Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (44 page)

“With my luck I’d probably have gotten a season pass to the opera,” Fred Talbot said.

We talk a lot about not drawing fans. At the same time most of the players are still telling the fans they’ll be fined $50 if they sign any autographs. If some of the guys spent as much time signing autographs as they do shooing kids we’d have a lot more friends around here. Chief kid-shooer is O’Donoghue. He enjoys the work. One of these days he’s going to make another Frank Crosetti.

The Cleveland trainer is called Wally “It’ll Get Better” Bock. That’s because if you come to him with a hangnail or a broken bone, he says the same thing, “It’ll get better.”

Two great putdown lines by Talbot: Before the game the pitchers were running in the outfield and an old, fat guy with two missing front teeth was giving us the business from the stands. “You guys are gonna get murdered in Baltimore,” he yelled. Then there was this sudden silence, and Talbot yelled up at him, “Nice teeth ya got there.” It put the old guy away for the rest of the night. The other line had to do with John Donaldson’s body. Donaldson is the winner of the First Annual Sal Maglie Death Warmed Over Award. Sibby Sisti says he could take a shower in the barrel of a .22. In other words, he’s fairly scrawny. And so is Ray Oyler. “Know something about Oyler?” Talbot said. “He’s the only guy on the club who’s physically afraid of his wife.”

Funny thing about the Billy Martin fight with his pitcher Dave Boswell. The guy who sort of caused the whole thing was Art Fowler, the pitching coach. He complained to Martin that Boswell wasn’t doing his running. Fowler, when he was a pitcher, was a notorious non-runner (not to mention several other things he was notorious for). In fact Fowler once put it this way: “The only reason I don’t like to run is that it makes me tired.”

We picnicked with the Steve Hovleys this afternoon but had to leave early because Steve had an audience with Marvin. It turned out that Milkes wanted to know what Hovley’s plans were. He said the Pilots didn’t want to increase their investment in him if he wasn’t going to continue playing baseball. I couldn’t think of anything more delicious. Here baseball is shoving around uncounted thousands of human beings who need baseball more than baseball needs them. And here’s Hovley, who needs baseball less, and he’s got them uptight. Beautiful. Steve told Milkes he wasn’t sure, that he’d just have to play it by ear. Which is exactly what baseball tells a player who wants to know what
his
future is.

After that, Milkes said, “Steve, how are you doing financially? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, I’m all right financially,” Steve said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I just wondered if you had enough money to buy the same kind of clothes the other players wear.”

“Look, on the road you told me to wear a sports coat and a tie, and I have been. Are you referring to clothes I wear to the ballpark here?”

“Yes. As you know, one of the problems we’re having in this country is a lack of heroes and the improper image that some of our heroes have. We think our players should be clean-cut and well-dressed. It means a lot for the image of baseball, the image of the Seattle Pilots and the image of the country as a whole for the young kids to be able to look up to well-dressed athletes. Don’t you agree?”

Steve didn’t hesitate. “I consider that nonsense,” he said. “The clothing I wear has to do with my preference. I don’t see how the Seattle Pilots’ image can be threatened in the time it takes to leave my car and enter the clubhouse. Besides, I prefer to have people judge me by what I say and do, not by what I wear.”

Hovley hitched up his blue jeans and left.

It’s interesting that no one even mentioned his hair. Steve hasn’t had a haircut since before spring training and it was six weeks ago that his manager in the minors was getting upset about the length of Steve’s hair. But no one says anything here any more. Could it be because Steve is hitting so well? Hitting over hair? Ridiculous.

Joe Schultz threatened Bones Donaldson, an ordinary left-handed hitter, that he was going to put him in the lineup against super left-hander Sam McDowell. Donaldson sniffed. “Hell, put me in,” he said. “I faced him before. The son of a bitch wouldn’t throw me a strike.”

Joe Schultz was being remarkably cheerful considering that we’d lost eight in a row now. I think he’s doing a little in-the-dark whistling, trying to keep us loose. Didn’t do any good tonight. Marty Pattin got knocked out in the fourth. Sam McDowell hit a bases-loaded double and we were off again. Number nine.

