Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

  After our sitcom experience, the three creators were so dizzy that Vic went into seclusion, Marvin went into shock, and I went back into baseball.

  THE PROBLEM

  I first noticed it about six years ago although it may have existed before that and I just refused to admit it to myself. Something was wrong with my marriage. Things were not the same anymore between Bobbie and me. It was hard to put my finger on it then. I only knew that daily living had become extraordinarily difficult. I was so unhappy that I talked out loud about leaving someday but actually doing it seemed unthinkable. In spite of outward appearances I was very old fashioned. I came from a background in which divorce was something that only happened to other people.

  This was all complicated by the inner struggle I was having with myself. Somehow my past successes hadn’t made me feel secure. There were all these thoughts racing through my mind, fragments of this and that. It was like listening to twelve radio stations at the same time. And I had trouble breathing. Sometimes I’d get this tightness in my chest and it felt as if I was buried ten feet underground breathing through a straw, terrified that someone would kick dirt into it. Even the memory of it frightens me. I felt I needed to get away from the noise in my head and find someplace I could breathe. The illusion was always that it would come with the next achievement, the next success. If I could just find that ultimate accomplishment I’d be safe.

  THE COMEBACK

  I began throwing a ball against the garage. I had always joked about making a baseball comeback. What if I actually tried it? I could be back on the road and have time to figure things out. I was convinced I needed a challenge in my life and it would be a blast if I could make it all the way. Maybe I could recapture that happier, simpler time in our lives that I wrote about in Ball Four.

  Our friends all laughed, of course. I was 37 years old, there were good job offers in television, I hadn’t played professionally for seven years and baseball didn’t want me. The whole thing just didn’t make sense. That’s probably why it felt right to me.

  I wasn’t completely out of shape because I had been playing in a beer league over the summers. At various times I’d been the ace pitcher for the Ridgewood-Paramus Barons, the Teaneck Blues, the Englewood Rangers, and the Clifton Tigers. I was like Jim O’Toole, hanging on with the Ross Eversoles in the Kentucky Industrial League. I threw a mediocre fastball which I had no trouble getting over the plate. I just had trouble keeping it in New Jersey. To make it in the pros I’d have to resurrect my old knuckleball. Maybe “Super knuck” would make a reappearance.

  My comeback did not get off to a rousing start. In the spring of ’77, White Sox owner Bill Veeck gave me a shot with his AA farm team in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was released after six weeks but I didn’t take it personally. My pitching record was 0 and 5. Then after a couple dozen phone calls I ended up pitching in Durango, Mexico. Only a foreign country would have me. I brought the family with me as I had always done years ago. Partly because I needed to be with Michael, David, and Laurie (between road trips), and partly because sometimes people pull closer to ignore the truth.

  After five weeks of 26-hour bus rides, galloping “tourista,” and a 2 and 5 record, I was released by Durango. At that point, any sane man would have quit. Naturally, I packed my spikes and headed for Portland, Oregon, home of the independent Portland Mavericks in the Class A Northwest League. They would give anybody a chance.

  The Mavericks were the dirty dozen of baseball, a collection of players nobody else wanted, owned by actor Bing Russell. The team motto could have been “Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched pitchers yearning to breathe free.” In a league stocked with high-priced bonus babies, Maverick players made only $300 per month and had to double as the ground crew. Revenge being a strong motivator, the Mavs had the best team in the league.

  The soul of the Mavericks was an old red school bus which was used for transportation. In addition to a seatless interior with mattresses on the floor, it featured a loudspeaker on the roof from which important announcements could be made via a microphone inside the bus. The Mavs had a unique way of attracting crowds to the ballparks. The afternoon before a game, we’d drive through the streets of whatever town we were playing in and insult the citizens over the loudspeaker. “You there, in the blue shirt,” one of the players would broadcast while the bus stopped at a light. “Pull in that gut, it looks disgusting.” No insult was too outrageous. “Hey, Lady, that sure is an ugly baby you got there.” And so on. Needless to say, that night the stands would be filled with hundreds of irate fans rooting passionately for our defeat.

