Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  I’ll have that feeling at least a couple of times this year. When I pitch against the Yankees.

  MARCH

  6

  Steve Hovley sidled over to me in the outfield and said, “To a pitcher a base hit is the perfect example of negative feedback.”

  Sal Maglie said he hadn’t seen me working on my breaking ball, and he’s right, because I haven’t. So tomorrow I’ll have to work on that too. Damn, I can’t believe the games are starting so fast. Tomorrow’s the first game and I don’t even know who’s pitching. Still, it will be kind of exciting to see how we do. I guess starting out with a new team is sort of like setting out to discover America. Sort of.

  Gary Bell is nicknamed Ding Dong. Of course. What’s interesting about it is that “Ding Dong” is what the guys holler when somebody gets hit in the cup. The cups are metal inserts that fit inside the jock strap, and when a baseball hits one it’s called ringing the bell, which rhymes with hell, which is what it hurts like. It’s funny, even if you’re in the outfield, or in the dugout, no matter how far away, when a guy gets it in the cup you can hear it. Ding Dong.

  At a pre-workout meeting Joe Schultz told us to learn the signs or it would cost us money. This is a lot different from Houk’s theory. Houk’s method was to be as nice to us as possible and if you missed a sign he would alibi for you. You could miss them all year and he would never get angry. I guess he figured that someday you’d come to like him enough to start paying attention to the signs. But the Yankees sure missed a lot of signs. Even when we were winning.

  MARCH

  7

  Okay, boys and girls, tomorrow is my birthday and I’ll be thirty years old. I don’t feel like thirty. I look like I’m in my early twenties and I feel like I’m in my early twenties. My arm, however, is over a hundred years old.

  Had our first spring-training game, the first real test for the shiny new Seattle Pilots. Today was the day. This was it. For keeps. The big one. Against Cleveland. Greg Goossen was the designated pinch hitter under the experimental rule that allows one player to come to bat all during the game without playing in the field. “Are they trying to tell me something about my hands?” Goossen went around saying. “Are they trying to tell me something about my glove?” And after that he became the first Seattle Pilot to say, “Play me or trade me.”

  I was watching the game today for some signs of what kind of team we’re going to have this year. There were lots of them, but I’m still not sure. Like we gave up two runs in the first inning on the first four pitches and I thought, “Oh, oh. Move over, Mets.” But in our half of the first we scored five runs and we went on to get nineteen in the game. I couldn’t believe it. I think the people in Seattle will now start believing we have a good team. And, my God, maybe we do. We scored all those runs without Tommy Davis, or Don Mincher or Rich Rollins. Or Jim Bouton, for that matter.

  I’ve started slowly tossing the real big overhand curve ball that once made me famous. I also threw the knuckleball to Freddy Velazquez and was gratified when McNertney came over with the big knuckleball glove and asked Velazquez if he could catch me for a while. Still can’t believe I’m pitching day after tomorrow, although mentally I’ve started getting ready—I mean I’m getting scared. I love to pitch when I’m scared. Of all the big games I’ve had to pitch in my life—and I’m including high school games that were just as big to me as any major-league game—I always did my best work when I was scared stiff. In fact, if I’m not scared for a game I’ll create some critical situations in my mind. Like, I’ll pretend it’s a World Series game and that it really counts big. I told Fritz Peterson about how I felt about being scared and one day before I was going to start a game he came over and whispered in my ear, “If you want to see your baby again, you’ll win today.”

  After the game Bobbie and I were at a party with Gary Bell and his wife and Steve Barber and his. Gary’s wife, Nan, said she’d been anxious to meet me since she’d read in the Pilot spring guidebook that some of my hobbies were water coloring, mimicry and jewelry-making. “Everyone else has hunting and fishing, so I figured you must be a real beauty. I mean, jewelry-making?” said Nan. “Make me some earrings, you sweet thing.”

  Then we got to talking about some of the crazy things ballplayers do. Nan told a story of the time she called Gary on the road to check on a flight she was supposed to catch. She called him at 4:30 A.M., his time, and his roommate, Woodie Held, answered the phone and said, without batting an eyelash, that Gary was out playing golf. And Nan shrugged and said, “Maybe he was.”

