Fear Strikes Out (18 page)

“Boudreau revealed that he called Piersall into the manager’s office at the Red Sox clubhouse at ten-thirty
A.M.
and said, ‘Jim, you’ve been optioned to Birmingham. I want you to quiet down, and I want you to improve your hitting.’

“The move was like sending Shakespeare out to write obituaries on a country weekly.

“At the airport, before taking off, the twenty-two-year-old right fielder made a few remarks of his own.

“ ‘Vollmer can’t even blow his nose,’ exclaimed Piersall.

“ ‘McKechnie is running the Red Sox; Boudreau isn’t,’ was another Piersall exclamation. [This reference was to Bill McKechnie, then a Red Sox coach.]

“ ‘There isn’t anyone on the club playing better than I am except George Kell,’ added Piersall. ‘And he likes to win, too.’ ”

I looked up from the scrapbook, and Mary was watching me.

“Did I do all that?” I demanded. “Did I say all that?”

“You must have. The newspapers all quoted you the same way.”

“McKechnie and Boudreau and Cronin and everyone else around the Red Sox must have been ready to murder me.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “I guess by then they were just glad to get rid of you. I can’t say as I blame them.”

“Neither can I. But how about you?”

“I was scared—scared to death. I knew there was something terribly wrong, and I was afraid of where it might lead you. There was only one thing that looked promising—”

Then she told me that, after I had been told about going to Birmingham, I had phoned her, and, although, I was deeply depressed, I talked logically about how I was going to handle myself.

“Those people want me to settle down,” I told her. “And that’s just what I’m going to do. I’ll concentrate on baseball, and when the Red Sox are convinced that I’m all right, they’ll take me back.”

“No more clowning?” Mary said.

“No more clowning. I’m going to behave myself. I’ve got to get back to Boston.”

Then I went home and wired Garrett Wall, my closest friend in Birmingham. We had spent a lot of time with him in 1951. He was a redhead who worked for a trucking company, a hot baseball fan and a real nice guy. I asked him to meet me at the Birmingham airport and drive me to the ball park, since I would arrive just in time to get into that night’s game for a few innings.

I wouldn’t let Mary drive me to the Boston airport. My parents, who had been in town for a few days, were driving back to Waterbury, so I had them take me to the airport first. When I said good-by to Mary and the children, I told her not to plan to go to Birmingham.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” I said.

Mary felt pretty good when I left the house, since I promised her over and over I’d behave myself. But then, when she read what I had said at the airport, she gave up any hope that things in Birmingham would be any better than they had been in Boston.

My 1952 Birmingham debut was similar to the start I had there in 1951. Instead of driving in with Mary, I flew in, and instead of coming from Louisville, I was coming from Boston. But in both cases, I rushed to the ball park the minute I arrived in town, and got there in time to get into the game that night. Wall met me and drove me to Rickwood Field, where the Barons played their home games.

The Barons had a new manager, Red Mathis, who was also the team’s catcher. I knew him well, since I had played with him the year before. He was another carrot-top—his hair was a real flaming red. A stocky, powerful man, he was a friendly guy who, in his first year as a manager, was very anxious to make good. When I walked into the dugout he put me right into the ball game. Miraculously, I hit the first ball pitched to me over the left-field fence for a home run.

When the game was over that night, I got Joe Cronin out of bed with a long-distance phone call to Boston and told him all about what a great game I’d played.

My ears burned when I read that in the scrapbook. I put it down and said, “I must have been in very bad shape. One minute I’d be perfectly logical and the next minute completely haywire.”

“The spells of logic had everybody fooled,” she replied, “and nobody wanted to be fooled more than I. I put too much stock in them myself—otherwise, I would have insisted that the Red Sox send you to a doctor instead of shipping you to Birmingham.”

“I was real bad in Birmingham?”

“You were pretty bad, honey. Worse than you had been here.”

I was with the Barons exactly twenty days. During that time, I had countless arguments with the umpires. I was thrown out of half a dozen ball games and suspended four different times. I baffled my teammates, infuriated my manager, insulted the umpires, squabbled with opposing ballplayers and delighted the sports writers and fans. Once I nearly got into an open fist fight. Twice, at my own expense, I flew back to Boston.

