by Bill Lee
Our entire lineup was a squad of assassins. And Rice was its leader. There didn’t seem any way to consistently get him out. Early in the year, some pitchers tried backing him off the plate by throwing at him. Jim Colborn was one of the last to try that. He threw a pitch close to Jim’s chin, and Jim trotted out to the mound to have some words with him. I thought Colborn was going to commit suicide. Rice told him, “If you come close to me with one more pitch, I’m going to tear your head off.” When the other pitchers throughout the league heard about this, the brushback pitches became fewer in number. A pitcher doesn’t like to give up the inside of the plate, but he also values his life and limbs. There wasn’t anyone in the league who wanted to mess with Big Jim. As Colborn put it after their confrontation, “When he came out to the mound, I thought it was all over. I figured he was going to turn me into Rice-a-roni.”
We were kicking the crap out of everybody; when we played the Yankees, we made them look like a pickup team. By mid-June we were so far out in front that fans were already inquiring when we would start printing playoff tickets. There was an atmosphere on our club, a sort of “no way we can lose” cockiness that all great clubs have to have. We had everything going our way, and then June 15 rolled around and we blew it.
The Red Sox trainer had been a fellow named Buddy Leroux. Everybody on the club used to call him Poppin’ Fresh because he looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. He got his revenge. After Mr. Yawkey died, he and Haywood Sullivan raised the money to buy a controlling interest in the club. After that sale was negotiated, Zimmer told us that we had nothing to worry about. He swore the Red Sox were not going to change and that we would still be a family.
Bernie and I were sure we were going to be dealt from the team, and we both had a lot of anxiety as the June 15 midnight trading deadline approached. When it passed, we were still on the club. We went out celebrating that night. The next day, I woke up and got the paper. Bernie had been sold to Cleveland for $15,000. Pocket change. I couldn’t believe it. It was the dumbest thing management could have done. The front office was angry with him because he was unsigned, and had, in their view, taken too much time recovering from an ankle injury he had suffered in late May. Instead of fussing with bullshit like that they should have realized what Bernie meant to our club. Carbo would spend days honing his bats down with a bottle, staying ready for that moment he would be needed. He had that Wally Moon inside-out stroke that was magic in Fenway. All he wanted from management was a fair contract. Carbo didn’t care about making big money; he cared about helping his team win ballgames. The front office didn’t see that. All they saw was an unsigned player who liked to take catnaps all the time, and who hung out with that left-handed troublemaker.
After reading about the deal I went to our clubhouse, ready to kill. I cleared out my locker, tearing my nameplate off the front of it. Then, grabbing my bags, I walked out of the clubhouse and off the team. Returning home, I tore the telephone off the wall. My kids got into bed with me, and we spent the rest of the day crying. It was pretty shitty. I missed that evening’s game. The next morning, my front porch was crowded with reporters and cameramen. All of the local papers the following day had my picture splashed across their front pages. Beneath each of them was the caption BILL LEE WAVES GOOD-BYE TO THE PRESS IN THE BOSTON CLUBHOUSE. Someone’s sense of location must have been severely off. Those shots had been taken in front of my house, and I wasn’t waving good-bye to anyone. I was telling the media to get the fuck away from my home. I was usually available to the press, but this was one of the few moments when I felt they were intruding on my personal life.
Haywood Sullivan tried to get through to me by phone, but obviously, it was out of order. He finally reached me via telegram and requested a meeting in his office. When we met, on June 17, the first thing I noticed was that there were ashes all over his desk. Wiping them off, I told him, “This was Mr. Yawkey’s desk, and I don’t think you’re taking very good care of it.”
That remark precipitated a shouting match. Haywood yelled that I had to answer for walking off the club. I shot back, “You sold Bernie, the guy who got us there in ’75. The best tenth man in baseball and one of the best individuals on the team. You sold him to Cleveland for fifteen thousand pieces of silver, all because you didn’t want to pay him what he was worth.”