  My wife and I burst out laughing when Gary asked me if I’d ever been on the roof of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. The Shoreham is the beaver-shooting capital of the world, and I once told Bobbie that you could win a pennant with the guys who’ve been on that roof. “Pennant, hell,” Gary said. “You could stock a whole league.”

  I better explain about beaver-shooting. A beaver-shooter is, at bottom, a Peeping Tom. It can be anything from peering over the top of the dugout to look up dresses to hanging from the fire escape on the twentieth floor of some hotel to look into a window. I’ve seen guys chin themselves on transoms, drill holes in doors, even shove a mirror under a door.

  One of the all-time legendary beaver-shooters was a pretty good little left-handed pitcher who looked like a pretty good little bald-headed ribbon clerk. He used to carry a beaver-shooting kit with him on the road. In the kit there was a fine steel awl and several needle files. What he would do is drill little holes into connecting doors and see what was going on. Sometimes he was lucky enough to draw a young airline stewardess, or better yet, a young airline stewardess and friend.

  One of his roommates, a straight-arrow type—Fellowship of Christian Athletes and all that—told this story: The pitcher drilled a hole through the connecting door and tried to get him to look through it. He wouldn’t. It was against his religion or something. But the pitcher kept nagging him. “You’ve got to see this. Boyohboyohboy! Just take one quick look.” Straight-arrow finally succumbed. He put his eye to the hole and was treated to the sight of a man sitting on the bed tying his shoelaces.

  One of the great beaver-shooting places in the minor leagues was Tulsa, Oklahoma. While “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played you could run under the stands and look up at all kinds of beaver. And anytime anyone was getting a good shot, the word would go out “Psst! Section 27.” So to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner” an entire baseball club of clean-cut American boys would be looking up the skirt of some female.

  Beaver-shooting can get fairly scientific. I was still in the minor leagues when we discovered that if you stuck a small hand mirror under a hotel room door—especially in the older hotels, where there were large spaces between the door and the floor—you could see the whole room just by looking at the mirror. This was a two-man operation: one guy on his hands and knees looking at the mirror, the other at the end of the hall laying chicky, as they say. We usually sprinkled some change around on the floor so you’d have a reason being down on it if anybody caught you.

  Spot a good beaver and you could draw an instant crowd. One time in Ft. Lauderdale we spotted this babe getting out of her bathing suit. The louvered windows of her room weren’t properly shut and we could see right into the room. Pretty soon there were twenty-five of us jostling for position.

  Now, some people might look down on this sort of activity. But in baseball if you shoot a particularly good beaver you are a highly respected person, one might even say a folk hero of sorts. Indeed, if you are caught out late at night and tell the manager you’ve had a good run of beaver-shooting he’d probably let you off with a light fine.

  The roof of the Shoreham is important beaver-shooting country because of the way the hotel is shaped—a series of L-shaped wings that make the windows particularly vulnerable from certain spots on the roof. The Yankees would go up there in squads of 15 or so, often led by Mickey Mantle himself. You needed a lot of guys to do the spotting. Then someone
would whistle from two or three wings away, “Psst! Hey! Beaver shot. Section D. Five o’clock.” And there’d be a mad scramble of guys climbing over skylights, tripping over each other and trying not to fall off the roof. One of the first big thrills I had with the Yankees was joining about half the club on the roof of the Shoreham at 2:30 in the morning. I remember saying to myself, “So this is the big leagues.”

  MARCH

  8

  Mesa

  Today Joe Schultz said, “Men, you got to remember to touch all the bases.” The occasion was a meeting after our glorious 19–4 victory in which one of the guys on the Cleveland club missed third base and was called out. So the lesson for today was “Touch those bases. Especially first.”

