In A Strike Zone Of His Own

His mother moved Jim and his sister, who was also adopted, to California, where they resided briefly in Whittier, then in Beverly Hills. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis lived across the street. Mrs. Wiesen married Max Palmer, a sometime actor and manager of the bars at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. Jim took his stepfather's surname in 1959, his last year in California. Then the family moved to Scottsdale, Ariz. One of the first kids Palmer met there was Susan. She would come over and swim at his pool. But she was going with another guy. When that romance broke up, Palmer moved right in. He married her after the Orioles signed him to a $50,000 bonus. He was only 18 years old.

Superstars have extraordinary bodies. Sometimes we forget that it all comes down to that. As kids they are superior to other children. They can do practically anything athletic right off the bat and they just get better and better. Palmer's mother would not let him play football until his junior year in high school. He caught 54 passes and made all-state. He was all-state in baseball as well, and not just for his pitching; he hit .483 one season. He was all-state in basketball, too, averaging more than 25 points a game. Had he taken a scholarship offered by UCLA, he would have played with Lew Alcindor. Later, Palmer took up golf and broke 80 within a year; his pro said he could make the tour if he applied himself. Now, in between stints in his garden, Palmer plays a surprisingly good game of left-handed tennis—left-handed in order to protect his pitching arm.

It is important to keep in mind that virtually all of the great athletes have this sort of do-everything-well experience. And because they are clearly superior in physical endeavors, it is not difficult for them to perceive themselves as special in every way. This accounts for the way they feel about several things: about women, about money, about returning phone calls, about picking up tabs. When you have a great body, life does not seem to be encumbered by many imponderables. What sets Palmer apart is that he has not only seen how frail life can be, but also how vulnerable his great body is. After he starred in the World Series at age 20, an arm injury sent him plummeting to the lowest minors, to rejection by every major league team, to a day when he gave up 10 runs and 14 hits in a five-inning appearance against instructional league kids.

"I'd never failed at anything," Palmer says. "Nothing. Maybe this was supposed to happen. I can't complain. Maybe if this hadn't happened, I might not be the same person today." As soon as his arm was cured, he came back to the majors and was 16-4.

Since then he has rarely turned down a request for his time or his good name. His major national affiliation is not with some commercial product, but with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, for which he has served as national sports chairman for five years. On the road, on those days when he is not pitching, he turns himself over to the local chapters. He sees the sick kids in hospitals, he makes radio tapes, he gives speeches.

"You can't believe this guy," says Dave Shapiro, a trustee of the Northern Illinois CF chapter. "Do anything you ask, never any rush, and do it in every town. I've worked with a lot of these athletes. Even in their hometowns, they let you know they're doing you a favor to help out a charity. They'll show up late, they give you a short speech, and then they ask for money."

Like the rest of him, Palmer's altruism is little known. He makes nothing of it. "Look, I know who I am," he says. "I happen to get a great deal of satisfaction from helping people. A ballplayer can't completely divorce his one life from the other. We are parents, we are humans, we live in the community. Sometimes people don't understand that. They think we all eat funny foods.

"Why put off living the other part of your life? Why not be the human now as well as the ballplayer? I'm going to have a normal life sometime, and all this helping Cystic Fibrosis is helping me make the transition easier."

Says Susie Palmer: "The trouble with Jim is that he can't say no—to a fault. It seems to me that he must do all these things for others because of what he has: two healthy children, a good marriage. I guess this is just Jim's way for making up for being so happy."

As a pitcher, Palmer is a split personality. He moans about the inevitability of lucky hits, and when things go sour he paces about the mound, kicks the front of the rubber, stares out into the distance and alternately stretches his arm to wake it up or lets it dangle by his side, as if he does not recognize it and wants nothing to do with it. George Bamberger, the respected Oriole pitching coach, says that Palmer invariably falls into one slump a year—and into a state of abject despair. "Then all of a sudden he decides he's going to win nine in a row, and he's fine," Bamberger says.