Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [28]
Then I went to the ballpark and surrendered another three-run homer to Galarraga.
Wrong again.
The Tiburones competed for the Venezuela League championship against clubs from five other cities, Caracas, Maracay, Barquisimeto, Maracaibo, and Valencia. All of the towns were reasonably close by, so I never found the road trips grueling. We rode in a wide-bodied, air-conditioned bus with plush leather seats and plenty of leg room. It resembled a motel room on wheels, a vehicle built to accommodate large men.
While traveling to Maracay one afternoon, our driver pulled into a gas station on a highway intersection. My teammates and I saw as many people riding burros as driving cars. We left the bus to eat lunch in a diner next door to the station. I sat down in a rickety truck stop constructed from desiccated drift-wood. No booths, just a dozen or so wobbly wooden stools in front of a long cracked Formica lunch counter. In the outdoor kitchen, white-hot coals purred in a large open barbecue pit. A deep fryer bubbled next to it.
Farmers carrying live pigs, goats, rabbits, chickens, and iguanas lined up at the cash register. They had come here to sell, not buy. Each farmer handed his animals over the counter to one of the cooks in exchange for a few bills or coins.
“What’s good today?” I asked the waitress.
She pointed to a freshly killed, skinned rabbit roasting on a spit. I had seen it only moments ago, vibrant and kicking, in the arms of its owner. Now it stared back at me with lifeless eyes. Oh, no. I refused to eat Bugs Bunny.
“Can you crack open a can of Spam?”
That item did not appear on the menu. I settled for a grilled chicken sandwich but waited outside until it finished cooking.
I saw a familiar deep yellow logo emblazoned across posters and billboards throughout this region. Shell Oil maintained a heavy public profile in all the cities we played in. Something poetic in that—hitters shelled me in every one of them. Ozzie started me in Maracaibo, where the air stank of burning petroleum from the nearby oil refineries. I walked around that city blind for all the smoke. My eyes burned. I gagged with nearly every breath. The wind blew hot off the lake near the ballpark, and the high humidity made pitching in a day game unbearable. The Maracaibo hitters scorched my best stuff and drove me to the showers in the third inning. I wanted to thank them for removing me from the heat.
My pitching did not revive until the closing weeks of the season, after the weather cooled, my arm warmed, and Ozzie started using me out of the bullpen as his primary left-handed reliever. I surrendered only two runs in my last eighteen innings pitched. The Tiburones finished the season at .500, a record just good enough to earn the last berth in the Venezuela League championship playoffs. We had to win three out of five games against Barquisimeto to advance past the first round.
Barquisimeto opened the series with two wins. We took the third game, but our opponents led 3–2 in the eighth inning of game four when Ozzie brought me in from the bullpen. Runners on first and second, nobody out. Willie Upshaw, a left-handed hitter, stepped to the plate.
Bruce Bochy called time and joined me for a mound conference with our third baseman, Luis Salazar, first baseman, Clint Hurdle, and second baseman, Ozzie Guillen. Upshaw had played first base with the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League. Neither Bruce nor I had ever seen him hit, so we could only guess how he might approach this at bat. We knew Upshaw had driven in more than a hundred runs for the Blue Jays in 1983. That told us he might look for a pitch to drive deep, to break the game open. Guillen disagreed. He had played against Willie many times and believed the first baseman would lay down a bunt to move the runners along.
I told Bruce we would feed Upshaw a hard cutter away. Willie could bunt that pitch fair