The Rebel Cave

It's three in the morning in the subterranean cement training room below the San lose Bees ballpark. The 10-by-20 windowless bunker is as musty and cluttered as Bruce Wayne’s Bat Cave. Though the airless cell with the low ceiling is the size of a Bowery flop, the three professional athletes who actually live here call it the Stadium Hilton.

The Hilton sports no bathroom, so Ken Reitz is outside peeing in the dark beneath the grandstand. Down below, Mike "Stash" Bigusiak and Darryl Cias are half out of their uniforms, lounging on their greasy mattresses and trying to forget the last three days on the road. It’s been a long night. Earlier in the evening the Bees were two-hit by the Fresno Giants, a collection of peach-faced, cocky teenagers wearing the sparkling uniforms of a bush-league team with major-league connections. After the game, the unshowered Bees were treated to a fifteen-minute dinner at a roadside Burger King. Then it was back on the bus for a rickety four-hour ride home, up California's desolate Central Valley and over the Pacheco Pass road, a suicide run to the South Bay.

Such is life for the lowliest team in the lowly California League. You ride a bus with a million miles under the hood, hang your one uniform on a locker-room hook, sleep in cheap motels, draw $11 a day meal money, and pay for whatever pleasure you can find on the road. Average California League salary: $750 a month.

It sure ain’t the Show. That’s what baseball players call the major leagues.

When you’re part of the Show’s cast, you ride first-class on chartered airplanes, sleep in fancy big-city hotels, play ball in air-conditioned domed stadiums, and have your pick of some of the finest groupies in the country. Average Show salary: $431,521 a year.

Team captain and third baseman Ken Reitz, catcher Darryl Cias, and six other San lose Bees have already played the Show, many in starring roles. But somewhere along the line, most were labeled-incurable drug addict, head case, or rebel-and banished, probably forever, from the major. They all want back.

But on this late San lose night, the bunker beneath the third-base line will have to do. The denizens have redecorated the place: rug remnants lifted from the dumpster of nearby Carpet City, U.S.A. now line the bare cement floor.There's a refrigerator, a beer sign, and three broken bleacher seats for guests. Cias, a devoted painter who bears a striking resemblance to Jimmy Buffett, has recently finished a huge, madly grinning portrait of a green-faced Charles Manson on the inside door. "I am not a fan of the man," says the laid-back twenty-nine-year-old. "I painted Charles Manson as a conversation piece."

Cias’s winding road through Organized Baseball began hours after his high-school prom. That was when the Oakland A’s signed the promising catcher for $15,000. He made slow but steady progress through the minors, finally getting called up at the beginning of the 1983 season. He batted a solid .333 with the A’s, then headed to South America, where he starred in winter ball. He thought he was a shoo-in to start for Oakland in 1984.

Over the winter, however, the team had hired a new general manager, Karl Kuehl. A strict disciplinarian who liked to lecture his troops on the psychology of victory, Kuehl apparently couldn’t come to terms with Cias’s Gomer Pyle attitude toward the diamond wars. "He was a real Nazi,” remembers Cias. ”He believed that you couldn’t have fun and work at the same time. To me the game was always fun. I played because I loved the game.”

After the first few games of spring training, Kuehl told Cias he was sending him back to the minors. Cias, convinced he could catch for someone else in the majors, asked for his outright release. The A’s refused; Cias asked louder. The A’s finally relented, and Cias suddenly found himself unemployable. "Anytime a new team wants to sign you,” he explains, ”they call your last team and ask why you were released. Now if the general manager is any kind of human being, he says, ‘There just wasn’t any room on the team.' But Kuehl said, 'Cias is a problem, he doesn’t want to work.' That was a lie-Karl Kuehl is the only guy in my entire life I didn't get along with."

Kuehl, still with the A’s, pish-poshes the notion that personality played any part in the decision to get rid of Cias. "We like people who have fun,” he insists. "Darryl was a good guy to have on a ball club-he kept guys loose and had a positive attitude. It's unfortunate when you run into a numbers problem.

With younger guys moving up, sometimes you just have to make room. No major-league ball club is going to let someone go who they feel can help them." Kuehl professes disbelief when he learns Cias thinks he personally blackballed the catcher. "Oh my God, not at all! ” he says. "You know, at one point a couple months after Darryl left, we had some injuries, and our manager wanted to have him back. We tried to reach him-and no one knew where to find him.”

