Lou Page 5

  This was my introduction to Earl Weaver.

  I’m groggily rubbing my eyes, trying to see, and Weaver is screaming, waking up everyone in the barracks.

  “You can thank this guy here for waking you all up,” he yelled. “This is what happens when you get here late!”

  That whole year at Elmira I felt Weaver’s wrath. He was tough. He was profane, and he was relentless when it came to adhering to his rules, instructions, and his way of doing things. But he was also all about winning, and in retrospect, much as I hated him, playing for him that season was probably the best thing that could have happened to me because he taught me the importance of discipline and team rules. I can also understand why he maybe didn’t think much of me as a player. It was cold, damp, and dreary those first couple of months in Elmira—I had never played in cold weather before—and I really struggled with it. But what I especially struggled with was the slider—I just couldn’t pick up the spin on it—and so I had the worst season of my career, hitting .249 with 11 homers and 64 RBI in 126 games.

  Temper, of course, was also a problem. We were playing a game in Reading, Pennsylvania, and with two outs in the top of the ninth inning, down by a run and runners on first and second, I had a 3-0 count and hit a triple. As I’m standing on third base, feeling quite proud of myself for knocking in the tying and go-ahead runs, Weaver, in the third base coaching box, says to me, “That’s gonna cost you fifty bucks.”

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “I had you taking 3-0,” he said.

  The next day, he confronted me in the clubhouse and demanded his fifty dollars. When I told him I didn’t have it, he started to grab for my wallet.

  “Don’t touch my damn wallet,” I shouted at him, and from there it escalated into a big argument.

  “You’re never gonna play in the big leagues,” Weaver said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because you’re too big of a red-ass!”

  “You’re a helluva example,” I countered, and with that Weaver suspended me for three games.

  Two days after he suspended me, I was sleeping at home and I heard this knock on the door. One of my roommates, Mark Belanger, opened the door, and I heard this clomping up the stairs. It was Weaver.

  “One of my outfielders got hurt last night and you’re in the lineup today so get your ass out of bed!”

  From that day on, Weaver and I actually got along the rest of the season.

  When I failed to make the adjustment to the slider that whole season at Elmira, the Orioles took me off their major-league roster. It was very deflating. I had gotten used to going to the major-league camp in spring training, and despite my struggles with the bat, Weaver had told me that he was going to take me with him to Triple-A Rochester the next year. Instead, over the winter the Orioles traded me back to the Indians, once again for a player to be named later. I flew out to Arizona to the Indians’ camp in Tucson and was greeted by their manager, Birdie Tebbetts, who immediately caught me by surprise by telling me they wanted to make me a catcher. Tebbetts was a former catcher himself, so maybe that’s what gave him this idea, but I never knew why and thankfully the experiment didn’t last too long. The first pitcher I caught was “Sudden Sam” McDowell, the Indians’ flame-throwing ace who threw a 100 m.p.h. fastball and a curveball that broke just as hard. I especially couldn’t handle his curveball, and his fastball practically knocked the glove off my hand.

  After about three weeks of this I went into Tebbetts’s office and told him I’d had enough. He had this knowing grin on his face and I was thankful my catching days were over. One of my everlasting fond memories of that camp was meeting—and being befriended by—Rocky Colavito, the great Indians slugger who had led the American League in RBI the year before and went on to hit 374 homers in the big leagues. The first night, Rocky took me out to dinner and made me feel at home, made me feel like I was a big leaguer, even though I wasn’t, and that was a thrill.

  I was actually in one of the first rounds of cuts and sent to the Indians’ Triple-A team in Portland, Oregon, where the manager there, Johnny Lipon, was about to have a profound influence on my career. At Triple-A, the pitchers were more experienced, and as such, I was seeing more and more breaking balls and having the same lack of success with them as I had in Elmira. Finally, one day Lipon called me into his office for a talk.

  “Do you want to stay here or go back to Double-A?” he asked.

