Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

horseback charging around the mountain and into the park shooting flaming arrows. I’d always heard you couldn’t work up a sweat in Arizona. Not true. I ran fifteen or twenty wind sprints and I can testify that anyone who can’t sweat in Arizona hasn’t tried.
    The clubhouse here is kind of cramped and the Yankees would probably sneer at it, but there’s a soda fountain—Coca-Cola, root beer, 7-Up, cold, on tap, freebie. If Pete Previte saw this he’d go crazy. Little Pete’s the No. 2 Yankee clubhouse man and he had this mark-up sheet. Every time you took a soft drink you were supposed to make a mark next to your name so he’d know how much to charge you. He spent the whole day going around saying, “Hey, mark ’em up. Don’t forget to mark ’em up. Hey, Bouton, you’re not marking ’em up.” And he’d never have enough orange juice, although that’s what everybody wanted most. One time I asked him, “Pete, how come you’re always out of orange juice?” And he said, “If I get it, you guys just drink it up.”
    We were running short sprints and I guess a couple of tongues were beginning to hang out because somebody yelled, “Marvin Miller, where are you now that we need you?”
    But don’t let baseball players kid you. All we did today was run about fifteen short sprints and Jim Ryun probably runs that much before he brushes his teeth in the morning. Baseball players are far from being the best-conditioned athletes in the world.
    I think I detect a bit of Drill Instructor in Ron Plaza. He’s the coach who gives us our daily calisthenics. He’s got those California-tan good looks, All-American, and he says, “Gentlemen, today we’re going to do some jumping-jacks.” I don’t mind the calisthenics; I think they’re good for us. I just don’t like the idea of Plaza looking as if he’s enjoying himself. He reminds me of the DI I had who always called us “people.” “All right, you people, today we are going to do fifty pushups, people.” He looked like
he
was enjoying himself too.
    And then there’s always the coach who hollers, “Good day, good day to work.” It could be raining a hurricane out there with mud up to your ass and some coach is sure to say, “Good day, good day to work.”
    Bob Lasko is in camp. I was glad to see him. He’s a pitcher, right-handed, and we broke in together in the Rookie League in Kearny, Nebraska, in 1959. He’s thirty years old, too, and he’s never pitched a game in the major leagues. He’s a real big guy and I remember he had a tremendous fastball and a great overhand curve. I used to try to model my motion after his. I always seemed to be better when he was around. We roomed together in Amarillo in 1961 and became close friends. His trouble was that the Yankees tried to hide him. He pitched in about thirty innings all season at Kearny. One time he got in a ballgame, struck out the side for three consecutive innings and they took him out of the game and put another pitcher in. The rule at the time was that if you didn’t get drafted your first year the organization could keep you for three years without moving you up to a major-league roster. Since he pitched so few innings that summer, no one drafted him.
    Bob told me today that he’d once complained about it. “I talked to one of the Yankee coaches,” he said. “I told him I didn’t think the Yankees had been fair to me and his neck started to get all red and he started to holler and damn, we almost had a fight, right there.”
    I asked him who the coach was.
    “Ralph Houk,” he said.
    Still, some of it is probably Lasko’s fault. He led a couple of leagues in earned-run average, but he seemed to have built up a sort of minor-league psychology. He was always an easy-going guy and as a result got pushed around. I know that in the big leagues, if you come to spring training real cocky it will antagonize a lot of the players but it will help your chances with management. They notice you and