Meanwhile, Stash Bigusiak, who has been listening to Cias lament from his mattress, chuckles, shakes his head, and flips on the Hilton’s battered black-and-white TV. Footage of bombed-out buildings from the U.S. raid on Libya flashes on the screen. "Shit," he says, shaking his head again. "And we think we’ve got problems.”

Unlike Cias, Stash never even made it to the Show. Signed three months after his high school graduation for $25,000, he made good progress through the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. But in 1976, shortly after he was named minor-league player of the month for his work with the Clinton, Iowa, farm club, Stash’s career screeched to a halt. He says his manager, Bob Hartsfield, called him a "dumb Polack.” Stash then told the skipper he would deck him if he repeated the slur. The manager said it again. Moments later, says Stash, the manager was on the floor, and Stash was out of baseball. "I was a punk,” says Stash. ”That’s one of the bad things about baseball-it takes young, immature kids and puts them in the limelight. And ten years later you end up like this." (Hartsfield, now a scout with the Houston Astros, says the incident never took place. "Forget it," he scoffs. "I never had any problems with Mike. He just couldn’t throw the ball real hard. He couldn’t get anybody out.")

Stash spent the next decade away from baseball. For the past two years he’d been working as a gumshoe for an Atlanta, Georgia, detective agency. But even while videotaping adulterous couples from behind motel hedges, he couldn’t forget his aborted career. When his girlfriend, a producer for the Cable News Network, gave him his walking papers, he signed with the Bees and headed West. Though he now spends a lot of time trashing his ex-girlfriend’s memory, he keeps two framed snapshots of her prominently displayed in the Hilton. "She'll be back,” he says as he adjusts the TV’s coat-hanger aerial, "just as soon as I hit the Show.”

Ken Reitz has finished his predawn piss under the grandstand and returns to the Hilton wearing only his underwear, black-and-white checked tennis shoes, and sunglasses. Cias holds up a clipping he’s been handed and laughs. "Hey, Reitzy,” says the catcher, "we were just reading about you. ln The New York TIMES !!” Reitz, thirty-five, yawns, pulls out a slimy mattress from the closet, and lies down. Cias reads aloud:

"Dateline St. Louis, April 23, 1979. 'The St. Louis Cardinals third baseman, Ken Reitz, said today that his temper had cost him $1,250. The penalty stemmed from an incident that occurred April 11 during a ten-hour rain delay at Lambert Airport here while the team was waiting to fly to Pittsburgh. Reitz said the amount represented damages he and two teammates caused to a Trans World Airlines waiting room, plus a fine of undisclosed amount .... ' ”

"We were sitting in this airport VIP lounge for ten hours," Reitz says. He laughs, takes off his shades, and settles back on the mattress. "Everybody was loaded-the players, the sportswriters, everybody. Keith Hernandez and I started to play football. I went out for a pass and crashed through a plate-glass partition.

Then everybody went wild. I started throwing chairs, and some phones got ripped out of the wall.”

"A twelve hundred and fifty dollar fine,” marvels Cias.

Reitz folds his arms behind his head and stares at the concrete ceiling. "Twelve hundred and fifty dollars, shit," he says with a laugh. "I made two million dollars playing baseball, and I don’t know where a fucking cent is.” Cias stares dumbfounded and says, "Reitzy, you’re laughing. How the hell can you laugh?" Stash barks, "What else is he supposed to do?" Reitz yawns, turns out the light, and giggles, "Yeah, what else am I supposed to do?" Cias returns the giggle. "Christ, Reitzy, you know I used to have a picture of you from the cover of the Sporting News on my wall?"

Reitzy is already asleep.

Most of the Bees dispersed that night as soon as the bus wheezed to a wee-hour halt in front of San lose Municipal Stadium. Hank Wada-a Zen master, former star catcher with the Nishetetsu Lions, and the Bees’ acupuncturist and pitching coach-mysteriously vaporized from the parking lot like Kane in Kung Fu. Meanwhile, the five Japanese youngsters on the squad headed home to their boardinghouse across the railroad tracks from the stadium. Outfielder Mickey Yamano probably had gotten the most out of the torturous trip back from Fresno. Before he boarded the bus, he had known only two American phrases: "thank you" and "hamburger.” Now, after a midnight tutorial offered by team captain Reitzy, Mickey could hum "Jingle Bells” and say "cow," "six-pack,” "Hulk Hogan," and "blow job.”