  “I want to stay here, of course,” I said.

  “Well then,” Lipon said, “we’ve got to fix your batting mechanics. You’re not going to be able to stay here if you keep on pulling everything. Tomorrow we’re gonna start changing you. I’m gonna teach you how to hit the ball to the opposite field.”

  With that, he handed me an old Nellie Fox bat with the thick “milk bottle” handle, which he’d taped up so I had to choke up on it. The next day, with Lipon throwing to me, I had to hit four out of five pitches to the opposite field. We did that in practice and then he ordered me to do the same thing in the games. I was allowed to pull the ball only one time in each game; the other three to four at-bats I had to go to the opposite field and up the middle. Lipon also instructed me to stay inside the ball more and wait on the ball in order to get a better look so I wasn’t swinging at so many bad pitches. He didn’t want me trying to hit home runs, but rather concentrating on hitting the ball to right field and right center. I had been used to standing almost right on home plate, but Lipon got me off the plate and helped me stride more toward the pitcher than to shortstop, while staying closed longer so I had more time to see the pitches. The purpose of choking up was to guard against getting jammed with the ball. Every day he’d have me come out early and make the effort, and soon I started to feel really good knowing the curve was coming, and I could hit the ball up the middle.

  Lipon was a great mentor but besides working with me on my hitting, he, like all my other managers, had to frequently talk to me about my temper. “You’ve got to control yourself or else one day you’re gonna really hurt yourself.” He was so concerned about me—and a couple other red-asses on our team—that he went so far as to install a punching bag in our dugout for us to take out our frustrations on. I came close to proving him right in 1967 when, after grounding into an inning-ending double play, I took my frustrations out on the right field wall, throwing my glove at it and kicking it furiously. I’d forgotten it was a portable wall, and after about my third kick, it fell on top of me. It took the whole bullpen crew to extricate me. Lipon didn’t even bother to run out there, and when I got back to the dugout he thankfully didn’t say anything. I was embarrassed enough.

  I was hitting about .150 when Lipon first called me in, but by the end of the ’66 season, I was at .289. Still, one year at Portland hitting .289 with not a lot of power wasn’t going to get me to the big leagues. My second year at Portland I hit .308 with 8 homers and 56 RBI in 113 games, but in the scouts’ and the organization’s eyes I was still a guy who didn’t have great foot speed, and was an average outfielder with not a lot of power. I know Alvin Dark, the Indians’ manager, must have felt that way because I was about the only prospect on that Portland club who didn’t get called up to the majors at some point that season.

  The next year at Portland everything started to come (except the speed). I was hitting .317 with 13 homers and 62 RBI—hitting the ball to all fields—when I ran into an outfield wall hard and suffered a separated shoulder. I could barely pick up my arm. Just when I thought I was finally ready for the big leagues, another setback. The Indians did call me up at the end of the year but I was still hurting and got into just six games without a hit.

  As the season came to an end, I began to assess my career such as it was. I’d been bouncing around the minors for seven seasons, and the realization began to stare me in the face that maybe I wasn’t going to make it in this game. I went home to Tampa after the season, knowing that in November there was going to be a draft for the two new American League
expansion teams in Seattle and Kansas City, and I’m thinking to myself if I don’t get picked in the expansion draft, if I don’t make it to the big leagues, I’m gonna hang it up. I wasn’t making any money playing baseball—the most I’d made was $1,200 a month in Triple-A—and I’d gotten married to Anita in 1967. She was still making more money than me, teaching first grade in the Tampa school system. You can’t support a family on $6,000 a year, and during the winter, while I was going to school at night to try and get my degree, I got a second job selling clothes in Tampa.

