Bill Lee and I have made a deal. He will give me an interview. I will give him a lift.
A few minutes later, I’m driving my compact car south on Highway 400 while Lee holds my tape recorder in the passenger seat. At 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds, he barely fits. As oncoming headlights reflect off his glasses, he spins yarns about pitching for the Expos and Red Sox, quotes assorted philosophers, extols the benefits of marijuana and laments the divide between the rich and poor.
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The white light of an Eaton’s sign appears as we pass a shopping mall, launching Lee into a rhapsodic homage to Roch Carrier’s classic story, “The Hockey Sweater,” about a boy in Quebec who orders a Canadiens jersey from the Eaton’s mail-order catalogue and gets a Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. Lee loves that story.
It is a warm summer night in 1995. Lee, 47, is still in full uniform. He has just pitched against a team of 21-year-olds in Barrie, a whistle-stop on a tour across southern Ontario for a barnstorming band of former big-leaguers called the Legends of Baseball. As Ernie Whitt, Vida Blue, George Foster and the other Legends board a bus bound for their hotel, I approach Lee for an interview.
Could we meet at your hotel?
Our hotel’s in Aurora, he says.
I live in Aurora, I say.
He grins. Let’s ride, he says.
Over the next 70 kilometres, I ask questions and he tells tales, some of them quite tall.
Twenty-four years later in another Ontario town, I hear a few of those stories again, almost verbatim. The pitcher known as Spaceman is still doing standup while sitting down. He praises pot, condemns “cybermetrics” and rides a stream of consciousness that can flow from Buckminster Fuller to Jiminy Cricket in a matter of seconds.
He has just come from a ball game in New York state and is on his way to another in Arizona. At age 72, Bill Lee is still barnstorming, and still pitching.
To baseball fans of a certain age, the name Bill “Spaceman” Lee evokes instant recognition, especially if those fans are from Montreal or Boston. Mention the madcap left-hander and they’ll smile, or roll their eyes, or both, because wild stories about him abound.
But they’ll also tell you that Lee was a good pitcher for a long time, as Baseball Reference confirms: 14 seasons, 3.62 ERA, 119-90 record, nearly 2,000 innings pitched, an all-star selection, two starts in the 1975 World Series.
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He would not fit today’s pitching prototype because his strikeouts were few and far between. To wit: In 1979, his first year in Montreal, he pitched 222 innings but struck out only 59. His ERA that year: 3.04.
Back then, his fastball averaged 88. At age 65, when his heater hovered around 75, he became the oldest pitcher to beat a pro team with a complete game. (They sent his indy-ball uniform to the Hall of Fame.)
Now, he says, the fastball is down to 70. He gets by on guile and command. And changing speeds.
Slow and slower.
“I can add and subtract,” he says. “I’m Pythagoras.”
He is standing in the lobby of the Registry Theatre in Kitchener, Ont., waiting to go on stage for an event to benefit the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region. This time, our interview is more conventional, although fans occasionally interrupt the Spaceman for a handshake or a selfie.
I ask about the origin of his nickname. The details come rapid-fire. Early in his career, after a splendid outing for the Red Sox in Baltimore, reporters mobbed Lee’s locker, blocking third baseman John Kennedy’s access to his own. Impatient to clear out, Kennedy heard someone mention astronauts on the moon. He nodded toward Lee and said, “We have our own spaceman over there.”
Kennedy was in a hurry, Lee tells me, because he had a date with a divorcée he met in the stands down the third-base line.
“So it was all because of a horny third baseman,” he says. “That’s how I got my nickname.”
Standing with us is Richard Griffin, the Blue Jays’ director of baseball media. Before that, he was the Toronto Star’s longtime baseball columnist, and before that the media-relations mogul for the Expos, in which capacity he did his best to pick up the pieces after Bill Lee, a generally hapless task. In that light, Griffin is the ideal referee for this event at the Registry. Both he and Lee know where the bodies are buried.
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I ask Griffin whether he plans to ask Lee about the nickname when they go on stage. I also ask whether he expects to get the same answer.
“No,” he replies, “it would be the same answer but …”
Lee interrupts and takes over.
“But it would be even more embellished, which is hard to do, because I tell you, I got two hits in that ballgame,” he says. “I won the ballgame. We won 7-4. I went 2-for-2, I had a fake bunt and hit a ball by Brooks Robinson down the left-field line for a double. I had two great at-bats and won the ballgame.”
Fact-checking Bill Lee stories can be a tortuous task, in part because of, you know, embellishments. But on these details his recollection was remarkably accurate.
On Aug. 2, 1971 two U.S. astronauts drove their off-road vehicle on the moon. That night in Baltimore, Luis Tiant gave up four runs in the first inning and Lee was summoned from the Boston bullpen. He pitched 8 1/3 scoreless innings. He also collected three hits (not two), including a bunt single. (This was two years before the DH came along.)
