from Jim Bouton's Ball Four:
Mike Marshall and I started rooming together when we got to Kansas City, and in the room tonight we got to talking about the special pressures there are on ballplayers. We wondered what it's like for a guy when baseball is his whole life and he has nothing else, no financial security, no job or profession to fall back on, no real interests. We talked about Fred Talbot saying, "I should have gone to college," and decided that, yes, the pressures on him are worse than the pressures on us.
I know that a guy like Gary Bell felt that pressure all the time. He'd say things like, "Rooms, tomorrow we go to a bookstore and buy some of those real-estate books." Or, "Rooms, if you were in my shoes, what kind of job would you start looking for?" And then, sometimes, after a bad game, he'd sit in the back of the bus with five or six beers in him and he'd mumble to himself, "I don't give a shit. I don't give a shit."
But he did.
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