Producer’s Note: Of all the copy the Spaceman generated in his twelve year career and beyond, Bill thinks this article is the best. It is, perhaps, the most thoughtful and in depth article ever written about Bill. Director Pete Vogt and I both took inspiration from “Rebel Hero” and began to understand the context that Bill operated in. Bill can be an elusive person and there were times when we needed to puzzle through his motivation in certain situations. We used the ideas here as a kind of reference point. The author, George Plasketes, is an athlete as well as intellectual. He has an intuitive understanding of Bill that was confirmed when they finally met. Mr. Plasketes opens our film and provides some context for all that follows.

This article appears on this web site courtesy of the author. It originally appeared in the publication Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 21, Summer 1987, Number 1: pp 121-138. All rights are reserved by the author.

The Rebel Hero in Baseball: Bill “Spaceman” Lee in an Orbit All his Own

By George M. Plasketes, Professor, Auburn University

For just an instant I thought I spotted Jesse James on the broken sidewalk.
- Thomas McGuane, Panama

You’re supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things
Man, that’s hard to do
And if you don’t, they’ll screw you
And if you do, they’ll screw you too…
- Warren Zevon, “Bill Lee” (1980)

“Flake” – the sports moniker for anyone whom the management and powers that be cannot understand. In the tight little world of major league baseball, a reputation for flakiness is easy to come by. Yogi Berra got one by looking funny. Dizzy Dean got his by talking funny. Paul Dean got his, and the nickname “Daffy,” just by being Dizzy’s brother. In his pre-sanitarium days, Jimmy Piersall earned his from antics like running the bases backwards. More recently, Bernie Carbo bought an extra seat on the team flights so his stuffed gorilla could sit next to him. In Carbo’s estimation, a flake is “merely someone who enjoys himself”. Someone like Bill Faul, who, during his minor league days, enjoyed himself by biting heads off live parakeets and eating live toads. Granted, conditions can get pretty grim for players in the minors, but in any league, Paul’s dining habits are a rather bizarre way to enjoy oneself. One of Carbo’s teammates, however, existed at a deeper level than most baseball flakes – a level that went beyond insanity, stuffed gorillas, and parakeet-toad buffets.

William Francis Lee, III. Bill Lee. He might as well be named Johnny Smith but he is not. He’s “The Spaceman.” Baseball’s flake-of-flakes. The organic flake. For 14 years (1969-1982), 10 with Boston and four in Montreal, Lee has been anything but the conventional major-league ballplayer. Intelligent, stubborn, and articulate, the free-spirited left-hander has been baseball’s Yossarian, a sole voice of sanity in a game run by “planet-polluting owners” and played by “blood thirsty carnivores”. With his propensity to do the ridiculous and sound off unsparingly, Lee has been both a folk hero to fans and a demon to management.

In this respect, instead of “flake”, perhaps a more appropriate label on Lee is “rebel hero.” The rebel hero, although gifted, is mainly characterized by a great vitality for life. The rebel hero also opposes the dominant culture. It is often the establishment, and the corruption of it, that provokes the heroism. In Lee’s case, the rebellion works at two levels; society in general, particularly the corporate mind set and the structures that violate human rights, the environment, and mother earth; and baseball’s structure as a microcosm of the larger culture. This notion of individualism versus conformity to the mainstream is a quality admired by certain subcultural groups who share similar values. In addition to these characteristics, the rebel hero develops along certain lines. This development includes: 1) spontaneous homage, though not necessarily on a large scale; 2) formal recognition, even though it may often be uncomplimentary; 3) the building of a legend; and 4) an established cult, usually a subcultural group. It is within this frame of reference and these criteria that Bill “Spaceman” Lee can be examined as a rebel hero in baseball.

* * *

“Tibetan priests can sit naked in the snow at 18,000 feet and they have such powers of mental discipline, that if they put their minds to it, they can generate enough heat to melt snow for 20 feet around. Now you put that Tibetan priest on the mound, naked or not, with the baseball in his palm, and he’ll take that power of concentration and make the ball disappear and then materialize down the line in the catcher’s mitt. There’s my idea of a relief pitcher.
- Bill Lee, on the perfect pitcher

Baseball players aren’t so square
They’ve got beards and stringy hair
- T-Bone Burnett, “The Sixties”

As a baseball player, Bill Lee must have some talent, otherwise he would not have pitched in the majors for 14 years. Yet, “gifted” is a somewhat relative term, especially among major-league pitchers. Lee’s success was built on outfoxing, rather than overpowering batters he faced. He claimed a repertoire of 55 different pitches, including a fastball that was rumored to break glass. His most baffling pitch, “The Leephus,” came up to the plate unraveling like a rainbow. Lee’s personal assessment of his pitching ability goes beyond the clichéd answers of most athletes. Lee’s response end up two page dissertations, in this case, on the Corioli effect on how the ball spins:

