The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  3

  I had lost my top four front teeth when I was a kid, the result of an ill-advised attempt to take a bite out of a football helmet that, at the time, had a speeding linebacker underneath it. Eventually, they were replaced by a dazzling three-tooth bridge with a cap on one side. If you don’t believe it was dazzling, just take a look for yourself. All you have to do is take a trip to Tigres Stadium in Caguas, Puerto Rico. It’s imbedded in the cement somewhere in front of the ballpark.

  I was pitching winter ball for Mayaguez and was the starting pitcher on a Sunday afternoon that saw us hosting Caguas, a bitter rival from a neighboring town. Eliseo Rodriguez, a major-leaguer with the Milwaukee Brewers, was the Caguas catcher. I knew very little about him and had no recollection of ever having faced him before. No matter. We were about to become well acquainted.

  It was a slider that got away from me in the seventh inning that brought us together. Rodriguez was hanging over the plate, guessing sinker. When the ball ran in on him, he was unable to get out of the way, and it clipped him on the elbow. Stepping out of the batter’s box, Ellie rubbed his arm and started yelling at me in Spanish. I didn’t comprehend a word of it, so I just shrugged, hoping he understood that the hit wasn’t intentional. I don’t think he got the message. Dropping his bat, he took two steps toward first base, turned, and charged toward me on the mound. I had an immediate understanding that he was not coming out to tell me what great stuff I had that day. Expecially since his entire team had emptied the dugout and was following behind him. I felt like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. As Rodriguez reached the mound he lunged at me. Stepping to one side, I set myself and caught him with a quick left lead, laying him out on the mound. My manager, Cal Ermer, later told me it was the best lefthand he had ever seen.

  The fans went crazy, and both teams started duking it out on the playing field. Rodriguez, after finally regaining consciousness, picked himself up off the ground and went berserk trying to find me. He kept diving in and out of the pile of players, shouting, “Lee, I get you!” He was so insane he didn’t realize I was standing right next to him, watching as he tried to penetrate the perimeter of the mob. When order was finally restored, we were both thrown out of the game. The next day the headlines read: MAYAGUEZ LOSES, BUT LEE TKO’S RODRIGUEZ IN THE SEVENTH. That was embarrassing for Ellie, who was a former light heavyweight Golden Gloves champion of Puerto Rico. I had damaged his elbow, his jaw, and his pride, and that was something he would not easily forget. Or forgive.

  Four days after the incident, we were scheduled to go to Caguas. All my teammates told me to say behind. Rodriguez had a reputation as a madman, and everyone was certain he would be out for my blood. I couldn’t believe that. I also didn’t want to miss my start that evening.

  I had completely forgotten about Ellie by the time our team bus reached Tigres Stadium in downtown Caguas; I was too busy thinking about the game I was about to pitch. After unloading my gear I stepped off the team bus and started to make my way toward the players’ entrance. I was just about at the door when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a muscular midget creep up from my right side. It was Ellie Rodriguez, looking a lot different out of uniform. As I turned to face him, bam ! I got hit in the back of the head and found my face being rammed into a steel pole. That’s the last thing I remember. Rodriguez had two other guys, apparently relatives, with him, and while I was unconscious they really did a number on me. While his cohorts held me down, Rodriguez sat on my chest and punched my face into pulp. He might have killed me if Ron Woods, an outfielder with our club, hadn’t come out and grabbed him. Moments after Ronnie jumped in, the policia showed up and tried to arrest me. I guess they were going to charge me with assaulting the sidewalk with my face and bleeding on public property. Our club owner talked them out of it, and I was sent back to the team hotel. The most amazing thing in all of this was the reaction of the Caguas townspeople. Hordes of them came to the hotel, saying, “Oh, Bill, please don’t hold this incident against our town or our country. We are not all this way.” That was unnecessary. I already knew that. I did find it funny, however, that one soulful gentleman kept telling me how peaceful they were down there, and then finished his monologue by offering to kill Rodriguez and his entire family. I said no thanks.

