Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

  That’s when I realized something terrible. I had forgotten to acknowledge Michael, whose letter had made it all possible! My plan had been to tip my cap to him as I came out of the dugout. But I was in such a daze, I’d forgotten all about it. Now it was too late. I panicked. What could I do?

  Then I remembered that there was going to be a game. I could tip my cap to Michael from the mound. That would actually make more sense. That’s when I’d do it if I got into the game. But not everybody plays. Old-Timers’ games are three-inning events, with players shuffling in and out, and some guys never get in. Gene Michael was managing the team. I went over and asked if I was scheduled to play. Fortunately, he wasn’t eating a liverwurst sandwich. Gene promised me one hitter. That’s all I wanted.

  Keith Olbermann, my favorite TV guy, was doing the play-by-play over the PA system. When my name was announced I headed for the mound, and my final curtain. It all went perfectly. The scoreboard flashed the message I had requested earlier that said, THANKS, MIKE. I took off my hat and pointed it to where he was sitting in the stands, holding it there for a moment so everyone understood, and gently placed it back on my head.

  Very gently. On my first pitch, the hat popped off as Mel had suggested, and Olbermann called it BALL FOUR! It was fantastic. On a day of ceremony, ritual, and gesture, I was allowed to play my part—not just for the fans, but for me and my friends and family. Then, to top it all off, Jay Johnstone hit a nice little dribbler to second base and I was out of there.

  How did it feel the day after Old-Timers’ Day? Like I’d just climbed off one of those paint-mixing machines at the hardware store. A temporary, but welcome, reprieve from the depression I’d been living with since Laurie died. Or, as I say in conversation, “Since Laurie…” because I can’t stand to hear myself utter those terrible words. But underneath, the depression was still there. In fact, I was so depressed, I didn’t realize I was depressed.

  I had gone from being a “pathological optimist,” as Paula used to call me, to a fearful and panicky person. I’d make an awful decision based on fear, then panic over how to recover from the awful decision. In the old days, when I was on my game, a friend had once said, “You know the expression, ‘He’s not playing with a full deck?’ Well, Jim’s playing with extra cards.” Now I was playing with half a deck. Or less. I was folding with aces and sticking with a pair of twos.

  I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. I’d be in an airplane, bouncing around in a storm, and I wouldn’t be nervous; just let it go down, I’d think, I’ve got plenty of insurance. I only wanted to eat comfort foods, like macaroni and cheese and hamburgers and mashed potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches. Which is why Paula never wanted me to drive alone, or pick the restaurants.

  Ironically, I only recognized that I was depressed when I was having a really good time. I’d find myself laughing at something, or enjoying a moment on a tennis court, and a noticeable feeling of joy would hit me, a fleeting speck of freedom from care and worry. But I couldn’t make it last. At night, instead of nodding off to sleep with hopes and plans for the future as I’d always done, I’d toss and turn with doom and gloom about the past. And feel sorry for myself.

  Then on August 20, 1999, a few days past the second anniversary of Laurie’s death and just over a year after my return to Old-Timers’ Day, I was driving to a quarry to pick out some stones and came upon a police roadblock where a bad accident had just occurred. A fire truck and an ambulance were on the scene, about seventy yards up the road, with their lights flashing. As I slowed down I could see it had been a head-on collision between a pickup truck and a gray Jeep.

  A bolt of terror struck me. Paula! That was Paula’s gray Jeep, the exact same color, same model! She had left the house about a half hour before me to do her own errands, in the same direction, along the same highway!

  In a panic, my heart pounding, I pulled over and jumped out of my car and started running toward the accident. A policeman held up his hand and signaled me to stop. I ran right past him. As I got closer another policeman, seeing me coming, jumped in my path with his arms held out.

  “Whoa, stop right there!” he commanded.

  “That’s my wife in the Jeep!” I shouted, as I dodged around him. “I have to get there.”

  My eyes were blurring with tears as I ran, my lungs gasping for air. No, no, no, I thought, not Paula, too. My Babe. Just as I got there, the ambulance doors were closing.

  “Where is she?” I hollered at the policeman coming toward me.

  “Where is who?” he barked, grabbing both my arms.

  “My wife!” I said. “I think she was in the Jeep.”

  “There were no women in this accident,” he said. “Two men. That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, in disbelief.

  “Positive,” he said, releasing my arms. “Now go sit over there and calm down.” And he directed me to a highway guardrail.

  I sat there for about ten minutes, until I stopped wheezing. If I don’t get a heart attack now, I thought, I’m never going to get one.

  Later, at the house, I couldn’t wait for Paula to walk in the door. When she did, I put my arms around her and held her tight. Really held her close and told her what had happened, and how scared I’d been.

  “My God, what a terrible experience,” said Paula. “But you can relax now. I’m here and everything’s okay.”