Sullivan said that was history and then wanted to know if I was ready to come back to the club. I had already decided I would. Bernie had talked me into it, saying, “Bill, I love what you did, but you have to go back. You can’t jeopardize your career over me, and you have to think of the kids coming up in the organization. You have to be around to protect them from all this bullshit.” When I told Haywood I would return, he said fine, but added, “You have to face the music some time, you might as well face it now. We’re docking you a day’s pay.” I asked how much that would come out to, and he said it would be about five hundred dollars. I told him to make it fifteen hundred, and to let me take the weekend off. He didn’t appreciate that idea.
During this battle of wits, Sullivan had left the door to the office adjoining his slightly ajar. It was opened just enough to afford me a view of Mrs. Yawkey sitting in her rocker, rocking back and forth. It was as though her rocking gave Haywood strength. As long as she rocked, he yelled at me. As soon as she stopped, he calmed down. It was like a scene with Tony Perkins in Psycho. She emitted no sound; the chair did all her talking for her. It said, “All right, Norman. You can slip him into the shower now.” Buddy Leroux was standing beside her. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was on my side, but he couldn’t say anything. He was the silent partner.
When he finished with me, Haywood went inside to confer with Mrs. Yawkey. Then he came back and sent me down to the clubhouse to see Zimmer. Zimmer was angry. The moment he saw me, he lit into me, calling me a quitter. I didn’t back up a step. I asked, “How could you do that to Bernie?” Zimmer answered by claiming that we no longer needed him on the team. That made me mad. I shouted, “But you said we were a family here, and you also said that Bernie was as close to you as your son. Well, I have news for you, pal. You don’t sell your son to Cleveland!” I finished up with a prediction, telling Zimmer, “You are going to rue the day you got rid of Carbo. The day will come when you are going to need him. There will be a crucial spot in a crucial game when only his bat can save us. Only he won’t be here.”
Zimmer waved me off and went back into his office, seething. By then, the media had started coming in, gathering around me to find out why I had returned. It was a circus. Bob Bailey watched and shook his head in disbelief, saying, “Do you realize that this country gave away the fucking Panama Canal yesterday, but Bill Lee is on the front pages!” Bob had a way of putting events into perspective.
I didn’t receive any flak from my teammates over my one-day strike. Fisk stood by me, taking the Voltaire stand. He didn’t necessarily agree with my action, but he would defend my right to take it. He said he thought it was a bit selfish on my part to walk out the way I did, but he respected me for standing up for my convictions. I’ll never forget him for that.
Getting rid of Carbo killed us. The Lord of Baseball turned his back to us, saying, “That’s it. You have spent your karma. Abner Doubleday will no longer look after you. You are disregarding the family unit and have treated your veterans unfairly. Therefore, you are going to get negative results for the rest of the season, tigers.”
It didn’t hit us immediately, but little things started happening to our club, little things that would gnaw away at our lead. Burleson got hurt and his replacement Frank Duffy was unable to do the job at shortstop. Hobson racked up his elbow so badly, he had to run halfway across the field to get off a throw from third. Zimmer tried replacing him with Jack Brohamer. Jack was good with the glove, but, when he played in place of Butch, we were giving up a lot of hitting power. That injury tore Hobson up. He would come into the clubhouse after a costly misplay with his head hanging down. Butch had a rigid c
ode of personal honor and he felt like he was letting the team down. Dwight Evans, having a great year, got beaned and started suffering dizzy spells in the outfield. We could have used Bernie as his replacement. Instead, we were forced to go with Gary Hancock, a rookie who wasn’t ready. The team’s casualty list eventually got so lengthy that Zimmer felt forced to use Fisk in left field. I’ll never forget that game. Fisk was in left, and Rice was in center. I sat on the bench that afternoon, wearing a cap six sizes too big for my head; the extra inches made it easier to pull the cap down over my eyes every time a ball was hit into the air. When asked why I obviously didn’t want to watch my battery mate set up under a fly ball, I replied, “For the same reason I don’t stand around to watch people jump off bridges.”
