Former Boston Red Sox Pitcher Bill Lee Featured in “Spaceman” Movie
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