It's hard to believe that The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson will be released a week from today. The passage of time has been so strangely blurred over the course of the last year, it seems like just yesterday that Ron Blomberg and I had our first phone conversation about collaborating on this project... but it also seems like about ten years ago.
In any case, I am incredibly excited to have the book finally coming out (via Triumph Books, who have done a marvelous job with everything from the cover art to promotion), and incredibly pleased with some of the reviews we've gotten for it so far — most notably in the pages of no less than the Wall Street Journal, where Ben Yagoda wrote that he "gobbled The Captain & Me up like a packet of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies." (Extra points for the period-appropriate pop cultural reference, Ben!)
So far, at least, the response makes me feel like Ron and I accomplished what we set out to do with this book — give people a better sense of who Thurman Munson was as a teammate and a pal, as well as shed additional light on what it was like to play for the New York Yankees during those promising-but-frustrating seasons in the first half of the 1970s. If you dig the Yankees, New York City, 1970s baseball, moustaches, delicatessens, mobsters, locker room japery, and heartwarming tales of friendship, I think you'll find much to enjoy herein. And for those of you who have asked if I was aware that The Captain & Me shares a title with a Doobie Brothers album, I was indeed; in fact, the Doobies were one of Thurman's favorite bands, which is something we get into in the book.
In a normal world, Ron and I would be up in NYC next week to do in-person signing events. While we still hope to be able to do some later this spring and summer, the sad fact is that it would be difficult/irresponsible to put on such events while the pandemic is still raging. So in the meantime, we've got a virtual Zoom event happening on April 21 with Bookends in New Jersey; Ron and I will be talking about the book, and all "attendees" will receive a copy of it with Ron's signature. Ron's a great talker, and it should be a lot of fun.
If you would like a copy of the book with my signature on it, the best way to do that at this point would be to buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Bookshop, or your local bookseller, and then send it to me with a SASE so I can sign it and get it back to you. Message me via the email link on this blog, and I'll let you know where to send it.
As always, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged my writing over the years — especially all of you who bought Big Hair & Plastic Grass when it first came out, thus propelling me on this amazing journey. I hope our paths will cross again, sooner than later.
“I’m the only guy in the world who could throw a ball through a car wash and never get it wet," James Rodney Richard used to say in jest, though more than a few hitters who faced him would probably tell you it was the truth. As my pal Lenny Randle, who was a teammate of J.R.'s at ASU and faced him 19 times in the majors (hitting only .167, but only striking out once, which I suppose was something of a moral victory) once said of him, "He starts out throwing Alka Seltzers, and ends up throwing Anacins."
From 1976 to 1980 — the most intense years of my early baseball fandom — there was no pitcher as intimidating as J.R. Richard. He stood six-foot-eight, regularly threw around 100 mph, and (even once he sorted out the control issues that caused him to lead the NL in walks in two different seasons) was always wild enough to keep batters from even thinking about getting comfy at the plate. If you ever got to see him pitch in person, you've probably never forgotten the experience; it was not at all unusual to see him fan 12-15 batters in a start.
J.R. seemed on a direct path to Cooperstown, but a series of strokes essentially ended his career at the age of 30 — strokes that might have been prevented if the Astros had only taken his complaints of arm numbness and physical discomfort seriously. (The press didn't help matters — check out any sports page from the weeks leading up to his collapse on July 30, 1980, and odds are you'll find an irate columnist accusing him of malingering, attitude problems, or worse.) It's incredible to look at how dominating he was in the 1980 All Star Game while also knowing that he'd be making his final MLB start less than a week later.
J.R.'s next couple of decades were rough, including losing a bundle via an oil business scam and spending a stretch living under a bridge in Houston. Happily, he got his life back together, found some peace about the way his career ended, and was able to once again enjoy the admiration and appreciation of fans in Houston and elsewhere. Unfortunately, it looks like he'd spent the last weeks of his life hospitalized for COVID, yet another unnecessary victim of a virus that never should have gotten this far...
One of my favorite things about spending summers with my grandparents in Alabama during the mid-to-late 1970s was watching the Atlanta Braves on WTCG/WTBS - the Braves were terrible back then, but it was still a treat to be able to see televised baseball broadcasts every night at a time when MLB's TV presence was limited in most markets to Game of the Week and Monday Night Baseball.
And the thing I loved most about watching the Braves were the games where Phil Niekro took the mound and baffled opposing hitters with his knuckleball. And honestly, I loved the games where he got lit up, too; I still smile looking at his 1979 stats, which include NL-leading totals in wins (21), losses (20), games started (44), complete games (23), innings pitched (342), hits (311), home runs (41), walks (113) and hit batters (11), along with very respectable ERA and strikeout numbers (3.39 and 208, respectively). And don't forget the number 40, which was how old he was that season.
Arguably the greatest knuckleballer of all time, "Knucksie" epitomized so much of what I loved about baseball in the 1970s - specifically the unpredictability of the game, and the unusual characters who played it. Here was a silver-haired guy who looked like he should have been working at some used car dealership in the Midwest, yet was calmly putting up some of the best numbers of his career at an age when most MLB hurlers would have long been put out to pasture.
I only got to see him pitch in person once, on my birthday in 1981 at Wrigley Field. It was a poor outing for him - he gave up 5 runs to the Cubs and was gone by the fifth inning - but it was still a thrill for me to watch him do his thing. I never met him, but by all accounts he was a friendly and charming chap who loved to shoot the bull with fans.
