Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [9]
I know what you’re thinking. Poor son of a bitch loses his career and he just completely falls apart; next he’ll be telling us how he slept among garbage cans under blankets of newspapers. Getting thrown out of baseball had nothing to do with this. I was not trying to escape. I just enjoyed feeling dopey. And I hadn’t drifted all that far from the game.
Six weeks after McHale released me, the doorbell rang as I sat in the bathroom admiring my picture on the cover of High Times magazine. I ignored the nagging buzzer. The questioning reporters, the commiserating fans—I had no desire to greet any of them. Just wanted some down time, a chance to reflect on my next move. But that damned bell rang again and again and still again and continued ringing until I finally yanked open the door. He introduced himself as Gino Lemitti, a mail-man whose route covered a neighboring district. Should have known. Leave it to a postman to ring more than twice.
Gino stood with his friend Claude in my doorway under the moonlight. A bright star hovering in the sky behind the pair made them resemble two of the wise men from a Nativity scene. “Jesus ain’t here,” I cracked. “You have any presents for him, just leave them on the stoop.” As it turned out, they had arrived bearing gifts.
“How would you like to be pitching again, Bill?”
“Why, you boys just buy the Expos?”
Gino was quick to explain that he did not have an affiliation with any major league club. However, he did manage the Longueuil Senators, a team in the Quebec Senior League. Soon as the news of my release reached him, Gino drove to the Ministry of Sports in Ottawa and persuaded its members to reinstate my amateur athletic status. Now he wanted me to join his pitching staff.
It sounded ideal. The Senators played their home games in a Montreal suburb just across the river from the Expos’ Olympic Stadium and only ten miles from my home. I could stay sharp pitching in regular competition against the best over-twenty semipro baseball players in Canada while showcasing my talents for any scouts who visited the area to watch the Expos. Before agreeing, I needed to know only two things.
“How soon can I start, and will you let me bat cleanup?”
“You can hit anywhere in the lineup you want,” Gino promised, “and would tomorrow night be soon enough? We need pitching badly.”
Culture shock jolted my receptors when I strolled into the Longueuil clubhouse on the evening of June 23. The ample room appeared spic-and-span clean but frill-free. I did not find any lockers or even stalls to dress in. When I asked where to put my clothes, an attendant pointed to a row of small hooks on the wall. Instead of the cavernous shower rooms I had grown accustomed to in the major leagues, he showed me to a midsized bathroom with two shower stalls and a single toilet. The lack of amenities did not discourage me. I felt grateful to be pitching again so soon, and the players greeted me warmly, many with bone-crunching embraces. Longueuil had played six games of a forty-game schedule and had already established itself as one of the strongest offensive clubs in the circuit. With a major leaguer pitching one-third of their games—the Senators played just three times a week—my new teammates believed they had a chance to win a championship.
We walked onto the home field a half hour before game time, and I immediately fell in love. It was an old-time major-league stadium in miniature, a one-tier ballpark with wooden stands topped by a row of modern klieg lights and a chain-link fence lining the outfield. The grounds crew had rolled a portable aluminum bleachers behind that fence to supply additional seating for the overflow crowd. Over fifteen hundred fans had come out that night to watch my return to the mound against the Joliette Beavers.
As I warmed up on the pitching rubber, I checked the players