Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond (review)

Full disclosure: I know Bill Lee and I like him, though he's a free spirit from California and I'm a puritan from New England. We're old pitchers though my career consisted of starting 11 games for the division III college where I now teach, and he won a national championship at the University of South Carolina and 119 games in fourteen years (1969–83) in the Major Leagues. We're both Vermonters now and proud of it.

Our connection is our love of baseball. I express mine by teaching courses that connect the game to American history, culture, and art; he expresses his by still playing the game (at fifty-eight years of age) every chance he gets. The last sentence in Have Glove, Will Travel, his most recent autobiographical foray, is simply "I'm a ballplayer," and it's true. He will play until they carry him off the field on his shield and bury him with his spikes on. I've never met anyone who knows and enjoys the game more, and that's why I like him so.

He brings to mind Babe Ragland, the hero of Jerome Charyn's novel, The Seventh Babe, a rebel in the American tradition. Banished from Major League Baseball at nineteen in 1925, Ragland joins up with the Cincinnati Colored Giants, a barnstorming black team whose players suffer the degradations of the road and the depredations of prejudice to their love of the game. "All the kid ever wanted to do was play ball," and the purity of his passion alienates those who want to exploit the game. Amid the confusion of his life, he knows one thing for sure: "I'm a ballplayer," he says.

After we read The Seventh Babe in my baseball classes, I invite Bill Lee to visit and introduce him as Ragland's real life counterpart; and he holds forth, never failing to entertain. The students ask him what it's like to face Reggie Jackson in Yankee Stadium before a packed house. He answers, but he's clearly happier talking about his most recent outing at a senior game in Arizona or Newport, Vermont. He does not live in the past. He didn't write "I used to be a ballplayer"; he is a ballplayer, present tense—not just a former Major Leaguer.

Like players in the old days, he plays round the seasons, more or less: In the summer, he plays in the Northern Vermont Senior League for the Lake Region Rangers. He plays in Arizona in the fall in senior tournaments. In the winter and spring, he plays in Montreal and Boston fantasy camps. Other barnstorming opportunities crop up ad hoc. He has an opening day gig every April at a bar in Boston, where he "throws out the first pitcher (of beer)." Lucky for him, and us, there are so many other baby boomers who also love the game and furnish him with teammates and competition as his hair turns white and his joints creak.

His first book with Dick Lally, The Wrong Stuff, confirmed him as a sixties rebel, clashing with the narrow-minded suits, smoking dope, spouting leftist politics, rocking and rolling, and infuriating those who ran the game. Every one of his Dylan-loving, Nixon-hating contemporaries who had played catch with his dad was drawn to Bill Lee for his irreverence. For a time, the baseball establishment tolerated him: you can put up with a lot from a lefty who can throw strikes and beat the Yankees, a rare talent that kept him in Boston long after he had worn out his welcome with management.

When he staged his one-day walkout on the Montreal Expos on May 8, 1982, protesting the release of his teammate Rodney Scott, he became baseball's persona non grata, like Charyn's Babe Ragland. In the unforgiving argot of the game, he, too, was "released." The...