Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  Late that afternoon, Stevie and I went shopping. We had about a hundred little things to pick up for the apartment, which took a couple of hours. Then Stevie had to go to the bathroom. We went into a couple of restaurants and tried to find a bathroom, but we couldn’t—and we couldn’t make anyone understand what we wanted. So we kept walking until we saw a big sign in English: TOILET. Stevie went in and I waited outside the door. A minute later, a guy walked right through the door Stevie had entered. I heard her shriek. I ran in, saw Stevie squatting down, and standing next to her peeing into the adjacent hole was the guy.

  “What the hell are you doing, you sonofabitch!” I yelled.

  The guy turned his head and smiled, nodding.

  Then I looked around and saw a couple of other guys and a couple of other women going to the bathroom side by side. In Japan, I discovered, the public toilets are unisex. That’s the way you had to do it. Stevie wasn’t too thrilled.

  Within a week, I hated Japan. I didn’t have anyone to talk to except Stevie, Luigi, and Arturo Lopez. Arturo was friendly for the first few days, then even he stopped talking to me. I didn’t know what was wrong. We went for a couple of drinks after a game, and I asked Arturo what was going on, why he’d grown so distant. Shit, we were the only Americans on the team, and while we didn’t have to become bosom buddies, we could at least converse with one another.

  “You probably don’t remember this,” he said, “but one night you and Mantle were going out, and I said, ‘Are you guys going to get something to eat?’ And you lied to me because you didn’t want me along.”

  Oh, shit, I thought. I did remember. Arturo had been carrying this around in his head all these years. Mickey had said something like, “We got to go someplace, Arturo.” Then we did go to dinner and who walked into the restaurant later but Arturo. I remembered it, because I’d felt bad for an instant then. But I said to myself, Tough shit, Arturo—I’m with a star. I was a front-runner and figured I’d rather live in Dallas, Texas, than in Spanish Harlem. Now I felt lousy, because that slight had really hurt Arturo. I’d never given it a second thought, till now, and it was too late to do anything about it.

  Stevie didn’t like Japan any better than I did. Because of the language problem, we couldn’t get around very well, go any place we thought we might want to. It was difficult getting anything we wanted. So we ended up just hanging around the apartment and bugging one another. The bad vibes of our circumstances caused bad vibes between us. It was ridiculous. We felt like we’d been shot into another world, and there wasn’t a good thing we could say about it.

  Within a couple of weeks I received a letter from Diane’s lawyer telling me I had to appear in court again. There was no way he could force me to appear. But for the first time I was happy to. Stevie and I flew to New York, and she went on to her folks in Kansas City. She wasn’t going back to Japan with me. The whole court deal took less than a week. But I didn’t go back to Japan for a month. I almost didn’t go at all. Then I figured since there were only a couple of months left in the season, I might as well make the best of it. I was being well paid.

  In my second or third game back with the Atoms, I tore some fibers in my ankle running to first base. The ankle swelled up immediately. I told the manager, and he said, “You be okay. You play right field next inning.” I played right field and stepped in a drainage hole chasing a ball, and my ankle really blew up. The Atoms didn’t seem to think I was actually hurt. I saw several doctors, including an acupuncturist. The ankle didn’t get any better. So I flew back to New York and saw a doctor, who put the ankle in a cast to immobilize it. When I got back to Japan, it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to play any more baseball in 1973.

  I told the Atoms’ management that I didn’t like Japan and that I wanted my release. Since I had played in only fourteen games, had managed only seven hits in forty-three times at bat for a .163 average, they were not at all reluctant to part with me. They owed me $10,000 of the $35,000 I was to receive for half a season, and said they’d give me my release for what I had coming to me. I said they could keep the ten grand. I never did get oriented to Japan.

  Sayonara.

  The only good thing that happened in Japan was that Stevie got pregnant. When she told me, I put her on: “I told you that you were putting those pills in the wrong place. Didn’t I keep saying, In the mouth’? Well, I won’t be finding the pills all over the floor any more.”

