Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  Diane and her friends opened my mind on this subject, and I enjoyed being with them. They were into a lot of what seemed to me heavy subjects. And they never talked to me about baseball. They asked me about what I was into. They asked me about me. For the first time since I’d been playing ball professionally in New York, I felt bigger than my Yankee label, that my identity wasn’t totally locked into a baseball uniform. I didn’t have to come on with bullshit with them—I did to some degree, me still being me, but not as much, because I was relaxed enough to feel like a whole, regular person for hours at a time.

  My debts had been battering me all season, and now I didn’t even have that lump of World Series money to ease any of the pressure. I not only wasn’t making payments to support my children in California, I couldn’t even pay the rent on my Queens apartment. It was suggested that I find other quarters. The girl who was sharing Diane’s apartment moved out, and Diane took care of me. She was earning four to five hundred dollars a week as a waitress. Just about every cent I earned had to go to creditors to keep me out of jail. My head would have survived about nine and a half seconds in jail.

  In February 1966, Diane and I got married. The Yankees found a financial adviser and attorney, Bill Sherr, to handle my money problems. My debts now amounted to something like $70,000, and the Yankees were paying me about $23,000. All my checks went to Sherr; he gave me fifty dollars a week to live on and used the rest to make settlements with my creditors. It took me two and a half years to get out of debt. The first year I got fifty dollars a week. The second year Sherr gave me a tremendous raise to sixty dollars, and nothing extra. He was very strict.

  I remember going to him just before Diane and I were celebrating our first anniversary. “Bill,” I said, “I just can’t make it. We’ve got to have more money to celebrate our anniversary. Let me have a hundred dollars.” I’d been to him many times and begged for more money, and he’d never given in. Even for emergencies. Diane had become pregnant, and we’d moved out of the city and taken an apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and we needed a second car. It was a necessity. He’d said all I could afford was a used car, and he looked around until he found one. So now, when I went to plead with him for a lousy hundred dollars for our anniversary, I got down on my knees in front of his desk and said, “Bill, please, just this once—just a hundred dollars.”

  He reached over his desk and handed me thirty dollars.

  Ralph Houk called me into the Yankee offices on Fifth Avenue and talked to me that fall. He told me I had to change my ways or I wasn’t going to be a Yankee much longer.

  “Are you going to trade me?” I asked him.

  “I couldn’t get much for you right now,” he said. “If I could get a decent player for you, I might do it. But all they offer are some mediocre guys who are four or five years older than you. I’d rather keep you, but you’ve got to change.”

  “I want to stay with the Yankees,” I said.

  “Then show me,” Houk said. “It makes me sick the way you’re throwing your life away. My God, what a future you have. You could almost be a Joe DiMaggio. You can do it all—run, throw, hit all kinds of pitching. There’s no telling how far you can go. You should drive in a hundred runs every year.”

  “I know,” I said. “I had a lot of trouble this year, Ralph . . . the debts, the family split . . .”

  “I know about your troubles, Joe. I’m sorry. But that’s all behind you now. You can’t destroy your life. You have to think of yourself. You’ve got to start thinking about baseball as a business. You should be making forty thousand by now, on the basis of what other players are being paid.”

  “I know, Ralph. And I’m going to change. I am.”

  “It’s not just for yourself, either,” he said. “It’s for your teammates. You owe them an honest effort. You’re not playing up to your ability. You have great potential. You have more than potential, because you’ve proved what you can do.”

  Then he told me to get a haircut, and I promised I would. I meant to, until I read about our conversation in Dick Young’s column in the New York Daily News. I don’t know how Young got his information, but he always seemed to know exactly what was going on in baseball. I know he always had me right, everything he wrote about me. But I was embarrassed. I didn’t like to see all that shit in the newspaper. I went to spring training with my hair growing down my back. I started hitting the ball like I did in 1963, and nobody mentioned that my hair was a good deal longer than the baseball “style.” Long hair was “in” throughout the rest of the world, but baseball managers tended to think you hit with a crew cut. When my batting average dropped fifty points at the end of spring training, I got a trim to keep the bullshit from raining down on me. Just a little off the back, please.

  In the opening game of the season, I hit a home run and a single off Mickey Lolich of the Tigers, a tough left-hander, and I felt I was going to have a good season. I did. My batting average was only .255, but I led the club in doubles with 21, in RBIs with 83, and in home runs with 31. I’d always been a streak hitter—get 20 hits in 25 at-bats, then go o-for-20. The ’66 season was no exception. In a single month, July, I hit 10 home runs, which gave me 22 at that point. I would have had 40 for the season if I hadn’t jammed my right wrist late in August on a slide into second base. Being a wrist hitter, I didn’t stroke a home run through the entire month of September. Forty homers would’ve made for a helluva comeback. I couldn’t complain, though. I had to play over forty games in the outfield in ’66, as I had in ’65, yet I still played enough at first base to win the Gold Glove award as the outstanding fielder in the league at that position for the second year in a row.

