by Jim Bouton
I dream I have pitched four consecutive shutouts for the Seattle Pilots, and the Detroit Tigers decide to buy me in August for their stretch drive. It’s a natural: The Tigers give away a couple of minor-league phenoms, and the Pilots, looking to the future, discard an aging right-handed knuckleballer. I go over to Detroit and help them win the pennant with five saves and a couple of spot starts. I see myself in the back of a shiny new convertible riding down Woodward Avenue with ticker-tape and confetti covering me like snow. I see myself waving to the crowd and I can see the people waving back, smiling, shouting my name.
I dream my picture is on the cover of Sports Illustrated in October and they do a special “Comeback of the Year” feature on me, and all winter long I’m going to dinners and accepting trophies as the Comeback Player of the Year.
I dream all these things. I really do. So there’s no use asking me why I’m here, why a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old man who has lost his fastball is still struggling to play baseball, holding on—literally—with his fingertips. The dreams are the answer. They’re why I wanted to be a big-league ballplayer and why I still want to get back on top again. I enjoy the fame of being a big-league ballplayer. I get a tremendous kick out of people wanting my autograph. In fact, I feel hurt if I go someplace where I think I should be recognized and no one asks me for it. I enjoy signing them and posing for pictures and answering reporters’ questions and having people recognize me on the street. A lot of my friends are baseball fans, as well as my family and kids I went to school with, and I get a kick out of knowing that they’re enjoying having a connection with a guy in the big leagues. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.
Like someone once asked Al Ferrara of the Dodgers why he wanted to be a baseball player. He said because he always wanted to see his picture on a bubblegum card. Well, me too. It’s an ego trip.
I’ve heard all the arguments against it. That there are better, more important things for a man to do than spend his time trying to throw a ball past other men who are trying to hit it with a stick. There are things like being a doctor or a teacher or working in the Peace Corps. More likely I should be devoting myself full-time to finding a way to end the war. I admit that sometimes I’m troubled by the way I make my living. I would like to change the world. I would like to have an influence on other people’s lives. And the last time I was sent down to the minor leagues a man I consider my friend said, only half-kidding, I guess, “Why don’t you quit and go out and earn a living like everybody else, ya bum ya?”
I was piqued for a moment. But then I thought, what the hell, there are a lot of professions that rank even with baseball, or a lot below, in terms of nobility. I don’t think there’s anything so great about selling real estate or life insurance or mutual funds, or a lot of other unimportant things that people do with their lives and never give it a thought. Okay, so I’ll save the world when I get a little older. I believe a man is entitled to devote a certain number of years to plain enjoyment and driving for some sort of financial security.
You can always be a teacher or a social worker when you’ve reached thirty-five. That gives me five more years and I’m going to use them all. You can’t always be a major-league baseball player. There are only a certain number of years—and I know how few they are—in which you can play baseball. And I think you can be a better teacher if you have played baseball, if only for the fact that the kids will listen to you more. I think I’ll have more value at anything I do later on for having been a baseball player. I believe that, foolish as it is, Stan Musial has more influence with American kids than any geography teacher. Ted Williams is better known than any of our poets, Mickey Mantle more admired than our scientists. Perhaps I can put my own small fame to work later on.
Right now, the fact is that I love the game—love to play it, I mean. Actually, with the thousands of games I’ve seen, baseball bores me. I have no trouble falling asleep in the bullpen, and I don’t think I’d ever pay my way into a ballpark to watch a game. But there’s a lot to being in the game, a lot to having those dreams.
A lot of it is foolishness too, grown men being serious about a boy’s game. There’s pettiness in baseball, and meanness and stupidity beyond belief, and everything else bad that you’ll find outside of baseball. I haven’t enjoyed every single minute of it and when I’ve refused to conform to some of the more Neanderthal aspects of baseball thinking I’ve been an outcast. Yet there’s been a tremendous lot of good in it for me and I wouldn’t trade my years in it for anything I can think of. If you doubt me, take a look at my fingertips; I’m growing calluses on them.
So what follows, then, is not so much a book about Jim Bouton as it is about what I’ve seen and felt playing baseball, for a season, up and down with an expansion team, and for what has been for me so far, a lifetime.
Part 1
They Made Me What I Am Today
NOVEMBER
15
I signed my contract today to play for the Seattle Pilots at a salary of $22,000 and it was a letdown because I didn’t have to bargain. There was no struggle, none of the give and take that I look forward to every year. Most players don’t like to haggle. They just want to get it over with. Not me. With me, signing a contract has been a yearly adventure.
The reason for no adventure this year is the way I pitched last year. It ranged from awful to terrible to pretty good. When it was terrible, and I had a record 0 and 7, or 2 and 7 maybe, I had to do some serious thinking about whether it was all over for me. I was pitching for the Seattle Angels of the Pacific Coast League. The next year, 1969, Seattle would get the expansion Seattle Pilots of the American League. The New York Yankees had sold me to Seattle for $20,000 and were so eager to get rid of me they paid $8,000 of my $22,000 salary. This means I was actually sold for $12,000, less than half the waiver price. Makes a man think.
