by Bill Lee
But they were not perfect. They carried their emphasis on communal welfare over the happiness of the individual to an extreme that denied a lot of the freedoms we take for granted in the United States. I didn’t meet very many freethinkers over there. Everyone just sort of drifted along with the program for better or for worse. I don’t know if a person as outspoken as I am could function there. I also found an interesting set of contradictions existing in their so-called highly developed physical consciousness. Though they were sticklers for intense exercise, almost all of them get hammered daily on gallons of caffeine. And they smoke severe nails for cigarettes. God, the Chinese pull away like chimneys. They have a cigarette over there called Phoenix. Smoking one is comparable to sucking on an exhaust pipe. The advertising for it should read, “Phoenix, the cigarettes that killed Chou En Lai.”
China’s economic system seems to be a failure. Their plumbing is awful. In order to go to the bathroom you had to use what they called a honey bucket. It wasn’t filled with honey. You took a dump in it and left it outside your door every night. While you slept, it was picked up and brought to the compost heap. That’s the bad job in their society. It’s what happens to you when you can’t hit .300 anymore. I never heard anybody complain about it, though. In fact, I think the hit song in Shanghai was, “I Carry Shit Up the Side of the Hill for the Commune.” Last on my list of complaints are their beer and their baseball program. Chinese beer tastes like crankcase oil, and their baseball program is prehistoric.
The game is still in the embryonic stage over there. I saw a contest that the Canton team played against a club from Japan. The Japanese team scored twenty-six runs in the first three innings, while shutting the Chinese team out without a hit. In the fourth inning, the Canton club took the field, claimed they had lost the baseball, and the game was called. I could appreciate that bit of chicanery. It’s something I had been tempted to do many times back in the States.
I had a conversation with a Cantonese truckdriver, who was supposed to be the best pitcher in the province. He asked me, “What do you do for a living?” I said, “Play baseball.” And he said, “Yes, I know. But what do you do for a job?” He could not understand that playing baseball was my job. To the Chinese, baseball is just a nice exercise, like calisthenics. One gentleman laughed when the truckdriver told him what I did for a living and asked me what I got paid. I told him in nice, round Chinese figures. His eyes bulged out of his head and he said, most earnestly, “Tell me, how do you play this baseball?”
Harry Edwards thought the Chinese would dominate every sport in worldwide competition within ten years of our trip. He based this belief on the Chinese collective consciousness, their political ideology, and their emphasis on conditioning. Well, it doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon. Their system hasn’t allowed them to straighten out their economic woes, making it impossible for them to afford the modern training facilities found in other nations. They also lack a competitive edge, and I think that will hurt them. They are going to run into a lot of athletes on the world-class level with honed killer instincts, Roberto Duran—types whose only interest in consciousness is in seeing how quickly they can separate you from yours. It may not be an attractive quality, but I think it’s a necessary asset in any high level of competition. Harry also ignored the fact that, while the lack of a fear of failure may make for a healthier head, it is a basic tenet that one travels fastest when one is being chased, especially when the chasers are the demons he carries inside him. The Chinese are not win-oriented. We played basketball against a team of Chinese athletes. We cleaned their clocks and it never bothered them. Some of the women on the trip were upset over this, claiming we had taken advantage of those poor, uncompetitive Chinese, and that we wanted to win too badly. I said, “Winning is better than the next worst thing.” I can’t digest losing. The Chinese seem to swallow it easily, and I think it will prevent them from becoming a world sports power.
After recovering from my flu, I decided to split while the trip still had a week to run. I was tired of the rhetorical bullshit that was going down on a daily basis. Catching a freighter out of Shanghai, I started my trip home. I did stop in at the Shanghai Library before leaving and received a tremendous shock. After coming out of the seventh game of the World Series, I had comforted myself with the knowledge that one billion Chinese didn’t know or care about my giving up that home run to Tony Perez. I didn’t know that the Shanghai Library had a foreign newspaper section. When I visited it, the first thing I saw, hanging from a rack, was a copy of the New York Times, dated October 23. On the front page was a photo of Perez taking me deep. Wrong again.
