108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game

Warm-Up

The Ties That Bind

A funny thing, baseball. When you spend your entire life watching it, playing it, covering it, thinking about it … it becomes a part of you. It gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe like a flattened packet of Gulden’s pressed to the concrete steps of a section of bleacher. And then it stays with you—you look up one day and you realize you’ve been trailing a fine film of mustard with every step.

A lifetime in the game—my lifetime in the game—leaves a certain trail. Better, a certain footprint. And in this way I have walked alongside every athlete who has ever put on a uniform, every coach or manager who ever sat in a big league dugout, every fan who ever played hooky from work or school and sat in the stands for a midweek day game.

We’re all rounding the same bases.

This well-trodden path leaves me thinking, more than forty years after I left home for the wilds of New Haven, Connecticut, to pitch for a Yale baseball team that had once been captained by a left-handed first baseman named George H. W. Bush, who led the Elis to appearances in the first two College World Series, and had once been coached by the legendary Smoky Joe Wood, who had once been a teammate of the great Babe Ruth on the 1915 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox, who had once reportedly hit a ball over the center field Green Monster—440 feet in his time. Indeed, the thru-line that runs through our national pastime can sometimes seem to stretch a country mile—the combined length, not incidentally, of all those wool and cotton strands used to wrap the cushioned cork center of an official major league baseball, onto which those of us in the game might find the six degrees of separation that connects every player who’s ever put on a big league uniform.

(Also not incidentally, that country mile is the distance sportswriters used to ascribe to the mighty home runs off the bat of the mighty Babe, to whom I am now inexorably connected, as I have shown.)

Upon further thought, it occurs to me that the intertwining of the collected stories of the game is a much richer, much more poetic metaphor than that flattened mustard packet, so I’ll be going with this one, here on in.

Consider the baseball: that cushioned cork center, wrapped tightly with four-ply gray wool, topped by a three-ply tan wool, a three-ply gray wool, and then a thin poly-cotton thread, all of it held together by two cowhide covers, hand-stitched with 88 inches of waxed red thread. For a guy like me, who made his living on the mound, those 108 raised stitches that give the ball its seams were where the game lived and breathed … and danced. Let us not forget, it’s these slight imperfections and variations in the stitching that catch the air and allow the ball to move this way and that, up and down, left and right. The slider, the two-seamer, the curve, the cutter, the sinker … without those imperfect stitches, hand-sewn in about five minutes by Rawlings workers using two specially designed needles, the ball would be a precise sphere, and all the ways a pitcher has been taught to spin and toss a baseball would fall away. The ball would behave differently, as it traveled from the mound to the plate—meaning, it would behave. (Or, not, which would in turn correlate to your time in the bigs.)

And so I’ve come to look on the baseball as a symbol for the game itself—because, alas, we’ve been knitted together by our time in the game, we fans and players alike, and as I was casting about for a conceit to stitch together a book of reminiscences I realized there was room on the baseball bookshelf for such as this. Oh, there have been some wonderful, yarn-spinning accounts from former ballplayers; behind-the-scenes looks at locker room and front office shenanigans from longtime baseball beat writers; historically based novels that help us to connect the dots from baseball past to baseball present. But I’d yet to come across a collection of variously connected anecdotes spun from the career of a baseball lifer—so I figured, Hey, may as well write one. Why? Because as the game changes I find myself reaching for ways to remind myself that it is also holding fast to its long-held traditions and time-honored characters, and because I’ve found over the years that when I’m swapping stories with friends, one tale often leads to another. The memories dip and swerve, like the arc of a cut fastball. They brush you back and set you on your heels and leave it so you’re not quite sure what’s coming. That’s the feeling I want to bring across in this book. Pull on one thread, and another one starts to unravel … and another one after that.

Perhaps an illustration is in order. In 1982, at my first major league spring training camp, I spent a lot of time with Dick Allen, one of the most feared sluggers in the game for much of my growing up. He was the NL Rookie of the Year in 1964 for the Philadelphia Phillies, when he was known as Richie Allen, and for the longest time he was one of my father’s favorite players, so I started rooting for him as well. He was the American League MVP for the Chicago White Sox, in his first year in the league, when he started asking sportswriters to refer to him as Dick, which was what he’d been called by friends and family his entire life, saying that Richie was a little boy’s name.

