Having Fun Is the Best Revenge

I once wrote that you went a long way toward understanding Jay Johnstone, the ballplayer, if you began with the fact he started out life rooming with Jimmy Piersall.

Piersall was immediately outraged. “Johnstone was already crazy before I met him!” he shrieked.

Their manager that year, Bill Rigney, had a simple explanation of why he had paired the game’s resident flakes. “I didn’t want to screw up two rooms,” he said.

The beauty of Jay Johnstone, Danny Ozark once said, is he thinks he’s normal. Everybody else is crazy.

It may not rank on the bookshelves with the memoirs of Henry Kissinger or the collected works of Count Tolstoy, but Johnstone has finally decided to tell his side of the story in the unexpurgated version of his biography, titled, “Temporary Insanity,” and written with colleague Rick Talley, a choice of collaborationist that shows Johnstone’s predilections haven’t changed much since the Piersall days.

The book is a romp through a career of a man who always found baseball to be a kind of ride at Disneyland, one part fantasy, one part play and three parts sheer joy.

Jay has a nice eye for the lunacy of the grand old game, of which there’s a lot. Where there wasn’t any, Jay introduced it.

Most ballplayers, when they get old, mourn things lost. Speed, hair, eyesight, agility, the ability to get around on the fast one, the curve. Johnstone mourns the loss of his Star Patrol helmet. The one with the broken antenna.

Johnstone wasn’t in the big leagues more than half a season before his teammates hung the handle Moon Man on him. There are several versions of how he got it, but the basic one is that he came to this planet in a splashdown or a bag of rocks.

Johnstone appears to be missing an antenna at times, too. Even he admits the first words his baby daughter learned were not “Da-da” but “Earth to Jay!”

Some of his more celebrated stunts include the time he and pitcher Jerry Reuss dragged the infield between innings with the ground crew, the melted brownie he put in Steve Garvey’s glove, the time he stole all of Manager Tom Lasorda’s wall pictures of Frank Sinatra, and the time he roped off the section behind first base and put sandbags in front of the seats after Billy Russell had made four throwing errors the night before.

His locker looked like a prop shop for a burlesque comedian. Johnstone took the game seriously but not very. He had a nice eye for the farcical. He figured Moliere would have loved baseball.

He once drew up his own All-Crazy team and it even had a disabled list. He himself was a starter, which was an upset, since he had not been a starter on any other lineup in years. He had the toughest job in baseball: Come off the bench cold and hit the ball someplace.

He did it about as well as anybody who ever played. Johnstone never had any trouble hitting or catching a moving baseball. The problem was to catch Jay himself. He, too, was moving. To use him, first you had to find him. That wasn’t easy. He was harder to find than Judge Crater.

He was out dragging the infield, or tying a pillow around his waist to do an imitation of the manager or nailing somebody’s shoes to the locker room floor or giving an umpire a hotfoot.

“He’s the only ballplayer I ever had who needs a beeper,” Lasorda complained.

Dodger executive Fred Claire once spotted him in full uniform in the middle of a game, standing in line at a hot-dog stand.

Usually, ballplayers have idols who are .400 hitters or 30-game pitchers or rocket-armed outfielders. Johnstone’s is a .500 left-handed pitcher named Hank Aguirre.

Jay looks up to Aguirre because Aguirre once stole a Greyhound bus, and also because the first major league batter he faced was Ted Williams, and he struck him out and was so thrilled that he went to Williams to get him to autograph the baseball. Williams did.

Two weeks later, Williams faced him again and lined a prodigious home run. As he trotted around the bases, he yelled: “Hey, kid! Go get that one, and I’ll autograph it for you, too!”

Johnstone sees himself as an island of sanity in a sea of lunacy. His book is pure fun and reminds us that baseball used to be a game. “It’s still better than lifting things,” he tells us.

Nowhere are there “and-then-I-hit” stories. Jay Johnstone has hit 102 major league home runs, not including a pivotal one in the 1981 World Series. And almost the only two seasons he played regularly, he hit .329 and .318.

He’d rather not dwell on those inconsequentialities. He’d rather tell you about the time the dashing Bo Belinsky brought not one but two live centerfolds, one of them Mamie Van Doren, into the team hotel in Palm Springs and asked Jay to sit with them while Bo ran some errand.

Since it was two minutes to curfew, Johnstone was in a sweat. “I didn’t care how beautiful they were because I knew one of the coaches was going to be knocking on that door. There I was--a rookie earning exactly $7,000 a year--facing a $500 fine. I started wondering if getting caught with two girls meant two $500 fines.”

Jay always kept an eye out for important details like that. His book makes you glad again there isn’t a strike.

There’s a lot more to this game than being MVP. The game without its cutups is just another balance sheet. Jay would like to bat .300 just one more time, homer in one more World Series.

But, even more than that, he’d like to find his Star Patrol hat.