In Search of Pennant Fever

THE thick Southern heat was beginning to diffuse our patience, and the girl next to me was getting very restless.

"When's this bus gonna roll?" she hissed from the back of the Greyhound, shifting around on the seat in a white chiffon gown. "Gawwd-damm!" she cussed, "when's this driver gonna get us to Winterhaven?"

She propped herself up on the seat in front of her and hissed with redheaded Irish sass, "Well, I'm just about ready to get up there and throw my dress over his head and TAKE OVER!"

Ten retired amateur golfers wearing CAT-Deisel hats turned their heads and smiled with bare tolerance at the sexy young "thang," cast some bawdy aspersions, and returned their thoughts to the giant plastic orange propped up over the citrus fruit shop. We had stopped at "The Orange Ring."

Perhaps encouraged by a smiling Anita Bryant on the billboard above, the golfers' wives re-boarded the bus with bags of real oranges to eat and sourvenir plastic oranges to keep, while Redhead June fidgetted, bumping her knees to the Rolling Stones' "Bitch" that blared from my cassette deck.

"This is a crazy place," June's road chum from St. Petersburg testified. "When I went to high school in St. Pete we used to sit around the lake and listen to music and drink beer and one day this Jesus Freak came up to us and started talking Jesus to us and jeez...he was weird! Well, we didn't really want to listen, so we just turned up the music and drank some more beer...."

I laughed sympathetically. A bunch of ten-year-old boys wearing Red Sox baseball caps started jumping up and down in their seats just in front of me, causing me to spill orange juice all over my lap. Their mothers brought them under control, but only after going beserk themselves. A band of spring-break student gypsies surrendered to the madness and lit up a joint.

We were a bus full of fed-up people. The magical summer heat had revived our fires, for months smothered by three-foot New England snowdrifts, and now we were burning bright and fed up--fed up with waiting, problem sets, deadlines, mortgages, schedules, responsibilities, and most of all, promises. We were out to put all the promises behind us, even as the road to Boston slid back behind us--who needs it?

Like the trailing aftermath of a tremendous fireworks display, we poured off the bus, into "Red Sox Country", already sunburnt and still cooking, consuming all our worries and frustrations in a wanderlust inferno. June and her road chum went to a bar to get drunk, the retired amateur golfers hauled themselves over to the Holiday Inn, and I was suddenly alone again, hitching up the road to the Red Sox training camp at Chain-O-Lakes Park out on Cypress Boulevard, where the Boston sportswriters were furiously clucking away at their plastic portable typewriters with half-crazed treachery written all over them. Body counts--buddies gone--a troop movement. Something had happened.

"I think it's a great trade," said Cliff Keane of the Boston Herald-American as he popped the top off a beer and sat down at a table with some other sportswriters and Red Sox coaches. "Locke-Ober South," the food-and-drink bar set up in the press lounge, was keeping the sportswriters all juiced up.

"Eckersley will help," Keane said, "but Wise pitched one of the best games I ever saw in spring training...since '68 when Jose Santiago pitched a beauty..." He took another belt and mopped the sweat off his head, burnt brilliant crimson and tinged with frosty gray hair.

Big deal, I though. That was the year the Red Sox dropped their first ten games and Jose Santiago was launched into that nameless baseball obscurity, on the fringe of memory, tossed in the stacks of bubble gum card limbo with Pumpsy Green and Jose Tartibull. Only a die-hard, hungry Boston carnivore like me, a Red Sox fan since childhood, would remember these names--these extinguished hopes of the past.

And there is nothing potentially more explosive than teasing a fatalistic Red Sox fan--a hungry breed of sports fan, a bug-eyed baseball lunatic who in the summer months follows every pitch and grabs for every grain of hope with the tacit, suppressed knowledge in the back of his mind that around August, no matter how many home runs Jim Rice hits, or how awesome Yaz is out there in left--the cold hand of fate will sweep down from New York or Baltimore or Detroit and topple all the dominos.

That night, I shambled over to the ABC Disco with some friends I made at the Winterhaven Mall. It was a "request" disco filled with pretty sedate people--slumped and smoking and going to the bathroom--except for a bunch of minor league ball players propped up behind the revolving merry-go-round bar playing "flick the cockroach." A big Thurman Munson clone walked up to me wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt and yelled in my ear that I wasn't drinking enough. A "Mother Harley" tattoo embellished his hefty forearm, set flatly in front of me.

I chugged my remaining rum-and-coke and bolted, motel room a serious five miles down the road. I reached in my bag, turned on the Stones tape, and stuck out my thumb.

And I think it was the second car I saw on the lonely night road that pulled over and offered me door-service. It was Thurman Munson, sipping a Budweiser, scrubbing his day-old whiskers and casually directing his Corvette. After exchanging the usual biographical information, I found out that Thurman was a pitcher from Omaha playing for the Cleveland Indian Double-A's.

"I could make the pros," he sighed, swilling some beer. "Could've signed with the Indians for $110,000 if I had the patience last year...I just couldn't take their craziness. It's nuts."