  The team itself was horseshit. Tony Kubek’s bad back forced him to retire before the season even started, Whitey Ford’s circulatory problems in his left arm allowed him to win all of two games, and there were all kinds of injuries and aging troubles that struck the Yankees that year. We finished tenth in a ten-team league. After we’d won only four of our first twenty games, Johnny Keane was pushed out as manager and Ralph Houk returned to the dugout. At least I played better for Houk. I liked him because he would never embarrass you in front of the rest of the guys. In private, of course, he could scare the shit out of you.

  I remember early in the season I hit a line drive up the alley between left field and center. I thought I’d really nailed that ball and that the left fielder would cut it off and hold me to a single, so I didn’t run hard. Well, the ball died, and if I had run hard I could easily have had a double. Ralph had one of the coaches mention it to me. I apologized. Then, in another game, I didn’t run out a grounder to the infield. Sure enough, the sonofabitch at shortstop bobbled the ball, but still had time to throw me out. I would have beaten it if I’d run flat out. Ralph got me aside after that, and I promised him I wouldn’t dog it any more.

  A couple of weeks later I hit a high fly to the outfield, an easy out. I trotted to first. Just as I got there, the outfielder dropped the ball. I should have been on second. Mantle singled behind me, which would have scored me if I’d been on second. The next batter struck out, and we lost a run. We also lost the game by one run.

  Afterward, everyone was undressing in the locker room. I was taking off my shirt at my cubicle when I saw Ralph Houk come out of his office—which was right across from me—with a cigar between his teeth and a little smile on his face.

  “Pepi,” he said, “could I see you for a minute?” He waved me over, still smiling.

  I dropped my shirt and walked into his office. I went over to the chair by his desk and sat down. He closed the door behind him and locked it, snapped the bolt. He took the cigar out of his mouth as he turned around, and he was no longer smiling. His eyes were slits and there was a mean look on his face, a kind of controlled anger seething just under the skin. He was a big man and he had a ferocious temper, and I knew there was no way anything good was going to come to me in that room.

  He took off his shirt, tossed it in the co
rner, and said, “Stand up, you prick. I’m gonna knock you on your ass.”

  “Ralph, what do you mean?” I said. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “You crossed me,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “I told you to run out the goddamn balls, and you loafed again. You are making me look bad, you are making yourself look bad, and you are making the team look bad. Get on your feet, you prick.”

  “Ralph, I swear to God—I thought he’d catch that pop up, I—”

  “Shit on what you thought! You crossed me!” He took two steps toward me, his fists balled up.

  “Ralph, I swear to God I won’t do that again!”

  “Don’t give me that shit, you always tell me that. Then you go out there and cross me.”

  He took another step, and I thought he was going to throw a punch. I ducked my head and said, “Ralph, I swear on my mother—I’ll never do it again. Never!”

  I would have signed something, for Christ’s sake, anything to show that I wouldn’t dog it again. I couldn’t win in that situation. There’s no way you can hit your manager back. There’s no way you want to when your manager’s as tough as Ralph Houk. He didn’t hit me. He had these little discussions with me periodically, and I think he came very close to rapping me a couple of times. The thing was, after these scenes, I’d hustle like crazy for a few weeks, a month. Then I’d revert to my old pattern, just playing according to my instincts, moods. Fuck the book.

  There was no question but that being married to Diane was an important factor in my solid season in 1966. She was a solid woman, younger than me but much more mature, much more together. She’d been through a lot of crap and was very sharp, street-smart. I was somewhat in awe of her.

  Diane convinced me to go to a psychiatrist for help. He took me on for nothing, because I only paid him for the first few visits, and he kept seeing me for two years. He helped me with that guilt about Willie, made me realize that I wasn’t responsible for his death, showed me that my father had done some things that warped my head a bit. These sessions were both enlightening and depressing. They both took some weight off my mind, and laid some on. But I liked the shrink. I went to see him or called him whenever I really got down, any time at all.

  Meanwhile, emotionally I was still about nine years old when it came to being married. I had hardly mumbled my vows when I started fucking around again. It was the same old routine, this hyper need to be out bouncing all the time, scoring with a lot of chicks to massage my ego. When the ball club was home, I wouldn’t stay out all night, but I continued to flaunt my activities in front of my wife. Diane and I went out together all the time, and I’d come on with her girl friends. A lot of her very best friends, girls she counted on, were star-struck by a baseball player. They wanted to fuck me, and they’d let me know that, under the table, at a booth in which Diane was sitting with us. I wasn’t exactly discreet.

  Not surprisingly, I suspected Diane of doing all kinds of fucking around, too. She didn’t, she was a good girl, but that’s where my head was. I’d been around, she’d been around. I was out screwing, so she had to be. I’d come home from a three-week road trip—during which I’d been to bed with some chick every single night—and I’d immediately start questioning her: “What’d you do the past three weeks?” Then interrogating: “Who was at that party?” “Who brought you home?” “Did you dance with so-and-so?” Blah, blah, blah.

  No matter what she said, she was suspect. I was consistently lying very coolly, so I figured she was, even though there were no facts on which I could base my suspicions. It is very difficult to catch someone fooling around when they are not fooling around. But I kept trying.

  And I kept fooling around until she caught me. “I’m sorry, Diane,” I told her. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  I swore to her that I would not do anything like that again. Then I called my girl friend, whom Diane knew, and told her it was over. It was. Two days later I found another girl friend.

