Milestone Department, March 8th, 2008

It’s Jim Bouton’s 69th birthday today. How do I know? Like every other American I read it in the paper. But of course! He published Ball Four in 1970 when I was docking my dream of moving to Manhattan. So I missed it then. Hey I missed the San Francisco earthquake too. Phew! Ball Four made a much bigger fire. A fire that forty years have not quenched.

Mr. Bouton saw glory days pitching for the Yankees. In his first season – 1962 – he got a World Series ring. In 1968 the Yankees traded him to the Seattle Angels, who would become the Pilots in 1969. In Ball Four he recalls his Yankee time com saudade - with longing - and tells us what happened with the Seattle Pilots and in the same season, the Houston Astros. He takes notes. He keeps his tablet in his uniform pants on the mound and his pen in the dugout. The Pilots’ general manager, the manager and the coaches - so like that great bunch from Lord of the Flies - treat Jim and his teammates as Piggy phalanx, a body of troops they’ve gotta mow down. Without the thrill of murder, but of course.

Pitching coach Sal Maglie, an old hero of Jim’s from the Giants, runs spring training in a way that Jim hopes is not like the way it went with the Yankees: “He told me I’d be pitching five minutes of batting practice today and that I’d be the last pitcher. That might mean something. It’s one of the tiny things you look for during spring training. You watch who you follow in batting practice, try to find out how many minutes you’ve pitched compared with other pitchers, decide whether you’re with the good squad or the bad squad, whether the morning workout is more important than the afternoon workout. The Yankees would divide the squad into morning and afternoon groups and they’d always say it didn’t mean a thing, just two groups for convenience. Except that the morning group always had Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Elston Howard, Whitey Ford and guys like that. The afternoon group would have a bunch of guys named Dick Beradino. I never saw a guy hit or pitch himself off the afternoon list.” This is on page 14, a harbinger.

Not having to negotiate his contract makes Mr. Bouton nervous. Then in Spring Training he has to run “fifteen or twenty windsprints” a day in 100 degree Tempe, Arizona sun. This does not light his fire. He concludes that “anyone who can’t sweat in Arizona hasn’t tried”.

GM Marvin Milkes sends a guy to the minors, right? But without any notice! A guy’s on the roster one day then yikes! It’s a heads up for Tony La Paglia. Mr. Bouton pitches two games after the season opens and then: “I died tonight. I got sent to Vancouver. My first reaction: outrage. Second reaction: Omigod! How am I going to tell Bobbie? …The $650 deposit on the place we’d already signed for. Moving again. Again. And we just got here.”

Joe Schultz tells Jim he had to send him to Vancouver because he didn’t think “your knuckle ball did that much in Arizona and we wanted to see what it looked like when it got out of the light air…” From Vancouver he segues to Hawaii – girls work topless at the nightclub in their hotel. Everyone likes this. He pitches well there. On April 29th, back to Seattle.

He concentrates on his knuckleball again. It’s pitch that most pitchers have. But he still wants to be a knuckleball pitcher. Joe Schultz does not believe in Mr. Bouton. When he gets to pitch Schultz demands fast balls and sliders. He obeys; he pitches walks, gives up hits and this makes him sad. If he could pitch more innings he’d be able to count on that knuckleball. It’s no go.

Mr. Bouton cannot tell coaches from babysitters; Eddie O’Brien sees guys eating sunflower seeds in the bullpen. “Hey, no eating in the bullpen. Not even sunflower seeds, Eddie? Nothing, not even sunflower seeds.” There are curfews. There are fines for acts of commission and omission. Guys get depressed and Omigod! It’s like, 20 years before Prozac! The solution? Greenies: dextroamphetamine sulfate! To not take the pipe, to get up, to have energy, to perform. That’s just one of the amazing secret of the book: Players take speed. Yes, they take speed - not injections but pills. And yes, they are not sorry about it.

Among the guys it’s not a secret: greenies are something they do, like having girlfriends in many ports. And there are other earthly pleasures. Egg-walking becomes egg-laying with utterly inspiring practical jokes. The kind that really hurt a person. Get your own notepads out! These are some of the rewards of being kids.

There’s so much that is rotten, horrible and funny if you’re not the perpee. Mr. Bouton reveals some old Yankee habits also. Too Much Information Department? Turn to page 163 of the 20th Anniversary edition.

Then Mr. Bouton goes to the Astros. They’ve been winning games. They’re pennant contenders. But first, there’s manager Harry the Hat Walker. I remember he played third base for the Phillies in my time. He was really ugly. He’s older now, still ugly and a screamer. But Jim gets to pitch, even as a starter. He wins games. And, there’re a hundred more pages of this great stuff!

Baseball Inc. really hated Ball Four. Yes. Everybody else loved it. It’s still fresh, and riveting. That was then, before free agency, million dollar contracts and a few other things. But Dido still sings, When I am laid, am laid to rest, remember me! Not to worry.

Lo Duca Lookout

Despite being ‘social and chatty’, he had a lousy 2007.
He was traded from the Mets to the Nats for their catcher Brian Schneider. He signed a contract for $5 million December 11th, two days before the Mitchell Report was released. It mentioned him 37 times: for receiving shipments of HGH, for putting other players in touch with Kirk Radomski, for writing $3200 cheques. To Radomski, who had given copies to Mitchell investigators.

In a February interview, Mr. Lo Duca admitted “a mistake, mistakes in judgment”. “You do something wrong in your life and you get away with it, you still have something inside you that burns.” ”...It’s a big relief for me to know that I’ve come to grips with it.” A mistake is an error, blunder or misunderstanding. A mistake is wrong, something wrongly judged. I don’t see how ‘mistake’ can describe writing cheques for $3200 a pop except those costly errors of ‘judgment.’

The Times analyzed named the Mitchell players’ performance while allegedly ‘using’, in bar graphs.

Mr. Lo Duca’s graphs show that before he was linked to performance-enhancing substances he only hit well above his career average in 2001. His great 2006 Mets season was so not better than that. Those big cheques were for naught!