Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  Singer Paul Anka was on the other side of the dressing room, and one of the racket guys led me over and introduced me to him. He proved once again that a millionaire can have the mind of a four-year-old. “Oh, you,” he said. “You’re the guy who got up on stage and started dancing in the middle of Tom’s act. You’re not supposed to treat a performer like that. It’s juvenile.”

  I got angry. He had been in the audience and should have understood what had taken place. “Hey, man,” I said. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

  When Anka mouthed off, the racket guy who had introduced us stiffened, his entire face stoning up. He pointed a finger at Anka and said, with about a second’s space between each word, “You keep your mouth shut.” Paul Anka got very quiet.

  But he had made me realize what an uncalled-for scene I had been forced to engage in. That was the first time I had experienced, personally, a heavy, heavy time around racket guys. I had to admit to myself that I had felt fear out there, and that wasn’t pleasant. All kinds of things that I had once admired were dying away. That was the last time I ever went to the Copacabana, or to any of the other places where I knew racket guys hung out.

  In the December 4,1969, edition of the New York Times, Joe Durso wrote: “Joe Pepitone, the last and most controversial of the old imperial New York Yankees, was traded to the Houston Astros today for Curt Blefary. The straight interleague exchange ended Pepitone’s eight-year career as the long-haired, long-talking Peck’s Bad Boy of Yankee Stadium. His exit had long been rumored but never quite attained, though the Yankees began to make strenuous efforts to trade him after he disappeared twice last August. . . .

  “‘In a sense, I feel relieved of a problem,’ acknowledged Lee MacPhail, the general manager of the team. ‘But it’ll be hard to imagine the Yankee club without him. He’s been a real good player, but not as good as everyone hoped he’d be. He was colorful and he had the spirit of youth, and some of the problems that go with it.’”

  All of the problems, Lee, I thought, plus maybe a few I invented. I can’t say I was overjoyed at the prospect of playing in Houston, Texas, even if I could have left all my problems in New York. Astro manager Harry Walker was widely rumored to have a rare talent for driving players crazy with his unbending rules and his unclosable mouth. I told my partners I wasn’t going to report, that I was going to spend all my time overseeing the hairstyling business. But within a week they had convinced me I had to keep playing. As an active ballplayer I could get publicity for the place; as a former ballplayer, that would soon end.

  Late in January I flew to Puerto Rico on a vacation-business trip. Orlando Cepeda had an eleven-story building under construction in Puerto Rico and we planned to put one of our salons on the ground floor of it. Then I stopped in Houston on the way home and got my first look at the Astrodome, which I labeled “the world’s largest hair dryer.” I told the writers, “I’m looking forward to a new start, a new league, new pitchers, new everything. I expect to raise my batting average playing on the artificial turf half the season. I hit a lot of hard ground balls, and I should get a lot more through the infield here.”

  I met the Astros’ general manager, Spec Richardson, and he gave me a nice raise to $45,000 a year for 1970. I told him the only other thing I wanted was to room alone on the road, that I had done so with the Yankees last season, and that it was definitely best for me and the ball club. “As long as you’re willing to pay the difference between a single room and a double, that won’t be any problem, Joe,” Richardson said.

  Even manager Harry “The Hat” Walker seemed okay on first meeting. I was afraid he might say something about the length of my hair in back. “I don’t care if you grow it down to your ass,” he said, “as long as you hustle on the field.”

  I looked forward to playing for Houston (we figured on putting a hair salon and boutique in there) until I got to spring training. The Astros trained way outside the city of Cocoa, Florida, and all of the single players had to live in barracks. The doors to the barracks were locked at midnight. If you came in after midnight, you were automatically fined $250. That was one of about twenty fines Astro players were subject to if they failed to follow the rules and regulations that were posted all over the training camp. I most admired the one that said, “No girls are permitted in a player’s room.” Another said you could not talk to a girl in a hotel lobby when the team was traveling. One of the guys told me, “You can talk to your sister—as long as she’s not pretty.”

