Fear Strikes Out (15 page)

To my utter amazement, I discovered that I acted quite normal in Sarasota. My blackout when I first stepped into the hotel lobby was complete but entirely internal. Outwardly I showed no more than signs of routine rookie nervousness. When I recalled how I felt that morning after getting out of the airport limousine, it seemed to me that I must have staggered across the lobby, or even passed out cold on the way to the desk, but nothing like that happened. I walked over to register without even breaking my stride. I checked in, let a bellhop pick up my grip, went up in the elevator and was met in my room by Lepcio, who got in ahead of me.

The Red Sox made it plain the first week of the special training school that they were grooming Ted and me to be the new second-base combination. “Lepcio is the Red Sox second baseman of the future,” one story read, “and Piersall is the shortstop of the future. Both look very promising, and in another year or so, they might have their jobs sewed up for many years to come.”

Since Lepcio was only a few months younger than I, close observers of the club figured that we’d be established stars for a long time. Ted was twenty-one at the time; I was twenty-two.

“I was really a good shortstop then?” I asked Mary.

“I should say you were. If you don’t believe me, look at the clippings. They can tell you more about how you were doing on the field than I can. After all, the men who wrote those stories were right on the spot. I was still in Scranton waiting to have Doreen.”

I flipped the pages of the scrapbook, and then came to a clipping that seemed unbelievable.

“Jim Piersall is a big-league shortstop already,” it read. He’s been given intensive instruction by two of the greatest shortstops of modern times, and they’re both satisfied with him.”

“Cronin and Boudreau,” I remarked to Mary. “And they both thought I was good?”

“Good enough to start the season at shortstop for the Red Sox.”

“This I’ve got to see.”

“Well, look at the box score on opening day,” she said.

I flipped the pages of the scrapbook until I came to the morning-newspaper clippings of April 16, 1952, which carried reports of ball games the day before. The Red Sox opened in Washington that year, and the first thing that caught my eye was a picture of President Truman throwing out the first ball.

“The President saw me play shortstop,” I said, hardly believing.

“So did a few thousand other people,” Mary commented.

I ran my eye down the Red Sox batting order—DiMaggio, center field; Pesky, third base; Williams, left field; Dropo, first base; Thronsberry, right field;
Piersall, shortstop—

The Red Sox won a 3–0 victory over Washington that day, and I played a good, if unspectacular, game. I got one hit—a ground-rule double that bounced into the center-field bull pen—took part in a double play and made no errors.

In the
Boston Daily Record
, Joe Cashman, who covered the game, wrote: “Piersall hit the longest drive of the game and handled everything that came his way at short, a position he was playing for the first time in a championship contest.”

I looked at Mary and said, “Honey, I made the ball club at shortstop the first year they tried me there, and I’d never played the position before in my life. Shouldn’t that have convinced me that the Red Sox really wanted me?”

“It should have, I suppose, but I guess it was too late then.”

“I know—but how did I act towards you and towards the children?”

“You were all right, Jimmy, but terribly nervous and I was scared and worried. You were so restless that you couldn’t stay still a minute. After the club came to Boston, people started asking you to go out and speak at smokers and dinners and all sorts of men’s groups.”

Speak in public? I’d never done any public speaking in my life before. What did I do? What did I say?

“Mary—”

“Yes, honey.”

“I must have made a terrible fool of myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—when I went out to speak in public. I wonder what stupid things I might have said.”

“Well, I never heard you, but people who did say you were great. After a few weeks, you were in such big demand that you had to turn down invitations to go out. But by then the real storm signals had started.”

“How?”

“An umpire threw you out of a ball game at the Yankee Stadium in New York,” she said. “That was the first bad thing that happened in public. Here—look at the clippings. It was early in May, I think.”

