Authors: David Halberstam
He found himself starting the 1959 season with the Yankee Class D team at Auburn, where very shortly thereafter he was hit in the right hand with a line drive and broke the thumb on his pitching hand. That finished him at Auburn, where his record was a less-than-inspiring 1-4 and his ERA was 5.73. Things were not looking good. After the accident he was sent out to the Yankee rookie team in Kearney, Nebraska, and told to work as hard as he could to keep his right arm from atrophying. His arrival in Kearney was inauspicious; he checked into his hotel, went immediately to the hotel room of the manager, Jimmy Gleeson, and announced eagerly that he was Jim Bouton, the new pitcher who had been sent out by the Yankees. Gleeson looked up at him, shook his head, and said, “Young man, I’m going to give you a great piece of advice. Don’t ever knock on a manager’s door without first calling from the lobby. It just so happens that it doesn’t matter to me, but there may be other managers, if you go higher up, who may be entertaining guests. So I’d be careful about it in the future.” In Kearney he worked out and pitched in a few games, and his record was 2-4 with an ERA of 5.40. For most young players in Bouton’s position, this would have been a dark moment. But Bouton was curiously optimistic. From Kearney he wrote his father a letter that began by saying that he was at the absolute bottom of the barrel, that he had a broken pitching hand, that he was still listed with the Class D team, the lowest ranking one of the thirteen teams in the Yankee organization, and that since there were ten pitchers per team, he ranked himself as the 130th pitcher in the Yankee organization. “But I think I’m going to make it,” he concluded. Years later that confidence astounded him, and he often wondered where it had come from.
It came, Bouton later decided, from an intuitive sense of how to deal with adversity. In high school, when he had not made the team, his love of the sport had kept him going. Now, he thought, as he grew stronger and a little heavier, perhaps his body was catching up with his hunger for the sport. In addition, he had begun to notice that, although the other young pitchers with him were taller, stronger, and far better credentialed, they seemed emotionally vulnerable. That vulnerability, he thought, came from the easy, early successes in their lives, when they had almost always been the biggest and strongest players among their boyhood peers, and therefore inevitably chosen as pitchers. As such, few had had to deal with adversity before. Now, for the first time, they were being subjected to physical and emotional stress. They had been sent to large, impersonal rookie camps where they were given numbers to put on the backs of their uniforms—and by this act alone, they were shorn of their individuality and perhaps their confidence. In addition, for the first time, they were pitching against other kids who were big and strong, and who had also always been the best. Bouton noticed something else about the other young men: because they had been high school stars, life in general had always been relatively easy for them. They had been invariably treated by their communities as local heroes; good usually not just in baseball but in basketball and football too; captains, it seemed, of all three sports, and thereby catered to; and always favored by the society around them. Now, starting out in these lower rungs of baseball where the amenities of life were quite marginal, they were dealing with being away from home for the first time. They missed their families, and they missed their girlfriends, and they missed those coaches who had been dependent upon them and who had treated them as if they were their own children, and in some cases better than their own children. They became homesick and their confidence had begun to desert them. When things went wrong they did not have the inner resilience to deal with their problems. When things went wrong in a game and their anger flared, they had a hard time controlling their tempers because this had never happened before. When they lost two games in a row, they got down on themselves, and it was harder for them to control their disappointment and depression. When their talent alone no longer carried them, they were not as smart about making adjustments, about listening to older pitchers who might teach them a new pitch. Whatever else, that was not Jim Bouton’s problem. He was by nature mentally tough. Hardship and disappointment had come early for him.
His career seemed fluky from the start. In 1960 he was sent to Greensboro in the Class B League, expecting that as the players moved downward in the beginning of the season (a few pitchers released from the major-league team would go to Triple A, and they in turn would move the Triple A pitchers to Double A, etc.), he would end up in Class C or perhaps Class D again. But right before the cut, a pitcher named Dooley Womack, who was supposed to pitch a game, had a sore arm, so Bouton pitched and won. A few days later, with Womack still unable to pitch, Bouton won again. They kept him in the rotation and he was 4-0 when it was time to make the cut, so he stayed with Greensboro and made the All-Star team. He pitched well there, winning 14 games and losing only 8, with a league-leading earned run average of 2.73, and that won him a chance to go to spring training with the major-league team.
