The Wrong Stuff

by Bill Lee

  Fanning called me into his office and demanded to know where I had been. I said, “Right here.” He asked why I wasn’t in uniform. I told him I had been in uniform that afternoon, adding, “Don’t you remember? I was here for the meeting. I took batting practice and did my running. Then, I came into the clubhouse and discovered that you finally found the guts to release Rodney. I went to the Brasserie to wait for you, and, when you failed to show, I came back here in time for the eighth inning.”

  Fanning said, “Rodney Scott is none of your business.”

  That set me off. I screamed, “None of my business! That guy gave us everything he had for three years. He helped us win ballgames and was one of the most decent guys on the club. He was my friend. And you say this is none of my business! You never gave Rodney a real shot, and you lied to him constantly!”

  Fanning got so upset, he started to tremble. When he finally got hold of himself, he told me, “This is still none of your business. I’m here to tell you that McHale wants to see you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I wanted to see John right then and there, but Fanning wouldn’t hear of it. Storming out of the clubhouse, I left for home. During the drive back, I thought about how Fanning, throughout our entire argument, could not once bring himself to look me in the face. I could recall similar experiences with other managers. I think it was because, in each instance, we both knew where all the bodies were buried.

  10

  McHale burst into his office, threw on the lights, and asked, “How did you get in here?” I answered, “Through the door.” That reply was another example of my mastery of dazzling repartee. I always believed in giving an immediate answer to a reasonable question. McHale was neither amused nor impressed. He went on the attack.

  “You did a bad thing yesterday, a very bad thing.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  “Look,” he protested, “we released Rodney because we felt he wasn’t doing the job and . . .”

  “Wasn’t doing the job! Hell, he did the job for three years. No one gave him a chance this season.”

  “. . . and you were drunk and disorderly last night. That was a crucial game we lost.”

  “Bullshit, John. I threw three innings the night before last. Fanning wasn’t going to use me. If anything, I would have been the last man used in an emergency situation, and I was ready for that. I was in the clubhouse prepared to pitch if necessary. I was watching the game and knew the situation.”

  “That’s not the issue. We didn’t see you. You were supposed to be in the bullpen.”

  He had a point, but I was not about to slow up while I was on a roll. “Will you please give me a break! I’ve been up here for fourteen years, and you’re going to tell me that! Do you think you have to tell me that? Let’s not get off the track. Let’s get to the truth. Are you going to claim that you treated Rodney right with all this crap? Are you going to ask me to believe that you couldn’t make some sort of deal for him, or that you couldn’t have handled his situation better than you did? Whatever happened to ‘Love thy neighbor’ around here?”

  McHale explained that they had tried to trade Rodney, but that nobody was interested. As I would find out later, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Expos had bad-mouthed him all over the league. I was about to release one more comment on this whole insane episode, but John interrupted me. He had one more thing to say.

  “We’re releasing you.”

  I wasn’t exactly shocked. “Yeah, sure you are. You’ve never forgiven me for the time USC beat Notre Dame 55–24. You’ve never forgotten that game, John, and it will eat your heart out as long as you live. That’s right, and so will this day. This day will come back to haunt you. Not because you are releasing me, but because the day will come when you’re going to need Rodney’s talents. But he won’t be there. I’ve seen this happen before. It will happen again.”

  I wasn’t wrong. It turned out that they could have used both of us. The Expos spent the entire summer trying to fill their hole at second base, and hunting for left-handed pitching. Despite these shortcomings, they finished only six games out of first place. Rodney and I could have made the difference.

  I should point out that I did have “legal counsel” present when I squared off with McHale. Steve Rogers, the Montreal player representative, had joined us in the middle of our meeting. It had been my understanding that Rogers was there to help me with my defense and insure that my rights would not be violated. Some defense. While McHale reiterated his charges against me—absent without leave and insubordination among them—Steve just stood there, nodding his head. He never uttered a word. I thought, “Cy Young, my dick. This guy’s seeing to it that I get the same kind of hearing Dreyfus got.”