"What's nuts?"

He crushed the Bud can in his right hand and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat. "We were losing on the road a lot last year," he said soberly, "the whole pitching staff."

"These...(he grimaced and searched the highway in front of him for words)...lunatics--they hired a shrink. They made us sit around in a circle and hold hands and tell each other what our problems were on the mound...so I said, "Fuck this, you're all crazy' and I left."

"I pitched well though," he said after a pause. "I got high for my last five games and I've been putting the ball just where I want it."

"You pitch high?"

"It's the only way to handle it...you just don't care about anything but the pitch."

"People think it's a big deal being in pro ball, but it's just like anything else. It's frustrating because things never turn out exactly the way you want." He was drunk and stoned, and he sat there all fizzed-out waiting for me to open the door and get out.

"I'm just gonna go home now," he said as I was about to close the door, "and do some of this," he said, holding a big fat reefer in front of me with a king-boy grin full of just enough vigor to get him home.

Captain Carl Yastrzemski didn't seem stoned when he took batting practice the next day. With the blind confidence of a speeding freight train, he pummelled each pitch exactly where he said he was going to put it, never seeing a doubt or distraction from the corner of his eye.

"Watch," he said boldly, "five base hits." And every muscle in his 38-year-old body responded perfectly, cracking every pitch like a cherry bomb with blind precision. "Knock yaw glove off," he cracked drily.

"Keep it up," warned TV-38 sportscaster Dick Stockton, "and you might earn a spot on the team!"

"Heh," Yastrzemski said. He shanked one of the pitches back into the batting cage and slammed his bat against the plate in frenzied frustration. Perfection's sake, the dude was serious. He laced the next pitch past the outfielders, whooping with Little League glee in celebration of his power.

Luis Tiant and Mike Torrez had sauntered off to the right field corner, and were chatting privately in Spanish. Only a sailing fly ball interrupted their head-to-head.

Some adoring fans looked on as the immortal Ted Williams stood in front of a TV camera showing broadcaster Ken Harrelson how to hit a baseball.

And the final ring in this crazy American star circus, William Francis Lee III, hit fungoes to outfielders. "Naaaaah," he snarled disappointedly after he cut the ball along the grass about 50 yards.

"I heard you got a single yesterday, Lee!" one of the outfielders jabbed as he trotted toward the dugout. Lee didn't seem to notice.

He was the only one who wasn't in full uniform or at least a $50 sweat-suit. He finished his laps wearing a tattered gym-class t-shirt and sat down with me to talk.

The Spaceman. Boston's star southpaw by Southern California and out of Zen Buddhism. He was slightly out of breath, pulling his gray-streaked hair back, squinting his thin tanned face. He talked gently, in a California beach mumble, no show-biz, setting me totally at ease, and then he came at me from the stars.

I have always loved Bill Lee. He was the only mad one, the only player I really wanted to talk to in Winterhaven, after I had been Holiday-Inned to death by all the other ball players to whom I asked the usual sportswriter questions and got the usual sportswriter dreck..."Well, you gotta like our ball club, we're lookin' good, lookin' good...just trying to get in shape, you know, we can win it all this year, that's what we're out here to do and we're gonna do it."

"Yeah, militaristic, regimented football, I never really got into it," Lee reflected. "Baseball's more grass...that's what I like about it. Football's too rush-rush, too kill-oriented, too carnivorous-oriented."

"And as America gets out of the industrial revolution, baseball is taking on a resurgence, people are more into a laidback type of sit down and relax and enjoy a beer, discuss politics, watch a ball game, you can do everything at the same time!" he said smoothly.

"It's sort of like the coffeehouses in...A-u-s-t-r-i-a," his voice drifted quixotically, "when Freud and Jung used to sit around and... bullshit. Drink coffee. That's where baseball's heading."

He drew a breath, and trying to fathom all of this, I laughed nervously, pretending to understand.

"You'll do it this year, Mikey," a retired amateur golfer yelled to Torrez, "You'll win it all for us." The man understood everything.

Bothered only momentarily, Lee started again. "It's a vicarious thrill they get out of it," he shrugged toward the fan. "Instead of attaining that thrill first-hand, they attain it second-hand...those people are expecting things from you and if you work toward their expectations you're negating your principle in life because you're working for them and not for yourself."

Spaceman and I were sitting under the intense heat, bombarded by devouring mass-media madness thrown up for TV cameras by worshipping little boys and the old timers ready to follow the Red Sox off of the earth for a pennant because they are tired of losing.

"You can't set ego-oriented, money-oriented, material-oriented goals...your goal has got to be to come down here and have fun playing ball and things will fall into place," Lee said.

"It's a kind of a reverse psychology, but if you try too hard for the dangling carrot in front of you, all you'll do is spend your energy too fast and when it comes time to get the carrot, you're not in the position to enjoy it or ever make the effort..." he sighed, dripping sweat on the turf, and looking around anxiously.

"These kids," he said almost to himself, "they gotta learn to have patience."