Читать книгу Rage - Peter Golenbock - Страница 12

3

THE BUMPY ROAD TO THE PROS

MY ADOLESCENCE WAS FURTHER FILLED WITH FRUSTRATION, resentment, and anger because my high school basketball coach was a prick who resented how good I was, and that I was a lot smarter about basketball than he was. I also felt a deep frustration in baseball because as a sophomore in high school I had trouble throwing strikes. Then, when I was a junior and my control improved, I was kicked off the baseball team when I deliberately hit a kid in the head with a pitch. For some reason, my coach wasn’t too happy about it.

I could throw the heck out of a baseball, but my first love was basketball. As a sophomore I was six feet tall, a solid 180 pounds, and I could shoot and dribble the ball like Meadowlark Lemon.

My sophomore year I started on the Woodrow Wilson High School varsity team.

Before my first game, my father, who himself had been a basketball star, wanted to talk to me in private. He told my mom he wanted to take me to the game. Dad and I drove the five miles to the high school, and as I started to get out of the car, he grabbed me by the arm and said, “Son, I’m only going to give you one piece of advice: If somebody whacks you, whack him back harder.”

I took his words to heart.

My junior year, against New Britain High School, one of the New Britain players stole the ball from me and drove in for a layup. On the next play a pass came to me close to the basket, and a New Britain player by the name of Dave Rybczyk slammed me into the padding three feet beyond the end of the court. I grabbed him, and we started swinging before cooler heads broke up the fight.

Another of my dad’s sayings was “Don’t get mad. Get even.”

I did both.

I’ll get even, I swore to myself at the time.

When baseball season came around I was on the mound facing New Britain, and in the first inning, who should come to bat but Dave Rybczyk. My first pitch was a fastball that hit him squarely in the head. Rybczyk went down. I had no remorse. My feeling was that since he had started the fight in basketball the previous season, he had it coming to him. It was part of my Catholic upbringing, because it says in the Bible, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” I settled for a broken helmet and a concussion. I stood over him and shouted, “I told you I’d get you, you son of a bitch.”

My baseball coach, Gene Pehota, was standing behind me, and he heard what I said, and he kicked me hard in the ass, removed me from the game, and kicked me off the baseball team.

A day or so later, my father and I asked Coach Pehota to let me back on the team.

“I can’t have Bill doing this,” he said to my dad. “As hard as he throws, he could kill somebody. We can’t have him throwing at people. He’s not going to play the rest of the season.”

And so I, one of the best pitchers in Connecticut, had to sit out my junior year of high school. I had to wait for American Legion ball to start during the summer to play ball again.

I like to say I got my temper from my grandpa, James Denehy, a fine Irishman and an alcoholic. He was once the head of public works in Middletown. I never met Grandpa Jim, but his wife, Anne, once told me that when a new mayor was elected, Grandpa was fired. According to Aunt Anne, after getting canned, Grandpa walked a block to the Elks Club, proceeded to get snockered, then headed back to his office in City Hall, where all the maps containing the locations of the sewers and water pipes in Middletown were stacked. Grandpa collected them, put them on the concrete steps of City Hall, and set them ablaze in a public display of spite and malice.

“Unless you have copies of these,” said the new mayor, “we’re going to put you in jail.”

Some copies did exist, but not all, and every so often there’d be a leak in a water pipe or a sewer, and no one would know what to do because there weren’t any maps of it.

Addiction is in my genes. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger. And like Grandpa, I didn’t have any remorse.

I rejoined the Woodrow Wilson High School baseball team my senior year. I could bring it, and the rest of the team was a nose-to-the-grindstone bunch of overachievers, but we had no idea we would be state champions at the end of the season.

Getting thrown off the team for hitting Dave Rybczyk didn’t curb my sadistic tendencies. The coaches didn’t know that my teammates and I devised a sick, potentially deadly game. A number of our players bet a dollar for the chance to pull a number out of a hat. The center fielder was position number eight, and the player who picked the number eight out of the hat won the pot. My job was to drill the center fielder of the opposing team with the ball. For me, it wasn’t much different from the dunk tank game you played at the state fair, only in this game I was hitting my target with the ball. We did it twice. Both boys I hit ended up with bad injuries, so we talked it over and decided to stop.