I turned more pages and finally came to a report of the game between the Red Sox and the Yankees on May 11. Piersall was still playing shortstop. Early in the game, Gil McDougald of the Yankees hit a ground ball to him which he fielded and threw to Billy Goodman, who was playing first base for the Red Sox. The throw wasn’t accurate, and it pulled Goodman off the bag, but he tagged McDougald going by—or at least it looked to Piersall as if he tagged him. Anyhow, Jim Honochick, the umpire, called McDougald safe, and that started Piersall off.

Piersall rushed across the infield and practically swarmed over Honochick, screaming and yelling at the top of his voice that Honochick had missed the play, and every time Honochick turned in another direction, Piersall turned with him, jabbering and howling in his face. Such a performance on the part of a veteran ballplayer is bad enough, and an umpire will nearly always throw a man out of a game for that sort of thing. In a rookie, it was unpardonable. Honochick thumbed Piersall out of there almost at the minute he started protesting and his continued yelling earned him a fine on top of the expulsion.

In the meantime, Goodman, who was right on top of the play and knew better than anyone whether or not he had tagged McDougald, started out by making only a routine perfunctory protest. This is common procedure whenever a play is close, and umpires expect it. A player mutters a mild disagreement with the decision, knowing that the umpire will pay no attention to it.

But when Piersall charged across the diamond, Goodman began yelling at Honochick, and then Boudreau and the coaches came out from the Red Sox dugout behind third base. The argument got hotter and hotter, and it ended up with the Red Sox lodging an official protest—which was disallowed by the league later—after the Yankees won the game—and all on account of that one play.

“Well,” I commented to Mary, “that doesn’t look so bad to me. Every player, even if he’s a rookie, is entitled to one serious squawk a year. And it couldn’t have been too unreasonable. Everyone else joined me in yelling at Honochick, and we even protested the game. What was so wrong about that?”

“Nothing, on the surface,” said Mary, “but I didn’t remember your ever making such a wild scene that the umpire would throw you out.”

“I guess that’s right. I’d never been thrown out of a game before. I’d never got that mad at an umpire.”

“And that’s what worried me. I was afraid it might only be the beginning. You were so jittery that it looked as if anything might happen.”

“What came next?” I asked her.

“I think the fist fights.”

“Fist fights? I never was mixed up in a fight that I can remember—at least not on the ball field.”

“Well, honey, you had two in one day—and they came even before the game started.”

We found some of the details in the scrapbook. It was two weeks after I had been thrown out of the Stadium game, and we were playing the Yankees again, this time in Boston. During infield practice, I was working at shortstop, and some of the Yankees, including Billy Martin, their young second baseman, were tossing the ball back and forth on the sidelines in front of their dugout behind third base. Martin and I began exchanging insults, cupping our mouths with our hands so we could hear each other. One word led to another, and after a while Martin pointed towards the runway leading to the dressing rooms and began walking towards it.

At that time, the Red Sox and the visitors’ locker rooms were side by side at the end of a runway leading in from the Red Sox dugout, which, at Fenway Park, is on the first-base side of the field, so there was nothing unusual about two players from opposing teams heading for the same exit. Today, the Fenway Park visitors use a new locker room under the third-base side of the grandstand, with a separate entrance from their own dugout.

Martin arrived at the runway first, and was waiting for me when I got there. We started swinging on each other, and had exchanged a couple of punches before the fight was broken up by two coaches, Oscar Mellilo of the Red Sox and Bill Dickey of the Yankees. Ellis Kinder, who was pitching for us that day, happened to come by right after the fight started, and he helped pull us apart.

It was all over in a few minutes, and Boudreau told me to go into the locker room and change my shirt. When I got there, Maurice McDermott, one of our pitchers, whose locker was near mine, made some remark, and I took a swing at him. We punched each other a couple of times before that one was broken up, and then Boudreau decided to make me sit the game out.

I guess I put on quite a performance in the dugout that day. I couldn’t stand the idleness, and I prowled back and forth on the bench, cupping my hands and yelling towards the field, hanging by one hand from the dugout roof and swinging myself back and forth like a monkey, moving around from bench to dugout steps and back to bench and changing seats constantly. The guys on the team kept yelling at me to sit still and shut up, but I paid no attention. And whenever Martin came to bat, I crouched on the top step of the dugout and screamed invective at him.