A few Bees near the bus tried to round up a proper quorum for an after-hours booze jaunt. "Hey, Howser,” one yelled to the most notorious Bee of all. ”You want to go drinking?" But infamous wild man Steve Howe, the 1980 National League Rookie of the Year, passed. Someone told Howe what L.A. sportswriters-the very men who’d hounded him out of their town in 1985 after portraying him as Iohn Belushi in a jockstrap-were calling his new team. "The Bad-Nose Bees?" laughed the rowdy, personable Howe. "I’ve got a great nose. The son of a bitch could suck an egg through a garden hose.” But not tonight, not this year, no more.

Steve Howe is on a mission. And although he has not turned into a wimp- it was his idea to paint the team bus black with a huge logo reading EAT ME- Howe has informed everyone that he has taken a vow of sobriety worthy of a Hank Wada disciple. He, too, headed into the dark alone, back to the San lose Hotel where he lives under an assumed name.

The Blackball

The Encyclopedia of Baseball gives no clue as to why so many ballplayers with big-league talent are spending their summers playing ball for the barrel-bottom Bees. The team's lineup of ex-big-league stars, each still in what should be his prime, is impressive: besides Reitz, Cias, and Howe, there is pitcher Mike Norris, thirty-one, who won twenty-two games and was runner-up for the Cy Young Award with the Oakland A’s in 1980 ; and Daryl Sconiers, twenty-six, a power-hitting first baseman who was knighted by the California Angels as Rod Carew’s heir apparent. Then there is Derrel Thomas, who in fifteen respectable years in the majors set the all-time record for most nicknames denoting a walking time bomb. Thomas’s monikers include Hot Dog, Minute Man, Farmer john, and junkyard Dog.

Somewhere along the line, each of these Bees blew a promising major-league career and was banished from the Show. For Howe, Norris, Thomas, and Reitz it was drugs. Reitz, a twelve-year major-league veteran who holds the single-season record for fewest errors committed by a third baseman, said he was so hooked on pills that by the time the Pittsburgh Pirates cut him, "I was functionally psychotic.” Reitz’s number came up on a Chicago expressway a few years back. Convinced a stranger was lurking in his backseat, Reitz pulled over, took out a shotgun, and blew his car to bits.

Substance abuse among baseball players is a tradition older than the seventhinning stretch. Ever since the Sporting News reported in the 18805 that St.Louis Browns outfielder Curt Welch habitually hid cases of beer behind the billboards lining Sportsman's Park, it has been common knowledge that baseball players enjoyed getting high before, after, and sometimes during games. In 1903, a Cincinnati newspaper went so far as to publish the following advice to the city’s constantly besotted Reds: "Whenever a ball looks like this-ooo-take a chance on the middle one."

Later, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and many of the innocently cast Brooklyn Dodger ”Boys of Summer" did much of their best work either plastered or hung over. Pete Rose admitted he used to enjoy an occasional pregame upper, pitcher Dock Ellis even said he was tripping on acid when he threw a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1970.

Still, the game retained its squeaky-clean image. Por the public, baseball players were working-class heroes who, like most of their fans, were paid little money for a lot of work and who suffered at the hands of their employers. Sportswritcrs, paid as poorly as the players, served the players as friends and propagandists. Even well-paid superstars were treated with kid gloves, and their images remained as shiny and vacuous as a smile on a Wheaties box. Hence, Ty Cobb was not even fined when he was accused in the 1920s of fixing a game years earlier. Hence, when Babe Ruth allegedly came down with a vicious dose of the clap that caused him to miss part of the 1925 season, the press reported that the Bambino had simply eaten too many hot dogs and come down with "the bellyache heard around the world."

The first real dent in the public's one-dimensional perception of ballplayers came with the publication in 1970 of Ball Four, pitcher Jim Bouton’s locker-room journal of life in the big leagues. Though the book seems quaint by today's tell-all standards, it created a scandal. Here, for the first time, were players as they really were-painfully human. They drank, they fought, and they whored.

