Chicago
More examples of how easy it is for this veteran right-hander to get into trouble. Yesterday a clubhouse meeting interrupted a chess game Mike Marshall and I were playing and during it we both stole glances at the board. Pretty soon, Ron Plaza was giving us some hard stares. Afterward I found out that when I didn’t show up in the outfield quick enough for Crosetti after the meeting, he sent Plaza down to the clubhouse to see if I was still playing chess.
And today, I managed to let it slip my mind that we were playing a two-night doubleheader. I strolled out to catch the bus at a quarter to five and no bus. Panic set in. All I could think was that we were playing another game in Milwaukee and how the hell would I get there in time. I dashed back to my room for my itinerary, and that, of course, explained it all. So I got to the park at five-thirty, a half-hour before game time, and this time they weren’t quite so friendly about it all. Hegan tried to help. “Quick, dress in your locker,” he said, “and maybe they won’t notice you’re late.” It didn’t work, largely because when O’Donoghue spotted me in there he said in a loud voice, “Well, look who’s here.” Then Talbot, trying to be funny, stood in front of my locker with his hands on his hips and said, “Where in the hell have you been?” I made shushing motions at him but he said, “I’m telling.” And he pranced down to where the coaches were sitting and said, “Hey, Sal, was Bouton out there during infield practice?” With friends like Fred Talbot I’m not sure you need any enemies.
JUNE
18
Mike Marshall asked Merritt Ranew to catch him a while in the bullpen and in no time the phone was ringing. It was Sal Maglie telling him never, never, never to throw without permission. Later on Marshall heard Sal telling Ranew never to warm up any pitcher unless instructed to do so by Sal himself. Then Ranew must have said something about the way Marshall had been pitching, because Sal said, “He always looks good in the bullpen.”
I’m not the only one who gets into trouble. But this business about asking permission to throw sounds ominous for the knuckleballer.
One of Marty Pattin’s friends or relatives from downstate Illinois sent him a big box of cookies and he put them out on the table before the game. “Let’s get to these cookies,” Joe Schultz said. “They came all the way from southern Illinois.”
Sitting at the table at the time was one of the young clubhouse boys, and he was reading a high school biology book. Joe peered over his shoulder for a while and then said, “Hey, Bouton, this is something that might interest you. A book about human tissues. Real scientific. Hey, look, they even got a picture of a cunt.”
As we stood there, laughing helplessly, he added, “And don’t forget, boys, pound those cookies into you.”
John Kennedy flew into a rage at Emmett Ashford over a called strike and was tossed out of the game. Still raging, he kicked in the water cooler in the dugout, and threw the metal cover onto the field. Afterward we asked him what had gotten into him. He really isn’t that type. And he said, “Just as I got called out on strikes, my greenie kicked in.”
One of the guys asked Curt Rayer if he had any greenies available and he said no, he wasn’t allowed to dispense them. “But I’d like to know who’s taking them.” This confirmed the feeling that Curt is selling information.
John McNamara, the equipment manager, is the sort who gets along well with ballplayers, but he’s been told—warned in fact—not to hang out with us. I guess they think we can be easily corrupted, although I suspect we could corrupt Mac quicker than vice versa. Anyway Mac was standing in the hotel lobby the other night and Curt said, “Where you going, Mac?”
“To bed,” Mac said.
Ten minutes later the phone rang in McNamara’s room. It was Rayer. “Just wanted to see if you made it to your room all right,” Rayer said.
The only thing that makes any sense, Mac said, is that Curt was checking up to see if he’d sneaked out with any players.
Also checking up on us, we’re certain, is Marvin Milkes personally. The other night Talbot and Oyler came in a little while after curfew and there was Marvin in the lobby. “Good evening, Marvin,” one of them said, cool.
“Good evening,” said Marvin, just as cool. “See you in Seattle.” Which means fine city.
Had dinner with Mike Marshall in a place called Cafe Bohemia. It’s one of the few restaurants in America that serves what can accurately be called exotic food—like lion, tiger, hippopotamus and elephant steaks. Also buffaloburgers, which is what Mike had. I ordered elk steak. In the next room there were the coaches. Mike and I speculated on what Eddie O’Brien would order. I said a steak—beefsteak. Marshall said fried chicken. We were both right. He ordered lamb chops.
