Only one candidate for Governor has a Hollywood biopic about him coming out this summer [View all]

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Bill 'Spaceman' Lee Wants to Turn Vermont Into a Sheep-Shearing, Baseball Bat-Making Paradise

Bill "Spaceman" Lee may have been the most colorful character the game of baseball has ever seen. Known for taking the mound for the Boston Red Sox throughout the '70s, the left-hander never shied away from offering controversial political views, championing environmental issues and challenging management. A notorious drug user throughout his career, he claimed to sprinkle marijuana on his pancakes in the morning as a way to combat bus fumes on his way to Fenway Park, a routine dramatized in the upcoming biopic Spaceman, which stars Josh Duhamel and chronicles the end of Lee's career with the Montreal Expos.

Not much has changed since Lee played his last Major league game. Now 69 years old, he lives a blissful existence in Vermont. Kind of. “I’m living in the back of a 1997 Buick Ultra with Vermont plates, going between Montreal and Cuba, and I’m running kids back and forth across the Canadian border playing baseball and doing humanitarian efforts, trying to get baseball back in the mainstream in the United States and Canada.”


Lee's house is in Vermont, though, which is important because in addition to his role as baseball's Johnny Appleseed, he is currently running for governor as the candidate of the Liberty Union Party. He doesn't seem too concerned about it. When I talk to him, the day of Vermont's gubernatorial primary, he's in New York City doing press for Spaceman, which premieres in theaters August 19. In a few hours he will head up to Boston to "throw out the first beer bottle" at the soon-to-be-retired Alex Rodriguez, and he's still fuming about losing a softball game to High Times magazine the day before. "I had them beat, and then they scored four unearned runs off me and beat me 5-4," he says.

Lee was hesitant when the Liberty Union Party, which Bernie Sanders was once the chairman of, reached out to him about running for governor earlier this year. "They came to me and they said, 'Bill, we need you to run for governor,'" he remembers. "I didn't want to accept, but I read Plato's Republic again and there is a young Plato sitting on Socrates's lap and he tells him basically that if you deny your constituents your voice, then you're doing them a disservice. So Socrates said I had to run, and when he speaks, I listen."

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http://europe.newsweek.com/bill-lee-still-crazy-after-all-these-years-489815

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