The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  Each Annie has a different approach. Some send letters with intimate photos enclosed. Others will send flowers to a player’s room, accompanied by a written invitation to dinner. Then there is the direct approach. You’d be sitting in the bullpen and some hot number would lean over the stands and say, “Hey, you with the cute ass. How about it?” I had one girl do that to me. She spent fifteen minutes trying to talk me into meeting her after the game. She kept insisting that she was madly in love with me and that her life would be unfullfilled unless she took me home with her that night. Despite her declaration of undying devotion, I had to pass. She didn’t shed a tear. She just asked me what my roommate was doing that night. I said, “I thought you were in love with me!” She responded, “I am in love with you. But I’m also fickle.”

  The most memorable Annie I had ever met was a woman who followed our club to Baltimore for a weekend series against the Orioles. Our paths crossed under unusual circumstances. I was seated in the hotel bar when one of my teammates came over and told me I had to check out the scene in his room. When we got there, I found this woman taking on what looked like half the ballclub at once. I was invited to partake, but it was one of the few times I was not interested in experiencing something exotic firsthand. I would not venture into that alley. It may not have been the voice of God that was calling us in there, it may have been millions of bacteria armed with baseball bats, waiting to bang us on the head. Or any other exposed part of our anatomy. Hours after this initial “meeting,” I saw the same girl downstairs in the bar, looking to get picked up. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to go over to her and ask, “Aren’t you ever satisfied?” I wasn’t criticizing, I was just curious. She assured me that she was easy to satisfy. She just liked to have a good time. When I asked her what she considered a good time, she said, “The Pittsburgh Penguins. All three lines.”

  There are dangers out there in the night, and many of them are able to hide under the cover of darkness. Two guys on our club once picked up what they thought was a very foxy lady in a dimly lit bar and took her back for an evening of ecstasy in their hotel room. The next morning one of the Rover Boys woke up and got his first look at this girl in the first light of morning. Thoroughly disconcerted, he slipped out from under the covers and sneaked into the bathroom, where he waited to observe his roomie’s reaction. He was not disappointed. His buddy woke up, rolled over, took one peep, and let out a scream. It sounded as if he had suffered a heart attack. In telling us about her later that evening, they both agreed that they had felt like the producer in The Godfather, the one who woke up and found his horse’s severed head in his bed. Both of them swore they would never fool around again. I could understand that. I’ve had the same thing happen. That’s why I went out and bought permanent contact lenses. Before I got them, there was many a time that I would end up with a woman whose face could only be handled by an advanced form of braille. And even then, I risked ruining my hands.

  Bringing home an unattractive girl isn’t the only risk one takes during the relentless search for the perfect rack of ribs. I got hammered in Texas once, in a place called Friday’s. At around midnight, some girl came over and started to throw all kinds of moves at me. In the midst of her come-on, she opened her purse, took out a little black pill, and said, “Take this. It will make you feel great.” I’m all for feeling great, so I downed it with my beer. Within minutes I was totally wasted. I was sitting at the bar one moment, and then lying in somebody’s guacamole dip the next. Then I blanked out. Upon waking up I found myself in a strange motel room, lying on a sagging waterbed to which I had not been formally introduced. I roused myself up, went outside, and found twenty-five rather obvious homosexuals prancing around the pool. I said to myself, “Oh, God! This just can’t be happening to me.” I started to check myself all over and kept looking out by that pool, waiting for Rod Serling to show up dressed as Truman Capote. Fortunately, it turned out that the room belonged to that girl. She and her sister had taken me home and looked after me. That was a relief.