7
I should have known that 1976 was going to be a bad year, when I spit over the Great Wall of China, and the wind blew it back in my face. Another tip-off should have been provided by Tiant’s wig. Luis had bought a rug over the winter. In the past, with his shiny bald head, he had resembled a cuddly Buddha, but, when he reported to spring training, that wig made him look more like a two-toned Mercedes.
Darrell Johnson had done his best to trade me during the off-season. Failing to do that, he instead traded Moret to the Atlanta Braves for left-handed relief pitcher Tom House. When the deal was announced, Johnson told a reporter, “Lee’s lucky he’s still here. He’s like a cat. He’s been falling out of trees all year and landing on his feet.” When that quote was relayed to me, I said that was a pretty witty line for Darrell, and I wondered who had been writing his material for him.
The Moret trade was no surprise. Roger was a good pitcher, but he was uncomfortable in the Boston organization. He felt misunderstood and mistreated. The players called him Wrong Way. I don’t know why. He was usually headed the right way, but he did have a habit of falling asleep while going there. He did that once while driving his car. He was doing eighty when he nodded out. The car slipped under a rock, tearing off part of his roof and almost killing Roger in the process. Only the fact that he was so completely relaxed saved his life. He did miss that evening’s game, spending most of the night in a local hospital. The next day, the front office read the riot act to him. I’ll never forget how that stunned him. He sat in front of his locker, shaking his head, saying, “They keep talking about fining me, or suspending me, or trading me to another club. But nobody has asked me how I am or what the X-rays showed.” That really blew him away.
I could never figure out how the collective brain of the Red Sox front office worked. If it worked at all. It was one of the great unsolved mysteries of my life. Immediately after coming within one run of the world championship, management started taking the team apart. Moret went to Atlanta, Beniquez, who had played sensationally in ’75, went to Texas for Fergie Jenkins. And Carbo was traded in mid-season to Milwaukee for Bobby Darwin. We had been the deepest team in the majors—that’s one of the reasons we came so close to winning it all—and the first thing they did was get rid of our depth. Petrocelli was fazed out at third and eventually replaced by Butch Hobson. Hobson, a rookie who had graduated from our farm system, made some great plays when he first came up, but his arm was terrible. Not weak, it just lacked accuracy. He certainly was an aggressive player, sometimes too aggressive. The first game he played for us, he rounded third and creamed Oriole catcher Rick Dempsey on a close play at the plate. Rick was out cold for fifteen minutes. Butch didn’t play baseball; he played roller derby on spikes. On pop flys near the dugout, he would dive headfirst into the bat rack. He was never concerned with making the catch. For Butch it was the crash that was more important. From the dugout, you could see him thinking, “Hmm, let’s see how badly bruised I can get on this play. How far can I dive into the ground without killing myself?” I never saw him come out of a game wearing a clean uniform.
Despite the changes, I thought we would win the pennant if we could get past Baltimore again. I was always fearful of the Orioles. Yaz saw our chief challenge coming from another direction. After our first spring training game against the Yankees, Carl warned u
s that they were a better club than last year. Much better. There wasn’t any one thing he could put his finger on, but it had something to do with the way all of them ran to first base. There was an intensity there he hadn’t noticed the year before. It was only an exhibition game but already Carl knew.
The people of Boston live in silent dread of the Yankees. When I first joined the Red Sox, our games against them weren’t the crowd-drawers they became later, but the Boston press wrote them up as if they were the first skirmishes on the road to Armageddon. Clif Keane was in awe of the Yankees even when they were a bad ballclub. Every Red Sox fan knows how New York stole all their stars—Babe Ruth, Herb Pennock, Waite Hoyt, Sparky Lyle, and others—and left Boston with a bucket of ice and a broken Louisville slugger as payment. To be a Red Sox fan was to have a definite aversion to pinstripes.
I always pitched well against the Yankees. Due to the dimensions of their stadium, their teams were built around left-handed power. When facing their lefty hitters in New York, I would throw a lot of soft stuff in their kitchens. They would try to pull it over the right-field fence, and the result would be a lot of two-hoppers to my second baseman. When they came to Fenway, they’d shoot for the Wall. I’d nail them with hard sinkers inside. They never were able to adapt, and after a few wins against them, I felt like I owned them.