No one was more surprised than he at having gone so far in so short a time. He was nothing if not a quick study and an eager student. In 1961 he already possessed at least a fair fastball, a good curve, a slider, and a knuckler, and he went over to Johnny Sain during spring training and asked him what he needed to do to become a big-league pitcher. Sain told him he needed to define himself better—that he had a good selection of pitches, but that he had to figure out which was his best pitch and then devote a disproportionate amount of time to developing it. He had to make that basic pitch his strength, so that the people in charge of the team knew what kind of pitcher he was. “What they look for down here is potential—that is, velocity and movement,” Sain said. “That can’t be taught. The other stuff, location, finesse, how to work against the hitters, they figure they can teach you. But the speed of the fastball—and whether it has movement—that’s what matters and that’s what you have to show them from the start. That’s what they’ll look for in the very small amount of time that you have to work with them watching.” Then Sain told him his own highly idiosyncratic philosophy of how the body behaves, that the body was all about memory: “It wants to do today what it did in the last few days. If you’ve run a lot in recent weeks, it wants to run today. If you’ve been throwing hard, it wants to throw hard. If you’ve been sitting down and doing nothing, it wants to sit down and do nothing.” Therefore, he said, the best thing Bouton could do for his body was to throw hard, because in the end that was what his body would respond to. So Bouton worked religiously on his fastball that spring and summer, experimenting with how he held the seams of the ball to see which grip allowed it to move the most. Told as well that he needed a change, he studied how Pete Mikkelsen threw his exceptional palm ball—Mikkelsen reared back and seemingly threw as hard as he could, but despite the violent arm motion, the ball traveled very slowly to the plate—and got Mikkelsen to teach it to him.
During the 1961 season he pitched at Amarillo in the Texas League, which was Double A ball. There he played with Pepitone and Linz. That was a good team and, even more, a wild team. The Texas League was so grim, the bus rides so long and so rarely air-conditioned, that they all played hard, in fear of being returned there for the next season. Then, exhausted by the bus rides and the heat, they played hard both on and off the field. In the middle of the season their manager, Sheriff Robinson, was called home, and for a time it was as if the inmates truly ran the asylum. Then one day they were at the pool next to their motel, practicing dives, and Bouton was on the diving board when he heard a voice saying, “Bouton—you hit the water, and it will cost you fifty dollars.” The Sheriff was back, and the party was over. It was a good season: he had made the All-Star team and, in a brutal hitter’s league, where the ball always seemed to carry, he won 13, lost 7, and kept his earned run average at 2.97—a major victory of sorts.
In 1962 he went back to spring training, hoping to make it to Triple A or even, in his secret wildest dreams, the big-league team. There he picked up an additional bit of advice, ironically from a pitcher he did not particularly like named Jim Coates. Bouton thought Coates was shrewd about one thing in particular, and that was what to do when they called on you to pitch batting practice—“The Jim Coates Theory of Spring Training Batting Practice,” Bouton later called it. The managers traditionally told the rookie pitchers to go out there and throw soft, so that the veteran hitters could work on their timing without being bothered by wicked curves and sliders. Coates said that was nonsense. Be selfish, he said. Go out there and throw as hard as you can and throw your best stuff. The pitchers who threw soft were soon gone. “Listen,” he told the younger pitchers, “It’s your ass and your career and you aren’t going to get many chances. The veteran guys you’re pitching to—they’ve already made the team.” It was, he said, about the survival of the fittest. That made eminent sense to Bouton, and so he threw his best stuff, and the other pitchers noticed that Maris, Mantle, Yogi, and some of the other veteran players were quietly cursing him during batting practice, but that only made him throw harder and harder. Ralph Houk, on the other hand, was quietly smiling.
Bouton made the major-league roster in 1962 by the skin of his teeth, and early in the season he was given a start against the Senators. A good deal depended on that start, he was aware, for the major-league roster cutback was still coming, and he was a likely nominee to depart for Richmond. He barely made it past the first inning, walking the first two batters he faced without throwing a strike. With the bases loaded, the count 3-0, and Ralph Houk, poised on the top of the dugout to come out and relieve him, Bouton threw ball four. Houk began to come out of the dugout when the umpire called the pitch a strike. Given that reprieve, Bouton got the hitter out, and then he retired the side. From there he went on to pitch what was surely the most inartistic shutout in recent Yankee history. Giving up seven walks and seven hits, wearing out the Yankee bullpen, and helped by some spectacular catches by Hector Lopez in deep left-center, he won that game. When he came into the locker room after the game, Mickey Mantle had strewn towels from the entrance clubhouse to his locker.