Rest in Peace, Knucksie; we will not see your likes again, but those of us who saw how your pitches danced will never forget it.
I am extremely proud and excited to announce that Ron "Designated Hebrew" Blomberg (#12 in this pic) and I have signed a deal with Triumph Books for a memoir of his Odd Couple-esque friendship with the man behind the plate — the late, great Yankees captain Thurman Munson.
Titled The Captain and Me, the book will reveal a lot about Thurman that isn't widely known (not to mention plenty of amusing/interesting tidbits from the glorious days of 70s baseball) and is currently slated for a 2021 release.
A huge thank you and/or a tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to everyone who has bought and supported my previous baseball books — you made this possible!
I got the idea for this post from a recent online conversation I had with my friend and fellow author Joe Bonomo. Though we didn't actually meet until 2012, Joe and I have repeatedly bonded over how similar our formative experiences were; from music to baseball to teenage alienation, we were definitely on similar (and in some cases outright parallel) paths during our early years. But in the aforementioned chat, we discovered a very crucial difference: Joe was an Action Jackson man, while I was all about G.I. Joes. I suggested we write dueling blog posts about our childhood action figures, and here's my entry — you can read mine first, and then read Joe's, or you can read Joe's first and then come back to this one. Either way works for us!
45 years ago this week, if you’d asked me to name the three greatest things that had happened during the previous twelve months, I would have invariably replied with:
Nixon’s resignation
Blazing Saddles
“Kung-Fu Grip” G.I. Joe
1974 — what a time to be alive, right?
Of the three, Hasbro's introduction of "Kung-Fu Grip" probably had the biggest immediate impact on my life. I had been heavily into G.I. Joe since the May of 1973, when my friend Doug gave me a G.I. Joe Air Adventurer action figure — “with LIFE-LIKE HAIR and BEARD” trumpeted the box — for my seventh birthday. My mom, a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, had previously refused to buy me anything G.I. Joe-related, despite my pitiful entreaties; still, she was wise enough to not make me return the present.
Besides, the Hasbro company — mindful of the growing anti-war sentiment among Americans — had recently repackaged Joe and his mates as a somewhat-less-objectionable “Adventure Team”. Sure, these fuzzy-headed dudes still had guns, grenades, flame-throwers, etc.; but these were all now employed in pursuit of “adventure,” instead of torching Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the evils of Communism. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “He’s not a soldier — he’s an Air Adventurer!” I don’t recall her exact response, but I suspect that there was some eye-rolling involved.
Of course, like any impressionable American boy, I wanted my Air Adventurer to stockpile as many weapons as possible. The big problem was that, given the hard-plastic construction of his hands, it was exceedingly difficult to get him to hold on to any of his equipment, lethal or otherwise, in a functional or vaguely realistic manner. (This became even more difficult for my Air Adventurer after he fell from a tree branch in our Ann Arbor front yard and shattered his left arm.)
Therefore, Hasbro’s 1974 introduction of G.I. Joe dolls with “Kung-Fu Grip” — hands made of soft rubber, with fingers that could be manipulated individually — came as a total godsend to me. “They know that this is exactly what I need!” I marveled. All of my future G.I. Joes would now be able to shoot, stab, climb, schlep and give each other the “soul shake” in a far more secure and realistic manner. For the first time in my young life, I felt validated as a consumer.
When I moved to England that fall with my father and sister, however, a whole new world of “adventure” immediately opened up for me. Action Man, G.I. Joe’s Palitoy-licensed British counterpart, had not only introduced the “gripping hands” concept a whole year earlier, but he also came with a variety of realistic historic military uniforms and weapons as part of Palitoy’s “Soldiers of the World” series. (Holy shit — they even had an Action Man tank!) This absolutely blew my mind; now, instead of just shooting killer cobras and blowing up aggressive octopi, my G.I. Joes could stage actual World War II combat scenarios!
Of course, to fully stage said combat scenarios, my G.I. Joes — now fully attired and armed with period-perfect British and American WWII infantry gear — required an opponent to fight against. To say that my father was displeased when he learned I wanted to spend my allowance on a German stormtrooper uniform set would be to woefully understate the case, but I was adamant that this was exactly what I wanted. “But Dad, G.I. Joe needs an enemy,” I insisted. He okayed the purchase in the end, though also (I’m sure) with no small amount of eye-rolling.
When we returned to Ann Arbor the following year, my Action Man gear was the talk of all my G.I. Joe-loving elementary school pals, most of whom thought I was making up the part about the existence of an Action Man tank (alas, I couldn’t afford to bring one back with me as proof). How was it possible that British kids could have their Action Men reenact the Battle of the Bulge with miniature STEN guns and "potato masher" grenades, while our G.I. Joes had been relegated to searching for buried treasure and engaging in mildly strenuous desert rescues? It seemed grossly unfair.
Nevertheless, I hit it harder than ever with G.I. Joe in 1975, acquiring (mostly via Christmas and birthday gifts) a helicopter, a submarine, and the Adventure Team Training Center, along with various other outfits and equipment. I had the Training Center set up in the basement of the first house we rented upon our return, with the “training slide” cord stretched halfway across the room, and a makeshift landing pad for the copter. Even though I was convinced that the house (especially its basement) was haunted, I still happily spent countless hours down there performing an endless array of G.I. Joe maneuvers. My mania for all things G.I. Joe-related would last another two years or so, until my enthusiasm for sports finally outstripped all my other interests. The turning point was probably the Christmas of 1976, when I fished a pecan out of my grandmother’s holiday nut dish expressly for the purpose of having my G.I. Joes play football with it.
