suit if you throw a first-pitch curveball for a strike.”
The first batter stepped in. I threw a curveball. “Ball,” said the umpire.
I didn’t miss by much, and I didn’t get my sharkskin suit.
The first game I pitched in my professional career was against the Washington Senators’ Instructional League team in Plant City, Florida. I struck out the first batter on a fastball eye-high—he wasn’t a professional. I walked a couple of batters, but got out of the inning without giving up a run.
A couple of days later Johnny Murphy, the general manager of the Mets, invited me for a bullpen session. Murphy had been a star pitcher for the New York Yankees during the 1930s and 1940s, seven times leading the American League in wins by a relief pitcher. John had pitched in eight World Series, and he was meeting with me to tell me he didn’t like my pitching motion because I fell off the mound after every pitch.
John taught me to drag my back foot as my pitching arm came forward. Dragging the back foot had been part of the Yankee way of pitching. By dragging the back foot a pitcher is forced to bend at the waist, compact his motion, and keep from falling off the mound.
John was wearing a sport jacket and tie and cordovan shoes as he showed me what to do. After I tried it once, Murphy wasn’t satisfied. He grabbed my glove, motioned for the catcher to come halfway, and demonstrated the technique, dragging his expensive leather shoes through the dust.
After Murphy’s pitching lesson, I returned to the dugout where my manager, Don Heffner, said to me, “It’s obvious to me that Johnny Murphy really likes you.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because he just ruined a hundred-dollar pair of shoes to teach you that motion.”
I was so green that I didn’t know how to sign a baseball. I picked up a box of balls and signed them, but the next day I was called into Don Heffner’s office.
Don said, “Let me explain something to you. If you look at a baseball, the place for the team’s superstar or the manager to sign is where the seams come closest together. The other players sign somewhere else on the ball. You haven’t even played a game yet. You might want to think about signing on the stitches.”
“I didn’t know,” I mumbled.
Soon after Murphy’s lesson, Jerry Kraft and I combined to throw a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers’ Instructional League team. I pitched five innings, Kraft pitched two. My performance focused even more attention on me.
My Instructional League experience was drama-free. I pitched pretty well that winter.
In one game against Minnesota, a hard-hitting team, I was batted around pretty good, but by the next time I faced them I had become more secure with my new motion of dragging my trailing foot as I delivered the ball home. Then, in a game a few days after Thanksgiving, the New York brass, including Johnny Murphy and Eddie Stanky, came down to watch their prospects. I pitched four innings of one-hit baseball against those same Twins, striking out seven batters.
I returned home to Middletown, Connecticut. I was inspired to stay in shape, so I worked out five days a week at the Wesleyan University indoor college facility. When February rolled around, I reported to Mets’ spring training minor league facility in Homestead, Florida, just south of Miami. I worked out with the Williamsport team. The Mets were hoping I could start my career in Double-A.
Homestead wasn’t a town for nineteen- and twenty-year-old baseball players. It’s probably why the Mets picked it. It had an army base and not much else. Manager Solly Hemus, another hard-bitten old-timer, had no curfew. One night a number of my teammates and I decided to drive to Miami and have some fun at the Fontainebleau Hotel.
Tug McGraw, his brother Hank, Kevin Collins, Terry Christianson, and I had a good time drinking and dancing. On the way back, somewhere south of Miami at two o’clock in the morning, we saw a sign for The Marina.
“Hey, let’s check this out,” said Tug. Hank, our driver, headed for the wharf.
From the distance we could see a large, black shark, hanging from a hook. Tug had an idea. We walked to the dock. Tug asked the fishermen on the dock if they wanted the six-foot-long creature. One of the fishermen asked, “Unless you cut it up and eat it, what are you going to do with it?”
Tug, with a gleam in his eye, asked the fisherman if we could have the shark. We had all been drinking, so that probably had some effect on our decision making.
The five of us lugged the smelly, oily, ugly, scary, toothy, leathery, three-hundred-pound sea creature over to our car and put it into the trunk. The shark’s head and tail hung out the back of the trunk, but it was so heavy that the shark was in no danger of falling out. We drove back to Homestead with the shark in tow.
We knew that Joe McDonald, the Mets’ director of scouting for the minor leagues, liked to get up early in the morning and swim in the hotel pool. Joe was very pale—we called him the “White Ghost”—but we liked Joe well enough. Tug decided—with my encouragement—to invigorate him for his swim. Under the dark of night we placed the lifeguard stand into the deep end of the pool and stood it up with the armrest just below the water. Then we dumped the dead sea monster, with the big, jagged teeth, into the water and sat it on the armrest of the submerged lifeguard stand. Satisfied with our work, we went to bed.
At seven o’clock the next morning, my three roommates and I were awakened by blood-curdling shrieks of horror coming from the pool area. We leapt up, expecting to see a frightened Joe McDonald, only to learn that a church bus filled with senior citizens had beaten him to the pool. The church folk had jumped in, and when they looked up, they were confronted by “Jaws” staring them in the face.
“Oh, shit,” we said to each other.
Sheepishly, we drove to training camp. We sat in the dugout, waiting for the other shoe to drop, when Joe McDonald confronted us.
“I have a pretty good idea who did this,” he said. “I’ll go a lot easier on you if you just admit to it.”
The White Ghost called us the “Five Irish Mafia.” He paced up and down until he stopped directly in front of me. He looked me up and down, kept on walking, then stopped and stared at Tug. He stopped in front Hank, in front of Kevin, and in front of Terry, and of course we were the five involved. We ran all afternoon as punishment.
One of the teams we played during Mets’ spring training was the University of Miami. Ron Fraser, the longtime coach of Miami, kept calling the Mets, asking if they would play an exhibition team against his talented college kids. Finally, Joe gave in.
The Miami team traveled to Homestead, and the three pitchers who manager Whitey Herzog chose to throw against them were three of his best minor league prospects.
Before the game I was standing with Tom Seaver, who had played at the University of Southern California. Tom was interested in what kind of team the University of Miami was fielding, and was curious how they would fare against some of the hardest throwers they would see all season long. Tom had a boyish way of giggling and laughing, and he was saying to the Miami players, “Wait until you see our guys.”
I got along really well with Tom. He didn’t have a big ego. He was funny, very cerebral. He was a California guy, a college guy, and he was far more mature than I was.
I didn’t hang out much with Tom because he was married to his college sweetheart, Nancy, and after games Tom went straight home. Nancy was sweet and charming.
Against Miami, Whitey pitched Dick Selma for the first three innings. I pitched the second three innings, and a skinny eighteen-year-old by the name of Nolan Ryan pitched innings seven, eight, and nine. Selma threw real hard, and then I came in, and when Nolan’s turn came, he blew them all away. Nolie was a twig, but his wrists were as big as his waist. He threw 100 miles an hour; his fastball clocked at 100, his curveball clocked at 100, and his changeup clocked at 100.
Those Miami college kids couldn’t hit Selma or me, but they