  It didn’t take very long for the concentration-camp atmosphere to get to me. Shortly after twelve o’clock every night, one of the unmarried coaches who lived in the barracks with us would walk into your room shining a flashlight to make sure you were in bed. I was breaking my ass during the day to get into shape, working as hard as I could, because I had a feeling I could really have a big year in the Astrodome. And just to make sure we were getting in enough exercise, every day after the three-hour workout in the blazing sun, Harry Walker had us run a mile. You had to do it in under six minutes or you started over. So I was literally pooped at night. The first time a coach came into my room after midnight, I had the light out and had been in bed for an hour.

  “You asleep, Joe?” he asked.

  “I was until you shined that fucking flashlight in my eyes,” I told him.

  A few nights later he woke me again. I jumped out of bed and yelled, “The next time you come in my room like that, I’m gonna blow your fucking legs off.”

  “You have a gun in here?”

  “I room alone and I always carry protection because I have a lot of valuables with me,” I said. “And the next time you burst into my room, I’m gonna treat you like any other burglar. I’m gonna shoot you and ask questions later,”

  “You’re going to get yourself in trouble talking like that,” he said. “I’ve got a job and I’ve got to do it.”

  “You do it in this room again, you’re going to end up with a hole in you. Fuck the rules, fuck your job, fuck the manager, and fuck the owner of this concentration camp. I’m not ten years old, and I’m sick of being not only locked up but fucking checked on every night. This is the last time.”

  He never entered my room again, bless his heart.

  Of course, after a few weeks of unrelieved training and detention, I came in after midnight. The barracks were locked. I beat on the door, kicked it, and yelled that I was going to knock it down if someone didn’t open up in thirty seconds. A coach came and said, “You’re a little late, Joe,” then went back to his room. The next morning I got a note that began, “Dear Joe,” and announced that I had been fined $250. I didn’t get too upset. The chick I’d been with had been worth the price.

  The following day I told Harry Walker that my wife was joining me tomorrow for the rest of the training period. I went out and rented a room for myself and the girl friend who flew in. What a relief! We could never go any place with the other players and their wives, but that was no problem until all the wives got together and organized a party. “My wife,” I told them, “is not feeling well.”

  The Astro players were all good guys, particularly Jimmy Wynn, and I was always laughing at Doug Rader, who was flat-out crazy. When the season opened Doug sent me a cake. It was wrapped in tin foil on the table in the locker room when I walked in. I peeled off the foil, and on top of the cake, blending in perfectly with the color of the icing, was a circular pile of shit. I complimented Doug on his rare talent.

  From the start, I loved National League pitching. Nine out of every ten pitches are fast balls or sliders, and I was a fast-ball hitter. In the American League, five out of every ten pitches are breaking balls and change-ups, which were not my thing. I batted from a crouch and was therefore primarily a low-ball hitter. The American League strike zone was from the top of the letters to the top of the knees. The National League umpires called strikes from just below the letters to just below the knees. Overall, the National League played a much more aggressive, faster, better bra
nd of baseball. Every team had two or three superstars, and there was a lot more base-stealing—with guys sliding into bases with their spikes consistently high—more hit-and-run, more hustling for the extra base.

  The first few months of the season I hit well, though Walker wasn’t happy with my RBI production. He moved me out of the cleanup spot and once even had me leading off, which was stupid I felt. But then I felt almost everything Harry Walker did was stupid. In June I had to take a couple of days off to fly to New York for an appearance in alimony court, where my child support payments were reduced from two hundred dollars a week to one hundred. When I returned, Harry kept my fill-in, Bob Watson, at first base and sent me to the outfield.

  I didn’t mind. What I minded were the picky fines Harry had hit me with. Like the fifty dollars for running three laps instead of five before a game. He yelled at everyone during clubhouse meetings, but Jimmy Wynn and I were primary targets. I quickly had enough of that demeaning bullshit.

  One day he yelled at me about breaking his rules, and I said, “Don’t yell at me; talk to me like a man.”