My friends and I admittedly enjoyed additional dalliances with other action figures — like the Johnny West, Steve Austin and Evel Knievel collections — but G.I. Joe was our main man. There were two realms we never entered into, however: Big Jim and Action Jackson. The latter did seem kind of cool (he had some sweet accessories, and that “bold adventure is my game” song from his TV commercials was catchy and fairly stirring), but those AJ figures were just too damned small for our G.I. Joe-sized world. And the commercials for the former always played like scenarios lifted straight from one of the more "open-minded" reader letters that popped up from time to time in my dad’s Penthouse magazines. (“Dear Penthouse: I never thought these letters were real, but last week I went camping with my buddy Big Jim, and we met this guy with a rugged face and a strange tattoo…”) The way Big Jim could bust a strap with his bicep was admittedly impressive, but his whole "hyper-masculine outdoorsman" trip just wasn’t my thing.
So yeah, G.I. Joe was where it was at for me. The gear, the outfits, the play sets — it all just seemed so superior to everything else that was out there, even if it didn’t fully sate my childhood lust for historic combat like Action Man’s stuff did. I finally sold (or, more likely, gave away) all my G.I. Joe/Action Man toys in the fall of 1978, as part of the preparations for my dad moving back to NYC to live with my then-stepmother, and my sister and I moving to L.A. to live with my mom. I know all that stuff would be worth a fortune now, but Joe and I had reached the end of our road long before that; and anyway, most of my figures had already lost some or all of the fingers from their “Kung-Fu Grip” hands, and there would never be much of a resale market for Leprosy G.I. Joe.
Even though we wouldn’t have much to say to each other now, I still think of G.I. Joe every year about this time. The sweet childhood memories of the holiday season come flooding back, and once again I’m sprawled across the floor of one of our Ann Arbor living rooms, listening to Christmas music on the radio, paging through the Sears and JC Penney catalogs, and trying to decide which G.I. Joe stuff I want to add to my Christmas wish list. Eight Ropes of Danger? The Five-Star Jeep? The Mobile Support Vehicle? Guess I’d better put 'em all on there, just in case…
"I thought you might want to read this," said Grandpa Fred, handing me his copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four.
It was the summer of 1977, and I had just arrived at my grandparents' palatial (to me, at least) home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was eleven years old, and looking forward to a blissfully relaxing month of swimming, golfing, throwing a baseball against the back steps, watching baseball on TV, and reading about baseball in the air-conditioned comfort of my grandfather's study. The baseball bug had bitten me hard, and I was determined to get my hands on any reading material that could expand my knowledge of my favorite sport — and, once again, Grandpa Fred had come through for me.
As a child of the Seventies, I was already well aware that baseball men were not necessarily squeaky-clean role models to be looked up to — after all, I had just seen a livid Billy Martin try to punch out Reggie Jackson on national TV — and I'd already heard that Ball Four was supposed to be "controversial". But by "controversial," I was expecting a gritty, hard-bitten exposé, something along the lines of Serpico or All The President's Men, to name two other books that my grandfather probably had no business lending to a grandson who had just graduated fifth grade. What I found instead, much to my surprise and delight, was a riotously funny account of life in the major (and minor) leagues that, if anything, reminded me most of an adult American version of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Down With Skool series. Like Nigel Molesworth, DWS's intrepid schoolboy narrator, Jim Bouton took me into a world full of bizarre rituals, arcane slang, side-splitting pranks, and unforgettable characters. Ball Four's detractors complained that Bouton trashed baseball's heroes; but in my eyes, he not only (further) humanized them, but also made me wish (even more than I already did) that I could be part of their gang.
As these things will do, the sad news about Bouton's death brought back vivid memories of that summer in Alabama, and reminded me of just how much Ball Four — and its sequel, the almost-as-great I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally — formed my understanding of (and attitude toward) major league baseball. With the possible exception of Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff (which I wouldn't read until over a decade later), I can't think of another player memoir that so beautifully captures the joy of playing baseball, yet so unsentimentally delineates the punishing stupidity and cold-blooded venality that permeate the game's executive and administrative sectors... and which have only become more pervasive in the decades since Ball Four's original publication. (As a friend of mine pointed out, the timing of Bouton's death was one final Fuck You to the baseball establishment, since it all but obliterated the buzz around the release of Bud Selig's new autobiography.)
Most of Bouton's on-field heroics were accomplished well before I became interested in baseball, and I wouldn't learn about his social activist side (he protested the apartheid rule of South Africa in 1968, long before that was on the radar of your average American) until many years after I first read Ball Four. But he became a hero of mine that summer, and even more the following year, when — armed with only a knuckleball and an insouciant smirk — he made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. In interviews, he always came across as warm, witty, and maybe even a little bit silly... and I always hoped that I'd get a chance to talk with him someday.
That chance finally came three years ago, when I was writing a story for VICE Sports on the 40th anniversary of the short-lived Ball Four sitcom, which ran on CBS for only five weeks before being unceremoniously sent to the showers. I had become friends with Michael Bouton, Jim's son, via Facebook, and I approached him about setting up an interview with his dad. Unfortunately, Jim had suffered a stroke by then, and Michael explained to me that his dad preferred to do our interview via email, because he was self-conscious about not being able to "retrieve" certain words. So I sent Michael a list of questions... which Jim apparently enjoyed so much that he decided he wanted to get on the phone with me, after all.
