The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  Roy Thomas, a 13-year veteran who began his career with the Phillies in 1899, supposedly fouled off 22 pitches during one plate appearance, but it remains unknown if he hit them consecutively. Jack Dittmer, a second baseman for the Milwaukee Braves in the mid-1950s, is also believed to have fouled off 22 during a single turn at bat. The 21st-century record belongs to Dodgers second baseman Alex Cora, who fouled off 14 straight pitches on May 12, 2004, and punctuated his effort with a home run. But the true master of the mis-hit—the Duke of Deflection, the Sultan of Slap—was Hall of Famer Luke Appling.

  “No batter could ever frustrate a pitcher more than ol’ Luke,” said Dizzy Trout, whose Detroit Tigers faced Appling’s White Sox more than 200 times in the 1940s. “He would stand there and nonchalantly foul off your best pitches—10, 12, or more—until he finally got the one he was waiting for.” One time, after Appling fouled off a dozen of Trout’s 0-2 pitches, Trout threw his glove at him and yelled, “Hit that foul!”

  Luke Appling was a foul ball–hitting machine. (Photo Credit 2.1)

  On another occasion, Appling hit two dozen balls into the crowd to get even with his own team. Why he did it, however, is unclear. One account suggests he was angry because the owner wouldn’t provide free tickets for his friends; a different (and better) story claims Appling took his course of action because the team wouldn’t give him baseballs to autograph and hand out to the fans. According to the latter version, Appling’s requests for baseballs were never denied again.

  Appling himself claimed to have hit foul balls at least once for his own amusement. During a game against the Yankees in 1940, the White Sox were so far behind that Appling decided to mess with Red Ruffing, the opposing pitcher. “I started fouling off his pitches,” he said. “I took a pitch every now and then. Pretty soon, after 24 fouls, old Red could hardly lift his arm, and I walked. That’s when they took him out of the game, and he cussed me all the way to the dugout.”

  And then there was the peanut vendor who made the mistake of laughing at a fan who had gotten hit by one of Appling’s foul balls. “I’ll fix him,” Appling declared, then stepped back into the batter’s box and drilled the guy in the head with the next foul. The vendor had to be carried out of the stadium.

  LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE

  Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn was so good at hitting foul balls that a teammate once approached him with an odd (and rather disturbing) request to use his batting skills. The teammate was angry at his own wife, who was sitting in the left-field stands, and asked Ashburn to hit her with a foul ball. Ashburn refused to do it, but on another occasion he accidentally sent a different female fan to the hospital.

  That fan was Alice Roth, the wife of Earl Roth, sports editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin. On August 17, 1957, she took her two young grandsons to a game at Connie Mack Stadium and made the mistake of momentarily looking away from the action to fix one of the boys’ caps. At that very instant, Ashburn fouled off a ball that whacked her in the face and broke her nose—but that was just half of Mrs. Roth’s ordeal. As she was being tended to by medical personnel and carried off on a stretcher, Ashburn stepped back into the box and fouled off another ball that hit her again.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” insisted Ashburn. “When I saw what happened, I felt terrible.”

  Ashburn felt so bad about it that he visited Roth in the hospital, and the team gave her grandsons free tickets and a clubhouse tour. Back then, people didn’t sue when they got hit by a ball, and in the end all was forgiven.

  Norm Zauchin hit 18 home runs for the Senators from 1958 to 1959. (Photo Credit 2.2)

  NICE “CATCH”

  Norm Zauchin, a hulking first baseman for the Boston Red Sox and Washington Senators in the 1950s, might not be a household name, but he made the great-est “catch” of all time on a foul ball. It was a Sunday afternoon in 1950—the year before his major league debut—and Zauchin was playing for the Birmingham Barons at Rickwood Stadium. At one point in the middle innings, Zauchin ran into foul territory to chase a pop-up, reached far over the railing to make a catch, and tumbled into the crowded front row. He happened to land in the lap of a pretty young woman named Janet Mooney, whose parents knew the usher in their section.2 Back in those days, it was customary for families to welcome players into their homes for Sunday dinner, so the usher finagled an invitation for Zauchin. He and Janet started dating, and the two were married the following season.