  “I don’t have to talk to you like a man,” he said. “You have a reputation.”

  “Why bring that up?” I yelled. “That’s supposed to be forgotten here. Talk about my performance here, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me,” he yelled.

  “You’re always yelling at everyone, Harry, and everyone is breaking his ass for you. There’s no reason to yell at grown men constantly. It’s ridiculous.”

  He got so angry I thought he was going to have a heart attack. But it didn’t make any sense to put down players in front of everyone. It didn’t help the guys, it didn’t help the team.

  One day during a clubhouse meeting Harry started yelling at Wynn, and Jimmy yelled right back. Harry was referring to Jimmy—who is black—as “boy.” Every sentence was “boy” this and “boy” that. It pissed me off, and not just because Jimmy was a friend and Harry was a fool. I had heard the word “wop” too many times to go along with that kind of talk.

  I finally said, “Harry, what is this ‘boy’ shit? Can’t you call a man by his name?”

  Walker got angry, but said he didn’t mean anything by the word “boy,” that it was just his way of speaking. Probably he was being truthful, but his use of the word didn’t improve the players’ feelings about him.

  I bought a .357 Magnum rifle one morning and brought it to the clubhouse in the Astrodome that afternoon. The bolt action was stiff, and I was sitting at my locker working it with a live shell. I had the rifle on safety, but someone called me at one point and I just stood the rifle in my cubicle and walked away. A few minutes later I turned around and saw that Jimmy Wynn had the rifle up to his shoulder and was aiming it at the doorway to Harry Walker’s office. Then I remembered that I’d left a cartridge in the chamber!

  I leaped over to Wynn in one bound, yelling, “Jimmy!” I pushed the barrel up toward the ceiling and said, “It’s loaded.”

  Jimmy, who was thoroughly pissed off at Harry Walker, handed me the rifle and said, “I’d like to blow that bastard’s head off.”

  “If he’d walked out that door, you sure could have,” I said, wiping sweat off my forehead.

  “Don’t sweat it, Joe,” Jimmy said. “I saw it was on safety.”

  On July 9 I was hit on the elbow by a fast ball from Pete Mikkelsen of the Dodgers. For two weeks after that, I could bend the elbow but I couldn’t swing a bat, as the Astro team doctor, Dr. Harry Brelsford, confirmed. During the All-Star game break, I went to New York, and when I returned to Houston I found that I had been fined $250 for missing a team workout. That was silly. How could I work out when I couldn’t swing a bat? Spec Richardson suspected me of malingering and implied I was lying about my injury despite his own doctor’s testimony. Richardson told me, “If you can’t play, maybe you should go into a hospital until you’re well.” I told him I wasn’t going to spend a week or more in a hospital with a sore elbow. Who ever heard of such a thing?

  A Texas magazine had taken some pictures of me lounging around the pool at the singles’ apartment building I lived in. That was in May. The magazine was out now; Richardson saw my picture and said to me, “The elbow doesn’t seem to bother you when you’re having a good time.”

  “What the hell does that picture have to do with it?” I asked him. “That was taken a month before I was hurt.”

  The Astros went off on a road trip after this, starting in Pittsburgh. A notice was posted regarding rooming assignments. All of a sudden I had a roommate. Pitcher George Culver, a nice guy, and I were to room together. I went right to Harry Walker, who was in his office in the clubhouse.

  “Harry, someone’s made a mistake,” I told him. “I’m listed to have a roommate on this road trip. I room alone. That’s my agreement with Spec Richardson.”

  “You have no agreement that I know of. You have a roommate: George Culver.”

  “Harry, I’m rooming alone.”

  “I said you’re getting a roommate.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What I say goes, and you’re getting a roommate.”

  “What you say is shit. I’m rooming alone. I have an agreement with Richardson. I’m not rooming with anybody.”

  “You want to bet?”

  “You want to bet I’m not?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because I quit.”

  I went to my cubicle and packed my personal belongings. George Culver came over and said, “Joe, what’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s not personal. I just don’t want to room with anybody.”

