The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  The spirit of our club was Petrocelli at short. He was a fireeater. Rico was in his last seasons as a shortstop, even though he would hit forty home runs that year. The club had already started experimenting with him at third. It seemed everybody in the infield, except Scott, was losing their range at the same time. Mike Andrews was at second and he was another good hitter with power, but by 1970 he couldn’t move two steps to his right or left. It was as if he was nailed down to the bag at second. He and Rico were both scrappers. Petrocelli had a temper. He was very quick to drop his gloves, and he knew how to box. Whenever a brawl broke out on the field, most players pushed and pulled and did their best to keep from getting hurt. Not our Rico. He’d be out throwing left jabs and overhand rights with no concern for life or limb. Petrocelli could be in the whirlpool when a fight started and he’d just jump up, wrap a towel around his middle, run out, and get a piece of somebody. He just loved to mix it up, especially against the Yankees. Rico had been involved in at least one memorable on-field brawl with them before I joined the club. Some of the guys on our team told me that it was something to watch. It seemed as if every time Rico threw a punch, a pinstriped body would hit the ground.

  Looking at our roster, people would shake their heads and wonder why we didn’t walk away with the pennant. The Red Sox had a lot of big names, and they were a liberal organization when it came to salaries, especially after they won the pennant in 1967. Mr. Yawkey was so happy he was giving the money away in wheelbarrows.

  Players told me a story about Gary Bell. After winning thirteen games in ’67, Gary went to Dick O’Connell, the team’s general manager, to talk contract. While waiting outside Dick’s office, Gary had a lot of time to ponder what kind of money he would ask for. He reached a figure he could live with, then went in and asked O’Connell for an amount fifteen thousand dollars higher than that. Dick didn’t bat an eyelash. He just turned to his secretary and said, “Mary, type up another one.”

  It was that easy. That sort of thing gave rise to the portrayal of the Red Sox as a country club, a label that was supposed to explain why we didn’t win the pennant despite all the talent we had. We were too pampered by management. I view that as a misreading. Mr. Yawkey was a compassionate man who cared about his players more than he cared about winning. He didn’t mind winning; he just never crucified you if you lost. But the high payroll and his treatment of players didn’t curtail anyone’s hunger for a pennant. Our problem wasn’t attitude. It was a lack of pitching, speed, and a deep bench. People would look at our starting eight and say, “Jesus, these guys should win the division by ten games.” They didn’t realize that it takes more than eight players hitting twenty home runs each to make a winner. Baltimore didn’t win because of their hitting. It was their pitching and defense that made them a great club. Their hitting merely combined with their other assets to make them unreal. In 1969 we finished in third place, twenty-two games behind them, yet we had a good ballclub. The problem was that Baltimore was better.

  No matter where we finished, for whatever reason, the Red Sox fans were incredible. They always turned out to support us. Sox fans are a special breed, living in a state of constant denial. Even when the team’s going good, they can’t allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security. They keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing that it usually lands on their heads. New York fans let it all hang out, never worrying about tomorrow because they know tomorrow may never come. In direct contrast, Boston fans figure no, let’s worry about tomorrow because the odds are it probably will get here, and when it does, it’s going to rain. They realize that death is lurking in the background of every celebration. It can’t be avoided. Their city is filled with famous old cemeteries. Every corner you turn, there’s John Adams or John Hancock. And they’re all dead.

  I became acutely aware of the difference between the majors and the minors in that first season with Boston. Some of the contrasts were obvious. The accommodations up here were all first class, the pay was better, and the media attention was intensified one hundredfold. The minute you put on a uniform you were a celebrity. But the biggest difference was the women. They were everywhere, and they would come at us in swarms. Guys in the bullpen did particularly well when we hit Comiskey Park in Chicago. The visiting bullpen was right near the bleachers, and any knowledgeable female could gain access to it through the ground crew’s entrance. A woman could come in through the back, go underneath the stands, and trip the light fantastic with one or more of her heroes. The best part about this was that if a player worked out his positioning properly, he could get it on and still watch the ballgame, elevating his enjoyment of the National Pastime to heights never before imagined. The first time I sat out there and checked out this sexual circus, I thought, Now I know why everyone is so hot to get up to the big leagues. I also realized what Dick Williams meant when he admonished us to keep our heads in the ballgame while we were out there.