The Red Sox won 7-4, just as Lee said.
I ask him how he stays in shape to keep pitching.
“By pitching,” he says. “I played all summer. Had a terrible year. Had a terrible team behind me. Burlington (Vermont) Cardinals, 35-and-older senior league. But I played for a junior team, an elite team, in Thetford Mines in front of 5,000 fans on Canada Day. I won that game.”
Lee lives on a rural hillside in Craftsbury, Vermont. Thetford Mines lies three hours’ north across the Quebec border. And Lee loves Quebec. Montreal is his kind of town. Like Lee, Montrealers know how to have a good time, he says.
As the Kitchener event unfolded, Griffin nimbly steered the proceedings, feeding Lee a quote here and a name there and letting him roll, never certain where it would lead because Lee’s mind and mouth run a perpetual nip-and-tuck race.
At one point, as he was comparing the three strongest Expos’ teams, Lee suddenly stopped and said: “I made mistakes. I fell out of a second-storey building.”
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A pause. And then: “Never date a girl from Toronto.”
In the audience, everyone was thinking: This is gonna be good.
Montreal was the scene of this near-tragic yarn. The woman on the second floor was apparently from Toronto. As Lee tells the story, he was out running in the rain at 6 a.m. and decided to climb up the side of the building to “say goodbye to this girl, being an honourable guy.”
As he grabbed a ledge, some rotten wood gave way and he fell. “I landed on a wrought-iron fence on my left hip. My head and my knee knocked each other out.”
He managed to get himself to the hospital. Griffin handled the cover story. The papers said Lee, startled by a cat, had slipped on the wet pavement and was clipped by a passing cab.
In Kitchener 40 years later, Griffin described the pitcher’s huge hip bruise – a massive swath of blue and yellow and purple – and said the imprint looked a lot like a wrought-iron fence.
Lee missed only two starts. “It was just a fuckin’ flesh wound,” he said.
Shortly after Lee joined the Expos in 1979, the Boston media descended on spring training to interview the Spaceman. They asked him about rumours about a drug problem in the Red Sox clubhouse. Straight-faced, Lee said it was a disgrace, the way that the players had been abusing coffee, nicotine and alcohol.
No, the writers said, we meant marijuana.
Oh yeah, I’ve been using pot for years, Lee replied.
Amid the furor that followed, commissioner Bowie Kuhn called Lee to a meeting and confronted him. No, Lee said, I never said I smoked pot. I said I used it. I sprinkle it on my buckwheat pancakes every morning. It makes me impervious to the bus fumes when I run six miles to the ballpark.
OK, Kuhn said, before fining Lee $250, to go to charity. The pitcher paid it in pennies and sent a cheque to an orphanage in Alaska.
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He had smoked pot, of course. Lots of it. In Boston, he hung out with a group of teammates known as the Buffalo Heads – Lee, Ferguson Jenkins, Rick Wise, Bernie Carbo and Jim Willoughby, a.k.a. Willow. All were children of the Sixties, partial to rock music, booze and drugs.
“We would get into the room, we would open the drawer, we would throw Gideon’s Bible on the bed, and we would shuffle through an ounce of pot and we’d get the seeds out of it,” Lee said. “And then we would twist up about five or six joints, and we would roll a towel and put it under the door, and we would start smokin’ and tellin’ stories, and Willow would throw his knife into the wall. He was a Potawatomi Indian from Oklahoma.”
Fact-check: Willoughby had three-eighths Potawatomi blood. He was from California. His mother was from Oklahoma. I could find no record of his knife-throwing exploits.
Sometimes, you’re just stuck with Lee’s version.
Such as his assertion that he could have saved the Expos from their day of infamy in the autumn of 1981.
Thirty-eight years ago this week, Rick Monday of the Dodgers hit the infamous home run that ended the Expos’ playoff run. It came off Steve Rogers in the top of the ninth inning of Game 5 of National League Championship Series in Montreal. Ever since, Expos fans have called that day Blue Monday.
It didn’t have to turn out that way, Lee says. Manager Jim Fanning should’ve listened to him. But the strait-laced skipper and the free-spirited lefty were not fans of each other.
Rogers, the Expos’ ace, had an ERA of 0.98 in the playoffs. But in relief that day, he “had nothing,” Lee said.
“I went down and warmed up on my own, went out and tapped my hat when Fanning went out to talk to him when they announced Rick Monday as the pinch-hitter,” he said, anger seeping into his voice all these years later. “And he left (Rogers) in there.”
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In his career, Monday was 1-for-7 with four strikeouts against Lee.
“I guarantee it: I’d bury a sinker in on his hands and he hits a foul ball off his own foot,” he said. “I’d throw another one and he hits a foul ball off the other foot. And then I drop down and I throw him a sidearm slider away and he swings and misses and we go to the frickin’ World Series.”