In one game against Southington High School, I retired the first eight batters; the ninth batter was the center fielder, and I nailed him in the arm but good. “What the hell was that for?” Coach Pehota wanted to know. He had no idea the kid writhing on the ground was the batter designated to get drilled.

Somebody once said, “You could kill someone.” I said, “When I put that uniform on, I’m here to win the game.” I was once asked by Don Lombardo, a close friend, “What would you do to win a game?” “Fuck the rules” was my answer.

I dominated my senior year. I pitched 151 innings and struck out 288 batters, only fourteen strikeouts shy of striking out two batters per inning. I finished the year with a seven-win-and-two-loss record, helping Woodrow Wilson High win the 1964 Connecticut High School State Baseball Championship. Then I had a perfect record of nine wins and no losses in American Legion ball for the Middletown, Connecticut team. None of this gave me much pleasure, though. I was a perfectionist and wasn’t able to throw strikes as easily as I wanted.

I threw real, real hard, and I didn’t let up; but I was wild. If anyone was going to see potential in me, it was from pure velocity.

In my first high school game, as a sophomore, I pitched against New Britain. I faced nine batters; seven walked and the other two batters got hit.

Against Middlefield that same year I faced five batters; two batters walked and the other three got hit. My coach came to the mound and asked my catcher, “What kind of fastball does he have?”

My catcher, Tom Serra, who would later become mayor of Middletown, replied, “I really don’t know. Every one he’s thrown has either hit the backstop or he’s drilled someone with it.”

Serra saw I was having trouble focusing. He told me, “I’m going to hold my glove over the middle of the plate. Just throw the ball to me, and we’ll win.”

And that’s what I did. In the summer of my sophomore year, pitching in an American Legion game, I struck out nineteen batters and walked seventeen. That’s a lot of batters where nobody hits the ball. It made for very boring—and frustrating—baseball.

My coaches and my catchers would tell me, “Just throw it over the plate. Just let them hit it,” but I wasn’t able to do that, and it was killing me. The culprit was bad mechanics, but either the coaches didn’t know how to fix it or I was too stubborn to adapt. I didn’t know what the word mechanics meant. I certainly never heard of it when I was in high school.

I threw straight overhand, and I pitched great on a high mound with a steep pitch, but too often when the mound wasn’t high, I wasn’t able to get on top of the ball and throw it over the plate. On a flat mound I was high and wild inside to a right-hander. Righty batters were taking their lives in their hands against me.

Still, I threw a mean fastball at over ninety miles an hour, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, major league scouts were paying attention. They came to my games trying to be anonymous, but I learned to spot them because they’d huddle together in the stands with their clipboards and speed guns. The speed guns were kind of a giveaway.

One night in my junior year my father asked me, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

I responded and he said, “We’re going to the Yankee Silversmith,” which was a fancy Middletown restaurant where the Wesleyan professors liked to eat. We only went to that restaurant on special occasions. I asked him why.

“Because the Boston Red Sox are taking us out to dinner.”

The baseball scouts had been watching me since I was a sophomore. Bots Nekola and Charlie Wagner scouted me for the Boston Red Sox. Harry Hesse of the New York Yankees contacted me, as did Len Zanke of the New York Mets.

Bots, the Sox’ top scout for New England, and Broadway Charlie Wagner, who had once been Ted Williams’s roommate, were the Red Sox scouts who hosted me and my family. Eating at a fancy restaurant in the company of two major league scouts was a little overwhelming for me. One of the first things Charlie Wagner asked me was “Do you like shrimp cocktail?”

“If you’re going to be a big leaguer,” said Wagner, “you gotta have shrimp cocktail.” And he ordered me one. Eating shrimp cocktail was one of the highlights of the visit.

Three-quarters of the way through my American Legion season junior year, Bots and Charlie invited me to a Boston Red Sox tryout camp for high school juniors and seniors.

I was scheduled to pitch a game one night, but I wasn’t able to participate. Bots brought me out to the bullpen, and he told me, “Listen, I just want you to throw a little bit, not even hard, and I want to show you something.”

Bots said he didn’t think that I was getting the most of my ability by throwing straight overhand. He had me drop my arm angle down to three-quarters.

“Just throw across your body,” he told me.

