Major League baseball pitching legend Bill Lee had a full day on Saturday. From 9 am till noon, the former Boston Red Sox ace lefthander was the star attraction at the grand opening of the Shark Shack, a retail store that sells logo merchandise for the Martha’s Vineyard Sharks amateur collegiate team.
That afternoon he participated in a baseball clinic sponsored by the Coogan family, owners of the Wharf Restaurant and Pub and Rockfish Restaurant in Edgartown.
Mr. Lee, 68, enthralled several dozen young baseball players, coaches, and fans who attended his high-intensity clinic at the Vineyard Baseball Park (Shark Tank), a session that included advice on both baseball and about life, before he hustled off to Fenway Park’s Legends suite to catch up with other former Red Sox players and to watch an evening game between the Red Sox and the Los Angeles Angels.
Mr. Lee, now a resident of the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont with his wife Diana, has lived a tumultuous life of baseball success and iconoclasm. He has been continuously outspoken on a variety of social and political issues over the past 40 years, becoming a nationally known personality outside the sports arena. A teammate nicknamed him “Spaceman” for his otherworldly life perspective, a moniker that has stuck.
A lanky surfer-dude-looking USC grad who burst on the scene in 1969 with the Boston Red Sox, Mr. Lee has always understood stage presence and use of the diamond as a bully pulpit. The Boston Red Sox were reluctantly beginning to abandon the Cro-Magnon school of management when the brash lefthander showed up to drive them, and a lot of the baseball world, out of their conservative minds.
The fans loved Mr. Lee, who organized chewing gum–punting contests in the bullpen during games, and was a prime mover in the formation of the Buffalo Heads, a group of Sox players who in 1978 publicly criticized management’s use of the pitching staff.
So much for baseball whistleblowing. The ringleaders, including Mr. Lee, were frogmarched out of town. In his case, Mr. Lee was traded to the Montreal Expos, where he won 16 games the following year. Oops.
He presents an open, booming, passionate persona that delighted — and riveted — his audience on Saturday. No small accomplishment, considering his target audience was teenage boys, an audience typically determined to be cool and unengaged around adults.
But the Island and Falmouth Babe Ruth League players oohed and aahed with the rest of us as Mr. Lee demonstrated a repertoire of heaters, curves, cutters, sliders, changeups, and his (in)famous Lee-phus pitch, which rises slowly and majestically skyward before descending into a catcher’s mitt, often without being hit into the next county.
Mr. Lee won 119 major league games, and at age 65 became the oldest player to start — and to win — a professional baseball game.
We may get to see the Lee-phus pitch next fall. Mr. Lee said he is considering a stint with the Martha’s Vineyard Dogfish, who compete in an over-40 baseball league.
Mr. Lee really taught good baseball on Saturday. “It’s amazing, these pearls of wisdom that drop every minute,” Dogfish player Steve Gallagher murmured. True. More than anything else, Bill Lee shows up these days as an offbeat, articulate, and intelligent performer who uses his physical talent to teach success at life. For example, in mid-windup he advised the assemblage to read The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2011 book about the roots of successful people.
As a teacher, Mr. Lee takes the game seriously. “I teach this game from the ground up. It’s like life; you need a good foundation,” he told clinic attendees on Saturday. Along with lower body posture and balance, Mr. Lee emphasized mindful breathing techniques — “Don’t mouth-breathe. Breathe in your left nostril and out your right nostril” — and he demonstrated basic Ayurvedic yoga stretches.
Then on to the mound, where hitters and pitchers got tips. For pitchers: “Establish your landing point in your warmup. Draw a line. Never over-stride it. Reach back as far as you can in the windup. Pronate your wrist so the back of your hand faces the plate, and turn your hand to face the plate during delivery. Pronate. Pronating properly adds 10 miles an hour to your fastball.”
To hitters: “Let the pitch come to you. Don’t chase the ball. Breathing is critical to that practice. The best hitters say that when they do that, the pitch takes forever to reach them. Sounds [counterintuitive], but that’s what breathing and waiting does for them.”
He also had words for every baseball player, regardless of position, that included: “My dad wrote ‘Hustle’ on the fingers of my first glove.
“Don’t alibi. This is important. Never alibi and don’t blame. Someone made an error behind you? That’s what happened; move on. Throw a double-play ball to the next hitter.
“Good communication is the first line of defense.”
Then on to pitching batting practice to young players from 5 to 15 years old, providing thrills to the Harold Lawries and Summer Cardozas of the Island, Babe Ruth Leaguers who got to face a major league pitcher.