George Scott went into a terrible slump at the plate and in the field. He had lost his mobility, leaving it in a rib franchise. George had always had a problem with his weight, but never like this. He’d sit at his locker, stare at his stomach and say, “I got Dunlop Disease. My belly done lopped over my belt.”
When Harvey Haddix had been a coach with the club, he had always been after Scott to trim down, telling him that, if he didn’t, pitchers would be able to throw fastballs by him on the inside part of the plate. Scott didn’t believe him, so Harvey challenged him to a test. He told George, “I’m going to throw you ten fastballs up and in, and you aren’t going to touch one of them.” Harvey was about forty-six years old at the time, and hadn’t pitched professional ball in almost ten years, but when he put George to the test, Scott couldn’t touch him. He threw the ball by George nine consecutive times. George fouled off the tenth pitch and considered that a victory. By the middle of 1978, even George had to admit he was too heavy, so he decided to lose weight. It was a big mistake. As his belly shrank, so did his batting average and power totals. He had created the George Scott Diet. After one month, you were guaranteed to lose numbers everywhere.
I couldn’t worry about the size of George’s stomach; I had my own physical woes to think about. By late August, my shoulder had gotten so unraveled that Zimmer took me out of the starting rotation, claiming he was giving me a short rest. It lasted about twelve years. Once again, Don buried me in the bullpen.
During the enforced vacation, my shoulder received some help from an unexpected source. I had belonged to a booking agency that occasionally sent me out on speaking engagements to various college campuses. The same people who handled me also handled Dick Gregory. Dick had lost over one hundred pounds after giving up all junk foods and adhering to a strict regimen built around macrobiotics, fasting, and physical exercise. He had been traveling across the country, lecturing on nutrition and had developed power-packed food pills. These pills enabled him to run fifty miles at a clip, while subsisting only on the pills, vitamins, and water. I had never met him, but someone at the agency had told me that he was trying to get in touch with me and had asked that I be given his number. When I got him on the phone, I introduced myself, and he didn’t even say hello. All he said was, “Where are you?” I told him I was at home and gave him my address.
Fifteen minutes later, a brown Rolls-Royce pulled into my driveway. He popped out of it, walked up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Dick Gregory. You may not know this, but these pills are going to bring your arm back. From what I’ve read about your injury, I know that your problem is lactic acid. Too much of it has been stored in your system, and it’s centering around the injured area. It’s as though you had washed your clothes with too much detergent. You’ve got all this excess soap in you, and your system can’t get clean due to the build-up. He took some comfrey root out of a bag and explained, “This is what you need. Take two hambones, put them in a pot of boiling water, and then throw in some comfrey root. Those two hambones will join together. Comfrey root is your key; it makes things whole.” Then, he laid everything on me, a variety of herbs in capsule form: ginseng, sarsaparilla root, goldenseal, ginger root, and others. He also gave me plastic packets filled with his food tablets. It would take me two handfuls to get it all down; I’d do thirty capsules and pills in one shot. Dick claimed they would neutralize the acid in my body. I took them first thing in the morning and, boy, did I get a buzz on. They gave me a tremendous power surge. I realize now that it was a form of megavitamin therapy, and that Dick was way ahead of his time. He couldn’t have been with me more than ten minutes. Once he delivered his gospel, he was gone. I never saw him again, but we’ve spoken over the phone. What an amazing piece of work! He cares about his fellow human beings and the planet. I like that program. And his pills really helped me. My arm came back as good as new.
I was happy that I was finally healthy enough to help the ballclub. On July 19, we had been fourteen games ahead of the Yankees and, to be honest, we had figured they were history. No longer worried about them, we were going to turn our attention to knocking off Milwaukee and Baltimore. During one series against New York, we had blasted one of their pitchers, Jim Beattie, into the minors. He was demoted immediately after we drove him out of a game. That same evening we almost ended Catfish Hunter’s career. He pitched an inning in relief of Beattie and had nothing. Our club knocked him all over Fenway. It was pathetic. He was a Yankee, and we wanted to beat him. But nobody wanted to beat him that badly. Watching him get tagged was like watching a fighter get battered into pulp. You kept hoping the referee would stop the carnage. Guys on our bench were saying, “Christ, why don’t they get him out of there.” It was that brutal. Everytime Catfish served up a fastball, one of our batters would hit it an awfully long way.