  Dick got fired before the season was over, and Eddie Popowski, our third-base coach, took over the job on an interim basis. He gave me my first major-league start during our final season series in Washington. He left a note in my hotel room one afternoon, informing me that I was starting. Unfortunately, that was the day I had picked to walk up and down the Washington Monument, followed by an on-foot tour of the Capitol. I came back to my room exhausted and found his message. I went out that night and was okay for six innings. Then the roof fell in. Mike Epstein hit a moon shot off me—I got whiplash watching it fly out—and Del Unser crashed a triple with the bases loaded. Even a couple of bat boys got up and hit ropes. By the time Popowski came out to get me, I was speaking in tongues, a victim of shell shock. Turning philosophical after the game, I figured things could never get any worse than that. Wrong again. Four days later I received a notice from the draft board, notifying me that my student deferment had gone down the tubes. I had been reclassified 1-A.

  After I notified the Red Sox of my change in classification, they immediately got in touch with an Army Reserve office in Boston. The team had a lot of pull. The day after I took my physical at a base in Oakland, I caught a plane to Boston and enlisted in a reserve unit. When I got back to California, a letter was waiting for me advising me of the date for my formal induction. I went down to the Selective Service office and said, “Thank you for the invitation, but you can’t have me. I’ve enlisted in the Reserves.” That pissed them off no end, but there was nothing they could do about it.

  Mary Lou and I were able to get to spring training with the Red Sox, and I made the team again, a totally unexpected development. Eddie Kasko was our new manager, and I really liked him at that point. I would reverse that opinion a bit later. We opened the 1970 season against the Yankees in New York. Gary Peters beat them, 4–2, and I came in to pitch three and two-thirds scoreless innings to get the save. I also received my first taste of the intense rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees. On my way in from the bullpen, while riding one of those golf carts that transported us to the mound, I got smoked in the chest with a beer bottle. That will wake you up and take the edge off you. You realized that the Yankee batters couldn’t possibly damage you any more than that bottle did. I thought New York should have signed up the fan who tossed it. He didn’t have overwhelming velocity, but he threw a heavy, sinking bottle for a strike. The guys had warned me about Yankee rooters, so I wasn’t amazed when I got hit by an object. I was surprised that the fan had such good control on the first day of the season, though.

  I pitched with the club for about two months, leaving them in early June. While playing an exhibition game against the Montreal Expos in Jarry Park, I received a telegram ordering me to report to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for the start of basic training in the Reserves. I had tried to get my induction delayed. Mary Lou was almost seven months’ pregnant with our son Michael, and she was too big to travel. Unable to swing it, I ended up at Fort Polk and Mary Lou went to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with her mother. My base was close enough to
Jackson, so it worked out pretty well. I was supposed to do six weeks there, and then do the rest of my time near Boston.

  My army aptitude test indicated that I would be a crackerjack clerk-typist. I couldn’t type a word, but that was the Army. Their test results were geared more toward what they needed than what a person could actually do. My unit needed someone to do their paperwork, and I had been nominated. Lonborg, Dalton Jones, and Ken Brett were medics, and a few other players were in the motor pool. Our captain put me on the fort baseball team as soon as he found out who I was. We played other bases down there and beat them all. We did so well that he tried to keep me down there, but the higher-ups wouldn’t permit it. That made my final weeks with him tough. He was so pissed off he wouldn’t let me play, and his officers really tried to make life miserable for me, assigning me eternal guard duty. I didn’t mind. I found it very peaceful, watching the armadillos and the rabbits as they played cards at four in the morning.