  “Wow, I thought it was me,” he said, smiling. “But, Joe, how can you give up the kind of money you’re making?”

  “They don’t give me any choice,” I said.

  I drove to my apartment, packed all my clothes and personal gear, went right to the airport, and caught a flight to New York. I moved into the apartment above “Joe Pepitone’s My Place.” Spec Richardson called and asked me to come back. I told him I wasn’t going to room with anybody and I wasn’t going back to Houston, period. I couldn’t stand Harry Walker and all his rules and regulations, I said, and I asked him to put me on waivers. Or trade me to the New York Mets or the Chicago Cubs. I still felt like playing ball. I was in great shape, and I hadn’t been hitting too badly: fourteen home runs, thirty-five RBIs, and a .251 batting average in seventy-five games. I was beginning to get used to National League pitching now, and figured to hit a helluva lot better the second half of the season. Richardson said he’d see what he could do, but he couldn’t guarantee anything. I was suspended without pay.

  I got in touch with a friend in Houston and asked him to check out my apartment a few days later. He called me from the apartment and said it had been cleaned out—everything in it had been stolen. I wondered: Did Harry Walker force me to quit because he wanted all my furniture? It was a pain, though, losing all that new furniture I had charged.

  Merv Griffin called and asked me to appear on his television show. Certainly, I said, knowing it would be good publicity for the hairstyling business, and that I’d also enjoy it. Dominic went with me to the taping the next day. Merv said he wanted me to talk about why I’d jumped the Astros. He also said he’d heard that I’d once sung a little on “The Mike Douglas Show,” which was true, and asked if I’d sing. I told him I’d sing “Around the World,” which was one of about three songs I knew all the words to. Then Merv asked me if I had any funny stories I wanted him to lead me into on the air.

  “Joe, tell him about the cap on your tooth,” Dominic said, laughing.

  I laughed, and told Merv that America was not ready for that story on the airwaves. Then I explained that I had lost the cap on a front tooth, and the temporary one I had on kept coming off. Every time I said a word that began with F, in fact, it popped off. But what Dominic was referring to, I said, was the chick I’d been with the day before.
When I had gone down on her, I had come up without the cap.

  “Don’t move!” I’d told her. I’d looked on the bed, on the floor, then checked out the immediate scene of the crime. Yeah, come here, you little rascal.

  Merv laughed. But I’ll be damned if during the show he didn’t say, when I apologized for slurring my Fs, “Oh, Joe, why don’t you tell that funny story about how you lost your cap yesterday?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said, as my face got red.

  “Well, one of these days you may be able to tell that on television, Joe.”

  I sang “Around the World”—“a creditably crooned version,” according to Time magazine—and Merv asked me to come back on his show the following day, which was a lot more fun than playing baseball for Harry Walker in the world’s biggest hair dryer.

  At the end of July I got a call from Spec Richardson. Dominic answered the phone in my apartment and said the call was coming from Montreal. Shit, I said to myself, I’m not gonna play in Montreal. I got on the phone and heard Richardson say he wanted me back with the Astros. No way, I told him. He said I had ten hours to make up my mind to come back, or he was suspending me for the season. I told him that was fine with me. Unless I could play for the Mets or the Cubs, I was going to be a full-time hairstyling tycoon.

  Richardson called back a few hours later and said Leo Durocher was very interested.

  Great!

  Then he called back to say he’d sent me to the Cubs for the $20,000 waiver price. Richardson, I decided, wasn’t a bad guy after all. The Cubs were in the pennant race, Chicago was among my favorite towns, and Leo Durocher was my kind of manager. He was an older version of me. I’d read about how as a ballplayer Leo spent more than he earned. He’d bought so many nice clothes that he was nicknamed “Fifth Avenue.” Later, when he’d been traded to Cincinnati, the team owner paid off all his debts and put him on an allowance, doling him a hundred dollars at a time. Then the other players started calling him “C-Note Leo.” Based on my allowance from Bill Sherr, I could have been called “Half-a-C-Note Joe.”