The Mouth That Roared (6 page)

*

In February 1956, the Phillies became the second major league team to open a “rookie school” in Florida (the Red Sox were the other). The idea was to give the organization’s top prospects a chance to work out in Clearwater with Phillies manager Mayo Smith before the start of regular spring training. I was one of 39 players invited to take part in the program.

It was at the rookie school that I hit it off with Paul Owens, a 32-year-old player-manager for the Phillies’ Class-D affiliate in Olean, New York. Paul loved the game and still played it pretty well, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, had long since abandoned hopes of pursuing a major league career.

After a year at Rider College in the early 1940s, Paul enlisted in the Army and went off to Europe to fight in World War II. He returned home to finish his degree at St. Bonaventure University, where he played first base on the school baseball team. Then, at the age of 27, he finally took a crack at professional baseball. He signed a contract with a then-unaffiliated Class-D team in Olean, which wasn’t far from his hometown of Salamanca. He hit .407 to lead the PONY League. The St. Louis Cardinals took notice of his performance and signed him to play at Class-B Winston-Salem the following year. He went out and hit .338, but then Paul suddenly gave up professional baseball to take a government job in Salamanca.

When I met him, he was giving the game another go, with an eye toward getting into baseball management. Back with Olean in 1955, he hit .387. A couple of years later, he surpassed the .400-mark for the second time in his career.

In Clearwater, Paul picked up on the fact that I was a hard worker. At the end of rookie school, Mayo Smith selected four minor leaguers to stick around to throw batting practice to the major leaguers. I’m pretty sure Paul had something to do with me being one of those four. It was an honor. A batting practice pitcher is supposed to throw low-velocity fastballs right down the heart of the plate, but out on the mound in Clearwater, my adrenalin kicked in, and I found myself trying to throw the ball past the likes of All-Stars Richie Ashburn and Del Ennis.

Over the next several years, Paul and I ran into each other every spring in Clearwater. He was a natural when it came to teaching and relating to young players. He loved to grab a bat and ball and work with the guys from the minor leagues. In that regard, he separated himself from a lot of his peers and superiors. Most managers and coaches at the time were aloof. Rather than instructing young players, they allowed us to sink or swim. With a major league season to prepare for, they didn’t have time to waste on kids.

Several years later, Paul became “Pope” to everyone who knew him. Soon after Paul VI was elected to the papacy in 1963, Phillies clubhouse manager Ted Zipeto remarked how much our friend resembled the new pope. Ted dropped to his knees and kissed a ring on Paul’s finger. “Pope Paul, you’re my boss!” he joked. A nickname was born. Over the years, the resemblance between the two men only grew.

On that subject, my high school nickname, “Spider,” fell by the wayside after I entered the Phillies organization. By my second or third year in the minors, my body had really filled out. I was now “Big D.”

*

In my second year of pro ball in Salt Lake City, I struck up a friendship with fellow pitchers Jerry Kettle and Tom Cronin. Each of us was 6'5", which gave the sports editor of the local newspaper a good photo opportunity for a story about the size of our pitching staff. He had us stand next to Salt Lake manager Frank Lucchesi, who stood about a foot shorter than the three of us.

I missed Sylvia a lot. When Kettle and Cronin found out she loved horses, an animal I’d rarely been around, they decided to help out this girl they’d never met by giving her boyfriend riding lessons.

We drove out to a ranch at the base of the Rocky Mountains, where we rented some horses and headed out for an afternoon on the riding trail. At least that was the idea. My teammates quickly got their horses to gallop along, but mine refused to budge. I nudged the horse a little bit and let out a “giddy up,” hoping the animal would get its act together. The horse finally started moving—in circles.

I called out for help, and the guys returned to lend me a hand. Armed with a few tips, I figured out how to make the horse walk straight. Trotting, cantering, and galloping would have to wait for another day.

To this day, Kettle remembers the incident well. He says I looked like someone out of a movie—not a John Wayne movie but a comedy Western. I guess I’m lucky I didn’t return from the outing with a new nickname like “Hopalong.”

Over the years, I’ve heard time and again that I remind people of John Wayne, my favorite actor of all time. My tough-guy persona and commanding presence prompt the comparisons. The difference between us is Duke rode his horse off into the sunset, while I rode mine in circles.

Fortunately, my pitching that summer was better than my horseback riding.

In a June game against Billings, I earned a complete-game victory and helped my own cause by hitting a grand slam. For the year, I went 17–12 with a league-leading 226 strikeouts. That performance earned me Pioneer League Rookie of the Year, a strangely named award considering not many guys spent more than a year in the league before moving up—or down—the minor league ladder.

My pitching mechanics were still a work in progress. I had a real big leg kick at the time that helped me throw with a lot of velocity but not much control. I walked way too many batters in Salt Lake City, 187 in 239 innings. I led the league in that category, too.

*

I was all set for my third year of pro ball when I got a telegram that changed my plans.

Back in the 1950s, there was only one kind of draft, and it didn’t involve major league teams selecting the best amateur players in the country. It was Uncle Sam calling you to service. In 1957, four years after the end of the Korean War, I got that call after Congress reinstated the draft to keep America prepared for any potential conflicts.

Instead of traveling from spring training in Florida to North Carolina, my next scheduled stop in the minors, I took a bus to an Army office in Philadelphia.

I couldn’t really process what was happening. My name had started to pop up in newspaper stories in Philadelphia about the top prospects in the Phillies minor league system. Just a few days earlier, I had been throwing batting practice to major league stars. Now my baseball career was about to go on hiatus.

In Philadelphia, I sat in a room full of future soldiers. The Army officials told us we’d undergo physicals that day, and assuming we passed, we’d then be shipped off to Fort Benning, Georgia, for two years.