I have a mediolateral rotation of the humerus, a culmination of wrist flexation, a pronation, which causes he all to use Newton’s law instead of trying to be Nolan Ryan and oppose Newton’s law. He tries to make the ball go up in a world that is basically going down. I just let gravity help my ball and make it sink; that’s because of the pronation. You’ve got all these muscles in your back and the shoulder. The summation of those forces with the pronation causes the ball to spin away from right-handed hitters and give them the illusion that it’s a good pitch to hit, but in the last minute, it’s not. It’s a kind of entrapment

If Nolan Ryan is the “Ryan Express,” then I must be the “Marakesh Express.” Baseball in 20 years will be played in some arcade in Cape May, New Jersey. Everybody will have to bat against Ryan’s 140-mile-per-hour fastball. You can’t get out of the way. What are you going to do? It will be the ultimate video game.

Lee’s assortment of lollipops, rainbows, and junk has paid off. Although not likely to be voted into the Hall of Fame, unless it is for lessening baseball’s dress code, Lee’s career record is a respectable 114-84, including three consecutive 17-win seasons at Boston, and a 16-win season with Montreal in 1979. Lee was also an outstanding fielder, had a good pickoff move, and was an excellent hitting pitcher. Yet, it was Lee’s vitality for life, manifest in his actions and comments that usually rated more attention than his performance on the field.

There have been countless occasions on which Lee reinforced his image as America’s paragon of lefthanders. He showed up on the mound dress in various apparel; coonskin cap, gas mask, beanie with a propeller, space suit. He hit fly balls to himself. On his daily jog to Fenway Park, he stopped to talk to a crow that he claimed was the reincarnated owner of the Red Sox, Tom Yawkey. These are fairly run-of-the-mill things to do – mere rattles in the playpen of flakedom. Yet Lee’s vitality for life is deeper than mere antics. Probably the greatest majority of his heroism is transmitted through the perspectives he offers verbally. Although an iconoclast, Lee’s values and vitality for life are rooted in rather traditional values: simplicity, conservation, and loyalty to friends, among other things.

In between attempts to straighten out the universe, Lee talks to animals, appreciates trees, does Yoga, eats health foods, ponders Einstein, Vonnegut, and Chief Joseph, quotes from Mao, seeks psychological guidance from mystics like Ouspensky and rock musicians like Warren Zevon. In short, Lee is very aware that another world exists outside of baseball. He is not your typical jock. Like the quote from Thoreau that hung above his locker, Lee “marches to a different drummer.”

Lee’s psychedelic Zen-vernacular and cosmic ponderings of life’s contradictions and meanings quickly earned him the “Spaceman” label – a name that both amuses and irritates Lee, because it implied he is not to be taken seriously. On August 12, 1971, the day that astronaut David Scott hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon, Lee beat the Baltimore Orioles. Attempting to put the matter into perspective, as Lee always seemed to do, he asked reporters what landing on the moon meant, after they asked him what his win meant. “What do those guys think of the game? 800 million Chinese don’t even know baseball exists,” Lee said. For Lee, “Spaceman” is actually a misnomer, s he is deeply entrenched in the earth – harmony on the planet and between human beings. Being concerned about overpopulation, equal rights, racism, pollution, recycling, starvation, and nuclear war, argues Lee, are obligations of any sensible person, even one who happens to be an athlete. “You can be a dedicated baseball player, but that doesn’t entitle you not to be depressed by all the things that are happening beyond a baseball stadium.

* * *

“It’s just a game and not a long-term thing. The weather’s gonna change before long and we’ll slip back into another glacial age or we’ll be sucked in by some black hole or something due to the fact that we’ve polluted our planet beyond repair. Like the dinosaurs became extinct, baseball will become extinct because it’s become overly specialized. They went to the designated hitter…Astro-turf…stadiums with no quaintness made of concrete…It’s just the nature of the system’s view of baseball, within the structure of the earth as a spinning spheroid with a type G star many billion miles from anywhere else.”
- Bill Lee, on the stage of baseball, present and future (May 1977)

When it comes to views on baseball, Lee’s attitudes and opinions may sound irreverent, but they are deeply rooted in traditional values. He is a “purist”, a “naturalist,” who wants the game to be a game, like it was intended to be. He wants it to be fun – a kid’s game. “Baseball players are the people who remain kids the longest,” Lee once said. Lee rebels against the business, commercial, and management aspects of the game that treat players as commodities rather than people, aspects that take away from baseball in its purest form. If Lee were commissioner, players would own the parks, where they would sell organic burgers and have mini-marathons and rock concerts after the games. There would be no artificial turf, no designated hitter, no free agency, no concrete stadiums, no advertising at the parks. It would be pure baseball. It would be a game, not a business. It would be fun.

