Hey, Mr. Spaceman! "The Wrong Stuff"

Bill Lee pitched for the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos. And was affectionately referred to as "The Spaceman," allah the Byrds. Won't you please take me along for a ride? v.c. P.S. Lee was one of the game's few counterculture symbols: he talked to animals, championed environmental causes, practiced yoga, ate health foods, sprinkled marijuana on his buckwheat pancakes (an indiscretion for which he was fined $250 by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn), pondered Einstein and Vonnegut, quoted from Mao, and studied Eastern philosophers and mystics. It was in this context that former Red Sox teammate John Kennedy first dubbed him "Spaceman," a nickname writers thereafter used as shorthand to describe his free spirit. At first irritated by the appellation (preferring to be known as "Earth Man"), Lee would eventually approve of the "Spaceman" moniker. "I realized that it's the ultimate compliment," he remarked. "Everybody thinks they're earthlings but in actuality we're only here for a brief moment, and the cinder that we're on is moving as Spaceship Earth, so we're all space travelers."
A folk hero to fans (especially to the students, hippies, and radical subculture that adopted Fenway Park in the early '70s), Lee was a voice of reason and sanity in a game corrupted by "planet-polluting owners" and the corporate mindset. Although he often crossed swords with management, matching his wits with their authority, Lee, in hindsight, can be viewed not as a rebel but as a "purist" and "traditionalist." In his freewheeling autobiography, The Wrong Stuff (1984), Lee argued his case: "I hated the D.H. and all the other new wrinkles that had been introduced in an attempt to corrupt the game. I wanted to go back to natural grass, pitchers who hit, Sunday doubleheaders, day games, and the nickel beer. . . . We have to drive these atrocities out of baseball. It will be doing the entire country a great service. Baseball is the belly button of America. If you straighten out the belly button, the rest of the country will follow suit.