In the middle of August I went to see Marvin Milkes, the general manager of the Seattle Angels, and the future general manager of Pilots. I told him that I wanted some kind of guarantee from him about next year. There were some businesses with long-range potential I could go into over the winter and I would if I was certain I wasn’t going to be playing baseball.
“What I would like,” I told him, “is an understanding that no matter what kind of contract you give me, major league or minor league, that it will be for a certain minimum amount. Now, I realize you don’t know how much value I will be for you since you haven’t gone through the expansion draft and don’t know the kind of players you’ll have. So I’m not asking for a major-league contract, but just a certain minimum amount of money.”
“How much money are you talking about?” Milkes said shrewdly.
“I talked it over with my wife and we arrived at a figure of $15,000 or $16,000. That’s the minimum I could afford to play for, majors or minors. Otherwise I got to go to work.”
To this Milkes said simply, “No.”
I couldn’t say I blamed him.
It was right about then, though, that the knuckleball I’d been experimenting with for a couple of months began to do things. I won two games in five days, going all the way, giving up only two or three hits. I was really doing a good job and everyone was kind of shocked. As the season drew to a close I did better and better. The last five days of the season I finished with a flurry, and my earned-run average throwing the knuckleball was 1.90, which is very good.
The last day of the season I was in the clubhouse and Milkes said he wanted to see me for a minute. I went up to his office and he said, “We’re going to give you the same contract for next year. We’ll guarantee you $22,000.” This means if I didn’t get released I’d be getting it even if I was sent down to the minors. I felt like kissing him on both cheeks. I also felt like I had a new lease on life. A knuckleball had to be pretty impressive to impress a general manager $7,000 worth. Don’t ever think $7,000 isn’t a lot of money in baseball. I’ve had huge arguments over a lot less.
When I started out in 1959 I was read
y to love the baseball establishment. In fact I thought big business had all the answers to any question I could ask. As far as I was concerned club owners were benevolent old men who wanted to hang around the locker room and were willing to pay a price for it, so there would never be any problem about getting paid decently. I suppose I got that way reading Arthur Daley in The New York Times. And reading about those big salaries. I read that Ted Williams was making $125,000 and figured that Billy Goodman made $60,000. That was, of course, a mistake.
I signed my first major-league contract at Yankee Stadium fifteen minutes before they played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on opening day, 1962. That’s because my making the team was a surprise. But I’d had a hell of a spring. Just before the game was about to start Roy Hamey, the general manager, came into the clubhouse and shoved a contract under my nose. “Here’s your contract,” he said. “Sign it. Everybody gets $7,000 their first year.”
Hamey had a voice like B.S. Pully’s, only louder. I signed. It wasn’t a bad contract. I’d gotten $3,000 for playing all summer in Amarillo, Texas, the year before.
I finished the season with a 7–7 record and we won the pennant and the World Series, so I collected another $10,000, which was nice. I pitched much better toward the end of the season than at the beginning. Like I was 4–7 early but then won three in a row, and Ralph Houk, the manager, listed me as one of his six pitchers for the stretch pennant race and the Series.
All winter I thought about what I should ask for and finally decided to demand $12,000 and settle for $11,000. This seemed to me an eminently reasonable figure. When I reported to spring training in Ft. Lauderdale—a bit late because I’d spent six months in the army—Dan Topping, Jr., son of the owner, and the guy who was supposed to sign all the lower-echelon players like me, handed me a contract and said, “Just sign here, on the bottom line.”
I unfolded the contract and it was for $9,000—if I made the team. I’d get $7,000 if I didn’t.
If I made the team?
“Don’t forget you get a World Series share,” Topping said. He had a boarding-school accent that always made me feel like my fly was open or something. “You can always count on that.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll sign a contract that guarantees me $10,000 more at the end of the season if we don’t win the pennant.”
He was shocked. “Oh, we can’t do that.”
“Then what advantage is it to me to take less money?”
“That’s what we’re offering.”
“I can’t sign it.”
“Then you’ll have to go home.”
“All right, I’ll go home.”
“Well, give me a call in the morning, before you leave.”
I called him the next morning and he said to come over and see him. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “We don’t usually do this, but we’ll make a big concession. I talked with my dad, with Hamey, and we’ve decided to eliminate the contingency clause—you get $9,000 whether you make the club or not.”
“Wow!” I said. Then I said no.
“That’s our final offer, take it or leave it. You know, people don’t usually do this. You’re the first holdout we’ve had in I don’t know how many years.”
I said I was sorry. I hated to mess up Yankee tradition, but I wasn’t going to sign for a $2,000 raise. And I got up to go.
“Before you go, let me call Hamey,” Topping said. He told Hamey I was going home and Hamey said he wanted to talk to me. I held the phone four inches from my ear. If you were within a mile of him, Hamey really didn’t need a telephone. “Lookit, son,” he yelled. “You better sign that contract, that’s all there’s gonna be. That’s it. You don’t sign that contract you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
I was twenty-four years old. And scared. Also stubborn. I said I wouldn’t sign and hung up.
