by Bill Lee
After I made those statements comparing Martin and Steinbrenner to the Nazis, Billy really had it in for me. He once paid a clubhouse boy to stick a dead fish in my trousers. The clubhouse boy was mature enough to bring it over to me while it was still in the bag. He asked, “You don’t need this in your pants, do you?” I told him I didn’t and we both got a laugh out of it. I understand that there was a note attached to the fish, but I never got a chance to read it. Supposedly the message said, “Stick this in your pussy.” I doubt that. I don’t believe Billy could spell pussy.
When my X-rays came back, they revealed a torn ligament in my left shoulder. After five weeks of complete rest I started to work out. I ran long distances with my left arm strapped to my side, which allowed me to run without harming my shoulder. I also started weightlifting. Nothing too intense. I started with a rubber hose tied up in knots. Seriously, that’s all my shoulder could tolerate. At first, I got depressed, thinking my career was shot. But then, I figured, “Hell, I never threw that hard to begin with. I can come back from this.” I did worry about being able to water the lawn, though. I mean, damn, that hose was heavy.
With each therapy session, the arm came around a little bit more. I had good days and bad days, but the good were on the heavier side of the scales. When I reached the point where I could throw again, I found that my elbow couldn’t handle the stress of throwing the sinker, and that I couldn’t get any snap on my breaking ball. I had made the mistake of favoring my shoulder and using too much elbow with my tosses. Now the elbow was hyperextended. The Red Sox physician wanted to grease me up with cortisone, but I wouldn’t let him. I opted instead for acupuncture. It got me back in harness in no time, though I did come out of it looking like a salt shaker. I was pitching again by mid-July, throwing in relief. I got hit hard at first, but I gradually started to pitch well, working my way back into the rotation.
My first start after the injury came against New York on July 24, in Yankee Stadium. I got mashed. Prior to the game, my father, who thinks Billy Martin is the best manager in baseball, called me and said, “If you have any guts at all, you’ll knock Nettles on his ass his first time up. You’ll really hurt him.” I was all for that. The problem was that, after the injury, I couldn’t throw hard enough to hurt anybody. So, I just tried to get him out. Tried too hard, really. He hit a home run off me the first time I faced him. So did his tag-team partner, Rivers. I left the game after four innings. That was depressing. Not because I had given up the home runs or had been knocked out of the ballgame. I was upset because I realized that I didn’t have the velocity to pitch the Yankees inside like I used to. That brawl and the resultant injury had robbed me of that. Instead of going right at guys, I now had to go to the slow curve and pitch to spots even more than I had in the past. I would make that adjustment, and I would still win. It just wouldn’t be as much fun as it had been.
I did start to pitch well in August. It was too late to help my teammates, though. We were going nowhere, on our way to finishing light years behind Steinbrenner’s Storm Troopers. My injury contributed to our fall from grace. The club never did make up those seventeen wins I had been giving them every year. We were also hurting in the bullpen. Tom House, supposedly our ace short man, could not do the job. I recall one game against the Yankees, in which he was brought in specificially to get Chambliss out, and Chris took him deep for the ballgame. That loss killed us. We were still in the pennant race, but, when the Yankees won that game in extra innings, they soared and we packed it in. I’m certain that was the game that convinced the Yankees that they were going to do it that year. Just as it convinced us that we weren’t. I know I was pretty convinced when that ball left the park.
House was hurting when we got him from the Braves. He had to do a certain number of exercises and stretches every day before a game. He was a bionic man with torn cartilage in both knees. Once Johnson saw that Tom wasn’t going to be effective for us, he started playing Reliever’s Roulette, using a different short man every other game. None of them panned out. The Red Sox got so desperate that they finally made that big deal with Oakland, sending the A’s Fort Knox in exchange for Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers. Bowie Kuhn nixed the deal, saying it was not in the best interests of baseball. I seem to recall Rudi reporting and suiting up with us, though he never got to get into a game. I never did see Fingers. You can bet I wouldn’t have forgotten if I had. Putting that sucker in our bullpen might have given us another pennant, if we only could have fixed one other chink in our armor.
