The Wrong Stuff Read online

  Dougie was a battler. He once got beaned by Nolan Ryan, which is about as scary a thing as can happen to you in baseball. Ryan throws one-hundred-plus miles per hour. He got Doug in the skull with his express, and I mean he crushed him. Griffin’s head was lopsided for three weeks. His first game back from the disabled list was against the Angels, and Ryan was on the mound. Doug went out and smoked him for two hits in four at bats. I’m telling you, it was one gutty performance.

  Aparicio was a big help to Griffin that first season. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about positioning, and he was a very canny player. Luis was always looking for that edge. While with the Orioles he played an exhibition game against the St. Louis Cardinals in which Julio Gotay was the opposing shortstop. Gotay had a lot of religious idiosyncrasies. Taking advantage of this, Luis laid tongue depressors in the shape of crosses on the second-base bag. In the very first inning Aparicio was on first with one man out, and the batter hit a perfect double-play ball to Gotay. Crossing to his left, Julio got ready to step on second, saw the crosses, and jumped into the air, screaming. He wouldn’t go near the bag until the tongue depressors had been removed. He was like Dracula. Naturally Luis and the batter were safe, and they both scored when the next hitter tripled. I asked Aparicio if he ever tried that trick again. He told me no, explaining that he wanted to save it in case he played against Gotay in a World Series or an All-Star game.

  Tatum was a disappointment for us. He came up with the Angels in 1969 and just blew people away for a season and a half. He was unhittable until the middle of the 1970 season, when he beaned Paul Blair of the Orioles and almost killed him. Blair was on his way to superstardom when it happened; he was never the same ballplayer after that. He could still go get them better than anybody in center field, but he really dropped off at the plate. That was understandable. A lot of guys turn gun-shy after getting hit a lot less badly than Blair did. That particular beanball hampered two careers. Tatum was never the same pitcher after he threw it. He hadn’t been trying to hit Blair. He was just a guy who had so much velocity, he didn’t have a clue where the ball was going. After beaning Blair he didn’t throw quite as hard as when he first came up. It was as if he was afraid of skulling someone again. Changing his pitching pattern, he stopped coming inside and lost his speed. Then his control, never great to begin with, vanished. By the time we got him, he was almost useless. I thought the tip-off on him came in spring training. I noticed he never spent any meal money and that he was always taking the uneaten toast off the players’ tables. Those are always signs that a player sees the end of the road coming up.

  We got off to a good start in 1971 and it looked like we might finally put it all together. Baltimore got off slowly, and by late May we were leading the American League East. Oakland was on top in the West, and when they came in for a visit on May 28, the club got its first glimpse of the season of them and Vida Blue. Blue had come up with the A’s at the end of the 1970 season and pitched a no-hitter against the Twins. I had faced him in the minors. He threw B-Bs that day and nobody on my team wanted to hit against him. In 1971 he opened the season for Oakland against Washington, got jocked, and then won his next ten decisions. Five of those wins were shutouts, and he had been striking out a man an inning. Vida was the hottest thing in baseball. When I got to the park that evening, I nearly freaked, having never seen anything like it. The media crush was tremendous; there were reporters hiding under second base hoping to get an exclusive with Blue. Traffic was snarled outside the park, and Fenway was packed almost full by the time we finished batting practice. It was like a carnival. All of Boston was turned on because both teams were in first place, Dick Williams was managing Oakland, and the Red Sox were sending Sonny Siebert out to face Blue. Without one-tenth the publicity that Vida had received, Sonny was already 8–0.

  When I got into our locker room, all the talk centered on what a light show this evening had become. Everybody except Petrocelli was impressed. Rico just sat at his locker, a look of contempt etched into his features, telling everyone, “Blue’s just another lefty who throws hard. We’ll take him over the wall a couple of times and have him out of there before he knows what hit him.” Rico never gave an inch to anybody. In the first inning, with us trailing 1–0 and Reggie Smith on first base, Rico hit a Blue fastball into the center-field bleachers. In the bottom of the sixth he hit a Blue slider over the left-field wall, putting us ahead to stay in a game we would eventually win, 4–3. That game would be the highlight of our season. Right after it we went into a slump and never recovered.