  The worst sort of trouble can occur when a woman becomes emotionally attached to a ballplayer she knows she can’t have. I saw that happen twice. Once it was with a player who treated a girl rather shabbily, telling her he was single and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Later she found out he was married with three kids. The next time Lothario came to town, she confronted him with the facts in a mature and sensible manner. She was great about it, even going so far as to suggest that they have one last fling for old time’s sake. Midway through their lovemaking, she suggested that she assume the female superior position. He thought that was a terrific idea. A ballplayer is always looking for ways to conserve energy. She worked him over pretty good and had him just about ready to peak. He was moaning and his eyes were shut. Luckily, he opened them just in time to see the knife she was about to crash through his chest. He blocked her thrust and slung her off of him in one fluid move. Getting up from the bed, he threw her clothes at her and chucked her out of his room. That was a close shave, and he was shaking over it for days. He retained his sense of humor, though. Whenever he told the story, he finished it by saying, “There is only one thing I can’t figure out. She was just as naked as I was, and that knife was like a machete. It must have been twelve inches long. What I want to know is where was she hiding it?” I guess we’ll never know.

  The other time I saw a girl get emotionally fired up over a ballplayer was when a lady in Anaheim fell madly in love with Lyle. She hung all over him and wouldn’t let him out of her sight. When we finished our series there, she realized she wouldn’t see him until next season. While saying good-bye to him, she broke down into tears. I felt badly about that, but she was with a friend who knew how to cheer her up. This friend was an older woman who was very well known around the league. As soon as this heart-broken babe started bawling, her buddy hugged her and said, “There, there, don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine. The Orioles are coming in at seven o’clock tonight.” That’s the sort of practical partner that ballplayers pray for.

  I always theorized that it was a mistake on the part of management not to take advantage of the skirt-chasing tendencies of ballplayers. On our club, for instance, we were always screwing up on the basepaths, missing signs and running past the coach’s red light. If the front office was really on the ball, they would have gotten two Playboy bunnies on the coaching lines. I’m not sure how many more signs we would have remembered, but we sure would have paid more attention when they were being flashed.

  A flukey piece of baserunning played a large part in our losing the division in ’72. After a languid start, we began to play good ball in June. Baltimore had traded Frank Robinson—a dumb move that transformed them into just another ballclub—and none of the other teams in the division had asserted themselves, so our poor start didn’t kill us. By mid-season, we were involved in a four-team pennant race with Detroit, Baltimore, and New York. The Yankees were being carried by Lyle, who was easily the best relief pitcher in baseball that year. Our end of the deal wasn’t holding up quite as well. Mario Guerrero, the shortstop New York included in the Lyle trade, was still in the minor leagues, and Cater was spending a lot of time on the bench. He was a mess. Danny had slumped early, just like the rest of the team, and Lyle was saving games for the Yankees from day one. The Boston media castigated the Red Sox front office for being hoodwinked by New York, and Cater had to bear the brunt of the fans’ dissatisfaction with the deal. The season wasn’t a month old before he had received a new nickname: “Why Me?” Danny would hit a line drive, really smoke the ball, and someone would make a great play on him for the out. He’d come back to the bench, shaking his head and mumbling, “Why me? Why is it always me?” I think the pressure of the deal got to him. That and the Wall. He saw that seductive Green Monster and tried to knock it over every time he came to the plate. That wasn’t the type of hitter he was, and it hurt him. He ended up batting around .230.

  Cater had the funniest
way of dealing with things. He treated each at bat as if it was a small melodrama. Once, while we were playing the Brewers, he got hit in the helmet by one of their pitchers. The shot dropped him like a sack of cement. Several of us came running out of the dugout to see how he was, and we were joined at the plate by George Scott, now playing first base for Milwaukee. Cater rolled on the ground, screaming, “I can’t see! I can’t see!” Everyone was frightened except George, who laughed and said, “Try opening your eyes!” That did the trick. Why me, indeed.

  Danny also had a few problems in the field. He was a good first basemen, but he fouled up a lot of pick-off attempts. At first I thought he was unaware that he had been given the sign, but after talking to him I realized that he was completely unaware that a sign existed. He screwed me up on several occasions. I eventually considered hiring a Western Union man to come out to first during a game and bring him a telegram, announcing, “I AM GOING TO THROW TO FIRST STOP BE AWAKE.” It’s doubtful it would have made a difference. Danny was never ready for me. I think he was too busy daydreaming about how Lyle might be faring that day. Actually, I didn’t blame him for messing up the play. I had a pretty good move and could pick off my own first baseman in a heartbeat.