Lee’s wry wit and opinions, when not self-directed, are usually directed at the system of society and baseball. Even though he considers his opinions “constructive criticism,” they are not often interpreted as such. Lee’s talk about alternative ways of energy and living, caring for each other, and living in harmony with the planet is not idle rambling about some dim utopia left over from the 1960s. Lee is sensitive and genuinely concerned about issues that affect our world and our lives. These concerns might also be magnified because of the fact that Lee is an athlete and in the public eye more than the average concerned citizen. But Lee never did change his style, as he considered his feet to be planted more firmly on terra firma than most people in the world.”

No matter how deeply or how firmly Lee stands on terra firma, in traditional values, or harmony, his words and actions have resulted in controversy, misunderstanding, and complications more than once during his career. These incidents have been among the most notable of a long list of rebellious acts:

• Boston, 1976. Lee called his manager, Don Zimmer, “a gerbil.” The same year, Lee retired for one day after the Red Sox sold his friend Bernie Carbo to Cleveland. After Lee returned and was fined $533 (one day’s pay), he told team officials he wished they’d make it $1,599 and give him the weekend off. He said he had returned on behalf of “future ballplayers yet unborn” and it was time for everybody to “start thinking about the earth.”

• Montreal, 1979. In his first spring training with his new team, the Expos, Lee casually remarked during an interview that he used marijuana. He never said he smoked it, but said he used it. He said he sprinkled it on his buckwheat pancakes in the morning because it made him impervious to the bus fumes when he ran six miles to the park each day. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn fined Lee $250. Lee engaged in a legal battle with Kuhn and eventually paid his fine – sending the $250, plus an extra dollar, to the charity of his choice, an Indian mission in Alaska.

• Montreal, 1982. Lee staged another walkout after he was upset at the treatment and subsequent release of teammate Rodney Scott. After tearing off his uniform and leaving a pear branch with a note challenging Manager Jim Fanning to a fight, Lee left the park for a nearby tavern, where he drank some beer, played pool and watched the Expos game on television. He went back to the park in the eighth inning because he figured they might need him to pitch. The next day, Lee was fined and waived. He signed his release form: “BILL LEE, EARTH ’82.”

In any other sport, Lee might be at most, a “colorful character.” It has been the nature of baseball itself – the tradition of conservatism that runs through the game’s foundations, that makes pariahs out of free-thinkers like Lee. It is possible that Lee was able to “get away with” some of the things he did and said because of the cities he played in. Many said that the Boston and Montreal settings were conducive to Lee’s style, whereas the New York media would have been far less tolerant and run Lee out of town. Possibly, but doubtful. These speculations should not be overshadowed by the fact that Lee spent most of his career with the Red Sox, one of the most straight-laced organizations in baseball. This fact could have served to magnify, and at the same time, suppress Lee’s rebellion. The Red Sox organization was one of the first to impose a no-liquor rule on team flights and one of the last to dress their team out in form-fitting knit uniforms. When they did, of course, Lee, the purist, protested by wearing two different color socks with his uniform. The Red Sox, even to this day, have very few black players on their roster.

In Lee, the team officials saw a flaming radical, junkballing, journeyman left-hander, with no fastball, no loyalty, and no values. They may have been right about the fastball, but the loyalty and values were more a matter of interpretation and understanding Lee. Lee’s loyalties and values differed from management’s, as his main concerns were people, the planet, playing baseball, and having fun. So what if the guy would occasionally pop out of the baggage chutes at the airport on road trips? Management did not take kindly to Lee’s “constructive criticism” or his lighting candles on the manager’s desk to protest a teammate’s unfair treatment. They did not interpret Lee’s actions as acts of loyalty, nor did they seem to fully understand his “friendship over competition” policy. Lee’s main policy seemed to be one of fairness. He did not always side with the players on issues in baseball: free agency, salary structure, and compensation. This again comes back to Lee’s concern for the game being fun and his opposition to anything that took away from that, whether management or players.

Another fact that contributed to Lee’s values and awareness was his education, which surpassed the level of most baseball players who sign contacts out of high school and head for the minors rather than college campuses. Lee graduated from Southern Cal, where perhaps many of his social conscious attitudes and values were shaped during the 1960s. He also has a Master’s degree in geography from Southern Mississippi.

Because Lee was considered rather intelligent and articulate, he was Boston’s Player Representative, a role that also magnified some of his anti-establishment views. Although a staunch union supporter during the spring training lockout of 1976, Lee’s union sentiment never lost out to his sensibilities. His union sentiment had its limits as he laughed at player’s demands for first class travel accommodations.