The next blow came in 1976 when haseba|l's reserve clause was lifted and players were allowed to market themselves to the highest bidder. During the next ten years, fans watched as average salaries went up almost 900 percent and their favorite players heedlessly shuttled from team to team. At the same time, a new breed of sportswriter emerged. Unwilling to act as sycophants for the game, they increasingly portrayed both owners and players as they often were: greedy and stupid. In other words, as people.

ln the past, the owners burnished the game's image by pridefully booting out chance screwups. Except, that is, when the jugheads turned out to be superstars who filled the owners’ stadiums and bankbooks. No longer. With the public calling for the heads of its former heroes, not even stars like Mike Norris and Steve Howe could keep messing up. "Knowing what I know now,” says Howe with a sigh, "I would never have come forward [with my addictions]. I would have kept my mouth shut and not said a word to anybody.” Howc’s statistics were great even when he was addicted-and he realizes that if he had not gone public with his problems, he would have saved a couple of the strikes that baseball allows its premier players.

The Rebel Leader

Last spring, thirty-year-old Harry Steve found himself in the role of president, general manager, and field boss of the sorry San lose Bees. Harry, a slight, chain-smoking man in an almost constant state of agitation, had already been running the club for two years as a salaried employee. But when the team’s owner, businessman Peter Kern, refused to raise his $1,000-a-month salary, Harry came up with an offer that even Kern couldn’t turn down. Harry would run the team for free, keep any profits the never-before-profitable Bees made, and pay for any losses out of his own pocket. Kern agreed, and Harry got what he had always dreamed of, his own baseball team. Never mind the fact that he was broke and there was virtually no way the Bees could make any money.

Harry Steve’s gamble was insane. Of the 150 teams that compose the country’s eleven minor leagues, only three have no affiliation with a major-league organization and, as a result, get no free players or financial help. Without that big-league umbilical, an independent club is doomed to suck, both on the field and at the cash register. All the good young players are already owned by major-league teams with minor-league affiliates, and it's almost impossible to turn a profit solely on gate receipts.

As fate would have it, the team Harry got for free was one of those doomed independents. For the last three years, the San lose Bees have finished last in the California League, averaging a dismal 752 fans a game. The Bees were so bad that no one ever complained when the San lose Mercury News barely mentioned the team. Harry's first move upon arriving in San lose was to try and lure a major-league team to associate itself with his team. No one would touch the dreck franchise or the unorthodox general manager. The only deal Harry could strike was with the Seibu Lions of ]apan’s Pacific League. T hat's how he came by Hank Wada and his five samurai.

Finally, at the end of his wits and bankbook, Harry got an idea. Instead of making do with young, talentless minor-league castoffs, he would try using genuine major-league athletes branded as untouchables by the men who run the Show. He would hire every talented dope fiend or head case who had been thrown a blackball by the majors. He would pay them peanuts, win some games, draw some fans, and maybe make some money, in return, the pariahs would get another shot at showing the world they had learned their lesson. So Harry got out a phone book and tracked down the twenty-eight-year-old host of a radio show called “Steve Howe's Rock and Roll Revue" in Whitefish, Montana.

The Rebel Reliever

In 1980, Steve Howe brought his 95-mile-per-hour fastball to the Los Angeles Dodgers. In his first year, Howe became the ace of the Dodgers relief staff, winning seven games and saving seventeen more. He finished with a 2.65 earned run average and was named National League Rookie of the Year. In the next two years, he won or saved dozens, had a minuscule ERA, and was named to the National League All-Star Team. The Dodgers won the World Championship, and Howe won a World Series game.

Howe, drawing an $800,000-a-year salary, was quickly buttered up as the toast of baseball-crazed L.A., whose sycophants rate personal access to Dodger stars on a par with lunch at Spago with Quincy Jones. Steve Howe, a twenty-two-year-old son of an auto worker from Pontiac, Michigan, wandered unaware into the dangerous sludge of Hollywood hangers-on. To put it mildly, he began to party.

At the end of the 1982 season, he publicly announced he was a cocaine addict and checked into an Arizona clinic for five and a half weeks. He went in again the following May, at which time the Dodgers fined Howe one month’s salary- $53,867. He briefly fell off the wagon in September and told management of his problem. They suspended him for the entire 1984 season. Manager Tommy Lasorda’s advice to Howe: "You sleep with dogs, you’re going to wake up with fleas.”

"It was brutal in L.A.,” he now says. "I found out one thing-the difference between real people and phony people. Everyone wanted something from me. I was fun at first-and then I got in trouble.” After he came forward with his addiction, the local press began hounding him. "Baseball is a great part of my life, but it was tedious to go to the park. I reached the point where I didn’t want to pick up the newspaper because I was afraid of what someone was writing about me.”