Ten years later, I was invited to Pompano Beach as a member of the Texas Rangers, and Mr. Allen, as I called him, was a member of the coaching staff. He took a liking to me—although, frankly, I found him a little intimidating. (He scared the plain crap out of me, if you must know.) Mr. Allen asked me what I wanted to get out of my time in camp. I said I was hoping to earn the fifth spot in the rotation. He laughed. And laughed. Like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He pointed to Jon Matlack, who’d been a member of the New York Mets’ legendary pitching staff in the early 1970s, who had a guaranteed contract, and suggested the fifth spot in the rotation was already spoken for … by him. Didn’t matter how I pitched. Didn’t matter how Jon Matlack pitched. Mr. Allen said, They’re gonna ship your ass to Triple-A, brother. Just you wait and see.

It was the first time I was made to see baseball as a business instead of as a game, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. At the same time, I appreciated Mr. Allen’s honesty, which even on Day One in a big league uniform I could tell was a rare and precious thing. Baseball people can be misleading at times—outright liars, at others.

Now, that’s just one story, but stay with me on this and you’ll see how it stitched itself to another, when the business of baseball bit me again on the last day of camp that same spring. What happened here was that Rangers manager Don Zimmer called me to his office. He said, Son, you’ve had an amazing camp. If we needed a fifth starter, you’d be coming to Texas. But we don’t, so we’re sending you to Oklahoma City, and in late April, you’re gonna come back to Texas and be our starting pitcher.

He was kind about it, in a way that he certainly didn’t have to be.

Understand, if you’re a big league manager for any stretch of time, one of your talents has to be letting people down. It might not be a talent going in, but you have a lot of opportunities to work on it, and here Don Zimmer found a way to tell me I didn’t make the club in classic good news/bad news fashion. He let me down easy—and, I must say, I took him at his word. I was as good as made.

I think I floated to the parking lot as I left camp. I jumped into the sweet T-top Datsun 280Z Turbo I’d bought with my signing bonus, threw my things in the car, and headed northeast from Pompano Beach to Plant City—the strawberry capital of the world, and home of the Texas Rangers’ minor league camp. The map said it was a four-hour drive, but it felt to me like it took just a half hour, and yet by the time I pulled in to the Holiday Inn where the minor leaguers were staying; the Rangers had taken a big fat eraser to that late April start I’d been penciled-in to make. The light was flashing on the boxy motel phone by my crappy bed, indicating that I had a message. This was long before pagers and cell phones, so people couldn’t always reach you on a moment’s notice—it’s a wonder we were able to communicate at all, right?

It turned out the message was from Lou Gorman, another baseball lifer—and another New England native, who’d been a prominent baseball executive during my days as a schoolboy ballplayer in Millbury, Massachusetts, just outside Worcester. His message didn’t say why he was calling, just that he was trying to reach me, so I assumed he’d heard I was coming to town and wanted to let me know that he was in town as well.

The players used to call Lou Mr. Good, because of a peculiar habit he had of always saying things were good, good, yeah, good. He was relentlessly positive, and here he answered the phone with typical good cheer. He said, Yeah, yeah, good. It’s good you called, Ron. I just want to welcome you to the Metropolitan family.

I had no idea what he was talking about. I should probably mention here that we also knew Lou as a bit of a wannabe wordsmith, could never quite figure out what he was saying, so it took a while for me to put two and two together on this and come up with four. The Metropolitans, I soon learned, was the full name of the team I knew as the Mets, who’d apparently traded for me in the time it took for me to drive from Pompano Beach to Plant City. Lou Gorman, I was also soon learning, had taken a job with the Mets as vice president of player personnel, working with general manager Frank Cashen. He was calling to welcome me to the club.

The first thing I could think to say was, Who’d I get traded for?

Even with just one spring training camp under my belt I knew the answer to this question was a clear way to measure your worth as a ballplayer. If you were traded for someone you’d never heard of, chances are no one would ever hear of you. If you were traded for a star, and if there were multiple players involved in the deal … well, then it meant that somebody, somewhere thought you might have some small thing to contribute to the acquiring club, at some point.

It was a little unusual, then as now, for a first-round draft choice to be traded away before logging a full season in the organization. Texas had taken me with the #9 overall pick in the draft the previous June, and I guess they’d seen enough. That’s how the game is played, I was realizing, and I was reminded of the uncertain, untethered ways I was made to feel as I took in this news when I read that Dansby Swanson, the #1 overall pick in the 2015 draft, had been traded to the Atlanta Braves less than six months after receiving a $6.5 million signing bonus from the Arizona Diamondbacks. I saw that and thought, Welcome to the big leagues, kid.

