Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [25]
Whenever a Tiburone homered, the fishermen among the spectators showered the diamond with freshly slaughtered baby sharks. Players brought the fish back to the clubhouse and cut them up for steaks. I learned something the first time I stuck a knife into one: when you slice a shark that died only five hours earlier, the pieces throb in your hand. I took some steaks home for dinner after one game. Tasted just like swordfish, only with a little more twitch.
During the seventh-inning stretch, ushers allowed as many as a hundred fans down on the field to dance along the base paths to the driving salsa beat. One night I saw two men shimmy from first base to home plate while carrying the carcass of a seven-foot shark over their heads. These celebrations never grew unruly except when we played against Caracas. Class distinctions and political differences added more edge to these games. Venezuelans considered the Tiburones the port team, a working-class franchise whose fans wore cutoffs, T-shirts, and sandals.
The Leones billed themselves as the city club, more blue-chip than blue-collar. Their loyalists arrived at the park dressed in Armani linen and Gucci shoes. Fistfights between the two factions would break out around the fifth inning, after patrons had guzzled all the sangria from the concession stands. Management maintained extra police on hand to stop the combatants before anyone suffered serious injury.
For weeks after the Galarraga game, my pitching stagnated. Ozzie finally yanked me from the starting rotation and relegated me to the bullpen where I languished in a Catch-22. My sinkerball needed work to remain effective; it dropped more sharply when my arm was tired. In order to pitch better, I had to pitch more, but Ozzie saw no reason to pitch me more until I pitched better. So those few times he did fetch me into a ballgame, I pitched worse. And so he pitched me less. And so it went.
Bruce Bochy did all he could to help end my slump. He spent hours catching me on the side and analyzing my delivery. Bochy had played with the San Diego Padres back in the States, and when he flew down to Venezuela he needed a separate ticket for his batting helmet. He had the biggest head in baseball. I don’t mean Bruce was an egotist. I mean his head looked physically immense. Picture an Easter Island carving. You could have used his catcher’s mask to net a school of salmon.
In fact, everything about him loomed large. Bruce stood six foot five with shoulders as broad as a cornerstone on a cathedral. His long arms enabled him to set a low target perfect for sinkerballers. You could not throw a ball past him in the dirt. Bruce’s hands were so big, his catcher’s mitt nearly filled the entire strike zone. He could catch a ball six inches off the plate in the webbing of his mitt and the umpire would still call it a strike.
Like most tall catchers, Bruce had difficulty throwing out base stealers. A catcher cannot release a ball until his feet are set under him. It took Bruce an extra second or so to raise all that body from his crouch and plant his feet. By the time he threw the ball, even the slowest base runners needed only a few steps to reach the bag. But that was Bochy’s only defensive weakness.
I appreciated how Bruce constantly studied the opposing hitters so he knew what pitch to call in tight situations. His zany sense of humor was also a plus. And when my pitching deteriorated, I needed someone who could make me laugh. One morning as we spoke at his locker, our sixteen-year-old bat boy, Luis, approached to ask if one of us would teach him English. Bruce worked on a phrase with Luis for several minutes and suggested the boy try it out on Ozzie Virgil.
Our batboy proudly walked into the manager’s office while mouthing the words to himself. Two minutes later, we heard a commotion. Luis came tearing through the clubhouse with Ozzie chasing after him. Turned out Bruce had instructed Luis to say,