For Now, They’re Still Between the Lines

It is opening night for the San Jose Bees, a truly festive and historic occasion.

The fans are pouring into Municipal Stadium. The San Jose Honey Bees Dance Review dancers are taking the field in their bee costumes. A Springsteen tape from the team’s new $51 music library is blasting on the loudspeakers, and reporters and mini-cam TV news crews crowd the sidelines.

But Manager-General Manager Harry Steve is apprehensive. The season hasn’t started and already he has fired his star center fielder, Derrel Thomas, for allegedly attempting a managerial coup d’etat .

Steve also had fired his star cleanup hitter the day before but reinstated him this morning.

Pitcher Mike Norris, one of four Bees with a history of drug abuse, has missed two practices and arrived late for another, just in time to take the field in his street clothes, and, with one hand in his pocket, pick a few ground balls.

And the Bees’ ace pitcher and No. 1 drawing card, Steve Howe, is warming up on the sidelines, popping the ball, but who knows? Howe has gone south on more than one team that was counting on him.

He has been great so far, but that’s another problem. At any second, Howe’s agent, who is on the ballpark pay phone, could come running onto the field and drag Howe off to the major leagues, or to Japan, or to another rehab gig. Who knows?

This isn’t a ball team, it’s a sociological experiment in spikes. It’s weird science.

Take a Single-A bush league team with no major league affiliation and thus no source of cash or promising young ballplayers. Add six former major league players with tainted reputations, and several other castoffs and guys nobody else wanted. The Statue of Liberty wouldn’t want some of these guys.

For good measure, throw in five kids sent over by a Japanese League team for seasoning, five pleasant young men whose entire English vocabulary consists of “Thank you very much,” and “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

What you’ve got is either a lot of fun or a lot of trouble.

The players have taken to calling themselves the Bad News Bees and they seem to revel in their image as a crazy, fun-loving, bunch of last-chance outlaws trying to reform and revive their baseball careers.

Others have dubbed this team the Bad Nose Bees, and the Dirty Half Dozen. The four players with drug histories don’t mind the constant references to their pasts. They openly discuss their drug abuse and rehab and hope.

Norris is holding court near the Bees’ third-base dugout. If this team were a beauty contest, Norris would be voted Mr. Congeniality. He greets every player with a sing-song “Hi-hi- hi -hi!” and has time for every reporter. He knows he should be 40 miles up the highway tonight, pitching for the Oakland A’s, but drugs and booze brought him down and made him a marked man.

“There’s an unspoken law now (for big-league teams not to hire him),” says Norris, who is 31. “Has to be. There’s no way a talent like myself should be here. (Pause.) Other than that I (bleep)ed up and put myself here.

“I’m in the hall of fame for fun, and now I gotta start acting like a member of society, not like Jimi Hendrix.”

Norris swears he has kicked alcohol and drugs. He tells about testing himself by visiting his former cocaine dealer. The dealer tapped out half an ounce of coke, about $1,000 worth, onto the surface of a record album cover and handed it to Mike.

“He told me, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, man. You’re not sick, you just got caught. You know you can handle this stuff.’ ”

Mike took the album cover, pulled it close to his face, as if it were a birthday cake, and blew out the candles.

“I can still see the stuff floating through the air, falling down into the carpet,” Norris says with a laugh.

Norris says he missed Bee practices because of command appointments with the DMV and the IRS. Apparently, he has no quarrel with the CIA or the BBC. He departed the Oakland A’s with a ton of money but says he’s not into showing off here in front of the other, less wealthy, players.

“I got an ’85 Jaguar and a Mercedes in my garage.” he says. “But I ain’t gonna be big leaguein’ these guys.”

Not without a driver’s license.

I ask Darryl Cias to show me the team hotel, a storage room under the grandstand, where three of the players are living. Cias is a catcher, played for the A’s in ‘83, but claims the team’s general manager got mad at him for balking at a demotion and put out a bad rap on him, that he has a lousy attitude and won’t work.

Cias shows me the room he shares with Ken Reitz, the former Cardinal All-Star third baseman, and a pitcher named Mike Bigusiak. The room is the size of a regular bedroom. There are mattresses placed neatly on the floor.

Cias went to the local carpet supermart and raided the dumpster for enough carpet to wall-to-wall the place. There is a black-and-white TV, a tiny refrigerator, a chest of drawers that has been repaired with athletic tape, and four old wooden stadium seats, connected in a row, for company.

The ceiling is upside-down concrete steps, the underside of the grandstand. The stadium’s huge water heater dominates one corner.