Determined to get out of Los Angeles, Howe asked for his release and last year signed with the Minnesota Twins. Eager to please his new bosses, Howe rushed himself back from arm surgery. His fastball still hummed, but his elbow ached. Not wanting to let down his teammates, he took the pitching mound secretly stoned on painkillers. "Needless to say,” says Howe, "I wasn’t too effective. I was taking three hundred to eight hundred milligrams of Darvocet, and I never knew whether to throw a slider or go to sleep."

At the end of last season, Howe went back to Montana to prepare for the coming year. He fielded phone calls from several other major-league teams interested in his still-hopping fastball, and it looked as if the Twins might resign him. He headed down to spring training in Florida, confident that a number of teams would be bidding for his arm. But when he got there, no one would even let him throw batting practice. Word was out-newly installed, hard-guy commissioner Peter Ueberroth was not happy with Howe’s past or the fact that his name had come up, along with those of several other major leaguers, at last year's heavily publicized trial of a Pittsburgh cocaine dealer. With Ueberroth frowning, no team dared touch Steve Howe. After it became obvious that no one was going to sign him, he went back to Montana and a part-time job as a DI for a local radio station. And then Harry called. Howe doesn't mind that he isn’t living the life of a Show star. “First-class is in the mind," he says. "If you're happy, you can have fun in the desert. And I'm finally happy."

The deal with the Bees was simple. Howe would get about $2,000 a month, a chance to play, and a constant supply of urinalysis bottles to fill. If and when Howe’s contract was purchased by a major-league team, Harry would get almost 50 percent of the buy-out action. In today’s bull market for relief pitchers who can throw 95-mph fastballs, Harry could make a few hundred thousand dollars.

Steve Howe also brought Harry Steve’s team much-needed publicity. As soon as word got out that he was negotiating with Howe, it seemed that every outcast ex-big leaguer in the country was calling San lose. Harry is quick to point out that he wasn’t on any moral crusade. "As long as they’re ready to play," he said, "I don't care what they do. I'm not going to be a baby-sitter-these guys know this is their last chance around.” The players didn't care that Harry was refusing the role of Mother Teresa. "Shit,” says Reitz, "he was the only one in all of baseball willing to give me a fourth second chance."

While all the other teams in the league sported spiffy pro-model warm-up jerseys, Harry printed up T-shirts for his players that read THE BAD NEWS BEES.

The team-which hadn’t had new uniforms in several seasons-got freshly minted on-field apparel. "I bought them on credit,” says Harry. "Buy now, worry later, I figured. The creditors will get their money, maybe not on time, but they’ll get it.”

Opening Day

The team was a mess. Harry couldn’t afford to send the Bees to Arizona for spring training, and there was barely enough time to get the new guys fitted for uniforms, let alone practice. Then there was a slight problem with Derrel Thomas. Upon arriving in San lose, Thomas decided that he, not Harry, should be the manager. Secretly gathering the players, Thomas outlined a bizarre plan for a dugout coup. The Bees said no, when Harry caught wind of the plot, he fired Thomas. The Junkyard Dog cleaned out his locker in five minutes and was last seen speeding his sports car up Highway 101.

And then there was the erratic behavior of Mike Norris. "When I was a kid,” Norris told a reporter while he was still with the A’s, "I used to scribble on pieces of paper that I was going to be the greatest pitcher ever." Five years ago, that seemed possible. But with the good life came the bad. Since his 1981 All-Star year, Norris has reportedly been in two drug-treatment centers and was recently placed in a two-year counseling program as a result of his 1985 arrest for possession of cocaine. Last winter, he spent four days in a Dominican Republic jail cell for allegedly carrying marijuana into the country. Even though the charges were later dropped, they didn’t help Norris’s growing reputation as a player who had blown his shot at greatness.