Lou told me I’d been traded along with another minor league pitcher named Walt Terrell for Lee Mazzilli, who’d been one of the Mets’ most popular players during the team’s fallow years in the late 1970s. It was all good, so good, yeah, yeah, very good, he said. For some reason, it gave me great comfort to know I wasn’t being traded on my own. To this day, I’ve got no idea why this mattered to me—maybe because I wouldn’t have to live up to the legacy of Lee Mazzilli, a matinee-idol-type Metropolitan, all by myself.

This second story connects to another—the story of Walt Terrell, who would clamber into Mets history after slugging two two-run homers off future Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins (the winningest Canadian-born pitcher in major league history!) in a 4–1 complete game victory over the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Terrell was famous among his teammates for the tower of empty Old Milwaukee cans that used to rise from the ashes of his evenings alone in his hotel room, which he spent drinking and smoking while the rest of us went out and got our nightclub on. We might have been on very nearly the same rung of the baseball ladder, but Walt was already a married man, with kids, so he would hang back in his room and wait for a few of us to return, unhitched, whereupon we would finish his beers and talk baseball. He was also famous for the time he tackled the San Francisco Giants mascot while the guy in the costume was running the bases at Candlestick Park, and became known forever more in our clubhouse as Crazy Crab, which for some strange reason was the name of the mascot.

There was yet another thread running through these stories, and that one was being pulled by Mickey Rivers, late of the New York Yankees championship teams of the late 1970s, who finished his career with these same Texas Rangers, but not before holding out on his contract and making himself a general pain in the ass, necessitating the trade for Mazzilli to potentially take his place in center field. During my one spring training with the Rangers, Mick the Quick was in the habit of parking his great big Cadillac just beyond the outfield fence at the complex. Just in case you weren’t sure it was Mick’s Caddy, you could tell by the steer horns he’d had mounted to the hood. Specifically, he was in the habit of leaning on the car horn, which he had retrofitted with a bleating air horn that made it sound like you’d stepped inside a circus.

Underneath the blare of the horn, my new teammates would swap Mickey Rivers stories like trading cards. He was, I was learning, one of the great characters of the game—and not always the most beloved figure in his own clubhouse, to put it kindly. When he was with the Yankees, he was known for hanging out at the racetrack. If he’d been to the track and had a rough day, he didn’t seem to want to play when he got to the ballpark. If the Yankees needed him in the lineup, manager Billy Martin would get on the phone to George Steinbrenner and say, Mickey’s making noises about playing today, Boss. He took a beating at the track. Within minutes, Steinbrenner would send down an envelope with a bunch of cash, whereupon Mickey would crack the envelope, fan the wad, put it in his pocket, and head out to the field.

Years later, Goose Gossage would tell me a whole bunch of Mickey Rivers stories. Goose told me about the time he was being brought in to close out a game—back during the days when the Yankees used to drive their relief pitchers from the bullpen to the mound in a car provided by the team’s automobile sponsor. This one time, as Gossage was being driven from the bullpen, Mickey crossed from center field and jumped on the hood of the car, screaming No, no, no, don’t let him in. Goose had been struggling at the time, and Mickey was always grousing that he had to chase down all those fly balls in the wide-open spaces of center field at Yankee Stadium whenever Gossage came into the game. Goose didn’t appreciate Mickey’s antics, to say the least—these guys really had it in for each other. Goose would scream right back at Mickey through the open window of the bullpen car: Get your ass off the car!

Once, the tension between these two came to a crazy head. Gossage came into the game in a tight spot. His thing was to start off every appearance with a fastball, so his catcher, Thurman Munson, wouldn’t even bother to put down a sign. He’d just flash the glove when it was time to go—only this time, Goose was looking in, and Thurman was looking down at the plate, not putting up his glove. This went on for a beat or two until finally Goose called Thurman out to the mound. He said, What the hell is going on? Let’s go.

In response, Thurman pointed to center field and said, Take a look at your center fielder.

There was Mickey Rivers in a three-point stance, putting it out there to all the world that Goose Gossage was about to give up a line drive or a long fly ball and that the great Mickey Rivers wanted to make sure he would get a good jump on it by setting himself like a sprinter. As it happened, Goose did give up a bullet to center, and Mick the Quick was able to dash under it to make the grab.

So there you have it—five or six or seven stories in all (depends how you count ’em), hung on this one line that stretches from Dick Allen and Don Zimmer, to Lou Gorman and Dansby Swanson and Walt Terrell, and on to Mickey Rivers and Goose Gossage, all of them tied up in such a way that I could never tell just one thread without telling all the rest.

This is how it goes, when it goes in just this way …

1

Drop and Drive

How far does this through-line stretch?