  HECKLE THIS!

  According to Joe Cronin, Red Sox manager from 1935 to 1947, Ted Williams once tried to silence a heckler by hitting foul balls at him. Williams later admitted it in his autobiography—the notorious incident taking place in 1942—but there was a discrepancy in the two men’s tales. Cronin claimed that Williams hit 17 foul balls at the fan and never missed by more than six feet. Williams said he “aimed three or four fouls in this spot behind third, but never got close enough.”

  Who’s telling the truth? Who cares? If the heckler had brought a glove, Williams would’ve been doing him a favor.

  DON’T MESS WITH CAL RIPKEN JR.

  Toward the end of his celebrated career, Cal Ripken Jr. drew heavy criticism whenever he fell into a slump. The future Hall of Famer was in the process of playing in a record 2,632 consecutive games, and lots of people believed that the streak was wearing him out. One of his critics was Baltimore Sun columnist Ken Rosenthal, who suggested that Ripken voluntarily take a day off for the good of his team. (The Orioles were actually sort of almost in contention at the time.)

  Not long after the column ran, Ripken responded with his bat, sending a foul ball flying back toward Rosenthal in the press box at Camden Yards. Rosenthal ducked out of the way, but the ball smashed and destroyed his laptop.

  LYNYRD SKYNYRD

  In 1964 a teenager named Ronnie Van Zant stepped up to the plate in a youth baseball game and ripped a foul ball down the first-base line. Two of his schoolmates were in attendance, one of whom got hit in the head by the ball and was briefly knocked unconscious. The kid’s name was Bob Burns. His friend was Gary Rossington. Van Zant didn’t know them well at the time, but the unnerving incident brought them closer together. All three of them, it turned out, were aspiring musicians, each playing in various garage bands, and in the following days they got together for some jam sessions.

  Later that summer, Van Zant and Rossington formed their own band called The Noble Five. The following year, Burns joined them, and they changed their name to My Backyard. The band, which included other members, ultimately became known as Lynyrd Skynyrd. Van Zant was the lead singer (until his untimely death in 1977), Burns was the drummer (until he quit in 1974), and Rossington played the guitar. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

  BANNED FROM BASEBALL

  Forget about Pete Rose and the 1919 Black Sox. The most outrageous gambling scandal in the history of professional baseball (as far as this book is concerned) involves an ex–major leaguer named Joe Tipton, who got banned for life from the minor leagues for hitting foul balls.

  In the late 1950s, speculation arose that numerous players in the Class AA Southern Association were intentionally hitting fouls to help gamblers. (Gamblers had an easier time convincing individual players to hit harmless foul balls than paying off entire teams to throw games. The gamblers then sat in the stands and bet with the fans at just the right time that the batter would hit the next pitch foul.) An investigation was launched, and everyone who was questioned denied involvement—everyone except Tipton, who admitted that while playing for the Birmingham Barons in 1957 he had accepted two payments—one for $50 and another for $75—to hit foul balls. Tipton had appeared in his final major league game three years earlier, and he’d already retired from the minors by the time he confessed, yet he still received a lifetime ban.

  In the 1960s it was revealed that the gamblers’ foul ball scheme had infiltrated the sport decades earlier. Wally Kimmick, a major league infielder whose career had ended in 1926, recalled a
bizarre incident in which a fan he vaguely recognized asked him if he could hit foul balls. Kimmick insisted that he could, but when the guy doubted him he was compelled to prove himself. “I could hit 10 in a row,” Kimmick told the man. “Naturally I wouldn’t try it if there were men on base, but if I come up with nobody on, you just watch.” Kimmick found out later that the man made $10,000 betting he’d hit foul balls, and he never saw the man again.

  GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

  It figures that a guy named Burns was responsible for a foul ball that started a fire. In August 1915, Tigers first baseman George Burns worked a full count against Red Sox starter Dutch Leonard and fouled the next pitch into the stands. As the fans jockeyed for position to make the catch, the ball hit a man’s coat and ignited a box of matches in his pocket. Then, when the fire began to spread, a soft drink vendor rushed over, opened up a bottle of soda, and poured it on the guy to douse the flames.

  HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

  Mother’s Day 1939 didn’t turn out the way Bob Feller had envisioned it. His family made the trip from their home in Iowa to watch him pitch against the White Sox at Comiskey Park, and he arranged for them to sit in box seats along the first-base side. The seats were particularly close to the action, and in the bottom of the third inning things went horribly awry. Sox pinch hitter Marv Owen slashed a vicious foul ball into the crowd that hit Feller’s mother in the face, broke her glasses, and opened a deep cut over her right eye that required six stitches. Feller, who had thrown the pitch, raced over to the stands and discovered that although his mother was bleeding and in serious pain, she was at least conscious.

  “I felt sick,” he later recalled. “I saw the police and ushers leading her out of the stands so they could take her to the hospital.… There wasn’t anything I could do, so I went on pitching.”

  Feller, incredibly, not only stayed in the game but went the distance for a 9–4 victory. The Hall of Famer then visited the hospital, and his mother ended up making a full recovery.

  FAMILY AFFAIR

  It wasn’t Mother’s Day, and no one went to the hospital. It didn’t even involve a future Hall of Famer, but at a game at Camden Yards in 2006 a foul ball nonetheless left a family up in arms. Orioles designated hitter Jay Gibbons fouled one straight back over the protective screen and into the family section, where it smashed his own wife in the ribs. Fortunately, she wasn’t seriously hurt, but Gibbons was furious. As the team’s player representative, he had asked Orioles management to raise the screen long before she got hit—he and his teammates felt it wasn’t tall enough to provide adequate protection for their families—but his request was denied. Management had claimed that a taller screen would disrupt the sight lines of fans sitting behind the plate, but team officials finally relented and raised the screen in 2007.3

  THAT BALL IS … GONE!

  It sounds impossible, but this story, reported by Sergeant A. D. Hawkins, a Marine Corps combat correspondent during World War II, comes straight from the archives of the Hall of Fame. The featured foul, as you might already be guessing, wasn’t hit at a major league stadium, and in fact this incident didn’t even take place during a game. The ball was hit during batting practice in the South Pacific by a player on a First Marine Division regimental team, so you know it had to be something special.

  Marine Private First Class George E. Benson Jr., a 20-year-old soldier from Dawson, Iowa, yanked a high foul ball that sailed behind third base and smashed through the windshield of a small Grasshopper airplane that was gliding 40 feet off the ground toward a nearby airstrip. But that’s not all the ball did. It broke the pilot’s jaw and briefly knocked him unconscious. Marine Corporal Robert J. Holm, a passenger with no flying experience, instinctively pulled back on the dual controls and prevented the plane from crashing, and when the pilot recovered he took over and landed safely at another airfield 15 miles away.

  Benson had seen the impact after following the flight of the ball, but a few of his teammates hadn’t noticed and went looking for it.

  “Once I broke a high school window with a foul ball,” he said, “but I never thought this would happen to me.”

  Grasshopper airplanes were not designed for combat—or for absorbing the impact of foul balls. (Photo Credit 2.3)

  1 In 1894 the mound was moved back more than 10 feet to its current distance of 60 feet, 6 inches, and the National League’s batting average increased 29 points to .309. By 1900 the leaguewide average had dropped to .279, and in 1901, the first season of the foul-strike rule, the average plummeted an additional 12 points to .267.

  2 As the story goes, it was love at first sight.

  3 Gibbons isn’t the only player to have struck a member of his own family with a foul ball. During a Spring Training game in 2010, Twins outfielder Denard Span sliced a wicked liner that hit his mother in the chest. (Don’t worry. She was okay.)

