Fear Strikes Out (17 page)

There was a Sunday doubleheader the next day, and over forty thousand people, one of the biggest White Sox crowds of the year, came out to watch it. Piersall must have been inspired by the mob—or maybe it was inspired by him—and he put on one of the corniest and most confusing series of acts ever seen during a major-league ball game. He was so bad in the first game that Boudreau wouldn’t start him in the second.

He went through all his old antics, and added a number of new ones. During the game, while the Red Sox pitcher was warming up, he started doing a hula-hula dance, and the customers behind him responded with a chorus that sounded like a thousand ukeleles strumming. Piersall got a fluke hit off Saul Rogovin, the Chicago pitcher, when the ball hit his bat as he was ducking away, and then he ran out to right field at the end of the inning, flexing his muscles like a professional strong man. When Ray Scarborough was sent to relieve Willard Nixon, the Red Sox starting pitcher, in the fifth inning, Scarborough rode to the mound from the bull pen in a jeep. As it passed Piersall he put up his thumb trying to hitch-hike a ride. He did it again when Bill Henry rode by to relieve Scarborough. The fans loved it.

Aside from the clowning, Piersall did well in the ball game. He was the only man on the Red Sox to get two hits off Rogovin, who won 7–2. Piersall made several good catches, and two throws that according to the stories in the scrapbook were outstanding. Twenty minutes after the game was over, Boudreau said, “Vollmer is my right fielder.” Piersall started the game on the bench, but later he wandered out to the bull pen, which in Chicago is next to the right-field foul line.

Vollmer played most of the game, but Boudreau sent word for Piersall to replace him in the ninth. Dutch came out from the dugout to get his glove at the same moment that Piersall dashed out from the bull pen. Before taking his setting-up exercises and going through the routine of giving the fans the full treatment, Piersall made a circus catch of the sunglasses which Vollmer tossed to him, then turned and bowed while the crowd in his corner of the grandstand roared. Later that inning he robbed Chico Carrasquel of the White Sox of a double with a spectacular catch that ended the game, and as he ran into the locker room, he kept turning and bowing to the screaming fans.

Warren Brown, the
Chicago Herald-American
sports columnist, wrote the next day:

“While the young man may never reach the batting heights nor collect salary checks proportionate to those which went Ted Williams’s way, young Jim Piersall, the Red Sox eccentric, continues to make his pitch as perhaps the game’s most distinctive crowd-pleaser.

“Comiskey Park fans, all over the park, were completely captivated by Piersall’s antics in the first game. When he finally appeared in the last inning of the second game, the ovation he got was as great as anything ever accorded a Williams or a Joe DiMaggio by a crowd whose sympathies figured to be with the home team.

“General Manager Frank Lane of the [White] Sox, conceding that Piersall is not only an excellent ballplayer now, but has unlimited potentialities, said he had encountered young Jim under the stands before the doubleheader began. Piersall was on his way from the clubhouse to the field.

“‘Hi, Mr. Lane,’ said Piersall, ‘I want to ask you something. Why do you go around giving those big bonuses for kid ballplayers? Why don’t you give Mr. [Tom] Yawkey [owner of the Red Sox] one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and get me? Then you’d really have something.’

“The best Lane could say to that was to tell Piersall to go ahead and arrange the deal.

“On the White Sox’s last trip to Boston, [Manager] Paul Richards was seated in a corner of the Kenmore Hotel lobby when a gangling youngster came rushing up, wanted to know how things were going, rattled off a lot of conversation, didn’t give Richards a chance to reply, and went darting down the steps and into the street.

“ ‘Who,’ I asked Richards, ‘might that be?’

“ ‘That,’ said Richards, ‘is Piersall. Wish I had him.’ ”

The Boston newspapers jumped down Boudreau’s throat for benching Piersall. Reluctant to admit that it was because of the clowning, Lou announced that he had done it because Piersall wasn’t hitting and he thought Vollmer might shake loose into another streak. The only trouble with that argument was that Piersall had been hitting very well, and Vollmer, after replacing Piersall, remained in a slump. The Red Sox went from Chicago to St. Louis and drew twenty-one thousand fans in two nights there. Piersall got into two of the three games in the late innings, and went through his repertoire, but Boudreau kept him out of the third game altogether. He benched Vollmer, too. Charley Maxwell played right field for the Red Sox that day.