It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any complicated formula to building an expansion team. We all know how it’s done—the way Kansas City is doing it. You go for young players and understand it’s going to take time. Seattle didn’t, and it shows. Kansas City, which was getting its brains beat out early in the season, is doing fine now. We’re struggling with Chicago to stay out of last. It looks like a losing battle. One question: Who will be blamed for this lack of foresight, Schultz or Milkes? Answer: Can Schultz fire Milkes?

“If we get a lead tonight, boys,” Fred Talbot said, “let’s call time out.”

We did get a lead, 3–0. And Fred called time out. Didn’t do a bit of good. Pretty soon we were down 4–3. Greg Goossen tied it with a home run, but they got two off Talbot to make it 6–4. In the ninth we scored a run and had two runners on—again—and lost it 6–5. Ten in a row.

One of the reasons the team has been doing so poorly is that we don’t make many double plays. And we don’t make many because, what with injuries, we’ve had a lot of different infielders out there. We did manage to work one today and I couldn’t resist asking the bullpen a trivia question. “What’s it called when you get two out with one ground ball?”

“Wait a minute,” Pagliaroni said. “I remember from some of the other clubs I used to be with. I think they called it a double play.”

A fan wrote a letter to one of the newspapers the other day about attendance at Sicks’ Stadium. He said that the team was playing interesting, exciting baseball, but he thought the blame for low attendance lay with the front office, which priced tickets so high. (Six dollar top.) I think he’s partly right. I also don’t think this is a town that will ever draw 25, or 30,000 regularly. It’s a town that’s much more concerned with culture than athletics.

Hy Zimmerman complained in print recently that there was always tax money available for some cultural thing, but there was no money for sports, which is why there was no air-conditioning in the press box and the showers in the clubhouse often didn’t work.

My feeling is that Seattle is the kind of cosmopolitan city that may never be good for baseball. People
are
interested in cultural events. They’re interested in boating. They’re interested in a great variety of outdoor sports. I don’t think they’re very interested in sitting and watching a baseball game. I guess to really like baseball as a fan you’ve got to have some Richard Nixon in you.

My wife’s been having some pains in her stomach and decided it was an ulcer. “Why would you be getting an ulcer?” I said.

“Well, I get nervous when you pitch and you’ve been getting into so many games this year,” she said. “I get nervous every day.”

“Why should you get nervous? I don’t. Except once in a while.”

“I don’t know, but I do. And every time they hit a home run off you, I just get sick to my stomach. I worry about how you feel, too, because I want you to be happy.”

“Aw, come on,” I said. “When they hit a home run off me I have a little switch on the side of my head. I turn it and immediately forget about the home run. Instead I start thinking about the next hitter. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes I think about Mt. Rainier. Besides, you can’t get upset about an individual performance. It’s the long view of things that really matters. Hell, even if I got bombed every day, when you take the long view, as far as our life is concerned, why, we’ve got everything in the world to be happy about. Baseball doesn’t really matter that much to us.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But I still get upset when they hit those home runs off you.”

We can now look forward to snapping our losing streak on the road against such weak sisters as Baltimore and Detroit. Maybe something nice will happen in New York.

Baltimore-St. Louis

Maybe it will. But it won’t happen to me. At nine this morning while I was asleep in my room at the Statler Hilton in Baltimore the phone rang. I picked it up and Joe Schultz said: “Jim, you’ve been traded to the Houston Astros.”

There were two things I wanted to know. The first was, where was I? You travel as much as we do and somebody wakes you up in the morning, you don’t know where you are. The second thing was, who for? You like to hear a big name on the other end. It’s good for your morale.

“Who for?” I said to Schultz.

“Dooley Womack,” he said.

Dooley Womack?
Holy mackerel. The same Dooley Womack whose great spring I almost matched with the Yankees? Oh Lord! I hope there was a lot of undisclosed cash involved. I hope a hundred thousand, at least. Maybe it’s me for a hundred thousand and Dooley Womack is just a throw-in. I’d hate to think that at this stage of my career I was being traded even-up for Dooley Womack.