  Everything fell apart simultaneously. Our defense held up, but our starting pitching failed us, especially when Sonny got hurt late in the season. And our hitting just died. We still scored runs, but we seemed able to score them only in bunches: ten runs in one game and then nothing for the rest of the week. Billy Conigliaro had replaced his brother in right. As soon as it became apparent that power was not part of Billy’s game, Kasko tried platooning him with Joe Lahoud. Joe must have hit 757 home runs in batting practice, but he couldn’t get his average over .230 when it came to the real thing. Griffin and Aparicio were as weak at the plate as they were strong up the middle. The biggest mystery, though, was Yaz. He went into an early-season slump and never got out of it. No one could understand why. I thought hitting forty homers in both ’69 and ’70 might have hurt him, causing him to try to pull everything, whereas he had been successful hitting the ball to all fields. Pitchers do have a grapevine, and once it got around that Carl was no longer going with the pitch, everyone pitched him away. The end result saw Yaz hitting a lot of ground balls to second. We started calling him “Four to Three.” As his slump wore on, the fans got on him, and that only made it worse. None of these things mattered much. Even if we had been able to correct all our inadequacies, there still would have been one insurmountable obstacle left: Baltimore. We just couldn’t beat the Orioles. We’d go into Baltimore, or they’d come to Fenway, and each game would be like a video-taped replay of the one before it. We’d get a lead, hold it for six, and then . . . here come the Robinsons! In the seventh, eighth, and ninth, Frank and Brooks would realize they were in a ballgame and it would be all over. We just couldn’t beat them, and we knew it. Boston was always lacking that righthanded reliever who could get the Orioles’ big right-handed hitters out. That’s why the club dealt for Tatum, but he couldn’t do the job.

  In one game when we had a lead in the late innings, we brought Bob Bolin in to pitch to Frank Robinson. Bob loved to knock hitters on their ass. In this game he threw one of the most hellacious knockdown pitches I had ever seen. Robinson’s hat went in one direction, his bat in another, and his legs went so high off the ground that for a few seconds he seemed suspended in space. His body was completely parallel to the ground. I watched him fall back to earth, get his gear together, and stalk back into the batter’s box. He was exuding so much obvious determination up there that I remember thinking to myself before Bolin delivered the next pitch, that we should have let sleeping dogs lie. Bob threw another fastball inside, and Frank stepped back and tomahawked it five hundred feet for the ballgame. Bolin wasn’t sorry. He said the only mistake he made was in not hitting him. But I never saw him throw at Mr. Robinson again. And Baltimore still beat the crap out of us. We finished the season eighteen games out of the hunt, languishing in third place.

  I thought Kasko handled us very well that season. He got the most out of his pitching staff, considering what he had to work with, and he never got too high or low. I also liked his sense of humor. Once, he was in the shower with George Scott, watching Scott wash his hair. George loved to lather up with about half a bottle of shampoo. The totally bald Kasko would look over at Scott’s bottle and say, “What a coincidence. That used to be my favorite brand.” George would spend fifteen minutes trying to rinse the stuff out of his hair.

  I had gotten close to Aparicio, and, when the season was over, he asked me if I wanted to play winter ball again. Luis was going to be
managing a team in Venezuela, and he needed left-handed pitching. I figured as long as it would be as far away from Ellie Rodriguez as possible, it would be fine. I was not making much more than the major-league minimum, and I could not afford another pair of dentures.

  There must be something about the balmy breezes of South America that induces visitors to part with small portions of their sanity, because one week after arriving in Venezuela my brain began to slip out of my right ear. I was ready for the fudge farm, and I was not alone. There was an entire group of us that became certifiable.

