Lifestyles

Famous baseball feuds: Part 1

By David Kittredge
By David Kittredge

In the decade of the 1970s there were a couple of famous baseball feuds that took place. Although most bitter rivalries come between teams in close geographical proximity as with the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees or the Yankees and the old Brooklyn Dodgers, these quarrels were between managers and certain players under them.

One of the bitter confrontations was between Red Sox manager Don “Popeye” Zimmer and Red Sox left-handed pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitched for the Sox from 1969-1978. “Spaceman” did not have a good fastball in his arsenal of pitches so he relied on slower “junk” pitches like the curveball and his infamous eephus pitch, which was thrown in a high arc at a speed of about 55 mph, versus speeds of 75 mph to 100 mph, which are more in the norm for velocity in major league baseball. Bill Lee threw the eephus pitch often enough that he renamed it the Leephus pitch, obviously with himself in mind. For three years, 1973-1975, he won seventeen games each year and held the lead in two games of the 1975 World Series before being taken out of each game, but the Red Sox lost both games and the series. In 1976 Lee started a game against the Yankees and pitched into the sixth inning when Lou Pinella slid into home plate, spikes high, crashing into Carlton Fisk who tagged Pinella out. A bench clearing brawl ensued and Bill Lee injured his shoulder during the rhubarb and he missed most of the rest of the season on the injury list.

In 1978, Lee got into a feud with manager Don Zimmer by questioning Zimmer’s handling of the pitching staff. This tête à tête became public and of course Zimmer took offense to being called out on his managerial skills by a player. Don Zimmer, during his playing days, was a good utility infielder who played third, short stop, and second base on different occasions. He was nicknamed “Popeye” after the cartoon character because of his spunky play, his facial resemblance, and his large forearms. The stuff hit the proverbial fan when Bill Lee re-nicknamed his manager “The Gerbil,” which Zimmer resembled facially at the age of 47 due to a gain in body weight. Zimmer reacted by banishing “the Spaceman” to the bullpen, meaning that he was no longer considered a starting pitcher. Bill Lee’s teammate and close friend Bernie Carbo was then traded to the Cleveland Indians, which triggered Lee to revolt and he left the team for a few days before returning to the club. The Red Sox were ahead of the dreaded Yankees by 14 games in early August 1978, but faltered and led the Yankees by only four games when they started a four-game series with the Bronx Bombers. This four-game stint against the Yankees became known as “the Boston Massacre.” Manager Don Zimmer made a number of questionable calls during the month of September, one being the refusal to start pitcher Bill Lee for the last game of the four-game set against the Yankees, of which the Yanks had won the first three games and were only one game behind the Sox at that point. Carl Yastrzemski pleaded with the skipper to start Lee, because of his previous successes against the rival club, Lee’s record was 12 wins and 5 loses over a 10-year period, but when you call your boss a gerbil he is likely to take it personally and because of his hatred for the “Spaceman,” Don Zimmer refused to oblige Yaz and started an unknown and untested pitcher who had just been called up from the minor leagues, Bobby Sprowl, who didn’t last through the first inning giving up four walks and one hit before he was pulled out of the game. The rival clubs ended up tied at the end of the regular season, which led to a one-game playoff, which the Yankees won with home runs by Buck Dent and Reggie Jackson. Now as a baseball fan you might expect Reggie Jackson to hit a homer but Buck Dent? No way! But alas, he did manage to hit a dinger, for which the Boston fans gave Bucky a new nickname and by which he is still known to most Red Sox fans even today, but I will fail to mention here as it would not be allowed into print.

Don Zimmer participated in major league baseball from 1949 until his death in 2014 for a span of 65 years, winning a total of 906 games as a manager for different teams.

Bill Lee was traded to the Montreal Expos at the end of the 1978 baseball season and won 16 games the next year, for which he was named “The Sporting News” National League Left Hander of the Year. In 1982 Lee was released by the Expos after a one day walk out because again a close friend and teammate was traded.

“Spaceman” Lee is an outlandish and brash character in and out of baseball. He ran for president of the United States in 1988 for the Rhinoceros Party, with the campaign slogan, “No guns, no butter. Both can kill you.” He also ran for governor of Vermont with a campaign slogan of “So far left, we’re right.” he of course won neither election and he was just having a little fun.

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