Fear Strikes Out (22 page)

“There are about forty or fifty in our group. People who have had breakdowns aren’t in a hurry to advertise it, so we know we only represent a small percentage of the recovered mental patients who live in the Chicago area. But we have succeeded pretty well in helping each other, and we think we can help a lot more people if they knew about the work we’re doing.

“Now, Jimmy, you’re the most famous former mental patient in the country, I guess—at least, I’ve never heard of anyone more famous who is willing to admit that he’s been a mental patient. If you would come and talk to our group, you could not only help some of its members keep themselves from going off again, but you could help us find others who need us. What do you say?”

“What makes you think I’m willing to admit in public that I’m a graduate of a mental institution?” I asked.

“Well, everyone knows that you are. Are you sensitive about it? Have I said the wrong thing? If I have, please accept my apologies.”

He got up to go, but I stopped him.

“No,” I said, a little doubtfully. “You haven’t said the wrong thing at all. You’re a former mental patient yourself, so you must know how I feel.”

“I think I do.”

“Well, I haven’t mentioned a word about my mental illness, except to members of my family and a few others who have helped me. I’ve been playing big-league ball and getting plenty of publicity on the sports pages, but everyone has studiously avoided the subject of my sickness. It never occurred to me that I could help anyone by talking about it, although I have felt that there are times when I’d like to discuss it with someone.”

“We’re a ready-made organization for you then,” Slovin said. “You can help our people and yourself as well then by talking frankly. But I’ll tell you this, Jimmy—you can give a great deal more help than you’ll get. You have had very special problems to face, and by telling our members how you’ve faced them, you’ll be contributing heavily towards their peace of mind. I don’t know how much they can contribute to yours.”

“Let me think about it, Don,” I said. “This is only our first trip into Chicago. We’ll be in again soon. I’ll give you an answer then.”

I did a lot of thinking on the way around the circuit and then talked things over with Mary when I got home.

“Why shouldn’t you do it?” she urged. “You’re perfectly all right and maybe you really can be a help to people who are still shaky about their nerves. You’ve been through the wringer and it hasn’t hurt you any. If you can help others, I think you should.”

I wrote Slovin that I’d like to help his “Fight Against Fears” group, and he arranged a meeting to coincide with the Red Sox’s next trip to Chicago. The moment I arrived at the meeting, I felt a warm glow in my heart. These men and women were my kind of people, for they had been where I had been, and knew exactly what I had gone through. They looked up to me, too, I found, because I could whip my problems while performing my daily work in a fishbowl of publicity and before thousands of people every day. It helped them to feel that they could perform theirs in the comparative privacy of their homes or their places of business.

I stood up and told them how everyone around me seemed anxious to help me come back, and that my fight was half won as soon as I learned to accept that fact. I told them that only a few were whispering behind my back and pointing a figurative finger of scorn at me, and that those few were lost in the shuffle.

“If you don’t worry about the guy you think might hurt you, you’ll find that he
can’t
hurt you,” I said. “I was a little afraid at first, but I found there was nothing to be afraid of. As soon as I realized that those fears were all in my head, I knew they really didn’t exist at all. Now I don’t have them any more.”

After my talk, I sat around for a couple of hours while people fired questions at me, and I found that I could bring my own thoughts into sharp focus by trying to answer them. For example, a lady asked, “What do you do when things go badly for you?”

“I try to keep my temper,” I replied.

“What if you feel yourself losing it?”

“I can stop myself before it goes too far.”

“But what if you
can’t
stop yourself?”

“If it gets that bad,” I said, “I pray that I’ll stop myself. That always works.”

“Then you never lost your faith in God?”

“Never. God helped me face this situation and He led me out of it. I know He’ll keep me out of it. Just telling Him my troubles is enough to relax me.”

“Don’t you ever get butterflies in your stomach?” a man asked.

“Sure I do. Everyone does at one time or another. You can get butterflies in your stomach doing anything.”

“But what if they get so bad that you can’t make them go away?”

