Fear Strikes Out

by Jim Piersall

  “All right, Doc—if you say so.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Now when you get down there, you eat and sleep and relax and fish and play golf and put on some flesh. What was your normal playing weight before?”

  “About one hundred seventy.”

  “I’d like to see you playing at about one hundred ninety. If you sit and stew all winter over what’s going to happen in the spring, you’ll never make it. And one other thing, Jimmy. Be natural and casual with people you meet. Don’t act as if they think you’re the star performer in a circus sideshow. And remember—if you need me, I’ll still be no farther away from you than the nearest telephone.”

  “Can I help Mary drive the car down?” I asked.

  “Drive a little—but not more than a hundred miles at a time. Let Mary do most of it.”

  Dowd had rented a five-room house for us on East Goldenrod Street in Sarasota. It was just off the South Trail, which is part of the Tamiami Trail, the main highway between Tampa and Miami. The ball park was about a mile away, but it might as well have been a thousand. I didn’t go near it.

  We were still moving our stuff in from the car when someone yelled, “Hey, Jimmy—”

  I turned, and coming along the side of the house from the direction of our back yard was George Susce, one of the Red Sox coaches. He had a huge grin on his face and he walked towards me with both hands outstretched.

  I was delighted to see him. Susce came from Pittsburgh, but he had moved to Sarasota the year before. He looked older than he was, for he had a weatherbeaten, India-rubber face and his sandy hair was rapidly deserting the top of his head. A chunky man, he was—and still is—one of the best bull-pen catchers in the baseball business. Never an outstanding ballplayer, he had become a coach when Boudreau had managed the Cleveland Indians and moved to the Red Sox later. Susce had a bright, friendly personality, backed up by a ready wit and a genuine interest in people, and everyone liked him.

  He was only in his mid-forties, but he was a fatherly sort of guy, and, indeed, he had a son who was just about my age. George was wonderful around rookies, for he loved to work with them, and he had a knack of giving encouragement with such solid sincerity that he could convince the most depressed kid that he had a big-league future.

  After we shook hands, I said, “Holy cow, you didn’t waste any time coming in to say hello.”

  “Didn’t need much time. I live right over on the next street. All you have to do to get to my house is go through your back yard and cross the road and there you are.”

  Susce was the perfect neighbor for me. Now I needed the close companionship of a trusted friend with a baseball background, someone who knew the people I knew and who understood how to handle the strangers who knew me. I had received nation-wide publicity for months, and my face was familiar to thousands of fans who had seen pictures of me.

  Mary and Dr. Brown and all the others had carried me this far—but another baseball man who could help me figure out the problem of meeting strangers and coping with their natural curiosity about me could carry me well along the rest of the way. Susce filled the bill in every conceivable way. The Red Sox couldn’t have found a happier situation for me if they had tried—and I’m still not sure they didn’t put me that close to George purposely.

  Any apprehensions I might have felt melted the minute I shook hands with this warm, sympathetic man. He knew baseball and its problems and he instinctively understood me and mine. He never forced himself on me, yet he was always around when I needed him most. He pulled me through some situations which I would have found hard to take, and he made all potential problems seem like ABC.

  Sarasota is more than just the spring-training headquarters for the Red Sox, who have been going there for many years. It is, in some ways, practically the hub of the baseball universe during the wintertime—or at least, the Eastern hub. Scores of baseball men make their home there, and scores more live in the surrounding communities. I couldn’t be in the place very long without running into someone I knew, and I wasn’t a bit sure what kind of questions I’d be hit with. After all, I had made a spectacle of myself for half the summer, and those who either knew me only casually or hadn’t met me at all would be reminded of it as soon as they saw me.

  When I mentioned it to George, he laughed and said, “What do you care what kind of questions people ask you? You can answer anything. Don’t give it another thought.”