  I couldn’t have been happier. I had finally decided to divorce Diane over a year ago, because I wanted to marry Stevie. The divorce would be final on September 19, 1973. Stevie and I could then get married any time before the baby was due in March. I was really looking forward to this kid. I was going to be around all the time to enjoy this one.

  We stayed in Kansas City for a while, and I got in a lot of hunting with Jim Shipley, a great outdoorsman. Then we went back to Chicago for a few months. On January 8, we got married in the Cook County Building. Circuit Court Judge Richard Cuska said, “I’ve sat on the bench for ten years, and this is the first time my five kids are going to react to a case. When I tell them I married Joe Pepitone, I’ll be a hero.”

  I was glad I didn’t marry him. Stevie looked funny enough, with her tummy popping out. She was seven months’ pregnant. If we’d waited a month, we could have had the ceremony performed while she was on the delivery table. I was present at the birth of Billy Joe, and it was one of the greatest moments of my life. Stevie had natural childbirth, and right after she delivered, with me standing there watching, they cleaned up my son and handed him to me. He was beautiful.

  I didn’t have any stupendous financial prospects for the future. But we’d saved enough to live on, simply, for a year or so. I had several job offers. Some friends in Colorado were starting a business and wanted me to go in with them. I didn’t have to put up any money and I’d draw a salary of $26,000 a year. The Playboy Clubs offered me the same salary to act as a host, either in New York or Chicago. I decided to wait a while and see what turned up. I preferred to work for myself. I also thought there might be a slight possibility that the Yankees or Mets might take a chance on me. That was a silly thought, considering.

  Then I began thinking about baseball and the ridiculous demands it makes. I love baseball, and I hate to see what it’s doing to itself. There’s so much dead time in it that it’s the most boring sport in the world to watch. But it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to be losing fans in so many cities. Attendance wouldn’t decline if fans could go to a ball park and have fun even in the dead time, if they could be allowed to see the players as human beings just like them. But the lords of baseball never allow players to seem human, to bring any fun, any color to the game. When Hawk Harrelson had his act going, the lords of baseball said he was a flake, that he was bad for the game. Yet fans loved him. Jimmy Piersall was another flake, sure, but who came to see the Washington Senators when he was gone? When Dick Allen wrote S-H-I-T in the dirt with his toe, the lords of baseball went crazy. And it was great, because it excited fans. There’s not a person in the world who doesn’t know what shit means. Seeing one of the greatest hitters in the game write that in the dirt, carving a protest in the base path, stirred up a helluva lot of interest. Shouldn’t the game be concerned with stirring up interest in itself, with bringing in more fans?

  When I opened my hairstyling place, I brought an extra fifty thousand fags into Yankee Stadium. I did a pregame show with Joe Garagiola before one All-Star Game where the subject was hair care. I showed him the first hair dryer in baseball and talked about my rugs: my Gamer, my Infield rug, my Afro rug for when I wanted to be like a brother. I had a blond rug which I told him I wore when I wanted to be baseball’s Golden Boy. Then Garagiola asked me about the two huge combs in my locker. “On damp nights my hair spray gets sticky,” I said, picking up the thick-handled comb, “and I use this one. Not only won’t it slip out of your hand, but it strengthens your wrist.” He asked about the thin-handled comb. “This one’s i
deal for cool nights,” I said. “You can whip it through your hair, and it also loosens up your wrists. So these two combs are the secret for the youth of American who are interested in baseball—the thick-handled and thin-handled models that strengthen and loosen up your wrists.”

  It was a funny put-on, and I got over two hundred letters from that show. Some of them said things like: “You’re a fag, you’re wife’s a lesbian, and all your kids are fags.” I expected some of that. But people came out to see me play. They were interested, or intrigued, by me. They always noticed me. And it’s the ballplayers who are noticed who draw the fans. Henry Aaron was a great ballplayer, but for most of his career he wasn’t a real gate attraction. He could hit four home runs in a game and people in the stands would hardly react. I always got a reaction, because my personal life was always in the papers. A lot of fans identified with me when they read that I was in debt. A lot of them were in debt.