  There were several keys to our pennant drive that season. The single biggest factor was the pitching of Luis Tiant. Tiant had been a winning pitcher with the Indians before getting traded to the Twins in 1970. He pitched well in Minnesota, but he came up with a sore arm and was released at the start of the 1971 season. Atlanta picked him up. He didn’t pitch well there and before the year was half over, he was sold to Boston. It was the best deal the Sox ever made. Tiant struggled for us that season, but he ran all the time, jogging long distances in order to get back into shape. He hadn’t thrown much over the last two years, and his legs were weak. As soon as they got stronger, his arm came around. Kasko did a good job with him, using him first as a mop-up man and then in long relief. Luis worked his way into the starting rotation, and once he started pitching regularly, he was awesome. He had sixty different pitches that he threw from ninety different angles. When he first came into the majors he was strictly a flamethrower, but now he mixed his pitches up. He was like a right-handed Mike Cuellar, except he could still throw hard. Watching him pitch was the most fun I could have in baseball without being on the mound myself. He turned the pitching rubber into a stage, pirouetting and twisting into the most bizarre gyrations, so that the batters had no idea where the ball was coming from. Luis won fifteen games for us, pitching six shutouts and leading the league in ERA. He stabilized our pitching staff.

  Tiant was also great to have in the clubhouse. God, I loved being around him. He was a sensitive and funny man who kept everybody in the clubhouse loose. He could criticize a player in a way that nobody found offensive. Once Harper pulled a rock in the outfield, costing us a few runs in a game we lost. When we came into the locker room, everybody was upset. Luis got up off his chair to go to the john. He took a dump, flushed the toilet, and yelled, “Goodbye, Tommy!” It broke up everyone and took the edge off a tough loss. Luis and Tommy were like brothers and were always getting on each other. Harper would make fun of Luis’ big behind and would hang pictures of orangutans with cigars drawn in their mouths over Tiant’s locker. Luis was the only man I ever saw who could smoke a cigar in the shower without getting it wet. It was an amazing thing to see, like watching Houdini. He was a happy-go-lucky guy who remained the same, win or lose. But he was also a fierce competitor, and everybody on the club respected him. He used humor to make people aware that the game was important, but it was also meant to be fun. A club has to have that sort of attitude if it’s going to survive a tight pennant race.

  Harper was a big guy for us. Smith’s knees were bothering him, and Tommy had to take over in center while Smith moved to right. He did a great job out there. He couldn’t throw with Smith, but he covered a lot of ground and, with his speed, was the igniter of our offense.

  Catching had always been a problem for the Red Sox, but Carlton Fisk made our club during spring training and turned the position into a plus for us. His game had changed since I had played with him in the minors. He was much improved behind the plate and was one hundred times better as a hitter. The ball jumped off his bat. Young and idealistic when he first joined us, Carlton had a utopian view of the game, viewing the majors as a large-scale version of the minors. He could not understand the clique situation on our club. The social polarization that occurs on a team is not an unusual or even necessarily a bad thing. Twenty-five guys can only stay in the same room with each other for so long. But Fisk didn’t understand this. He thought everybody would be going out to eat together and be more of a group off the field. It upset him when he discovered that things weren’t like that up here. He also expected Yaz and Smith, the team’s two biggest stars, to be the club’s leaders. When he didn’t see them taking up the reins, he really let them have it in the papers. I didn’t see the problem, but I never did think much of leadership talk. As far as I was concerned the best leadership is provided by a grand slam home run that overcomes a three-run lead, or by a shutout that stops a losing streak. Anyway, by the time Carlton spoke his piece to the writers—something I thought took a lot of guts, whether I agreed with him or not—we had already found our leader. And it was him.

  Fisk took charge of our pitching staff and really turned it around. He had learned the importance of working a pitcher and nursing him along when he didn’t have his best stuff. Fisk also demanded your total concentration during a game. If you shook him off and then threw a bad pitch that got hit out, he had a very obvious way of expressing his displeasure. After receiving a new ball from the umpire, he would bring it out to you, bouncing it on the grass like a basketball all the way to the mound. There would be an expression on his face that said, “If you throw another half-ass pitch like that, I’m going to stuff this ball down your throat.”