This spring, Roger Angell devoted his annual New Yorker baseball preview to the topic of drugs in baseball. The best baseball writer ever wrote:

Anyone who has been involved with the sports world can easily bring to mind a particular athlete whose shining, wonderfully promising career was cut down by drug addiction. (For me, this will always be Mike Norris, the angular and elegant right-handed pitcher ... with the A’s .... I can still see the unique little flourish of his trailing leg as he finished his delivery, and his comical, hot-dog mannerisms on the mound, and recall the charm and intelligence of his interviews .... )

Norris arrived in camp with a permawear grin and a Willie Mays "sayhey-heyhey" for anyone in earshot. After casing out his new teammates, Norris opined, "I feel like I'm at an AA meeting,” But he quickly announced that he would not be one to judge. "I'm in the Fun Hall of Fame”-he giggled-"and now I gotta start acting like a member of society, not like limi Hendrix." Unbothered by references to his several convictions for cocaine possession, Norris says he was so confident of his willpower that he recently tested himself with a visit to his favorite Oakland dealer. The dealer laid out ten grams of coke and invited Norris to sample. Instead of inhaling, Norris says, he blew the coke over the entire room. "I can still see the stuff floating through the air,” he says with a laugh.

The reason he’s with the San Jose Bees? "There’s an unspoken law in the majors about not hiring me,” Norris snaps. "There’s got to be. I'm too good to be here. Except, I guess, that I fucked myself and put myself here." But he has no intention of showing up his fellow Bees. "I’ve got a Jaguar and a Mercedes sitting pretty in my garage. But I ain’t going to be big-leaguing my teammates.” There was another reason for Norris keeping his automobiles where they were-the California Department of Motor Vehicles had suspended his license.

Norris misses several practices his first week. His excuses include missed rides and command performances with the IRS and DMV. Harry is worried but not surprised. "I knew who Mike Norris was before I signed him. He is just someone who is very irresponsible in his personal life. But he is sincere, he means well, and he has a good heart.” Does Norris plan to be around for the season opener? "Heyheyhey,” says Norris, "I’ll be there.”

Opening Day finally arrives at San Jose Municipal Stadium, Steve Howe warms up on the sidelines. The stands are overflowing with 4,911 fans, lured by the appeal of Harry Steve’s geek show. I-Ie has gone all out for the opener, investing $51 in rock tapes that boom over the stadium's scratchy public-address system. A local grocery clerk sings "The Star-Spangled Banner,” and john Novak, an almost totally deaf, one-legged, seventy-one-year-old retired railroad baggage handler, throws out the first ball. ("They could have gotten a president,” Novak told reporters, "but they chose me.") Finally, and to loud cheers, Steve Howe takes the mound.

Howe blows the first Salinas Spur away on three straight major-league strikes. Several beefy major-league scouts are in the stands, chomping cigars and taking careful notes. Howe goes on to toy with the Spurs for five innings, giving up only one hit and no walks. "Most of these guys have no idea what it means to be set up by a major-league pitcher," he later says gleefully. "They're just out there hacking.”

The Bees lose their next two games at home and head to Fresno for the season’s first road trip. "I’m not worried,” says Harry, "because there’s no way this team is not going to be in first place at the end of the season. We just haven’t had any practice." Harry is exicted about Fresno, he has scheduled Norris to start and has told several scouts to show up-with their checkbooks.

The Bees’ team bus pulls up in front of the Tropicana Inn, an ugly motel splayed on the ugliest concrete strip in Fresno, which was ranked two years ago as the worst American city in which to live. Across the street, loitering in the parking lot of a furniture-rental store, are four of what must surely be the fattest hookers in the Central Valley. "All the teams stay at the Tropicana," says Fern, who says her real job is working the legalized chicken ranches of Nevada. On most game days, however, she can be found right here, bird-dogging the Tropicana.

Norris is not on the bus ride from the motel to the Fresno stadium. He shows up minutes before game time in a dented green Buick, nicknamed Bess, owned and driven by his pal Ken Foster, a journeyman bush-league outfielder. "Heyheyhey," yells Norris, several pairs of cleats slung over his shoulder. Norris explained later that Bess had stalled on the way to Fresno. "I was sitting out there with the cows, thinking, They ain’t never going to believe this one. I thought I’d miss this game and Mike Norris’s days -with the Bees would be history.” Harry decides to hold Norris out until the team gets back to San lose.

The first game is a fiasco. Some 1,500 fans have shown up for the Fresno Giants’ Opening Day, the rain starts twelve seconds after the national anthem. The showers intensify, the Bees and Giants boot half a dozen balls in the mud and the umpire doesn’t stop the game. By the seventh inning the deluge has whittled the paid audience to 23, including 8 bare-chested drunks doing a mambo in the aisles. It starts to hail, and the leader of the pack wanders behind the backstop and quiets the stadium by waving his arms. "Hey, Howe," the young drunk screams toward the Bees’ dugout 15 feet away, ”you’re a douche bag! A real douche bag! Yeah, a real fucking douche bag!" With that, he dumps a beer over his head. In the dugout, Howe and Harry listen impassively, both with cigarettes cupped in their hands. The Bees lose 6-4.