“They’ll go away if you face your problem squarely.”

“But what if you can’t make yourself face it?”

“There’s no situation you can’t face if you make up your mind to face it,” I said.

On the way back to the hotel, Don said, “Jimmy, you were great. You were a real inspiration. Now how would you like to be an inspiration to people who don’t know about ‘Fight Against Fears’?”

“How?”

“By telling your story in public to Herb Kupcinet.”

Kupcinet is a Chicago newspaper columnist who also conducts a local television program. I had heard of him and had watched his show, and I knew he was tremendously popular.

“Do you really think it will help?” I asked Don.

“I
know
it will.”

“O.K. You arrange it.”

The interview was short, but frank. I told Kupcinet’s audience that I had been a victim of mental illness and had spent nearly two months in an institution, and that I was now completely cured. I pointed out the need for coming into the open and letting the world know that there were thousands like me, who could be cured if people would try to understand them. I also said that I was a member of “Fight Against Fears,” and that we could help others if they wanted to join us. I added that I’d be personally glad to help anyone I could, and invited people with mental or emotional disturbances to write and tell me about them.

The result was instantaneous. The studio telephone lines were jammed before we went off the air. Scores of people wanted to know about “Fight Against Fears” and where they could go to join it. Kupcinet was still getting inquiries about it a year later.

My own mail became so heavy that I had to get a secretary to help me answer it. Much of Kupcinet’s mail was addressed to me in his care, and when I returned to Boston, I had over a hundred letters from Chicago people, nearly all of whom had been victims of some sort of mental illness. But one letter—not from a mental patient—made me particularly proud. It read, in part:

“Undoubtedly, you proved to be a source of inspiration to anyone who has gone through an experience similar to yours. But I might also suggest that you were also an inspiration to those who have other troubles and are finding difficulty in solving them. Like the philosopher who said something akin to, ‘I must face the facts even though they may slay me,’ you have faced the facts and slain them. And in the stark reality of day, you have gained the greatest of all victories—man’s victory over himself.

“You resolved a possible tragedy into this ultimate victory. And though I shamefacedly admit little knowledge of your baseball ability, you have my deepest respect as one of the most courageous individuals about whom I have ever heard.”

When I returned to Chicago for the first Western trip of 1954, “Fight Against Fears” had grown to five hundred in membership, all from the Greater Chicago area. They still meet regularly, still helping each other, and I enjoy meeting with them when I can. I spend all my spare time with these people whenever I’m in Chicago, and just being with them is a heartwarming experience for me.

You can therefore imagine my pleasure when, on our first trip into Chicago last year, Kupcinet presented a plaque to me on his television show, in the name of the “Fight Against Fears” organization. It was the first of what will be an annual award to someone who contributes help to the group. The inscription reads:

“Presented to Jimmy Piersall for outstanding recovery and being inspirational example to others that they also may rise above their illness to become happier and more accomplished in their lives.”

B
ASEBALL IS, AS
I hope it will be for a long time, my principal means of livelihood, but it’s no longer my only one. Thanks to the owners of the Colonial Provision Company in Boston, I have a good off-season job, which carries with it prospects of permanent employment when my baseball days are over. As a goodwill ambassador for the company, I cover most of New England, giving talks to many different kinds of groups. I was offered the job at the end of the 1953 season and it came at a time when I most needed that sort of lift. With a growing family—Mary and I now have four children and we had three then—I found myself faced with heavy responsibilities. Thanks to the Colonial people, I was never given time to worry about them.

The
Boston Globe
sent me to write a daily feature on the 1953 World Series, between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a marvelous experience, because it gave me a chance to rub elbows with the newspapermen who had treated me with such consideration and tact. Incidentally, I also had a fine time for myself, thanks to the enthusiastic co-operation of the ballplayers on both teams. One New York writer, nowhere nearly as mad as he sounded in print, put it this way:

“As if we don’t have troubles enough fighting off other writers, now we have to compete with a ballplayer for news. The Yankees and the Dodgers stand in line to be interviewed by Jimmy Piersall, while the rest of us get the leavings.”

