Baseball clubhouse a home away from home: some players spend more time in the locker room than they do at home so clubs have offerd more luxuries for their comfort

Baseball Digest, May, 2004 by Larry Stone

"WHEN I WAS A KID, I thought the players all lived in the clubhouse. I never thought they had homes or wives or anything like that. I thought the game ended and they all went inside the dugout and back into the clubhouse, where they all lived together. Mickey Mantle went home after the game? Lived in a house? Come on."

--Joe Sambito, Former major league pitcher, 1987

Sambito was right. You can live in a clubhouse.

"Don Zimmer was born in a clubhouse," said Jim Bouton, former major league pitcher--and just try to prove him wrong.

When he served as Mariners coach in 1979-80, Bill Mazeroski, a future Hall of Famer, indeed lived in Seattle's home clubhouse at the Kingdome, concluding that the facilities available there beat any hotel he could find.

"He used to tell me that there was a keg of beer on ice, cable TV, a full refrigerator of goodies, and a big lawn out there he didn't have to mow," said Dave Heaverlo, a former major league pitcher who was a member of the Mariners in 1980. "What else did he need?"

With a true ballplayer's sensibility, Heaverlo captured the appeal of the clubhouse lifestyle.

"Where else can you run around naked, scratch, and play cards?" Heaverlo said dreamily. "It's our sanctuary."

A few years after Mazeroski, Mariners manager Rene Lachemann also lived part of the time in the M's clubhouse at the Kingdome. He was house-sitting in Enumclaw, facing an hour-plus drive home after games, so on late nights he often concluded it was easier to stay in the clubhouse.

"They had a nice couch in there, a whirlpool, showers, ten TVs," he said. "I had everything. It was very convenient."

The clubhouse is baseball's biosphere, a self-contained world where players lounge, bond, fight, play, eat, kibbitz, give each other "hot feet" and occasionally knock over a table of food in fits of rage.

They spend more time in these confined quarters than they do on the field--more time, often, than they do in their own homes. One of the supreme compliments in baseball, thus, is to be "a great guy in the clubhouse," because more teams have been brought down by internal bickering than by poor fielding or untimely hitting.

"It's too long a season to be butting heads," said Fred Lynn, a 17-year major leaguer. "The chemistry inside the clubhouse has to be good, or else someone has to go."

Lynn began his career in Boston in 1974, during an era when it was said of the Red Sox that 25 players left their clubhouse in 25 cabs.

As plush and well-equipped as the new wave of clubhouses are, with more amenities than the ritziest resort, and a staff to cater to a player's every need, it's a wonder anyone wants to leave.

"The clubhouses today are like Club Med," said broadcaster Joe Garagiola Sr., who played in the major leagues from 1946 to '54. "It used to be two nails; that was your locker."

For a baseball player, who often shows up at 2 p.m., sometimes even earlier, for a 7 p.m. game and stays until midnight, the clubhouse serves as restaurant (two, sometimes three meals a day are served) and church (chapel services are held every Sunday).

It can be a health club (state-of-the-art weight rooms, saunas, even massage therapists are on site), a courtroom (kangaroo courts are a time-honored source of clubhouse camaraderie) and a living room (big-screen televisions, state-of-the-art sound systems and leather couches are ubiquitous).

Said former Mariners pitcher Roy Thomas in an e-mail: "It's like the holding tank prior to the lineup. Inside the sanctuary, you can behave as you wish, yet on the outside, you must 'toe the line.' It's like the den at home. You can sit around in your underwear and watch TV, spill Cheetos on the carpet, and 'mark' your fiefdom. Yet in the end, you still have to go outside and mow the lawn."

The very name speaks volumes. Other sports have locker rooms; baseball players have clubhouses, with all that the title connotes--the opulence of a tony country club, and the goofiness of that treehouse you played in with your buddies.

"The clubhouse is one of the seductions of baseball," Reggie Jackson "wrote in his autobiography, "Reggie," in 1984. "It is a place where you don't have to grow up."

But sometimes you have to wake up, whether you're relief ace Lee Smith, who would catch a few Z's in the clubhouse during the early innings of games, or Lachemann, who would routinely sleep in-the clubhouse when he managed in the minor leagues.

That led to one memorable incident in Spokane when he was sound asleep on the clubhouse floor at Indians Stadium.

"I wake up, there's a cop standing there with a gun pointed right at my throat, and a growling German shepherd next to him, teeth bared," Lachemann said. "I had left the door open, and they thought someone was in there robbing the place."

Usually, the most dangerous occurrence in a clubhouse is some sort of hysterically diabolical prank, of which baseball players are the acknowledged masters. From the hot foot (lighting another's shoelaces aflame) to that revered classic, heating balm in the jockstrap, a player learns quickly he is never quite safe in the clubhouse.