The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  I thought he was joking. I knew some players had walked out on their contracts. Most of them were homesick or couldn’t handle the food and water. Others went into culture shock. But I liked it in Venezuela. I pointed out that I was leaving my clothes here in an apartment that was paid up until the end of the season. He said it didn’t make a difference. Others had claimed the same thing, and then didn’t return. After his refusal, he did something sadistic. He picked up a piece of paper, waved it in front of my face, and said, “This is what you want, and you’re not going to get it.” It was my letter. He had already filled it out and signed it, but he wasn’t going to give it to me. He stuck it in his desk. Pushing him out of the way, I grabbed the note and hightailed it back to the airport. By the time I got there, it was too late for us to catch the flight to Aruba, so I got screwed out of that adventure. But Mary Lou and I did get to spend three days in Curaçao.

  When we got back, Aparicio was angry with me. Luis claimed I made him look bad by leaving the way I did. We didn’t get along too well after that, and I did end up going before the season was over. I felt bad. I had looked forward to playing winter ball, but Puerto Rico and Venezuela had been somewhat disappointing. I still would like to play at least one more season in Latin America, though. I always wanted to go to Cuba, study their baseball program, lay some slow curves on Castro, and then go body-surfing in the Bay of Pigs. It’s one of my many unfulfilled fantasies.

  Upon returning to the States, I started to hear rumors about how the Red Sox were going to back up the truck and make some drastic personnel changes. Scott, Lonborg, Culp, Conigliaro, and Peters were all supposedly on the block. And Boston was also reportedly entertaining thoughts about dealing away young, promising, charming, and handsome Bill Lee. To the New York Yankees.

  4

  I would have left baseball if that trade with the Yankees had gone through. Having grown up hating their cold, corporate image and their strutting glorification of elitism, there was no way I would have put on pinstripes. I would have headed for Japan. The Yankees, though, weren’t all that interested in getting me. Their manager, Ralph Houk, wanted Lyle for his bullpen. Boston countered by offering me instead, and New York, bless their hearts, turned them down. The Red Sox gave in and sent them Lyle for Danny Cater. I’ll never forget how I felt when I first heard the news about the deal. Relieved. I also remember thinking, Jesus, how could we let Lyle go? You would have thought this team had learned its lesson after it got suckered out of Babe Ruth!

  It was a frustrating time. I thought the Red Sox were on the verge of becoming a force. We had made a terrific trade with Milwaukee, sending Scott, Lonborg, Billy Conigliaro, and Lahoud to the Milwaukee Brewers for Tommy Harper, Marty Pattin, and Lew Krausse. Harper was an outfielder who could flat-out motor on the basepaths and hit with some power. He would give us our first real base-stealing threat since the Reconstruction. Krausse could pitch, and I thought Pattin would win twenty games for us just by showing up. While hating to lose Scott, I knew that getting Harper would allow Yaz to move to first, and that the deal would give us the speed and pitching help we needed. I really liked the look of our roster after that deal. Then we had to go and blow it by trading Lyle.

  Clif Keane and Larry Claflin, two reporters in Boston, instigated that deal. They hosted a radio show called Clif and Claf, though in our clubhouse it was better known as Syph and Clap. Both of these gentlemen, neither one of whom could find their way around a baseball field without the aid of a map and a guide, loved to sit back in the safety of the radio studio and take a lot of cheap shots at players. They tried to pass this off as incisive journalism. None of it was constructive, and a good deal of it was cruel. When George Scott reported to camp overweight, they suggested that he be melted down for hockey pucks. That sort of thing. Nothing they said broadened anyone’s perception of the game or imparted any sense of the joy that baseball is about. They regularly passed on some less than complimentary remarks about me, but they never got under my skin. I always considered the source.

  I thought both of these geniuses seemed anxious to get Danny Cater over here. It was as if he was the answer to everything that ailed the Sox. We kept hearing how Cater was hitting about six thousand against us in Fenway Park, and what a great first baseman he was. Clif and Claf also made it pretty clear that there would be nothing wrong in getting rid of that tobacco-chewing, Dewars-drinking left-hander, not realizing that Sparky was the reincarnation of the Babe and that dealing him to New York would spell our ruination.