In spring training 1963, still sure that he needed to improve even though he had spent a year in the majors with a record of 7-7, he sought out Ralph Terry to ask what he needed to do to improve his chances. Bouton considered Terry one of the most thoughtful players on the team. Terry thought for a moment and told him, “Well, Jim, I don’t feel like you’ve really decided what kind of a pitcher you are yet. You have several pitches and you have enough talent, but you haven’t decided whether you’re a side-arm pitcher or an over-hand pitcher. Let me give you one bit of advice. Forget about side-arm. You’re not six-five or six-six and you’re sure as hell not Ewell Blackwell. You’re six feet, and you’ve got a good fastball. Get up on top and throw everything as hard as you can from up on top.”
The first part of the season had ended up immensely frustrating for him. Bouton had evened his record at 7-7 just before the All-Star break in a game in which he had been very lucky to get a win. He had taken a 4-3 lead over the Twins into the eighth, but walked Tony Oliva to start the inning. Then Harmon Killebrew had hit an enormous home run to give the Twins a 5-4 lead. Berra had left Bouton in, largely because he was to be the first batter up in the bottom of the eighth, and Johnny Blanchard had batted for him. Blanchard struck out, but he had got to first because it was a wild pitch. Phil Linz bunted and got to first on a wild throw by the pitcher, Al Worthington. Bobby Richardson sacrificed the runners to second and third, Hector Lopez struck out, and then Mantle hit an enormous home run into the upper deck to win the game for Bouton.
At first the second half of the season seemed to be more of the same, a win and then a loss. Then, on July 21, with his record 8-8, Bouton pitched against the Senators. His arm had begun to feel stronger, and on that day he gave the Senators only four hits. It was the first of a mini-winning streak, and he ran four victories in a row, three of them complete games. Starting with that game, he went 10-5 for the rest of the season, feeling healthy and pitching as well as ever.
L
ATE JULY WAS A
bad time for the Cardinals, a time when the long baseball season seemed even longer. Bill White had begun to hit, and Lou Brock was playing so well that Bing Devine had already decided that the Broglio-Brock trade was the best of his life. But they were still playing .500 ball. On July 21 they played a three-game series at home with the Pirates and lost all three games. Worse, none of their three starting pitchers had gotten past the fifth inning. The next night they went to Philadelphia to open a four-game series with the Phillies. Bob Gibson pitched the opener against Chris Short and was hit quite hard, losing 9-1. It was not the way a team wanted to open a series against the league leaders, particularly with a man who was supposed to be its ace on the mound. The defeat gave the Cardinals a record of 47-48, and left them tied for seventh place, ten games behind the Phillies.
But they went on to win the next three games in Philadelphia. It was the beginning of what at first seemed like the slowest of comebacks. In Gibson’s next start against the Cubs, he was hit hard again, lasting only six innings and giving up ten hits and six runs. Only the fact that the Cardinals absolutely hammered the Cubs’ pitching for nineteen hits, and came back to win, 12-7, eased Keane’s frustration. Keane told reporters afterward that he had no idea what was wrong with Gibson. “He’s just not pitching,” Keane said. People who should not have been hitting him were hitting him hard. There was some talk that he might have a sore arm and was stoically trying to hide it, but Gibson himself waved that speculation aside. “Why should I hide it? If I’m hurt I can’t help the team and I can’t do the club any good, I can’t do myself any good,” he said. The manager and the coaches studied him, and checked out his motion to see if there was a hitch, Keane said, but they couldn’t find any. They tried giving him extra warm-up time because there were indications in the past that he needed more time than other pitchers to loosen up. They also, Keane noted, tried giving him less warm-up time. They tried to figure out if he was understriding or, for that matter, overstriding. Keane wondered if Gibson’s arm was tired, something that occasionally happened to power pitchers without their knowing it, but Gibson insisted that his arm was not hurt and not tired. Tim McCarver, who was catching Gibson in those days, thought that his fastball was as sharp as ever, and that most of the hits were coming off the slider. By late July Gibson was very edgy. His record was now 8-8, and his earned run average was ballooning upward.