“Take a pitching rubber and look at the third base side, where you’d place your push-off leg,” he said. “If you draw a line from where your toes are toward home plate, in order to throw across your body all you have to do is stand to the third base side of that line.”

I was getting instruction from a former major league ballplayer, and I tried to do as he said. My pitching problems had nothing to do with my motion or my release point. What the change in angle did was to set up more of a rotation and a closing-the-door effect—as opposed to my previous up-and-down motion. Once I moved my left leg toward home plate and to the left of that line he showed me, it opened up my chest and hips. The result was that I could be more of a power pitcher. It may sound complicated, but what he told me was actually very simple.

“I think you’ll have more movement on your fastball if you pitch this way,” he said.

I returned home, and that night in my game against Cromwell American Legion, I pitched using the motion Bots showed me. Throwing three-quarters motion, rather than up and down, I found I could get the ball down, and I threw a lot more strikes than I ever did before. I threw a no-hitter against Cromwell, retiring the last twenty-one batters in a row.

I went back to the Red Sox camp the next day. Bots asked me, “How did you like that?”

“Pretty good,” I said. That was an understatement. I had never pitched better in my life.

In my next start against East Hampton, I used the same motion. Thanks to Bots Nekola’s advice, I was throwing nice and easy, and I retired the first twenty East Hampton batters in a row. With two outs in the top of the seventh, I was one strike away from throwing a perfect game. Coach Pehota called time and came out to the mound.

“A bunch of scouts are sitting here,” he said, “and you haven’t thrown a really good curveball all game long. You have two strikes on this guy. Snap off a really good curve and show them you have that pitch, too.”

Pehota’s intentions were good, but as I look back on it now, I wish he had stayed in the dugout. On the next pitch I snapped off a curve as instructed and hit the batter in the foot. There went my perfect game. But in those two games, using the motion suggested by Bots Nekola, I went from a guy with a wild fastball to a pitcher who retired forty-one consecutive batters.

I went from this hard-throwing, grunting, 120 percent-throwing fastball motion to this 75 percent, sidearm, easy-whipping motion. When I pitched those two no-hitters, it was like I was playing catch in the outfield before the game. I actually felt let down, because I wasn’t getting the rush from having to exert myself, even though the results were better. It was almost like it was too easy.

Before the end of summer, the Red Sox brought me to Fenway Park, where I got to meet Carl Yastrzemski. Bots had signed him. Carl, who was in civilian clothes, took me up to Tom Yawkey’s box and introduced me to Mr. Yawkey. Mr. Yawkey asked my parents to have lunch with him while Carl welcomed me to the Red Sox, and he showed me around the clubhouse and introduced me to the players.

“Bots is really high on you,” said Yaz. “We’d like you to be part of the organization.”

The Red Sox showed a lot of interest in me. With that interest, and my being Irish, I really should have signed with them. But I was strangely noncommittal, in part because my favorite team was the New York Yankees, and because my heart was actually set on becoming an NBA basketball star.

My secret goal was to be a shooting guard for the Boston Celtics. All I had to do was beat out Sam Jones. I had been so wild on the mound that baseball wasn’t fun for me yet. I also thought, despite the attention of the Red Sox, that I couldn’t really believe anyone would be interested in signing me as a pro baseball player.

As a guard on the Woodrow Wilson High School basketball team I was a brawny, six-foot-three 180-pounder. I was a magician with the ball who could dribble between my legs and behind my back, pass, and stuff the ball into the basket two-handed. I just loved the game of basketball.

When I was a junior in high school, we played a basketball game at the Waterbury Arena against powerful Wilby High School, which was among the top five schools in the state. We had no business getting within fifteen points of Wilby, but somehow at the end of regulation play, the score was tied.

In the overtime period, we scored first and quickly got the ball back. Wilby called time.

Our coach, Jim Sullivan, told us, “Stay with our offense,” but when the team walked back onto the court, I called my teammates together and told them, “Listen, they’re in a zone defense. We have the ball. Let’s stay as far away from the zone as possible. Let’s just hold the ball.”

At the time, there was no shot clock in high school basketball. I thought that holding the ball was the smart way to go. The whistle blew, the ball was passed to me, and I just stood out on the perimeter, holding the basketball underneath my arm. I did this for three and a half minutes. I couldn’t believe that Wilby was staying in their zone defense. I guess they figured we’d have to do something eventually.