  I was directly affected by the deal. My role on the club in 1971 had been that of long reliever. I was the guy who would come in during the middle innings and try to keep the game close until we could take a lead and roll out Lyle. Now the Red Sox management was whispering loudly that I was going to replace Sparky as the short man. I told them what they could do with that idea. I knew I wasn’t physically up to the rigors of short relief.

  The ultimate reliever would be a Tibetan monk. Standing on the mound, he would raise his hand and direct the ball toward the plate simply by using mind over matter. From the moment it left his palm, it would gradually accelerate until it reached the point where the batter could make contact. Then it would disappear and rematerialize in the catcher’s mitt. Even the great hitters would get jammed by that pitch. The Red Sox didn’t have any apprentice monks on the roster, but they did have Sparky, and he was the next best thing. Lyle used to get a sore arm once every year. It was voluntarily self-inflicted every spring training. During his first few days in camp, he would throw as hard as he could, allowing himself to break down the adhesions in his arm. That left wing would get so sore he’d be unable to pick up an empty glass with it. After a few days of rest the soreness would disappear, and he would be ready to pitch almost every day. An ideal short man should be able to answer the bell several times a week and be used as often as three or four days in a row. I was young and my arm wasn’t conditioned to throw that often. I had tried that regimen a couple of times under Dick Williams, and each time I did, my arm paid the price. It would stiffen so badly I would be unable to comb my hair for a week. I didn’t feel this would be good for the club or my general appearance, so I balked.

  Kasko was good enough to tell me that he understood my problem and that he had no intention of overworking me, explaining that he would work Tatum and me in tandem. We would be alternated, with an eye toward getting the maximum use out of us with the minimum amount of strain. I could go along with that Eddie must have liked my attitude about it. Praising me in the papers, he told the press the rumors that Boston had offered me to New York were unfounded, and that he never would have permitted the Sox to trade me for Cater. I liked that. It made it seem as if Eddie was in my corner, and I think he was. Until he saw my T-shirt in spring training.

  I had walked into the clubhouse in Winter Haven resplendent in the latest addition to my personal wardrobe: a T-shirt with a huge red tongue emblazoned across the front of it, along with the slogan LICK DICK IN ’72. The words weren’t referring to any dick in general. They were specifically aimed at Richard Nixon, who was running for reelection that year. Kasko saw it and went out of his gourd. He turned out to be more conservative than my father. Eddie loved Nixon, and he thought wearing that shirt was akin to using the American flag as toilet paper. From that day on our relationship was never the same, and I know it affected the way he used me during the season. I made forty-seven appearances, but any time I got into a crucial game it was by accident. I won seven and saved only five. Most of those wins came in games that seemed hopelessly lost when I was brought in. The team would explode for a bunch of runs, and I would luck out a win. Kasko hardly ever used me in a save situation. It was a frustrating season.

  I wasn’t the only player who was less than pleased with his summer. Yaz was coming off his worst year ever, and after the first few months of the ’72 season, it appeared that he was still in his slump. He was really taking a lot of heat in the papers, but to his teammates, Ca
rl was golden. He didn’t let his problems at the plate affect his fielding or his relationship with his teammates. No matter how badly things were going for him, he would still come to my locker and talk baseball or fishing. Carl loved baseball, enjoyed every aspect of it. He would usually be the first one in the clubhouse, looking to get a bridge game started. I wasn’t a bad card player and was often teamed up with him. He liked me because we won money together. I cherish our friendship, even though it may have shaved a few years off my career. Nightlife doesn’t kill a ballplayer. What gets him is trying to keep up with the demands of running around with someone like Yaz. Not to bars or anything. He was always being asked to attend benefits or participate at openings. He rarely turned down a request, and he would often ask me to accompany him. Wherever we went, everyone was quick to buy us a drink. Carl was in animal shape and could handle anything; I never saw him drunk. But it was murder on whoever was with him. Carl would be standing in the middle of the crowd, demonstrating how he waited on the curveball, and I’d be hanging on to a bar stool, slipping into a world that was one step beyond hammered. I was amazed. I’d never seen anyone in the kind of super condition that Carl kept himself in. It was phenomenal. It didn’t do my poor body any good, though.

