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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Have Glove Will Travel Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond by Bill Lee New movie proves that 'Spaceman' Lee is still way out there. If you're a Red Sox fan, there are few people you could spend a more entertaining hour with than former Sox pitcher Bill Lee . Lee has always been one of the slyest and uncensored players in the business. When he was in Boston last year to promote his book, ``Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond," for instance, the man known as ``Spaceman" told the Globe that Yankee fans won't like the book because ``there are no pictures," and acknowledged that he regularly took steroids -- ``Oh, yeah, I took anything they'd give me. They shot me up with stuff all the time just to get me back out there. I looked like a Frank Perdue chicken half the time." A new movie profiles the fiercely independent player, who was with the Sox from 1969 to 1978. Called ``Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey," it follows Lee to Cuba for a stint as a guest pitcher for an adult baseball league team from San Diego. It's supplemented with wonderful archival material and commentary from folks including former Sox teammates Luis Tiant and Fred Lynn and Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy . ``Lee's life is just one long quest to play baseball," says the film's producer Josh Dixon , who first heard of the colorful player in 2000 (Dixon claims to have subsequently become a Sox fan). ``When Lee was about age 36, he was essentially blackballed -- no one wanted to touch him -- because he had ruffled so many feathers. But he continued to play baseball all over Canada, in Russia, China, Japan, Central America, South America." Lee, who's 59, still travels whenever somebody invites him to play. The movie meets up with him at his home in Craftsbury, Vt., where he's wandering his property with a shotgun. Most of the rest of the film takes place in Havana and Vinales, where Lee goes on a diet of ``black coffee, cigars, and straight rum," quotes Marshall McLuhan, and, after gimping around the bases with his bum knee, offers a little Cuban kid 14 acres in Vermont in exchange for his legs. The film has its New England big-screen premiere on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Woods Hole Film Festival, which started yesterday and runs through next Saturday. ``Spaceman" also has been shown twice on NESN , and is scheduled to replay on Aug. 6 and 28. Dixon is planning a theatrical and DVD release of the film in September. For information about the rest of the festival, call 508-495-3456 or go to www.woodsholefilmfestival.com . For information about ``Spaceman" the movie, go to www.spacemanincuba.com. CONVERSATIONS WITH: The Museum of Fine Arts is hosting an interesting series around the 2005 documentary ``Sketches of Frank Gehry ": several of the screenings between today and Aug. 20 will have post-film discussions to dig into director Sydney Pollack 's film and Gehry's monumental role in the world of architecture. Today, William Mitchell , MIT professor of architecture and media arts and sciences, will lead the conversation after a noon screening of the film. Mitchell was involved in the MIT Stata Center project, which Gehry designed. The film's producer Ultan Guilfoyle will be the guest after the Aug. 13 show at 2:30 p.m., and Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell , who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1996, will offer comments after the Aug. 20 show at 2:15 p.m. The series is co - presented with the Boston Jewish Film Festival, which coordinated the speakers. Information is at 617-369-3306 and www.mfa.org/film . ONLINE RESOURCE FOR FILMMAKERS: TurnHere.com is a neat concept: It's a travel guide website that, instead of featuring text descriptions of places, provides free short films that describe different city neighborhoods and their atmosphere, restaurants, and way of life. The site's tagline: ``Short Films Cool Places." For Boston, for instance, there are currently 15 short films online about neighborhoods from ``Allston Rock City" to ``Little Italy in the North End" to ``Dudley Square" in Roxbury, and films that focus on ``Boston Dive Bars" and ``South End Tails" (that is, the dogs who live there). HAVE GLOVE, WILL TRAVEL. Now in his mid-50s, countercultural and free-spirited as ever, the popular ex-Major League southpaw continues to zip curveballs over the plate and at the establishment in this sequel to The Wrong Stuff (1984). One reason 20 years have elapsed between the two books may be that Lee robustly and publicly enjoys his recreational intoxicants; another may be that he has kept very busy playing baseball outside