Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [10]
We traveled to our road games in a minibus or drove our own cars, the hops were so short. The Senators competed against teams from nine nearby cities: Verdun, Sorrel, Mascouche, Victoriaville, Thetford Mines, Joliette, Sherbrooke, Quebec City, and Trois-Rivières. Some of the players in these towns demonstrated professional skills, but most of them could not have made even a low-level minor-league team. I noticed early on that many Canadians hit off their front feet. That meant they set up in the batter’s box with their weight evenly distributed down the center of their bodies. As the ball arrived at home plate, they would shift their entire mass forward, so they ended up hitting with just their hands and shoulders. Their lower torsos—where most of a hitter’s power resides—hardly came into play.
A pitcher could challenge these batters without worrying about surrendering a long ball. Even someone who threw as softly as I did encountered little trouble getting them out while pitching inside. Instead of swinging for home runs, hitters in the Quebec Senior League contented themselves with looping singles and doubles to the opposite field. I believe that had something to do with all the ice sports Canadians play. Ice skating and skiing require you to push and glide. It takes a different exertion, more a plant and push, to smack a baseball for distance. To generate torque, most sluggers must spin off their back legs, a motion skaters and skiers seldom employ.
Many QSL pitchers threw hard, and some could deliver their fastballs in the low nineties, rapid enough to attract the attention of any major-league scout. However, few of these pitchers knew how to change speeds or even location. They could win with nothing more than pure velocity so long as they competed in a circuit where so many players had such slow bats. Major-league hitters would have pulverized them.
Of the forty or so pitchers who played in the QSL, perhaps three owned decent curveballs. That may have represented the biggest difference between this league and the majors. A firstrate professional curve appears to be a fastball when it leaves a pitcher’s hand, but it breaks late and hard in a tight spin as it crosses home plate. Unless you identify the pitch early, it’s like trying to hit an unraveling ball of yarn. You swing where you think the ball should be, but there is nothing left to connect with except a bit of string. The pitch has already curved under your bat to nestle into the catcher’s glove. Good curves also emit a sound—the crackle of static electricity—as the seams of the ball bite into the air.
QSL hurlers threw rinky-dink curves with large orbits, pitches that broke so early, hitters could easily read them. These pitches swished as they passed over the plate. I hit over .350 that first season; many of my hits came off hanging curves. My own assortment of breaking balls and changeups so baffled the opposing hitters, I won ten games while losing only one, averaged a Randy Johnson–level fifteen strikeouts a game, and finished with an ERA of 1.75. Not a single major-league club noticed, but our team contended all season, and I reclaimed my status as a Montreal sports hero, albeit on a smaller scale.
Meanwhile back at the ranch . . .
My wife divorced me. Mary Lou and I had been married since 1969, but she never completely adapted to being a baseball player’s spouse. She wanted me to emulate Mr. Price, our next-door neighbor, who worked nine to five, arrived home every night at six, and sat in front of the fireplace smoking his pipe while the kids told him what they had done in school that day and his wife mixed the martinis and cooked that perfect pot roast. A Douglas