  The Player’s Association, in a dispute with the owners over the size of our pension benefits, called a strike that tore out the first two weeks of the 1972 season. Gary Peters was the Red Sox player rep, and I was his assistant. I thought we were making a mistake striking when we did. Those first two weeks don’t make much of an impact on attendance; the weather’s too cold. We should have struck on the Fourth of July, when attendance is about to peak. Owners only believe you mean business if you hit them in the wallet. Being an assistant players’ rep gave me an opportunity to observe our union leader, Marvin Miller, up close. Boy, was that impressive. He went in and beat the owners punch for punch. It wasn’t because the owners were weak or disorganized, as some reports intimated. It was because Marvin was always so well prepared. He took nothing for granted. If an owner made some point, Marvin would pounce on him with twenty pounds of facts that left his poor victim mumbling to himself. The owners’ propaganda machine tried to vilify him as a devil who cared more about his own glory than he did about the game. By the time they got through with him, you would have thought he had sold his firstborn to slavers. It was all bullshit. Marvin was an intelligent and compassionate man who cared about the game and the players.

  The day we went on strike, he voluntarily gave up all claims on his salary, feeling that if we were going to be made to walk the financial plank, then it was only right that he walk with us. He did this without fanfare, and it won him a lot of respect. However, not all the players were solidly behind the walkout. Reggie Smith stood up the day we took the vote, announcing that he was voting no because every week out was going to cost him four thousand dollars, while it would cost most of the other players less than eight hundred. I looked at him and said, “Reggie, you didn’t say that, did you? That didn’t come out of your mouth?” But it had. Yaz and Petrocelli were also against the strike. They had been treated well by management and were close to Mr. Yawkey, so this stance was consistent with their honestly held beliefs. And Reggie would go whichever way Carl went. That was totally consistent with his nature, too. The rest of the club voted strike and the brief discussion between Smith and me was forgotten. By everybody but Reggie. From that day on I was numero uno on his shit list.

  After the season commenced, we played as if we were still walking a picket line. God, were we bad. We were getting whipped by clubs like Milwaukee and Cleveland, teams we should have been eating up. It got so bad that Kasko took to ordering random bed checks. He assigned different coaches to stay in the lobby after curfew, in order to catch late returnees as they stumbled in. The first one, in Milwaukee, was the most successful; it nailed seven of us. Ray Culp got caught coming in five minutes past the deadline. He had been across the street buying an order of tacos to go. Upon returning to the hotel, he discovered that he was being fined a hundred dollars. He flipped out, yelling, “One hundred bucks! You have got to be kidding me! That’s thirty-three dollars a taco!” No one had to tell Ray a recession was coming.

  I got caught, too. They nailed me coming in the next afternoon, but still only fined me the same hundred. When Culp heard that, he was steaming. He came over to me and said, “How can this be fair? I’m five minutes late and you stay out all night, but we both got fined the same amount.” I told him, “Ray, there is no justice.” And there wasn’t. Ray had bought only three tacos, while I had spent the evening feasting on a long-legged rack of ribs, yet we had both received identical bills. I apologized for the inequity of it all, and Ray just laughed. Culp was a tough man. He once gave up a line drive to Willie Horton that caromed off Ray’s head, shooting into center field where Reggie Smith made a shoestring catch on it. Culp shrugged it off, got the next batter, and finished the game. When he came into the clubhouse he said, “Don’t tell me I don’t know where to play hitters.”

