The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  The point being that Jason Schmidt is no different from the majority of his colleagues. Unlike Jim Bouton, who drew scorn from teammates and opponents alike when his groundbreaking Ball Four was published, depicting for the first time the major-league ballplayer as he truly lived and worked, most modern players avoid similar treatment not just by avoiding topics of potential embarrassment but by refraining from saying anything remotely interesting.

  “The first thing they teach you is that what goes on in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse,” said Dusty Baker. “That’s not so anymore. Now everybody wants to know what the team meeting was about. Well, that’s the team meeting. If you’re on the team, we’ll tell you. It’s not being anti-press, it’s not being secretive—it’s just how it is. [While managing the Chicago Cubs], I wanted to put up a sign, just like in the locker rooms in the old days, that says ‘What goes on in here stays in here.’ I wanted to put it in the kitchen, because if you put it in a public area it would be construed as anti-press, which it’s not.”

  Perhaps, but this still makes it difficult to write about the unwritten rules. House described it like this:

  Baseball protects its own, no matter what the offense, as long as the offense stays within the confines of the baseball world. You may have a serious gambling problem, and the team may know about it, but they’ll keep your secret as long as you perform, and as long as you keep your problem to yourself. Someone may take you aside and tell you to watch yourself, but no one is going to talk to the press or the commissioner’s office until you do something to warrant it.

  … There are many things that baseball manages to keep quiet about. In fact, players who are foolish enough to discuss what went on in a closed clubhouse meeting, or reveal that two players almost killed each other after the game, often turn up on other teams the next year. That kind of behavior just isn’t acceptable. You must be loyal to your teammates, even though you may hate every last one of them.

  That such potential for discord exists within a clubhouse is hardly a secret—any group of twenty-five guys that spends as much time together as does a baseball team is bound to have conflicts—nor is it a secret that any leaks from within spell open season for the media. For proof of this, one has only to look at the rare instance when tempers boil over in the open, such as Jeff Kent pushing Barry Bonds in the Giants dugout, or Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez coming to blows in front of a phalanx of reporters during Mets spring training. Stories deconstructing team strife followed each of those incidents for weeks; years after combatants have put their differences aside the press continues to look at any reconciliation with skepticism.

  This was the case long before the existence of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. After a tough, 2–1 loss in the opening game of the 1939 World Series, Cincinnati’s starting pitcher, Paul Derringer, and right fielder, Ival Goodman, fought in the clubhouse over a fly ball that Derringer thought Goodman should have caught. As teammates raced to separate the two, Reds manager Bill McKechnie ordered the doors to the clubhouse closed and all reporters kept at bay until the mess was straightened out. To reinforce his instructions, he threatened a thousand-dollar fine—slightly less than a month’s pay for the average player—to anyone who leaked the information. When reporters were admitted about ten minutes later, team members, true to their manager’s wishes, acted as if nothing was amiss, and not a word was written about it the next day. It wasn’t until Reds third baseman Bill Werber wrote a book more than sixty years later that a description of the affair came to light.

  Even more dramatic was the hotel-room brawl between Davey Johnson, then a star second baseman for the Braves, and his manager, Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews, in 1973. The way Johnson tells it, after an initial verbal disagreement the manager invited him into his room and challenged him to a fight. Johnson, reluctant at first, changed his mind when Matthews wound up for a roundhouse punch, then knocked the older man down. Matthews charged back, and as the sounds of the scrape flooded the hallway, players converged on the scene. In the process of breaking things up, several peacemakers were soon bearing welts of their own.

  “The next day at the ballpark we looked like we had just returned from the Revolutionary War,” wrote House (a member of the team, who, true to the code of silence, left all names out of his published account). “Everybody had at least one black eye, puffed-up lips, scraped elbows, and sore hands. It had been a real knockdown battle.”

  This was something that couldn’t be hidden from the press. Matthews called the team together, and as a unit they came up with a story about a game that got carried away, in which guys took good-natured beatings. Flimsy? Maybe. Accepted? Absolutely.