Then there’s the Graig Nettles story. During a brawl between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1976, Nettles slammed Lee to the ground, separating his shoulder. Moments later, with his numb left arm dangling and the melee still rolling, Lee started yelling at Nettles, who responded with a punch to the face.
It was two years before Lee regained the strength in his shoulder.
Lee displayed his long-term revenge to his audience in Kitchener. As he has done time and again, he reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet and extracted a tattered Graig Nettles baseball card.
“The smell and the view do not improve for him,” Lee said. “I’ve been sitting on his face for …”
The audience erupted, drowning out the rest of his sentence.
He has probably used that line a thousand times. It always gets a big laugh.
Lee loves this. In front of a crowd, his energy is extraordinary. These sessions have long since become performance art, and no matter how often he tells the same stories, he always sounds like he’s telling them for the first time. He is a trouper in the true theatrical sense, touring an old show that always feels new, throwing slow fastballs on old, rutted mounds and telling tall tales with evangelical fervour.
It is not all fun and games. Immodest and outspoken, this is a left-hander who has always espoused southpaw political views. He also walked away from both the Red Sox and Expos in protest after they released friends he thought deserved to stay.
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“When people do things wrong, you have to put their feet to the fire,” he says.
His scattershot mind keeps audiences riveted as they wait to see where the next tangent goes. In one breath he’s playing basketball with Cheech Marin (remember “Up in Smoke”?) in Malibu and in the next he’s recommending that everyone read “The Denial of Death” by Earnest K. Becker.
In our rolling interview 24 years ago, he ranted about the DH and quoted author and philosopher Carlos Castenada. In Kitchener, he excoriated Bill James for ruining baseball with analytics and quoted Buckminster Fuller, who clearly has made a lasting impression, since Lee also kept mentioning him as he held my tape recorder in 1995.
In Kitchener, a Fuller citation took Lee on a whirlwind trip from philosophy to Disney movie inside of 10 seconds.
“Bucky Fuller wrote ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’ in ’69, and I signed in ’68 but I came to the big leagues in ’69,” he said. “And Bucky Fuller, his first chapter is Comprehensive Propensities. I had to read it three times. It means rely on yourself, or as Jiminy Cricket said, to thine own self be true.”
Actually, Shakespeare said that. Jiminy Cricket said let your conscience be your guide.
But enough fact-checking. It’s the sentiment that counts. And if you’ve read as much as Lee has, it’s easy to mix up the great thinkers.
“I’ve read everything out there,” he said. “I know Nietzsche personally.”
On his loosely guided tour of the Bill Lee canon in Kitchener, Rich Griffin’s last stop was the Spaceman’s impact on Canadian baseball, and so it shall be with this opus.
Lee’s four Expos years produced a 3.57 ERA in 95 games as a starter and reliever. But he has played many more games in Canada since then, starting with four seasons (1984-1987) as a pitcher-first baseman for the senior amateur Moncton (N.B.) Mets.
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Then came his barnstorming days, which took him to countless Canadian cities, as well as many more around the world. (“I hit six home runs in one game in Kelowna,” he says. Drove in 22 runs that day. He tells that story everywhere he goes in Canada. We’ll take his word for it.)
Meanwhile, working through a Nova Scotia foundation, he helped collect millions of dollars’ worth of baseball equipment for kids in the small towns of Cuba. For 18 years, he delivered the goods while helping to shepherd Canadian Little League teams on trips to play games in Cuba.
All of which left Griffin to wonder why the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame has so far spurned the Spaceman.
Lee replied: “There’s an old saying: The outfit that really doesn’t want you, why would you want to belong?”
He told me he’ll never leave that old house on the hill in Vermont. But from there he can almost see Quebec. Clearly, a piece of his heart rests in Canada.
Lee once played a charity game with Montreal Canadiens all around: Frank Mahovlich at first, Yvan Cournoyer at second, Henri Richard at short, Steve Shutt at third, Jean-Guy Talbot catching, Maurice Richard on the mound. The entire roster, he says, boasted 48 Stanley Cup rings.
“People say, what’s the greatest team you ever had on the field? It was that team.”
About the charity
Lee’s event in Kitchener benefited the anti-human trafficking division of the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region. The centre itself is 30 years old, but the anti-human trafficking program has operated only since January 2018. In that time, staff have taken more than 260 calls and served more than 100 victims. Nearly all of them are Canadian citizens or permanent residents, said co-ordinator Nicky Carswell. “It’s not like the movie ‘Taken’, with Liam Neeson,” Carswell said. There’s a severe housing shortage in the region for those trying to escape the trafficking trap, she said.
For more information or to donate, contact the centre here or call 519-741-8633.
(Photos of Bill Lee in Kitchener by John Lott / The Athletic)