At first, the Birmingham baseball people welcomed my clowning. Eddie Glennon, the Barons general manager, announced a few days after my arrival that I had injected new spirit into the team. “He’s the greatest center fielder that I’ve ever seen,” Glennon said. “A one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar ballplayer.” I added color to the Barons and made them the talk of the Southern Association—indeed, the talk of baseball. Every unconventional move I made was relayed to the nation’s newspapers and splashed all over the sports pages.

But it didn’t take long for everyone, including Glennon, to get sick and tired of Piersall. He was funny only as long as he added something refreshing to the ball game. But when he tried to make his antics take the place of the ball game, he was in trouble. His clowning was turning games into travesties. He did stupid little things—anything he could think of—to delay the games, and the angry umpires, anxious to hustle things up, reached a point where they had to banish him in order to get contests completed at all.

Piersall put on one of his most aggravating performances in New Orleans on July 5. Aside from going through the regular routine which had first attracted attention when he was in the majors, Piersall added a whole new bag of tricks, making them up as he went along. When he went up to hit, he stood in the batter’s box, dropped his bat and imitated the pitcher as he wound up. Naturally, the umpire had to call time, and the game would be held up while Piersall stooped to pick up his war club. He pulled the stunt two or three times each time he came up.

When Piersall wasn’t imitating the pitcher, he was holding up the works while he ran either down the first-or the third-base line to give instructions in a dramatic stage whisper to one of the coaches or to a base runner. Sometimes he rushed back to the dugout to talk to Mathis, who repeatedly ordered him to get back up there and hit.

After Birmingham’s turn at bat, Piersall loafed his way out to center field, stopping to talk to infielders on the way, taking his time about picking up his glove, sauntering over near the stands to exchange quips with the crowd and spending so much time reaching his position that the game had to be held up while an umpire came out to hustle him up. Once while New Orleans was at bat, Piersall suddenly ran into the Birmingham dugout from his center-field position and the game had to be stopped. Mathis, who was catching, had to leave his position to come over and tell Piersall to get back on the job.

About halfway through the game, one of the Barons hit what Mathis thought was a home run, and when the umpire called it a foul ball, Red blew his top. He rushed over to George Popp, the plate umpire, yelling and gesticulating—and Piersall rushed right behind him, imitating every move he made. Mathis got so excited that Popp finally threw him out of the game. Piersall didn’t stop aping Red until he turned around to go into the locker room.

When Birmingham’s half of the inning was over, Piersall went out to the pitcher’s mound, picked up the ball, and walked out to the shortstop’s position. When Johnny McCall, the Barons pitcher, came out to warm up, he yelled to Piersall to throw the ball. Piersall wound up and slammed it right at McCall. McCall had to put up his gloved hand fast to keep from getting hit in the face. Boiling mad, McCall threw the ball right back at Piersall, who fell flat on his face, then got up holding his stomach in mock hysterics after the ball had sailed to the outfield.

The crowd laughed, but neither McCall nor Popp thought it was very funny. Popp came halfway out on the diamond and called to Piersall, “Go out and get that ball in here before I throw you out of the game.” The ball had stopped in dead center field. Piersall dropped his glove on the ground and kicked it as he went along. Just before he reached the ball, he crouched and crept towards it as though he were a pointer dog and it were his quarry. Then he kicked it a few feet, and kept repeating the performance until the ball and he had reached the scoreboard.

Piersall finally picked it up and threw it to the scoreboard boy, who threw it back. They began playing catch, but that game didn’t last long. All of the umpires at once were screaming at Piersall to get out of the ball game. When the scoreboard boy refused to throw the ball back, Piersall walked off the field.

Then, still in uniform, he wandered over to the right-field side of the grandstand, where five hundred boys, guests of Joe L. Brown, the president of the New Orleans club, were chanting, “We want Piersall!” Piersall stood in front of them and led them in the cheers. Somehow they got the game started again on the field, but nobody was watching. Everyone was looking over at Piersall.