  “You can ask Hank Aaron and others on that team,” Johnson said, laughing. “Eddie said his biggest regret [in his baseball career] was not having it out with me again. That one never got out. It never made the papers.”

  “You might not like everybody on your team, but just because you don’t like a guy, it doesn’t mean you talk about them …,” said Yankees closer Mariano Rivera. “If someone is doing the wrong thing, you should address the problem but not bring it into the world. You don’t have the right to publish it. If it’s a problem, go and attack it and try to fix it, but not by telling everyone.”

  Look no further than Robin Ventura for proof. After suffering one of the most humiliating beatings in baseball history, he had every right to shout from the rooftops about the injustices visited upon his team by Nolan Ryan, baseball’s premier badass, and how he wanted only to put an end to the bullying. Instead, he adhered to the Code and basically kept quiet about the situation. It might not have done much to win respect outside baseball’s inner circle, but the guys in clubhouses around the league expected no less.

  PART ONE

  ON THE FIELD

  1

  Know When to Steal ’Em

  In July 2001, Rickey Henderson was forty-two years old and, by an enormous margin, baseball’s all-time stolen-base leader. The San Diego Padres outfielder was well over two decades into his major-league career and had long since been anointed the greatest leadoff hitter of all time. Then he stole second base against the Brewers, and Milwaukee manager Davey Lopes exploded.

  It wasn’t just any steal that set Lopes off—it happened in the seventh inning of a game in which the Padres led 12–5, after Milwaukee’s defense had essentially cried “uncle” by positioning first baseman Richie Sexson in the hole behind Henderson instead of holding him on. The play was so borderline, as far as stolen bases go, that it was ruled defensive indifference, and Henderson wasn’t even credited with a steal. That wasn’t his goal, however. Henderson was approaching Ty Cobb’s all-time record for runs scored (which he would ultimately best in the season’s final week), and he had just put himself into scoring position.

  Lopes could not have been less interested in the runner’s motivation. As soon as Henderson reached second, Lopes went to the mound, ostensibly to talk to pitcher Ray King but really to direct a tirade up the middle. At top volume and with R-rated vocabulary, Lopes informed Henderson that he had just become a target for the Brewers pitching staff.

  “I didn’t appreciate what he did,” Lopes told reporters after the game. “I know he’s trying to obtain a record for most runs scored, but do it the right way. If he keeps doing stuff like that he’s going to get one of his players hurt. I just told him to stay in the game because he was going on his ass. We were going to drill him, flat out. I told him that. But he chose not to stay in the game; I knew he wouldn’t.”

  Henderson was removed after the inning by Padres manager Bruce Bochy, which the skipper insisted had to do with the lopsided score, not Lopes’s threats. Afterward, Henderson said that he was reluctantly following green-light orders given to him by third-base coach Tim Flannery and sanctioned by Bochy, and that showing anybody up was the last thing on his mind. “Davey and I argued, but I told him that on my own, in that situation, I wouldn’t go down and steal that base,” he said. (�
�Rickey said I gave him the sign?” said a surprised Flannery when he heard Henderson’s take. “Rickey didn’t even know the sign.”)

  “To be blunt, what he did was bullshit,” said King after the game. “We weren’t holding him on. If he’s going to break the record that way, he doesn’t deserve it. The guy’s probably going in the Hall of Fame, but to try to get to second base just to score a run, that’s sorry. When he took off I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

  What Henderson had done was break one of the cornerstone entries in baseball’s unwritten rulebook: Don’t play aggressively with a big lead late in the game. It’s tantamount to running up the score in football, and no tenet of the Code is more simultaneously revered and loathed. It means the cessation of stolen-base attempts, sending runners in search of extra bases, swinging at 3-0 pitches, and an assortment of other tactics aimed toward scoring at all costs.

  “There is no excuse that can be made up to justify trying to show someone up,” said Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson, one of the Code’s staunchest practitioners in his twenty-five years at the helm of the Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers. “There’s no excuse, and you can’t invent one.”