Boudreau put Piersall back in the lineup when the Red Sox got to Cleveland for a four-game series with the Indians. He played right field throughout the series, but the Red Sox lost three of the games and Piersall put on another comprehensive clowning act during the Sunday doubleheader that ended the Cleveland stay. His style was a little cramped in Cleveland, because the stands at the Municipal Stadium are some distance away from right field, and there was no one for him to yell to. However, he attracted enough attention to be the central figure of the afternoon, and Boudreau benched him again in Detroit. Vollmer was back in right field, but Piersall got into every game, and, back in a ball park where the fans could talk to him, he gave the customers everything he had. Then the Red Sox came home to Boston to open a series against Washington on the night of Friday, June 27.

“Holy cow,” I said to Mary, “I was worse in the West than I had been in Boston.”

“You were pretty bad, honey, so bad that I went out to see if I couldn’t quiet you down.”

“You mean you made that trip with us?”

“Part of it. I had to.”

“Why?”

“Partly because I wanted to talk to Boudreau about you, but mostly because I wanted everyone on the ball club to know that I hadn’t left you.”

I stared at her.

“To know
what?”

She nodded.

“That’s right, honey. You told everyone that I had walked out on you.”

On the morning of the day the Red Sox left for the Western trip, Mary, scared and upset herself, started out for Scranton, where she intended to stay while we were on the road. The children and Ann, Mary’s sister, were with her. Mary kissed me good-by when I left for the ball park, and then left town. A few days after she arrived in Scranton, she got a call from Jim Tracy, who, in common with his brothers Bill and Frank, had been in and out of Boston all season trying to straighten me out. He had been at Fenway Park for the last game of our home stand, and one of the Red Sox ballplayers asked him if it was true that Mary had left me.

“That’s when I decided to go to Cleveland,” she said. “I had been thinking about making the trip anyhow. The Scranton papers were full of your antics in Chicago, and when Boudreau benched you, they had it all over Page One. I thought maybe if I could talk to Boudreau, it would help.”

Mary met me in Cleveland, and we stayed a couple of nights at the hotel and one with Ethel and George Minnicucci, some friends of ours who had moved there from Waterbury. But Mary didn’t get to talk to Boudreau at all, and didn’t even see him until we got on the train to Detroit. We were in the dining car that evening, and Boudreau was sitting at a nearby table with the coaches. They didn’t know we were so close by, and Mary overheard them talking about me.

“They were all so upset and puzzled over the way you acted that I didn’t have to ask Boudreau what he thought about you,” she said. “I realized then that he didn’t have any more idea how to handle you than I did. Besides, he had so much on his mind that I didn’t want to add mine to his collection of worries. I never did speak to him about you.”

Mary didn’t stay in Detroit for the whole series. Instead, she took the train back to Scranton. There she picked up the children and then drove to Boston with her father. She arrived late on the night of the twenty-seventh, the same night that we opened our home stand against Washington. It was also the night that I outdid myself to a point where it was obvious that something would have to be done to get me back into line. I went through all the old gags for the fans, twenty-six thousand of whom flocked out to the ball park that night, and I invented plenty of new ones. But because Vollmer started the game, I had to cram most of my action into the practice session that preceded it. Bob Addie, of the
Washington Times-Herald
, devoted his column to my activities that night. Here, in part, is what he wrote:

“There have been few rookies in all baseball history who commanded as much attention as James Anthony Piersall, a twenty-two-year-old product of Waterbury, Connecticut, heretofore known chiefly for its watchmaking. In the case of J. A. Piersall, the inference has been that there was something wrong with the works.

“Before the Washington Nats were to play the Red Sox, Boston was taking batting practice. As is usual in those cases, the opposing team was on the bench waiting its turn.

“The Nats were all seated in the dugout when Piersall gave a special performance of his gifted clowning ability—while parrying barbed insults from the Washington players.

“Piersall would see a pop fly coming, stagger under it and then make it miss his head by a fraction of an inch. He was stopping ground balls with his feet and looked like Nick Altrock at the latter’s clowning best.