  Curfews and bed checks are time-honored baseball traditions, and they met with a certain amount of success with our ballclub. I can honestly say that every time a bed check was held, they found all the beds. Right where we had left them. Ballplayers get bored with the routine of life on the road, and this boredom makes it very difficult to resist the lure of the bright lights. Every city has a lot of pavement lying in it, waiting to be pounded. I recently saw a television interview with Nancy Marshall and Bobbie Bouton, the former wives of Mike Marshall and Jim Bouton, in which they discussed the extracurricular sexual activities of married ballplayers on the road. The interviewer asked then if they thought any of the ballplayers were true to their spouses. I think it was Nancy who said, “I believe Tommy John is.” That was it; she couldn’t think of anyone else. Out of approximately five hundred married ballplayers, she was able to come up with one name. I don’t believe the odds are as bleak as all that. But they’re close.

  Most ballplayers subscribe to the blind frog theory of sexual awareness. The blind frog is a species in which neither gender can see. The female lets her prospective mate know she’s in heat by a series of noisome movements. The male responds by jumping on anything that sends off vibrations, until he hits the jackpot. Most ballplayers are like that. They will jump the bones of anything that moves.

  Baseball is a game for collectors. Teams collect wins and losses, players collect stats, and fans collect souvenirs. There was a woman in Detroit who bribed a bat boy to scrape up some of the dirt around home plate because she wanted to have some of the earth that Tiger catcher Bill Freehan squatted over every night. A souvenir of any sort allows the fan the illusion that he owns a personal share in his hero’s life. In that sense the groupie is the ultimate fan. She doesn’t settle for a mere autograph. She wants the hand that signs it, and everything that’s connected to it. For one night. Athletes are made to feel like gladiators from the days of the Roman Empire. If you took a whole garrison of centurions into Istanbul, what are they going to do on a Friday night? You can only pillage for so long at the ballpark, then you have to search out some relaxation. Strutting into the local tavern of the newly conquered town, you go up to the bar and announce, “I just smoked the shit out of the Cincinnati Reds!” Some smitten young thing is going to immediately say, “Oh, you devil you, let’s fuck!” And then it’s all over. Ballplayers are suckers for free drinks and long legs who tell them anything they want to hear.

  The problem with groupies—or Annies, as they are sometimes called—is that they can give you an overinflated sense of yourself. They go into orgasm if you just look at them and can really make you believe that you are the Second Coming in the sack. It’s rarely true. We’re just ordinary human beings with excessively greased hormones. There was a female writer in Oakland who did a study on ballplayers in bed. I remember her, because she wore short dresses and no underwear and conducted her survey by trying to screw every ballplayer she came in contact w
ith. When she was through, she told me that even though ballplayers have great hands on the field, most of them were lousy in bed. Especially the superstars, who seemed to think that the moment they dropped their shorts the earth would start spinning off its axis. One example of this was the home-run slugger who got it on with her while he spoke to his wife over the phone. When I asked what the conversation was about, the writer said, “Nothing much. He asked her how the kids were and whether or not she had gotten the car fixed. It was all very sick. As soon as his conversation was over, he reached orgasm, rolled off me, and went to sleep.” She also told me that the best lovers were usually utility infielders, who, she observed, were all blessed with the ability to play a lot of positions.

  Her revelations didn’t surprise me. I had once attended a banquet in Washington, D.C., that was held to honor several of the nation’s greatest athletes. Also in attendance was a young woman who had dated several players from Washington, Boston, and Baltimore. She covered all the sports. The highlight of this particular bash occurred when one of the honorees was introduced as “that fabulous superstar,” prompting her to yell, in a voice loud enough to be heard in Guam, “Superstar, my ass. He’s the worst lay in the major leagues.” Everybody went into shock, and the outburst put the embarrassed ballplayer away for the rest of the evening. He crawled back to his seat and hid under a napkin.

  I met the most famous of all groupies, Chicago Shirley, during my first visit to Comiskey Park. She had achieved a legendary status in baseball, and by now was something more than just another Annie. I realized that when I later met Detroit Shirley, Milwaukee Shirley, and a Shirley from Cleveland. Shirley had become a franchise, with outlets all over the country. Just like McDonald’s.