  Though many baseball minds hew to this rule, there’s a group of firm believers who call it hogwash. Bochy in particular took up the opposite side of Lopes’s argument, pointing out that by playing Sexson back and failing to hold Henderson on, Milwaukee’s manager effectively gave his team a defensive advantage it wouldn’t have had if the first baseman had been tethered to the bag. “[In a blowout game a team] will make moves to improve its defensive situation, yet it wants the team hitting not to do anything to try to improve its offensive situation,” said Hall of Fame baseball writer Tracy Ringolsby. “If you’re not going to hold the runner on, the runner has the right to take the next base, because you’re saying it’s not that important—and you’re taking away an offensive opportunity from the ball club by not playing your normal defense.”

  Lopes wanted no part of the second-guessers. “All of those people that took shots at me, they don’t know nothing,” he said a week after the incident. “Unless you’ve played this game, you have no clue. You can say what you want as an outsider and criticize me, because that’s your right. But you have no idea what you’re talking about because you didn’t play the game. They’re ignorant when it comes to that…. The people in baseball, they know. I’ve had people here, old-timers, come up to me and say, ‘We’d drill the guy at second base [if he did what Henderson did].’” Never mind that Bochy was effectively an old-timer himself, having caught in the major leagues for nine seasons before becoming a manager.

  It was the same reason Yankees third-base coach Larry Bowa got so upset in 2006 when Baltimore’s Corey Patterson stole second base, then third, when his team held a 10–4, eighth-inning lead, screaming, “Play the game right!” at the startled runner. But here’s the rub: The Orioles led 10–0 just a half-inning before, and New York possessed the best offense in baseball, as it showed during its four-run seventh. Patterson said after the game that he checked with people in his dugout and got the green light to run. At the very least, he displayed a cognizance of the Code and was doing his best to straddle the line between propriety and victory.

  Patterson’s dilemma illustrates a common conundrum: What’s a big lead, and when exactly is late in the game? As evidenced by the difference of opinion between Bowa and Patterson, one man’s idea of running up the score is another man’s idea of reasonable insurance.

  Baseball’s semi-official “closing time” used to be four runs after six innings—the reach of a grand slam—but that’s no longer a universal notion. When players started getting bigger and pitching started getting softer and the designated hitter was invented and home runs started flying out of ballparks more frequently, what was once considered a big lead was no longer so.

  “Five runs in the fifth inning in the American League is nothing,” said manager Jim Leyland. “That’s only one half-inning away from having someone tie up the game.”

  The best way to illustrate a diversity of opinions, of course, is with the opinions themselves:

  “It used to be that [running with] anything more than a four-run lead was wrong, and you’ve got to be careful with that.”—Tony La Russa

  “When I was playing, if you had a four-run lead it was a courtesy not to run. But you can do that now.”—Ozzie Guillen

  “Once I had you by five runs and you couldn’t tie me with a grand slam, that was it.”—Sparky Anderson

  “I was always taught you shut it down at five runs after six.”—Dusty Baker

  “Five runs in the sixth, I’m not stopping there. We get into the seventh inning, then I’ll start chilling a little bit.”—Ron Washington

  “We play [to shut it down] if you’re up seven runs in the seventh inning.”—Jim Slaton

  “From the seventh inning on, if one swing of the bat can tie you up, it’s game on,” said ex–first baseman Mark Grace in 2006. “If it’s 4–0, you have Jason Schmidt on the mound, and he’s only given up one hit, you still go for it if Ray Durham gets on base in the eighth inning. Now, if it’s 6–0, you’re in territory where you might get a player hit in the brain in response.”

  “There’s always going to be fights arising from those situations where you have one side thinking one way and the other side thinking another,” said ex-outfielder Von Joshua. “I guess that’s why they call them the unwritten rules.”