  The day of the draft I was calling the local newspaper, the Tampa Tribune, all morning to find out if anyone had taken me. Finally, on the third round, I got a call from Marvin Milkes, the general manager of the new Seattle Pilots, welcoming me to his team. It was a brand-new team, one with low expectations, but I was elated. I’d seen a lot of Seattle playing in the Pacific Coast League for three seasons, and I really liked the city. But when I got to the spring training camp in Tempe, Arizona, I was a little surprised to see most of the hitters the team had drafted were right-handed—Tommy Davis, Tommy Harper, Rich Rollins, Wayne Comer—and I wondered privately how this was going to work out. The Pilots’ manager was Joe Schultz, a paunchy, grizzled old baseball lifer who you knew had not been hired for the long term but rather just to shepherd the team through its first season. Schultz had been around in baseball since the early ’30s and had managed in the minors since 1950. He was not what you’d call a taskmaster, and this being a veteran team, he didn’t have a lot of rules either. Every day we’d come to the park and his message was the same: “Pound some mud and drink some Bud!”

  I liked Schultz and got along with him fine, but as the spring went on I wasn’t getting a whole lot of playing time and I began to worry whether I would make the team. After being taken in the third round of the expansion draft, I figured I was gonna get a good look in spring training, but that wasn’t the case. I remember one time Schultz came up to me in the clubhouse and asked me, “Where you playing tomorrow?” When I told him I didn’t know, he snapped, “Goddammit, Piniella, you’re supposed to know where we’re playing.”

  “It’s not where you’re playing,” I countered, “it’s how you’re playing!”

  He didn’t like that answer, and I remember saying to myself I should’ve kept my mouth shut because here we were coming to the end of camp and I was just waiting for that call to the office—the call I’d gotten so many times before—where the manager tells me I’m going back to the minors. Sure enough, on the next-to-last day of camp, Schultz called me into his office, where Milkes and the team traveling secretary were also.

  “Good luck,” Schultz said.

  “Good luck?” I said.

  “We just traded you to Kansas City, the other expansion team,” Milkes said.

  In return the Pilots got Steve Whitaker, a left-handed-hitting outfielder who had previously been a top prospect in the Yankees’ system, and a right-handed pitcher, John Gelnar. That now made three times I had been traded before ever making the majors to stay, with the new Kansas City Royals now being my fifth different organization. I was an official baseball vagabond.

  I left Schultz’s office and went back to my apartment to pack my bags for the flight home to Florida. The Royals trained in Fort Myers, but the next day they were playing the Phillies in Clearwater, just a few miles from Tampa, and I was looking forward to making my Royals debut in front of my family and friends. Before I left, I got a call from Cedric Tallis, the Royals’ GM, who I have to say was one of the strangest people I ever knew in baseball. Cedric called to welcome me to the Royals and to assure me I was going to be part of the big-league team. He also gave me a raise from $10,000 to $12,500. I felt like a rich man. All the while, however, he was talking in an English accent! Through the years I got to know Cedric pretty well, as the GM in Kansas City and later when he came over to the Yankees as the assistant GM for them. (I actually had a bit of a hand in that after he was forced out as Royals GM in 1974. He had traded me over to the Yankees the year before, and when Gabe Paul, the Yankees’ GM, was looking for an assistant, I told Mr. Steinbrenner they couldn’t find a better baseball man than Cedric and urged him to hire him.)

  That Royals team that won four AL West division titles from 1976 to 1980 was almost entirely put together by Cedric, who made tremendous one-sided trades for Amos Otis, John Mayberry, Hal McRae, and Larry Gura, and drafted or signed George Brett, Freddie Patek, Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff, Willie Wilson, Frank White, U. L. Washington, John Wathan, and Dan Quisenberry for the organization. Cedric never got his due credit for all of that. He was a great baseball executive and judge of talent. At the same time, though, he had the persona of Peter Falk’s Columbo, the seemingly absentminded TV detective, and oftentimes it was hard to tell just where he was coming from. In my second contract negotiation with him, in 1970, we were talking numbers in his Municipal Stadium office when, all of a sudden, Cedric reached under his desk, pulled out a putter, and started putting golf balls.