  A couple of things about spring training. Mike Ferraro, an infielder, was with the Yankees last spring. Bobby Cox got a big winter buildup and was supposed to have the third-base job there, but Ferraro had such a hot spring (sportswriters voted him the Yankees’ outstanding rookie; he hit .351, Cox hit .186) they had to start the season with him at third. They let him play eleven games and when he didn’t burn down any buildings they benched him and sent him to Syracuse. He feels that they never intended to use him at all but were embarrassed into it and were not unhappy when he didn’t do well.

  Then there was Duke Carmel. He was supposed to be the second coming of Joe DiMaggio, and they really gave him a good shot. But he didn’t hit in Ft. Lauderdale, and I remember Whitey Ford saying to him, “Well, Duke, it looks like you just can’t hit in southern Florida.” We made a trip to Tampa and he didn’t hit there either. “Well, Duke, it looks like you’re just not a Florida hitter,” Whitey Ford said. Then we played a few exhibition games in the South and Carmel didn’t get a hit. “Well, Duke,” Ford said, “it looks like you just can’t hit south of the Mason-Dixon line.” When the season started it turned out Duke couldn’t hit north of the Mason-Dixon line either, and finally he was sent down when he was about 0-for-57. If they hadn’t wanted him to make it so bad they never would have held on to him that long. But they’d spent all winter building him up. And they’d built up Bobby Cox the same way. They wanted Cox to make it, not Ferraro.

  The other thing is a story Johnny Sain once told me. Sain is not only the greatest pitching coach who ever lived, he’s a man who tells the truth. And what he says, believe it or not, is that sportswriters actually play a part in deciding who’s going to make the team. Sain said he sat in on many meetings where the performance of the individual player hadn’t changed, but there had been two or three articles written about him and immediately the coaches and management tended to look at him in a new light. Sain says if there’s not a lot of difference between players, the job will go to the guy who seems to be getting the most attention in the newspapers. Power of the press.

  Tomorrow I’ll be pitching three innings or less against Oakland, and I’m a little worried. My fastball isn’t ready yet and my knuckleball is just marginal. Yet, as several people have pointed out to me, I need to accumulate some good statistics to throw at them when spring training is over. I can’t say, well, I’ve been working on my knuckleball all spring and that’s why I got clobbered.

  My wife reminds me that I never got clobbered in Seattle when I was first working on my knuckleball and she suggests I go with it all the way. I give her opinion a lot of weight. We were both freshmen at Western Michigan when we met and all she would talk about was baseball. When I told her I was going out for the freshman team, she said, “You don’t have to do that because of me.”

  I didn’t tell her it wasn’t because of her. And then, when she first saw me pitch she said, “That’s a big-league pitcher if I ever saw one.” So she’s a hell of a scout. Knuckleballs. Hmm.

  I’ve had some pretty good advice from my family. My dad especially. He helped pick the college I went to and got me into it. My services as a pitcher were not exactly in great demand. I pitched a no-hitter in my senior year in high school but I was only 5–10 and 150 pounds. My dad got a look at the Western Michigan campus, fell in love with the beauty of it, thought I’d love the baseball stadium and had me apply. I didn’t hear anything for a long while, but my dad was real cool. He took a bunch of my clippings—all six of them—had copies made and sent them to the baseball coach there, Charley Maher. He wrote, “Here’s a fellow that may help our Broncos in the future,” and signed it “A Western Michigan baseball fan.” A week later I was accepted.

  It was my dad’s cool that got me the bonus from the Yankees too. I’d been playing with an amateur team in Chicago in the summer of 1958 and nobody noticed me much until I pitched two good games in the tournament at the end of the season. I mean scouts would walk up to me and ask where they could find a player, but it was always somebody else. After those two games, though, the scouts were buzzing around me, wanting to take me to dinner, and there were a lot of rendezvous in cars and a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and it was all a big thrill to me.

  When I got home at about nine o’clock my mom and dad were playing bridge with some friends, and when I walked in the door I said, “Dad, you’re not going to believe it, but I pitched the best game of the tournament and the scouts want to sign me. Dad, they’re talking about real big money.”

  My dad looked at his cards. “Two no trump,” he said.

  He didn’t really believe me. Then the phone rang and I said, “Dad, that’s a scout on the phone, I know it is. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him $50,000,” he said. “Three spades.”

