Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [99]
I saw my father play enough games with Jackson Paint to know he could have excelled in the major leagues. He fielded his position expertly, with quick feet and even quicker reactions. Dad could dive to his right to catch a hot grounder on his belly and scamper up to throw from his knees to nip even the fastest runner at first base. Smart hitter too. He kept his hands above the ball and smacked line drives to all fields. I never saw him strike out or look bad on a swing. But he entered the Army Signal Corps during World War II, and by the time Dad left the service professional teams considered him too old to tab as a prospect. My mother was pregnant with me, so he went to work for the telephone company and played semipro baseball at night and on weekends.
Dad excelled at every sport he tried. He averaged 200 the first year he joined a bowling league, top man on his team. He all but gave up the game after that. Needed something more challenging. My father just turned eighty-three as we write this and has shot his age or better at golf for the last ten years. In fact, he probably ranks as the best over-seventy-five golfer in all of California. And he remains fiercely competitive. I bested him on the links not too long ago. He refused to talk to me during the entire ride home.
Soon as I grew big enough, he passed on everything his father had taught him about baseball. He sized me up as a pitcher right away. Dad showed me how to properly throw a curve by snapping it off with my thumb and index finger rather than using my elbow to provide torque. I pitched nearly fourteen years in the big leagues without suffering an elbow injury, largely due to his advice. He also helped me develop a big-league attitude. “Don’t get down when someone gets a hit off you,” he would say. “Give him credit. But remember what pitch he hit, and don’t throw it in that situation to that hitter again. Learn from your mistakes instead of brooding and you’ll get him out next time.”
That lesson stayed with me. I can’t tell you what I ate for breakfast yesterday, but I do remember the sequence of pitches I threw to Del Unser of the Washington Senators before he homered against me in 1969. When I signed to play professional baseball, Dad gave me a glove bearing an inscription that continued his tutelage and formed the credo for my entire career: “Throw strikes. Keep the ball down. Be smooth. Don’t alibi.” Across the front of each finger on the glove he wrote six letters wide in black marker: HUSTLE.
When dad could not catch me in the backyard, my aunt Annabelle Lee put on a mitt. During the 1940s she had starred as the ace left-hander for several women’s baseball teams, including the Minneapolis Millerettes and the Fort Wayne Daisies. Annabelle earned her living, and a good one at that, as a professional ballplayer for nine seasons. She pitched a perfect game and two no-hitters while posting a lifetime ERA of 2.19. Her uniform hangs at the entrance of the Baseball Hall of Fame, right next to Jackie Robinson’s.
My aunt worked on my control and mechanics and taught me how to change speeds. She also smoothed my delivery and insisted I throw every pitch from the same release point and with the same motion. “That way,” she would remind me, “the batter can’t read your motion and figure out what you’re going to throw.” Annabelle and my father were the best pitching coaches I ever had, though Dad could be a difficult man to satisfy. He praised me when I played exceptionally well and acted proud of my accomplishments.
But he also used sarcasm to prod me to do better even after a win, and I grew up thinking I could never completely please him. In the winter of 1975, I brought some Red Sox teammates to his house in San Rafael for a barbecue and some beers. Before long he was sitting in the middle of them, smoking a cigar and