  She looked intently at me. “And you’re back,” she said. “You’re back.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant.

  “You haven’t been yourself for two years,” said Paula. “This is the first time, since Laurie died, that I’ve felt you’re really with me. I was afraid I had lost you and that you were never coming back.”

  In any case, I think I’m getting better. I still carry a handkerchief for sudden tears, and melancholy is still my default setting, but at least I’m not so numb anymore. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’m actually glad to be alive. I’ve got plans to build a stone terrace on the east side of the house. I’ll be doing some work with a money-management firm in New York. I’m back on regular foods now and I’m starting to care when the plane jumps around.

  And I’m getting invited to more ballparks.

  A group I recently spoke to in Seattle arranged to have me throw out the first pitch before a Mariners’ game against the Minnesota Twins. On my way to the stadium, I stopped by the Eagle Hardware store, the edifice built on the parking lot that was once Sicks Stadium, home of the immortal Pilots. At least it’s recognized as an historic landmark. Just outside the entrance, in a batter’s box painted on the cement, stands a bronze statue of a batter hovering over a brass home plate.

  “Batter up!” reads the inscription on home plate. “You are standing on the site of Sicks Seattle Stadium, home of the Seattle Raniers and Seattle Pilots. If the year were 1942, you would be in perfect position to knock one out of the park.”

  It’s altogether fitting that the Pilots should have to share credit with a minor-league team, and as if that wasn’t pitiful enough, the statue is standing sideways in the batter’s box, as if the pitcher’s mound was over by the first-base dugout! A pop fly would leave the park—about a hundred feet foul.

  Inside the store, near cash register No. 17, sixty feet, six inches away from the batter outside, is a beige circle on the floor representing the pitcher’s mound, with a white pitcher’s rubber in the middle. There is no inscription on the mound, its location next to a checkout lane being commentary enough.

  And not far from the checkout lanes, a Sicks’ Stadium display case features photographs and memorabilia of the Seattle Raniers. The only Pilot item is a photo of Don Mincher with the caption: “Don Mincher, Pitcher.” It never ends.

  While Seattle’s Safeco Field lacks the charm of Sicks Stadium, it certainly holds more people. A few of them recognized me standing on the field before the game. They would smile and wave and then nudge the child sitting next to them and point in my direction
. What were they telling the kids, I wondered. “You see that man down there? He once had his spikes nailed to the floor.”

  Before I threw out the first pitch I went over to the Mariners’ dugout to say hello to manager Lou Piniella, who was almost a Pilot until he was traded in spring training to the Kansas City Royals. We laughed at the first sight of each other, and the notion that we were together in Seattle under circumstances neither of us could have predicted in 1969.

  I asked Lou if he remembered the day Joe Schultz told him he’d been traded.

  “Sure,” said Lou, “I’ll never forget it. Joe called me into his office and said, ‘Lou, you’re gonna have to pound Bud somewhere else.’”

  There should be a statue of Joe Schultz in front of the Anheuser-Busch Inc. headquarters.

  I’m sixty-one years old, but in my mind, I’m forty. I turned forty a few years ago when I couldn’t get amateur hitters out with my knuckleball. Before that I was twenty-eight. I had turned twenty-eight when I couldn’t throw my fastball past major-league hitters and had to resort to the knuckler. Before that I was nineteen. I was never in my thirties.

  I judge my age in baseball years, but I don’t live as a former baseball player. My scrapbooks are stashed in the basement, my trophies are still in boxes. I enjoy my memories, but I don’t live in the past. I go there only when someone else brings it up or when I occasionally open Ball Four to get a laugh from Joe Schultz or one of the players.

  Laughing is important. Laughing, and paying attention to the details, and appreciating things. As I’ve learned to live with loss, I’ve also learned to make the most of whatever time I have left, because life is so fragile and we never know when it will end or what awaits us, if anything, when it’s over. So I’ve become a major appreciator of things, large and small.

  Right now I’m appreciating a very small person named Georgia Grace, born to Lee and his wife, Elaine, on April 12, 2000. My first grandchild. There is nothing like the joy and wonder of holding a newborn baby. And fear. When they handed Georgia to me in the maternity ward I was afraid I was going to drop her; she was too tiny for my arms and too big for my hands, and with her wobbly head I wasn’t sure how to get hold of her. But she sure smelled good. That new-baby smell.

  Now Georgia is three months old and grabbing onto my pinkies with her tiny fingers and lifting herself up off my lap. I pretend I’m playing “soooo big,” but I’m really strengthening her hands and forearms.

  You need a good grip to throw a knuckleball.

  THE PILOTS LIVE! IN CYBERSPACE!