  We could have at least mounted a defense against the earlier charge that I had been drunk and disorderly. I was not drunk. I had consumed three beers in three hours at the Brasserie, and that’s not enough to give me a light buzz. I also hadn’t been disorderly. I may have raised my voice two or ten decibels in the manager’s office, but so had Fanning. If I had been disorderly, what about him? None of this made the slightest impression. McHale’s idea of considering my side consisted of asking me my name, pronouncing me guilty, and shipping my ass off to Devil’s Island.

  After leaving McHale’s office, I went down to my locker and cleared out my stuff. As I packed, I felt an invisible wall go up between me and some of my teammates. It was as though I had been suddenly transformed into a leper. Only the black ballplayers on our club ventured over to say good-bye. Gary Carter also stopped over. Catchers and pitchers have a special relationship. Of the coaches, only our pitching coach Galen Cisco walked over to tell me that he was sorry to see me go and to thank me for the good work I had done for him. I thanked them all and left. I didn’t bother to look back.

  When I got home, Pam was still in bed, sleeping. She woke up and asked me why I wasn’t at the ballpark. I said, “Hon, I don’t have a job there anymore.”

  She thought I was kidding, but when she realized I was serious, she said, “Well, what do you want to do today?” She bounced right back from the news and that picked my spirits up. Pam wasn’t into being Mrs. Ballplayer, and so she had no trouble adapting to my new status. The first time she attended an Expo game as my wife, she was introduced to some of the ballplayers’ spouses by Scott Sanderson’s wife Kathy. Kathy said, “This is Mike Gates’s wife, and this is Bill Gullickson’s wife, and this is Tim Wallach’s wife.” Pam later told me she had chatted with them for an hour and that they were very nice, but she never found out any of their first names. Their identities seemed wrapped around their husbands; it was as if none of them had a life of her own. All they talked about was hubby’s career and how he was doing at the time. They had nothing to say about their own lives away from the ballpark. Pam thought that it was all very sad.

  On the evening I received my pink slip, Rodney and I went out and did up the town. I don’t believe it’s good to linger in a depression. I started to view my release as a positive thing, reminding myself that I would now have time to go camping with my kids and play basketball with my friends. That’s how I am. I’ve always tried to change a negative into a positive. If I were in a concentration camp, I’d find a broken broomstick, roll up some old twine and tape, and scrounge up a game of stickball. I decided I would explore some new horizons. I didn’t have any thoughts about trying to hook on with another team. Yet.

  Radio Station CJAD in Montreal offered me a job doing a five-minute sports broadcast in the morning. I accepted and it turned out to be fun. I also got a call from Frosty Deer of the Kanawake Indian Survival School, inviting me to play softball on their reservation. I jumped at that, and it was an outstanding move. The moment I arrived there, I felt a renewal of strength. There’s a vibrancy to the place that is energizing, yet peaceful.

  I did play some baseball. Semi-pro hardball with the Longueil Senators. I pitched and played first base. I understand that when Dick Young o
f the New York Post heard about it, he wrote that I was up in Canada, bullying a bunch of semi-pros with my pitching. He was so wrong. The Senators asked me to play, hoping they could help keep my arm in shape while at the same time using me as a drawing card. I was still something of a gate attraction in Canada. I would have liked to compete on a higher level, but the majors had been closed off to me.

  Playing those semi-pro games was no picnic. It involved a great deal of traveling to a lot of places that were far from the beaten path. I loved the game, and this experience made me realize just how much it meant to me. I had always said that I would play baseball for nothing, and this proved it. It was nice to know I hadn’t been bullshitting myself. As for Dick Young, I don’t know what he loves. I do wonder, though, based on the way he jumped ship from the Daily News just as it appeared to be going under, if he would write sports for free. Somehow, I tend to doubt it.