Another reason for my success against them was my flatout dislike for their organization. They were an elitist corporation with a self-promoted public image of cold arrogance that went against my grain. The Yankees represented the political right in baseball, while the Red Sox were their opposite number. We were composed of the stuff that had made this country great. We were like a bunch of modern-day pilgrims.
Whenever the Red Sox prepared to play the Yankees, it was as if they were dressing up for battle. You play against other clubs, and it’s as if they were all Cleveland. Against the Yankees we would button up differently, taking a little bit longer then usual to put on the uniform. We knew we were getting ready to take the field and uphold our values. It was as though we were knights in armor. That’s how I felt. And I wasn’t alone.
Petrocelli hated the Yankees. He had been involved in that Pier-Sixer with them in 1967 and had managed to drop about half a dozen of them. I was there in 1973, when Fisk and Gene Michael went at each other. That wasn’t much of a fight. Fisk emerged from it with two scratch marks on his right cheek. They looked like two hookers fighting it out over a John. Michael was supposed to be feisty, but I never saw him throw an actual punch. He was probably afraid he would crack his freshly polished nails.
The Fisk–Thurman Munson rivalry was hyped up in the papers, and there was some truth to it. They never actually fought each other; they were both swinging pretty big purses at the time. But I know they were aware of each other’s presence. Munson was always checking Fisk’s stats, and Carlton would go nuts any time a reporter mentioned Munson’s name.
We got off to a slow start in ’76, and the Yankees broke out of the gate fast. I couldn’t buy a victory, but I wasn’t worried. When we made our way into Yankee Stadium on the evening of May 20 for our first confrontation of the season, I figured now was just as good a time as any for us to start getting our record healthy, and for me to pick up my first win. Instead, it turned out to be the night I left my shoulder in New York City.
Billy Martin was managing the Yankees. He and I did not get along. I don’t know why. I had a lot to do with Billy getting his job in New York. Shortly after Moret and I shut out the Yankees in a 1975 doubleheader, Bill Virdon was dumped as their skipper. That opened the post for Martin. Billy was available because he had recently been canned by the Texas Rangers. I also played a role in that firing.
Mike Hargrove, the Texas first baseman, was a hitter who drove me nuts. Known as the Human Rain Delay, it takes him about ten minutes to get set at the plate. He goes through a ritual before and after each swing. He pounds his spikes, adjusts something on his leg, twists his thumb, reads a chapter of Fitzgerald, and then he’s ready. The pitch is delivered, and, unless he gets a hit or makes an out, he goes through the whole routine again. One afternoon, he really got to me, and I wasn’t even pitching. I decided to retaliate. Every time he stepped out of the batter’s box, I would count to twenty. If he hadn’t stepped back up to the plate by then, I would pick up a bat, pound it on the steps, and yell, “Time’s up. Strike one!” Hargrove took it in stride, and the home-plate umpire, Nestor Chylack, loved it. But it drove Billy off the wall. He yelled at me, and I ignored him, which only got him angrier. He started swinging from his dugout roof, pointing at me and scratching under his arms like a chimpanzee. A few days later, the Rangers’ owner, Brad Corbett, told him to pack his bags. I like to think I had something to do with that. After all, you’re an owner with a large investment in a team, and here’s a guy who is supposed to lead your ballplayers, providing them with a role model. And he’s swinging from the dugout, impersonating a chimp during a major-league ballgame. That’s bound to cause you to have some severe doubts about him.