Well, for me, it reaches all the way back to 1883, when a journeyman catcher named Dell Darling had a cup of coffee with the Buffalo Bisons of the National League, alongside future Hall of Famers Dan Brouthers, Deacon White, Pud Galvin, and player-manager Jim O’Rourke. Darling collected three hits in 18 at-bats, over six games, although if you described his short tenure in this caffeinated way he wouldn’t have had any idea what you were talking about.

A cup of coffee? What the hell was that?

This particular Darling would come back a couple years later and stick with Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings, establishing himself as a reliable utility man, and he rates a mention here because of his name, which in a sidelong way also happens to be mine. See, like a lot of baseball-mad kids, I was in the habit of losing myself in the statistics and ephemera on the backs of the baseball cards I used to flip and trade with my brothers. I was a sucker for baseball history, and with a name like Darling it was only a matter of time before I started scouring the pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia to see if there were any other Darlings who’d played the game. I suppose I would have done the same thing if my name had been Smith, or Jones, or Molina. These days, of course, I could do a search online and see if I shared not only a name but a birthday with any of the all-time greats, or a hometown, or a hobby, but when I was a kid our search engines were pretty much confined to alphabetical order—a familiar crutch I’ll lean on as these pages develop.

What’s worth remarking on Dell Darling’s otherwise unremarkable career, which spanned a total of 175 games over parts of six seasons, was how it ended—and, relatedly, how it bumped against a story that made an indelible mark on what was left of my childhood.

Here’s the front end of that tale:

About a year after his final big league game, Darling married a woman from his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, named Anna Crum. The couple wound up having seven children, but before all those kids started piling up my namesake made a whole new name for himself, when he was connected to a series of railroad heists that seemed to borrow a page from the stagecoach robberies that had once been a sad fact of life in the Wild, Wild West. Allegedly, Darling and the other suspects would hide out on these passenger trains, and while everyone slept or drank or stared at the passing scenery they’d toss luggage and other belongings from the moving cars. Then they’d hop off the train and double back to assess and collect their ill-gotten gains.

Quite a legacy, huh? No, it’s not like we were related or anything, but I had enough trouble wearing a name like Darling when I was growing up, so it’s not like this black mark would have done me any favors if I thought to mention this loose connection to any of my friends.

It turned out Darling’s role in these robberies might have been overstated, because he was released shortly after his arrest, together with several of his former teammates, including a somewhat more accomplished ballplayer from Erie named Lou Bierbauer. With that bit of unpleasantness behind him and the stain on our good name not as bad as it first appeared, Darling tried to latch on with another professional club, eventually retiring to Erie, where he found work doing odd jobs, mostly as a blacksmith and painter. He died just after the birth of his seventh child, at the age of forty-two—quite possibly from the long-term effects of an old baseball injury, according to some newspaper accounts. What was curious about Darling’s passing was that he died around the time his purported accomplice Bierbauer was widowed as well, throwing the former Mrs. Darling into the arms of the suspected train robber. Anna Darling wound up marrying Bierbauer, and the couple went on to have two children of their own, who joined the Darling kids and Bierbauer’s three children from his previous marriage to form a bustling Brady Bunch–type household.

Some story. And the bridge to the next story I want to tell is that it marked one of the first times in baseball history that teammates ended up sharing the same spouse, a rarity that would serve as the backdrop to one of the most sensational stories of my own baseball-aware childhood. As reaches go, this one’s a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit. But when you follow the bouncing ball you never know where it might land …

In 1973, as many readers will surely recall, New York Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich ended up trading wives, a domestic shuffling that confused the hell out of this twelve-year-old Massachusetts kid. Oh, man … this was a big, big deal, more Peyton Place than SportsCenter, about as far removed from a turn-of-the-century Brady Bunch scenario as you could get, and a sure sign to us Red Sox fans that the hated Yankees were in league with the devil. Actually, the two teammates didn’t just trade wives—they swapped out their entire families, right down to the family dog. It was a weird, wild story, and a sign of the times, I guess, only at twelve years old I couldn’t think what to make of it. It was exciting and lurid and a little bit creepy, and it had almost nothing to do with baseball other than the concomitant fact that the game just happened to be the place of business for these two friends and teammates. Still, whenever I heard the name of Fritz Peterson, who went on to pitch 11 seasons for the Yankees, Indians, and Rangers, or Mike Kekich, who pitched for the Dodgers, Yankees, Indians, Rangers, and Mariners over nine big league seasons, I was taken back to the Swingin’ Seventies, where players wore shag hairdos and porn mustaches and wide-collared leisure suits that would have made their predecessors lift an eyebrow and wonder what the world was coming to.

Well, what it was coming to was … this.

For years afterward my mind would flash back to the tabloid headlines that