The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  We knew Kasko would be gone. We were expected to win the pennant, but we didn’t come close, so someone’s head had to roll. I didn’t think Eddie was a bad manager. He was a little too nervous and didn’t understand the subtleties of handling a pitching staff. He had been a shortstop for the Reds when they won the 1961 National League Championship by pounding the rest of the league senseless. I think that made him too offense-minded. I know he didn’t evaluate his personnel very well. If he was going to have me on his pitching staff at all in ’72, it should have been as a starter. Not because I was God’s gift to Fenway, but because of the type of pitcher I was. I was a control pitcher with good but never great velocity. I wasn’t overpowering enough and did not have a resilient enough arm to pitch relief. Eddie didn’t understand that. He compounded his mistake by not using me once he had me out there. He put his personal feelings about me ahead of the best interests of the team. My T-shirt may have cost us the pennant. But the following year, he put our differences aside and let me pitch. We had a lot of injuries that season, and Baltimore was better than we were. None of that was his fault. Still, I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

  Darrell Johnson had spent the last couple of seasons managing Boston’s Triple-A farm club in Pawtucket. I knew him from his days as pitching coach under Williams. We had gotten along well. The younger guys on the club had played under him—Fisk had been his catcher in Louisville—so his hiring was a popular move with them. The veterans were leery of him. Veterans aren’t always happy about managerial switches, unless the guy who was dumped is someone they couldn’t bear. A veteran knows where he stands with the old manager, and when a new one is named you don’t know what might go down, except possibly you. A new skipper might find that someone who was thought to be a vital cog in the club is expendable. When a change is made in the manager’s office, everyone tends to step lightly for a while.

  Darrell surprised everyone that first spring training. He released Cepeda and Aparicio on the same day. During the ’73 season, Orlando had hit twenty home runs with eighty-six RBIs, and Luis had batted .271. Their releases sent a message to the rest of the team: “Don’t get old and slow.” Johnson wanted a streamlined attack that could play defense. Luis had lost a few steps in the field, and Orlando was like a giant billboard on the basepaths. I felt releasing Cepeda was a good move. As much as I liked him, I knew we couldn’t carry a one-dimensional ballplayer. But I was worried about releasing Luis.

  Aparicio was no longer what he once had been. But I didn’t know who we had to replace him. I got very nervous when I saw Juan Beniquez in camp. Beniquez had been up briefly as a shortstop in 1971 and 1972. He was absolutely the worst infielder I had ever seen. If he could have eaten his glove, he would have died of food poisoning. Juan would make diving, backhanded stops in the hole and then throw the ball into Boston Harbor. It was brutal. I think it was after one of his tosses almost killed a peanut vendor in the twenty-sixth row that the coaches handed him an outfielder’s glove. That upset him, but the pitchers were happy. I was thrilled when I discovered that the front office had told him that if he went anywhere near the infield again, they would confiscate his green card. I had hoped that Mario Guerrero would be Luis’ successor. He had been kept out of the lineup by Aparicio’s name and salary but, by the time of Luis’ release, Mario was the better player and had earned a promotion off the bench. But our new manager had other plans.

  Johnson had brought Rick Burleson with him from Pawtucket to play short. I had never met a red-ass like Rick in my life. Some guys didn’t like to lose, but Rick got angry if the score was even tied. He was very intense and had the greatest arm of any infielder I had ever seen. The moment he reported to camp, he brought a fire to the club that we had been lacking.

  There was one other familiar face missing when we reported to spring training: Reggie Smith. He had been traded with McGlothen and Curtis to the Cardinals for Rick Wise, Reggie Cleveland, Diego Segui, and Bernie Carbo. That turned out to be a great deal for us. Carbo was another fireeater, a real piece of work on the field, but a kindred spirit off of it. He came down to Winter Haven with a stuffed gorilla, given to him by Scipio Spinks. He carried it around with him wherever he went, engaging it in long discussions. I loved his innocence. The first time we talked about the Bermuda Triangle, he thought we were discussing pussy. He and I would get high together, but only during rainouts. We were the flower children of baseball.