The year 1976 was the first year a player could play out his option and become a free agent. All he had to do was go through an entire season without a contract. When the season was over, he could entertain bids from as many as thirteen major-league clubs. There were three potential free agents on our club: Freddy Lynn, Carlton Fisk, and Rick Burleson. Jerry Kapstein was their agent. They were like an oil cartel. I have no use for agents, who come in and turn baseball into a game of corporate musical chairs. A baseball player should be like the ancient samurai. A samurai warrior had integrity when he defended the underdog, but, if he took his act down the block to some other dynasty for bigger bucks, then he was no longer being true to himself or the game he played. He was not going to hit .300 that year.
When Fish, Lynn, and Burleson got entwined in the economic machinations of free agency, it seemed to take something away from their game. They had lost that spark that had come out of the youthful dive-for-every-ball enthusiasm that all three of them had. They still played hard; you can’t just shut their kind of intensity off. But they had lost their edge. Free agency seemed a burden for them. It was tearing at their brains. Over the course of the full season, I could see it playing havoc with the concentration, impairing their ability to give one hundred percent. That doesn’t mean they dogged it. They were giving everything they had, but they didn’t have 100 percent to give. The game itself, left on its own, is demanding enough. They didn’t need the albatross of unsigned contracts and front-office mind games wrapped around their necks. The press compounded the pressure. Fisk’s locker was near mine, and, after every loss, I knew I would be hearing at least one writer asking him if his contract squabbles were hindering his performance. Freddy and Rick were going through the same thing. There was no place for them to hide. When they finally did sign, late in the season, you could sense their relief.
Two events occurred in ’76 that would directly affect my future with the club. Three, actually, if you count the injury. The first occurred in mid-season. Mr. Yawkey died.
Mr. Yawkey and I weren’t particularly close, but whatever relationship we did have was a good one. We had a common bond, solidified by our mutual interest in the National Geographic. I had a subscription to the magazine, and I would bring it into the clubhouse, leaving it at my locker while I did my running. One afternoon I returned to the clubhouse to find that my latest issue was missing. I didn’t think anything of it. I figured someone had taken it to read in the can and had forgotten to return it. But, the same thing happened again the following week, and the week after that. I was puzzled and determined to catch the culprit. Before I had a chance to enlist the aid of the CIA, however, the Mystery of the Missing Magazines was solved. The break in the case came one afternoon while I was meeting with Dick O’Connell in his office. I had only been there a few moments when Mr. Yawkey popped in and handed me a brown paper bag, saying, “I think these are yours.” Inside the sack were the purloined magazines.
After making a positive ID, I nodded that they were. He sat down, and we got into a discussion on the subject of ecology. Mr. Yawkey told me how he used to watch the ivory-billed woodpeckers as they flew along the coast of South Carolina. He lamented that they had become extinct. Then he told me how he used pesticides on his property down there, explaining, “We spray the Carolina coast with pesticides because we have had problems with the soft pine beetle.” I tried to tell him that the ivory-billed woodpecker was the natural predator of the soft pine beetle, and tha
t by using pesticides he was breaking up the natural order and depriving the birds of food. That’s why his precious woodpeckers had died off. He admitted he had never thought of that. He should have.
On the last day of the 1976 season, a pigeon flew into the bleachers and crashed into a seat, killing himself. I knew it was the late Mr. Yawkey. He had been sent back as a pigeon with instructions to get firsthand knowledge of the dangers of pesticides. Having done that, he was now simply shedding his skin so that he could assume another form. I wish they had let him come back as our owner again. After he died, the Red Sox ceased to be the one big happy family we had been. That point would be driven home to me later.
Not long after Mr. Yawkey passed on, the second event that would eventually pave my road out of Boston occurred. Darrell Johnson was fired and replaced by Don Zimmer. Zim had been our third-base coach, and I thought he had done a hell of a job. But making him manager was an admission by the front office that the team was being run on the Peter Principle. They were raising Zimmer to a position in which he could operate at his highest level of incompetence. He had some strange ideas about pitching. He constantly encouraged his pitchers to loosen batters up with a brushback. One pitcher turned to me and asked, “How bright can this guy be? Here he is walking about with a plate in his head, the souvenir of a serious beaning, and he’s talking about knocking guys down.”