  And the Mav manners weren’t any better at the ballpark. Whenever the opposing pitcher got knocked out of the game (which was often), the Mavericks, resplendent in red uniforms with black trim, would stand in front of the dugout and serenade the departing player. It was always the same tune, a loud chorus of Gene Autry’s closing theme, sung with a smirk. “Happy trailllls to youuuu, until we meet againnn. Happy trailllls to youuuu, keep smiling until thennn.”

  One night an umpire came over to our dugout (umpires were always coming over to our dugout) and said we should knock it off because we had too much class for that. To which one of our players responded, “Oh yeah! Who says?” I’m embarrassed to say I enjoyed every tasteless minute of it. It was just the sort of slapstick humor I needed to cover the pain.

  On the surface it seemed like a good summer for the family. We saw the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, and Mount Hood in Oregon. We traveled any distance necessary to avoid seeing the problems nearby. Looking back, I realize that it had always been our pattern. We would go places and we would talk, but we never went places together and we never talked about us. As good as I was at observing others, I had always been blind to myself.

  Bobbie and I had gotten married after I became a ballplayer. Our life had been built around separations and homecomings. Yet it’s hard to believe ours was a baseball marriage, like Gary Bell’s. We had always liked baseball and we enjoyed traveling. If we couldn’t be happy during a baseball season, we couldn’t be happy together.

  That summer I realized we couldn’t be happy together. But could I live alone and still be close to the kids? I still didn’t know what I wanted, only what I didn’t want.

  It was the worst of winters. Bobbie and I grew further apart and our life together became unbearable. After my 6-and-13 season there were no teams willing to give me a chance. Still, I worked out three nights a week in a gymnasium until two o’clock in the morning. Some nights I stayed out later than that.

  And it was the best of winters. I got to meet Ted Turner when he came to New York to accept the Yachtsman of the Year award for winning the America’s Cup. Ted said, “Sure, what the hell, why not?” He’d give me a chance to make one of his minor-league teams. So what if I was 39 years old. He was 39 and he wasn’t washed up. Ted said he believed in the American way, that everyone should get his chance, and let the best man win.

  THE MAGIC LADY

  And I met somebody else. It was at Bloomingdale’s department store in Hackensack, New Jersey, at an evening fund-raiser for a local hospital. I spotted her across a crowded room. She was very beautiful. Our eyes first met in the furniture department and we smiled. We saw each other in notions and we stared. We crossed paths again near the luggage and we smiled and stared. When we saw each other back in furniture we stared and smiled and laughed. Then to my astonishment she walked over and said, “I think we’re destined to meet.”

  I told her I was Jim Bouton. She said, “What’s a Jim Bouton?” I said I was a former baseball player with the Yankees. She said she knew nothing about baseball. Her name was Dr. Paula Kurman and she was a behavioral scientist. I said, “What’s a behavioral scientist?” She replied that she was a college professor and she also helped people with relationship problems. I told her I had a few relationship problems that needed help and asked for her telephone number. She handed me her business
card.

  This was October. The next day I called and got a recording. Since I didn’t want to talk to a machine I hung up. For the next three months every time I called I got the machine. After awhile, I wasn’t even sure why I was still calling, except that there was something about this woman. And things were falling apart at home.

  Finally, in January I left a message, she called back, and we had lunch. She was just as lovely as I had remembered her. This was a college professor? I had this silly nervous grin on my face and her hand trembled when she drank her sherry. The next time we had a longer lunch. I told her my story and she told me hers. “My God,” she said, “I think we’re going to be catalysts for each other.” I didn’t know what the hell she meant but I liked watching her say it. In two weeks I would be leaving to play baseball. I gave her the address of the Braves minor-league camp in Florida.