  Cepeda’s dismissal allowed Johnson to get Cecil Cooper into the lineup. He was just as good a hitter as Orlando. Cecil was also ten years younger, could run, and could play first base. My favorite addition to the team, however, was Juan Marichal. I had watched Marichal when I was a kid in California and he was pitching for the San Francisco Giants. I thought he was the greatest pitcher in baseball. When we got him he was all but done. His back was giving him a lot of problems. The Red Sox finally had to put him on Clinoril, an anti-inflammatory that makes your back feel like it’s twentyfive again. It helped him for only a short period of time, but during that period—about five weeks—he had the magic again. He showed us a little bit of everything, a twilight glimmer of what he had been. But it didn’t last, and we had to let him go. Too bad.

  Juan was a walking encyclopedia on pitching and a lot of fun to be around. He was constantly bringing people into the clubhouse. Real exotic types. Once he brought in a Rumanian midget who was billed as the world’s smallest man. He was very entertaining, and everyone got a kick out of him. But he sent Juan into a panic by vanishing. We looked everywhere for him and were about to call the police, when we finally found him asleep in an old catcher’s mitt.

  I was inconsistent in ’74. I started out pitching great, but I didn’t get much hitting support. Then when our bats came alive, I became horseshit. The only reason my record stayed above 500 was because we were scoring so many runs. The strange thing about my lack of effectiveness was that I wasn’t being jocked by the big-name batters. It was the Punch-and-Judy hitters like Ken Suarez and Ed Brinkman who were doing me in. I ate home-run hitters for lunch. Except for Dick Allen. He was unfair. I faced him in a game in Chicago. With a two-run lead, I had walked the lead-off hitter in the ninth. Buddy Bradford, a right-handed hitter who murdered lefties, was up, and my pitching coach came out to see how I felt. I told him I was fine and that I was going to try to get Bradford to hit into a double play. The coach pointed out that Allen was the next batter, so I said, “Well, then I better get Bradford to hit into a double play.” First pitch, Buddy hit a one-hopper to short and we turned two. Allen got up with the bases empty, and I yelled, “Okay, Dick, let’s see how far you can hit this pitch!” I threw him a terrific slider outside. Great pitch. Allen hit a shot into the upper deck that was still rising when it slammed into the facade. That ball was smoked about five hundred feet. Dick was one of the very few guys who could take your best pitches and hit them hard somewhere. He was the strongest man I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe the size of the bat he swung. Stan Bahnsen had one, and he once showed it to me. I couldn’t even lift the son of a bitch. When I hefted that bat, I thought, “Thank God he didn’t hit the ball up the middle on me. All that would have been left of me would have been a grease spot and a pair of spikes with smoke coming out of them.”

  The team played well for Johnson, and I thought we were going to win the pennant. I started pitching well in late August and also managed to become a father again. Andy was born on August 24. I was pitching that evening in Fenway, and Mary Lou was watching the game from her usual seat behind home plate. Using hand signs, she was able to signal to me the length of her contractions after each inning. By the sixth, those signals ceased. She was too busy bouncing up and down. I came out of the game with a blister and went right from the field to her seat. I had her in the hospital in twelve minutes. The nurses took Mary Lou into the labor room, and she went into delivery before the doctor got there. One nurse scrubbed up to assist with the birth, while the other one tended my blister. Andy popped up not t
oo long after we arrived. What a kid he turned out to be. I love watching him play. He runs into walls, gets his face lopsided, then gets up and runs into something else. Like father, like son.

  On August 30 we were in first place, with a five-game bulge over the Yankees. The team looked unstoppable. Then we went to Minnesota and never returned. We came back in body, but our minds were left in Calvin Griffith Land. His Twins had honed our bats into fishing rods and had sent us to the Ten Thousand Lakes for the rest of the season. After losing three there, we went on to Baltimore. Tiant and I started a Monday doubleheader against Cuellar and Ross Grimsley. Unable to buy a run, we lost both ends by identical 1–0 scores. The team got five hits the entire afternoon. God, was that agonizing. That evening I lashed my hands to my bathroom sink. My hotel room was on the eighteenth floor, and I did not want to risk the temptation of walking near an open window.