The player I most admired as a kid, Ted Williams, sacrificed some of the best years of his career to serve his country in World War II. Unlike Williams, however, I was at the start of my career. There were no guarantees that a job would be waiting for me after two years in the Army. The other difference was that ballplayers called to active duty in the early 1940s were actually fighting for their country. I’d be sitting at an Army base waiting for a conflict to happen.

I returned home to Delaware to await the results of my physical and attend a going-away party thrown by family and friends. I tried my best to hide my disappointment. I said my good-byes and told everyone I’d see them soon. It didn’t escape me that I’d be away from baseball
and
Sylvia for two years.

The next day I got a telegram from the Army that informed me of the results of my physical. I had a hernia. Because of that, I got slapped with the 4-F tag. I was physically unfit for duty, thankfully.

I never asked if Phillies owner Bob Carpenter had anything to do with that diagnosis. A few months later, I had surgery to fix the problem.

I unpacked my bags and we had another party in Delaware to celebrate my reprieve. Instead of heading off to Fort Benning, I headed to High Point, North Carolina. My friends were tired of partying and glad to see me go.

*

In some ways, it was a different era in baseball.

Fresh off his perfect game in the 1956 World Series, which I attended with friends, Don Larsen of the Yankees was looking for a pay raise. The amount he and the team agreed upon? $20,000.

And on April 22, 1957, the Phillies became the last National League team to integrate when John Irvin Kennedy entered a game as a pinch runner. He got into just five games that season, his only big league appearances, coming to bat twice.

In other ways, the game was much the same as it is today, especially in the minor leagues, where I was among thousands of players plugging away in the hopes of getting a shot at the big time.

In the Carolina League, I took a step in that direction by walking far fewer batters than the year before, a major step forward in my development as a pitcher.

But sometimes, admittedly, I missed the strike zone on purpose.

In those days, pitching inside was part of the game, a way to keep hitters from getting too comfortable at the plate. I was a dedicated practitioner of the brushback pitch. That pissed off some hitters, who for some strange reason didn’t like seeing a 95 mile-per-hour fastball coming toward their chins. But whether they liked it or not, I didn’t back off.

In a June 1957 game against Winston-Salem, I threw a couple of inside fastballs to Gene Oliver, a burly catcher who later enjoyed a long major league career that included a season with me in Philadelphia. After the second high-and-tight pitch, Oliver shot me a scowl and raised his index finger in the air. He wasn’t signaling that he was No. 1. He was saying that if I came in on him one more time, he was going to have something to say about it.

My teammates, including Kettle, who followed me from Salt Lake City, knew exactly where the next pitch was going. I reared back and uncorked a fastball designed to knock Oliver on his ass. Down he went. After getting up, he came out to have a word with me, as promised. I didn’t wait for him to get out to the mound. I took two steps forward and landed a haymaker to Oliver’s face. He got in a few punches as both teams spilled out onto the field. Kettle came out with a batting helmet on. What followed wasn’t your average baseball brawl, in which players grab each other and mill around. This one was a real donnybrook, with haymakers and wrestling and probably some eye-gouging. When the dust cleared, our manager, Frank Lucchesi, ended up in possession of the umpire’s home-plate brush. I’m still not sure how that happened.

A few days later, I got a telegram from the president of the Carolina League that read, “You have subjected yourself to the automatic Carolina League fine of $5 for accepting Winston-Salem player Oliver’s challenge to fight. For actually participating in a fight, you are hereby fined another $5, making the total fine $10.”

Believe it or not, that was a good amount of money at the time for a minor league baseball player. Who did they think I was? Don Larsen?

Later in my career, I was involved in another brushback incident. Future Dodger John Roseboro thought I was throwing at him, so he bunted a ball up the first-base line. As I bent over to field the ball, he bowled me over. He was playing good hard baseball, and so was I. Many years later, as a catcher for the Dodgers, Roseboro took exception to inside pitches being thrown by Juan Marichal of the Giants. With Marichal at the plate later in the game, Roseboro made sure his return throws to Sandy Koufax came as close to Marichal’s head as possible. In what became an infamous episode, Marichal retaliated by hitting Roseboro over the head with his bat.

*

Still young and single, I had some fun times in High Point, the sleepy southern town I called home for the summer. It was mostly of the good, clean variety. Almost half the team lived side by side on a nice residential street in High Point. Kettle, Eddie Keegan, and Freddie Van Dusen lived in one house, and I lived with Dick Harris and a couple of other guys next door.

To pass the time between games and practices, we formed a commando group that went on secret late-night missions. On one hot night/morning, while drinking some beers, we decided to go for a swim at the local country club. We weren’t members of the club, and even if we had been, I doubt we would have been permitted to take a dip in the pool at 2:00
AM
.

We drove over to the country club but the gate to the pool was bolted shut. We could have aborted our mission at that point, but that wouldn’t have made us very effective commandos.

A tall metal fence surrounded the pool. We had consumed too many beers to do any serious fence climbing, but Kettle had an idea.

“Boys, we’re going
under
the fence,” he announced.

“We’re tunneling in?” Harris asked.

“Nope, the fence is going up,” Kettle replied.

Kettle got a jack out of the car, hooked it up to the fence, and proceeded to hoist it out of the ground. One by one, we slid underneath the uprooted metal.

After splashing around in the water for a while, Harris noticed the headlights of our car were still on. At an otherwise pitch-dark country club, the lights cut a bright path through the night, providing a road map for a security guard who would have loved to catch some pool-hoppers.

We decided to get the hell out of there. My teammates slid back under the fence and jumped in the car. I was at the top of a ladder leading to a diving board when they all took off. Without thinking, I jumped about 20 feet down to the ground and landed awkwardly on my ankle. Man down! My teammates came back to retrieve me, pulling me across the pool area and back under the fence.