Confessions of a Cunnythumber

Pitchers are a large contributor to baseball's eccentricity. Depending on their effectiveness, or lack of same, they drive hitters to the edge of insanity or managers over the edge. They say that you have to lose your fastball if you want to learn to pitch. I was fortunate enough to not have much of one from the very beginning — and then I lost it completely.

My mother called it a game only once. Both my parents tell the story in one voice. When you have been married 67 years, that is the only way to tell a tale.

It was the summer of 1941, the halcyon days before Pearl Harbor. The date that would separate my parents for the better part of four years. My father was quietly fuming behind the wheel of the old Ford. He was trying not to show any emotion. He had gotten his pitch, he thought. But after toiling in the mound for nine innings in the late summer heat, his bat had slowed down. It was a 3–1 fastball right down the chute. He got under it and popped it up to right. (Twenty-seven years later, while leaving USC on my way to Waterloo, Iowa, of the now defunct Midwest League, I saw that my father had written on my glove, covering each finger: Throw strikes. Keep the ball down. Don't alibi. Hustle, hustle, hustle. His advice I now give to my sons Mike and Andy, and their sons, Hunter, Kazden, and Logan Lee.) Bill Lee Jr., my father, couldn't alibi. He had learned not to alibi from his father, Williams Francis I, who played for the Hollywood Stars on the Pacific Coast League. Besides, Ring Lardner had not written Alibi Ike yet, so no one was listening anyway.

My grandfather used to cut the center of his glove so he could feel the ball better on his palm. He said it made his hands softer and quicker while he was turning the double play. No one got the ball quicker to first base. Not until the great "No Touch" Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

My grandfather's job, when he was not playing second base, was opening up new Gilmore Gas stations. Their symbol was the lion, and they had given him twin male lion cubs to raise. The lions lived in the backyard of his North Hollywood home. He had them for four years, in which time they traveled together up and down the California coast and had become inseparable. When Mobil Oil took over Gilmore Gas, they felt the lion promotion did not go with their logo, which was a flying horse — apparently lions eat flying horses when they land. My grandfather ended up taking the lions to the Griffith Park Zoo under the condition that he be allowed to visit any time he wished. On his first visit, the young lions came running, pressing up against the bars, purring and rolling around on their backs so that he could reach through the bars and scratch them on their bellies. The visitors at the zoo were dumbfounded by this action.

When the time came for my grandfather to leave, he had tears in his eyes, and when he turned away, the lions started to roar. They were trying to get him to stay. The other animals at the zoo sensed the anxiety and started calling out in their own voices. Monkeys howled and birds screeched. Snakes did relatively little. You get the picture. The zookeeper came to my grandfather and told him never to come back.

My maternal grandfather played football for USC. His father was Dean of Graduate Schools for USC from 1900 to 1937. When he left there he was one of the founding fathers of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, on the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. He had been raised along those river banks. He went to World War I as a medic and was gassed in some obscure farm in France. When he returned partially disabled, his brothers set him up at a farm in Oakdale on the Stanislaus River. He became president of the Oakdale water district. On his farm he raised peaches, walnuts, and almonds (people always called baseball players from California the "boys from the land of fruits and nuts" in a derogatory fashion, but I was one in a literal sense). He had learned to fly and had a couple of planes in which he used to survey the dams along the water district. When I was eight years old, he taught me to buzz the farm doing barrel rolls and loop-de-loops, culminating with a stall coming right down over my grandma — which drove her nuts.

One day he let me fly all the way back from Donnells Reservoir. He told me to follow the river and then he fell asleep. When he woke up, I was following the wrong river and was heading for Atwater Air Force Base, about 20 miles off course. When I saw the jets in the distance, I knew I was in trouble. It would have been embarrassing to be shot down by our own guys. Other times he took me up to chase the coyotes off the pheasant fields on the Rodden ranch. He would fly under the power lines, sometimes giving me the stick while he shot at them. As you can see from my two eccentric grandfathers, the apples don't fall far from the tree. While it might better serve the purposes of this book on eccentrics if I had been raised by the wild man of Borneo and a she-wolf, my mother and father were like Ward and June Cleaver in comparison, fairly normal. Like talent, eccentricity must skip a generation.

* * *

In the old days pitchers like me were called cunnythumbers. In fact, I almost called this book Confessions of a Cunnythumber. Then I Googled it and all kinds of interesting things popped up. I figured that we might get more readers, if only by accident. A certain demographic would have lined up to buy it because it sounds pretty filthy — like you should be going for counseling to rid yourself of it. Welcome to Cunnythumbers Anonymous, sir. Hello, my name is Bill Lee and I'm a cunnythumber. Or maybe you need to go to the doctor for a shot of penicillin. Mr. Lee, I'm afraid you have a severe case of cunnythumb. You'll need a series of injections. Actually, the term may have its origins in marble shooting. Cunnythumbing was a way of striking the "shooter." So go and wash your mouth out with soap for anything you might have been thinking.

It's an expression for a guy who can't throw hard but is still a really good pitcher. My dad told me about a guy named Red Barrett who threw the shortest game in history — he never went to three balls on anybody, induced eight double plays, and only threw 58 pitches! He was the epitome of the classic cunnythumber. You use your thumb to either make it break away or make it break in. I have a really strong thumb. I can hitchhike like nobody else. When people ask how to get a good curveball, I say, "Well you gotta get your wrist at 90 degrees, your elbow at 90 degrees, you put a beer cap in your hand and you know how to flick it off your fingers." You actually do a rotator cuff exercise while you're throwing your breaking ball. It's called multitasking. I build up my rotator cuff and my cunnythumb simultaneously.

My father was the first to call me a cunnythumber, though he ended up calling...