TIME OUT withBILL LEE
by Steve Sheppard Independent Sports Editor
If you want to talk baseball, is there anyone better on the planet than Bill "Spaceman" Lee, the lefthanded Red Sox legend, guru and raconteur?

MICHAEL GALVIN/The Independent file A threat on the mound and sometimes at the plate during his major league career, Bill Lee continues to play competitive baseball into his 60s. Tonight he plays softball at Nantucket High School with other former Red Sox stars.

Lee and other former Sox players will be at the high school baseball field tonight at 6 p.m. to take on a team of islanders in a softball game to benefit the Friends of the Nantucket Public Schools. We caught up with Lee via telephone last Friday at his farm in northern Vermont - "Kind of like Robert Frost," he pointed out.

"I've been on the road so much - I just came in from Calgary," he said. "I haven't mowed my lawn in so long, I'm going to have to hay it."

Although he's been retired from the major leagues for 25 years now, Lee still pitches in traditional wooden bat and senior leagues. Last weekend, for instance, he traveled to Westfield, Mass., to play in an authentic 1881-style game with that other famous lefty, Jim Bouton.

Never one to shy from controversy, Lee is the subject of a new documentary "High and Outside," that had its premiere two weeks ago at the Maine International Film Festival. "People want to know what makes me tick," he said, "but I don't have a spring."

Lee was a member of the Red Sox teams of the '70s whose battles with the Yankees were so intense that each game was a personal battle among players. While today's teams may harbor a certain dislike for the other side, the squads of the '70s absolutely loathed one another. And, lest anyone forget, Lee simply dominated the Yankees - to the point where he was slammed to the ground during a bench-clearing brawl between the teams in '76, breaking his collarbone and seriously injuring his pitching shoulder. While he recuperated, help came from an unlikely source.

"Dick Gregory (the comedian and activist) came to my house and gave me a food program. This was right after the brawl in '76. He pulled up to my house in a Rolls-Royce, I'll never forget it." Gregory urged the pitcher to heal through healthy eating, a treatment that was well outside the mainstream at the time. "I took comfrey root, and my shoulder got better," Lee says. "I'm throwing harder now than I was in 76. I was throwing in the low 80s two weeks ago."

And then came 1978, when the Red Sox held a 14-game lead over the Yankees in July, only to lose the division title to them in an epic one-game playoff. In a crucial home series against the Yankees that September, manager Don Zimmer refused to pitch Lee, pitching recent Pawtucket call-up Bobby Sprowl instead, and the Sox suffered a four-game sweep, the still remembered "Boston Massacre." As we all know, Zimmer most recently served as a coach for, who else, the Yankees?

"That's what the movie is about," Lee says. "There could have been a whole conspiracy thing going on. Johnny Pesky told me years later that he saw Zimmer talking to Steinbrenner before the playoff game."

Those were the years of the Buffalo Heads, and locker room interviews with Lee quoting Warren Zevon and "Lawyers, Guns and Money." Zevon later paid homage to Lee by recording a song about him.

Lee was gone in 1979, traded to Montreal for weak-hitting utilityman Stan Papi, a move that prompted Lee to ask management, "Who's Stan Papi?" While Papi floundered with Boston, Lee won 16 games for the Expos that year.

Lee still follows the Sox and didn't like what he was seeing before the team took three out of four from the White Sox last weekend. "We've gone from, 'Who's Stan Papi' to Big Papi," he said. "I'm worried. The Red Sox don't have that comeback instinct. It reminds me of '78 - it's like 'Drums Along the Mohawk.'"

While players today don't seem to have a fan's passion for the game, Lee always did. One reason fans continue to love him is we know he cared. "We win (the pennant) in '74 if they had the foresight to play Rice and Lynn in September," he notes. Instead, the Red Sox suffered a 14-game shift in the standings in just over a month and lost the division by 7 games. Lynn and Rice, both rookies in 1975, helped lead the Red Sox to the World Series.

Along with the new movie about his life, Lee also has written a new book, "Baseball Eccentrics." He's particularly fond of the chapter about managers called "Ranters and Ravers" that, he said, would not be appropriate for a family newspaper. "We ran some of the dialogue verbatim."

He's 60 now, and ready to turn 61 in December. "I really have to watch my weight now," he says. "I have to go on the Atkins Diet every other week."

He's happy to be still playing the game he loves, and especially proud that there are now four generations of Lees on the field. When he comes to Nantucket tonight, the love of the game he has given so much to will undoubtedly shine through.

"Let's lock down the town," he said. "Warn the Steamship Authority. Tell them I want the captain's

chair, and the hat." I

The celebrity softball game to benefit the Friends of Nantucket Public Schools takes place tonight at the high school baseball diamond at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and are available at the field. Expected to attend are former Red Sox stars Bill Lee, Sam Horn, Oil Can Boyd, Jim Corsi and Rick Miller. Because of limited seating, people are advised to take a lawn chair to the game.