I couldn’t understand it, either. I believed in drilling guys only as a form of reprisal. If an opposing pitcher hit one of my teammates, then I was obligated to hit one of his. An eye for an eye. Usually the reason for a knockdown is that the pitcher made a bad pitch on somebody and got jocked. Angry at himself, he knocks down the next hitter. This is supposed to make the pitcher feel better, while also making up for the horseshit pitch he had thrown to the previous batter. It does not work that way. All the beanball does is reinforce your conviction that you are throwing bad pitches. The more intensely you believe that, the more bad pitches you will throw. This is the power of negative thinking.
Of course, there were some guys you couldn’t avoid hitting. Jerry Terrell of the Twins was one of them. He would do anything to get on base or drive in a run. Jerry was always willing to take one on the elbow for the team. Maybe that’s why he did so much praying in the on-deck circle. He also liked to try to get pitchers to balk. I saw him do it once to Diego Segui. Diego had a 3–2 count on him with two men out and the bases loaded. As Segui went into his wind up, Terrell reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt. Diego was so distracted by the move he balked in a run. Afterward, Terrell said, “God made me reach down and grab for that dirt.” My ass, it wasn’t God. It was fear, fear that he wouldn’t hit the ball, and fear that it would be strike three. Segui was pissed off when he heard that explanation, but he shrugged it off quickly. Diego was a Latin Catholic and he could understand Terrell’s belief. But he also knew that his God and Terrell’s God would never meet. Terrell’s was born again. Diego’s had been here from the get-go.
I worked hard during the winter to get ready for the ’77 season. I stuck to my own program of running and lifting light weights. By spring training, I felt great. The Yankees had picked up Reggie Jackson and Don Gullett in the free-agent market during the off-season. We countered by getting Bill Campbell, the relief pitcher from Minnesota. I liked that. He was a great pitcher, and I figured he would be all the cure our bullpen needed. I didn’t care what we were paying him. I wasn’t crazy about free agency, but I knew there was no way we could pass on a pitcher of his ability. I did wonder how he would respond to the pressure of having everybody in Boston expecting him to save every game, pitch us to the pennant, help us sweep the Series, and end the Middle East crisis, all without breaking a sweat. I also wasn’t sure how wise it was to sign a pitcher to any kind of a long-term deal. You never knew when someone might drop him on his shoulder.
Campbell had no problem handling the pressure. He was one cool customer. One evening he and I went to an all-night diner in Cleveland where the counterman makes great corned beef sandwiches. Well, they may not be great, but at two in the morning, who knew? We walked down the middle of the street to get there. You tend to walk down the middle of streets in this particular section of Cleveland, away from parked cars and alleys. You’re negotiating for a little bit more reaction time. When it’s late at night, you want the chance to be able to ascertain whether that guy coming toward you is carrying a machete or a dog leash. Campbell and I were about to cross the avenue in front of the diner when all hell broke loose. A car was giving off a nasty backfire. Except it wasn’t a car backfiring at all. Some cop had gone into the diner with his wife just as two hoods were sticking up the place. The cop laid his wife across a table, used her as an armrest, and blew both guys away. One crook died in the diner’s doorway. His partner barely made it to the street before buying the farm. The owner of the place got shot in the leg.
I was paralyzed with fear, but Campbell was stepping over bodies, saying, “Yeah, that one’s gone, but the other one’s still twitching.” Bill had been in Viet Nam a long time and it helped him develop the intestinal fortitude that all relief pitchers need. I don’t know what he did wrong while he was over there, but he must have pissed off someone because they made him carry the radio pack. The radio pack is a big, shiny object with long antennae. Campbell was six foot three to begin with, so he must have made a hell of a target. It’s a miracle he survived to pitch in the American League. He threw great that first season with us, but Zimmer pitched him too often and he threw his arm out. Bill had a hell of a time coming back. His arm healed just as his contract with Boston reached its final year. I thought that was nice. It was as though he was being rewarded for surviving Nam.