Even though management felt threatened by and often misunderstood Lee’s vitality, they also saw in him a hero who visited sick children, kept local sports talk shows and columns in clover, and drew fans into the owner’s stadiums. They also knew that Lee was as competitive as any player on their roster.

* * *

My problems are few if I don’t stop to think…
I’m traveling lone on this highway of sight…
My eyes see the moon rise
And yes, I’m a visitor, I’ve got a life to live
While here upon this circumstance called earth.
And all I am is energy and now I’m in this form
I came shooting down from the universe at birth.
- Steve Forbert, “A Visitor”

“I met him (Bill Lee) on the space shuttle.”
- Lon Simmons, Oakland A’s announcer

Whether management, fans, teammates, or media, everyone had their own perceptions of Lee. Some hated him and all they thought he represented, while smaller sub-groups, to whom Lee represented certain of their own resentments toward mainstream culture, loved him. Perhaps many players could be included in this group, as Lee articulated resentments that many players felt but were reluctant to voice for fear of reprimand.

The old guard sportswriters, like New York Post columnist Dick Young, had no use for free-thinkers like Lee, because they believed them to be dangerous to the game. Instead of criticizing management for changing the game into more of a business and only being concerned with filling the stadiums, or attacking players for holding out for more money, writers like Young chose instead to criticize Lee for getting hit by a taxi while jogging to the park. The Boston Globe’s Ray Fitzgerald wrote that Lee’s “leave ’em laughing style is all right when he is winning. It’s different when he loses. Why doesn’t the guy leave comedy to the Marx Brothers?

Even radical sportswriter, Jack Scott, saw a connection between Lee’s erratic performance in 1976 and his deteriorating relations with management and the media. “Lee speaks out so much he’s challenged. He’s out there by himself and any energy he expends on those other things takes away from what’s left for performance on the field, said Scott. Boston TV reporter Clark Booth, a friend and ally of Lee’s, felt that Lee sometimes went too far, especially with comments directed toward Manager Don Zimmer.

Clif Keane and Larry Claflin, two rather rigid veteran sports reporters with rather rigid beliefs about how baseball players should behave, were not moved by Lee’s observations about the game – for example, “Each baseball represents some Haitian slave’s eight-hour work day.” Te conservative hosts of Clif and Claf radio talk show waged a campaign to rid the New England region of Lee almost from the time he first toed the Fenway rubber. Claflin may have been more restrained since Lee once rescued him from a near brawl with teammate Gary Peters in a Detroit bar. Keane’s descriptions of Lee, however, included “goon head”, “imbecile,” and “drug addict.” Keane also wondered over the air whether Lee received cortisone shots in his head or in his shoulder. He also said that if the Red Sox management had any class, they would tell Lee to “shove it” after his 24 hour sabbatical following Bernie Carbo’s trade. Lee Keane’s assaults and was only concerned about comments directed and Lee’s family and teammates.

George Kimball of the underground Boston Phoenix, the journal most closely allied with Lee’s style, made the rather general distinction between Lee’s fanatical friends and fanatical foes: “Nobody who can count doesn’t like Bill Lee.”

Well, yes, no, and maybe. Love him or hate him, people know who Bill Lee is. The Boston area public had always been divided along geographical as well as generational lines in its feelings toward Lee. In the blue-collar Irish bars of Southie, Lee was an anathema after he defended Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr., who ordered the desegregation of Boston schools by busing. Lee called Garrity “the only guy in this town with any guts.” A week after that comment, Lee received a rambling missive from City Councilor Albert O’Neil, a demigod among the anti-busing forces. The letter attacked Lee’s politics, ancestry, personal habits, and pitching ability. An amused Lee returned the letter with a note: “Dear Mr. O’Neil: I think you should be aware that some idiot has obtained some of your stationary.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Lee was a hero to a smaller cultural sub-group, comprised of the young, hip-liberal college population – largely based in Cambridge, the bleachers, and the Eliot Lounge. After being traded to Montreal, Lee’s following may have grown even larger. He enchanted Canadians, relegating Margaret Trudeau and the Stanley Cup playoffs to second billing and earning Lee an ovation after each inning he pitched. “The French Canadians love him,” said one longtime Expo fan. “They’re free spirits and so is he. They don’t speak English and neither does he.”