“All right,” Topping said, “how much do you want?”
“I was thinking about $12,000,” I said, but not with much conviction.
“Out of the question,” Topping said. “Tell you what. We’ll give you $10,000.”
My heart jumped. “Make it ten-five,” I said.
“All right,” he said. “Ten-five.”
The bastards really fight you.
For my ten-five that year I won 21 games and lost only 7. I had a 2.53 earned-run average. I couldn’t wait to see my next contract.
By contract time Yogi Berra was the manager and Houk had been promoted to general manager. I decided to let Houk off easy. I’d ask for $25,000 and settle for $20,000, and I’d be worth every nickel of it. Houk offered me $15,500. Houk can look as sincere as hell with those big blue eyes of his and when he calls you “podner” it’s hard to argue with him. He said the reason he was willing to give me such a big raise right off was that he didn’t want to haggle, he just wanted to give me a top salary, more than any second-year pitcher had ever made with the Yankees, and forget about it.
“How many guys have you had who won 21 games in their second year?” I asked him.
He said he didn’t know. And, despite all the “podners,” I didn’t sign.
This was around January 15. I didn’t hear from Houk again until two weeks before spring training, when he came up another thousand, to $16,500. This was definitely final. He’d talked to Topping, called him on his boat, ship to shore. Very definitely final.
I said it wasn’t final for me; I wanted $20,000.
“Well, you can’t make twenty,” Houk said. “We never double contracts. It’s a rule.”
It’s a rule he made up right there, I’d bet. And a silly one anyway, because it wouldn’t mean anything to a guy making $40,000, only to somebody like me, who was making very little to start with.
The day before spring training began he went up another two thousand to $18,500. After all-night consultations with Topping, of course. “Ralph,” I said, real friendly, “under ordinary circumstances I might have signed this contract. If you had come with it sooner, and if I hadn’t had the problem I had last year trying to get $3,000 out of Dan Topping, Jr. But I can’t, because it’s become a matter of principle.”
He has his rules, I have my principles.
Now I’m a holdout again. Two weeks into spring training and I was enjoying every minute of it. The phone never stopped ringing and I was having a good time. Of course, the Yankees weren’t too happy. One reason is that they knew they were being unfair and they didn’t want anybody to know it. But I was giving out straight figures, telling everybody exactly what I’d made and what they were offering and the trouble I’d had with Dan Topping, Jr.
One time Houk called and said, “Why are you telling everybody what you’re making?”
“If I don’t tell them, Ralph,” I said, “maybe they’ll think I’m asking for ridiculous figures. They might even think I asked for $15,000 last year and that I’m asking for thirty now. I just want them to know I’m being reasonable.”
And Houk said something that sounded like: “Rowrorrowrowrr.” You ever hear a lion grumble?
You know, players are always told that they’re not to discuss salary with each other. They want to keep us dumb. Because if Joe Pepitone knows what Tom Tresh is making and Tresh knows what Phil Linz is making, then we can all bargain better, based on what we all know. If one of us makes a breakthrough, then we can all take advantage of it. But they want to keep us ignorant, and it works. Most ballplayers in the big leagues do not know what their teammates are making. And they think you’re strange if you tell. (Tom Tresh, Joe Pepitone, Phil Linz and I agreed, as rookies, to always tell. After a while only Phil and I told.)
Anyway, on March 8, my birthday, Houk called me and said he was going to deduct $100 a day from his offer for every day I held out beyond March 10. It amounted to a fine for not signing, no matter what Houk said. What he said was, “Oh no, it’s not a fine. I don’t believe in fining people.” And I’m sure it never occurred to him just how unfair a tactic this was. Baseball peo
ple are so used to having their own way and not getting any argument that they just don’t think they can be unfair. When I called Joe Cronin, president of the league, to ask if Houk could, legally, fine me, he said, “Walk around the block, then go back in and talk some more.”
After walking around the block and talking it over with my dad, I chickened out. Sorry about that. I called Houk and said, “Okay, you win. I’m on my way down.” I salved my wounds with the thought that if I had any kind of a year this time I’d really sock it to him.
Still, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have signed. I’d have called him back and said, “Okay, Ralph, I’m having a press conference of my own to announce that for every day you don’t meet my demand of $25,000 it will cost you $500 a day. Think that one over.”
Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten $25,000, but I bet I would’ve gotten more than eighteen-five. I could tell from the negative reaction Ralph got in the press. And I got a lot of letters from distinguished citizens and season-ticket holders, all of them expressing outrage at Houk. That’s when I realized I should have held out. It was also when Ralph Houk, I think, started to hate me.
The real kicker came the following year. I had won eighteen games and two in the World Series. Call from Houk:
“Well, what do you want?’”
“Ordinarily, I’d say winning eighteen and two in the Series would be worth about an $8,000 raise.”
“Good, I’ll send you a contract calling for twenty-six-five.”
“But in view of what’s happened, last year and the year before that, it will have to be more.”
“How much more?”