The Jim Bouton I spoke with in 2016 turned out to be just as kind and funny as I'd always imagined, and — except for stumbling over maybe two or three words — was just as articulate, as well. It remains one of my all-time favorite interviews that I've ever done, and this seems like as good a time as any to share the whole thing with the world. I am forever indebted to Michael for making it happen, and forever grateful to the old "Bulldog" for taking the time to go down memory lane with me, even if some of the memories we discussed weren't exactly sweet. May he rest in peace and power...
Jim Bouton: The Big Hair & Plastic Grass Interview
DAN EPSTEIN: With the 40thanniversary of the Ball Four TV series coming up, it needs to be —
JIM BOUTON: Forgotten? [Laughs]
No chance of that, at least on my watch. So, whose idea was it to turn it into a TV series?
It was such a long time ago, I don’t remember if it came down to one person. There was a group of friends that would hang out at the Lion’s Head bar in [Greenwich] Village — Vic Ziegel, Marvin Kitman and myself, and others. We just thought this might be a good thing to do. Little did we know! [Laughs]
When Ball Four was first published, nobody was knocking on your door to make a TV show or movie out of it?
Well, this was just within a year of when the book came out; we weren’t sitting around for years waiting for this “golden opportunity” — we just thought, “Well, this will be fun!” And it certainly was fun to be part of Ball Four, and to listen to all those wonderful characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys? It was certainly fun to think about the possibilities of transferring that to the TV screen.
Though obviously, you faced some challenges in doing so…
Standards and Practices, I think was the name of the division — we were not allowed to capture the grittiness and the language, that kind of stuff. We weren’t able to put it on the screen. [Laughs]
You certainly couldn’t have anyone saying “Ah Shitfuck,” a la Joe Schultz.
Yeah, and you couldn’t say “Horseshit” — you could have “Horse!” maybe, or “Horse dot-dot-dot”. There were all sorts of ways they had to neuterize it. When we would sit around at night… our plan was to sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took us so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at 2 in the morning. The funniest part about the whole sitcom was writing aboutthe sitcom, and we had some great fun with that. A sitcom about a sitcom would have been better than the actual sitcom, itself. That should have been the show! [Laughs]
The CBS people would come into the writing room, which is a dark place, in many respects. [Laughs] There were many vice presidents — none of whom could write, but they could “help.” So they’d say something like, “Maybe this guy could be a jerk!” So we’d listen to their ideas, and then they’d leave the room and we’d start laughing about what they were saying. We’d do the best we could with it. They would say things like, “Why can’t you write like Gone With The Windor The Old Man and the Sea? That would be good!”
I’ve been in writing rooms with network vice presidents. It can be a pretty soul-crushingly awful experience.
Well, when I think about it, I never think about it as a negative in my life; it’s not like, “Oh boy, we really screwed that up,” or, “That was terrible!” It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level. [Laughs] We were having a good time; we were enjoying ourselves. But the censor wasn’t enjoying it, and the vice presidents weren’t enjoying it. And apparently, right off the bat, the audiences didn’t like it very much, either! [Laughs]
Was the shooting of the show fun for you, as well?
Oh, absolutely. We accidentally did some really wonderful things, but we weren’t allowed to do much of them.
For example?
Ben Davidson played Rhino, the catcher. He was a professional football player, from that same era of characters [as in Ball Four] — guys who made it to the big time but barely made it through college to get there. Ben Davidson was the only "real" person on the set, because everyone else was an actor. [There was one scene where] Ben improvised and lifted up one of the coaches, then hung him on a hook in the locker room by the back of his shirt. The guys from CBS saw that and were like, “What are you doing?!? That’s not a good idea! We’ve got a liability here!”
Were you always supposed to play the lead character in the show?
I don’t remember whether anyone thought that would be a good idea or not, but they probably thought it would be inexpensive, because I was not a real actor. And who knew what a difficult chore that would be! Oh god…
Ball Four debuted on CBS in September 1976, and only lasted five episodes before being cancelled. Did you have the sense that it would get a quick axe, or did the cancellation take you by surprise?
Well, shooting an episode would last, you know, a week, and we were always feeling like we were behind — we always had that feeling of, “Uh-oh, this is not any better than the one we did yesterday!” [Laughs] We would watch other sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter, and there would be a put-down line like, ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’ And we would start laughing, and thinking, “Maybe we need a line like that? How about, ‘Stick it in your doo-dah?’” [Laughs] It was four amateurs trying to do something that we’d never done before.
Plus, it’s 2 in the morning, and you’re all punchy…
Oh, exactly. We didn’t even know what day it was! Jesus… Finally, about three episodes in, they told us, “We’re going to have to cancel this show.” We said, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives — we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people!”
Was that when you decided to rededicate yourself to your baseball comeback?
Well, I needed to get out of the TV business by then, for my own safety. [Laughs] I was playing semi-pro baseball in New Jersey, amateur baseball, and I was pitching pretty good for a guy who was in his late-thirties; I was having a good time, and my knuckleball started to move around, and I thought it might be a good idea to go down to spring training, and see if I could work out with some minor league team. And Bill Veeck ended up offering me a minor league contract with the White Sox.
Your brief return to the majors in September 1978 remains one of my favorite childhood baseball memories. It all seemed so improbable — you were thirty-nine, and you hadn't pitched in the majors since 1970 — but you actually pitched pretty well in three out of five appearances!