  I wanted to play golf, but I was a little fearful about meeting people on the course. Susce took me to the Bobby Jones Club and made me feel at home there. He stood beside me as I was greeted by baseball people whom I knew and fans whom I didn’t know. He laughed and joked and made things easy when strangers approached me. That seemed to happen all the time, and, sooner or later, I was bound to run up against a reminder of something unpleasant.

  Susce didn’t play golf, but he used to walk around the course with me for exercise. Sometimes I played alone and sometimes acquaintances or friends would go around with me. I was never physically alone, because if I had no one to play with George came along. He was with me the day a man I’d never met before came up with one of those recollections I dreaded.

  We were in the snack bar of the club one afternoon, and a stranger came over, held out his hand, introduced himself and said, “Say, Jimmy, I’ve been following your career right along.”

  “That so?” I asked, pleased.

  “Yes, sir. And you’ve done some of the most wonderfully crazy things I’ve ever heard of. Say, how in the world did you ever think to bring a water pistol to the ball park so you could squirt the plate with it? What a gag that was!”

  Wonderfully crazy things ... water pistol ... squirting the plate ... wonderfully crazy things ... crazy things ... crazy ... crazy ... crazy ...

  I stiffened and wet my lips and clenched my fists and mumbled something, then turned away. I went and stood off in one corner of the room, so I could be as far away from that guy as possible. Then, as I sulked and continued to clench and unclench my fists, I heard Susce, now at my elbow, snap, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Did you hear what that guy said?”

  “Sure I heard him.”

  “Did you hear him talk about crazy things—and ask me about that water-pistol thing?”

  “I heard him.”

  I turned on Susce and, in a low but clear voice, seethed, “Well, I don’t have to take that stuff from anybody.”

  “You don’t, eh?”

  Susce put his hand on my arm and led me out to the porch. Then, poking his forefinger at my chest, he said, “I thought you were all O.K. again.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, you didn’t act it in there. You looked like you were going to blow your top.”

  “Well,” I said, “I was mad.”

  “Why?—because the guy used the word crazy? Isn’t that part of the English language? Don’t people always use it? Do you expect them to change when they’re talking to you?”

  “The guy should have known better.”

  “Maybe he should. But he didn’t. Can you get mad at him for that?”

  “But, George, did you hear what he asked me?”

  “Why shouldn’t he ask you?” Susce said. “That water-pistol gag was a beauty—one of the funniest I’ve ever heard of. A lot of guys are going to ask you about it. They’ll ask you about leading cheers for yourself and doing calisthenics in the outfield and hitching rides in the bull-pen jeep and playing catch with scoreboard boys and heckling umpires from the president’s box and imitating Satchel Paige and all the other things you did while you were sick. And why shouldn’t they? You might have forgotten all that, but you can’t expect everyone else to. You’ll run into a million people who saw you or heard about you and never realized you were sick—don’t even know you were in the hospital. Are you going to blow your stack every time one of them says something about those stunts of yours? You’d better not, boy—because you’ll be blowing your stack too often for your own
good.

  “Look, Jimmy”—he was talking softly now—“I’m glad this thing happened. It had to happen sooner or later. It’s going to happen again—and it will keep on happening as long as you play ball—maybe for the rest of your life. You’ve got to accept it, just the way you’ve learned to accept everything else. But don’t let it throw you.”

  He’s right, of course. This is going to happen often. I’ve got to learn to take it. What was it the doc said—“You can cope with anything”—well, I’ll cope with this. I’m going to meet a lot of people who will ask questions like that guy asked me. I can’t blame any of them. I’d probably do the same thing myself.

  That night I prayed that I might keep my temper, no matter what anyone said to me, and I prayed just as hard for that as I always prayed for everything else—that I’d never be sick again and that I’d be able to play ball as well as I ever had and that Mary and the children would always be safe and well.

  One day, just before spring training began, I asked Susce if he thought I could make the Red Sox ball club.

  “You’ve got it made already,” he said. “You’re going to be the right fielder.”