  He still didn’t believe me. I went over to the phone, and sure enough it was a scout from Philadelphia. “My dad says $50,000,” I said. The scout said, “Fine. We want you to fly to Philadelphia and work out with the team.”

  That ended the card game.

  I flew to Philadelphia, and it was great. I met Robin Roberts and Puddin’ Head Jones and a lot of the other players. And they put me up at the Hotel Warwick, which had these leather-padded elevators that impressed me tremendously. I ordered a $10 meal, including three or four appetizers and a giant filet mignon. But I felt kind of guilty because all the time I was in Philadelphia it rained and I didn’t get a chance to throw a single pitch. I went home and never heard from them again. For a long time I worried that it was because I spent so much on that meal.

  I also went to Detroit, and I remember meeting Al Kaline and seeing Ted Williams smack five in a row into the upper deck in batting practice. I threw on the sidelines for the Tigers and all they would offer me was $10,000. I went home and talked it over with my dad and we decided the money the scouts had been talking was all a lot of baloney. Hardly any of the other clubs were interested anymore. I was discouraged, disappointed.

  So my dad went to work on a form letter. “My son Jim is prepared to sign a major-league contract by Thanksgiving. If you are interested, please have your bid in by then.” He sent the letter to about half the major-league clubs. The only club we fooled was the Yankees.

  Jerry Coleman came out to talk to us, and my dad was careful to have baseball-team letterheads strewn around as if we were up to our ears in offers. Coleman authorized the local scout, Art Stewart, to go up to $30,000, and it was laid out this way: I’d get a $5,000 bonus, $5,000 a year in salary over the next three years, and I’d get the remaining $10,000 if I made it to the major leagues. It came to $10,000 a year—if I made it. A lot of bonuses weren’t as big as they sounded.

  But I was happy and my dad and I threw our arms around each other and congratulated each other on how smart we were to pull such a fast one on the New York Yankees. As it turned out I spent those three years in the minors and did make the Yankees, which means they made a pretty cheap investment. In recent years I’ve been kidding my dad about having sold me short in the first place and how a really astute father would have been able to get me at least $50,000 or $60,000.

  MARCH

  9

  Tempe

  Before the game today Rollie Sheldon was talking about old-timers. It’s a f
unny thing, but athletes have improved tremendously through the years in every sport where performance can be objectively measured—track and field, swimming, etc. Yet in other sports, especially boxing and baseball, there are always people who say the old-timers were better—even unmatched. I don’t believe that, and I was very interested when Sheldon pointed out some figures in the Hall of Fame book. Like, old “Hoss” Radbourne, who played before the turn of the century. He pitched the last 27 games of the season for his team and won 26 of them. Old Hoss was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 168 pounds. Some hoss! Pony is more like it.

  Some of the other heights and weights in the book were great. Wilbert Robinson was 5–9 and 215 pounds. Can you imagine what he looked like? Which reminds me of what Johnny Sain used to say on Old-Timers’ days: “There sure is a lot of bullshit going on in here today. The older they get the better they were when they were younger.”

  Pitched my three innings today and gave up two runs. I consider it a good outing, however. I struck out the first hitter I faced on four pitches, all knuckleballs. (Don’t ask me who he was; hitters are just meat to me. When you throw a knuckleball you don’t have to worry about strengths and weaknesses. I’m not sure they mean anything, anyway.) I noticed again that I throw a better knuckleball in a game than I do on the sidelines. Maybe because the juices start flowing.

  I gave up only one hit, a line-drive single after I got behind on the count to Danny Cater—2 and 0 on knuckleballs. I had to come in with a fastball and he hit it pretty good. The only other well-hit ball was off a knuckler, but it was on the ground and went for an out.

  In the three innings I walked two, committed an error (hit Bert Campaneris in the head trying to throw him out at first), was hurt by a passed ball (a real good knuckler that broke in on a right-handed hitter, went off McNertney’s glove and back to the backstop) and a couple of sacrifice flies. Two unearned runs. So the old ERA starts off at zero.