  If the Yankees had been smart, they would have released the fact that I was not only in debt—I was seventy thousand dollars in debt. You think people wouldn’t have come out to boo and cheer and react to a major-league ballplayer who was in worse financial shape than they? Shit. The commissioner’s office would have had a fit if anything near my real story had gotten out. The commissioner, who is a puppet of the owners, had a fit about a lot of the things Charlie Finley did to liven up baseball. But after years of battling with the commissioner and the other owners, Finley finally saw many of his innovations introduced, and fans loved them. Charlie Finley might be a bitch of a man to work for, but he is one of the greatest things ever to happen to baseball. He’s colorful, he’s unique. What other owner would think of letting a mule shit on the field?

  Ralph Houk used to yell at me about the length of my hair. I’d say, “Ralph, do you hit a ball with your hair? Do you catch a ball with your hair?” It was bullshit. Five years later Charlie Finley was paying his players a bonus to grow moustaches, to be distinctive. I got fined for having my hair too long. I got fined for not wearing a cap on the field before a game. It was these petty things that bugged me more than the big things in baseball, like the length of the season, the long road trips, the official scorers who made so many bad calls because they were amateurs, sportswriters sitting so far from the play that there was no way they could consistently make accurate judgments.

  I played in the Yankees’ Old-Timers’ Game at Shea Stadium in 1974, and I was sitting on the bench next to Yogi Berra between innings. He asked me if I thought I wanted to play again in 1975. I told him I really didn’t know. If I got the right attitude back, if I felt that I could return and really enjoy baseball again without being hassled. . . . It didn’t seem likely, unless baseball suddenly named a new commissioner who was about twenty-four years old and smoked grass and encouraged some humanity to enter the game, let the fans see the players having fun out there, being real people.

  I knew I was going to miss a lot it. I’d had a lot of good times with a lot of good guys. I’ll never forget, in my first full season, walking into the clubhouse one day and finding an original cartoon being hung in my locker by Mickey Mantle. He had been on Phil Linz and me for months about the fact that we tended to use our Yankee affiliation all over town. So Mickey had Murray Olderman, a writer and cartoonist, do a drawing of Phil and I doing our thing around town. The sketch showed me sitting in an open convertible with “JOE PEPITONE AND PHIL LINZ OF THE NEW YORK YANKEES” written on the door. I had my arm around a chick and Phil was in a harness pulling the car and smiling.

  Another day Mickey hung a picture of himself in my locker. On the picture he wrote: “To the greatest little Dago blow job in the big leagues. Love, Mickey Mantle.”

  He could be funny as hell, and he could be moody as hell when he wasn’t hitting. He’d sit around the clubhouse with his head down and not talk to anybody. One day during my second season with the Yankees, Mickey was in a mood because he was in a slump, and Roger Maris went over to him.

  “Mickey, I hope you don’t mind,” said Roger, “but can I say something to you?”

  “What do you want to say?” said Mickey, barely looking up. “Well, I know exactly what you’re doing wrong at the plate, I can help you.”

  “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I’m doing wrong?” said Mickey, glaring.

  “All right,” said Roger, “take it easy. “I’m sorry. I just thought I might help you. But I’ll never say another goddamn word to you again.”

  Our two greatest hitters didn’t speak to one another for weeks.

  Roger Maris was one of the better people I met in baseball. After hitting those sixty-one home runs in 1961, he never got along with fans or writers. The pressure had been too much for him, and I thought at times that he wished he’d never broken Babe Ruth’s record. But Roger was a nice, quiet guy, and a good family man. In all the years I played with him, I never once saw him come on with a chick. All he wanted to do was make money to support his wife and five kids. He went out of his way to help other players. He used to give me tips in batting practice. He was a master of waiting till the last split second before striding into a pitch—something I had trouble with. I tended to stride too soon and hit off my front foot. Roger would stand behind the cage during batting practice and say, “Stay back, Joe, stay back,” reminding me to wait. Roger and Wally Moses, the Yankee hitting coach, helped me a lot with this.