  “But suppose I’ve lost my touch? Suppose I can’t catch a fly ball any more? Suppose I can’t throw? Suppose I haven’t got that instinct any more—that ability to know just where I should throw the ball, to know just what the best play to make is? And suppose I can’t hit?”

  “You’re the right fielder,” he insisted.

  “How do you know? You’re not the manager.”

  “Don’t worry, I know.”

  “Did Boudreau tell you?”

  “Jimmy—don’t ask me any more questions. Just take my word for it—you’ll be the Red Sox right fielder this year.”

  He repeated it a dozen times a day in the next few weeks. He said it in my back yard and on his front porch and on the golf course and everywhere else we went together. When it was time to report for spring training, he had me convinced. I checked into Payne Field absolutely certain that I would be the regular Red Sox right fielder for 1953.

  I was in perfect physical condition and, just as Dr. Brown advised, I had put on twenty pounds. When I stepped on the scales I weighed one hundred ninety-two pounds. I felt good and couldn’t wait to get out on the field to see if I was still a major-league ballplayer.

  The other Red Sox players treated me exactly as they treated each other. When ballplayers meet to begin spring training, the general reaction is the same as it is when any group of men, closely knit for part of the year and separated for the rest of it, come together to renew their association. There’s always a lot of hand shaking and back slapping and kidding around and shouting back and forth. I was included in all of it. As far as the boys were concerned, I was a routine ballplayer who had had a routine winter vacation.

  Everyone I’d played with who was still with the club acted the same towards me. The boys were neither too hot nor too cold. There was no self-conscious moving in, shaking hands and moving out again. I was one of the crowd and that was just the way I wanted it. Even when I saw McDermott for the first time, I felt no embarrassment. He shook hands and kidded with me just as the others had. The same thing happened with Martin when I saw him later in nearby St. Petersburg, where the Yankees trained. The flareups of the year before were forgotten. We met in the natural course of events, shook hands as any two people would after not having seen each other for some time, and passed the time of day.

  I was a little concerned about how the umpires would treat me. After all, I had given them a worse going-over than anyone else. Umpires have spring training just the way ballplayers do. Usually an umpire is assigned to a team for several weeks at a time. Bill Summers, a rolypoly veteran who had been around for years, was with us.

  When we met for the first time, he held out his hand and said, “How are you doing, Jimmy?”

  “Fine,” I told him.

  “You look great. Now just get out there and stay loose and you’ll be all right. Don’t worry about anything. Play the best ball you can. The umpires all want to help you. They’ll do anything they can to make it easy for you.”

  Charley Berry, another veteran American League umpire, who joined us later, told me the same thing. Everywhere we played, the umpires who were working the game went out of their way to be nice to me. I was a little apprehensive about Honochick, with whom I’d had that terrible battle in New York, and Passarella, whose conscience I had once challenged, but they were just like the rest.

  One umpire even said, “Don’t be afraid to squawk if you think we missed a call. No one’s trying to muzzle you. If a protest is legitimate, you’re entitled to make one. But don’t squawk just for the sake of squawking. That’s what gets the boys mad.”

  The newspapermen were wonderful. I read all the Boston papers daily, and I didn’t see a single reference to any of the stunts I had pulled either on or off the field, or to the nature of my illness. There was nothing but encouragement, as the baseball writers, to a man, reported how well I was hitting and fielding and how certain it was that I was on my way towards making a sensationally successful comeback.

  After the first week of the training season, I began to get heavy mail, most of it from absolute strangers, all of it heartwarming and sincere. Everyone seemed to be wishing me nothing but the very best of good luck.

  “They’re all with me,” I said to Mary. “How can I miss?”

  “You can’t,” she replied. “You’re doing fine, honey.”

  There was still one gnawing fear in my heart. What about the fans? The baseball people—players, coaches, managers, umpires, writers—were all co-operating to give me a break, but that’s the way baseball people are. Fans come from all walks of life. Most of them figured to give me the best of it—but somebody, somewhere was bound to start yelling insults at me from the stands. And what will I do then?