With only thirty seconds left in the game, Wilby changed to a man-to-man, and at that point we went to our man-to-man offense. The ball was again passed to me; I made a layup, and was fouled. When I made the free throw, we led by five, and it was enough to seal what was an incredible, improbable victory. The joy I felt was unrestrained.

The upset of Wilby was a sterling victory, and I was fiercely proud of my role in it.

After the game ended, the thrill of victory lingered. The sportswriters went to talk to a smiling Coach Sullivan. Sullivan took the credit for our holding the ball; I couldn’t believe it.

The storyline should have led with how senior guard Bill Denehy’s brilliant strategy had won the game against Wilby, but instead Coach Sullivan hogged the glory. His lack of morality angered me so, and my joy was dimmed considerably.

As we were boarding the bus to go back to Middletown, I was one of the last players to get on. I was still aglow with the thrill of the upset when Coach Sullivan pulled me aside and said to me angrily, “Listen, I’m the coach. Don’t you ever pull that shit again.”

Didn’t we just win the game? I thought to myself.

In my rage over what he said, I was also thinking something else: My cleverness was what earned my team an improbable victory over a team we had no right to beat, and this lying son of a bitch refused to acknowledge my role in it.

Coach Sullivan and I had never had much of a rapport, and we never would.

My senior year at Woodrow Wilson we had three players who were six foot three or taller, and we won the conference basketball championship. We should have won state, too. The ego and pigheadedness of our coach kept us from going all the way.

The first time we played rival Middletown High School, we won by twenty points. Middletown High was a much faster team. Before our second meeting I went to Coach Sullivan and said to him, “Listen, we’re a big, bullish team. That’s why when we play small teams, we kill them, because they can’t run with us and they aren’t as strong as we are. Middletown is a small team, and the next time we play them, instead of playing our usual offense, why don’t we bully them?”

Coach Sullivan, once an excellent finesse player in his own right, wasn’t comfortable playing rough, and he wasn’t about to play the game that way. “I’m the coach,” he told me. “I know you went to basketball camp for a couple of years and you think you know basketball, but I’m the coach, and we’re going to play it the way I set it up.”

I bit my lip and held my tongue. In the rematch against Middletown, we did it his way; they held the ball, and they beat us. Middletown went on to win the state championship, a championship that could have been ours, if not for Coach Sullivan.

A new conference MVP award was inaugurated that year, and after our loss to Middletown in the conference championship, they held a ceremony. The award was presented to Middletown High School’s Bill Brown, who had eighteen rebounds and twenty points.

Before the announcement of the winner, players from both teams lined up on the court, and I was standing there stewing about the fact we had lost when I heard Brown’s name announced as the MVP. I walked off the court in a blind rage and made a beeline for our locker room.

Spectators whispered that I had left because I hadn’t won the award, but that wasn’t it at all. I couldn’t have cared less about the award. I walked off the court because I was so fucking pissed off that we had lost a game that we should have won. Jim Sullivan didn’t do anything to help us win, we lost, and that pissed me off royally.

That week Sullivan called me and the other two captains of the Woodrow Wilson High basketball team into his office.

“We want to send a letter to Middletown wishing them luck in the tournament,” he said.

To his face I told him, “They’re our biggest rivals, and I didn’t feel we played them to the best of our capabilities, and I refuse to sign it.” He talked about sportsmanship. “It has nothing to do with sportsmanship,” I said. “It has everything to do with winning.” And I walked out.

My anger was so great that I also refused to go to the end-of-season party with my teammates. A couple of friends brought a case of beer. We walked into the woods and got drunk.

I told my two buddies how fucking pissed off I was that we had done nothing to change the offense. I told them exactly what we could have done to win the game. Yes, I had gone to Bob Pettit’s basketball camp for two years and I had learned a lot. But was that any reason for Sullivan not to listen to me? I will never forgive Coach Sullivan for as long as I live.

I didn’t play college basketball, despite my size and talent, because I wanted to go to St. Bonaventure University to play both basketball and baseball. But during my senior year, St. Bonaventure announced it was dropping baseball from its curriculum.