  I got caught again, apologized again. It really hurt Diane, cut the shit out of her that I was doing that to her. I felt bad, witnessing her hurt. I felt even worse when I would think about my father, realize that I was following his pattern of hurting someone, and immediately apologizing for it. I kept telling myself, You’ve got to stop doing that shit, hurting people, then apologizing for it. You know how that hurt you. But I couldn’t stop.

  I thought I was in love with Diane. She did everything for me, everything she could to help me. She had four thousand dollars saved when we got married, and she gave it to me. I had nothing coming in except the fifty dollars a week spending money. Diane worked till she was a few months pregnant, then I made her quit. When our daughter Lisa was born after the ’66 season, Diane went back to work to keep us going. We would never have been able to go out, to have any fun at all, if she hadn’t worked as a cocktail waitress. But I was such a jealous bastard I even made her quit that. I’d go to the place she worked and see her get hassled and I’d get pissed off. I couldn’t stand to see guys coming up and hugging her, grabbing her leg, bullshit like that. She could handle it, get rid of the guys in a nice way, without causing any bad vibes. I’d see that shit and challenge the guy, want to break his head . . . just like my father.

  Diane got angry. We needed the money. I knew it. But I just couldn’t tell her how I felt, seeing her at work and guys flirting with her. She’d kid them along, and I’d want her to tell them to go fuck themselves. When she didn’t, I took it as a personal putdown, a guy flirting with my wife with me in the place. I felt the guy was saying to himself, “Hey, Joe Pepitone’s old lady wants to fuck me.” That’s what I’d sit there and think, watching the action. And I could never explain it to Diane, never admit how I felt, that my ego was so sensitive, that I bruised so easily. I couldn’t tell her that I saw this as a putdown, guys coming on with her, and that I couldn’t stand to have anyone put me down, that that was the kind of ego trip I was on. I felt if I told her, I’d be admitting a kind of weakness . . . which was an ultimate putdown.

  At the time, it was all very confusing in my head. I didn’t even tell the shrink about it. I didn’t tell him everything, all my flaws, weaknesses, confusions. I felt if I revealed everything, he’d think I was a total, full-house sicky. So I covered up, kept stumbling along as best I could. It was not best.

  Diane had been a good actress and she decided to get back into the profession after I had her quit waitressing. She started going into the city a lot in search of work. I’d call her at her agent’s, where she was supposed to be, and she’d be gone. I’d get pissed off, thinking she was fooling around someplace. When she’d come home, we’d have a big brawl because of my jealousy. She’d been out trying to get a job to make some money for us, and I’d start a fight, then go out and screw around. That would make me feel bad and I’d call the shrink, he’d talk to me, relieve the guilt of the moment, I’d feel better, and the beat would go on.

  After I’d been talking to the psychiatrist for about two years, one day he suddenly announced to me, “Joe, I should be with you all the time. You’ve got a lot of problems and I should travel around with you and the ball club. I’m sure there are a number of players on the Yankees I could see as well as you.”

  I went berserk. “Will you look at what you’re doing? I’m coming to you for help, you seem to really like me, you’re helping me get some things straightened out in my head—and here I see you’re just trying to use me. You’ve been helping me just to use me. You’re a phoney, man.” I never spoke to him again. I went off, alone again, on my merry way.

  XIV

  “I think I’m old enough to handle it now.”

  When my daughter Lisa was born in November 1966, I again got off on the parent trip. She was as beautiful as her mother. But I just couldn’t handle marriage. I cared about Diane, but I cared about myself so much more that we never had a chance. All I really thought about was keeping my fun-ball rolling. I don’t know why I married her, knowing full well that
I wasn’t about to settle down, work at a one-to-one relationship. All I knew was that I felt the need to have somebody there, somebody I could count on to love me. I guess I also had a need to constantly test that love.

  I was even more crazed the second year of our marriage. We had some great times together, really nice, just the two of us. It was a new experience sitting home and enjoying being with a wife. There was often a third party present, though: pot. We didn’t have that many good vibes when I was straight, because I couldn’t sit still, could seldom relax. But when I was smoking dope, I’d relax and really listen to what Diane had to say, groove on her words, on being with her. And, of course, pot was the greatest thing in the world for balling, intensified the pleasure of every texture. I was such a child that I always felt guilty if I didn’t feel like balling. There were times when I was just too tired, when the night had run on too long. But I felt I had to fuck, that I had to prove myself to Diane. That’s where my head was. I was into so much bullshit at this time that I look back now and marvel at the fact that I didn’t completely disintegrate.

  The Yankees gave me a $15,000 raise after my thirty-one home runs in ’66. I was making $38,000 a year and living on $50 a week. Although Diane was Jewish, she turned out to be a fantastic Italian cook, and I went to spring training weighing 218 pounds. It took me weeks to get into shape, which didn’t help my quickness in the outfield. I had been switched to center field so that Mickey Mantle could move to first base and save his aching legs. I got a kick out of working around the bag with my idol, giving him tips on the footwork you have to employ at first. Mickey was a natural.