Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud by Joe Pepitone

Author:Joe Pepitone [Pepitone, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781613217962
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Ralph Houk called me into the Yankee offices on Fifth Avenue and talked to me that fall. He told me I had to change my ways or I wasn’t going to be a Yankee much longer.

“Are you going to trade me?” I asked him.

“I couldn’t get much for you right now,” he said. “If I could get a decent player for you, I might do it. But all they offer are some mediocre guys who are four or five years older than you. I’d rather keep you, but you’ve got to change.”

“I want to stay with the Yankees,” I said.

“Then show me,” Houk said. “It makes me sick the way you’re throwing your life away. My God, what a future you have. You could almost be a Joe DiMaggio. You can do it all—run, throw, hit all kinds of pitching. There’s no telling how far you can go. You should drive in a hundred runs every year.”

“I know,” I said. “I had a lot of trouble this year, Ralph . . . the debts, the family split . . .”

“I know about your troubles, Joe. I’m sorry. But that’s all behind you now. You can’t destroy your life. You have to think of yourself. You’ve got to start thinking about baseball as a business. You should be making forty thousand by now, on the basis of what other players are being paid.”

“I know, Ralph. And I’m going to change. I am.”

“It’s not just for yourself, either,” he said. “It’s for your teammates. You owe them an honest effort. You’re not playing up to your ability. You have great potential. You have more than potential, because you’ve proved what you can do.”

Then he told me to get a haircut, and I promised I would. I meant to, until I read about our conversation in Dick Young’s column in the New York Daily News. I don’t know how Young got his information, but he always seemed to know exactly what was going on in baseball. I know he always had me right, everything he wrote about me. But I was embarrassed. I didn’t like to see all that shit in the newspaper. I went to spring training with my hair growing down my back. I started hitting the ball like I did in 1963, and nobody mentioned that my hair was a good deal longer than the baseball “style.” Long hair was “in” throughout the rest of the world, but baseball managers tended to think you hit with a crew cut. When my batting average dropped fifty points at the end of spring training, I got a trim to keep the bullshit from raining down on me. Just a little off the back, please.

In the opening game of the season, I hit a home run and a single off Mickey Lolich of the Tigers, a tough left-hander, and I felt I was going to have a good season. I did. My batting average was only .255, but I led the club in doubles with 21, in RBIs with 83, and in home runs with 31.

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