I had had dreams of playing college basketball, but after St. Bonaventure dropped baseball, I decided to concentrate on becoming a professional baseball player. Sounds silly, but that’s how kids think sometimes. Baseball was starting to be fun, and after going from wild and inconsistent to domineering on the pitcher’s mound, I wanted to see what the pros had to offer.

After the money offers to play baseball started to come in, I thought, Why am I going to go to school? To get a job? I can start a job right now and start making some money.

When baseball season rolled around my senior year, I approached the game with more maturity. For reasons I will never understand, I abandoned the easy three-quarter motion Bots Nekola had taught me. Maybe it was too easy. Maybe I felt I wasn’t working hard enough. Maybe I was self-destructive. I can’t honestly say why. But I returned to my overpowering overhand fastball, and my senior year I was a force to be reckoned with.

Woodrow Wilson needed to beat Middletown to get to the state finals. I pitched fourteen innings, striking out twenty-six batters in that game. On that day, in my mind, I asked myself who else was in my class as a pitcher. Christy Mathewson, Bob Feller, and Sandy Koufax came to mind.

In the Connecticut State Tournament we won our first two games, and then I threw a one-hitter against Northwest Regional High School, led by pitcher John Lamb, who would later play for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and we won the game 3–0. I could have had a no-hitter, but our shortstop fielded the ball and slipped as he made the throw.

That game was played on a Wednesday, and the final game of the tournament against Seymour High School was to be played on a Saturday. It didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t going to pitch, but our coach, Gene Pehota, announced that John Hudak would start the game.

Pehota explained to the local reporter, “Bill has a chance to play professional baseball, and he just pitched eleven innings, and we don’t want him to hurt his arm.”

Just about every player on the team and many of their parents went to Coach Pehota and told him his reasoning was bullshit.

“We’re playing for the state championship,” they told him. “You can’t do that.”

Nevertheless, Coach Pehota stuck to his guns. But it rained on game day, the game was postponed until the next Monday, and I was named the starter.

Seymour High was located somewhere in the Naugatuck Valley, about fifty miles away. We had never played them before. I only knew about one player they had, a fine outfielder and left-handed pitcher named Milt Cochrane. I struck out the first ten batters I faced. Once I did that, it was just a question of whether we were going to score. Seymour didn’t have a chance. We walked away champions of all the Class B high schools in Connecticut.

After the game we drove the bus past rival Middletown High blasting the horn, and we kept blasting it all the way down Main Street. No one expected us to be in the championship game in the first place. My great disappointment is that, to this day, our team has never gotten the acclaim that the 1964 Middletown High School basketball team got when they won it all. There was no parade and no celebration. Our team isn’t even in the Middletown Hall of Fame.

After my senior baseball season was over, I was asked to come to Springfield, Massachusetts, to work out with the Springfield Giants, the Double-A farm club of the San Francisco Giants. Carl Hubbell, one of the greatest left-handed pitchers of all time and the head of minor league development for the Giants, asked me to try out. In the 1934 All-Star Game, Hubbell had struck out in succession Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin—five of the best hitters of their era. Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx were three of the greatest hitters of all time.

My father called Hubbell and told him, “We’re supposed to play Rockville. You can come and see Bill pitch on Sunday against a real team.”

Hubbell agreed to come to the game.

On that day I had a live, crackling fastball. My adrenaline was flowing, and I struck out twenty-four of the twenty-seven batters I faced. Afterward, I wondered why I couldn’t have that kind of stuff all the time. But that day I had it. I was throwing pitches to a left-handed batter on the outside part of the plate, waist high or cock high. I wasn’t on the black.

I thought, Here it comes. See if you can hit it. You can’t fucking touch it.

I don’t know if I was hyped up because I knew Carl Hubbell was coming to see me or what, but I just had an exceptional fastball that day, and I had it throughout the entire game. I was throwing just as hard in the ninth inning as I was in the first.

I thought, Take a deep breath, because here it comes, baby.

After the game I was on a high, waiting to hear what Carl Hubbell had to say about my performance. I waited.

Carl Hubbell never showed up. I was crushed. I felt let down like the cast in the movie Waiting for Guffman. I later heard from another scout that Hubbell hadn’t made it to the game that day because he was playing golf.

My success against Rockville wasn’t a fluke. In a game against Niantic, the score was 0–0 for fifteen innings. We won on a squeeze bunt in the top of the fifteenth.