I did pretty well. This was with the Atlanta Braves organization, and Ted Turner — well, he was agreeable to those kind of things. I said to him, “Give me a shot, and if I don’t embarrass myself, let’s see what happens!” Only a real nut, like a Bill Veeck or a Ted Turner, would say, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” It was kind of like a sitcom, only you had more control over it — and I was not humiliating myself on national television!
So I went to spring training with their minor league Triple-A team, I think it was, and I got better and better. The last game of spring training, they were going to have the Triple-A guys play against the major league Braves. And the idea was, “Let Bouton pitch for the minor league guys against the big leaguers!” I thought, “Well, this sounds better than a sitcom, but not that much different.” I actually pitched a very good game, and I think we won the game. I did so well that they sent me to the minors, and said, “See what you can do!” I did really well there, and they eventually invited me to the big leagues. I beat the San Francisco Giants, and they were not goofing around — they were in a pennant race! But I beat those guys. And then I pitched the next game against the Astros and James Rodney Richard. [Bouton threw seven innings at the Astrodome, giving up only five hits and two earned runs, but didn’t get the decision.] So that was fun!
More fun than sitting in the writers’ room at CBS?
Oh, yeah. It was like, “God, please don’t let me write any more scripts!”
Back to the TV series, though — the episodes covered some controversial topics for the time, such as gay players, female sportswriters in the locker room, and the use of pep pills...
I thought those subjects would be interesting — and I thought that people would be interested in them. But we couldn’t get most of what we wanted to do past Standards and Practices.
Do you think the show was actually a few decades ahead of its time?
It might have been — and it might get there yet, by another route. Who knows?
But a reboot of a Ball FourTV series isn’t something you’d like to be involved with?
Uh, not in an important role. [Laughs]
Harry Chapin wrote and sang the show’s theme song. How did that come about? Were you a fan of his music?
Yeah, Harry Chapin was a nice guy. I was friends with a handball player named Jimmy Jacobs, and Jimmy Jacobs had a great film library. I happened to run into Harry Chapin through him, and I was telling him and Jimmy Jacobs about the sitcom. Harry’s song opened the show — and then it all went right downhill after the song. I think the best part of the show was Harry’s song.
It's the only part of the show that you can currently find on YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, too! [Laughs]
Do episodes of the show still exist?
I’m hoping they don’t exist anymore, just for mercy purposes!
Before I let you go... do you have any thoughts on the enduring appeal of Ball Four, the book? It has long outlived the controversy that surrounded its original release…
When I think of Ball Four, I don’t think of my writing — I think basically of keeping notes. Those players were the funny guys; you can’t make up those guys. They were all characters. Doug Rader, Gary Bell, Don Mincher… One of the great things about baseball players back then was, they were not sophisticated guys. They were not college guys; they were guys outta the mines or off of the farm, guys trying to make a living. And that’s why it took so long [for MLB players] to get real money, because the guys just wanted to play ball.
Sure, they realized, “Maybe we oughta be getting a little more money.” But if they’d said to those guys back in the 1950s or even 60s, “Okay, we’re not going to pay anybody anymore, there’s no money whatsoever,” the players would have still said, “Well, we’ve got two teams here — why don’t we just play and see who can win this game?” You know what I mean? They wanted to play ball. They were very, very interesting people. They came from mostly small towns, and they just wanted to play ball.
And your book immortalized them.
The best thing I ever did was to keep notes and write all that stuff down. I’d keep notes all day long; and when I’d run out of paper, I’d write on a popcorn box or an air-sickness bag, whatever was handy. And then, at the end of the day, I needed to look at my notes because there were so many funny things going on. Wonderful characters; I love them all now, even the ones I hated! Now I was listening to the players, now that I was writing things down, they were now fodder for great material. So I began to think about them in a positive way. They were not competitors for playing opportunities in games; no, these guys were funny! And that’s why Ball Four is so funny — it’s not me, it’s the players.
And because the minor leagues have kind of been replaced by college ball, the players are much more savvy now, much more sophisticated. They’re wiser, and all of that stuff — but I don’t get the sense that the crazy guys, the wacky guys, the funny guys are there anymore.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Jim. It’s been a real pleasure.
Well, it was fun remembering those things. And now I have to go lie down for a while. [Laughs]
I am incredibly thrilled to accept The Baseball Reliquary's invitation to deliver the Keynote Address for their 20th annual Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day, which will be held Sunday, July 22nd at the Pasadena Central Library. This year's inductees include legendary White Sox organist Nancy Faust and White Sox/Dodgers/Yankees/Angels pitcher Tommy John, both of whom will be in attendance.
The Baseball Reliquary is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history — so it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has read my baseball books that I've a big fan of the organization and its mission for a long time. (I mean, their collections include Dock Ellis's infamous CURLERS, people!)
Previous inductees to the Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals include such personal heroes as Dock Ellis, Dick Allen, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Luis Tiant and Jim "Mudcat" Grant, so it will be a huge honor for me to speak at this year's induction ceremonies, especially since Nancy Faust, Tommy John and fellow 2018 inductee Rusty Staub all played such formative roles in my early baseball fandom.
The induction (which is free and open to all) will be held almost three years to the day since Katie and I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I can think of no better excuse to return to Southern California for a few days. If you love baseball and live in SoCal, please mark your calendars for this fantastic event!