Ron Guidry and the Yankee bench kept New York from drawing its last breath. Guidry was ridiculous; he awed me. Everything he threw was hard and down. He was very tough to elevate, and it was hard to hit the long ball off of him. Come to think of it, it was hard to hit any kind of ball off of him. Guidry never walked anybody in crucial situations, and he struck out almost a man an inning. The most impressive thing about him, though, was the way he would sustain his velocity throughout nine innings, throwing hard from pitch one to pitch one hundred. I also couldn’t get over the fact that he didn’t hit a slump. A lot of pitchers have tremendous two-thirds or three-fourths of a season. But they always have those two or three week stretches when they can’t buy a win. Even the twenty-game winners go through these periods. It’s one of the mysteries of pitching. You throw the ball to the same spot, with the same velocity, and, for months, the hitters can’t smell you. Then you have a stretch when you’re throwing the same pitches to the same batters, but now they’re kicking the crap out of you. If we could figure out the reason for that, there would be no baseball. Pitchers would throw nothing but shutouts, and attendance would fall to zero. For one summer Guidry must have found the secret. He didn’t have anything but great stretches. He lost only three games that year, and it seemed as if the teams that beat him should have apologized for it.
When the Yankees got hit by injuries, they had the bench strength to keep them above .500. We didn’t have their depth. As soon as our regulars got hurt, we were in big trouble. We started to lose game after game. Meanwhile, New York got healthy, and Hunter’s arm came back from nowhere. Suddenly our lead over them was down to four games, and it was time to sing “Dum-dum-dum-dum, here come the Yankees!”
They roared into Fenway on September 7 for the start of a four-game series. No team ever looked more intense than they did. Getting on the field with them was akin to stepping into a wading pool with Jaws. Every time we made a move, they would bite off another limb. It was terrifying to watch. We had expected at least to split with them in our own ballpark. That’s what everyone said and wrote, “All we need is a split and we’re in good shape.” That was the wrong attitude to have. The Yankees weren’t thinking split. You could see that in their eyes. They came in thinking sweep.
By the fourth inning of the first game, we had to regroup but couldn’t. We were playing scared. Guys on our club kept looking into their dugout and shaking their head in disbelief, as if
to ask, “Who are those guys? That’s not the same team that played us in June.” That was an understandable reaction. I mean, Jesus, we had beaten Beattie into shellshock the last time we had seen him. In that game, he looked as if he didn’t belong in the majors. He kept looking around at the stands, obviously thinking, “Where did all these people come from?” But when he came back against us in September, he had undergone a complete personality change, transforming himself from Major Catastrophe to Sergeant Rock. Everything he threw was a hand grenade, and the expression on his face said, “Hit that, asshole!” We didn’t score off him until the ninth, and by then, we were behind by a couple of touchdowns and a field goal.
After they beat us the first two games, we were finished. We spent the final two games waiting for something to go wrong, and it invariably did. By the time the Yankees left Fenway, we were walking around in a daze. It was as if the entire team had just returned from Cambodia.
I was fit to be tied. I was ready to pitch in that series, but Zimmer wouldn’t give me a start. Despite the great record I had against New York, Don wouldn’t start me because he hated my guts. I understand he told someone, “There’s no way that California fag is ever going to pitch for me.” He did end up using me in relief against them, in the second game, when things were hopelessly out of hand. I pitched seven innings against them and gave up one earned run. Everytime I got up in the bullpen, I received a standing ovation from the Fenway faithful. They stood whenever I warmed up, came into the game, or got a man out. I even got an ovation when I went into the dugout to take a piss. The fans knew. There was no way I shouldn’t have started one of those games. Maybe I would have gotten jocked, but my record against New York was worth taking a gamble on. But Zimmer couldn’t be persuaded. Despite my pitching well in relief, he still refused to use me the following weekend in New York, when we lost two out of three.
