The Angriest Blue Jay

[Mac]

Fresh out of jail, Mark Lemongello went looking for work.

After a year out of baseball, Lemongello called Toronto Blue Jays general manager Pat Gillick and asked for another shot with the organization. He had last pitched in the majors with the Blue Jays in 1979, and it was a disaster. The general manager told Lemongello they would talk once his legal issues were resolved, but Gillick must’ve known that the Pinellas County District Attorney’s case was pretty strong.

There was no way Lemongello was going to pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays again.

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Lemongello couldn’t handle losing. He didn’t hate to lose like the average ballplayer; no, defeat turned Lemongello into a different being. He tore up clubhouses and destroyed their vending machines. He once took scissors to his uniform, shredding it to pieces. Following a particularly painful loss, he threw french fries at a waitress when he received them instead of a baked potato with his post-game steak.

“If a little thing happens on the mound, he’ll go crazy,” said his former minor league teammate Frank MacCormack. “I’ve had to hold him down on the bed in hotel rooms so he wouldn’t tear sinks off the wall, smash the TVs, and rip the lamps apart. Even then, he managed to smash a few.”

The stories grew, and they were mostly true. One scouting report took the myth of Lemongello to another level, but it contained one of the few allegations he denied. After a bad outing on the mound, he was said to have dove headfirst into the food table and, quote, “JUST LAY THERE in hot dogs, burritos, mustard, ketchup.” After another, he was said to have bit into his shoulder so hard it bled. Not so, said Lemongello, and he had a scarless torso to prove it. “I’m a colourful personality, and I’ve done some things that I wish I hadn’t done, but I’m not nuts, and I’m not crazy,” he said.

If there was anything that rivaled how much Lemongello hated losing, it was finding out he had been traded to the Toronto Blue Jays.

It had been over a month since the Blue Jays brought in Lemongello in an offseason trade with Houston, and the team had yet to speak with him. One of the three players acquired for catcher Alan Ashby, Toronto hoped Lemongello would slot third in their rotation behind Tom Underwood and Jim Clancy for the upcoming ‘79 season. Now, they were hoping that he would just show up to camp. “All we can do is send a registered letter to his home,” said personnel man Elliot Wahle.

It stood little chance of being answered. Lemongello was in the wind, not thrilled with the idea of being a Blue Jay and having to live in Canada. Describing a move north as “10 steps backwards for me,” the Arizona-born Lemongello told the Ottawa Journal that he was not reporting to the organization and vanished. He took a long trip to the Grand Canyon, then took an even longer drive cross-country to New Jersey, unreachable the entire time. Scrambling, the Blue Jays tried reaching out to Lemongello’s mother, who said she had no idea where her son was, but he did have a question, one that was relayed to the team and no doubt gave them their next sign of the trouble ahead.

“What’s a Toronto?”

Undeterred, team president Peter Bavasi dug deep. He heard that Lemongello worked at Coca-Cola bottling plants in the offseason and tried to get word to the pitcher that, hey, lifting crates in a cool climate might be better than the sweltering heat in Phoenix. As the end of January closed in, Bavasi was able to make contact with Lemongello’s agent, Gary Walker, who had also received a call from his client. Earning his dues, Walker brought the sides together. There was only one problem: Lemongello didn’t work at the soda plants. Either way, the pitcher was touched by Bavasi’s efforts to comfort him, and any fears of playing in Toronto had been run off, for now. 

Lemongello signed a two-year deal as spring training closed in. Saying he heard nothing but good things about the city, Lemongello explained he had been reeling and in shock after the trade. After all, no one wants to find out they are unwanted by their previous team. And everything about Canada? Simple geographic confusion. “It would have been different if I was traded to Montreal because I would still be in the same league as I had been (in Houston),” he said. “I didn’t even know where Toronto was.”

Pitcher that hates losing, meet the team that loses most of all. Toronto lost over 100 games in each of its first two seasons, and the ‘79 season would turn out no different. The Blue Jays started the season 0-3 when Lemongello failed to make it out of the fifth inning in his first turn through the rotation, an 8-3 loss to Kansas City. By the end of April, the Blue Jays were 7-15, with three of those losses on the winless Lemongello. The anger inside the pitcher was building. “Any time he had a bad outing, he’d blame it on Canada,” said teammate Bob Bailor.