Mary pointed to a picture, showing me yelling at Martin from the dugout, and I said, “What in the world ever happened to start this thing in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “All I know is that there were stories that you and Martin disliked each other on sight and had begun this feud during spring training in Florida.”

“I’ve met Martin and played against him a couple of times before, but I don’t remember ever having feuded with him. Honey, how can I ever face a guy like that again? How can I face McDermott? Imagine getting into a locker-room fight with one of your own teammates!”

“I asked you about it when you got home that night, but you told me to mind my own business.”

“I did?”

“You told me that often during those days, Jimmy.”

I brushed a hand across her cheek and said, “Poor Mary—you took a pretty good beating yourself, didn’t you?”

I turned back to the clippings. Right after the game with the Yankees, Boudreau called McDermott and me into his office off the locker room and made us shake hands. Then, according to one story, he announced, “There will be no more fights among our own players,” and, as far as I could tell by the clippings, nothing unusual relating to me happened for several more days. But when I commented on that, Mary said, “No, honey, that’s wrong. Everything wasn’t in the papers.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like your imitating DiMaggio’s running stride.”

“My what?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Boudreau decided to put you back in the outfield, since this shortstop experiment seemed to make you so nervous, and you started to mock the things that DiMaggio did during pre-game fielding practice.”

DiMaggio had an unusual stride. He ran flat-footed, his legs almost rigid from the knees down, and he flapped his arms like wings with every step. At first, when I was practicing in the outfield, I just imitated him as we came in to the bench, but later, when Boudreau put me in right field beside DiMaggio, who played center, I used to follow him in that way after every inning. I’d fall into step a few feet behind him and run just like him, while the fans in the stands roared. I guess it must have looked pretty funny to them, but it wasn’t funny to me when Mary told me about it.

“Dominic DiMaggio was one of my idols, honey,” I said. “Why, as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to play in the same outfield with him and Williams. But when I got the chance to play next to him, I went out of my way to make him look silly.”

“You were sick,” she said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. DiMaggio will understand the situation. All the ballplayers will understand it.”

“What else did I do that I won’t read about in the clippings?”

“Well, you drove Boudreau crazy trying to get him to put you back into the lineup.”

Boudreau, after deciding to shift me back to the outfield, kept me on the bench for several days. Neither he nor the players could quiet me down, but he sometimes got me to sit still by moving in beside me and talking to me. He kept telling me that he expected to put me into right field as soon as I had calmed down, and he advised me to get used to the position. I had always been a center fielder, but right field at Fenway Park is very hard to play. It’s not only the sun field, but the grandstand turns sharply in one corner, with the result that the ball bounces peculiarly when it hits the wall. Some of the caroms it can take are almost unpredictable.

Even so, Boudreau had no doubts about my ability to play the position. At that point, he wasn’t even concerned too much about my hitting. All he wanted to do was tone me down enough so that I could play ball without driving everyone around me to distraction. The only trouble was that the longer I sat on the bench, the more nervous I became.

As a result, not a day or a night went by without my hounding Boudreau to put me back in the lineup. I’d get to the ball park early and see him in his office before most of the other players were there. After he posted the day’s lineup on the bulletin board in the locker room, I’d go after him again. Then, just before the game started, I’d try to get him to change his mind, and even if I got in for a few innings, I’d rush back to his office after the game and say, “How about tomorrow, Lou? Am I going to be in?”

He was using Clyde Vollmer in right field during this period. Vollmer was a powerful veteran, known among baseball men as a streak hitter. When Vollmer was hot, no pitcher in the world could fool him for very long. He’d get two and three hits a game for a week at a time, and if we were at Fenway Park, he’d sock home runs in clusters, since he was a right-handed pull hitter. He once won eight or ten ball games in less than three weeks with key hits, and from that time on he became known as Dutch the Clutch.