JUNE
19
We got to talking about Marvin Miller. Pag said that when he was the player rep in Pittsburgh John Galbreath, the owner of the club, had a heart-to-heart talk with him about Miller. Galbreath said Miller would be bad for baseball.
“It just shows how out of touch these guys are,” Pag said. “After his long heart-to-heart talk I had to tell him it was too late. Miller had already been signed.”
There had been, by the way, a concerted effort to stop the players from hiring Miller. The St. Louis players were told by the front office, for example, that of all the candidates for the job Miller would be the worst choice. They voted for him unanimously.
My own mind was made up about Miller when Joe Reichler put his arm around me and solemnly warned me to be “very, very, very careful about this guy Miller.”
Then there’s this. Soon after Miller was elected to run the Players’ Association, Joe Cronin, president of the American League, put his arm around him and said, very earnestly, “Young man (Marvin was forty-nine), I’ve been in this game a long time now, and I’ve learned something that I want you to think about. Players come and players go, but owners will be here forever, and don’t forget it.”
Locker said he understood very well why the owners get so mad at Miller. He said it was because Miller never lets up. “If he has a point he jumps on them with both feet and never gets off,” Locker said.
I couldn’t help saying that was fine with me. I told Locker that Miller isn’t doing any more than any lawyer would do in the same situation and that the problem was not Miller, but the owners, who were so used to having things their way, getting away with technicalities, pushing things on us, that they were now affronted when all Miller was doing was his job. I’m not sure he understood.
Pag also said that he nurses a grudge against Bowie Kuhn, our new Commissioner. He remembers when Kuhn was the owners’ rep and when we submitted a proposal to raise the minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000, he waited six months before he answered. And then it was at a meeting and what he said was, “Oh yes, we’ve heard something about that. Just what are the details?”
Okay, so he was the owners’ Marvin Miller. Now I’m glad we got one.
Broke bread with Gary Bell and he was feeling much down. He said he hadn’t been able to find his rhythm and that he was afraid he’d lost it altogether. Gary said Ray Berres was a good pitching coach, but that nothing could help him anymore and he was terribly worried about his future. Not only that, his wife was still in Seattle and he hadn’t been able to find a place in Chicago that wasn’t crazy expensive, and all in all it was depressing.
Mike Marshall and I talked about the possibility of becoming roommates, and he said he hesitated to because we’d probably have to take too much crap from the players and coaches—two kooks rooming together. And if there was crap, he said, he’d probably blow up. “I remember the time you were nominated for alternate player representative and got only one vote,” he said. “If that happened to me I’d stand up and say, ‘Fuck all you guys.’ I mean, here you were obviously better qualified to do the job than anybody else and you get one vote. To me that’s sheer stupidity and I couldn’t let them get away with it.”
All of which reminded him of a line Sal Maglie delivered tonigh
t. Talbot was pitching and threw a slider that was nailed into the upper deck, just barely foul. So Sal hollers out, “Hey, watch the first pitch on this guy.” Now, that’s a classic second guess, because there can no longer be a first pitch to this guy. It’s now strike one.
Joe Schultz is not like Sal with the pitchers. Gelnar was telling us about this great conversation he had with Joe on the mound. There were a couple of guys on and Tom Matchick was up. “Any particular way you want me to pitch him, Joe?” Gelnar said.
“Nah, fuck him,” Joe Schultz said. “Give him some low smoke and we’ll go in and pound some Budweiser.”
JUNE
20
Seattle
At the meeting before the twi-nighter against Kansas City, Joe Schultz asked if anybody knew anything about John Martinez. Silence. “Well,” said Joe Schultz, “we’ll just zitz him. Up and at ’em men, and let’s win two tonight.” One of these days I’ll find out how to “zitz” a guy. It sounds like a valuable pitching weapon.
Right after that I ran into Sal Maglie and, because I’d been pitching a lot lately, I felt I ought to tell him that I wasn’t tired. Rather than just say I was ready to pitch, old stonehead here said, “Sal, I could pitch both ends of this doubleheader if you need me.”
