Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (66 page)

Players are treated better today because there’s a lot more money invested in them. Other comforts include personal trainers, chartered planes, suites on the road, and no doubleheaders. Players today are like thoroughbred horses.

We were farm animals.

“But we had more fun,” said Gary Bell. My fellow beast of burden was on the phone from his home in San Antonio. “We’d go out after the games, five or six guys. Hell, they don’t even have roommates anymore.”

“You probably could have won twenty games with the Pilots if you didn’t have to room with me,” I said.

“But then I wouldn’t have learned about Mars and Pluto and shit,” said Gary.

We laughed. And then we talked about the money in baseball. I asked Gary if he resented what the players are getting today.

“I resent
me
not getting it,” he said. “You know, nobody says anything about movie stars getting money. That was then and this is now. I
would
like to see them be a little more humble about things. I’d be pogo-ing around, saying hello to people. Let me get in the stands and sign autographs.”

“What do you think of today’s players?” I asked.

“Good guys and horses’ asses,” said Gary. “Just like when we played.”

The last time I saw Gary was about five years ago near a sporting goods show he was attending. We threaten to get together more often but we can never coordinate our schedules.

“Hell, I’m doing more shit now than I did when I was playing,” said Gary. “With these charity golf tournaments and fantasy camps. I enjoy getting with the guys, dick around, laugh, have a good time. See all the fuckheads again. I was at a fantasy camp with Pepitone a few months ago. Remember that game in New York when we almost had that fight with you guys? Stan Williams had thrown at a couple of our players and Birdie Tebbets told me to drill Pepitone, so I nailed him in the ribs. I hadn’t seen him in thirty-five years and the first thing he says to me, in that mafia voice, is, ‘All my boys in Brooklyn are still looking for you.’”

I asked Gary if he ever decked any doctors or lawyers at the fantasy camps.

“Not with my weak shit,” he said. “The last time I pitched was about fifteen years ago in an exhibition game when I threw one of the longest home runs I’ve ever seen. Some asshole got out of a milk truck, in bib overalls, and hit one over the trees. So Luis Tiant comes walking out to the mound with a bent coat hanger, to give me the hook. I said, ‘Get me out of here.’”

I asked Gary about his health and he told me all about his quintuple bypass.

“I was sitting on a plane to Las Vegas to appear at a card show with Duke Simms, which is dangerous enough in itself. It was ten minutes before they closed the door and I started to feel nauseous, and I was sweating profusely, so I got off the plane. The stewardess said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m history,’ and I walked down the ramp, got into my car, drove to my office, and called Rhonda. I told her to meet me at the hospital, I was having a heart attack. She said, ‘Stay right where you are, I’m sending an ambulance.’ I had had an angioplasty about four years ago and she didn’t want me to move.”

“That probably saved your life,” I said.

“The problem was, my cholesterol levels were up, due to a faulty liver. For six months I ate nothing but lettuce and cardboard and my cholesterol was still 246. Tests showed my liver wasn’t doing the job. Gee, I don’t understand it, because I always took such good care of myself.”

We both laughed.

“So this is my second one, Roomie,” said Gary. “I’m good for one more, then that’s it. I got a zipper from my ankle to my groin where they took an artery, and I got one leg left.”

I told Gary that Duke Simms was one of the players in that Masters Baseball game I organized about fifteen years ago with Andy Messersmith.

“Duke was probably happy I couldn’t make the card show,” said Gary, “so he could collect both fees.”

We talked about the phenomenon of fantasy baseball camps, how it gave fans a chance to hang out with players they once idolized, in exchange for giving players a chance to hang out with each other. Seemed like a fair trade.

“These are the last of the golf outings and fantasy camps,” said Gary. “You know the current guys aren’t going to do shit. They don’t have the camaraderie, and they don’t need the money.”

Maybe it was the notion of camaraderie, or the sense of time passing, but we got to talking about the Seattle Pilots, as we always do.