So sad to hear about the passing of Rusty Staub. I know he was much beloved by Mets and Expos fans, but for me he'll always be an All-Star outfielder on the 1976 Detroit Tigers, the first MLB team I ever fell in love with. He was also, by all accounts, a warm and lovely person, which ultimately counts way more than his considerable accomplishments on the field. Rest in Funky Peace, Le Grand Orange.
You can't talk about major league baseball in the 1970s without talking about Oscar Gamble. Well, maybe you can, but it's impossible for me to conceive of baseball's funkiest decade without him — which is why, back in 2009, when plans for the publication of Big Hair and Plastic Grass were finally underway, I insisted that the St. Martin's Press art department include his image on the book's cover. And which is part of why my heart is so heavy today after learning about his passing at the far-too-young age of 68.
Oscar Gamble was not a superstar. He finished in the MVP voting only once (in 1977, when his 31 home runs for the White Sox earned him exactly one vote), never made an All-Star team, never led the league in any batting or fielding category, never won a World Series ring. He was often benched against left-handed starters, and only once in the course of his 17-year MLB career (1974, his best season with the Indians) did ever he log more than 500 plate appearances. Though he had a better arm than he was generally given credit for — he threw out 10 runners from the outfield in 1976, and another 12 in 1978 — Oscar's range and glove were a tad below average, and thus he spent over a third of his 1584 career MLB games as a designated hitter.
It's true that a player of his particular caliber (he walked more than he struck out, had a lifetime OBP of .356 and a lifetime OPS+ of 127) would likely be more prized today than he was in an era where Triple Crown stats were the be-all/end-all. And yet, Oscar Gamble epitomizes 1970s baseball to me. There was, of course, that gloriously funky Afro of his — arguably the greatest in the history of the game, and which in its peak state could have accommodated three caps simultaneously — and his even funkier batting stance, where he crouched so low at the plate that his elbows practically touched his knees. Both of those things were beautifully emblematic of baseball in the 70s, an era in which ballplayers finally began to feel free to express themselves on a major league diamond. But while he generally looked like the coolest cat at the disco (and he actually owned one — Oscar Gamble's Players Club in Montgomery, Alabama), Oscar always came to play; and despite his less-than-imposing size (5'11, 165 lbs in his prime), he could easily launch a pitch into the stratosphere whenever that left-handed swing uncoiled. Though never a showboat on the level of, say, Mickey Rivers or Reggie Jackson (to name two of his teammates during his Yankees stints), he was nonetheless tremendously entertaining to watch, in part because he seemed to be enjoying himself so damn much out there.
But beyond all that, Oscar Gamble was an intrinsic part of my own 70s baseball experience — he truly was a cornerstone of my love for the game and its history, and ultimately one of the main inspirations behind my baseball writing. His legendary 1976 "Traded" card was in one of the first wax packs I ever opened, which meant that I knew of him before I knew of Mark Fidrych, Dock Ellis, Bill Lee, Luis Tiant, Dick Allen, Lenny Randle, or any of my other favorite players from the era. Oscar was a starting outfielder for the 1976 Yankees, who played against the Tigers in the very first MLB game I ever attended, and whom I studied at great length during their run through the first post-season I ever paid actual attention to. (Oscar's immortal quote, "They don't think it be like it is, but it do," was in reference to the insanity and dysfunction of the Yankees clubhouse under George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin.)
Oscar enjoyed his finest season as rent-a-player for the 1977 White Sox "South Side Hitmen," who nearly slugged their way to the AL West title, and whom I became obsessed with despite observing from a distance. He was a free-agent bust with the 1978 Padres, who my paternal grandparents took me to see that year when I visited them in San Diego; and the following year, he was traded back to the Yankees while I was visiting the same grandparents at their new digs on Long Island. I rooted for him even when he was playing against teams I rooted for — because, c'mon, how could you root against Oscar Gamble? "He was a sweet, decent man without a single ounce of malice in his heart," Reggie Jackson told the NY Daily News today, "one who came through the door every day with a smile on his face." And even from the stands, or on TV, I could totally pick up on that.
Oscar's 'fro attained its greatest shape and circumference during his 1973-75 stint with the Indians, a period during which he could have easily been mistaken off-field for a member of the Chi-Lites or Rasputin's Stash. I didn't learn until many years after the fact that the Yankees had made him cut it when he was traded to the Bronx from Cleveland, or that said haircut forced him to pass on a possible Afro-Sheen endorsement deal with Johnson Products. I talk about his haircut at length in Stars and Strikes, and also got into it a bit in this "Bicentennial Baseball Minute" video I did a few years back in conjunction with the book.
I've long loved that story, because — even if the world was deprived of what could have been a seriously dy-no-mite Afro-Sheen commercial — it underlined how much of a team player Oscar Gamble really was. Though the Yankees were uptight and old-fashioned about grooming, and he would have been well within his rights to cop an attitude about their edict, he saw the bigger picture. After all, he'd spent the bulk of his career playing for lousy teams in Philadelphia and Cleveland, and he was not about to let a little (or a lot of) hair get in the way of him being part of a contender.
There is a sadder side to that story, though, one which I didn't fully grasp until a year or two ago, when I turned up an interview with Oscar Gamble while digging through some newspaper archives from 1977. In a Chicago Sun-Times article with the headline "Oscar Gamble Sheds Bad Boy Image," Ron Rapoport writes about how Gamble — by all accounts a chatty, affable guy and a dependable teammate — was widely viewed as a "troublemaker" by baseball GMs, simply for having the temerity to groom himself like the proud, handsome black man he was... and that a lot of reporters were flat-out afraid to talk to him because they perceived him to be some kind of black militant in double-knits.