  Ah, spring training. I needed to run in the sunshine and clear my head. The pitching mound was my isolation booth and the locker room was my sanctuary. And I could use some laughs. These are not hard to find around baseball players. Especially if they’re 19 years old and you’re 39. In my first exhibition game I was winding up for my first pitch when my shortstop hollered, “C’mon, Mr. Bouton!” I had to call time out to laugh. Actually, the players were very kind to me. They called me Dad. Or Old-Timer.

  After the workouts we’d go out and have a few beers together. I felt a little out of it whenever they’d be trying to pick up 19-year-old girls. Then one day somebody walked in and the players all started screaming, “Hey Jim, here comes one for you.” It was a little old lady with blue hair.

  In the beginning I was a real curiosity. The players would sneak glances at me and whisper a lot. But they seemed to respect me. Maybe that’s because I was old enough to be their father. They knew I was the guy who wrote Ball Four, but they didn’t dislike me for it. In fact, they liked me because I wrote it. A few players said it sounded like so much fun, they were inspired to play harder so they would be sure to make it. They told me if I was writing another book I should be sure to spell their names right.

  It was an incredible spring. I was in terrific shape, worked harder than anybody in camp, pitched 13 scoreless innings—and was released! I had suspected things might be difficult back on the first day when farm director Henry Aaron told the press I was there only because the owner invited me. Henry hasn’t been a fan of mine since we were on the Dick Cavett show together and he attacked my book and then admitted he hadn’t read it.

  Strangely, after I was cut, I didn’t panic or get angry as I might have in the past. Instead, I felt calm and somehow in control. What’s hard to believe is that I was feeling this way because of what I was getting in the mail. Every other day I’d receive a letter from Paula which contained, among other things, some fables and poems she would make up. Her letters were not only warm, but very educational. The stories were simple but their effect on me was profound. And she seemed to sense exactly what I needed to know.

  One of her fables was about a group of people watching three men challenged by the ocean waves. The first man angrily tried to stop the waves with his fists, flailing about until he drowned. The second man stubbornly built elaborate barricades which the water eventually demolished. The third man sat and thought for a while. Then he carved a wooden board which he took into the ocean and used to ride the waves, dipping and swaying, using the force of the water to his advantage. The people thought this was remarkably clever and elected him their king.

  And this was before I got released. When Aaron gave me the bad news I didn’t argue or complain. I told him very nicely that I respected his judgment but if he didn’t mind I was flying to Atlanta that afternoon to speak with Ted Turner. After a friendly chat, in which I compared the baseball establishment to the yachting establishment, Ted smiled and said he would find a place for me.

  Let me say a word here about Ted Turner, the maverick baseball owner who gives other mavericks a chance. In person, this guy is hard to believe. For one thing he doesn’t act like a millionaire yachtsman who owns two sports teams and the world’s first 24-hour cable news television network. He’s a regular guy who you’re likely to catch walking down the hall wearing jeans and a work shirt and a railroad engineer’s hat.

  And Ted will talk to anybody. At the ballpark, instead of sitting in some sky box like the other owners, Ted sits down by the dugout and shoots the bull with the fans. In this high-pitched voice that sounds like Rhett Butler with a head cold, he’ll talk about any subject from military preparedness (he’s for it) to the high cost of third basemen (he’s against it). But he listens to people and he remembers their names. If a fan or an usher comes by with a good idea Ted will write it down and promise to do something about it. And he will.

  The only other baseball man who comes close to Turner in imagination and spirit is former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, the original maverick who sat with the fans in the bleachers. And their rustic personal styles are also similar. When Veeck told me I had earned a shot at his Knoxville farm team he was sitting on the grass in spring training massaging the stump of his peg leg. “If you dust off old junk sometimes you come up with a gem,” he told me as he squashed a lighted cigarette butt into a knothole on the wooden peg.

  The Braves decided I could pitch batting practice for their AAA farm team in Richmond, Virginia. This was like Br’er Rabbit getting thrown into the briar patch. The Richmond pitching coach was my old friend Johnny Sain, who also happens to be the best teacher in baseball. (Astute readers will not be surprised to learn that John is in the minors. In the coaching business, loyalty to the manager is more important than ability. The best qualification a coach can have is to be the manager’s drinking buddy. John drinks milk shakes and is loyal to pitchers.)