  Another of his eccentricities was when he’d be engaging in conversation about baseball and all of a sudden burst into a dialogue recreating his battlefield experiences in World War II. When he was with the Yankees, he delighted in flummoxing the New York writers by interrupting an interview and saying cryptically: “We have to worry about the Indians.” No one ever knew if he was referring to the Cleveland Indians (doubtful, since they were always at the bottom of the division) or real Indians. Cedric would never say, but he took great fun in periodically greeting the writers by raising his palm and saying “How!”

  By this time, I probably should not have been at all surprised when I showed up at Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater for my first game with the Royals to find that their manager, Joe Gordon, was yet another ex-Yankee. This was getting almost eerie—the scout who signed me, two of my first general managers, and now three of my first six managers, all ex-Yankees. I was somewhat taken aback when I saw the lineup card, in which he had me leading off and playing center field. It was Johnny Lipon at Portland who had moved me from center field to what I presumed would be a semipermanent corner outfielder in 1966, and I had never led off a game in my life.

  But on the second pitch of the game, I hit a home run over the right-center-field wall. The wind was blowing out that day, but I got three hits and made an immediate impression on Gordon. After breaking camp, we played a pair of exhibition games against the Cardinals in Kansas City and filled old Municipal Stadium to capacity. In the first game, I tried to further impress Gordon by running over the Cardinals’ catcher Tim McCarver at the plate—much like Pete Rose’s jarring bowl-over of Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game. The KC fans loved it but McCarver was enraged and came up screaming, “What are you, crazy? This is spring training, man!” Fact was, McCarver was a bona fide major leaguer and I was just a wannabe major leaguer.

  I was still leading off and in center field on Opening Day against Tom Hall, a lefty with the Twins whom I had faced in the Pacific Coast League, so I knew him a little. In my first at-bat I hit a double to left field. You never forget your first major-league hit, and this first game as a Royal I got three more, including a game-tying RBI single in the sixth, and we won, 4–3, in twelve innings. After eight nomadic years of struggle, work, and doubt, I had finally arrived.

  Now all I had to do was prove I should stay there, and thankfully that’s just what I did. After three games, Gordon moved me from center field to left and down in the lineup, initially to fifth, then to third, and I went on to have a really nice first season in the big leagues, .282, 11 HR, and 68 RBI. Nice enough to be named, at twenty-six, the oldest Rookie of the Year in history. It was a proud moment for me—and especially for my wife, Anita.

  All through my development years in the minor leagues, Tom McEwen, the local sports columnist for the Tampa Tribune, seemed almost too eager to chronicle my struggles and temper tantrums in his Sunday column, which always began: “Over breakfast of corn flakes, scramble
d eggs, sausage, hashed browns, rye toast and coffee …” and then he’d go on to say why “Lou will never make it to the big leagues.” So the day after I won the Rookie of the Year, Anita got herself a paper plate and stapled a piece of lettuce and some bacon to it and put it in a box along with the newspaper article of my winning the Rookie of the Year, sprinkled some corn flakes over it, and added a note saying, “All those things you wrote about my husband never making the majors, try this with your breakfast!”—and mailed it to McEwen.

  Of course, my rookie season was also not without incident. In mid-July, we flew into Chicago from Anaheim and had an off-day before a three-game series with the White Sox. My roommate, the pitcher Wally Bunker, and I decided to take advantage of the day off to hit some of the nightspots on Rush Street. I don’t remember too much of that evening, only that when we got back to the Executive House, where the team was staying, I was soaking wet. It must have rained. Anyway, I went to sleep only to be woken up by a phone call early in the morning. It was Cedric Tallis calling from Kansas City.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said. “What the hell did you do last night?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cedric,” I said. “I only know I went out for a couple of drinks with Bunker and came in wet.”

  “Well, you better get up,” Cedric said, “because Joe Gordon is coming up to your room and you’re gonna have to tell him what happened.”