The potential flashed, then the rage. Lemongello earned his first win of the year on May 13, a complete game effort in a 3-1 win over Texas on 108 pitches. The success was short-lived. In his next start, Lemongello fell victim to the long ball and then himself. Having already been taken deep by Andre Thornton and Dave Rosello, Lemongello was taken out in the sixth inning after another home run, this by Toby Harrah. What he did next in the dugout, in the wonderfully descriptive words of Alison Gordon in the Toronto Star, was "alarmingly self-destructive in nature."

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First he sat, head down, elbows on his knees, hands tightly clasped in front of him. Then he leaned back, in an imitation of ease, arms spread out along the back of the bench. This lasted for a few minutes before he suddenly began bashing at the bench with the side of his left fist. The sequence repeated itself several times before he added a change of pace. With his right first, he hit himself, very hard, on the jaw.

By the time he was done, Lemongello was, in essence, beating himself up, hitting himself again and again, very hard, in the face. While this went on, no one stopped him. His teammates and coaches sat in their places and watched the game. Finally, Lemongello got up and walked calmly down the tunnel to the clubhouse.

Now 10-27 on the season, the Blue Jays and the self-battered Lemongello got a shot at Cleveland the next week at Exhibition Stadium. With one away in the third inning of Lemongello’s start, manager Roy Hartsfield ordered an intentional walk to load the bases for Thornton. A high fastball to the Cleveland slugger ended in the same fate as the last week’s pitch, the first ever grand slam surrendered by Lemongello in the majors. When Cleveland went ahead 7-5 on a sacrifice fly in the sixth, Hartsfield had seen enough. So had Lemongello. As the manager approached the mound to remove him from the game, Lemongello showed Hartsfield ultimate disrespect, flipping the ball past his outstretched hand on his way to the dugout.

No one talked about the incident afterwards, but the crime committed was clear in the eyes of Hartsfield. The punishment was severe. When it came time for Lemongello to start again, he didn’t. Lemongello wasn’t pitching anywhere good enough (1-6, 6.46 ERA) to warrant more starts, but his outburst was the final straw. He was now the final man on the depth chart, pitching mop-up innings from the ‘pen or taking reluctantly-given spot starts around doubleheaders. He was supposed to start the first game of a double dip against Baltimore on June 29, but instead, Toronto called up Dave Stieb from Triple-A to make his first career start. Stieb would start 407 more games in his career for the Blue Jays; Lemongello would only pitch in another three.

Lemongello pitched in relief later in the series, and six Orioles’ hitters got him for two runs on three hits. He wouldn’t pitch again until his birthday, 20 days later. He recorded eight outs against the Twins, and the outing was his final good major league appearance. The frustration over his non-existent role was reaching an apex. “I know I can pitch,” he said. “I was a regular starter on one of the best pitching staffs in baseball, and here I am not pitching on one of the worst.”

Two nights later, on July 23, Lemongello would exit the majors in a way befitting him. With under 8,000 in attendance at Metropolitan Stadium, Lemongello entered a tied ballgame in the eighth inning and retired 9-1-2 in the Twins’ lineup. The Jays were held scoreless in the top half of the ninth, and Hartsfield left his pitcher in the game. After he got the first out, Bombo Rivera tripled off Lemongello to deep center. The winning run was 90 feet away, and Lemongello and Hartsfield would have their final disagreement on how to deal with it.

Hartsfield intended to walk the next two hitters to set up a force at every base and signaled his pitcher to do so. When he saw the sign, Lemongello started shaking his head in disagreement towards the skipper in the dugout. He was already mad at Hartsfield for having him warm up on multiple occasions during the game, but when the phone rang in the bullpen, it was for Tom Buskey to enter and then for Tom Underwood. Each call down from the skipper for someone other than him felt like a slap in the face. Despite being tasked with a high-leverage situation, Lemongello entered the game pissed.

With catcher Rick Cerone standing up for the first intentional pass, Lemongello sailed the first pitch well over his catcher’s head. Rivera couldn’t score from third, so the game continued, and Hartsfield had to be restrained from running onto the field after his pitcher. The next seven balls were uneventful, and the bases were now loaded. On the third pitch of the at-bat to Minnesota pinch-hitter Mike Cubbage, Lemongello uncorked a wild pitch, this time allowing Rivera to score, giving the Twins the walk-off victory.