“Ten times a year,” said Gary, “I think about the time you told Joe Schultz you had the feel of your knuckleball and he grabbed his crotch and said, ‘Oh yeah? Well, feel this.’ I fell back in my locker, I was laughing so hard. I couldn’t stand it.” We talked about the deaths of Joe Schultz, Gene Brabender and Ray Oyler, but we didn’t want to dwell on the subject for very long.

“You know, I still expect to see Oyler walk through the door,” said Gary, “and Brabender shootin’ a goddamn missile over his head with a blowgun.”

We laughed again about all the characters we played with.

“One of these days I’m gonna write a book like that,” said Gary, “but I gotta wait till everybody in my family dies.”

Then we promised each other that we’d try to get together sometime soon.

“Okay, Rooms,” he said. “See you on down the road somewhere.”

Down the road is where I found Steve Hovley.

It was about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Long Beach, California, where I had given a motivational talk, to Steve’s home in Ojai. I had been looking forward to seeing him for a long time—thirty years to be exact. The last time I’d been with Steve was on that morning in our hotel room in Baltimore when Joe Schultz called with the news that I’d been traded to the Houston Astros.

“Ah, the dreams, the dreams,” Steve had said when I woke him up.

When I’d told him that I had to fly to St. Louis that afternoon to meet the Astros, he had said, “You can’t go to St. Louis today. You’re supposed to go to the Museum of Art this afternoon. You promised.”

So I was really looking forward to this visit. Steve and I had kept in touch by phone over the years, and his wife, Lynn, was good about sending cards, but I was anxious to see him in person. Would we have that same connection, as fellow outsiders, that I’d always felt?

Steve said on the phone that he wasn’t sure when he’d be getting home from a big plumbing job he’d been working on, but that if he wasn’t there I should just go into the house and have a beer and make myself comfortable. He said that Lynn was out of town visiting their grandchildren, but the house wouldn’t be locked.

The drive up from Long Beach was magical; all alone in a rented car, tooling north on Ventura Highway, with
America’s
tune of the same name playing in my mind, past the citrus and avocado ranches, on into the beautiful Ojai Valley, framed by the Topa Topa Mountains of the Los Padres National Forest. It felt like I was traveling in a novel.

About four o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled into a driveway next to a cozy house on a shady street, on the outskirts of town. I knocked on the door and nobody answered, so I decided to wait in the car and read a newspaper. Twenty minutes later a truck pulled up and a stocky guy with a short beard climbed out. Could that be him? I wondered. The guy was wearing a green T-shirt, work pants, and a nondescript baseball cap. Then I recognized the grin.

“I guess you didn’t have any trouble finding the place,” said Steve, in that laconic way he has.

We greeted each other with a hug and a handshake combination.

“As soon as I get cleaned up, we can have some Mexican food,” he said. “I bought some strip steaks and avocados. I’ll grill the steaks and you can make the guacamole.”

Steve dumped some charcoal briquettes onto a grill and blasted them with a blowtorch while I chopped garlic and onions for the guacamole.

“So what do you think about baseball these days?” I asked.

“I don’t follow it, or anything,” said Steve. “I don’t enjoy watching it that much. It’s a little slow. I like to watch basketball.”

“Do the people you work with know that you used to be a major-league ballplayer?” I asked.

“It comes up less in conversation than it used to,” he said. “It depends on the job. Sometimes I’m able to slide and sometimes I’m not. They ask a few questions and that’s the end of that.”

“Why do you try to hide from your baseball past?” I asked.

“Because then they want to know why you’re not a millionaire. They don’t realize how little we got paid.”

“What about the money in baseball today?” I asked. “You think it’s turned the fans against the players?”

“I haven’t been consciously monitoring the thing,” said Steve, “but my feeling is it’s the same as it always was. I remember people expressing the attitude that the players make too much money, back when we weren’t making anything.”

Before long, we had polished off the steaks and the guacamole. I don’t recall whether we pounded Bud or something else. Then we went for a drive around the area, through some orange groves, and past the Catholic school that Steve went to as a kid. And we talked about religion, among other things.

“Religion is like baseball,” said Steve. “Great game, bad owners.”

That sounded about right. But what I mostly wanted to talk about was the Seattle Pilots. For example, did he remember the day I was traded and we couldn’t go to the museum in Baltimore?