Cias is proud of the place. It’s clean, and he has started painting the walls. He is an artist, and he has executed a large likeness of Charles Manson on the door, not because he’s a Manson fan but because he liked the picture.

Reitz was a little spooked at waking up in the middle of the night and having Charles Manson staring at him in the dim light of the neon Coors beer sign hanging over the door, but now he’s used to it.

Cias played in Italy last year.

“I talked to a lot of clubs and they all said their roster was full,” he says, then adds a statement that could serve as the team motto. “Nobody wanted me. I said, ‘OK, I’ll go to San Jose and try to prove ‘em wrong.’ ”

I ask Cias how well Howe has been throwing.

“You know how left-handers are?” he says. “You’re not left-handed, are you? Left-handers don’t have a clue where the ball is going. Howe has total command of four pitches. He’s the best I’ve ever caught.”

Overhead, the grandstand is filling up fast. The Bees averaged about 800 fans a game last season, but tonight they’ll top 5,000. Former big-name big leaguers are a draw, and the curiosity factor helps. The drug stuff has given the team an aura.

Some day, these fans can say they were there the night Hall of Famer Steve Howe began his wondrous comeback; or the night Steve Howe began his last dramatic pratfall off the bottom rung of baseball’s ladder.

Howe gets the loudest cheer during the pregame introductions. There are no boos. He blows down the first Salinas batter on strikes, and gets through the first inning allowing one harmless single. He is staked to a one-run lead when Daryl Sconiers blasts a double off the right-field wall.

The contrast between the Bees and the Spurs is startling. The Bees are mostly large guys, and mature looking. Their average age is probably in the late 20s. The Salinas Spurs, almost to a man, are short, and very young. Probably half of them are still in their teens.

But they, too, are trying to get to the major leagues, and they battle Howe on every pitch. He works five solid innings, doesn’t walk a batter, strikes out three, makes two very slick fielding plays. On the mound, he is confident, in command, composed. The old Steve Howe.

After his five strong innings, Howe acknowledges the cheers and retires to the trainer’s room for a shoulder ice pack, and then to the team’s tiny clubhouse. The game is still going on, and Mike Norris is the only other player in the clubhouse.

“I wanted to go five, but I didn’t expect to have the velocity,” Howe says, evaluating his performance for two reporters. “I didn’t walk nobody. Man, those guys were hackin’ . They didn’t have no idea what it is to be set up. They’ll swing at anything. I’m trying to make it, and they’re hungry, too.”

How fast was Howe throwing?

“They didn’t pull too much,” he says with a smile.

He is asked about playing at baseball’s lowest minor league level, other than rookie league.

“This is good, this is baseball,” he says. “I love it. It’s my thing. Baseball is baseball. As you can see, money can’t buy happiness.”

It’s difficult to figure why Howe or Norris ever took drugs. In their natural, undrugged state they both run about 80 volts higher than normal human beings. Now, in the dingy clubhouse, they’re working one another, having a great time.

“Only thing I told Mike when I got here,” Howe says, “is I ain’t riding with him.”

Norris laughs.

Howe says he came to San Jose alone, no family. He is checked into a local hotel under an alias. He’ll talk to the press, but he wants to pick his spots.

“This is my time, my thing, this is me ,” he says emphatically.

Norris says he’s due to pitch Sunday.

“He’ll be throwin’ the deuce (curve) and the scroogie,” says Howe, who doesn’t plan to start any more games. “Then I’ll come in and gas ‘em.”

Howe says he threw all winter in Montana but wasn’t sure how he’d pitch in competition.

“Surgeries and (bleep) set you back,” he says.

“And addictions!” Norris adds.

Howe and Norris both say that having four reforming drug abusers on the team will be good for all four. The season will be an ongoing therapy session.

“Talkin’ always helps,” Howe says. “All they gotta know is if they need somebody, I’ll be there.”

Unless Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth clears Howe to sign with a big league club, that is. Howe’s agent, John Lentz, is also in town, making daily phone calls to the commissioner. With luck, Howe will only pitch two or three more times in San Jose before he is snapped up by a team willing to give him one more chance.

“Who knows?” Howe says. “You can’t predict anything.”

Norris has a story to illustrate this point.

“I got a friend never smoked a cigarette in his life, not one ,” Norris says. “The (bleep) stepped out into the street in front of a tobacco truck. Ran him over. Killed him. A tobacco truck.”

Norris and Howe laugh like crazy.

Opening night was last Friday. The Bees won but lost their next two, and attendance dropped to 1,245 and then 915. Norris’ mound debut was delayed when he was suspended for missing another practice. He is scheduled to pitch Saturday.