  We never recovered from that doubleheader shutout. The team stopped playing as a unit, and everybody tried to win games singlehandedly instead of staying within themselves and doing the little things that had gotten us our lead in the first place. We stopped bunting and began to swing at bad pitches. Guys who couldn’t hit home runs were trying to hit the ball to Luxembourg. Johnson did everything he could think of to halt our slide, but it was of no use. One thing he did not do was call a team meeting. He knew it wouldn’t have helped. I mean, what could he have said? “You guys better start hitting?” The Yankees finally caught us in early September, and then Baltimore overtook them. We finished third.

  I pitched an unusually long game toward the end of that season. On September 21 we beat the Orioles, 6–5, in ten innings. Due to rain delays the game lasted six hours and twenty-seven minutes. I went all the way for the victory. Tiant and I pitched a lot of innings in that final month, and the toll almost killed me. On the last day of the season I went home and went straight to bed. Waking up the next day, I discovered that I could not get out of bed. My arms were completely paralyzed. I rolled around like a turtle upturned on its back and screamed for Mary Lou. I thought I had been stricken with a disease, and it scared the shit out of me. My wife packed me up and got me over to the doctor, who gave me a big shot of Benadryl. That fixed me right up. According to his diagnosis, I had taken so much of the anti-inflammatory Butazolidin over the last few months that my adrenal glands had ceased to function, and all the pitching I had done had brought me to a state of complete exhaustion. After that shot I was fine, but the stress of the episode probably took ten years off my life.

  For the next couple of weeks I rested and allowed myself to reflect on the just-finished season. That led me to some severe second-guessing. Finishing third after playing so well for so long was hard to take. I blamed myself for not pitching better. Then I blamed the front office for trading Lyle. Sparky had another great season in ’74, and he would have helped us. We didn’t have a bullpen stopper all year. With Lyle on our side we would have won the pennant. Not just the division, the whole bag of ice. I also questioned why management brought up Fred Lynn and Jim Rice at the end of the year and then hardly played them. They might have made a difference. We weren’t scoring anyway, so why not go with the kids? Knowing how our season turned out, it was an easy thing for me to say. The kind of slump we went into grabbed us by the balls without warning. In a pennant race you tend to trust the established players, the guys who have done it before, to start hitting and playing like they had in the past. I guess if Johnson had put Rice and Lynn in the lineup and they didn’t hit, I could have just as easily said, “Jesus, why did he give up on the veterans?”

  Now I know that we didn’t win it that year because we weren’t ready to win it—1974 was the turning point for our club. It gave guys like Burleson, Cooper, Beniquez, and Dwight Evans a chance to participate in a pennant race, maturing them as players. And I think the disappointment of its finish made us hungrier than we had ever been before. It made us a championship team in 1975.

  6

  The first time I smoked hash was in Cleveland in 1972. I was in a car, and I think I was driv-ing, though I can’t say for sure. I might have been tied to the roof. We used to do that to guys. Catching their hands in the car window, we would drive off with them lying across the roof like a dead moose, their pants pulled down to their knees. That was always good for a laugh.

  Several of us were going to a friend’s house in the rich section of town. We were smoking a joint and listening to music. Just cruising around. When we stopped for a red light, a van pulled up alongside us. There were two teenagers in it, passing a pipe back and forth. They signaled that we should pull over and join them. We got into the van, gave them a few joints, and they let us smoke the pipe. On finishing, we got back into our car and drove to our hotel. We forgot all about visiting our friend. I sauntered into the hotel lobby and said hello to a few of my teammates. Everything was fine. That’s the last thing I remember. Duane Josephson, my roommate, found me about an hour later in the elevator. Actually, I was halfway in and halfway out. The doors would start to close, bang into me, and then open. Over and over again. I was just standing there, oblivious to everything. I imagine I had almost made it out of the elevator when I got nailed, and my lights went out. This taught me never to drink VO and then smoke pot and hash in the same afternoon, unless I wanted to have a deeply moving religious experience. Duane shuffled me into our room and threw me onto my bed. I wanted desperately to go to sleep and started undressing. The next morning I was still lying there as the sun came up. Completely clothed, I was still trying to unzip my boots. I had never lost consciousness and had kept thinking to myself, If I can just get these off, I’ll be all right. My mind was trying to send the proper impulses to my hands that would enable them to function correctly. But it was no use. I had beaten up my body, and my brain had died.