  As much as I wanted it to, the incident would not go away. I flew back to Boston for a few days to get fitted for a new set of choppers, and when I returned to Mayaguez I was met at the airport by the club’s general manager. He seemed very excited, and when I asked him what was up, he said, “Bill, how would you like to make three thousand dollars?” I asked him what I had to do, and he replied, “You’re going to fight a three-round preliminary against Ellie Rodriguez before next Thursday’s game.” I said, “You got to be shitting me! I’m scheduled to pitch that night. I can’t fight three rounds and then go out and pitch a ballgame.” Pondering that for a minute, he said, “No, no. You’re right. Okay, you don’t have to pitch that evening.” I told him there was no way. Fighting Rodriguez on the mound was merely a case of self-defense; he had attacked me. But I wasn’t about to get into the ring with him. Lacing up those gloves would have been playing right into his hands. Then again I guess I could have handled him for three rounds. I would have danced and counterpunched. But we’ll never find out. I had come down to pitch, not to fight, and I wasn’t about to forget that. Deep in my heart I wanted to get back at Rodriguez, but I also knew that I would be seeing him in the States. Whether or not he knew it, he had just made my list.

  My life underwent a drastic change in 1971. My commitment to the military consisted of only one weekend a month and two weeks out of the year, so I knew I would get to play my first uninterrupted season of major-league ball. I had a great spring and had made the club as its primary long reliever. I also became good friends with Gary Peters and Sparky Lyle, the two renegades who were responsible for starting me on the road that has taken me to where I am today.

  Gary Peters was my hero. Talk about being able to handle the call of the bright lights—this guy could do it all. He could drink a half bottle of VO and show absolutely no ill effects from it. There was at least one time, though, when he was forced to pay the piper. After spending a good part of the evening pumping villainous potions into his body, he had to drag himself to the ballpark and run through a series of wind-sprints in killing ninety-degree heat. By the time he was finished he had punished himself so badly that he could barely crawl from the field into the clubhouse. When he finally got to his locker he collapsed in a heap. I thought he had died, but after a few minutes we noticed his eyelids were fluttering open. Picking up his head, he just barely managed to get his mouth open. When his words came, it was as if they were arriving from the grave. “Please,” Gary implored us, “don’t anybody light any matches near me, or we’re all going up in smoke.”

  Peters was an eight-year veteran, and he took me under his wing. He once told me that as I got older I should become aware of any young lefthanders who might take my job, that I should find out their weaknesses and take them to that bar. After the season commenced Gary had a few bad outings, and he started biting me on the left elbow. I took it as a compliment.

  Peters introduced me to Lindell’s AC in Detroit, a great bar with a heavy sports atmosphere that served as the backdrop for some of baseball’s funniest moments. God, I loved that place. Lindell’s owner had a cigarette lighter that looked like a .22 pistol. You pulled the trigger and a flame would come out of the barrel. One night Norm Cash, the Tiger first baseman, was up there with several players, and they started messing around with the gun. They pointed it at each other and then aimed it at their own heads. Finally one of them took out a cigarette and went to light it. Pulling the trigger, he managed to put a bullet hole through the office wall. Wrong gun. When Cash realized what had happened, he paled out. He looked like a cadaver and ended up going into a slump for about a month. That was the kind of story that could put Peters in stitches for the rest of the season. He seemed to have
a taste for the absurd.

  Gary was always into something. He had a benign violent streak. Once he was in a nightclub in Minnesota when he, Yaz, and Aparicio started tearing each other’s clothes off. Luis was an impeccable dresser, and it started when Gary tore the lapel off one of his Oleg Cassini suits. Yaz grabbed Gary from behind and ripped his shirt to shreds. Naturally, Gary and Luis united and turned on Carl. They used to do that all the time. Carl, of course, always made sure to wear one of his twenty-dollar suits, which gave him a big advantage in these confrontations. On this particular evening, after having his jacket converted into a heap of rags, Yaz did not come back with an immediate retaliatory response. Waiting until he got back to the team hotel, he got his revenge by throwing together a pile of clothes belonging to Luis and Gary and setting them on fire. He nearly burned a hole through their hotel-room floor. Back at the nightclub, everything had calmed down when Reggie Smith decided to get involved in the fun. But Gary was tired of the whole thing, and he let Reggie know it before he even had a chance to grab a cufflink. He did this by holding a steak knife to Smith’s throat, telling him that if he moved he’d cut out his Adam’s apple. Reggie not only didn’t move, he didn’t breathe for what seemed like fifteen minutes.