In the American Legion tournament, my Middletown team lost the opener and we had to start from the loser’s bracket. I think we would have won if I had pitched the opener. We played Rockville in game two, and in that game I struck out fourteen of the eighteen batters I faced.

The next night John Hudak started for us against East Haven. He was pitching well when he was hit on the elbow with a pitch and had to come out of the game. I relieved John and struck out thirteen of the fifteen batters I faced. In eleven innings, I had struck out twenty-seven batters, which, to this day, is still the Connecticut state tournament American Legion record. Unfortunately, the legion tournament imposed an inning limit, and I was only allowed to pitch one more inning. We lost to Bristol, who went on to represent Connecticut in the New England tournament.

I was hoping to sign with the Yankees, and I had that opportunity. John DeNunzio, the baseball coach of Middletown High School, was a bird dog for the Yankees. If John found a prospect, and that prospect was signed by the Yankees, he got some money. John told the Yankees about me, and I was invited to come to Yankee Stadium for a look-see.

I visited Yankee Stadium with my dad, and it was a good bonding experience. I brought my spikes and gloves and wore a red undershirt, the color of our legion team. I was met at the press door and taken down into the Yankee clubhouse. The equipment guy asked me what size pants I wore, and I told him a thirty-six waist, and the only pants they had with a thirty-six-inch waist were Yogi Berra’s. I wore Yogi’s pants and a Yankee uniform top. I walked around the corner to the trainer’s room and saw a Yankee player standing on top of the trainer’s table. I could only see him from the waist down.

He has the most pathetic-looking legs I ever saw, I thought.

He was getting big rolls of elastic bandages wrapped around him. I was escorted back to the clubhouse, to dress in the ball boys’ stall. Then I was told, “We made a mistake. You’re not supposed to dress back here. We’re going to move you.”

They took me to the locker closest to the trainer’s room in the Yankee clubhouse, which belonged to Mickey Mantle.

“You’re going to get dressed here,” I was told.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, Mickey wants you to dress here.”

“Mickey?”

“Yeah, he’s in the trainer’s room. He saw you coming in.”

That’s when I realized the player standing on the trainer’s table with the gimpy legs was Mickey Mantle.

I was dressing when Ralph Terry, who pitched for the Yankees, walked over to me and introduced himself. He said, “Listen, if you’re going to dress here, you have to look like a Yankee. We don’t have red undershirts on here. Put on one of mine.” He gave me a navy-blue-and-white undershirt to wear.

I was then introduced to Bill Dickey and Whitey Ford, two legendary Yankees. Dickey was going to catch for me. Whitey, one of the greatest Yankee pitchers ever and the Yankee pitching coach for that year, was coming along for a look-see.

The three of us went out to warm up. Bill Dickey had caught for the Yankees for twenty years and was elected to the Hall of Fame, and here he was, catching me. I wondered whether Dickey would be able to catch me. I was eighteen years old. What did I know? And Dickey caught me like I was throwing butter. I was throwing real hard, but he had great hands, and caught everything so easily.

I threw my fastball from a windup, and then threw my fastball from the stretch. Whitey wanted to know whether I had any other pitches.

“Yeah, I have a slider,” I said.

“Oh, he has a slider,” Whitey said sarcastically. “The kid has a slider. Let me see it.”

I threw it, and Whitey said, “Holy shit, you do have a slider.” I had learned a slider through reading an instruction book written by pitching great Sal Maglie.

I threw a little more. I was concentrating, throwing strikes and hitting Bill Dickey’s target, and without my noticing him, a batter had wandered toward the plate.

“Do you mind if I step in here?” he asked.

It was Mickey Mantle. Aw, fuck. I thought, All I need to do is hit Mickey Mantle with a pitch, and I’m in serious trouble.

As Mickey stood there, I threw a half dozen pitches. Mickey never said a word, and when I was done, I went back inside the clubhouse. My father was in the stands, and while I was throwing, an usher walked up to him and asked who I was. He must have been one of reporter Dick Young’s stool pigeons, because the next day a story about my workout appeared in the New York Daily News.

“Congratulations,” said Whitey. “It looks like you have a good arm. I hope you sign with the Yankees.” I was waiting for a visit from someone from the Yankee front office, but no one said a word to me before I left.