  My first day down there, everybody was talking about how easy it was to procure greenies. It was amazing. Greenies are amphetamines and act as an anti-depressant, just the thing a ballplayer needs after an evening on the trail of Jack Daniel’s. They are verboten in clubhouses in the States, though players still find a way to get them. One way is to play winter ball. In Venezuela and the Dominican Republic they’re sold over the counter. Guys would load up and return to the States with buckets full of them, enough to last the whole season. You have to watch what they sell you, though. While I was down there, one of our pitchers came to my room with a fresh supply. Turning me on to one, he told me how he had already done two that day, and how they were the most incredible things he had tried. I took one taste and told him, “These are not amphetamines. These are a placebo.” He said, “A placebo? Is that what they’re called in Spanish? Back home we call them greenies.” When I tried to explain that they were only sugar pills, he wouldn’t listen, telling me, “But I paid good money for them and they got me fried!” I finally gave up arguing and proceeded to prove my point by taking two more and going to sleep. That didn’t faze him in the least. He took them and thought they were God’s gift. That proved to me that a lot of fatigue is mental.

  I’ve done greenies, but for the most part I tried to stay away from them. For two reasons. One, they made you feel stronger than you really were, making you believe you could blow the ball past people. For a control pitcher like me who didn’t have a whole lot of velocity, that could be fatal. Secondly, you never know when it might rain. There’s nothing worse than dropping a greenie before a ballgame and then having the contest washed out. That’s when you see entire teams of players chattering away at each other while doing six hours of Nautilus.

  One of my teammates was a pitcher who really liked to pound the pavement. He was relentless. He also was the owner of a bad case of jock itch, which was eroding his nuts so badly that he had to have them painted blue with silver nitrate. One night we went to a whorehouse in Caracas. He grabbed the first girl he saw and headed for a rear room. They weren’t back there three minutes when she came running out, screaming, “Blue balls! Blue balls!” My friend came out, wearing nothing except a big grin, and said, “Hey, no problem. I’m royalty.”

  Dropping into a cathouse wasn’t a sexual thing. It was just a chance to grab another one of life’s experiences. God knows we didn’t have to go looking for women, they came looking for us. I remember one in particular. She followed me for days, although, as it turned out, not for reasons gratifying to my ego. She was a beautiful woman who was skating with the Ice Capades, and I first noticed her in a bar after one of the games. She didn’t say anything to me; she just looked interested. She started coming to the ballpark, sitting near the bullpen. She still hadn’t made a move, but I was always catching her out of the corner of my eye, staring at me. She finally did approach me in a café near our hotel, joining me at my table as I was having lunch. For the first couple of minutes she didn’t say anything. She just watched me eat. I was about to ask her what she wanted, when she reached into her pocketbook and took out a hundred-dollar bill. Placing it on the table, she looked deep into my eyes and said, “I will give you this and the best blow job you’ve ever had if you hit Rod Carew in the balls during tomorrow’s game.”

  For the first time in memory I was speechless. I couldn’t think of anything to say until I decided that it might be a good idea for all concerned, especially Rod’s gonads, to talk her out of this foolishness. I told her it wasn’t a good idea. Not only was getting hit in the balls painful, it could do a lot of damage that people aren’t usually aware of. In some cases, a shot in the cubes could be fatal. That gave her pause. She took a few sips from her drink and stared down into the glass, looking as if she was deciding what to do. It didn’t take her long. She looked up at me again and said, “You’re right. I hadn’t realized the dangers. Well, in that case could you just nip him in the cock?” That’s when I made for the door, knowing this woman had to be crazy. I mean it was true I could pitch to spots, but how good did she think my control was?

