatement to say that this book was a collaboration.

My deepest gratitude goes to the late Leonard Shecter, my friend and editor of the original
Ball Four
. It was Shecter who encouraged me to keep a diary, who helped sell the book to World Publishing and who, with patience and humor, turned a reasonably observant relief pitcher into a writer of sorts.

Next I want to thank my teammates on the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros who would just as soon not have cooperated but who, nonetheless, contributed their matchless hilarity and enduring humanity. What kind of a book would this be, after all, without Joe Schultz, or Fred Talbot, or Gene Brabender, or Gary Bell? Novelists spend lifetimes trying to invent characters like these.

I also want to thank Michael and David, Lee and Hollis, and my brothers Bob and Pete, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

Lastly I thank my wife Paula Kurman, the primary editor of all three updates, and an accomplished writer herself. Always and forever the magic lady, only Paula had the editorial expertise, the intimate knowledge, and the emotional understanding that enabled me to write about the events of the past few years. Thanks, Babe.

www.JimBouton.com

Lenny Shecter died on January 19, 1974. He was only 47 years old. He had leukemia. It says something about Lenny that I was one of his closest friends and I never knew he had the disease. He didn’t sit around and cry in his beer that he might die young someday. He probably didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for him. He was a courageous man.

I had heard about Lenny Shecter even before I had met him. It was during spring training in 1962 when I was a rookie with the Yankees and he was a sportswriter for the New York
Post
. The veteran players were teaching the rookies about life in the major leagues. “Don’t talk to the writers,” they would say. “Especially that fuckin’ Shecter.” That spring I heard “fuckin’ Shecter” so many times I thought it was his first name. I expected this guy to be some kind of monster.

Instead, I discovered that he was a jolly fellow with a quizzical smile and a twinkle in his eye. He was also smart and funny and tough and he taught me things about the world that I never learned in a locker room. He had opinions about politics, the war, newspaper reporting, and almost everthing else, and he didn’t mind expressing them. He was famous for being irascible but I found that to be part of his charm. We’d have some wonderful, raging debates and I’d always come away tired and happy and a lot wiser. I would rather argue with Lenny Shecter than agree with anyone else.

The establishment hated Shecter because he exposed the hypocrisy, the greed, and the racism in sports. As the sports editor of
Look
magazine, his profile of Vince Lombardi was the first insight into the dehumanizing demands of big time football. Lenny was one of those few reporters who refused to become an extension of the teams’ publicity departments. Referring to the stacks of press releases teams would send out, he said the most important tool a reporter could have was a “shit detector.”

Lenny insisted upon truth in all matters. When friends would describe him as portly or heavyset, he would laugh. “I’m not heavyset,” he would say. “I’m fat. Let’s be honest.”

As a free lance writer Lenny was one of the first journalists to write about sports as big business. His first book,
The Jocks
, introduced Shecter’s First Law of Sport: “Larceny abhors a vacuum.” But his books and his other writings also contained funny and loving looks at sports figures like Casey Stengel and an obscure marathon runner named Buddy Edelen. And it was Lenny, writing about the early Mets, who transformed a clumsy first basemen into the legend of Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

What I remember most about Lenny was his guts. He would write a less than complimentary column about Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris, and the Yankee clubhouse would be steaming. Players would be threatening to tear Shecter apart the next time they saw him, and I’d be sitting over by my locker figuring he wouldn’t dare come near the clubhouse for at least a couple of months. Then suddenly the door would pop open and here he’d come, smiling and carrying his notebook like nothing happened. And nobody would say a word.

Lenny Shecter was my friend. I miss him a lot.

Shecter also edited Bouton’s second book
, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally;
wrote
Roger Maris,
a biography
; Once Upon the Polo Grounds,
a nostalgic history of the first two years of the New York Mets; and
On the Pad,
with by William Phillips, the bribed policeman whose testimony before the Knappy Commission helped uncover corruption in the New York City Police Department
.

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