Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [4]
Fanning never appeared. I watched the Expos’ game on the bar’s TV while drinking beers with the political cartoonist Terry Mosher and playing pool with a quiet gentleman whose cerebral palsy made his hands shake violently except when he held a cue stick. Then his fingers turned so rock-steady, he ran the table on us. By the sixth inning the Dodgers were once again shellacking us, and I realized our team was about to run out of pitchers. The walkout immediately ended. I wanted to stick it to Fanning and the front office, not my teammates. My friends hustled me back to Olympic Stadium.
I reached the ballpark just before the bottom of the seventh inning. Fanning refused to put me in the game, and we tangled in his office afterward. He accused me of deserting the team; I accused him of lying to Rodney. He sputtered. He fumed. His face swelled red. But his boxing gloves stayed locked away. He pointed me back into the clubhouse and said, “[Montreal general manager] John McHale wants to see you in his office tomorrow. Bright and early. This is between you and him now.”
“What’s wrong with right now?”
“John does not want to see you in the state you’re in. The morning will be fine.”
I had walked off a ball club once before to protest management’s mistreatment of a teammate. In 1978, the Boston Red Sox traded Bernie Carbo—for my money, the most dangerous left-handed hitter on our roster—to the Cleveland Indians simply because they did not appreciate Carbo’s colorful late-night lifestyle. I left the team for twenty-four hours right after the front office announced the deal. Boston fined me one day’s salary over that incident. I expected a similar punishment from McHale.
What else could he do? The edge belonged to me. McHale would never jettison his best left-handed reliever. During the previous season I had topped the Expos in earned run average while finishing second on the team in games pitched and holds. I even hit .348. And I still ranked among the most popular players on the team. People chanted my name the moment I appeared on the field not just in Montreal but in ballparks around the league. I led the club in speaking engagements. My fans were so passionate, they lowered bottles of tequila to me in the bullpen before the start of every game. At one point I collected sixty-seven bottles in less than two months, an all-time record in the annals of sport that will undoubtedly remain unbroken for years to come. Most teams considered my sort of player invaluable.
Irreplaceable.
Untouchable.
Wouldn’t you think?
“We just released you from your contract,” McHale announced not ten minutes into our meeting. Just seven words, but they instantly altered my identity. I could no longer call myself a professional ballplayer. I had become a line of agate type on the AP transactions wire. A black hole on the rosters of rotisserie league managers across North America. A blurb on tonight’s evening news that began, “And now a sad note from the world of baseball . . .”
In calculating my worth to the Expos, I had let ego throw off the math. Not exactly a first for me. In essence, the Expos had decided they would rather pay me $225,000 not to play than keep me on the team. It rankled to discover how expendable they considered me. The Lee Irish temper flared. I shook my fist at McHale and shouted, “You want to cut me, fine. There are plenty of clubs in this league desperate for left-handed pitching. One of them will sign me. You just watch.”
McHale’s cold eyes brightened. A smug look crossed his face as he leaned over his desk to whisper, “Don’t bet on it.”
A blackball had just thudded onto the floor, but the sound took its time reaching my ears. The next day, my wife and I sent letters offering my services to the other eleven National League clubs. We did not contact anyone in the American League. I liked hitting too much, and the designated hitter rule would prevent me from taking my cuts at the plate.
We expected teams to overwhelm us with offers. My contract stipulated that the Expos had to pay the rest of