Former MLB Star Runs for Governor in Vermont

Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the former Major League Baseball pitcher who played for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos from 1969-1982, has declared himself a candidate for governor.

He’s running on the Liberty Union Party ticket, a socialist organization that presidential candidate Bernie Sanders helped launch in the 1970s.

“I’d never heard of them,” says Lee, a longtime resident of Craftsbury, Vt., population 1,136. “But I’m a socialist and a left-winger, so they came to me and said, ‘Bill, would you like to run for governor?’ I said, ‘where?’ They said, ‘the state of Vermont.’ Well, I live in Vermont, though I’m here only three months of the year. But I hear it’s only a part-time job.”

Lee earned the nickname “Spaceman” in 1971, when he talked with reporters about the Apollo 15 moon landing and the U.S. space program. A teammate who was blocked from his own locker by the crowd quipped: “Looks like we got our own spaceman.”

The name fit, as Lee’s mind often ventured beyond the stratosphere. Lee, who made the All-Star team in 1973 and started two games in the 1975 World Series, which Boston lost to Cincinnati, has said that he sprinkled marijuana on his pancakes to battle Boston’s bus fumes on his jogs to Fenway Park.

“To anyone who has ever talked at length with Bill Lee,” the UPI news agency wrote in 1978, “there is a sense of wonderment at what you’re hearing and how it’s presented. It often makes no sense to anyone but Lee.”

What are in Lee’s political plans? “My platform is just to erase borders,” Lee says. “I’m a pragmatist. I could call myself a very radical contrastive pragmatist rastafarian ex-Catholic. I’m not a flag waver. I want to do away with that. I want to get all the steroid guys in the Hall of Fame.”

Also on his agenda: “I’m an anti-prohibition guy,” Lee says. “I think everything should be taxed, legalized. We should have complete health care just like Canada and Cuba. And I want to adopt the Cuban policy of education, where no child is left behind. Nothing like what was in the Bush administration, which was a crock of doo-doo. There’s no such thing as a compassionate conservative. Conservatives are like a Tyrannosaurus rex. They have little short arms that never get to their pockets.”  Source: Time S