Another important audience for Lee, of course, were his teammates. For the most part, they seem to have understood Lee’s vitality for life, perhaps because they were in a better position (no pun intended) to do so than other people. Sure, many of his teammates thought Lee to be a little crazy or weird or flaky, but as long as he continued to work hard and compete with the intensity that he did, they did not mind Lee having fun. Former teammate Tom House had this description of Lee:

Deep down inside – where nobody has ever gotten to him – Bill is a great human being. It’s just that in baseball, the Peter Principal reaches its absolute and highest level, and the absolute worse people run the show. Bill realized very early the ludicrousness of being in a position where so many intellectual vegetables have to much authority and influence over the way he lives his life. I always thought Bill was an accident looking for a place to happen. But he’s too intelligent to be self-destructive. He knows marginal players have to play by the rules. Any deviation from the norm is the ticket out. But he’s a master at walking the tightrope. Bill never let anyone diminish his character. And he never will.

Carlton Fisk, Lee’s catcher at Boston for years, came up through the minors with Lee at Pittsfield and Waterloo. The prevailing atmosphere, according to Fisk, was “A whole lot of shouting matches between Bill and the manager.” Fisk claimed that even back then, Lee would have nothing to do with authority or discipline. He was way ahead of the other players in age and worldliness, and resented being treated like a teenager, which most of the players were. Fisk said he was perhaps attracted to that quality in Lee, that his cares and priorities were at the opposite end of the rainbow from most players.

“When I did something it was for a reason, out of judgment or something,” said Fisk. “But this guy Lee would do something just for the hell of it, and not think about the consequences.” Fisk also remembers Lee getting to the majors in a hurry, less than a year. Fisk figured that they moved Lee up so fast to be sure that he couldn’t get anybody out and then they could send him on his way. Fisk said:

Management was still making it hell for Bill last season (1977). People around here told him he wasn’t worth anything, that he wasn’t the type of guy to have around. The club tried to infect the area with nasty talk about what a miserable mess Bill Lee was. They tried to turn the flock on one of their won. But the Spaceman tricked ‘em. He tricked everybody.

“I went to a psychiatrist at Harvard once. He said I was the greatest con artist he had ever met. He said don’t dare stop.”
- Bill Lee

Lee’s popularity was less favorable with other teams, which, not out of character for Lee, has labeled among other things: “emotionally mediocre,” (Oakland A’s championship teams of 1972, ’73, and ’74), and “couldn’t break a chandelier if they held batting practice in a hotel lobby,” (California Angels). Lee, who was the third highest winning percentage of all time versus the Yankees , always saved some of his best verbal off-speed pitches for them as well. He labeled them a “fine sociological study of human frailties,” saying that they “fought like a bunch of hookers swinging purses.” Following that comment on a bench clearing brawl between the Yankees and Red Sox, which incidentally left Lee with a badly dislocated shoulder, Yankee manager Billy Martin sent Lee a Mafia-style package, complete with a dead fish and note that read, “Put this in your purse you no good —.” Lee once called Martin a “neo-Nazi” and the team “his Brown Shirts,” owner George Steinbrenner “a convicted felon,” and insisted he would never play for the Yankees because “they represent everything that is wrong with America.”

In sorting out all that players, fans, and media have said about Lee, perhaps there was one man’s opinion that might be respected just as much, or more than anyone’s – Carl Yaztremski. Lee referred to Yaz as “Mr. Infinity” because his number was “8” and if you turn it on its side, it looks like the sign for infinity. “Anytime Yaz sleeps, he gains strength. If he sleeps enough, he may play forever,” said Lee. Yaztremski perhaps best sums up Lee’s vitality and energy ad marvels at Lee’s athletic ability: “He’ll play pepper for 20 or 30 minutes and never want to stop. He’ll take fungoes in the outfield all by himself. He shags forever in batting practice. He runs four or five miles a day. Billy really works. Between the lines, he’s all business. He puts the uniform on. He enjoys the game. You talk about a guy who would play baseball for nothing, no pay. This is the guy.”

If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, and the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, then that means left-handers are the only ones in their right minds.”
- Bill Lee, struggling with another of life’s contradictions and paradoxes

I knew a man from Montreal who looked a lot like you
I’ve been around a long time, forever – that’s how long
And once I was a gut of wind, a brief but mighty gale,
And once I was a wagon wheel and once I was a whale,
And I’ve been on other planets, too, at least fifteen I’d say,
And all across the universe, in every which way,
But mostly it’s been planet earth, and I don’t know why that’s so,
Let’s drink up one more glass of beer, it’s almost time to go.
- Steve Forbert, “One More Glass of Beer”

Lee’s existence and self-perception is at times filled with contradictions. Lee is a Spaceman, but he is entrenched in Mother Earth. He seeks harmony, but his protests cause disharmony. Baseball brings him peace and it brings him turmoil. Perhaps contradictions are apart of the nature and existence of the rebel hero. “I walk the tightrope between two worlds. Between the oral and the doing, which I think are contradictory worlds,” said Lee. “And the only way to resolve contradictions is to do them both.”