Toward the end of my American Legion season, Len Zanke, a scout for the New York Mets, asked me to try out. I drove down from Middletown to Shea Stadium. I was having my tryout, warming up on a mound between the visiting dugout and home plate, while the visiting team, the San Francisco Giants, took batting practice.

Two Giants players, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, took a particular interest in me. I wanted to say to them, “If you like what you see, you could have had me. I had one of the best games of my life, and your scout Carl Hubbell didn’t bother to show up.” But I didn’t say it.

Every time the catcher would throw the ball back to me, I’d turn around and go back to the mound, and I could see Mays and McCovey moving from the batting cage, getting closer and closer.

After I was finished throwing, I went into the Mets clubhouse, and I got to meet Mets manager Casey Stengel, who talked so fast I couldn’t understand most of what he said. He was chattering away, and I was nodding and thinking, What the fuck is this guy saying?

Casey was talking a mile a minute and shuffling his feet; he was funny and entertaining. I was only able to understand, “Listen, we don’t have any super pitchers, so if you sign with us, you can get here within two years.” I thought about my previous offers to play.

Several months earlier, the Chicago Cubs had offered to sign me for $75,000. Another prospect was involved. In short, he got the job and the money, and I didn’t.

The Boston Red Sox had offered me $25,000, much lower than I expected. For some reason, I never felt a connection with the Red Sox. If only Bots Nekola had followed through. My Aunt Jody, a die-hard Red Sox fan, was heartbroken. Until the day she died, Aunt Jody wanted me to be a Red Sox.

I turned down Boston because several of their starting players did not take the field for infield practice before a game against the Yankees. I was in the Red Sox clubhouse when it was time for the Sox to take infield practice. First baseman Dick Stuart, the worst-fielding first baseman I ever saw, should have taken infield practice every day, but that’s not the kind of player he was. I had the impression that the Red Sox didn’t care about winning. And since winning was an important part of my psyche, it was easy to cross the Red Sox off my list.

Harry Hesse, the head New England scout for the Yankees, came in with an even lower offer—$15,000—and he wouldn’t go any higher.

Harry told me, “You’re going to get a World Series check every year.” Harry turned out to be very wrong about that. This was the fall of 1964, and the Yankees, having just been purchased by CBS, wouldn’t see the World Series again until 1976.

The Mets offered me $22,500. Two days later I signed the deal. I had great expectations. The downside of having great expectations is that when they don’t come to fruition, you’re left feeling angry and disappointed.

My dad and I had agreed that if I signed with a team, any team, that team had to send me to the Instructional League. When my dad proposed that to Wid Matthews, the Mets’ head of scouting, Wid tried to convince us that I would be in way over my head, and that they didn’t want me to start my pro career on a negative note.

Matthews then asked Len Zanke, who was also in the room with us, “Can he pitch down there?”

“Absolutely,” said Zanke.

My dad told Matthews, “We want Bill to be ready for the next full season. The instructional season will help him learn the tricks of the trade that might help him pitch better in pro ball. It’s important to us that this is part of the offer.”

I was the only player in winter ball with zero professional experience.

At the time I signed, I couldn’t understand why my signing bonus wasn’t higher. The Cubs were going to offer me $75,000 and that seemed about right.

Looking back now, my family and I made a mistake in dealing with the ball clubs. We thought if we used the threat of my going to college to play basketball against my signing a professional baseball contract, we could get more money. I told the baseball scouts all through the summer that I was considering going to college, and I suspect that some organizations questioned whether I was really serious about playing baseball.

It haunted me that my signing bonus was so low. Why? I kept asking myself. I had a great summer, a great year. What reason could it be? I pitched two no-hitters my junior year in American Legion. It was a full year of great pitching.

It isn’t fair. I’m not appreciated. Coach Sullivan didn’t appreciate me, and now the Mets weren’t showing me much appreciation for my skills with their middling offer.

Despite my deep disappointment, I still had a world of confidence in my ability. I was eighteen years old and I was on my way to the big leagues. When I arrived at the Mets’ Instructional League camp, I had a chip on my shoulder the size of a boulder. I asked myself, Why couldn’t I pitch tomorrow with the Mets?

You motherfuckers, I thought to myself, I’ll show all of you.