  Carlton always gave his best effort, and he demanded the same of everyone he played with. That was important. Not so much in his dealings with Tiant, Siebert, Culp, and Peters. They were veterans who knew what it took to win, and they had been around the league long enough to be aware of the weaknesses of every hitter they faced. Fisk’s biggest contribution to the club was found in the way he took care of Lynn McGlothen and John Curtis and turned them into major-league pitchers. The three of them had been in the minors together.

  Curtis was a lefthander with good stuff and a great curveball. McGlothen was a Bob Gibson clone. I had seen Lynn pitch in the minors and thought even then that he was impressive. But since that time he had smoothed out his motion and was throwing even harder than when I had last seen him. These two eventually pushed Culp and Peters out of the starting rotation. By July we were starting Tiant, Pattin, Siebert, Curtis, and McGlothen. The five of them really put us on a roll. Fisk was a calming influence on Pattin. Marty had a lot of talent, but he was high-strung. He used to throw up after the first inning of every game he pitched. Carlton would make him stay within himself, getting him to take out his anxiety on the hitters. Marty still threw up with every start, but then he would come out in the second inning and look like Cy Young, Jr. He won seventeen games for us and was smoking down the stretch.

  Ben Oglivie was another farm-system graduate who helped the club. He was a tall, wiry left-handed hitter with all kinds of power and good speed in the outfield. Ben faked a lot of people out. They heard he was from Colon, Panama, and assumed he would have difficulty with English. So on first meeting they would talk to him very slowly and in a loud voice, using many hand gestures. It was a riot, because the first thing I had noticed about him was his ability to complete the New York Times crossword puzzle in about five minutes. He did have an accent, but he was the brightest guy on the club and had hardly any trouble understanding anybody who didn’t stick his hand in Ben’s face while they spoke. When we got him we were able to put him in left and play Yaz at first against righthanders. Cater played first against lef
ties, with Yaz moving back to the outfield. That put our lineup in great shape. Yaz came out of his year-and-a-half slump after the All-Star break, hitting the ball where it was pitched and going on a tear that lasted the rest of the season. By the final two weeks of the schedule, it was still mathematically a four-team race, but it was clear that the two best clubs were us and Detroit. In late September, we took a doubleheader from Baltimore that effectively knocked them out of the race. The Yankees followed suit, and, after the season’s final weekend, we were in first place, half a game ahead of Detroit with three games left to play. All with the Tigers, and all in Detroit.

  I think we were a little bit tight when we opened that final series. We had spent the first part of the season being vilified by the media for playing bad ball. Then we spent the second part hearing how, now that we were in the pennant race, we would invariably blow it. The only question it seemed was how. The pressure was getting to everybody. Luis was still wisecracking, but you could sense the edge underneath the humor. The laughter it elicited seemed forced. Even Peters, the coolest customer on the team, seemed somewhat frazzled. The night before we started that big series in Detroit, Gary and I had gone to Lindell’s AC, where we ran into Larry Claflin. He came up to us at the bar and said, “You guys don’t deserve to win the pennant because of the strike. Ballplayers are all alike. You’re all a bunch of bastards.” Normally, that was the sort of thing that Peters would have some fun with. Gary was good at using his tongue to whittle a guy down to size. This time he didn’t say a word. He just started climbing over bar stools as he headed for Claflin’s throat. I was able to hold him off just long enough for Claflin to make an unmolested getaway. Good thing, too. Gary was as strong as an ox, and there was no way I could have held him much longer. He would have had Claflin for dinner.

  I had my own share of anxiety before that series got under way. Kasko hadn’t used me in very many crucial situations throughout the season, but I was hoping to see some action in Detroit. They had a lot of left-handed hitters—guys like Cash, Jim Northrup, and Dick McAuliffe—and I was certain Eddie would be using me against them sometime during the series. It didn’t seem possible that he would risk the pennant over a T-shirt. When we headed out to the ballpark Monday night, I was antsy to get into a game of importance, and I was nervous, wondering how I would do once I got out there. I figured it could be put-up-or-shut-up time for my favorite lefthander.