Back at the motel, Captain Reitz hosts a midnight party in his motel room. Nine players jam inside with cases of beer, Reitzy turns on the tube and blasts MTV. "Springsteen, you like Springsteen? ” he asks the Japanese players. Three nod their heads, jump from the bed, and air-guitar an accompaniment to a blasting "Born in the U.S.A.” Harry observes it all, silently sucking up ciggies. At two-thirty, the party breaks up.

The Bees lose the next night, getting only two hits and making six errors. After the game, the team moves right from the dugout to the waiting team bus that will take them back to San lose. Everyone, that is, except Mike Norris and Ken Foster, who have sped off in Foster’s green bomber. Five minutes later, the bus pulls up to a Burger King at the edge of Fresno. Across the street, in the parking lot of Rep’s House of Ribs, are the four hookers from outside the Tropicana. “Come on,” yells Fern from across the road, ”we’ll do you right here. Twenty-five bucks.” Howe walks across the road, and the girls begin preening. When the pitcher comes within 10 feet, he makes a wide veer to the left. He trundles off into the dark, returning with a pack of cigarettes. ”I’m amazed,” says Harry Steve, "by how many women want to drop their drawers for Steve Howe. lust because he’s Steve Howe!"

Munching fries, the team quietly reboards the bus for the midnight ride back to San lose. The silence is shattered as soon as the bus hits the highway. Reitz, sipping from a flask of vodka, decides it’s time to introduce the Japanese kids to the sing-along. As the bus careens through the pitch-dark flatlands, he leads the team in boisterous choruses of "New York, New York” and "We Are the World.” The smiling Japanese join in, mouthing ”heyheyhey” for lyrics.

Howe says this team has the best spirit of any he’s ever been on. "You have to be close. This is our last chance," he says. Even Harry allows a tad of sentiment to creep in. "I never went into this as a moral thing,” he says. “I did it to win ball games and make some money. But once I got to know these guys, I took a real personal interest. I’d like to see these guys beat the system and forget about their pasts and go on from here. This rebel image is great. Some of those major-league teams that were laughing when we signed Howe will begin standing in line when they see how he can still pitch. Now there’s a part of me, the adventurous part, that says I never want a development deal.”

An hour out of Fresno a burning car is spotted on the side of the road. It is green, a bomber, and empty. ”Bess!” shout several players. A mile on, two black men in baseball uniforms are standing on the side of the road with their thumbs out. In this part of California it is not safe to be a black man hitchhiking on the highway at midnight. Even if they are carrying baseball bats.

The bus pulls over, and Howe runs out the door to welcome Norris and Poster with high fives. Norris, delighted, wanders back to the bus with a mock-arthritic Fred Sanford waddle. "I am so happy to see you guys," he yells. "I was about to call up a bitch and tell her to get her ass down to this fucking exit.” Harry is silent, barely listening to explanations about the broken radiator that led to Bess's cremation.

In the back of the bus muted conversations are held regarding the fates of the team’s stars. All agree, Ueberroth allowing, that Howe should be up in the majors within weeks-his fastball is popping, his head is centered. But no one is betting on Norris. ”He’s lost thirty pounds,” ventures one. "His strength is all gone. He looks like Kunta Kinte.”

As the bus throttles through the darkness, lim Bolt, an innocent-looking first-year infielder, excitedly quizzes seatmate Daryl Sconiers. "So what’s it like up in the Show?" he whispers. "I hear there are guys whose whole job is to keep track of your luggage." Sconiers, veteran of three full major-league seasons, nods. "Your luggage. Your plane ticket. Your check. All you have to do is play.” The bus rumbles on, over the Pacheco Pass, home.

The Bad News Bees

Two nights later, Norris and Foster are two hours late to the San lose ballfield. More car problems, they say. Harry shakes his head, looks in their eyes, and fires them both. All three chat for a few seconds, then shake hands. Norris and Poster clean out their lockers and hand back the last pro-baseball jerseys they will probably ever wear. Both know there are no more Harry Steves in Organized Baseball, but there are smiles on their faces as they head to the parking lot and Foster’s new old car. At last sight, they were burning rubber toward Oakland.

