Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [30]
“The people here want to win,” he said, “that’s all that matters to them. Our club needs another left-hander in the bullpen, someone who can come into a game early and throw strikes. If you can still get people out, you’ll get a fair shot.”
The next week Pam and I drove to the Padres camp in Mesa, Arizona. As I lugged my bags into the clubhouse, I bumped into Ballard Smith, the San Diego general manager, and his assistant, Jack McKeon.
“What are you doing here?,” he asked.
“Dick asked me down to try out for the club. Said you were short on left-handed relievers.”
“Oh, he did, did he? Well, we’ll have to see about that.” Tom Haller’s words all over again. The two men stalked off to find their manager. Five minutes later I sat in Dick’s office. He shuffled the papers on his desk, fiddled at the water cooler, and looked everywhere but right at me. When he finally spoke, he sounded angry. Apologetic. Embarrassed.
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” he rasped in a low voice. “I’ve never had this happen before. You look as if you’re in shape, and I want you on this team. I just told our general manager I think you can help us and we should at least give you a look. But he said we cannot touch you. Not that we don’t want you. We cannot touch you. Now, that’s how it is. If you tell anybody I told you this, I’ll have to deny it. But you know what’s going on, right?”
Yes, I knew. I thanked Dick for his honesty and left. His revelation hardly surprised me, though it did disappoint. As I walked through the parking lot I realized that my professional career had just ended. How could I say goodbye to fifteen years of my life? Wave to the ballpark? Burn my glove in front of the clubhouse entrance?
The answer came when I opened the door to our car. This pungent odor assaulted my sinuses, an instant reminder that Pam had eaten a McDonald’s hamburger during our drive. Big Macs had this strange effect on my wife’s gastrointestinal system—they passed right through her. With no bathrooms in sight, my poor wife had no choice but to relieve herself in a takeout bag. The Kroc family owned McDonald’s and the San Diego Padres. As a longtime supporter of recycling, I could think of nothing more appropriate than flinging that bag of shit over the left field wall of the Krocs’ ballpark as we pulled out from the lot. My farewell to the major leagues.
“Don’t bet on it,” the man in Montreal had said. Son of a bitch was right.
5
INTERLUDE
I kept my arm in shape playing for the Moncton Mets in Canada’s New Brunswick Senior League from 1984 to 1987. Pitched in forty-five games and won forty of them while giving up less than a run every nine innings. Winning that easily becomes monotonous, but that was fine with me. Sometimes you need a touch of monotony. I craved peace and wanted to escape the hugger-mugger of urban life with all its beguiling excess. No more cocaine. No more pounding the pavement through several rotations of the planet. A little pot? Yeah, never hurt. Couple of beers at the end of an evening? Could handle that. But the party hardy days? I consigned those to the past.
Picked a funny place to do it. Coming to Moncton to get reasonably sober made as much sense as moving to Brazil to give up sex. Temptation lurked everywhere. Moncton enjoyed a reputation as a good drinking town with a serious fishing problem. Happy hour in that burg started around 9 a.m. and lasted well past midnight. Few Monctonians drank sarsaparilla; nearly all the best restaurants doubled as taverns. This was the home of the four-beer lunch, and you must keep in mind that the beer of choice in those parts—Canada’s own Moosehead—contains 50 percent more alcohol than your standard brews.
Perhaps the sudsy glow Moosehead imparts after only a can or two accounts for all the mellow Monctonians I met. No one in this town ever moved in a hurry. You rarely heard drivers honk their horns or saw cars jockeying to pass each other. People greeted strangers on the street with a wave and a big hello. If your vehicle broke down on the road,