“I remember you were traded,” said Steve.

What about the time he stole my pants and I had to walk into the locker room in my bathing suit? Or the “pitcher’s fund” money he had planned to steal?

“It’s funny how you remember those things,” he said.

Didn’t he ever think about the Pilots?

“No.”

“No?” I said in disbelief. “Don’t people ever ask you about them? Or
Ball Four?
”

“I hate to say it,” said Steve. “But I think people have forgotten about it.”

This was a little hard to accept from one of the main characters in the book, not to mention one of my favorite people. Was Steve living in a bubble—or on some higher plane? Or was I living in a self-involved world of my own making? The possibility was too frightening to consider.

“You know, there’s a Seattle Pilots Web site,” I said. “Fans get together and talk about the Pilots, exchange memories, leave messages.”

“That’s kind of like the American Brotherhood of Bobs,” said Steve. “They have conventions every year in Cleveland or Waukegan. They figure if your name is Bob, you need someone else to commiserate with.”

This will come as harsh news for Pilots junkies.

“Have you ever been on the Internet?” I asked.

“A guy was showing me how amazing it was,” said Steve, “so he punches in my name and one of the references said, ‘See John Donaldson and Steve Barber.’”

“Why those guys?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Steve. “I guess because they were on the team.”

Linked in perpetuity to John Donaldson and Steve Barber. There may be more bizarre things in life, but I can’t think of any offhand.

People ask if I keep in touch with old teammates. Very sporadically, I say. Phone calls once in a while. A card or a note. Mostly we bump into each other at sports dinners or golf outings. Occasionally, my old Yankee roommate, Phil Linz, and I will team up for a baseball clinic. Phil gives batting tips to the kids. I tell him he should teach them how to play the harmonica.

I exchange e-mail with my other Yankee roommate, Fritz Peterson. Fritz says he still likes to speed along a freeway playing Spanish music as loud as the radio will go, just as we did on those road trips long ago.

Every once in a while I run into Tommy Davis, another member of the lost tribe. He flies into New York for the Baseball Assistance Team dinner—they raise money for older players in financial need. Tommy is one of Paula’s favorite players, even though she knows he doesn’t remember her name. She just likes the way he says, “Hey, Baby,” when he sees her.

Not long ago I was giving a talk in Chicago and I drove out to nearby Oak Brook to have lunch with Johnny Sain and his wife, Mary Ann. The great pitching coach is still tall and handsome, and very distinguished now, with a mane of white hair and that touch of Arkansas in his voice. And he still works out everyday. “If you don’t watch,” says John, “as you get older you find yourself saying you can’t do this or that, but that’s bullshit.” I asked John how old he was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

I finally retired from amateur baseball in the spring of 1997.

Over the years, I had played in a variety of leagues near where I lived. When we moved up to Massachusetts, I switched from the Met League in New Jersey to the Twilight League in Albany, an hour’s drive from our new home. These are both very good leagues, made up primarily of college kids and returning minor-leaguers. The average age is about twenty-eight, with a few old-timers in their forties. I was the Ancient Mariner—or Pilot—in my fifties.

The kids were nice to me once they saw I was serious. They remembered me from their baseball card collections, or from
Ball Four
. “Are you going to write a book about the Twilight League?” they’d ask. “We got some good stories for you.” I told them not to worry, I was only there to pitch.

And I meant it. I didn’t want note taking to distract from the experience. Even though these were amateur games, these guys wanted to win. And so did I. It’s the reason I could never play in those over-forty leagues where the competition is a little more casual. Those are terrible leagues for a pitcher because the players are too old to do anything but swing a bat. They can’t run, throw, or field, which negatively impacts the defense, to put it mildly, and anything hit to the outfield is extra bases. As I said, I never did like 14–12 games.

At first my teammates treated me as a novelty. They’d ask what it was like to play ball with The Mick, and get me to sign stuff for their little brothers. After they got to know me they’d make old-age jokes, or use me to rag on other players. “
Look
at this guy,” they’d say to some out-of-shape twenty-year-old. “You should be ashamed of yourself with that body of
yours.
”