Fear Strikes Out

by Jim Piersall

  “They were all so upset and puzzled over the way you acted that I didn’t have to ask Boudreau what he thought about you,” she said. “I realized then that he didn’t have any more idea how to handle you than I did. Besides, he had so much on his mind that I didn’t want to add mine to his collection of worries. I never did speak to him about you.”

  Mary didn’t stay in Detroit for the whole series. Instead, she took the train back to Scranton. There she picked up the children and then drove to Boston with her father. She arrived late on the night of the twenty-seventh, the same night that we opened our home stand against Washington. It was also the night that I outdid myself to a point where it was obvious that something would have to be done to get me back into line. I went through all the old gags for the fans, twenty-six thousand of whom flocked out to the ball park that night, and I invented plenty of new ones. But because Vollmer started the game, I had to cram most of my action into the practice session that preceded it. Bob Addie, of the Washington Times-Herald, devoted his column to my activities that night. Here, in part, is what he wrote:

  “There have been few rookies in all baseball history who commanded as much attention as James Anthony Piersall, a twenty-two-year-old product of Waterbury, Connecticut, heretofore known chiefly for its watchmaking. In the case of J. A. Piersall, the inference has been that there was something wrong with the works.

  “Before the Washington Nats were to play the Red Sox, Boston was taking batting practice. As is usual in those cases, the opposing team was on the bench waiting its turn.

  “The Nats were all seated in the dugout when Piersall gave a special performance of his gifted clowning ability—while parrying barbed insults from the Washington players.

  “Piersall would see a pop fly coming, stagger under it and then make it miss his head by a fraction of an inch. He was stopping ground balls with his feet and looked like Nick Altrock at the latter’s clowning best.

  “In fielding practice, Piersall was playing second base. Del Wilber was catching while Manager Lou Boudreau was hitting grounders. Piersall fielded the ball, threw to the plate, then ran to second base, lay prone on the ground and stuck his glove over his head. He caught Wilber’s relay from the plate as easily as if he had been five feet away.

  “When Clyde Vollmer, who took over the right-field position from Piersall, was at the plate in the batting practice, Piersall kept up a running comment for the benefit of the Washington players.

  “‘I’m Vollmer’s caddie,’ he said. ‘If he gets hot, I’ll never get back into the lineup.’

  “Out in center field, a group of bleacherites unfurled a banner reading, ‘We want Piersall.’ Jim acknowledged his followers before the game began, then went into the dugout because Vollmer started.

  “With one out in the seventh inning and the Sox in the field, Boudreau suddenly inserted Piersall in right field. He went out there like a returning war hero. The crowd went wild.

  “You would have thought the Sox kept Piersall tied in a sack because it took him longer to unkink than any man I’ve ever seen. He took calisthenics. He imitated the pitcher [Sid Hudson], He mimicked the batter, Jackie Jensen. There was a foul hit into the stands back of first base. From thirty yards away Piersall, who had no more chance of catching the ball than I did from the press box, came tearing in. He was all over that field. When the inning was over, Piersall trotted in behind Dom DiMaggio.”

  Addie went on to describe my imitation of DiMaggio’s gait, and repeated some of the other stories concerning my activities of the previous month. Then he wrote:

  “Piersall’s teammates, from all that can be gathered, greet his hi-jinks with cold fury. Yet the fans and the press love him because he is so colorful. The newspapermen in Boston talk of Piersall as one speaks of an incorrigible child, tsk-tsking some of his exploits yet taking pride in his deviltry.”

  Aside from everything that Addie described, I apparently did something else that night that caused a great deal of unrest in the ball club and, when it was disclosed, a tremendous amount of discussion around the baseball circuit. It seems that I was in the Red Sox locker room changing my shirt when Vera Stephens’s four-year-old son walked in. According to the stories I read, I reached out, spanked him and sent him screeching down the runway to his father, who was in the dugout.

  I know I did a lot of unusual things during this period, but I’m positive that I never spanked either Stephens’s or anyone else’s child. I might have—and probably did—give him a little pat on the flank, but I suppose I’ll never be able to prove it. I don’t remember, the child was too young to say anything one way or the other and nobody else happened to be in the locker room at the time. However, the story did break several days later and I am quoted as saying that I patted the child lightly, which is enough to convince me that that’s all I did. Stephens evidently is also convinced, because he has since told me that his boy cried simply because I was a stranger to him and that there is no question that I neither spanked him nor hit him very hard. However, in the light of what happened within the next sixteen hours, I don’t suppose anyone can be blamed for what was said or written about me.

  At midnight, after the June 27 game with Washington was over, Boudreau announced to the press, “From now on, Piersall’s my right fielder.”

  The next morning, he called me into his office and told me that the Red Sox had decided to send me to Birmingham.

  Here, in part, is the way Roger Birtwell, a Boston baseball writer, told the story in the July 9, 1952, issue of the Sporting News:

  “Jim Piersall—at twenty-two—is without question one of the best fielding and throwing outfielders in the game today. With the Red Sox, he batted .296—one hit under .300—for all the games he started as an outfielder.

  “Yet the Red Sox, in a startling move late in the morning of Saturday, June 28, demoted Piersall to their Double A farm club at Birmingham. The big-league career of one of the most talented and colorful players in the game’s history had been sliced to ten and a half weeks. And part of that time was spent on the bench.

  “Less than twelve hours before, Manager Lou Boudreau had announced that Piersall would return from the bench and resume his place at right field for the Red Sox.

  “ ‘Piersall’s attitude was detrimental to this club,’ was Boudreau’s explanation of Jim’s assignment to Birmingham. ‘I have to consider twenty-five or thirty other ballplayers—plus trying to win.’

  “Said General Manager Joe Cronin: ‘Apparently everyone on this club is against him [Piersall]. There really was a bad situation down on the bench and in the clubhouse.’

  “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 s
omething 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.