“In fielding practice, Piersall was playing second base. Del Wilber was catching while Manager Lou Boudreau was hitting grounders. Piersall fielded the ball, threw to the plate, then ran to second base, lay prone on the ground and stuck his glove over his head. He caught Wilber’s relay from the plate as easily as if he had been five feet away.

“When Clyde Vollmer, who took over the right-field position from Piersall, was at the plate in the batting practice, Piersall kept up a running comment for the benefit of the Washington players.

“‘I’m Vollmer’s caddie,’ he said. ‘If he gets hot, I’ll never get back into the lineup.’

“Out in center field, a group of bleacherites unfurled a banner reading, ‘We want Piersall.’ Jim acknowledged his followers before the game began, then went into the dugout because Vollmer started.

“With one out in the seventh inning and the Sox in the field, Boudreau suddenly inserted Piersall in right field. He went out there like a returning war hero. The crowd went wild.

“You would have thought the Sox kept Piersall tied in a sack because it took him longer to unkink than any man I’ve ever seen. He took calisthenics. He imitated the pitcher [Sid Hudson], He mimicked the batter, Jackie Jensen. There was a foul hit into the stands back of first base. From thirty yards away Piersall, who had no more chance of catching the ball than I did from the press box, came tearing in. He was all over that field. When the inning was over, Piersall trotted in behind Dom DiMaggio.”

Addie went on to describe my imitation of DiMaggio’s gait, and repeated some of the other stories concerning my activities of the previous month. Then he wrote:

“Piersall’s teammates, from all that can be gathered, greet his hi-jinks with cold fury. Yet the fans and the press love him because he is so colorful. The newspapermen in Boston talk of Piersall as one speaks of an incorrigible child, tsk-tsking some of his exploits yet taking pride in his deviltry.”

Aside from everything that Addie described, I apparently did something else that night that caused a great deal of unrest in the ball club and, when it was disclosed, a tremendous amount of discussion around the baseball circuit. It seems that I was in the Red Sox locker room changing my shirt when Vera Stephens’s four-year-old son walked in. According to the stories I read, I reached out, spanked him and sent him screeching down the runway to his father, who was in the dugout.

I know I did a lot of unusual things during this period, but I’m positive that I never spanked either Stephens’s or anyone else’s child. I might have—and probably did—give him a little pat on the flank, but I suppose I’ll never be able to prove it. I don’t remember, the child was too young to say anything one way or the other and nobody else happened to be in the locker room at the time. However, the story did break several days later and I am quoted as saying that I patted the child lightly, which is enough to convince me that that’s all I did. Stephens evidently is also convinced, because he has since told me that his boy cried simply because I was a stranger to him and that there is no question that I neither spanked him nor hit him very hard. However, in the light of what happened within the next sixteen hours, I don’t suppose anyone can be blamed for what was said or written about me.

At midnight, after the June 27 game with Washington was over, Boudreau announced to the press, “From now on, Piersall’s my right fielder.”

The next morning, he called me into his office and told me that the Red Sox had decided to send me to Birmingham.

Here, in part, is the way Roger Birtwell, a Boston baseball writer, told the story in the July 9, 1952, issue of the
Sporting News
:

“Jim Piersall—at twenty-two—is without question one of the best fielding and throwing outfielders in the game today. With the Red Sox, he batted .296—one hit under .300—for all the games he started as an outfielder.

“Yet the Red Sox, in a startling move late in the morning of Saturday, June 28, demoted Piersall to their Double A farm club at Birmingham. The big-league career of one of the most talented and colorful players in the game’s history had been sliced to ten and a half weeks. And part of that time was spent on the bench.

“Less than twelve hours before, Manager Lou Boudreau had announced that Piersall would return from the bench and resume his place at right field for the Red Sox.

“ ‘Piersall’s attitude was detrimental to this club,’ was Boudreau’s explanation of Jim’s assignment to Birmingham. ‘I have to consider twenty-five or thirty other ballplayers—plus trying to win.’

“Said General Manager Joe Cronin: ‘Apparently everyone on this club is against him [Piersall]. There really was a bad situation down on the bench and in the clubhouse.’