Rage. Peter Golenbock

INTRODUCTION

      I’M BLIND, AND MY BELOVED BASEBALL HAS made me this way. I’ve always loved Ray Charles and wanted to be like him, but not like this. I wanted to sing like him, not be blind like him.

      The reason I’m blind is that during my five-year professional pitching career, team doctors prescribed fifty-seven cortisone shots for my aching shoulder. I didn’t know any better. This was before the dangers of cortisone were made public. I knew Sandy Koufax was taking them for his arm, and Sandy was my hero, so I figured what was good for Sandy was good for me. I found out years later that no one should take more than ten cortisone shots in a lifetime. I was later told that if you take more than ten shots in a lifetime, your corneas will grow weak and you risk going blind. I wish someone had said something back then.

      I was one of the best young pitchers in the nation when I graduated from high school in 1964. I could throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour. I once struck out twenty-four batters in a high school game. I retired forty-one batters in a row when I pitched in two American Legion games. Both outings were almost perfect games. Did you ever do something where you felt—where you knew—that you were the best in the whole wide world? That’s how I felt when I was a teenager in high school.

      When I came up to the New York Mets in 1967, I got more ink than Tom Seaver, the college kid from California. In our first games pitching for the Mets, Tom and I each struck out eight batters to set a rookie record that wasn’t broken until 2012. My future was so bright that Topps even put us on the same baseball card, calling us Mets Rookie Stars of 1967. I was living my dream. It was a dream I got to live for about two weeks.

      In my fourth start, I hurt my arm. I never saw it coming. I had never been hurt before. I threw a pitch and felt the intense grip of pain in my shoulder. Little did I know that my brilliant major league career was finished after exactly two months; after that I was just hanging on to my dream.

      I would experience one more brief moment of fame that was very unusual at that particular time. The Mets traded me to the Washington Senators for their manager Gil Hodges. The Cleveland Indians had once swapped managers by trading Joe Gordon to the Detroit Tigers for Jimmy Dykes. However, no player in baseball had ever been traded for a manager. That trade was a first. Mets fans who remember me ask, “Oh, Bill Denehy. You’re the guy who was traded for Gil Hodges, aren’t you?”

      “I am,” I tell them with great pride.

      I spent the next five years trying to hang on. For a short while I played for Ted Williams. I sat by his side in the dugout and learned about pitching from perhaps the greatest hitter who ever lived. Later I acted as Billy Martin’s hatchet man in Detroit. Billy wanted me to come into a game and hit a batter. To keep my job, and because I was something of a sadist, I was only too willing to do so.

      I then pitched in the minor leagues, hoping beyond all hope that I’d be struck by lightning and my arm would come back. I never was, and it never did. You hear all the time how an athlete dies twice. The first time is when his athletic career comes to an end, and the second is when he leaves this world. Sometimes I think that the second death would have been preferable to what I went through.

      I haven’t had it easy in civilian life. I’ve had anger issues. I don’t work well with others, especially assholes who don’t respect me. My rages usually got me fired—and so did my drug use.

      I toiled in the minors for a few years, uprooting my family and picking up a nasty drug habit, though I didn’t see it that way. After baseball released me, I needed to make money, so I went into real estate. I soon discovered that sitting behind a desk felt more like a prison sentence than earning a living. I quit my lucrative sales job and took a job working for a pittance as a pitching coach for the Boston Red Sox in their minor league farm system. I loved my job. But I had two daughters to raise, and my long-suffering wife, Marilyn, wasn’t happy with my low wages. Because of her harping, I went to management and demanded that I be made a manager so I could earn more money. I was let go. I was crushed.

      Then I got a well-paying job as a radio talk show host, another job I loved, but as luck would have it, the station went bust nine months later. I was broke. My wife, two daughters, and I had to move in with her mother, who hated my guts, partly because I was seemingly incapable of holding down a steady job.

      Hartford College hired me to coach college baseball, another job I loved. I took the worst college baseball team in America and built it into a powerhouse. But before I could realize the fruits of my labor, my anger got the best of me. I threatened to blow up an opposing coach’s car, and a snooping, sniveling reporter put my comments in the papers. I was fired from that job too.

      I got divorced, and my drug habit only got worse. I smoked marijuana incessantly, and I snorted cocaine with my buddies.

      I moved from Connecticut to Florida to take another job in radio, leaving behind my ex-wife, mother-in-law, and two daughters. For ten years my ex-wife wouldn’t speak to me or let me see my daughters. By then my drug habit had become so bad that I knew either I had to do something about it or I’d die. I entered a drug rehab program, began recovery, and got my life back, though I was still unable to control my rages.

      One time at a recovery meeting one of the other attendees called me a liar. I went for his throat. The guy’s lucky I didn’t kill him. Another time in a Publix supermarket I asked for fresh, homemade peanut butter. They didn’t have any. Four days in a row I went back, and finally I blew my stack. The cops came, and Publix management barred me from the building.

      I was fired from my job at a golf shop for trying to strangle one of the other workers and because I wouldn’t deliver his illegal drugs to him. Without a job, things got so bad that I had to ask the nonprofit Baseball Assistance Team (BAT) to pay my rent and give me money for food. They provided for me for a year and a half. I had to ask for help because baseball has royally screwed about 850 of us out of our pensions.

      In 1981, the Major League Baseball Players Association made a deal with the owners not to include any players in the union who played before 1980 and who didn’t play for five years or more. I played part-time in three seasons between 1967 and 1971. Since I don’t qualify to join the union, I can’t get a pension. Marvin Miller and Bob Boone conspired to really fuck me but good.

      That would be enough to enrage anyone, but now I’m blind, and baseball is the reason. When I tried to get workman’s comp, I was told, “You don’t have any records of your fifty-seven cortisone shots. How do we know you had them?”

      Those bastards! The baseball moguls are like the Holocaust deniers. Baseball is making so much fucking money. I just can’t understand why they won’t do the decent thing and help me out.

      I don’t want you to think this is a story of disappointment and loss. It’s not. Well, yes it is, but it’s also a story of great fun and amazing memories. My baseball stories are every bit as colorful as Jim Bouton’s in Ball Four. I played with Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw, Frank Howard, and Gates Brown. I was managed by Roberto Clemente, Ted Williams, and Billy Martin. I had sex with Chicago Shirley; I almost got shot after a teammate picked up a stripper. My teammates and I once threw a dead shark into a motel pool and scared the hell out of a bunch of senior citizens. Tug McGraw and I slept with the same woman. And I almost hit Willie Mays in the head with a pitch.

      My story is also a story of redemption. My ex-wife had her own problems with alcoholism,