And I think it was the second car I saw on the lonely night road that pulled over and offered me door-service. It was Thurman Munson, sipping a Budweiser, scrubbing his day-old whiskers and casually directing his Corvette. After exchanging the usual biographical information, I found out that Thurman was a pitcher from Omaha playing for the Cleveland Indian Double-A's.

"I could make the pros," he sighed, swilling some beer. "Could've signed with the Indians for $110,000 if I had the patience last year...I just couldn't take their craziness. It's nuts."

"What's nuts?"

He crushed the Bud can in his right hand and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat. "We were losing on the road a lot last year," he said soberly, "the whole pitching staff."

"These...(he grimaced and searched the highway in front of him for words)...lunatics--they hired a shrink. They made us sit around in a circle and hold hands and tell each other what our problems were on the mound...so I said, "Fuck this, you're all crazy' and I left."

"I pitched well though," he said after a pause. "I got high for my last five games and I've been putting the ball just where I want it."

"You pitch high?"

"It's the only way to handle it...you just don't care about anything but the pitch."

"People think it's a big deal being in pro ball, but it's just like anything else. It's frustrating because things never turn out exactly the way you want." He was drunk and stoned, and he sat there all fizzed-out waiting for me to open the door and get out.

"I'm just gonna go home now," he said as I was about to close the door, "and do some of this," he said, holding a big fat reefer in front of me with a king-boy grin full of just enough vigor to get him home.

Captain Carl Yastrzemski didn't seem stoned when he took batting practice the next day. With the blind confidence of a speeding freight train, he pummelled each pitch exactly where he said he was going to put it, never seeing a doubt or distraction from the corner of his eye.

"Watch," he said boldly, "five base hits." And every muscle in his 38-year-old body responded perfectly, cracking every pitch like a cherry bomb with blind precision. "Knock yaw glove off," he cracked drily.

"Keep it up," warned TV-38 sportscaster Dick Stockton, "and you might earn a spot on the team!"

"Heh," Yastrzemski said. He shanked one of the pitches back into the batting cage and slammed his bat against the plate in frenzied frustration. Perfection's sake, the dude was serious. He laced the next pitch past the outfielders, whooping with Little League glee in celebration of his power.

Luis Tiant and Mike Torrez had sauntered off to the right field corner, and were chatting privately in Spanish. Only a sailing fly ball interrupted their head-to-head.