  I just barely managed to keep out of jail while I was in Venezuela. Jim Rooker, Joe Keough, and I had gone into a Caracas restaurant after Rooker had taken a tough loss in that evening’s game. He was upset, and Joe and I decided to cheer him up by stuffing ourselves with good food while getting hammered. Somehow we never got to the good food. First we drank to each other’s health. Then to the health of our families. Each individual member of our families, going back four generations. As the bar bill got heavier; our heads got lighter and our toasts got louder. Soon we were being asked by the proprietor to quiet down. A wedding party was going on in the back room, and we were upsetting the celebrants with our uncouth behavior. We didn’t mind, having too much class to stay where we weren’t wanted. Rooker did get a trifle pissed, though, on the way out. He overturned a table that was loaded down with beautiful, intricately designed ceramics. Kicking the legs out from under it, he sent the pottery crashing into several thousand pieces.

  Once outside, we decided we were hungry. A perfectly natural discovery, since we hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. We went to an open-air café, directly across the street from the bar, but it was closed. Now we were all upset. We did some very adult things, like banging on the doors and knocking over tables. After getting no response, Rooker picked up a chair and chucked it through the plate-glass window of a store next to the café. A jewelry store. I wasn’t that drunk. Seeing that glass shatter told me it was time to get my ass out of the vicinity. The three of us did the mile in three minutes flat and didn’t take a drink for the rest of the month. We had heard the alarm bells go off and the wail of the sirens as they cut through the night. Just the thought of a Venezuelan jail was enough to put the fear of God in the three of us. It was better than the threat of a year of daily AA meetings.

  Winter ball was a vacation for me. I played ball, basked in the sun, and got paid for it while people back in the States were freezing their tails off. The Latin American fans were very intense. Their love of baseball borders on the fanatic. Cal Ermer had told me the story about the time he had played for the Rochester Red Wings in a game against the Havana Sugar Kings in Cuba. This was in the late fifties, right after Castro had kicked out Batista. The Kings were up by one run, and the Red Wings had the tying run on third with no one out. One of Fidel’s soldiers stood up and trained his rifle on the runner at third. He said if the guy tried to score, he would shoot him. And nobody, except the Red Wings, seemed to think this was a particularly bad idea. I guess everyone figured, Hell, they closed down all the casinos. The war is over. There’s nothing else to do, so why don’t we just shoot a couple of ballplayers. Things weren’t quite this hot in Venezuela, but the rooting did seem to be a thin skin over an underlying violence. I also noticed some paranoia on the part of the club owners down there. They were always afraid that the players from the States were going to skip out on them. It was such a fear that did a great deal to damage my relationship with Aparicio.

  I had done a good job for Luis, and I felt the experience had been mutually rewarding. I could always change speeds and throw strikes, but now I had learned how to pitch to a batter’s weakness and how to pace myself to go nine. I was grateful for that, and Luis seemed to appreciate the hard work I had done for the club. We had an excellent rapport. So I had no compunctions about asking his permission to go to Aruba, givi
ng Mary Lou and me a chance to visit her greatgrandfather’s gravesite. He had been the governor of the Dutch Antilles.

  There shouldn’t have been any problem. The Venezuelan All-Star game was coming up, and that meant a three-day holiday for all those who hadn’t been selected to play. When I asked Luis if I could leave, he said, “Fine. That won’t be any trouble.” Except there was trouble. Luis split for a holiday of his own without giving me the necessary papers that would allow me to leave the country. I was detained at the Maracaibo airport and told that I wasn’t allowed to leave. Stunned, I asked what documents were needed for our departure, but no one seemed able to help me. Ozzie Virgil, a coach from the States who was managing down there, came along just in time. After hearing about my difficulty, he explained exactly what I needed, telling me that the only thing standing between me and Aruba was a letter of permission to travel from my general manager. I took a cab back to the stadium, went up to the GM’s office, and asked him for that crucial piece of correspondence. He looked at me as if I had three heads. He said, “No, no, no. You are not going to leave. I know what will happen. You will get on the plane and not come back. We want you here for the second half of the season. You’re not going to skip the country.”