Former Boston Red Sox Pitcher Bill Lee Featured in “Spaceman” Movie
The movie “Spaceman” comes out Friday and follows former Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee after the end of his MLB career.
On August 19, the Bill Lee story will be told on the big screen in movie theaters across the country. Bill “Spaceman” After clashing with the baseball establishment throughout the 1970s as a Boston Red Sox pitcher, Lee’s career came to an end too soon in the early 1980s. This movie follows Lee during those post-baseball years as he continues to play the game he loves over the next 30 years in many interesting and unusual places. Lee is one of the most interesting players in MLB history and his post-career escapades provided great material for actor Josh Duhamel to work with.
Lee is best known by baseball fans for those years with the Red Sox in the mid-1970s. He was at his peak from 1973 to 1975, when he went 51-35 with a 3.38 ERA and 1.31 WHIP across three seasons. He pitched an average of 276 innings in those three years, and completed 51 of his 104 starts.
The 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds is an all-time classic among October showdowns and Lee was a big part of it. After the Red Sox won the first game of the series, Lee started Game Two and took a 2-1 lead into the ninth. He allowed a leadoff double to Johnny Bench and was taken out. Reliever Dick Drago then blew the save opportunity by allowing Bench to score on a single by Dave Concepcion. After a steal of second, Concepcion scored on a Ken Griffey double. The Reds won the game and the series was tied.
After the epic Game Six in which Carlton Fisk waved fair one of the most famous home runs in baseball history, Bill Lee took the hill for Game Seven. The Red Sox had not won a World Series since 1918. Lee held the Reds scoreless through five innings and the Red Sox took a 3-0 lead. In the top of the sixth, Lee tried to slip his signature high-arcing eephus pitch past Tony Perez and paid for it as Perez launched a 2-run bomb out of Fenway to make it 3-2. Lee stayed in the game until he allowed a one-out walk in the top of the seventh. The Red Sox bullpen once again could not hold the lead and the Reds won the game and the series. Some longtime Red Sox fans still blame Lee’s eephus pitch for being the turning point in that game.
During the filming of “Spaceman”, Lee showed up on the set and taught actor Josh Duhamel how to throw the infamous pitch. Duhamel told NESN.com’s Michaela Vernava, “Bill actually taught me how to throw an eephus, believe it or not. He came to the set the last day we were shooting. And literally, you know, it’s about getting it high and getting this topspin on it. And after a few tries, I started getting it. And then we did some BP, and I just love the guy. I love what he stood for.”
Duhamel talked about Lee’s charismatic personality, his incredible smarts, and how he owns every room he enters. The movie is expected to portray the complexity of Bill Lee, both the good and the bad. As Duhamel said about Lee, “he’d be the first one to admit that he made a lot of mistakes.”
Next: Lee's Rebellious Spirit
Lee’s Rebellious Spirit
Despite his success on the mound for the Red Sox during this time, Lee did not fit in well in the baseball world. He was a product of the 1960s and known for his eccentric behavior. Curry Kirkpatrick penned an article about Lee for Sports Illustrated in August of 1978 that portrayed Lee in all his flaky glory. Kirkpatrick wrote about Lee jumping off motel balconies into swimming pools, playing bullpen Frisbee games with fans in the bleachers, and referring to Billy Martin and the Yankees as “that neo-Nazi and his Brown Shirts.”
As outrageous as he was in those days, in some ways Lee was a man ahead of his time. He embraced the healthiness of soy burgers and disdained the badness of sugar before it was cool and has been an advocate for decriminalization of marijuana for more than 40 years. Recent polls show that the majority of people in this country now agree that marijuana should be legal.
The Red Sox franchise was one of the most straitlaced organizations in sports in the 1970s. They were ahead of other teams in imposing a no-liquor rule on team flights (which must not have been in effect when Wade Boggs allegedly drank 64 cans of Miller Lite on a cross-country flight during his career with the Red Sox). They had also been the last team in baseball to employ an African-American player when they signed Pumpsie Green, twelve years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in modern baseball. Lee once called the Red Sox “the whitest team in baseball. Just look at the hierarchy of the ball club. We could have a winning team made up of the black and Latin American guys who’ve been traded away.”