"I knew this wasn’t going to be some fantasy where this all worked out perfect,” Harry later told reporters. Howe reflected pragmatically: "The public doesn’t care if your car broke down. They just see you’re late. I’m at the ballpark an hour before I’m supposed to be because of that. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of me getting back to the majors. Too much money to be made."

Finally playing together as a team, the Bees catch fire in the coming weeks. They win seven out of eight and pull from last place to within three games of the league lead. Howe is magnificent, clocking in with another win, some saves, a 1.97 ERA, and only three walks in thirty-two innings. More important, he passes four drug tests-three administered by Hany and one by the California League under the auspices of Peter Ueberroth’s office. (That the league subjected Howe to a test is not unusual-under order from Ueberroth, all minor-league players are now subject to random urinalysis.) With Howe's fast-ball humming and his specimens clean, the cigar-chomping scouts in the stands are replaced by major-league executives with buffed nails. When it comes down to actually signing someone like Steve Howe, the big boys who sign the checks make the final call.

In mid-May, the Fresno Giants pull into town. Howe is scheduled to pitch the last game of the series. In attendance, he and Harry know, will be Al Rosen, president of the San Francisco Giants, and Pat Gillick, vice-president of the Toronto Blue lays. Two hours before game time, John Johnson, president of the National Association, which governs minor-league baseball, calls Harry with news that he has been informed by Ueberroth’s office that there is a "discrepancy" in a fifth drug test administered to Howe thirteen days before. Refusing to say exactly what that discrepancy is, the California League temporarily suspends its best pitcher.

Harry Steve is infuriated. "Thirteen days to get drug-test results?" he mutters. "Shit, I could test him myself in a day. There was a mistake.” He ignores the suspension-something that is just not done in Organized Baseball-and goes with his scheduled pitcher. Howe throws five strong innings and is put on the ineligible list the next day by Iohnson. "I know I’m going to get fined and suspended myself,” says Harry, "but it just wasn’t fair." A week later, California League president Joe Cagliardi announces Harry's penalty: a two-week suspension and a $500 fine.

Howe, banned from even suiting up, says, "It’s like what was said in North Dallas Forty-we say it's a game, and the owners say it's a business. So we say it's a business, and they say it's a game. The owners’ attitude is 'We say it, you believe it, or you're gone.’ I’ll be back. Count on it."

With Howe gone, the team sputters, falling back into last place. Harry, who has been keeping in touch with Norris, gives him a call and asks him to come back. He says he re-signed the erratic player "because we were into a losing streak and had some pitchers that weren't doing the job. I know he can pitch in our league. Hopefully he can win games for us."

Meanwhile, the residents of the Stadium Hilton ponder their future. Reitz, batting only .231 a month into the season, realizes he will probably never play back in the Show. But he has some other plans. He recalls his time in the drug hospital, after he got straight, when he stayed on as a counselor. Staying up all night with violent runaway teenagers tripping on angel dust, he got a new idea. "I realized how much I liked working with young people,” he says. "It made me think I could be a good coach. But first I have to prove to people that I’m not insane.”

Cias, batting a strong .306, spouts nothing but hope. "I have something to prove to myself,” he says. "I can still play. I don’t want to be one of those sour guys who quits and then years later tells everybody how he could have played major-league baseball." Cias is willing to bide his time, until he gets the call, he will busy himself airbrushing billboards out in the Bees’ outfield. "You should see what I’m going to do to the TraveLodge sign," he says.

There is a void, however, down in the Stadium Hilton. A couple of weeks into the season Harry made a painful decision regarding Mike Bigusiak. "He stunk," says Harry. "He just plain stunk." So Stash is now gone for good from the Stadium Hilton, and he is sorely missed by his cave mates. Upon getting fired, he took away the few things he brought to San lose-his cleats, his glove, and the two framed pictures of the woman who he was sure would be back "just as soon as I hit the Show."

Heading south on 101, Stash passed near Monterey, home of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Like the Stadium Hilton, like Harry Steve’s gamble, like the unknown futures of Steve Howe, Derrel Thomas, and Mike Norris, Cannery Row, wrote Steinbeck, "is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream." Like those who tried one last time at San lose Municipal Stadium, "its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ’whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody.”