While on a promotional tour for the new movie Spaceman, a biopic of his life in and out of Major League Baseball starring Josh Duhamel, big league legend Bill Lee recently went head-to-head in a softball game against the legendary HIGH TIMES Bonghitters. The friendly rivalry between “the Spaceman” and HIGH TIMES dates back to 1980, when Lee—still an active MLB pitcher—appeared on the magazine’s cover, and recalled to HIGH TIMES his affinity for “sprinkling marijuana on organic buckwheat pancakes” before his daily five-mile jog.
A veteran of 14 seasons with the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos, Lee notched 119 career wins with a lifetime 3.62 ERA. So hardly a lightweight—but the Bonghitters also have a proud history of crushing their opponents, leaving them in a cloud of pot smoke, scratching their heads and wondering what happened. At one point, they boasted a three-season-long winning streak against other New York media softball teams.
Wholly unintimidated, however, the 69-year old Spaceman not only pitched a complete game, he went 3-4 at the plate, including a towering home run that wowed a crowd of onlookers in Central Park (see video).
“That’s the longest home run I’ve seen hit off us in more than ten seasons,” commented one stunned Bonghitter, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from his own team’s pitcher.
But in the end, the Bonghitters held on for a hard-fought 5-4 victory, which they celebrated in high style with a rousing rendition of their David Peel-penned anthem “Take Me Out to the Bong Game.” Lee took the defeat in stride, regaling teammates, opponents and curious onlookers alike with post-game tales of his glory days.
Looking back now, with cannabis legalization spreading rapidly, and his extraordinary life the subject of a feature film, the Spaceman—who believes his honesty about marijuana led to him being blackballed from baseball—opined that, “I was just ahead of my time. As we found out, the natural products of [marijuana] are more medicinal than they are derogatory or detrimental.”
Lee debuted with the Boston Red Sox in 1968, and—HIGH TIMES aside—the press never knew what to make of him. Although he set a Boston Red Sox pitching record for three consecutive 17-game-winning seasons, in 1979 he was banished to the National League, with the then-lowly Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals). Allegedly this was because the iconoclastic pitcher called Red Sox manager Don Zimmer “a gerbil.” But in HIGH TIMES, Lee set the record straight: “Actually, I never said [Zimmer] was a gerbil… [though] he does have those puffy cheeks that gerbils use to stock food in. And he waddles a lot.”
The HIGH TIMES July 1980 cover
Clearly not a man to be told what to do or say, in 1979 Lee freely admitted to a sportswriter that he’d “used” marijuana just as he began spring training with the Expos. As he told HIGH TIMES, “A writer comes up to me, out of nowhere, and says, ‘I’ve always been afraid to ask, but people have been saying there was a problem with drugs in baseball.’ And I said, ‘Definitely. Players have been abusing caffeine, nicotine and alcohol way too much… the guy says, ‘No, I was talking about marijuana.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘I’ve been using marijuana since 1968.’”
A furious Bowie Kuhn, then commissioner of baseball, levied a $250 fine against Lee. The headlines over that fine, and Lee’s subsequent lawsuit against Kuhn raged for most of the ’79-80 season. So naturally Lee proved to be eminently quotable on marijuana and more in his candid 1980 interview with HIGH TIMES.
“The media jumped on it,” Lee told the magazine, “They said smoke, smoke, smoke. Pretty soon Kuhn sends down this guy… He wanted to know if what I’d been quoted as saying was true. I said, No, I never said I smoked it. You can ingest THC other ways as long as it gets into your system and provides the beneficial ingredients. I told him I sprinkled it on ordinary buckwheat pancakes before I went on my daily five-mile jog.”
He continued, “[Marijuana’s] a way to let you down slowly from a ballgame… It makes people better in the way they act towards society. Everybody’s nicer. It’s hard to be mean when you’re stoned. It’s made players a lot less alcoholic.”
During his career, Lee was named to the American League All-Star team and in 1979 was named The Sporting News National League Left Hander of the Year. In 2008, he was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame as the team’s record-holder for most games pitched by a left-hander (321) and the third-highest win total (94) by a Red Sox southpaw. On August 23, 2012, Lee signed a contract to play with the San Rafael Pacifics of the independent North American League, where, at age 65, he pitched a complete game for the team, which he later called the best outing of his professional career.
And if all that’s not enough, he’s now running for Governor of Vermont.
So here’s to the Spaceman, and many more stoned trips to the ballpark!
from
http://hightimes.com/culture/watch-69-year-old-bill-spaceman-lee-crush-a-towering-homer-vs-high-times-bonghitters-softball-team/
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