After winning 51 games and averaging 276 innings per year from 1973 to 1975, Lee got off to a bad start to the 1976 season. Heading into a game against the Yankees in New York on May 20, Lee was 0-3 with a 9.27 ERA. Lee beat the Yankees more often than any other team in his career and he came through with a well-pitched game, tossing six innings and allowing just one unearned run.
The Yankees led 1-0 and were looking to score again in the bottom of the sixth. Lou Piniella was on second and Graig Nettles was on first when Otto Velez hit a single to right field. Right fielder Dwight Evans, who possessed one of the best throwing arms in the game, came up firing. Piniella barreled into catcher Carlton Fisk in an attempt to knock the ball loose, but Fisk held onto the ball and the two players rolled in the dirt with punches being thrown. In the ensuing melee, Mickey Rivers sucker punched Lee from behind and Nettles threw Lee to the ground, which resulted in a separated shoulder.
The injury sent Lee to the disabled list and he continued to struggle upon his return, finishing the year with a 5-7 record and 5.63 ERA. He was limited to 128 innings the next year, going 9-5 with a 4.43 ERA. Meanwhile, there had been an ongoing feud between Lee and Red Sox manager Don Zimmer for quite some time. The Red Sox got off to a good start in 1978 and Lee was having another good season. Through July 19, he was 10-3 with a 2.94 ERA. At the time, the Red Sox were leading the AL East by nine games over Milwaukee, 12.5 over Baltimore, and were 14 games ahead of the hated Yankees.
From this point forward, the Yankees would go 52-21 (.712), while the Red Sox were 37-36 (.507). Lee was 0-7 with a 4.53 ERA in 11 games over the last two-and-a-half months of the year and spent most of September in manager Don Zimmer’s doghouse. The Yankees caught the Red Sox at the end of the year and beat them in a one-game playoff to advance to the postseason.
During the 1978 season, Lee was the founding member of a group of Red Sox players known as the Buffalo Heads and he famously referred to Zimmer as “the gerbil”. He was quoted as saying, “Zimmer wouldn’t know a good pitcher if he came up and bit him in the ass.” After the epic collapse of ’78, Zimmer and the Red Sox were tired of Lee’s shenanigans and he was traded to the Montreal Expos for utility infielder Stan Papi in the offseason. When he departed the Red Sox, Lee said, “Who wants to be with a team that will go down in history alongside the ’64 Phillies and the ’67 Arabs?”
Next: Resurrecting His Career in Canada
Resurrecting His Career in Canada
Lee rebounded with a 16-10, 3.04 season with the Expos in 1979 and was named The Sporting News National League Left-Hander of the Year. It was a nice comeback after his poor performance in the second half of the previous season. Unfortunately, he struggled in 1980. He was then shifted to a bullpen role in 1981, where he found some success in the strike-shortened year. His time with the Expos ended early in the 1982 season when he walked away from baseball after staging a one-day protest because the Expos released his good friend, Rodney Scott.
The movie “Spaceman” picks up the life of Bill Lee after his release by the Expos. Lee tried to hook on with another big league club, but no team wanted him. A 1984 article in People magazine caught up with Bill Lee in August of that year and told of his career in MLB and his recent post-MLB years. Of course, the article mentioned his claim that he had sprinkled marijuana on his pancakes during his big league career, which earned him a $250 fine from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. This story and others like it were included in Lee’s 1984 autobiographical book, The Wrong Stuff.
One of the running themes of Lee’s post-baseball years, both in real life and as portrayed in the movie, is his feeling that he was blackballed by the baseball establishment. He told People magazine he had no regrets, “It takes guts to speak out. I’m basically an honest person. When they dump on people, I don’t let them get away with it. Economics wasn’t the underlying factor in my life; honesty was.”