show purviews. Lee has always been an outspoken, unconventional character who irked managers and front offices alike. (Both blackballed him from time to time.) In the mid-1980s, after 13 years in the limelight with the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos, he found himself looking for rubbers from which to pitch. He found plenty who were eager to tap his profane and exuberant personality, from the senior circuit and the exhibition leagues to colleges and clinics for Mic-Mac Indians in his adopted Canada. Lee is supreme at conveying the pure joy of playing baseball, and he also captures the fun of his run for president of the United States as the Rhinoceros Party candidate (he gets Abbie Hoffman’s endorsement, but not Hunter Thompson’s), of learning how to drink cognac from Bobby Hull, of playing in the 1988 Goodwill Games in the Soviet Union, of hitting a home run while playing for a semi-pro team in Saskatchewan that instantaneously coincided with a shatter of lightning and the coming of rain to quell an ruinous drought. He’s entertainingly all over the field: going to Cuba and tendering a savvy piece of travel writing, discussing Bernoulli’s principle and the physics of the curveball with Ted Williams, explaining the dynamics that involved pitching into trade winds rather than prevailing westerlies, sending up a lovely tribute to his father and his children, or taking the Major League to task for its greed and glitz. The Red Sox just delivered the World Series, but Lee delivers the beauty of elemental baseball: two pleasures the sport sorely needed. Bill Lee. William Francis Lee III (born December 28, 1946), (nicknamed " Spaceman "), is an American athlete and retired Major League Baseball pitcher. He played for the Boston Red Sox from 1969-1978 and the Montreal Expos from 1979-1982. On February 25, 2008 the Red Sox organization announced that Bill Lee will be inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame on November 7, 2008. Lee will be inducted as record-holder for most games pitched by a left-hander (321) in team history and the third-highest win total (94) by a southpaw. On June 21, 2008, Lee was the starting pitcher for the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks for the 103rd Midnight Sun Game. an event he last pitched in 1967 (losing to the Japan Amateur National Champion Kumagai-Gumi on seven unearned runs). Lee is known for his adherence to the counterculture behavior, his antics both on and off the field, and his use of the Leephus pitch, a personalized variation of the eephus pitch. [1] Lee has written four books: The Wrong Stuff ; Have Glove, Will Travel ; The Little Red (Sox) Book: A Revisionist Red Sox History ; and Baseball Eccentrics: the Most Entertaining, Outrageous, and Unforgettable Characters in the Game . In 2006, the documentary film Spaceman in Cuba featured Lee. Contents. Early life. Although Lee was born in Burbank, California, he was raised in Canoga Park and later in San Rafael. [ citation needed ] . He was born into a family with a number of former professional baseball players. His grandfather William Lee was an infielder for the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League and his aunt Annabelle Lee was a pitcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She was the first to throw a no- hitter and a perfect game in the AAGPBL. He graduated from Terra Linda High School in 1964. Lee attended the University of Southern California from 1964-1968 where he played for Rod Dedeaux. Lee was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in the 22nd round of the 1968 Major League amateur draft. Major league career. Rather than rely on the use of a fastball, Lee developed as a finesse pitcher. He threw a variety of off-speed pitches, including a variation of the Eephus pitch. The Leephus pitch or Space Ball, the names for Lee's take on the eephus pitch, follows a high arcing trajectory and is very slow. Lee was used almost exclusively as a relief pitcher during the first four years of his career. During that period, Lee appeared in 125 games, started just nine of them, and compiled a 19-11 record. In 1973, Lee was used primarily as a starting pitcher. He started 33 of the 38 games in which he appeared and went 17-11 with a 2.95 Earned Run Average. He was rewarded for his strong performance with a nomination to the American League All-Star team. He followed 1973 with two more 17-win seasons. Lee started two games in the 1975 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. His first start came in Game Two of the series. Lee let up just one run in eight innings; however, the Reds scored two runs off of Dick Drago in the top of the ninth inning and subsequently won the game 3-2.

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