  CHAPTER 3

  DEATH BY BASEBALL

  DANGEROUS GAME

  Remember that scary moment during the 1999 American League Division Series when Kenny Lofton dove violently into first base and dislocated his shoulder? Or the regular-season game in 1995 when Ken Griffey Jr. crashed into the center-field wall and broke his wrist? Or the incident during the 2001 All-Star Game when the 73-year-old Tommy Lasorda got knocked on his ass by a flying broken bat? Fortunately, Lasorda was okay, but the fact remains that there are many ways to get hurt on a baseball field. In addition to the obvious, waiting-to-happen accidents like catchers getting bowled over while blocking the plate, shortstops getting spiked while covering second base, or first basemen falling down the dugout steps while chasing foul pop-ups, there are unexpected hazards everywhere. Players don’t necessarily have to dive headfirst or slam into walls to land on the disabled list. After a Cubs victory in 2009, Ryan Dempster broke his right big toe and missed three weeks after tripping over the dugout railing in an attempt to run out onto the field with his celebrating teammates.

  What do all these misfortunes have in common? None of them are directly linked to the ball. Sure, the bat that hit Lasorda had been broken by the ball—and it was the ball that Griffey had hoped to catch when making his fateful dash to deep center field—but these guys were not hurt by the ball itself. Ball-related injuries are a whole other story. There’ve been enough to fill an encyclopedia, and with all due respect to Mariners reliever Josias Manzanillo, who needed testicular surgery in 1997 after taking a 107-mile-per-hour Manny Ramirez liner to the groin, any discussion of them needs to start with Indians pitcher Herb Score.

  Herb Score was never the same after getting hit in the face by a line drive. (Photo Credit 3.1)

  A 23-year-old phenom in 1957, Score was struck in the right eye by a wicked line drive off the bat of Yankees shortstop Gil McDougald. The impact broke several bones in his face, permanently affected his vision, and ruined what was shaping up to be a Hall of Fame career. Score had been named the minor league player of the year in 1954 and was voted the American League Rookie of the Year in 1955. The following season he won 20 games while striking out 263 batters and posting a 2.53 ERA. In the five years that Score pitched after his injury, he won a total of 17 games and had a forgettable 4.43 ERA.

  Because Score was so young and gifted, and because he played during baseball’s golden age, he remains the poster boy for devastating injuries—even though Cardinals right fielder Juan Encarnacion suffered one that proved to be much worse. On August 31, 2007, while standing in the on-deck circle at Busch Stadium, Encarnacion got hit in the face by a foul ball that shattered his left eye socket and caused severe trauma to his optic nerve. The Cardinals’ head physician said it was the worst injury he’d ever seen on a baseball player’s face and compared the mangled socket to a disintegrated eggshell. Fifteen months later, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that Encarnacion had “not yet recovered enough vision in his left eye to drive, let alone attempt to play baseball again.” And sure enough, his career was over.

  There’ve been lots of other notable
ball-related injuries over the years. In Game 4 of the 2001 American League Division Series, A’s right fielder Jermaine Dye fouled a ball off his leg that shattered his fibula. During batting practice in 1988, Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez yanked a foul ball that ricocheted off the batting cage and broke his nose. In Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek suffered a bruised larynx when a ground ball took a bad hop and hit him in the throat. Prior to the 2007 season, Giants catcher Mike Matheny was forced to retire because of all the concussions he’d suffered from getting whacked by foul tips. During a regular-season game in 1996, home plate umpire Ed Rapuano sustained a broken collarbone and was taken off the field on a stretcher after getting struck by a foul ball. On Opening Day in 1954, Hall of Fame baseball writer H. G. Salsinger lost his vision in one eye after being nailed by a foul ball in the Briggs Stadium press box.4

  Then there are the untold number of batters who have sustained serious injuries from being hit in the face or on the head, the most notorious cases including Tony Conigliaro, Dickie Thon, Andre Dawson, Kirby Puckett, Ron Santo, Joe Medwick, and Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane, who in 1937—four years before batting helmets were first used—suffered a fractured skull, remained unconscious for 10 days, and never played again. Incredibly, in the history of Major League Baseball, only one player has ever died from being hit by a pitch. That player was Ray Chapman.