A few days later, the job of telling Lemongello he was being demoted fell on Gillick. As Bavasi sat outside of the meeting, Lemongello stormed out, shouting he would take vengeance. When Bavasi went into the room, he saw a shaken general manager. On his way out, Lemongello hurled one last one high and wide – an ashtray that would firmly implant itself into an interior wall at Exhibition Stadium. Verbal threats accompanied his tirade, and Bavasi reported the altercation to major league officials, who had a word with Lemongello before he reported to Triple-A Syracuse.

Lemongello turned his season around in the minors. He won three of his four starts, threw a three-hit shutout in the first game of the playoffs, and started a crucial game five in the International League championship. Steve Grilli would get the win in relief, and Syracuse moved a game away from the title before losing the next two to Columbus, including a walk-off in 12 innings in game seven. Sadly, there is no record of how Lemongello took that loss, but his performance in the minors would keep him in the Blue Jays’ plans for 1980.

Not in Toronto’s plans was Hartsfield, who was fired, and where most of the blame for the Lemongello situation was laid in the offseason. Sure, the guy punches himself in the face, but the manager was his downfall. Hartsfield was no peach, but that line of thought was cope for a front office hoping new manager Bobby Mattick would turn a new leaf with Lemongello, who entered spring training in competition for a roster spot.

It didn’t go well. He was middling in some appearances at best and hit hard in others. Mattick rarely mentioned his name while talking about the Opening Day roster. In a last-chance game against the Twins, Lemongello was smacked around again, and his ERA for the spring ballooned over 10. In the press box, Twins public relations man Tom Mee joked that Lemongello’s line for the day was “one inning pitched, two hits, two runs, both earned, two hit batters, and a one-way ticket to Syracuse."

A week later, Lemongello was gone, his contract unceremoniously sold to the Chicago Cubs organization. Gillick’s headache was a thing of the past. Lemongello reported to Double-A Wichita and sucked in his final professional season. He surrendered 11.1 hits per nine innings, pitching for the Aeros, where he met another wayward pitcher on the staff. Manny Seoane had pitched briefly in the majors a few years prior, and with neither him nor Lemongello headed back to the bigs, the duo looked for their next payday. 

Sources are linked throughout as usual, but I wanted to shout out two pieces in particular: Malcolm Allen and his Lemongello biography from the invaluable SABR, as well as the late Earl McRae and his feature on the pitcher in the May 12, 1979 edition of the Toronto Star and their invaluable archives. (photo credit: Toronto Star)

One has to wonder what Joe Sambito was thinking. One of the best lefty relievers in the National League in the late 70s, Sambito was once roommates with Lemongello while the two were on the Astros. Despite intimate knowledge of his former teammate's erraticness, when it came to building a new home, Sambito entrusted Lemongello. After all we have read about Lemongello, why would you invest with him? But Sambito did. And now Sambito found himself on the wrong end of a gun being pointed by none other than Lemongello himself. 

The shadiness of the situation wasn’t entirely on Lemongello. It was, in fact, a family business. Lemongello’s cousins – Peter, a professional crooner, and Mike, a professional bowler – were building houses under Heron Development Corp. in Florida, and the ex-Wichita teammates joined the scheme. Lemongello had connected Sambito with his cousins, and now, neither party was happy. Cost overruns and shoddy worksmanship plagued Sambito’s property. On this day, he was meeting with the cousins at the construction site to discuss a few things.

Sambito’s future home was also where Lemongello and Seoane were headed. They were feeling slighted as well, having not received a cent in commission for the referral of Sambito. Deciding to take it for themselves, they took the cousins at gunpoint. When Sambito tried to intervene, Lemongello aimed his revolver at him. Sambito wasn’t playing hero, and off the cousins went, forced into a bank to hand over $50,000 from a security box to Lemongello and Seoane, before they were dropped off in a wooded area.

Lemongello would turn himself in, and before he made the call to Gillick, he blabbed to authorities. Based on what Lemongello said, Peter was arrested for arson and insurance fraud and ended up with 10 years’ probation. For the robbery, Lemongello received seven years’ probation, and by the time his sentence was over, the Blue Jays were on their way to their ‘90s successes. They were a long way from the organization that once employed Lemongello.

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