It is not surprising, then, that Lee sees himself as more philosophical than political, because political “just hides what’s beneath.” Lee believes in a bumper sticker he once saw: “Don’t vote. It only encourages them.” He doesn’t believe in political systems the way they stand but in “interrelation, like Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians.” Lee is more concerned with irreconcilable contradictions:

Christians believe in God, in helping one another, and do unto others. On the other hand, atheists don’t believe in God, they say we’re only here for the moment, nothing else matters. Now capitalism says every man for himself, do whatever you want to better yourself, while communism has everyone sharing and working together. Logically, communists should be Christians and capitalists should be atheists, but it’s just the opposite.

Lee even describes himself in somewhat similar contradictory terms: “radical conservative with a liberal heart.”

Lee does not consider himself a rebel, but rather views the management as the rebels in baseball. They are the ones, according to Lee, who want to value commodities over human beings and push the butch haircuts and the tines-on-the-road-trips-type thing. “One time when I was a kid, I asked my dad, ‘how come the good guys always get screwed?’ and he said, ‘It’s because of the jerks who run it,’” said Lee. “My dilemma in life is that I have never known who the white hats are.”

Conformity, and the demand for it, has always been Lee’s problem with baseball. To management, he was a free spirit–but not in the same spirit of their game. Lee examines this aspect of the game and where he fits in:

It’s not conformity that makes for your spontaneous, great plays. It’s the fact that everybody has the ability to express themselves differently, which makes baseball so great….

Baseball is a very conservative institution…You’ve got to stay conservative…but you still have to let your heart stay liberal. If it becomes too rigid, it’s going to die. You have to want it to change for the better. I am very conservative. I believe that they’re very liberal, because they keep pushing institutions that were brought onto this planet that seem to be destructive, polluting things. And I am not that way. I would rather run to where I have to go rather than taking a private automobile. And then I would rather take rapid transit… and that’s the way I conduct my life. And they don’t like it that way. And I consider myself the conservative in that way. They’re the liberals.

People who perpetuate the system are not conservative. The system is a self-destructive system. Liberals are liberal with a fragile ecology of this planet. A true conservative is the American Indian.

The earth is my status quo – not profit…

Lee’s values are socially conscious, humanistic values – rooted in a 1960s mentality. The corruption of the status quo–human beings, the establishment, and environment–are what provokes much of Lee’s heroism and rebellion. At the core of Lee’s heroism lies a vitality for life and opposition to the dominant culture–individuality versus conformity to the mainstream. In many ways, baseball’s management reflects the structure, the institutionalization, the corporate mind set that dominates the larger society and often violates human and environmental concerns.

* * *

You’ve seen him leaning on the streetlight
Listening to some song inside
You’ve seen him standing by the highway
Trying to hitch a ride
Well they tried so hard to hold him
Heaven knows how hard they tried
But he’s made up his mind
He’s the restless kind
He’s the wild age…
- Warren Zevon, “Wild Age”

I’m different and I don’t care who knows it
Somethin’ about me, it’s not the same, yeah
I’m different and that’s how it goes
Ain’t gonna play no boss man’s game
- Randy Newman, “I’m Different”

Lee’s development as a rebel hero in baseball has included spontaneous homage, formal recognition that was usually mixed between the positive and negative, an emerging legend out of his persona, and identification with him as a hero by a small subcultural group.

The spontaneous homage the Lee, whether at a bar, in the media, or at the ballpark, usually took on subcultural overtones, or in this case, undertones. Whether people liked him or not, Lee was a recognizable figure in baseball’s culture and the “other” culture. People knew the “Spaceman” – the guy who “did this” or “said that”. Recognition of Lee in the media was steady, and usually came in little tidbits. He never appeared on the cover of a major sports publication, even though one like Sports Illustrated (May 1978) would occasionally do a lengthy feature on him. Instead, Lee was more likely to – and did – appear in publications not devoted exclusively to sports, as his appeal reached beyond the baseball audience. New Times, MacLean’s, High Times, Playboy, Penthouse, and People were among the magazines that did features or interviews with Lee. The audiences of these magazines are indeed wide ranging, from hip-countercultural-underground to strictly men to grocery-lane-checkout. It is somewhat surprising that the only time Lee has appeared in Rolling Stone has been in their Random Notes column. In July, 1980, Lee did, however, make the cover of High Times, a subcultural/drug magazine. The cover had a picture of Lee in the lower right hand corner, and print on the entire cover: HIGH TIMES; “What would happen if Bowie Kuhn levied a $250 fine against every player in baseball who smoked dope?” BILL LEE; “He’d be a rich man.” The inside article featured a lengthy interview with Lee.