I was particularly happy when the
Globe
sent me to the 1954 World Series. The first time, it could have been a stunt. The second time, they obviously felt I could be of some use, and that meant a lot to me. That series was between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, and I almost felt like a newspaperman while I was working on it.

But I knew I was Jimmy Piersall, the ballplayer who had returned from oblivion, when the airplane in which I was traveling took off from LaGuardia Airport for Cleveland halfway through the series. The stewardess came over and greeted me with a cheerful, “Hi, Jimmy, how are you?”

“Fine,” I said, a little vaguely.

“Family all right?”

“Swell.”

“Wife, children, everybody?”

“Yes.”

“And how about you—are you happy now?”

“I’m very happy,” I said.

“And I see you’re playing the position you want to play. I’m glad of that.”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded.

Then she said, “Say, Jimmy, you don’t seem to recognize me at all.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember ever having met you.”

“Well, I was the hostess on the chartered plane the Red Sox took through Texas when they barnstormed on their way north from spring training in 1952.”

“Gee,” I said, “I don’t remember much of anything that happened to me then. 1952 was a bad year for me.”

“You mean because you were sick?”

“Yes.”

“But wasn’t that also the year that you were cured?” she asked.

“Yes, it was.”

“Well, then, I’d say 1952 was a good year—the best of your life.”

I guess maybe she was right, at that.

I’m glad this book is back. It seems like the movie about it has run twice a year for the last thirty years. I don’t like the movie, because the star doesn’t look any bit of a ball player, but for forty years it has kept the story out there. The trouble is, most of the young people who know about me get their information from the movie, and the older people saw me play in Boston, Cleveland, L.A., New York, and Washington. And I played ball a lot better than the guys in the movie.

A lot has happened since the time in the book and the movie. I played some more in Boston, then Cleveland, then with Washington, and in 1963 I was with the Mets. Those early Mets had some trouble, but it was a good time. We had Duke Snider and some other older players that the fans liked to see back in New York. Duke was coming up on his 400th career home run, about the same time I was coming up on my 100th. I told Duke I would get more attention when I hit number 100 than he would get for 400. Now, they just laughed because Duke was big in New York from being on the Dodgers, and 400 is a lot of homers. So when I hit mine, I ran around the bases backwards, and it was all over the papers.

When the Mets let me go in 1963, we were in New York, and over in the American League, the Angels were in town to play the Yankees. So I went to see Bill Rigney, who was managing the Angels then. I told him that I was in shape and I could still play and that I thought I could help his club. He saw it the same way so he signed me.

Believe it or not, after the Angels left New York they went to Boston for a series. I was glad to be back in the American League, and the fans gave me a big hand the first time I came up to bat. Well Bill Rigney must have wondered what he had gotten into, because I got thrown out on one pitch. I’m up at the plate and I want to do good, to show both the Angels and the Boston fans they didn’t make a mistake. Dick Radatz is pitching, and he’s six feet seven. The first pitch was high, but the umpire called it a strike. Now, that seemed unfair. So I said to the ump, “He’s a big guy, he doesn’t need any help.” I had the bat in my hand while I was arguing with him, the third base umpire came and grabbed the bat from my hand, he fell down, and I got thrown out.

I enjoyed playing with the Angels and got the comeback player of the year award the next year. So it did look like Rigney made a good move. I enjoyed playing for Rigney—he’s a very happy guy, and I picked up a lot of knowledge about baseball from him. We were quite a team; we had Fregosi and Knoop and some kids who could play, and we had a bunch of older players—Frankie Malzone and Joe Adcock. We had fun—we trained in Palm Springs, what else could you want to do but spend the New Year in Palm Springs? I was there about seven years. It was an outstanding opportunity, and I really enjoyed myself. When I got through playing, I coached with Bill for awhile. Bill had played for the old New York Giants and managed a long time, and I’m glad he enjoyed me!