Joe sounded as down as I felt. I know he’s in trouble. All kinds of rumors in the papers about his being fired. So I tried to cheer him up. After all, he wasn’t going to the Astros, I was. I told him I thought he was a helluva man and that I was sorry I couldn’t do more for him. I told him that even though I disagreed with the way he used me, that looking back I think he did the right thing.

I was only lying a little.

I wouldn’t say I was excited, but as soon as I hung up on Schultz I called Gabe Paul to arrange a flight to St. Louis where Houston was playing a two-night double-header. “Jim Bouton here,” I said. “Listen, I’ve been traded to the Houston Astros and I got to go to…” I must have talked for three minutes without pausing. When I finally did, this voice on the other end said, “I think you’ve got the wrong party. My name is Dave Walker. I’m with Kimberly-Clark. But what you’ve told me is very interesting. I’ll keep it to myself.”

“Hey, Steve, wake up, wake up!” I said to Hovley. “Wake up. I’ve been traded to Houston.”

And he sort of rolled over a little and said, “Ah, the dreams, the dreams.” Then he said, sitting up, “You can’t go to St. Louis today.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re supposed to go to the Museum of Art this afternoon. You promised.”

We speculated why Milkes would make a deal like that and Hovley said, “He’s building a team for the future, and how long can a knuckleball pitcher last?”

It is possible to laugh at nine in the morning in Baltimore.

I thought of calling my wife right away but realized it was only 6 A.M. in Seattle, so I went down to breakfast instead and ran into Mike Hegan, who was just rejoining the club after two weeks in service. Opposite us was Curt Rayer, the trainer. They started talking about how tough it probably was in Houston, since they were only two-and-a-half games out of first place in a five-team race.

“Now you’ll be with a real ballclub,” Hegan said.

“Think of it, imagine the pressure on those guys,” Rayer said.

“Hey, knock it off,” I said. “I’m one of them now. I hope they have plenty of Titralac for my stomach.”

And I thought, Jesus, the Houston Astros, a pennant race, my first since 1964. Pinocchio, you’re a real boy now.

“The end of an era,” Mike Hegan said, “and there goes the Seattle dynasty, slowly crumbling.”

When I went back to my room to pack I started to feel a knot in my belly. What if I don’t have the feel of the knuckleball when I get there? Christ, they’ll kill me in that league. Well, I’m just going to have to tell the Astros that I’m still learning the pitch and they’ll have to be patient and not expect any miracles. Lord, wouldn’t it be awful if I couldn’t get the feel of it? If it happened in Seattle, nobody would notice. But here the whole country is watching a pennant race, and I’m in it, and suppose I can’t pitch? I took a Titralac and started to pack.

Now about those waivers. I wondered how I happened to be waived out of the American League. I know Williams was interested in me in Washington. What happened? The waiver price is only $25,000. If waivers are supposed to protect players, they’re not working.
Somebody
in the American League had to want me. All you can think is that some sort of deal has been made. No wonder Milkes said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get those waivers.” You don’t claim my waiver, I won’t claim yours. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. One hand washes the other. It takes two to tango. And the player gets the dirty end of the stick.

Not that I mind going to Houston. How much did you say a World Series share would be?

I was supposed to call Spec Richardson, the Houston general manager, first chance I got, so I called him from the room. He seemed pleasant enough for a general manager. I asked him if they had anyone who could catch the knuckleball and he said, “Well, we have Johnny Edwards. He’s our catcher. I talked to Johnny and he said he’d give it a battle.”

Sudden thought. Could Milkes have traded me because he doesn’t want to pay for the Gatorade?

I checked into the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, which brought back memories of staying there with the Yankees for the World Series. I remembered the inside of the hotel very well, because I had spent the night before my first Series game looking at the walls and memorizing the carpet and the potted plants and eating about a dozen times in the coffee shop. It was a good feeling of nervousness, and now I felt it again. I went up to Spec Richardson’s room to get a schedule before calling Bobbie. He asked me to sit down. Then he said, “Are you a bad actor? You know what I mean?”

Now, let’s see. What’s a bad actor? Whose definition should I use? Steve Hovley’s? Frank Crosetti’s? Jim Turner’s? Elston Howard’s? The Motion Picture Academy’s? So I said, “If I get work, I’ll be a happy man here.” I thought it was pretty snappy.