Ball Four Bot

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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 I have pitched four consecutive shutouts for the Seattle Pilots, and the Detroit Tigers decide to buy me in August for their stretch drive.

I dream my knuckleball is jumping around like a Ping-Pong ball in the wind and I pitch a two-hit shutout against my old team, the New York Yankees, single home the winning run in the ninth inning and, when the game is over, take a big bow on the mound in Yankee Stadium with 60,000 people cheering.

FALL 1968 I’m 30 years old and I have these dreams.