  Cleveland always did funny things to me. It was the sort of town that invited exploration, because on initial glance there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot to do there. On one of my first visits to the city, Sonny Siebert, who had been a star with the Indians, volunteered to take several of us to the best bar in Cleveland. We went on a Thursday night, arriving there at ten o’clock. The place was closed. Everybody was mystified. We kept asking Sonny, “Are you sure this is the place? Jesus, if it’s closed at ten p.m., when is it opened?” After other experiences similiar to this one, it was understandable that many players wrote off the city as a place where nothing was happening. How little they knew. They hadn’t discovered the Cleveland Public Library.

  I had gone there the day after I first smoked that hash. Feeling totally alive, I realized I had never felt so good. The hash had been cleansing, pushing out the alcohol that had been stored in my system and accelerating my metabolism. That afternoon, I walked all over Cleveland until I felt a tug at my sleeve that pulled me into the Cleveland Library. I had been there previously, having spent hours in its reference library on the ground floor. I had never ventured into any other section, but that day, the invisible force led me to the shelves marked philosophy and religion. They were on the third floor. A higher level. Once there, the force directed my attention to a book by an Indian mystic, Paramahansa Yogananda. His close friends called him Yogi. The book was a chronicle of his life and times. One story told of his disciple, a man police mistook for a bandit. They cut off his hand. Gazing at the wound, the disciple stemmed the flow of blood by the sheer force of his will and walked off. He left his hand with the police, giving them something to practice using their cuffs on. The parable was used to illustrate how the disciple had achieved complete mastery over forces previously thought to be uncontrollable. I liked that. After putting Yogananda’s book aside, I found other books by men like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

  Their writings turned me on to self-determinism. They convinced me that everything we needed to live a successful life was locked away in our minds, and that unless we understood that, we were sleeping our lives away. I didn’t grab any of these books from their resting places; i
t was more like they grabbed me. It was as if each volume had stood up on the shelf, jumped into my hands, and said, “Well, thank you for coming up and visiting us. We’ve been stuck on this shelf for years, gathering dust and waiting for someone to look us over. Have we got a deal for you. We will paint your brain any color for only $39.95.”

  Those books marked the beginning of my quest for knowledge. I began with Gurdjieff. Reading other mystics and philosophers, I worked my way up to Buckminster Fuller. And he led me back to Gurdjieff. It was wild. Seemingly, all these philosophers—Fuller, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, and the rest—were disciples of the same school of thought. Each one added something else to the previous master’s work, but in the end you were returned to the original form. Therefore, the end was merely another way of reaching the beginning. That seemed far fucking out. I didn’t understand all of it, but I got the basic idea. We come out of the world, not into it. We are an extension of the planet and if we care for it, we are caring for ourselves. That made me realize that, although I loved the way I made a living and had no wish to stop, playing ball satisfied only my own needs. It did not contribute to the earth’s well-being. I decided to change what had been a selfish existence by donating my free time to other people and their worthwhile causes.

  I got involved with Fair Share, a group that labored to help consumers gain more control over the public utilities, and I worked for almost anyone else who bothered to give me a call. I jumped on the zero-earth-population bandwagon, a good cause but a source of some embarrassment for me. Shortly after joining them, Mary Lou became pregnant with our daughter, Caitlin. Feminists asked me to support the ERA in Massachusetts. At first, I told them I couldn’t support any ERA unless it was under 3.50, but they talked me into campaigning for them. The amendment made sense to me. We are all extensions of the planet, therefore we are all equal. I didn’t see any reason why that shouldn’t be part of the Constitution.