  At least the game’s most prominent minds share the same general vicinity of opinion, largely because most of them come from the old school. With many modern players insisting that the run differential be as many as eight before shutting things down, however, it’s easy to see how arguments occur. Look to the base Arizona’s Craig Counsell stole while his team held a 6–0, sixth-inning lead over the Rockies at home in 2005. Colorado pitcher Jamey Wright disagreed with Counsell’s philosophy and voiced his displeasure by sending a pitch toward the head of the next hitter, Chad Tracy. According to traditional opinions, Wright had a point—but a half-inning later, the Rockies scored three times and had the tying run on deck, lending credence to Counsell’s attempt to steal his way into scoring position. “With one hit that game’s tied, so that stolen base was not out of line,” said Diamondbacks hitting coach Mike Aldrete. “In my opinion they were wrong, but there was a lot of screaming and yelling.”

  For Counsell, this was standard procedure. He had done the same thing against Philadelphia in 2003, when he swiped second in the seventh inning while his team held a six-run lead. In that instance, Phillies pitcher Joe Roa took it out on Counsell himself, aiming a fastball at his chin during his next at-bat, which served to empty both dugouts.

  “It’s getting harder and harder to know when to draw the line, because of the frequency of the big inning,” said Dusty Baker. “That’s something that, I think, is going to be more and more wrestled with, more than any of the other unwritten rules in modern baseball.” (To Baker’s point, the day before Lopes exploded at Henderson, the Pirates scored seven runs with two outs in the ninth inning, to beat Houston 9–8.)

  The most glaring modern example of such a comeback came in 2001, when Seattle led Cleveland 12–0 midway through the fourth inning, and 14–2 in the top of the fifth. Even after a three-run Indians rally, Seattle still led by nine in the bottom of the seventh, and Mariners manager Lou Piniella removed three of his stars, Ichiro Suzuki, Edgar Martinez, and John Olerud. (Indians skipper Charlie Manuel countered by replacing Roberto Alomar, Juan Gonzalez, Ellis Burks, and Travis Fryman in his own lineup.)

  Things, however, didn’t play out as expected. Cleveland put up three runs in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth to tie the game, then won it in the eleventh, 15–14, becoming just the third team in history—and the first in seventy-five years—to come back from as many as a dozen runs down to win. After the game, Manuel talked about his own team’s resilience, but he may as well have been directly add
ressing both Piniella and the Code. “The biggest message is, never give up,” he said. “Keep swinging.”

  Which is the whole point. Even Lopes, whose run-in with Henderson preceded Cleveland’s historic comeback by just a few weeks, had an opinion on the Mariners’ collapse. “There’s a difference in trying to manufacture runs,” he said. “What if Lou Piniella said, with a 12-run lead, that he’s going to bunt a runner over to second? Would he do it? No…. You don’t stop playing to win. You don’t stop trying to score runs. But you don’t hit and run, you don’t steal bases and you stop trying to manufacture runs. That’s the difference.”

  On the flip side of the argument, do a handful of examples like Cleveland’s comeback (which happens once every several generations) really undermine baseball’s need for this unwritten rule? Does the notion that a team might once a season stage that type of rally offer adequate justification for a player or manager fiercely tacking runs on to an already intimidating lead?

  Part of the beauty of the Code is that there is no truly correct answer. Piniella may have erred in removing his stars too early that day against the Indians, but he hit it on the screws in his post-game comments. “You never know about baseball,” he said. “That’s for damn sure.”

  Even without strategic certainty, informed guesses can be made about when to shut things down, based on a variety of factors:

  Where are we playing? It used to be only the bandboxes of Wrigley Field and Fenway Park that blurred the line (“You can never have enough runs in Boston,” said longtime Tigers catcher Bill Freehan), but, with new homer-friendly ballparks in places like Arlington, Houston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, the notion of how much is enough has never been so muddy. The poster child for this consideration is Coors Field, where, in the thin air of Denver, the losing team scored at least ten runs ten times in 1998 alone—a rate of nearly once a week. (On May 19, 1999, the Rockies scored twelve runs and still lost by a dozen to Cincinnati, 24–12.)