  Smith was Gary’s favorite victim. Reggie was into scuba diving. Once, while on a road trip, a bunch of us were sitting in the restaurant of the Holiday Inn ordering breakfast, when a girl came running in, shouting that we had to see what was going on in the pool. Once out there, we found Reggie sitting at the bottom of the hotel pool in full scuba gear. Gary made note of this, and a few months later took Reggie on an expedition to the underwater caves in Freshwater Springs, Florida. They dived down with searchlights and tanks filled with about thirty minutes’ worth of oxygen. As soon as they got deep inside of one of those caverns, Gary stole Smith’s light and took off. He came back five minutes later and found Reggie praying. Smith had about four minutes of oxygen left, and they had to use the buddy system to get out of the cave.

  Though Gary was a starter, the bullpen was really his domain. He was adept at keeping us loose out there. Whenever the team was down by a few runs, he would grab Lew Krausse in a headlock, announcing, “I’m going to squeeze Lew’s head until we score or he turns blue.” He’d get Lew to the point of coma before he’d let go. Krausse must have thanked God that we had a good-hitting ballclub. Peters did that to him twice, and the team was able to rally both times.

  Lyle was our short man, and he was the greatest, befriending me the moment I joined the club. He was the sort of guy who would give you the shirt off his back if you asked him for it. Sparky was a man of simple philosophy. He believed that water was to be used as a mix, never a staple. One night in New York, Sparky got so blind he couldn’t stand. He was leaning against a wall, calling for a taxi at four in the morning. Finally one stopped. Unable to move, Sparky just looked at the driver and said, “Cabbie, I want you to take me to the Biltmore Hotel.” The cabbie poked his head out the window, looked at Lyle, and said, “You’re leaning on it.” Following his and Peters’ examples, I formulated the Bill Lee exercise program: Take a Jack Daniel’s in your left hand and a bottle of Molson’s in your right. Do two sips of the beer, down the Jack Daniel’s, and then chase it with the rest of the brew. Do a minimum of eight reps and then pass out. Not only is this a wonderful way to improve flexibility, it also relaxes tension.

  I found a lot of drinking going on in the majors, especially on the road. I was doing more than my share. The partying begins at the airport. We usually get to the airport early, so we kill time in the terminal lounge. Many times the flight doesn’t take off as scheduled. The longer the delay, the longer we’re in that lounge. When we finally do board our plane, the first thing they do is start pounding drinks into you. There are usually open bars on board, and we had our methods of getting a little bit more than our normal allotment of liquid refreshments. I was often designated to distract the stewardess while the guys went in and grabbed all the two-ouncers of Scotch they could carry. While I set up a screen with the stewardess, another scouting party would be sent to keep management occupied. If you’re ever on a plane with ballplayers and you see a bunch of them involved with their coaches in an intense discussion about the subtleties of the slider, you know the alcoholic supplies are being raided. By the time the plane touches down most of them will be severely hammered.

  The games present us with excuses to take a drink. If we have a good game, we want to celebrate. If we were horseshit, we want to forget. Young players drink to fit in, to take part in the camaraderie and relieve the boredom. When a player sees his career coming to an end, it’s a more dangerous time. He tends to drink a lot more than he used to, knowing that his days in the sun are almost at an end and there’s nothing he can do about it. That’s one of the off-shoots of being unable to separate the game from your life. You drink out of fear, mindful that when you get off that bar stool and walk out that door, the Grim Reaper is waiting with a pink slip and a greeting: “Hello, Jim. You gave up that home run with the bases loaded last night. You’re gone.”

  Alcohol and baseball go hand in hand, and whether or not the powers that be care to admit it, it’s a marriage that baseball condones. Bowie Kuhn was quick to preach about the evils of alcohol and drugs, yet he allowed breweries to form a major portion of baseball’s advertising. He made statements for public consumption that lauded the work baseball is doing in the area of addiction rehabilitation, but I noticed that after doing all this terrific PR, he looked the other way when a ballplayer hit a home run and the team announcer celebrated with a plug for beer. Some may call this a contradiction; the commissioner and the owners call it economics.