  One day I was cruising the web and came upon a treasure trove of Seattle Pilots lore on a site developed by a fan named Mike Fuller. It turns out there are a whole lot of Pilots junkies out there who post letters and photographs and chat with each other on this site. Mike even has an updated Where Are They Now? section on the Pilots. There’s another guy named Charles Kapner who may be the world’s greatest collector of Pilots’ memorabilia. Most of the photos in the back of this book were supplied by Charles. There’s also a fellow named Shawn Collins who has a Ball Four site in case anyone’s interested. I’ve never met any of these gentlemen, but I’d be happy to link you to their web sites from jimbouton.com if I can ever figure out how to set it up.

  Maybe one day I’ll post the original notes from Ball Four which I discovered in a box down in the basement. Except that they’re a little hard to read because they were scrawled on spiral notebook paper, hotel stationery, popcorn boxes, ticket stubs, scorecards, bar coasters, air sickness bags, and whatever else was handy at the moment. Ancient scribblings of a lost tribe.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s not an overstatement to say that this book was a collaboration.

  My deepest gratitude goes to the late Leonard Shecter, my friend and editor of the original Ball Four. It was Shecter who encouraged me to keep a diary, who helped sell the book to World Publishing and who, with patience and humor, turned a reasonably observant relief pitcher into a writer of sorts.

  Next I want to thank my teammates on the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros who would just as soon not have cooperated but who, nonetheless, contributed their matchless hilarity and enduring humanity. What kind of a book would this be, after all, without Joe Schultz, or Fred Talbot, or Gene Brabender, or Gary Bell? Novelists spend lifetimes trying to invent characters like these.

  I also want to thank Michael and David, Lee and Hollis, and my brothers Bob and Pete, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

  Lastly I thank my wife Paula Kurman, the primary editor of all three updates, and an accomplished writer herself. Always and forever the magic lady, only Paula had the editorial expertise, the intimate knowledge, and the emotional understanding that enabled me to write about the events of the past few years. Thanks, Babe.

  www.JimBouton.com

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Lenny Shecter died on January 19, 1974. He was only 47 years old. He had leukemia. It says something about Lenny that I was one of his closest friends and I never knew he had the disease. He didn’t sit around and cry in his beer that he might die young someday. He probably didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for him. He was a courageous man.

  I had heard about Lenny Shecter even before I had met him. It was during spring training in 1962 when I was a rookie with the Yankees and he was a sportswriter for the New York Post. The veteran players were teaching the rookies about life in the major leagues. “Don’t talk to the writers,” they would say. “Especially that fuckin’ Shecter.” That spring I heard “fuckin’ Shecter” so many times I thought it was his first name. I expected this guy to be some kind of monster.

  Instead, I discovered that he was a jolly fellow with a quizzical smile and a twinkle in his eye. He was also smart and funny and tough and he taught me things about the world that I never learned in a locker room. He had opinions about politics, the war, newspaper reporting, and almost everthing else, and he didn’t mind expressing them. He was famous for being irascible but I found that to be part of his charm. We’d have some wonderful, raging debates and I’d always come away tired and happy and a lot wiser. I would rather argue with Lenny Shecter than agree with anyone else.

  The establishment hated Shecter because he exposed the hypocrisy, the greed, and the racism in sports. As the sports editor of Look magazine, his profile of Vince Lombardi was the first insight into the dehumanizing demands of big time football. Lenny was one of those few reporters who refused to become an extension of the teams’ publicity departments. Referring to the stacks of press releases teams would send out, he said the most important tool a reporter could have was a “shit detector.”

  Lenny insisted upon truth in all matters. When friends would describe him as portly or heavyset, he would laugh. “I’m not heavyset,” he would say. “I’m fat. Let’s be honest.”

  As a free lance writer Lenny was one of the first journalists to write about sports as big business. His first book, The Jocks, introduced Shecter’s First Law of Sport: “Larceny abhors a vacuum.” But his books and his other writings also contained funny and loving looks at sports figures like Casey Stengel and an obscure marathon runner named Buddy Edelen. And it was Lenny, writing about the early Mets, who transformed a clumsy first basemen into the legend of Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

  What I remember most about Lenny was his guts. He would write a less than complimentary column about Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris, and the Yankee clubhouse would be steaming. Players would be threatening to tear Shecter apart the next time they saw him, and I’d be sitting over by my locker figuring he wouldn’t dare come near the clubhouse for at least a couple of months. Then suddenly the door would pop open and here he’d come, smiling and carrying his notebook like nothing happened. And nobody would say a word.

  Lenny Shecter was my friend. I miss him a lot.

  Shecter also edited Bouton’s second book, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally; wrote Roger Maris, a biography; Once Upon the Polo Grounds, a nostalgic histo
ry of the first two years of the New York Mets; and On the Pad, with by William Phillips, the bribed policeman whose testimony before the Knappy Commission helped uncover corruption in the New York City Police Department.

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