Along with honesty, a pure love of baseball has permeated Bill Lee’s life. He played softball on an Indian reservation in Canada and baseball with a semipro team called the Longueil Senators. Lee is quoted as saying, “I always said I would play baseball for nothing and this proves it.” He’s played with numerous semi-pro teams over the last 30 years. He was part of the Senior League in Florida that included other retired major leaguers. He also played in Venezuela and Canada and in numerous old-timers’ games.
Next: Still Crazy After All These Years
Still Crazy After All These Years
Lee didn’t write about it in his 1984 book, but he recently went on the Dan Le Batard Show and claimed to have once smoked pot with former president George W. Bush. He claimed that he and George W shared some marijuana under the Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil at Boston’s Museum of Science in 1972. Bush has admitted to smoking pot in the past, but never confirmed that he smoked it with Lee.
Bill "Spaceman" Lee recalls smoking with George W. Bush under the T. rex at the @museumofscience. -Charliehttps://t.co/P3hZFmrZ4K
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) August 9, 2016
Five years after his Major League career ended, Lee announced that he planned to run for President of the United States as a member of the Rhinoceros party in the 1988 election. He’s still in politics these days, as he’s running for Governor of Vermont, the state that brought us Bernie Sanders. Lee has some of the same views as Sanders, including single payer health care, taxing the rich, and paid family leave, but he also advocates for the seizure of federal highways and harnessing the tidal bore of Bay of Fundy for energy.
Lee is running for Governor of Vermont as a member of the Liberty Union Party. Adding to his views listed above, Lee also advocates for the Tampa Bay Rays to be moved to Montreal. He claims that this would boost the Vermont economy when Red Sox fans travel through the state to see games played in Montreal. He also argues that steroid users should be inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
His political platform features clean water as his number one environmental concern. “Earth first” is a major theme of his candidacy. Physical education is also high on his list of concerns. He would like to have students run every day before class. Pre-schoolers would run three-quarters of a mile and kindergartners would run a mile. Also, if Donald Trump were to become president, Lee would advocate for Vermont to secede from the U.S. and join Quebec as part of Canada, saying, “All you have to do is take away that line to the north,” referring to the border.
Next: Spaceman, the Movie
“Spaceman”, the Movie
The mostly-true story of Bill Lee hits theaters on Friday, August 19. It comes from the guys who gave us “Bull Durham”, “White Men Can’t Jump”, and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, which seems appropriate because Bill Lee is the baseball version of Hunter S. Thompson.
More than anything, Bill Lee’s story is about a love for baseball. He reached the pinnacle of the sport as the starting pitcher of Game Seven in one of the most memorable World Series in baseball history. When Major League teams were done with him, he just kept on playing. He’s played for local adult baseball leagues and with former major leaguers on the Oil Can Boyd Traveling All-Stars. The Alaska Goldpanners had him pitch in their annual “Midnight Sun” ball game played at night during the Summer Solstice in 2008.
In 2010, the 63-year-old Lee pitched 5 2/3 innings for the Brockton Rox, a member of the Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball, and Lee picked up the victory. This made him the oldest pitcher to appear in or win a professional baseball game. The following year, he participated in the “100 Innings of Baseball” game hosted by the Boston Amateur Baseball Network to raise money for ALS. In 2012, he once again got in the record books when he pitched a complete game for the San Rafael Pacifics. The start made him the oldest pitcher to make a starting appearance, pitch a complete game, and earn a win in a professional baseball game.
Lee will be 70-years-old in December and is still going strong. He’s a regular at the annual Red Sox Fantasy Camp in Florida and always one of the most popular players. Even as he runs for Governor, he continues to play baseball in the Vermont Senior Baseball League. Two years ago, his Burlington Cardinals, won the state championship. The average age of the players on this team is 45. Lee is 69. If the movie “Spaceman” can accurately depict the love Bill Lee has for the game of baseball, it should be fun to watch.