And Sal Maglie said, “Let’s get one first.”
I had broken a baseball taboo. You’re not supposed to talk of winning two games. You should only be thinking of the first game, the big one, the one you play today after putting your pants on one leg at a time. If you’re thinking about the second game, you can’t be concentrating enough on the first game. Got it? Which is why I thought it sweet of Joe Schultz to tell us to go out there and win two—and pound some Budweiser.
Today the Seattle Pilots enjoyed one of their finest hours. We pulled off one of the great practical jokes of all time. The victim was Fred Talbot. Chief perpetrator, as the police like to say, was his roommate, Merritt Ranew. But we were all aiders and abettors.
When Talbot arrived at the ballpark a uniformed policeman handed him a letter. He sat down to read it in front of his locker. We all knew what it was: a legal document written by a local lawyer friend of Ranew’s that announced a paternity suit against Talbot by an anonymous girl in New York. A paternity suit is only somewhat worse than being accused of murder. No matter how innocent you are, you lose. Who wants to win a paternity suit?
Business in the clubhouse seemed to be normal, but in fact everybody was watching Talbot. He opened the letter, looked at it, put his head down, looked at the floor for a while, gazed up into the air, shook his head slowly from side to side, started to read the letter again. Then he folded it, put it back in the envelope, tossed it onto the shelf in his locker, lit a cigarette and stared around the room. The expression on his face was one of shock and disbelief.
Meanwhile everyone in the clubhouse was biting his lips, trying not to laugh. Talbot stomped out his cigarette, reached up into his locker, opened the envelope and read the letter again, as though he was hoping it would say something different this time. Finally, after he’d devoured both pages, put them back in the envelope and thrown it on the floor of his locker, Brabender felt he had to tell him it was a joke. He might have slashed his wrists. “Some joke,” Talbot said. “Why didn’t you just send me a telegram telling me my kids had been burned to death?” While Talbot then looked around trying to figure out who would do such a terrible thing to him, there were, among others, the following remarks:
Tommy Davis: “I didn’t think you caucasian guys could get any whiter.”
Ray Oyler: “You couldn’t have pulled a needle out of his ass with a tractor.”
Finally Talbot decided that it was Marshall and I who had sent the letter. Of course. Fortunately we were able to convince him he was wrong. I wouldn’t want to fight him. As far as he’s concerned the Marquis of Queensberry is some fag hairdresser.
JUNE
21
Gene Brabender went all the way tonight and pitched a beautiful game. He had a no-hitter going for six innings. One of the nice things about it was that he gave the bullpen the rest it needed. I’ve pitched in four- or five-straight games now (my outings are beginning to blur together in my mind) and although I like the work, I liked the day off too. My earned-run average is down to 3.45. There are only four guys ahead of me in ERA. I wonder if anybody is thinking of giving me a start.
Another way Mike Marshall gets into trouble. He has conversations with Joe Schultz, such as:
“I went to him and said, ‘Joe, what should I do in a situation like this? I started on Monday. On Tuesday I threw on my own. I pitched two innings in Wednesday’s game. Then you had me warm up three times on Thursday. The first time I felt all right. The second time I felt a little tight. The third time my arm was tired and stiff and I wasn’t effective.’ All the time I’m talking, Joe doesn’t look at me, only at the floor. Suddenly he looks up and says, ‘You shouldn’t have thrown on your own on Tuesday.’
“So I said, ‘Well, yes. But the point is that I wasn’t ready to pitch on Thursday. Now, what should I do in such a situation? Should I call down from the bullpen and tell you, or should I let you put me into the game knowing I wasn’t going to be effective? It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll go out there and pitch no matter how tired my arm is. But I don’t want to hurt our chances of winning. What do you think, Joe?’
“At that point Joe turned his back and walked away.”
JUNE
22
In the rain the little Seattle clubhouse takes on an aura of great intimacy. The talk flows freely and takes in everybody. It’s like sitting around in somebody’s living room. Tonight we got into the Pilots’ yearbook and we kidded each other about what it said in there about us.