  For five weeks I threw batting practice waiting for somebody to get a sore arm, but it never happened. What did happen was that the Atlanta Braves came to town for an exhibition game against their top farm team. And Ted Turner said I should pitch for Richmond. This generated considerable laughter among the Richmond players, including myself. I hadn’t pitched in a game since spring training and the Braves were a month into their season with four guys batting over .300. Not only that, but my pitching arsenal consisted of an uncertain knuckleball and a little sinker that was only two weeks old.

  But I had a few things going for me that nobody knew about. Like, I understood how to get out of my own way. It’s hard to explain but as it applies to pitching, it means that instead of thinking about the mechanics of the knuckleball, as I had been doing, I thought about nothing and just let it happen. I had forgotten that my unconscious knew a lot more about pitching than my conscious.

  I got this strange idea about pitching from a book about archery sent to me by someone who knew nothing about either sport. Along with her letters, Paula was now sending me books, one of which was Zen and the Art of Archery. This was a helluva pen pal. She wrote me letters and I called her on the telephone. We were starting to have some long conversations.

  On May 10, 1978, in front of the second largest crowd in the history of Parker Field (they were standing in roped-off sections of the outfield), I got out of the way and let my knuckleball do its thing against the Atlanta Braves. In the seventh inning I left the game to a standing ovation with a 3–1 lead, having struck out seven of the big boys, including Jeff Burroughs (.416), the National League’s hottest hitter. It was my greatest night ever in a baseball uniform. My reward was a contract with their AA farm team in Savannah, Georgia. I had made it to the next plateau.

  Mesmerizing the Atlanta Braves was unexpected, but it was nothing compared to what was happening with the rest of my life. I was feeling happy and peaceful for the first time in longer than I could remember.

  Was it possible to fall in love through the mail with a college professor you met at a department store? I wouldn’t believe a movie like that. Maybe I’m old fashioned but it seemed to me that before a guy fell in love he ought to have spent at
least three days with that person. Which is how it happened that Paula Kurman, Ph.D., came to be sitting in the wooden bleachers in Charlotte, North Carolina, wearing basic silk and pearls. That was the weekend my teammates stopped kidding me about blue-haired old ladies.

  Being a trained observer, it did not take Paula very long to grasp the significance of baseball. “Obviously,” she said, “one of the cardinal rules is: When in doubt, spit. Everybody spits. It’s like punctuation.” She was also very adept at picking up the signs. “I’m not sure what it means,” she said, “but whenever the ball is not in play, somebody grabs his crotch.”

  And she made some other fascinating discoveries. Because she didn’t know enough about baseball to watch the game as a fan, Paula watched the things she did know about, like nonverbal behavior. She noticed that each pitcher went through his own series of mannerisms before every windup and, what’s more, that minute differences in this routine appeared to be connected to the success or failure of the pitch. In any case, she said, it was clear that the totality of a pitch began many moments before the windup. Of course, it may be a few years before baseball takes advantage of this information. I can just hear pitching coaches saying, “O.K., men, let’s go to work on those mannerisms.”

  I was learning new ways to win games without even picking up a ball and new ways to feel about myself as a person. It was a very enlightening summer.

  And it was a lot of fun. The Savannah Braves were the youngest team in the league but I felt more at home with them than I ever had with the Yankees, the Pilots, or the Astros. Once the players got used to me I became the team guru. I was the fountain of wisdom on everything from pitching and finances to careers and love lives. I’d sit around my room at night with guys like Roger Alexander and Stu Livingstone; we’d make some popcorn on my hotplate, and have a few beers and shoot the bull. It was a kind of closeness which had been impossible for me to achieve years ago. At age 39 I was finally one of the boys. It was late in coming but it was sufficient.