  Military life was interesting, a mixture of perfect logic with a huge helping of the absurd. We received our immunization shots on our first day. Lining us up single file, they had us walk into a room that offered no clue as to what dangers it held until you were just about to enter. The first thing you saw was two nurses standing across the room. And they looked great. You sauntered through the door, gave them your best smile, and froze just long enough for two medics to grab you and nail you with four shots in each arm. You never knew what hit you. Then you were slung on a cot, where you spent the rest of the day throwing up.

  The Army had a clever way of inducing you to get into top physical shape. We had one guy in our outfit, Ken Livesgood, who was a skinny little runt when he first signed up. They fed him like a horse, exercised him until near death, and he came out like Mr. America. They put me in the best shape of my life and taught me a new respect for punishing my body. When I got in I couldn’t do a chin-up. I had a weak upper body and a big ass. By the time I left basic, my ass had gotten smaller and my chest and arms had expanded. I was overweight when I came in, and Ken was underweight, but we both came out the same. The Army accomplished these miracles through the strategic use of clothing. If you were big you got a tight uniform, little you got a baggy one. The uniforms were all the same size, and you were expected to mold your body into them. That made sense. They attacked us through our fashion consciousness, getting us to work our butts off while at the same time holding down their clothing bill. They simply bought one or two sizes in bulk. It worked well, convincing me that our society would be better off if we had special agents riding about in unmarked cars. They would be like specialized dog catchers. Every time they spotted someone who was obese or smoking too much, they would hustle him off to a variation of boot camp for six weeks. It would put people in terrific shape and return the sparkle to their eyes. Could be disconcerting, though. If some overweight businessmen went into Macy’s to buy socks and suddenly vanished for six weeks, it could cause a small panic. Of course, I believe this is already being done on a much smaller scale. I suspect those video games are part of a plot. I’m certain the Army has a trap door in front of each machine. Whenever a kid registers an unbelievably high score, he types in his initials and the door is automatically sprung, causing him to drop down into the waiting arms of a drill sergeant. Then the kid is transported via an underground railroad to the Pentagon. Three years later, he’s driving a computerized tank through Europe.

  I fit in well in the Army. I wasn’t rebellious, but I did get into trouble for helping Pineapple, an asthmatic kid from Hawaii. We were on a field march with full gear when he passed out, falling into an irrigation ditch. He was in the midst of drowning when I pulled him out. A sergeant came running over, yelling, “Leave him there! People fall by the wayside all the time, but we have to press on!” Somebody forgot to tell this hero that we were still in the States. He thought we were in the heart of Cambodia. He noticed that I had placed my rifle on the ground, or, to use military jargon, had dropped my weapon. He went bonzo, and it led to a very bizarre scene. Pineapple was lying in the ditch, turning seven shades of blue, and this guy is screaming, “Where’s your weapon? You must never drop your weapon in the field, it’s your top priority!” He was like the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now, the one who kept checking the break of the waves for surfing while the world was being blown up around his ears, and who says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like . . . victory.” The sergeant ended his tirade by lecturing me on Army procedure, telling me that I should have kept my ass in gear and let our trucks pick Pineapple up. I don’t know about that. Pineapple didn’t look like he was in the mood to wait for any rides unless they were showing up in a hurry. That little episode got me a week of KP.

  My son Michael was born on July 24, the day I was supposed to go out on bivouac. Bivouac was an excellent opportunity to go out and sleep in the woods while being assaulted by various spiders and snakes. I got to miss that, receiving a two-day pass and getting to the hospital in Mississippi two hours before his birth. He was a cute little butterball, and when I looked at him I got dizzy. Seeing what Mary Lou and I had made was better than pitching a no-hitter.