"After I got a haircut [in 1976]," Gamble told Rapoport, "a lot of writers came over and said, 'We didn't talk to you because we thought you were violent.' They just came up and admitted it. That's what the hair meant to them. I just wore it that way because it looked good on me and I looked good in it. It's funny in a way — people always judge people the way they think you should be. You never know what people are thinking. I've always been a nice friendly guy, easy to talk to."
This, in a nutshell, is the side of sports that I've always hated — the side that not only encourages conformity, but also casts character-assassinating aspersions upon those who refuse to knuckle under accordingly, and punishes those who stand up for what they believe. And 40 years later, things haven't gotten a whole lot better on that score — just ask Colin Kaepernick, a gentleman whose own 'fro and ironclad sense of self surely caused Oscar to flash a knowing grin or two. Then again, that's why so many baseball players of the 70s continue to inspire me to this day; they were true to themselves, even when the game's old guard — the owners, skippers, General Managers, journalists and even veteran players — did their best to tamp them down...
It always hurts when one of the favorite players from your childhood dies, especially one who thoroughly embodied the fun, excitement freedom you felt whenever you ran out onto your local diamond as a kid. But Oscar's passing hits me extra hard today, because I'd love to commiserate about it with someone else who's no longer with us — James Saft, a brilliant Reuters columnist and one of my oldest and dearest friends, who passed away in October. One of the first things Jim and I bonded over in high school was our shared Alabama connection; my maternal grandparents lived in Tuscaloosa, and his aunt lived in Greensboro, and we each spent many formative summers in the state, which may as well have been Mars as far as our private-school classmates on the north side of Chicago were concerned. As such, we both shared a particular affection for Bama ballplayers; and Oscar Gamble, who was scouted by the legendary Buck O'Neil while attending Montgomery's George Washington Carver High School, was one of our favorite members of that fraternity. Jim spent the last years of his life in Huntsville with his wife, daughters and dogs, and I would always ask him to keep an eye out for Oscar Gamble's Players Club memorabilia at the thrift shops in Montgomery, whenever he was there. (None ever turned up, but a man can dream, right?) When the rumor of Oscar's passing first hit Twitter this morning while I was still waking up, my first instinct was to drop Jim an email, asking him if he'd heard anything... and then I remembered that I couldn't do that anymore.
And so, unfortunately, it goes; in the words of Hank Williams, another great son of Alabama, I'll never get out of this world alive. But I'm not in the mood to play any Hank right now — I'd rather spin some Delfonics, whose sweet Philly soul strains doubtless caught Oscar's ear early in his playing career, and whose gorgeous "Delfonics Theme" both fills me with the same sense of joy and wonder that I experienced while watching Oscar Gamble in action, and echoes the sadness that I feel now that he's gone. Rest in funky peace, Oscar. And thanks for everything.
You don't usually see champagne corks a-poppin' in the clubhouse of a team that's just finished their season in second place, but these five members of the 1976 Oakland A's — Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, Don Baylor, Gene Tenace and Sal Bando — were toasting a different sort of victory when Ron Riesterer snapped this celebratory shot following the A's 1-0 loss to Nolan Ryan and the California Angels on October 3, 1976. All five players (along with teammates Willie McCovey and Billy Williams) had played the entire season without signed contracts, which meant that they were now eligible to leave the A's (and Charlie Finley, the team's erratic and dictatorial owner) and market themselves in MLB's first annual free agent re-entry draft, as it was known in those days.
At the time, Don Baylor was the only guy in this photo who wasn't considered a "star" — the other four had won three World Series rings as integral members of the A's "Moustache Gang," while Baylor was merely a very good outfielder and first baseman who had come to Oakland that April (along with pitcher Mike Torrez) as part of the deal that sent free-agents-to-be Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman to the Baltimore Orioles. Baylor, who'd had his first Big League cup of coffee with the Orioles in 1970, began playing regularly in 1972; he'd shown flashes of power along with his considerable speed (he averaged over 29 stolen bases in his first four full seasons), but didn't really start hammering the ball until 1975, when he set then-high marks for himself with 25 homers, 76 RBIs, 79 runs, a .360 on-base percentage and a .489 slugging percentage. His power numbers dropped again during his lone year in Oakland — only 15 homers, 68 RBIs and a .697 OPS — but he did steal 52 bases for Chuck Tanner's theft-happy team, which set a modern major league record that year with 341 swipes. Baylor was also hit by 20 pitches that year, making him the American League leader in that category for the third time in four seasons.
In all, it was enough to land Baylor a a six-year, $1.6 million contract from Gene Autry and the Angels, which worked out to a considerable raise from the $35,200 that he'd earned as a member of the A's. Joe Rudi would do even better, signing with California for five years and $2.1 million dollars, but the Baylor signing would be the one that really paid off for the Angels. Baylor's plate performance improved steadily over the next three seasons, peaking with a 1979 campaign that saw him hit .296/.371/.530 with 33 doubles and 36 home runs, and lead the league with 139 RBIs and 120 runs scored; he also led the Angels with 22 stolen bases, and played in all 162 games that season.