  Most of the players in semi-pro ball spoke very little English, but I found that wasn’t important. Baseball has no language barriers. This was the game in its purest form. No agents, no commissioners. Just a bunch of guys hitting, running, throwing, and working up a healthy sweat. Playing without salary, the players in this league showed a professional brand of competitiveness. In one game, against the Quebec All-Stars, I was matched up against a pitcher who threw like Stu Miller. Miller was the pitcher with the Giants and Orioles who threw change-ups off his change-ups, each one slower than the one that preceded it. This pitcher for Quebec had the same repertoire. All I could do with his junk was hit a bunch of hard foul balls. After fouling off about ten consecutive pitches, his catcher looked up at me and said, “He throws like Lefty, huh? Just like Steve Carlton?” I shook my head, and then he said, “You think we should give you a fastball for the fans?” I said, “Great.” He replied, “Well, this isn’t a show for the fans. We’re trying to win.” We both laughed, and I ended up going three for five in a ballgame we won, 8–4. I loved every second of it.

  I got a chance to play some outfield against Quebec after first ingesting four grams of psychedelic mushrooms. I spent an inning talking to the pine trees in right field. The rest of the time was spent trying to wipe a very big grin off my face. God, did my mouth ache when that game was over. I did very well that day. I snared a ball down the right-field line that I had almost overrun. I caught it off my chest. I played five games in three days in that transcendent state and the mushrooms did not mess up my fielding at all, though I must admit that there were times when the ball did appear to be dancing when it was hit out to me. It was doing the “Nutcracker Suite.” But I caught anything I got to.

  The psychedelic mushroom is a natural substance. The Earth Lord put it here so that the high priests of Stonehenge could pound it down their gullets. This enabled them to exert power over the neighboring townspeople. By turning on, they could stay up all night. While everybody in the village slept, the priests sat around the campfire and bullshit with each other. Eventually bored, they sought other ways to amuse themselves. They lined up huge stones, using their shadows to predict the coming of the lunar eclipse. Once they had their forecasts down to a science, they used this knowledge to show the minions who was boss. Gathering the villagers together, the priests would say, “We are going to make the moon vanish.” And it would. The people would panic and cry, “Please, give us back our moon!” The priests would retort, “You may have it back on the condition that you vow to heed our words in the future.” It was, of course, a trick. They couldn’t make the moon disappear; they just knew in advance when it wouldn’t be around. The only powers they had were the powers of observation. The priests were like a group of used-car salesmen, displaced in time. In order to pull off their scam successfully, they occasionally needed the assistance of a little graft. Every now and again, the moon would visit them and say, “Give me five dollars and I won’t talk.”

  After a few weeks of leisure, my friend Bill Brownstein said, “Okay, the party is over. It’s time we got you back into the pros.” He called most of the twenty-six major league teams, telling them I was considering all offers and that if they were interested they should get in touch with me through him. The few responses we did get were all the same: “We have our roster set; yes, it’s true we’re in last place; yes, it’s true we’re twenty-five games out of first and it’s only June; and yes, it’s true we don’t have any pitching. But we don’t need you at this time.” At this time actually meant at any time. Ever.

  Dick Lally called the Atlanta Braves for me in early August. At the time, the Braves were in a monumental slump that they eventually came out of before winning the Western Division title. Dick first spoke to Atlanta’s assistant general manager Pat Nugent. After telling Nugent that I was available, he bombarded him with stats showing what an effective pitcher I had been in Atlanta, and how I had always thrown well against Western Division clubs, especially the Braves’ biggest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Nugent digested the data and promised he’d get back to us.

  When he didn’t, Dick called John Mullen, Atlanta’s vice-president and general manager. Once again, he made his presentation. Mullen’s first response was, “We already have our twenty-five-man roster set.”

  Dick told him, “Yes, I understand that. And at the moment they’re sinking faster than the Andrea Doria, so let’s talk business.”