  The only time I hated to be around Maris was when he was with Clete Boyer and Hal Reniff and they were out drinking. Individually and out of a saloon, they were three of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. But almost every time I ran into them with glasses of booze in their hands, they’d start cutting me up so bad I’d want to punch them. After a while, whenever I walked into a bar and saw them there, I’d turn and walk right back out.

  I remember one night during spring training in Florida when their mouths really caused trouble. It was in a place called Nick’s, and I was sitting with another player and a couple of girls. Maris, Boyer, and Reniff were drinking at a table when a male model walked past them with a pretty girl. Reniff said something to her or made some remark about her. The guy turned to Boyer and told him he expected an apology. Boyer said he hadn’t said anything, which he hadn’t. They exchanged a few words, and the guy turned away. Then Reniff said something like, “Go fuck yourself.” The guy came back and challenged Boyer, who told the guy to beat it, that he hadn’t said a word. The guy wouldn’t accept that, and the two of them ended up outside. Clete decked the guy, splitting open his mouth. The guy sued Maris, apparently figuring Roger had more money. Boyer had to admit he’d hit the guy.

  Johnny Blanchard, the reserve catcher and great pinch-hitter, was the only other Yankee player I hated to run into in a bar. One night Phil Linz and I were on our way to the Tower East, a bar I frequented, when we met Blanchard, who was already smashed. He wanted to go with us. On the drive to the lounge, Blanchard abruptly said to Phil, “Did you ever see a bull in a China shop? That’s the way I feel tonight.” Phil looked at me like, What the hell’s wrong with him?

  We went into the Tower East and I said hello to Joe the bouncer, a huge friend who was standing by the door. We worked our way to the bar and ordered a drink. Blanchard poured his right down. Then he said to Phil and me; “In two minutes, both of you guys are gonna be on your way to the hospital. Two minutes.”

  “John,” I said, “what’re you pissed off about?”

  “You guys stay out late every night, and you can’t play baseball staying out late every night. You,” he said to me, “are the first one going to the hospital, and,” he pointed at Phil, “then you.”

  “That’s ridiculous, John,” I said, starting to bob a bit. I wanted to glance at the clock to see if my two minutes were up, but I was afraid to take my eyes off Blanchard. He was a big, very strong man.

  All of a sudden Joe the bouncer, who was even bigger, stepped in front of John and said, “Listen, pal, there’s only one tough guy in this place. That’s me. Now y
ou put your hands in your pockets and walk out of this place quietly, or you’ll be the guy going to the hospital.”

  Blanchard did exactly as he was told, as Phil and I looked at each other and said, “Whew.” The next day I made sure I was the last guy to show up at the clubhouse. I wanted to be sure there were other guys around when I saw Johnny Blanchard. The instant I walked in, Blanchard came right over to me. “Hey, we had a good time last night, didn’t we?” he said.

  “John,” I said, “what the hell was wrong with you last night?”

  “What do you mean?” he said, pretending to forget.

  When Johnny Blanchard was traded, the big, strong, mean-behind-drink sonofabitch walked around the Yankee clubhouse for an hour crying on everyone’s shoulder.

  The only two guys I played ball with that I genuinely disliked were Jim Coates and Jim Bouton. Coates was a hard-throwing pitcher with an abrasive personality. I called him “Mummy” because he looked like a mummy, and we were always on one another. He tried to intimidate batters, which was okay, but he’d hit guys and start a fight on the field, then disappear when the punches started flying. When he was traded to Washington, he came up to me after packing his gear and said, “I just hope I pitch against you, because I’m gonna knock you on your ass every time.”

  “Are you serious, man?” I said. “The first time you hit me, I’ll come out there and hit you with a fucking bat.”

  Well, the first time I had to face him, I was scared to death. On the first pitch I hit the ground, and I don’t even remember what I did that time at the plate, whether I got a hit, walked, or made out. But the next time up, Mantle, batting ahead of me, hit a towering home run off Coates. I pulled my batting helmet down over my ears as I stepped into the box. Just then Gil Hodges, the Senator manager, walked to the mound to take out Coates. What a relief!

  I heard Coates say to Hodges, “Just let me pitch to this guy.”