Sport, a monthly publication, aided in Lee’s continuing recognition as they provided a column, “Ask Bill Lee,” for readers to write in questions on any topic and Lee would answer one each month. Questions ranged from environmental issues to politics to baseball to cosmic inquiries. Lee’s column ran from October, 1977, to February, 1980. This type of obscure column was the type of place Lee’s followers were most likely to search regularly for notes, quotes, and updates about the Spaceman. The “Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee” by-line in the “Quotes of the Week” or “They Said It” columns of newspapers and magazines appeared almost as regularly as the comics or editorial page.

Lee’s notoriety was not bound to a few lines in some off-the-track, out-of-the-way columns. The headlines he received when he protested or walked out vowing not to return to baseball pointed to a recognition and appreciation that was not limited to the counter culture. When Lee “retired” from baseball after the Carbo trade, it was such a wondrous story to the millions of New Englanders who loved and hated Lee that the baseball-mad Boston newspapers bannered it on the front pages, above the Carter-Torrijos meetings in Panama.

Montreal newspapers were not different than Boston’s in their homage to Lee, except that Montreal’s were in French. After Lee homered, pitched the Expos to a pennant-drive victory over the Cardinals, and stopped the game in the seventh inning to chase a butterfly from the batter’s box (again claiming it was the late Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey returning to tell Lee he appreciated his effort); the French tabloid, le journal de montreal, carrier a picture of Lee on the front page the next day and the headline: “Lee pitches, bats, and makes people laugh.”

There is other evidence, particularly in the media, that indicates homage, formal recognition, legendary status, and an established cult following for Lee:

• Newsweek, October, 1982, ran a two column story on Lee in the magazine’s “Update” section. It is significant that the article appeared almost six months after Lee had been released from the Expos and ultimately from baseball.

• Pitching for the Longueil Senators of the Quebec Major Senior League, after being released by the Expos, Lee drew a league-record 1,000 fans. On most nights, the teams have trouble drawing even 200 fans.

• Pacific Alliance, a non-profit, non-nuclear organization, sold more Bill Lee t-shirts than any of their other shirts.

• In Bob Chieger’s Voices of Baseball, Quotations of the Summer Game, only Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher. Yogi Berra, Jim Bouton, and Joe Garagiola are quoted more often than Lee. Lee’s autobiography, The Wrong Stuff, is published by Viking Press, 1984

• Warren Zevon, anything but your conventional singer/songwriter, who is responsible for catchy tunes like “Excitable Boy,” “Werewolves of London,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” among others, wrote a song in tribute to Lee. The song, cleverly titled “Bill Lee,” is on Zevon’s “Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School” album (1980).

• A 70-minute documentary film about Lee and his life was released in Canada in 1981. The film was reported to have done well in Montreal’s small movie houses.

• Lee’s appearances on television have also been rather limited to late night shows – Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow and Late Night with David Letterman, talk shows that appeal to the subcultural audience. Although in one interview he expressed an interest in hosting Saturday Night Live, Lee interestingly has never appeared on the show. It seems that Lee would have been a logical choice to host the show. Of course, Lee also regularly gave the line ups if his team was playing on TV’s “Game of the Week” as producers undoubtedly recognized Lee’s personality and penchant for off the wall (for a double) comments.

• Lee remains a popular choice for giving addresses to students at colleges. His most recent was at Rhode Island College in Providence. Since the students normally have some input into the selection of speakers, the choice of Lee might indicate that there still remains a strong Lee following in the New England region as well as a subcultural following.

• Even though there has been no record of it happening yet, it is possible that someone will change their phone number to 337-7718, which is Bill Lee upside down.

* * *

And sometimes I say things I shouldn’t
Like…
—Warren Zevon, “Bill Lee”

I consider the wonder of things that befell me, convinced that my lie was the best omelet you could make with a chainsaw.
—Thomas McGuane, Panama

Don’t get complicated, Eddie. Because when you get complicated, you’re unhappy, and when you’re unhappy, your luck runs out.
—from The Blue Dahlia

Bill Lee’s opinions, protests, and virtual existence within major league baseball eventually ended May 8, 1982. After being waived by the Expos, no other team claimed Lee. This was somewhat surprising since most teams welcomed a smart left-hander, especially during pennant drives. On the other hand, who wants a rebel? Some claimed that Montreal bad-mouthed Lee around the league and that he was unofficially blackballed from baseball. Of course, Lee did not help his own cause by insisting that he would not go to the American League because of the DH and he preferred to play with a team whose home park has natural grass. More specifically, Lee said he wanted to play for the Cubs in Wrigley Field so he could live out a fantasy of playing left field in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. “With two outs, the batter hits one up the alley and I catch it and become stuck in the ivy for eternity,” said Lee.