  It was amazing how many people I met in the Army who were really borderline. There was a whole group of guys from Chicago and two-thirds of them never made it out of high school, and the ones who did were functionally illiterate. The Army didn’t care. It was a lot like baseball. They weren’t interested in having to answer too many questions. It would have been chaos to have a bunch of recruits from MIT come in, saying, “But Sergeant, we really think you should do it our way. It would lead to greater productivity.” You lay something like that on them and you were looking at four weeks of latrine duty. The Army wanted us to keep our heads down, our eyes open, and our mouths shut. At all times. In my whole time in the Reserves, I never once let on that I had been to college. They get a college boy in the army and they try to make him out to be the biggest asshole the world has ever seen. Whenever I was asked about it, I just said, “No, sir, I did not get out of junior high school.”

  At the end of basic, orders came down, transferring me to Fort Worth, Texas. After six weeks on base I had learned at least one thing. The warrant officer could get my orders changed. Fortunately for me, ours was a heavy baseball freak who knew who I was and was able to get me stationed in Massachusetts, in a fort not far from Boston.

  When I got there, they tried to make me an MP. I lasted about a day. Our first sergeant came up to me and said, “Look, you don’t want this job. It’s got late hours and it’s risky. Let’s find something else for you. We have to protect that left arm.” He attached me to the adjutant general’s office. I spent my day answering the phone and typing letters. Whenever a congress-man wrote protesting some boy’s induction, we sent him a form letter. I also typed a lot of letters informing the parents of dead soldiers where and when they could pick up their son’s medals. They had a choice. The medals could be sent home or the parents could come to the fort on a Saturday to view a parade and receive the medals in a small ceremony. Those notices hit me hard. I was a privileged character by virtue of the fact that I could throw strikes; no one was shipping me overseas. I’d get off work at four o’clock, get to the park by five, and throw batting practice. Since I wasn’t on the club’s active roster I couldn’t get into a game, but I could stick around the press box for a few innings and then go back to the fort. Other guys were coming back to the fort, too, only they were coming back in green bags.

  I thought I was doing a good thing, coming to Fenway and throwing batting practice. It seemed like a fine way to show the Sox how much team spirit I had. Later on, I found out they wished I had stayed away. They were having trouble with the military at the time, because one of our players had allegedly told an officer to shit in his hat and the officer told him, “I’m going to have you and the rest of these ballplayers walking point in Quang Tri.” That really hurt the club’s relationship with the Army. That player hadn’
t messed around. He didn’t tell this to a sergeant or a second louie. He picked on a colonel. Somebody later told me that player had been Tony Conigliaro. That made sense—old spur-of-the-moment Tony. I had to stop showing up at the park when people started asking, “What’s Bill Lee doing here? We thought he was supposed to be in Fort Worth, learning how to type.”

  I finished my military commitment for the year just as the baseball season was ending. Coming out of the Army, I found myself in great shape, but with my feelings about armed conflicts clarified. I was opposed to the war in Southeast Asia because of my moral convictions, the chief of which was that I did not want to get my ass splattered all over Nam. I knew the war was immoral and illegal. The writings of Colonel Thompson had convinced me that it was also unwinnable. Thompson was a British officer who had served in Malaysia. He had conclusive proof that the only way to win a guerrilla war of the type that was taking place in Viet Nam was to have maximum air support and a ten-to-one manpower advantage over the enemy. He knew one thing about the Viet Cong that the American public hadn’t been told: They had shovels. They could just dig in and let their pursuers exhaust themselves trying to find them. I built a political science paper around that theme at SC. It got a D-minus. The professor was a conservative, and he said my paper showed a lot of imagination but that it was based on a false premise. He also wrote across the top of it that this country would never lose a war. Seven years later Saigon fell.

  Coming out of basic, I hungered to pitch. When I received an offer to play winter ball, I packed up Mary Lou, Michael, and my equipment, and headed south to warm climes and balmy breezes. I went down with the illusion that only my baseball skills would receive a stiff test while I was there. Little did I know that my military training would also come into use. Thanks to a fastball thrown in the general direction of Ellie Rodriguez’s body, I was going to be involved in a different kind of war in Puerto Rico.