  As it turned out, I had to wait a long time to test this situation, for the fans were as wonderful to me as everyone else. We opened the 1953 season in Washington, then went to Philadelphia, then home to Boston, then to Detroit on the first leg of a Western swing and finally to Cleveland before I heard an unkind word from the stands. At the Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, one guy got on me but I managed to ignore him. He didn’t start riding me until late in the game, and I could take him or leave him. At that point, I could leave him.

  But I was bothered by some of the things he said, and concerned over what might happen when we returned to Cleveland on our next trip. No one else anywhere, even in Chicago, had shown anything but the utmost consideration for me. There was a little flareup in Detroit, when one of the players rode me, but that had no effect on my nerves. The only thing I wanted to find out was just how much I could take from the stands.

  On our second trip into Cleveland, I made a spectacular catch, and a guy in the stands yelled down, “Hey, screwball, look out for the man in the white suit!”

  Mr. Yawkey had just torn up my contract and given me a new one at a salary raise. I turned around to the guy in the stands and yelled, “How would you like to make the dough this screwball’s making?”

  A roar of laughter drowned out the heckler’s voice, and that was the last I heard from him that afternoon. Ever since then, I’ve been able to take anything, although, even now, I get very little of that sort of heavy humor from the stands.

  My fears about whether or not I could play big-league ball were still gnawing—although vaguely—when we opened the season in Philadelphia. We had to wait two days, because of rainouts. We finally played on April 16, and I got two hits. I had another hit the next day in Philadelphia, and I was beginning to get some confidence in myself. From then on, I managed to get by at the plate, but, aside from the fact that I was coming back, I didn’t attract any real attention until May 8.

  We returned to Boston from a Western trip and opened a series with the Yankees on that date. Late in the game, Johnny Sain, the Yankee pitcher, who was a fine hitter, slammed one
that was headed for the bull pen in right field. I got a good jump on the ball, ran with my back to the plate and, just before it dropped into the bull pen, managed to grab it. That catch saved the game, which we won in extra innings when Billy Goodman hit a home run.

  Mickey Mantle, the Yankees’ great switch hitter (a batter who hits from either the right or the left side of the plate), was batting right-handed the next day when he hit a ball to deep right-center field for what appeared to be an almost certain triple. The ball was headed for a corner formed by one side of the bull pen and the fence in front of the center-field bleachers. I ran back, and balancing myself with one hand against the bull pen, I reached over with the other and caught the ball. A veteran New York reporter wrote in his paper the next day, “In twenty-seven years of covering baseball, I never saw a catch like it.”

  Those two catches, along with plays I later made both at Fenway Park and in Yankee Stadium, seemed to convince Manager Casey Stengel of the Yankees that I was a great outfielder, and he later proved he felt that way when he picked me to play in the 1954 major-league all-star game in Cleveland. That was one of the big thrills of my life, for Stengel is a veteran baseball man who knows his business. The fans and the writers accepted me as a star, but I wanted recognition from someone who knew baseball from all its technical angles. When Casey selected me to play for him, I felt that I had really made the grade.

  Early in the 1953 season, after he had seen me make those catches off Sain and Mantle, Stengel said, “Guess this Piersall must be the best outfielder in ten years, except for Willie Mays.” When the season was over, he said, “Piersall is the best right fielder I’ve ever seen anywhere.”

  I robbed Mickey Vernon, who won the American League batting championship that year, of a sure triple in Washington. Later I took two home runs away from him on successive days in Boston. After I made the first of the two Fenway Park catches, Cronin is reported to have said, “That’s the best catch I’ve ever seen.” The next day, after I’d robbed Vernon again, they tell me Cronin said, “I take it back. That was the best catch I’ve ever seen.” Incidentally, by that time, Vernon would gladly have strangled me.