Teams around the league might have grown weary of Lee’s free spirited approach to the game and refused to sign him. It is the 1980s now, not the 1970s, not the 1960s. Just as the “profit at all costs” is the dominant attitude in society, baseball has evolved into more of a business than a game. The players and owners do not exist in some vacuum, but rather are members of that larger culture outside of baseball. A few, however, like Lee, chose not to go with the flow – the cash flow.

Along with its new corporate look of the 1970s and 1980s came a player’s strike, free agency, contract disputes, mega-buck salaries, and drug abuse – things that tarnished baseball’s conservative image. The powers that be seem determined to rectify these problems and return baseball to a pedestal in society. Within this structure, it is unlikely that there is a place for the rebel hero, and if he did exist there, how much of his individualism and non-conformity would be tolerated by those who run the game? One wonders whether or not Lee could exist as a rebel hero in baseball for 14 years had be begun his career in 1979 rather than 1969. Evidence may point to Lee as the last of a dying breed in baseball – an endangered species, vanishing, soon to be extinct. One year after his release for the Expos and after no team claimed him, Lee called the Expos Olympic Stadium offices, presumably to discuss the possibility of his returning to pitch for them. Management did not accept his calls.

On a broader cultural perspective, Lee is no different than other individuals or groups that choose not to conform to the mainstream. These individuals, like Lee, almost become tragic figures within The System, as they usually find their individualism, values, causes, awareness, and cries for change suppressed and swallowed. Awareness is not hip, upward mobility is. Money is the long hair of the 1980s. And it seems that the more one simply tries to live, the more one attempts to put everything into a proper perspective – the more complicated it gets, the more wearisome the struggle for individualism grows.

The growing hassles of the game that Lee loves – the game that was supposed to be a game, supposed to be fun, supposed to allow him to be a kid longer than anything else–seem to have caught up with the Spaceman. Lee’s constant refusal to conform, to be robotized and confined within baseball’s structures and the cultural mainstream ultimately led to his release and possible blackballing. Yet he survived 14 years, sometimes going too far, while other times being misunderstood. Perhaps baseball “wasn’t fun anymore,” and the game had been corrupted. It was that corruption that Lee rebelled against – corruption that violated humans, society, baseball and the earth.

Lee claimed that he could find solitude elsewhere and the same peace of mind that baseball brought him. Yet, one year after his release, he was calling the Expos to discuss recycling–his own. Just another contradiction weaved into the fabric of the rebel hero.

Although Bill Lee is now removed from baseball, the legend lives on within the dominant culture and is perpetuated by a subcultural following and the occasional tidbits and surface in hidden corners of newspapers, sports publications, and obscure columns. Those interested have to search a lot harder now and only get fragments about Lee. Some of those fragments may even border on rumor: He has applied for immigrant land status in Canada…Became a subsistence farmer in the Pacific Northwest where he shares fishing rights with the Indians (not Cleveland)… Is working on his family’s walnut ranch in California… Is forming a league for older players who will travel around the world with their kids, play ball, and have picnics… Is biking to the Shakespearean Festival on Prince Edward Island like he did during the 1981 strike… Is in British Columbia building geodesic dome in the side of mountain, with southern exposure and heated by solar energy and methane gas extracted from chicken manure… Coaches a semi-pro baseball team whose expertise includes yoga, Zen Buddhism, karate, and solar energy… Is touring China again… Is playing a lot of semi-pro ball and will play winter ball to prepare for a comeback next year… Works as an instructor at a baseball school for kids in Cote St. Luc, teaching them that autographs are a waste of time and excess baggage that one carries forever. Lee advises them to shake someone’s hand instead, enjoy the moment, and split.

Others might remember what Lee said in 1979: “But someday, someday soon, I’m just going to disappear and no one will ever see me again.” Whatever the case, the legend of the Spaceman will live on, and there will always be that small, subcultural group that identifies with the notion of individualism versus conformity to the mainstream and the other values Bill Lee represented as the rebel hero—not only in baseball but in society.

Heroes—whether rebels or traditional—are important to any culture. Every culture—whether the dominant mainstream or the smaller subgroup—needs heroes. They provide a culture with an idealized image of itself. The relieve anxieties and personify what a culture is capable of becoming. Heroes provide clues to the continuing values of a culture.

Bill Lee once said that “people love the etherealness of a spaceman, that his environment is anywhere and he can exist anywhere. All he needs is an umbilical cord somewhere.”

Lost in space
I heard you were lost in space
That’s such a lonely place for you to be
Out of control
Singin with too much soul…
—Neil Young, “Lost in Space”