Bernie Carbo and George Scott returned from exile in Milwaukee before the season started. We got them in a trade for Cecil Cooper. I also came back in 1977. Of course, I hadn’t been aware that I had been gone, but everybody who looked at my 9–5 record said, “What a great comeback!” At the end of the season, I went over the team’s stats and it seemed as if every hitter in our lineup had hit ninety home runs and had three hundred runs batted in. Looking over the numbers, I thought, “Gee, you mean we didn’t win the pennant?” No, sports fans, we didn’t. We finished third, one and a half games behind the Yankees.
Zimmer hurt us that year. He didn’t have a clue on how to handle a pitching staff. I noticed right away that the biggest difference between him and Johnson as managers was that Johnson was taller. Zimmer worked Campbell to a state of collapse, and he never settled on a starting rotation. At one point, he had eight guys moving in and out as starters. He also held out pitchers so they could face certain teams. Wise wouldn’t pitch for a week and a half because Don wanted to save him for Baltimore. He would do the same thing with me, keeping me on ice until we faced New York. It was a half-assed way to run things. None of us could establish a good working rhythm pitching under those conditions. Laboring in the bullpen for him wasn’t a treat either. Unless you were Bill Campbell, you never had any idea when or how he was going to use you.
Don let his personal feelings get in the way of his decisions. Fergie Jenkins didn’t think Zimmer knew diddly about pitching, and he let him know it. Don responded by jerking Fergie around all season. This was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Instead of letting Jenkins do his thing and help the club win, Zimmer did everything he could to bring out the worst in him.
Don also alienated Wise. Rick had gone through a few bad outings, and Zimmer tried to bury him in the bullpen. When Wise complained about it, he was immediately consigned to the manager’s shit list. Zimmer took to jumping on Wise for little bullshit things such as growing a beard, even though other players had been allowed to grow one. He would even hold pitchers’ meetings and not bother to invite Rick. It was weird. Zimmer made no attempt to set up lines for communication with either Jenkins or Wise, despite their being two of the best pitchers we had. I took it upon myself to let Don know that I thought his treatment of them w
as hurting the ballclub. That landed me on the list with them. And Willoughby eventually pissed him off by hanging out with us. By mid-season, the manager had stopped talking to half his pitching staff.
Zimmer thought we were a danger to his ballclub. He was of the old school, and we were part of the counterculture. He and the front office thought that we were going to corrupt the morals of the rest of the team. One executive warned one of the younger pitchers, Allen Ripley, not to socialize with us if he knew what was good for him. He didn’t listen, and, the next thing he knew, he was back in the minors.
Jenkins, Wise, Willoughby, Carbo, and I banded together to form the Loyal Order of the Buffalo Heads. Jenkins had nicknamed Zimmer Buffalo Head, pointing out that the buffalo was generally considered to be the dumbest animal in creation. It was also Fergie who had summed up Zimmer’s problems with us by saying, “The man knows nothing about pitching or pitchers. He’s a lifetime .230 hitter who’s been beaned three times. He hates pitchers. We will never see eye to eye.”
If Jenkins was the Order’s president, then Willoughby was its resident mystic. Carlos Castenada had Don Juan as a mentor. I think pitchers should also have a guru. We should go into the desert during the off-season and try to live off the land while looking for Don Juan the philosopher. When we find him, he’ll probably look like Tom Landry, and he’ll say things like, “Take whatever they give you,” and “Throw strikes.”
The first mystic sage I ever encountered was a shopping-bag lady I met in Detroit. She told me not to walk in that city carrying any more money than I could afford to get rolled for. Willoughby seemed to have that same gift of the all-knowing. He was a complex person. Jim would be serene and earth-oriented before a game. But, after a game, he would pound six beers into himself and become a different guy, hellbent for leather. He would get loud for a few hours, totally exhaust himself, and then retreat into a state of calm that was awesome to behold.