Finally, he went down to the Birmingham locker room and changed into street clothes. Then he went back to the stands and sat down in a box occupied by Charles Hurth, the president of the Southern Association. From there, Piersall heckled Popp, as well as Danny Murtaugh, the New Orleans manager, who had been giving him a pretty rough going-over all through the game. For that performance he was suspended.

A few days later, everyone in the league had four days off while the Southern Association all-star game was being played. I hopped a plane and flew back to Boston, wiring Mary ahead of time. I thought that the Red Sox might let me stay with them, once I was in Boston. But when I called Cronin, he told me to go back to the Barons and stick to baseball. I left the next day.

By this time, Glennon was worried about me, too. He persuaded me to let him take me to a doctor in Birmingham, and I was given some pills to calm me down. I behaved all right for a day or so, but then I went off again worse than ever. We were starting a long home stand, and the Birmingham fans and I were enjoying each other hugely. The only trouble was, nobody else was enjoying me.

I became worse and worse. Nobody could keep me under control, including the umpires. One night I stood at the plate and screamed over a called third strike, and when the umpire thumbed me out of the game, I pulled a water pistol out of my pocket, squirted the plate with it and said, “Now maybe you can see it.” I drew another suspension for that, my fourth since I had arrived in Birmingham.

It looked as if I were going to be stuck there for the season, so I decided to go back to Boston to get Mary and the children. Up to that point they hadn’t moved South because we always had the hope that I’d get back to the Red Sox any day. They kept the house in Newton while I stayed with Garrett Wall in Birmingham.

Garrett had had no more luck trying to settle me down than anyone else had. He was placed in a position similar to that of Ted Lepcio when I was with the Red Sox. Like Mary, they both had to stand by and watch me crack up, doing what they could by talking to me but not daring to go much further, in the desperate hope that I might get straightened out by myself. Every morning when they got up, they were saying to themselves, “This might be the day.” And every night they went to bed, thinking, “Maybe tomorrow.”

I bought a ticket on a Boston plane that left Birmingham late in the afternoon of July 17. We made several stops on the way, including one at LaGuardia Airport in New York, where Bill Cunningham, the able
Boston Herald
sports columnist, and his secretary, Miss Frances Donovan, got aboard. Apparently, as soon as I saw Cunningham, I rushed over to him and began pouring my troubles into his unwilling ear. Evidently I talked all the way to Boston, where we arrived at one-thirty in the morning. Here, in part, is what he wrote in his column a day or so later:

“I chanced to be on the plane that unexpectedly brought the Red Sox problem child Jimmy Piersall into Boston at one-thirty
A.M.
From approximately eleven-forty-five
P.M.
until the ship set down in Boston, I’d heard little but the machine-gun chatter of this tormented youth who so foolishly is throwing away a promising career...

“It’s my considered opinion that the less written now the better, and if anybody’s really interested in helping the young man, a complete press blackout until he can get his bearings would be the best medicine that could possibly be prescribed.

“I’m no authority on such matters, but my guess is he’s heading straight for a nervous breakdown.”

Cunningham was an accurate prophet. My breakdown was just around the corner. It happened within forty hours after I arrived in Boston. And, suffering more pangs than I suffered, living more horrible minutes than I lived, fighting more fights than I fought, sinking farther into depths of desperation than I sank, hoping more than I hoped, and praying more than I prayed was Mary. I went through it all under the unhealthy anesthesia of a mental blackout. Mary was fully aware of everything that went on. She carried me through every step of the way without so much as a sleeping pill—and, to this day, she remembers every dreadful minute. She told me all about it during those days when we sat quietly in our rented house and relived the past together.

The house was alive with reporters and photographers the day after I flew into town from Birmingham. All of the papers, the major press services, the radio and television stations—every conceivable dispenser of news—sent out representatives. Everyone interviewed me, and while I reveled in the prospects of so much publicity, I was reasonable and rational in my speech. I told them all the same story—that I was through with clowning, and from that moment on, was going to be no more and no less than a ballplayer. I said that I would go back to Birmingham and do the best I could to help the Barons win the Southern Association pennant, and that my one hope was to get back to the Red Sox as soon as possible. And once with them, I would forget all about these mad antics.