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I play because whether you win or lose, the cold beer tastes better after a game.

I love rolling in the newly mowed outfield grass, where the oxygen hides on late summer afternoons. You run wind sprints till sweat drenches your uniform and your lungs emit the sound of gasping bellows. Your body drops to the cooler ground, where the grass respires, and you dig your face deep into the green and take in the breath of life and you know you can play another game. In the spring the ground feels soft, same as your muscles, still not quite in top shape, and it cushions you when you dive or stumble chasing after the ball. As your body hardens, the field hardens with it, and it pounds you all summer until your bones and joints ache and you feel your age and mortality and all the distance you’ve run over a thousand base paths and your body comes close to breaking until that first cool fall rain gentles the ground, so when you slide tough into second base to bust up the double play, the earth gives and catches you in its arms like a teammate.

I continue to take the field because I fear growing old, not the wrinkles or the gray hair—I can live with those—but the muscles turning slack and my mind growing numb. You don’t work baseball, you play it, and the little boy in me never wants recess to end. I love the dance on the mound, my body flowing through my pitching motion. I love the feel of the ball sliding from my left hand, sweet as a lover’s caress. The years have notched my fingers with calluses that fit perfectly around the seams on that horsehide. The world resting in my palm.

After a hard afternoon on the mound the resin has stained my nails black; they remind me of an artist’s fingers dipped in paint. I cup my hands around my nose and breathe in deeply. The smell of freshly cut pines transports me to that Christmas morning when I found my first baseball glove wrapped in ribbons and colored paper.

I love running out ground balls. My spikes bite deep into the ground to produce perfect traction. My ankles and calves shove against the earth, and I explode out of the batter’s box. Running down the baseline, the wind blows off my cap and scurries on its tiptoes to catch me, but I am fast and I am elusive and I am free and I am beyond the reach of the wind and pain and time and I am eighteen again forever.

I still play because I have no choice.

I am a ballplayer.

Also by Bill Lee and Richard Lally

Bill Lee’s

story begins

in the baseball classic

The Wrong Stuff

“Still a great read after all these years.”

—Jim Bouton

0-307-33978-5 $13.95 paper

Finally back in print after many years, here is Bill Lee’s classic tale of his renegade life on and off the mound.

With refreshing candor and an obvious love for baseball, Lee shares his irreverent observations about the nature of the game, its players and bosses, and his own experiences on two great teams.

(sample chapter to follow)

Available from Three Rivers Press wherever books are sold.

An excerpt from the baseball classic The Wrong Stuff by Bill Lee and Richard Lally In Stores May 2006

1

God, it’s dark. I am sitting in the lotus position on the floor of the office of Montreal Expo president and general manager John McHale. There is not another soul around. It is early morning, the lights are out, and the room is as quiet as a crypt. That may seem spooky to some, but I find it rather relaxing.

I had been summoned to these executive chambers for an audience with McHale. I was presuming he was upset with me. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I had walked off the Expos in protest over the release of our second baseman, Rodney Scott. The walkout lasted four hours; I had gone back to the clubhouse before that afternoon’s game was over. Upon returning, I was informed by manager Jim Fanning that I had been indefinitely suspended, was about to be fined, and had to see McHale the next day. I assumed that it would be then that the shit would really hit the fan.

I had stopped off in