  Alcohol is like anything else. It’s only as bad as the person it’s being poured into. If it’s used to heighten an occasion, or to take an edge off stress, I don’t see a problem. Trouble starts when you either lose control and let the bottle run you, or when you believe its promises of immortality. You realize that no matter how much you punish yourself, you always seem to wake up the next day. Pretty soon you’re convinced that you will never die. When that happens I guess it is time to look for help before your life becomes one long, lost weekend. You can lose sight of the dangers because athletes are treated as an elite class. It’s rare that one of us gets called to task for anything. While I was in Boston, a story was making the rounds that Wayne Cashman of the Boston Bruins had been picked up on a misdemeanor. He was brought down to the police station and told he was allowed to make one phone call. Wayne called a Chinese restaurant for some takeout and had it delivered to the precinct house. As far as I know, he probably had the cops pay for it.

  Alcohol never hurt me. I never showed up drunk at the ballpark, and I was never incapacitated to the point that I couldn’t perform the day after the night before. I’ve pitched through a few hangovers, but I’ve always been one who believes that, quite often, the worse an athlete feels, the more menacing he becomes. Juan Marichal was the same way. When he was feeling sore with a bad back or stiffness in his joints, he was amazing. When he felt super, he got jocked. Unfortunately, by the time he joined our club he was feeling super most of the time. There were days when I would get my nine hours of z’s, get up with the dawn, do some calisthenics, have a great breakfast, and get to the ballpark early. I wouldn’t make it past the first inning. On the other hand, there was many a time when I got to the stadium with my head on fire, still smelling of last night, and I’d go out and twist the opposition into pretzels. I guess what they say about “no pain, no gain” has some truth to it. When you’re hurting badly enough you don’t think about pressure. Your body is like an open wound, so your instincts take over, and this is still basically an instinctive game. Managers try to make you live right and watch Patton before each ballgame, hoping to get you psyched. Your adrenaline reaches an early peak and explodes like a premature ejaculation. When it comes time to romp, you can’t perform. But guys like me who can sleep standing up, or like Bernie
Carbo, who would nod out in the bus racks on the way to the park, are ready when the bell rings. You show me a bunch of guys who come dragging into the stadium, and I’ll show you one dangerous ballclub.

  The front office had made a lot of moves prior to the start of the 1971 season, in an attempt to restructure the ballclub. Boston was haunted by its history of teams boasting .290 club batting averages, which would lead the league in home runs and runs scored and still finish fourth. They had ticket-takers who could hit .270, but they never won anything. To reverse that trend, we traded Tony C to the Angels for Ken Tatum, a hard-throwing right-handed reliever, and Doug Griffin. Tatum had already had two great seasons with California, but everyone knew that Griffin was the key to the deal. Doug was a minor-league second baseman who, our scouts claimed, was the second coming of Bill Mazeroski. That deal allowed us to ship Mike Andrews and Luis Alvarado to the White Sox for Luis Aparicio, the best shortstop in baseball. After moving Petrocelli to third on a permanent basis, it became quite clear that we had radically changed the complexion of our ballclub. These moves beefed up our team’s speed and defense, the two areas that formed this club’s Achilles heel. A lot of people screamed that we had sacrificed too much power in surrendering Conigliaro and Andrews, but as a ground-ball pitcher, I thought the deals were great.

  Aparicio was amazing. Everyone says his glove got him into the Hall of Fame. They don’t have to convince me. When he joined the Red Sox he was thirty-seven years old. At least that’s what he admitted to. He had lost a step, but he had the greatest hands I had ever seen, and he knew where to play everybody. He could no longer steal a lot of bases; he was saving his legs for more important things—like walking. Based on how good he looked when we got him, I would have loved to have seen him in his prime, when he was swiping bases and moving at full throttle in the field. He must have been unreal. He and Griffin shored up our infield. Griffin was everything the scouting reports said he was: fast, with good range and soft hands. He was excellent on the double play, and I sure appreciated that. When you have guys like Aparicio and Griffin making plays that other infielders couldn’t, and turning double plays that you have no right to expect, it really means a lot to a team. They save runs, not only the runs they cut off with great stops, but the ones a tiring pitcher might give up later on. They cut down on the number of pitches needed to get twenty-seven outs, and that can make a difference in a tight ballclub.