Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [50]
Yeah. Bobby. Martin. Nixon. We all knew what had happened.
I hugged him and left for home. We campaigned little after that meeting. After talking to a real revolutionary, someone who had spent his life putting everything on the line, the joke had lost its humor. I just wanted to get back on a ball field and shag fly balls in the sunshine. My writers prepared a speech for election night in case we won. I had planned to immediately resign and turn over the reins to Hunter Thompson. You never heard that address; those twelve write-in votes I received left us just short of reaching the White House. Next time I’ll figure out how to fill out the ballots faster.
Hunter Thompson and I never did get together. My friend Jim Nowik met him in New York City in 1992 and learned the journalist had known of our ill-fated candidacies. Jim later wrote to me describing the encounter. We close this chapter with a portion of his letter as evidence that my vice president and I would have made a perfect match:
I ran into Hunter Thompson at the bar of the Pierre Hotel in NYC, around the first week of November. He was in town for Rolling Stone’s twenty-fifth anniversary bash at the Four Seasons restaurant. . . . I had caught him alone, though I’m sure he would have been happy to find something with two legs and a dress. . . . [A]fter treating him to about four pint glasses of Chivas Regal over ice in about half an hour . . . he treated me to some barely intelligible bursts of conversation (not to mention a bar bill of $100).
I brought up your . . . run for the White House on the Rhinoceros ticket with him as VP. I can’t quite remember his mumbled words exactly, but I did catch “mutant,” “pigfucker,” and “I’ll gnaw on the bastard’s skull.” . . . I could tell immediately you were still intimate running mates.
9
ALMOST A GOOD IDEA
In 1989 I signed on as player-manager for the Winter Haven Super Sox in the newly formed Senior Professional Baseball Association. The league offered an opportunity to test my skills against clubs composed entirely of my peers. Jim Morley, a Colorado real-estate developer, had founded the eight-team league as a haven for retired pro players thirty-five or older (the league made an exception for catchers, who could be as young as thirty-two). Our schedule called for teams to play seventy-two games from the first of November to the end of January. Each player received $9,000 a month.
My teammates included several former Boston Red Sox such as Ferguson Jenkins, Bernie Carbo, Butch Hobson, Darrell Brandon, Mario Guerrero, and Gary Allenson. We played our first game on November 1 against the St. Petersburg Pelicans in Winter Haven’s Chain of Lakes Park. Mitchell Maxwell, the Super Sox owner, had assured us he would run a first-class operation, but the opening-day ceremonies convinced me I had returned to Port Hawkesbury with the Hockey Legends. A singer from Les Misérables began the festivities by belting out an off-key rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” while the balky sound system slapped our ears silly with feedback. A twenty-one-gun salute followed the performance. I swear at least six of the rifles misfired.
Maxwell chose some celebrity for the traditional throwing out of the first ball, a celebrity no one in the crowd of over three thousand had ever heard of. He jogged to the mound in near silence. After he completed his tosses, the players on both teams were forced to wait before assuming their positions while the Winter Haven High School band promenaded across the field and treated us to their entire catalogue of marches, each of them sounding like a high-velocity variation of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
For the finale, the stadium loudspeakers blared a fight song that ended with the immortal phrase, “It ain’t over till it’s over, that’s Super Sox baseball!” I still own a tape of that ditty and play it outside whenever we want to chase rodents from our property.
Jim Bibby started for us that day. The right-hander had won nineteen