Fred Talbot read out loud that when John Kennedy was in high school he was used for late-inning defense, which is funny because most guys in the big leagues were superstars in high school. Talbot then composed a last line for Kennedy’s career. “Also has been known to pop a greenie.” (Which reminded Wayne Comer that rainy days were sure tough on greenie-poppers. You never know whether to pop.)
Gene Brabender’s biography noted that he was an outstanding athlete at Black Earth, Wisconsin. I wondered what the school song was there. “Black Earth, we love you, hurrah for the rocks and the dirt.” Someone else suggested that Brabender had probably made the Future Farmers of America All-America football team.
Mike Hegan had made the All-Catholic High School baseball team and said that Jim Bouton had probably made the All-Agnostic High School team.
“Hey, Fred, how come you never went to college?” said Ray Oyler after reading that Talbot had received several football-scholarship offers.
“You ever hear of an entrance examination?” I said and was rewarded with a dirty look from Talbot.
And Hegan said, “Here’s one for Oyler. Now taking correspondence courses for his high school diploma.”
JUNE
24
For a while I was getting almost no work at all. Now I’m getting plenty. I’ve been in 29 games and about eight of our last ten. But I suddenly realized I never get in at crucial times. I’m never in there if it’s close and we have a chance to win. No wonder I have 29 appearances and only one win and one save.
Today there was a perfect example of what I mean. We’re playing a doubleheader against Chicago and in the first game Timberlake (even he gets a start) is taken out in the second inning, losing 4–0, bases loaded, two out. I come in and get the first hitter I face on a fly ball. I then get the next nine-straight hitters, three scoreless innings. Now we’ve tied it at 4–4 and I come out for a pinch hitter. We end up losing 6–4.
In the second game we’re losing 4–2 in the fifth and O’Donoghue’s in there, pitching in relief of Talbot. They let O’Donoghue bat for himself in the fifth even though we’re two runs down, which I don’t understand at all. Anyway he’s out. Somebody gets a base hit and Comer hits a home run. Now if somebody had batted for O
’Donoghue, we might have gotten three runs instead of two. Instead we have a tie game and O’Donoghue is still pitching. Pretty soon they’re ahead of him 5–4 and then 6–4. And when we tie it at 6–6, who goes into this critical situation? The knuckleball kid? Nah. Diego Segui. He’s in trouble right away with a walk and a base hit, but he gets out of the inning. By this time I’m warming up. But do they take him out? Nope. So he gives up a home run. Do they take him out now? Nope. Not until he gives up a double in the ninth. Then I go in. I need one out, I get it. One third of an inning. And we lose 7–6. I never got a real chance to save either game, and if I had we might have won both. I think I’ll go bite Sal Maglie on the leg.
JUNE
25
I read in the paper today that Richie Allen, who has left the Phillies, says he wants to be traded and will not play for them next year. Then I heard Van Patrick on the air complain that baseball ought to have some recourse against a player who simply walks out on a team during the season. Bullshit, I thought to myself, gently. Here’s one of the few cases where a baseball player has enough courage or money or both to tell baseball to take its one-sided contract and shove it. How many times does a ballclub release a player without a thought to his future? The players have zero recourse, but Van Patrick wants to think up another weapon for baseball.
I’ve admired Richie Allen from afar ever since his second year in the majors when, after a great rookie season (.318, 125 runs, 13 triples, 29 home runs and 91 RBIs—I looked it up) he demanded a large salary, $50,000 or $60,000 and said he wouldn’t play unless he got it. Philadelphia must have thought he meant it, because he got it. (I wonder if they told him there was a club rule against quadrupling salaries.)
The minute somebody refuses to work for somebody else at a particular wage, the onus, in the public mind, is on the person who chooses not to do the working. I’m not sure why this should be, but it is. Like the lady in my Wyckoff, N.J., bank who said to me during a plumbers’ strike, “Well, they don’t have to be plumbers if they don’t like it.” She probably thinks, well, Allen doesn’t have to be a baseball player if he doesn’t like it. Sure, he can always be vice president of the Wyckoff, N.J., bank.