The Chris Moeller Archives

Spaceman

I'm still ruminating on the Labor Day connection, but I've put the together today a little bit of the best of Bill Lee. Affectionately known as 'Spaceman," Bill was a left-handed pitcher in the bigs from 1969 to 1982 first with the Boston Red Sox, and later with the Montreal Expos. Bill is and has always been an outspoken baseball purist opposed to the designated hitter [1973 was "the year (commissioner) Bowie Kuhn took the bat out of my hands"], AstroTurf, night games, and the "planet-polluting owners." He has simultaneously possessed the type of countercultural opinions about marijuana use and American military policy that often gets a person saddled with the label "free thinker."

Consistent with his democratic principles, he shunned the common reliance on throwing fastballs during his career in favor of a series of junkball pitches that included the Leephus, or Space Ball, a variation of the Eephus pitch thrown slow and with a high trajectory. There's little doubt he was an influence on the formulation of Kevin Costner's existential ballplaying character in "Bull Durham," and Susan Sarandon's as well.

Long before Don Zimmer was regarded as a lovable comic foil for pithy New York sportswriters and Biff Henderson, the veteran baseballer was the pointman for a bit of Lee's ire as manager of the Red Sox. Publicly feuding over Zimmer's handling of the Red Sox pitching staff in 1978, Lee dubbed his 'old-school' manager "the designated gerbil," and Lee was dealt to the Montreal club immediately following the season. The pitcher responded to the transaction by offering up one of the great lines in baseball history, in reference to the Red Sox having just surrendered a 14-game lead and the pennant to the Yankees: "Who wants to be with a team that will go down in history with the '64 Phillies and the '67 Arabs?"

Now a 60-something resident of rural Vermont, Lee barnstorms on diamonds from Alaska to Cuba ("I don't want to look fat when they bury me," he says) and he believes that baseball leads the path of all social progress. "(It's) the belly button of America," he wrote in one of his books, "If you straighten out the belly button, the rest of the country will follow."

Here are three Bill Lee gems, courtesy of YouTube-- first, a sample of Lee's contributions to Ken Burn's PBS miniseries "Baseball," next, a clip of Lee being interviewed by a guy with a Canadian accent after an Expos game in 1979, and finally, a chat with the man in the new millennium.

posted by CM @ 6:36 PM