That's the Don Baylor I remember best, a stoic mountain of a man (at least, he seemed mountainous at the time, though Baseball Reference lists him at 6'1" and 190 pounds in his prime) who coolly led the Angels to the post-season for the first time in their 18-year history. That was a really fun Angels team to watch — in addition to Baylor and Rudi, they had Rod Carew, "Disco" Dan Ford, Frank Tanana, Nolan Ryan, Willie Mays Aikens, Carney Lansford, Bobby Grich and Bert Campaneris on the roster — and the only Angels team I ever actively rooted for. In fact, the first post-season game I ever attended was Game 4 of that year's ALCS in Anaheim; unfortunately, it turned out to be an 8-0 blow-out that clinched the AL pennant for the Orioles, and Big Don went 0-4 that day with two strikeouts. (I was utterly miserable, anyway — having just gotten braces the day before, my mouth was in such pain that I could barely eat a ballpark hot dog. My only happy memory from that day is of the streaker who led the Big A security in a post-game chase across the field.)
I loved Don Baylor because, like most of my favorite players of the era, he was an anomaly. He was a big guy who could steal bases as well as hit home runs. His 1979 performance earned him the AL MVP award, which made him "the first Designated Hitter" to do so, even though he only actually DH'd in 65 games that season. He was a badass-looking dude who, unless you were an opposing pitcher or a middle infielder trying to turn a double play, had a reputation for being exquisitely good-natured. Though his nickname "Groove" supposedly came from his brash rookie pronouncement that "If I get in my groove, I'm gonna play every day," he was quite the disco denizen, as well; several years back, when he was serving as the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Baylor waxed effusively about his disco days to a broadcaster friend of mine who'd showed him a copy of my book, Big Hair and Plastic Grass. According to my friend, Baylor pulled Big Hair out of his hands and began enthusiastically thumbing through it, and appeared quite reluctant to give it back.
That's the closest I ever came to meeting Don Baylor, but the news this morning of his death at 68 due to complications from multiple myeloma still hurts really, really bad. Maybe it's because he's another one of my childhood baseball heroes who, like Willie Stargell, Dock Ellis, Mark Fidrych, Gates Brown and George "Boomer" Scott before him, left this life much too soon. Maybe it's because the Don Baylor I cheered for as a kid seemed utterly impervious to any sort of negative force; after all, the guy set a modern-day MLB record (since surpassed by Craig Biggio) by getting hit 267 times with pitched balls — and no matter how hard the pitch, he'd simply shrug it off and head down to first. Maybe it's because, even though the guy never really achieved superstar status, his positive nature resonated with fans at every one of his stops during his 17 years as a full-time major leaguer (and later during his managerial stints with the Colorado Rockies and Chicago Cubs), and I'm seeing a lot of shared sadness online today that attests to how much he'll be missed. Maybe it's because, at a time when lying, cheating, antagonism, maliciousness and willful ignorance are such recurring themes in our daily lives, it feels like the human race can't afford to lose any more of the "good guys". And maybe it's because someone I love dearly is currently gutting her way through cancer issues of her own, and is anxiously awaiting a pathology report that could contain some very bad (or hopefully very good) news...
At least I — and his countless fans — can take comfort in the fact that Don Baylor packed a lot of living into his 68 years. The first African-American to play baseball for the recently-integrated Stephen F. Austin HIgh School in Austin, Texas, Baylor would later become the first African-American manager ever hired by the Cubs. He played in seven American League playoff series, finally reaching the World Series in each of the last three years of his MLB career: With the Boston Red Sox in 1986, with the Minnesota Twins in 1987 (earning his first and only WS ring), and with the Oakland A's in 1988. He won 627 games as a major league manager, including 77 with the Rockies during the strike-shortened 1995 season — a number good enough to get them into the post-season for the first time in their short history. He worked as a hitting coach with several teams (noticeably improving the performance of Chipper Jones, among others) and even served as a broadcaster for the Washington Nationals in 2007. He was active in charity work as well, winning the Roberto Clemente Award in 1985 for his efforts on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. If his untimely death leaves us with a great void, that's only because he made such large mark while he was here.
So groove on, Big Don. If there's an afterlife, I hope it comes complete with the most happening disco imaginable, and that your legs are feeling good enough again to let you bust a few moves on the light-up dance floor. And may you rest in funky peace.
On Monday, August 8, I'll be doing my only Chicago-area book-signing for the paperback edition of Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 , in conjunction with a rare 35mm showing of one of the biggest film hits of 1976 (not to mention the greatest baseball film ever made): The Bad News Bears.
This joyous event will take place at Chicago's legendary Music Box Theater, located at 3733 N. Southport Ave. in Chicago. I will be co-hosting the event with WGN radio's Nick Digilio, and copies of Stars and Strikes will be available for sale in the lobby via those fine folks at The Book Cellar, my favorite local indie bookstore. Tickets for the screening are $12, or $9 if you're already a member. The actual screening begins at 7 pm, and will be followed by a discussion of the film led by Nick and myself.
If you've already read Stars and Strikes, then you know how much this film means to me; the one-two punch of The Bad News Bears and the sudden emergence of spectacular Tigers rookie Mark "The Bird" Fidrych went a long way towards making ten-year-old Dan transfer his obsession with war comics and G.I. Joe dolls to all things baseball-related. If it wasn't for the Bears and the Bird, my life might have taken a much different path, and I almost certainly wouldn't have written Stars and Strikes or Big Hair and Plastic Grass many years down the road. So it's a huge honor to be able to present this wonderful film — whose slyly subversive script still holds up remarkably well 40 years later — on a big screen.
There are no Cubs or White Sox games scheduled that night — so if you're in or near Chicago, I hope you'll come out and say hey. Buttermaker would have wanted it that way, man...
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.