I wasn’t worried about Billy Martin on the evening of May 20. I was just interested in getting myself and the Red Sox back on track. For the first five innings, I did exactly that. I had a 1–0 lead in the sixth when Otto Velez, New York’s right-handed DH, came up with Graig Nettles on first, Lou Piniella on second, and two men out. With the count two and one, I thought Otto would be pulling the ball, so I fed him the sinker, low and away. But Velez went with it, hitting a scorching line drive over my second baseman’s head. The right fielder, Dwight Evans, came tearing in and grabbed the ball on one hop. Now, with an arm like Evans out there, God could have been rounding third, and he would have been out. And this was Piniella. Lou runs as if he’s got high-heeled shoes on. Tight high-heeled shoes. Lou should have been out gracefully; there was no need for any contact. But since there was a big crowd there, and he wanted to show them and Billy that he was a Martin-type ballplayer, he decided to crash into Fisk at the plate. Lou had forgotten a cardinal rule: “Never ram into a catcher. It will make him wink out.” Fisk, being as stubborn and tenacious as he is, decided to stand in front of Piniella and take his best shot. Flipping Lou over, Carlton tagged him with the ball and his fist, not necessarily in that order. Piniella is not the best guy in the world to pull this maneuver on. Lou is not a disciple of Gandhi; he wakes up in the morning pissed off. Now we had two guys winking out on each other. This was a twin wink-out, better known as a twinkie. The whole thing took me by surprise. I was backing up the throw to home plate—just doing my job—when the next thing I knew, I was in the midst of a brawl. Velez came charging in, trying to get at Fisk, and I tried to stop him. Otto was not exactly a dwarf. I tried to tackle him high in order to lessen the risk of injury to my shoulder. Wrong. I should have tackled him low and just taken my chances. Actually, I should have just kicked him in the cubes and gotten my face out of there.
Somehow, in the midst of this melee, I got spun around while grabbing Velez and was hit from behind. A picture later showed that Mickey Rivers had hit me in the back of the head with a sucker punch. That dazed me. He packed a pretty good wallop for a skinny, little guy. As I tried to clear my head, Nettles came over, picked me up, and dropped me on my shoulder. He later claimed that he was only trying to keep me out of the fight. He did do that. I guess Graig’s idea of keeping the peace was to arrange for me to get a lot of bed rest in a quiet hospital.
Immediately after he had ground me into the Stadium turf, I got up, went to pick up my glove with my left hand, and discovered my arm was dead. There was no pain; it was just numb. My first thought was, “I don’t think I can finish this game.” Then, realizing how badly I was hurt, my brain screamed, “I have no fucking feeling in my arm!” Turning to Nettles, I yelled, “You son of a bitch! How could you do this to me? I played ball with your brother Jimmy in Alaska, you no-good prick! How could you be such an asshole!”
I believe it was the use of the word asshole that set him off again. He cam
e at me, and I tried to swing at him. Nothing moved. It was like trying to swing a piece of dead meat. Ducking under a punch I never threw, Nettles came up and hit me again. He gave me a shiner and knocked me down. He hit me so good that I just sort of slid halfway into our dugout. I felt like Popeye after being stomped by Bluto. I wanted to yell, “Where’s my spinach!” Before I had the chance, a fan came out of the stands and tried to kill me. I held him off with my feet. The entire episode became a Fellini movie. As the reel unwound, I saw the trainer examining my arm while I’m lying on the floor and I’ve got some poor son of a bitch nailed to the dugout wall with my spikes perforating his chest. And 45,000 Yankee fans are screaming for the lions to devour the Christians. It was insane. When the dust had settled, and order had been restored, the umpires decided to throw Nettles and me out of the game. As it turned out, I really had no choice in the matter. My arm was totally screwed up.
I didn’t know how badly I was hurt. I was rushed to the hospital for a preliminary examination and X-rays. I heard one doctor say that he thought I might never pitch again. That certainly did wonders for my spirits. That night, I lay in my hotel room after having consumed four Demerols and seven shots of VO. I was out of my brain. I swear to God, I started hallucinating. I imagined seeing George Steinbrenner coming in through my window, leading helmeted troops of Yankees into my room. George took out a magic marker and drew lines across my body, telling an aide, “Okay, you can start cutting here.” The next morning, after the demons had vanished, I met with the press. I told them what I thought of Steinbrenner and his goons, criticizing him and Martin for their Brown Shirt mentality. That fight was a product of the Martin influence. There is a lot of fascist in Billy’s approach to the game. I’m sure he thinks Mussolini was just a nice guy whom Hitler led astray.