  Mullen’s next response held out some hope for me. He asked about my contract situation with the Expos. That was no problem. Outside of the monies owed me for the present season and my deferred payments, I didn’t have a contract situation with the Expos. He wondered what sort of condition I was in (excellent), and said he would talk to Braves manager Joe Torre about me. After speaking with Joe, he assured us, he’d give us a call. We’re still waiting. When the Braves met the Cardinals in the 1982 National League playoffs, Joe Torre was quoted as saying that they lacked an experienced left-handed pitcher. I just want Joe and the Braves’ fans to know there was at least one such pitcher only a phone call away.

  I became suspicious about all the cold shoulders I had received and began to suspect that I had been blackballed. McHale is a powerful figure in baseball. I asked Marvin Miller about the possibility of taking the Expos to court, charging them with collusion. Marvin, honest as always, said, “If you want to do that we will help you as much as possible. But, I have to tell you, you won’t win. Collusion is the most difficult thing to prove in a court of law.” The only evidence I had against them was my gut feeling that a conspiracy had been entered into. I did have some proof, however, that Rodney and I were being bad-mouthed around the league. One player told me that he had been speaking to Expo scout Eddie Lopat about me. Eddie told him that the Expos had released me because I hadn’t been throwing well. That was a lot of shit. I had given up one run in my final three relief appearances as a Montreal Expo. If I had been throwing much better, Fanning wouldn’t have yelled at me that evening. He would have paid for my drinks at the Brasserie, and had a limousine pick me up to bring me back to the stadium.

  I was invited to be on Late Night with David Letterman, a talk show airing out of New York. I liked the show’s energy, so I said sure. Billy Crystal, the actor-comedian, and Tommy John were also scheduled as guests. Backstage, Tommy told me that Yankee vice-president Bill Bergesch had called him, asking him if he knew anything about Rodney Scott. The Yankees were interested in signing him to a contract. Tommy said that Bergesch had heard that Rodney might have a drug problem or that he might be a homosexual. I don’t have to think too long to figure out who spread those rumors. Both of them were bullshit. Rodney may have been screwed in the ass a few times, but only by management. I know he wasn’t a homosexual because he’s attacked my wife on at least four separate occasions. Tommy’s response to Bergesch’s queries was priceless. He said, “Who cares what he is as long as he can play.” That’s a player for you. He knows what’s important. Management eats all that other crap for breakfast. I did come away from our conversation with one question: If it was the
Expos who were spreading around those lies about Rodney, a player who went off quietly into the night, what sort of garbage could they be spreading around about me?

  I didn’t know, and I no longer cared. I resigned myself to the idea that I was not going to be pitching in the majors that summer. I spent the rest of it having a ball, doing my radio show, and learning something of Quebec and its people. It was the best summer I had ever had with my kids. I saw them every day and brought them to my games. We went on outings every afternoon. I got to know them again.

  If I learned anything after leaving the Expos, it was that I liked myself. I wasn’t always sure whether I did or not. And I learned that people liked me, too. Not for being a ballplayer, but just for being me. That was nice. A lot of good things happened.

  The Quebec chapter of the YMCA put together a petition, asking the Expos to put me back on the ballclub. It had over ten thousand signatures on it when it was sent to McHale. Members of the media also rallied behind me. Jane Gross of the New York Times came up to Quebec and did a piece on me. I respected the way she approached the story of my new semi-pro career. She searched for every detail and gave me the impression that she cared about me as a person, that I wasn’t just grist for her journalistic mill. I always like the human approach.

  Dick Schaap also came up and did a TV piece on me for ABC. It was a “What is he doing now?” type of story. Dick was a lot of fun. After the filming was over, we went back to his hotel and had a few drinks. And then a few more. At ten p.m., Dick was saying he would do everything he could to get me back into baseball. At eleven, he was calling for a congressional investigation into my charges of collusion. By midnight, we were both seeing God.